Attention Must Be Paid (Please)
By: Lisa Boylan
Tags: Seniors, Hospital, Death, Mothers

Some people have the year of living dangerously. Apparently, I am having the Year of the Emergency Room.

Friday morning my sister called to say my mother had fallen and they were taking her to the emergency room. I drove to Sibley Hospital, which always opens a Pandora’s Box of emotions — it’s where my father was first diagnosed with cancer, it’s also where my two of my babies were born.

Birth School Work Death.

I don’t know what I am facing. Will my mother die this weekend? That is the big bad horrible thought. That mortality question. I am driving, and it’s over long-traversed terrain — the upper skirted layer of D.C., Bethesda, Westmoreland Circle, Dalecarlia Parkway (which we used to drive down backwards as teens — daft).

I arrive at Sibley — the unintentional harbor of so many events and emotions. They have no record of my mother’s admittance of course. Because that is the way things go these days — this arbitrary painful indifference — a mélange of crapped-up details and false starts and no accountability.

I did not waver. I knew she was there. The grand piano tinkled in the lobby, played by the white-haired, red-coated volunteer — the place is manned by older sophisticates in that way, a pleasing comforting atmosphere.

I found my mother in one of the curtained-off stalls of the emergency room. She is somehow regal, elegant, even in her hospital gown. What my mother possesses is this absolutely artless joie de vie — which she pronounces precisely like the Oklahoman that she is, no pretense, all bad French, which makes the statement, in its way, even more lovely.

My mother is gallant. The ultimate optimist. All pumped fist greatness and just a slight patrician gentility — without a trace of ostentation. My mother has lived all around the world — Singapore, Japan, Australia, and India — and in D.C. in between, since 1948, and yet if you ask my mother, to this day, “Where are you from?” She will say, proudly, unabashedly, “Ada, Oklahoma.”

I walked into the ER stall and my mother’s face lit up, “Oh, Lele, you came! You didn’t have to come! How did you get away from work?” I looked at her, over the metal barricade of the semi-stretcher, and the tears just started to fall — I knew I shouldn’t but I just couldn’t stop — and this is what kills me about my mother — she knew, she just knew that I was heartbroken to see her, the strongest person in the world, so vulnerable and so she did not say one single word about the tears. So I wouldn’t feel bad about crying. As in, “We’ll just brush it off! Right-o!”

The physician’s assistant leaned over my mother’s gurney and said, right in front of her, “Is she baseline?” And I just looked at her, like, I’m sorry did you just speak to me, right over my mother, without acknowledging her presence? And, you know, I could not just refer to my mother as this inanimate marginalized human being, right there in front of her. And I said, “Baseline?” And she said, “Is she always like this? Is this normal?”

My mother had fallen and had lain on the floor of her assisted living apartment for an undetermined amount of time. So they needed to do tests — X-ray, CAT scan, blood work — to determine if the fall was organic or not. Or something. They came to take her for X-rays and I asked if I could come and they said no and they rolled her off and she said, “Oh please let her come!” I just stood there.

She came back and said, “Tell me about the little people.” And so, relieved, I started telling her a variety of stories about my kids and she threw back her head — deeper into the rubberized hospital pillow — and laughed these great life affirming optimistic thrilled laughs and I stood there looking at her in wonder — like, Oh my God, I have this person in my life who loves me and loves my children so much.

I don’t know, my mother’s spirit really infused me with hope yesterday. Just watching her talk to the nurses — old Foreign Service tricks that might as well be Sanskrit they are such lost arts — drawing people out and getting them to talk about themselves. The nurses were lovely, but they kept calling her “hon” and “sweetie” and “darlin’,” which my parents would be the first to tell you is better than “Late to dinner,” or other epithets, but for some reason when you’re in a hospital watching this one-time fabulous person be trivialized by people who don’t even mean it — all the old saws come out — Attention must be paid!

Let’s not forget that this person, with the gray hair and the slipped off tie-on gown, was once a horseback riding girl with her own airplane who flew WWII fighter planes and met dignitaries all over the world and voted Democrat all her life and read books and was funny — and fun — and threw dinner parties and welcomed people into her beautiful house for more years than any of us can recall.

She kept asking questions and no one in the room got to know about her — and all her life had encompassed. I stood there as a silent, but respectful, witness.