As a Parent Fades, the Calls That Matter




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As a Parent Fades, the Calls That Matter

By JANE GROSS

New York Times, June 8, 2003

For months now, not a day passes without a telephone call or e-mail message from the nurse or social worker at the nursing home where my mother is dying at a glacial pace. Often the rabbi calls. Sometimes one of the physical or speech therapists who worked with her before a series of strokes left her paralyzed, virtually mute, with nothing left but her lively mind and mordant humor.

They call with information on my mother's physical condition, with suggestions about how we can make her more comfortable and to schedule family meetings to discuss end-of-life issues. But more often they call to see how I'm doing, if my brother is O.K.

They are mindful they have two constituencies: the elderly patients at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, in the Bronx, and their exhausted, grieving adult children. They even buoy us with thanks for helping them do their jobs, unlike those other sons and daughters who live on the other side of the country, or simply stay away.

Many is the time that Eileen Dunnion, my mother's primary nurse, has interrupted her rounds because she sensed my distress. She takes me to a quiet corner and tells me of the countless daughters who have cried in her arms, all of us turned upside down by the role reversal of mothering our mothers, some of us finding and losing them at virtually the same time. My mother, a former nurse, sees none of this but would not be surprised. She told me once that Eileen's professional gifts surpassed her own tenfold.

When she could still speak, my mother regaled Eileen with stories of being a nurse during World War II, when there were no suction machines to clear the windpipes and lungs of premature infants and my mother, at Lenox Hill Hospital, did the delicate job with her fingers. Now, it is Eileen who uses the suction machine on my mother. Often she is the only one, other than Hannah Cury, my mom's social worker, who understands what she is trying to say. When Hannah was on an extended medical leave, she and Eileen spoke nightly by telephone, often about my mother, sometimes, I suspect, about me.

Recently, I got a message from Diana Lubarski, a physical therapist who got my mother on her feet every couple of days long after it was clear that her paralysis was not reversible, just because she said she'd give anything to stand up, one last time. D.K., as she is known, had visited her that day and "made her laugh a little," the message said. But that was not the main purpose of her call.

She wanted to read me a poem, written by a former nursing home resident, about the slow passage from this world to the next. She wanted me to have her home telephone number. "If you need me for anything, at any time," she said, "please call."