Dancing on a Fire Escape While my World Burns

They say Nero fiddled. I'll be toasting marshmallows and making s'mores.

Click the little blue arrow if you’d rather listen to me than read me.

I don’t want to write about any of it.

The world is on fire and my metaphorical fire escape rusted and lists dangerously away from the building at the slightest pressure, a single footstep. It sways, threatening to fling me into the abyss. I’ll need to jump—take a leap of faith.

Young and drunk, I danced on that actual fire escape, bolts creaking, coming loose from building. The second floor, over a bar on the corner of Second Street and Avenue A. Someone yanked me in, I think. On the 3rd floor in an old building on the Bowery where all the buildings were old but I wasn’t yet, I readied to leap from the fire escape of one building to the next. I don’t remember who or what stopped me.¹

It seems I’ve spent a lot of drunken nights on fire escapes—fucking, dancing, attempting a broad jump. The nice thing about being drunk all the time was never understanding, or caring, how dangerous or bad things were. There may be a metaphor to be woven with fire escapes & life & wanting to be rescued, but I don’t have the time or energy for that right now. Sober a long time, it doesn’t feel great when I crawl back into the drunk mindset, trying to parse what I was thinking then, when I was that.

I’d like to run away from all of it.

From who and what we’ve become as a country. From my responsibilities. That was another nice thing about being drunk. I may’ve had responsibilities, but I wasn’t expected to be responsible. If I was still drinking, I wouldn’t care about the world, I wouldn’t be able to take care of my mother.

I’m thinking about expat communities in the mountains in Mexico. Panama accepts Medicare Advantage. I’m considering Israel, for chrissakes—they have to take me—even though I hate their current government as much as I hate mine. Overstaying a tourist visa in New Zealand is on my list, living below the radar— undocumented—a senior citizen illegal alien. When my parents and their friends, in their 70s, snuck from one movie to another in the multiplex, their rational was, “We’re senior citizens, what are they gonna do to us?” My rational for intentionally becoming undocumented? What’s the worst that could happen? I’d be deported back to my country of origin. The US.

Yeah, that’s what everyone who is being deported from here thought, too. Take nothing for granted.

I can’t go anyplace while Ma is still kicking.

She shows no signs of slowing down. Healthy as a horse. Looney as a tune

.
A few years younger than she is now, her grandfather was in a nursing home. He’d wait until the nurses left, let the pills drop from his mouth and toss ‘em out the window. We joked he had the healthiest pigeons in the Bronx. I think the two of them were made of the same stuff. He outlived all five of his children. I created a trust in case she outlives me.

She made me promise that’d never be her, alone, in a nursing home.

She blossomed in assisted living. Got herself in with the popular “girls,” had her some running buddies, and men to flirt with. She only moved in with me to recover from a compression fracture—she broke her back sliding across the floor on her ass for fun, then crashed into a wall she’d forgotten about. Assisted living AND twenty-four hour private health aides came to $15,000 a month. We have never been a $15,000 a month family.

What if I’d left her there, bit the financial bullet?

She’d probably be dead. I’ve been accused of being a caregiver version of a helicopter mom by more than one home health aide, watching everything, course correcting the tiniest deviation.

Covid deaths soared in long-term care (LTC) residential facilities—nursings homes, memory care, assisted living—as one after another entire buildings were locked down in isolation. Thirty-eight percent of all Covid-related deaths in 2021 were in LTC facilities. If she’d stayed, we might’ve been able to visit through windows, if she wasn’t on the 3rd floor. Or if I was taller. Much taller. Residents were restricted to their rooms, their meals delivered, they ate alone. If Covid didn’t kill her, the misery and loneliness would’ve.

I can live with the idea of her dying. I can’t live with her being lonely or miserable.
We each got Covid while she was living here. She was sick for a day. One. Day.

I’ve been researching memory care (MC), which is not $15,000 but it also ain’t cheap. I had a long call with a nearby facility, a memory care unit in the same chain where she’d had assisted living. Thursday, I’m doing a walk-through, going with one list of questions and another of things I want to eyeball for myself.

Three is our magic number.

There were three in her family of origin: Mom, her brother, her mother.
Three in our nuclear family: Mom, Dad, and me.
Three.
In memory care they get three meals and three snacks a day. Three activity sessions. Three toileting sessions.
Whenever she asks a question that starts with “How many…” the answer I give is always three, no matter the end of the question.
Three. It’s who we are.

They’d be checking and recording everything I check and record: bowel movements, mood, O2 level, blood pressure, skin condition and integrity. And more.

It’s 1 ½ times the cost of her home care, which is almost exactly (that’s how much I don’t want to write, I slipped in the oxymoronical almost exactly, which if you turned that in on a paper to me, I’d cross out)…what we’re spending now is pretty close to what she gets monthly with her pension, VA pension, Social Security, dividends, minimum required distribution from her IRA, and the rent from her apartment.

So, where would the extra money come from you wonder. I wondered that too. For a minute. La ti da, in my best Scarlett O’Hara voice, I’ll think about that tomorrow.

She might be happier

She’d have more social interaction, more stimulation.
Is that a rationalization because I’m frayed, my seams unraveling?
You know when you’re trying to figure if it’s time to euthanize your cat (or dog) for their own good, and because it’d make your life easier at the same time? You pick through your brain to find what’s making the decision, convenience or compassion? Like that, but in this case, the cat is my mother.

Who would be there in the night and the nightmares? Keep track of the damn hearing aide she puts in her mouth / loses in the bed / tosses in the garbage?

Who will tickle her to get that her fake laugh she does to please the tickler? Do that loud, annoying seal bark with her, the one she does, constantly, and loves when someone harmonizes with her? Rock side-to-side with her, until she moves back and you fall over and she claps because she won that game? Stroke her head, as she moves it side-to-side like a kitten, so you get all of it?

Would she know the difference? Do I give myself too much credit, over-inflating my contribution? She hasn’t known me as her daughter for a long time. Only very occasionally says my name but it’s not me, it’s just a familiar name, a word.

Couldn’t she have those moments with someone else? A friend, just as loony as she? She'd have people around her all the time.

I’d go from living with her and an aide to a silent, empty apartment.

I can see myself crying the first night. I don’t imagine I’d be able to sleep. I think I’d cry for a long time and regret it, but what if it really is the best thing for her? And in the long run, me?

I really don’t want to go back to therapy, which I’m sure is inevitable no matter what I do. Or don’t do.

I don’t know.

I don’t know anything except this is the worst of times and the worstest of times in the world. A world that seems to be tilting to the right, fascists rising in power everywhere. Friends whisper and wonder, will there be a civil war? Voices are being trampled. Laws disregarded. People are being disappeared. Disenfranchised. Discounted.

There is chaos everywhere.
Even with our home grown crazy, our little one bedroom box in the sky has become more predictable, insular.
I want to hide here in my hidey hole.
I want her to be gone already so I’m not responsible for someone who was my moral North Star and now can’t understand how bad things are or know that whatever I do, whatever decision I make, I have her best interest in mind.
I want not to wish that she was gone.
I want her to have been gone, or be better.

Could I leave the country?
Technically, yes.
Actually, no. I couldn’t leave her here.

Thursday is just a look. A walk-through. Gathering intel. To know what’s out there, what’s possible.

You know what’s impossible?

Getting Ma out of this building. The elevator is out of service until mid-November for an upgrade and our box of air in the sky is on the 4th floor. Great news for how good my ass will look by Thanksgiving, but she’s restricted to the apartment and the hall outside our door.

If I decided on memory care, how would I get her down four flights of stairs?

So, why am I looking?
Because I need to do something, take an action.
I need to find hope somewhere.
I need there to be an option in the world.
Even if it’s improbable, I need it.

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They say Nero fiddled. I’ll be making s’mores.

1. thank god that god looks out for drunks and babies.