ADVANCED CARE PLAN

The soundtrack of the Eurythmics’ “Walking on Broken Glass” is playing in my head.

I have to meet with mom’s social worker this week at the rest home to talk about a document that will set parameters for Advanced Care Planning.  This is a relatively new government initiative to codify the wishes of individuals for their families and caregivers.  The theory is that we should all, young and old, healthy and infirm, have such a plan in place.  Of course, you want to make this plan while you are still able to articulate your wishes--which is one of many reasons I’ve been resistant--if not openly hostile--about the process of setting this up for my mother, who can no longer speak (or perhaps think--who can tell?) coherently.

What they really want, I guess, is permission to pull the plug when and if this becomes necessary--but as far as I can tell I’ve already authorized this through other channels and on other documents.  I see this as a government-sponsored program to create more paperwork.  Do I sound cynical, paranoid?  I guess I’m just dreading sitting there with my mother and the social worker, my mother in tears, me being stoic (whatever that means), etc.  People keep telling me I need to talk to my mother about this, that, and the other thing--and I just don’t want to.

I think these people want to see us in tears in each other’s arms, forgiving and forgetting decades of miscommunications and whatever else.

OK, I guess I’m projecting my fears, my anxieties, my limitations as a human being.  I read somewhere recently that reconciliation should be freely embraced, because it costs nothing.  I can’t agree.  I think it would cost me something I can’t afford, perhaps my sanity or even just the carefully constructed sense of self I’ve fabricated over the years.

That sense of self, let’s face it, is already fracturing (I was going to say eroding but that sounds like too gentle and gradual a process to describe it).  I feel the cracks starting to fissure every time I put together a letter to send out to mom’s various correspondents, a schizophrenic exercise whereby I construct a voice that is not mine (although it could be), not my mother’s (although it somewhat, and misleadingly, does purport to be), not the family as a whole (although that’s ostensibly what is)--but instead some dysfunctional hybrid of third person and first-person plural.  Pronouns are a challenge but as an English teacher I manage (I think) to walk the fine line between logic and fallacy, between coherence and disconnect.

It’s part of a growing sense of hyper-awareness of the way in which I perceive my world.  “We all construct our own moral universe,” my sainted godfather once told me.  While I see the wisdom of those words, I believe the concept to extend beyond morality and into the realms of both memory and practice.  How else is it possible to deal with impossible situations?

This past week, as my younger daughter navigated the difficult journey beyond her terrible twos, I kept thinking about (as one does) how short a time ago my thriving preschooler was a tiny, helpless infant--and how my mom rode heroically to my rescue in the crisis that followed my daughter’s birth.  Two weeks after a difficult caesarean delivery, in which my blood pressure quite frighteningly--though briefly--crashed, I was recovering at “home” in a rustic cabin in the woods while my husband was working seven days a week renovating our house near the village in our small island community, where my mom had an apartment as well.  As a non-driver, I was truly isolated and having second, third, and fourth thoughts about the advisability of being so far away from civilization (such as it was).  

One night around 3AM, when my baby was sixteen days old, I woke to the unmistakable sounds of my husband (who suffers from epilepsy) having a grand mal seizure.  I grabbed the baby, hoping my older daughter would stay asleep, and made my way gingerly to the attic bedroom, where he lay convulsing in a pile of broken glass from the bedside tumbler.  Several minutes later he had recovered enough to recognize me as a familiar face, but was totally confused about who or what the baby might be.  When he was back to himself, within say half an hour, he assured me he felt fine and not to worry.  He even thought he might go to work later.

By 10:30, although in no shape to work (and glass shards still embedded in his shoulder), my erstwhile hubby seemed chipper enough, so (god knows what I was thinking) I went to the washroom to have a shower, leaving the baby in her cot (an Ikea bathtub).  No sooner was the water running than I heard a terrible crash and the harsh cry that typically accompanies a grand mal.  I rushed back to the living room to discover that he had narrowly missed the woodstove and that our five-year-old (who had never witnessed one of her father’s seizures before) was looking on in disbelief.  The baby was still lying safely in her “bathinette” (as we called it).

Again he recovered and said he felt fine--and again he had a seizure--this time in the bathroom.  This was now such a deviation from a seizure pattern of once every year and a half (you can do the math and figure out why I was reliving all this right now) that I called an ambulance to come and get him--and my mom to come and get me and the girls.  She drove us to the hospital in town and stayed with us while the patient was dosed up and lectured about the necessity of taking his medication more diligently.

My mom, bless her heart, spent her life rescuing people, but not usually me.  I always prided myself on my independence, a quality which struck me as ironic for a non-driver when this crisis occurred.  Nor was it my mother’s way to suggest that I change anything about myself--she was never one to give advice, but only to offer unconditional support.  Yet I know she was proud of my decision to start driving the next day, and happily sat at my side while I tootled around the island roads.  Later, when she had lost her own independence in the wake of a debilitating stroke, she made her way to the car--with help--and I drove her into her therapy appointments on the mainland.  Only once, as I sped with newfound confidence along the upper levels highway, did she tentatively suggest that I curb my enthusiasm.

Now I find myself remembering other times she bailed me out by driving me somewhere, starting with my preteen years, when she would pile five or so kids into our very small car and take us all from another small island community (where we then lived) to town for roller skating and disco dancing; more recently, driving me to my ten-years’ service employee recognition awards ceremony at work; etc.

This past Friday was my fifteen-year award ceremony, and so of course I thought about Mom and how proud she was (and perhaps still is) of my success at work.  She worked contracts all her adult life and now lives on a minimal government pension income as a result, so she praised my longtime commitment to a college teaching job that has a generous retirement plan.  

On my way to the ceremony on Friday, feeling guilty and more than a little apprehensive about leaving the kids, I hitched a ride to the downtown skytrain station with a friend (I still don’t quite have the stones to truck all the way to Surrey).  We were cruising along West Georgia Street chatting about the sandwich generation when--crash--a sudden impact from behind threw us forward in our seats and the wind and rain rushed in from the shattered rear window.  They say you see your life flashing before you at such moments, but I flashed instead on my family and the impact on them if anything happened to me.

Stupidly (and/or perhaps in a stupor), I left the scene of the accident at once, saying only, “Sorry, I gotta go.”  I wandered the several blocks to the skytrain station in the rain, realizing only as I entered the station that I had forgotten to put up my umbrella.  Once on the skytrain, I popped a couple extra strength Tylenol and hoped for the best.  My friend called me on my cell to check I was OK.  “No worries,” I insisted.

I arrived late but in time to get my award, a certificate accompanied by, and I quote, “a jewelled nametag” in recognition of my “distinguished and longtime service.”  This one’s for you, mom, I thought as I mounted the podium and shook the principal’s hand.

“How about another 15?” the principal asked.

Trying to ignore the tingling in my scalp, a psychosomatic artifact of my imagining the tiny shards of glass from that rear window, I smiled and nodded at my boss.  I’m in it for the long haul.

Maybe, as a talisman of sorts, I’ll wear my jewelled nametag to the appointment with the social worker on Friday, and we’ll head down the difficult road of mom’s Advanced Care Plan.