She is 94 years old in 2025. Will be 95 at the end of the year.
She was and is a lot of things. Primarily, willful, stubborn, manipulative and can be very charming when she is conspiring something. She is Hungarian.
She is my Mother. Just the two of us left of our small refugee family now. My brother was killed at sixteen years of age, and my father passed 25 years ago. She has her own apartment in a senior building, but she doesn’t go out to the market, bookshop or coffee shop like she used to. She is becoming house-bound. Bad dentistry has left her toothless, with an awful upper partial she pops in for vanity and photo purposes. That oversized, crooked upper partial does absolutely nothing to help her chew her food.
She is not ready for a nursing home, which is unaffordable for a good one, or a nightmare for a bad one. She can keep herself clean. Keep her apartment tidy, and collect her mail. Her mind while never very stable, is in full blown dementia, flipping back and forth through the decades like they are the present. Her imagined drama becomes her reality. Everyone is either stealing from her, or wanting to marry her.
Evidently, she stopped seeing her doctor because she was told she had the body of a twenty year old, and everything was perfect after her last blood tests. Alas, her young body cannot get her to the Publix any longer, and her young mind cannot order herself food. Her fabrications and delusions are becoming dangerous in our view.
We used to joke about telling stories three times, but now they number in the thousands of repetitions. Luckily, she only gets violent when the subject of moving or change comes up.
We are now committed to seeing her now every week and taking her food and necessities.
She had begun receiving “meals on wheels’ prescribed by her doctor, whom she doesn’t visit any longer. She complains non-stop about how horrible the food is, how it has mold growing on it. That this horrible food is recycled from returned food, and is sent out again to these poor old people. There is no end to the injustices. She has quite a litany of creative complaints.
Of course it’s very logical to be so critical. My parents were wonderful cooks, had their own gardens, fruit trees, and cooked fresh foods. My father was a perfectionist, and probably today would be considered a “food snob”. My mother however is just a plain old snob, labeling everything she doesn’t like as not fit for even peasants. (Who are lower than dogs, as dogs she will feed from the table).
The caretaker who had been entrusted with her care went MIA and my daughter found her in a pretty neglected state. So she and I have taken things over completely, much to Nana’s chagrin, as we are the two people she can’t manipulate or hoodwink. If anything happens, the first thing she says is “Don’t tell Ondi or Lala.” What? Is she two?
My daughter had been instacarting her favorite staples: Sugar, coffee, milk, cream, yogurt, bread and butter. Then one night she called her that someone had stolen all her food. On further investigation we found she indeed had nothing in her house, not even dish soap, tide, paper towels, Nothing. We were very angry. We also realized we can’t believe what she says, things like who is visiting her, the doctors she seeing and what they are saying. People are taking care of her. It’s all a delusion. We need to monitor everything personally.
Nana is not much of a meat eater, but she loves her sugar and dairy, especially in pastry form. We want to keep her in her safe familiar place as long as possible. So I will be making soups, stews, noodle and rice dishes, that a 95 year old Hungarian drama queen will find appealing and familiar.
And of course, lots of pastry to go with coffee so sugar laden its practically syrup.
mizandie.com 