“Get The Pie Out Ella!”

I arrived today to find Gram asleep, sitting in the wheelchair at a table in the lunch room.  Lunch was being served, so I tried to wake her to eat.  I called her name.  I shook her.  Nothing.  “She must have pulled another all-nighter,” I say, smiling, to the aide serving lunch.  She does that.  She’s nocturnal these days. 

The aid serving lunch said, “Don’t worry, she’ll wake up for me, she always does.  I have a loud voice.”  I said, “Ok.”  She came over and as she got right in Gram’s face, yelled, “Gram!”  Pop, the eyes opened.  Gram mumbled a few not-so-nice words in the aide’s direction, looked down at me (I was now kneeling on the floor beside her wheelchair) and mumbled a few more obscenities and random words, then turned her head and went right back to sleep. 

I hate visiting at meal time and I usually don’t do it.  Today, I just wasn’t paying attention to the time. 

I remembered during my visit how things used to be.

Gram always loved to feed other people.  She loved to cook.  She would always make enough for an army, my Aunt Jude and I would say.  She wouldn’t have it any other way.  After Sunday dinners, you were required to take leftovers home.  Required.  If you didn’t, Gram would be insulted. 

For most of my adult life, I went to Sunday dinner at Gram’s every week.  She made delicious meals.  Roast beef, meat loaf, pork roast, chops, sauerkraut and amazing soups.  Her mashed potatoes couldn’t be matched.  She creamed vegetables.  Creamed corn was my favorite and she often made it for me.  I would pour it over my mashed potatoes.  She always made my favorites.  “Here Mikey, I made corn for you.”  There were sweets, too – pies, cakes, cookies.  She loved to bake, too.  “Get the pie out, Ella,” Pap would say after a wonderful Gram dinner and as we drank freshly brewed coffee and waited for dessert.  Pap called her Ella.  It’s short for Elizabeth, her real name.

Things began to change as Gram’s disease progressed.  Sunday dinners took on a new twist.  They were subtle changes at first.  “I forgot to take the Goddamn vegetables out of the microwave,” she would exclaim after we had all finished dinner.  Roasts were sometimes over cooked.  Side dishes were sometimes cold and often forgotten.  Things tasted different due to missing ingredients that she forgot or because she used sugar instead of salt.   Gram was always so good at timing, ensuring that things got done together so everything was hot when we sat down to eat.  That began to change and sometimes the food was cold.  Overall, there was a sense that she was trying so much harder to do what had previously been second nature to her.  Sunday dinners became a struggle.

“What’s all this?” I ask, upon walking in the door and seeing 2 meatloaves on the counter both charred black, one still in the pan.  Farther, on the other end of the counter, was a large bowl of cabbage and carrots for coleslaw next to a bowl of lettuce she would use to make her famous hot bacon dressing salad.  She was sweating and appeared flustered and turned to me just as she was putting the mayonnaise on the lettuce salad instead of the slaw.  My heart dropped and tears burned in the back of my eyes as she immediately realized her mistake, stopped dead in her tracks and looked at me like a child who, after giving her all, had just let down her parents in a grand way.  That look burned into my memory.  I would see it again and again.  It is hard to describe – discouragement, disappointment, embarrassment, frustration, fear, anger, and sadness all wrapped up into one horrified, but at the same time, lost, look that hit like a serrated knife directly into my heart.  “It’s ok Mum.”  (Almost everyone who know Gram, called her Mum at that time, including me.)  “We can go out to eat.”  “No Mikey,” she said in a soft, weak, almost whisper of a voice, mixed with a sigh of disgust.  “I have a roast in the oven.  I just need to make the Goddamn potatoes.”  “Ok.”  I  help her get dinner together.  I want to save her any more embarrassment or stress. 

I miss those Sunday dinners.  I miss those delicious meals, too.  Most of all I miss that Gram so much.  My sisters wrote down a few of her recipes, but most were not salvaged and are somewhere lost among the bad circuits and missed connections and confusion in Gram’s ever-shrinking brain. 

Meal times here are hard for me and it’s why I try to avoid them.  There are a couple reasons.  First, I get very frustrated because I can’t get her to eat.  When she lived with me, I could always get her to eat and do almost anything.  I knew her; I knew how.  She trusted me.  “I’ll see what Mikey thinks,” or “I have to check with Mikey,” she would often say.  But here, at Manor Care, I can’t get her to even eat.  So I get frustrated and I get sad.  I know she needs to eat to live, but I can’t make her do it.  Secondly, I’m a distraction to her.  As I said, Gram loved to feed other people.  When I visit at meal time, even if she is hungry, she is consumed with trying to give me her food instead of eating it.  It’s just best that I not go during mealtime. 

Sandy, one of my favorite aides, reaches over and puts a glass of chocolate milk in front of Gram then she takes her now cold hand and places it on Gram’s cheek and neck, like they often do playfully.  This time Gram wasn’t playing.  She let out a few more grumbling obscenities, put her head down and went back to sleep.

As Sandy began to walk away, she said to me, “She hasn’t been eating, you know.”  “Oh,” I say, surprised.  “It’s been like this for a couple of weeks.  She drinks, but she just won’t eat.”  My heart sinks.  We’ve been here before – twice actually.  Gram stops eating, loses a bunch of weight and is placed on hospice.  Both times before, she subsequently began eating again and was discharged from hospice.  My heart hopes this is just a temporary thing.  My brain knows it could go either way.