Filed under: Life
My dad called me yesterday around 11am to tell me that the rest home called him to let him know that my mother was in her final stages (i.e. she was dying). I was surprisingly calm when he called and told him I would be there ASAP. Which, in actuality, was a lie. I spent the next hour washing dishes. straightening up the house and taking a shower. THEN I left. Grief or no grief, I wasn’t leaving the house in disarray if someone was coming over to take care of Chumley. Weird, I know. Fucked up priorities, maybe.
Anyway, when I arrived, my aunt and uncle (my mother’s last remaining brother) and my dad were in the lobby. I went in to see my mom, who was being looked after by a hospice nurse. After the introduction by my aunt and being greeted with “Oh she has a healthy boy” (WTF? Suck it!) by the hospice nurse, I went to hold my mom’s hand. She didn’t look any worse for wear, but they did have her on oxygen again. I sat with her for a while…until the BANGING started, on the wall directly behind her headboard. I looked around like “WTF?” but just assumed they were doing construction or something and let it slide. Until it continued with reckless abandon, moments later. I went to the front desk and was like “What’s with all the hammering?” They said that the woman in the office (next door to my mom’s room) was working on some shelves or something. I was like “Is it going to be over soon or what?” And when the nurses were too big of a fuckin’ pussy to confront the woman (I think maybe she was the director or something), saying “You can knock on the door and tell her if you want to”, I said “I will!” SO, I knocked on the door and some guy opened it, and there was a woman standing next to the wall, holding a hammer. I said “What’s with the hammering?” She said that she was hammering some nails into the wall, to which I told her “My mother’s headboard is on the other side of that wall your hammering on. Are you about done?” She apologized and said she was. Idiots.
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