Musings of the Night Nurse [2]: The Wanderings

A new series on caretaking my mom as she nears the end while fighting off the entities who prey on the old

“A weird thing happened to me today,” your mother tells you over the phone, and goes on to explain how she got up that morning, got dressed and, as she had just about every morning since moving to Brooklyn Heights in 1963, went out to grab The New York Times.

“But it was still dark out,” she said, and she thought this was kind of strange, seeing as it was 10:30 in the morning. Nevertheless she continued the four blocks to Montague Street, thinking it would be light by the time she reached the paper stand.

“And there really weren’t any people on the street,” she says, sounding completely chill as she comes to what she thinks is the punchline.

“It turned out it was 10:30 at night,” she says. “Isn’t that funny?”

Funnily enough, you - 3,000 miles away on the west coast - do not find this funny. You find it alarming and pepper your mother with questions, about whether she’d taken some sort of tranquilizer, or had a long nap that left her confused, questions that ruffle her not at all.

You, on the other hand, are gripped with what, for now, is light panic, picturing your mother walking alone on the empty streets, dressed impeccably as she always is and wondering why everything was so quiet and closed.

“And I didn’t even get the paper!” she says, which is kind of funny, until she calls two weeks later to say, it happened again.

In the ten years before this phone call, your mother has had several episodes where you think she might have blacked out. One was on the tennis court, where, according to the women she was playing with, there was no precipitating incident, no going for a shot when your mother went down like a sack of bricks. Soon thereafter, she totaled her VW Bug by driving it off the road in upstate New York, an accident she had no memory of. There was also the cheesecake incident…