before. He’d make spaghetti instead, and she’d say there was too much of it.
“It got a little confounding,” Michael said. “I almost dumped it on her head.”
MIMI
DONALD
JOHN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
MARK
MATTHEW
PETER
MARGARET
LINDSAY
CHAPTER 39
“I have to—very slowly,” Mimi said haltingly, her words slurring but her smile intact. “I’ve had I’ve had a crane—brain—problem. So my is very crazy. But you have to speak well and louder.”
Half of the words that came out of Mimi’s mouth were not what she intended them to be. She went back and forth for a full minute just on the word Austria, when what she really meant was India. “Most words came out as water,” Jeff Cheney, the family friend helping out as one of her caregivers, said. But she would not stop trying to explain herself, and was always chuckling a little.
“Margaret’s here. She’s how—you know. And my mouth is there—might be having to go, too—we’ll see—but as I’m—you know—my original was eight dollar for being old, for getting too old.”
Mimi tittered softly, exasperated. “Pretty bad. But I can try. Sometimes say boy, school, but today, boy or book!”
She laughed again. “So I’m trying a little. It’s pretty bad. Not very good. And I thought I’d be, by now, I’d be over.” She laughed louder, and then out came something perfectly clear. “Well, as Mary said, ‘Mother, you’re just taking longer now!’?”
The people around her had learned to decode much of what she was trying to say through her aphasia. They’d set up a hospital bed in the basement level of the house, easier for her caregivers to access. Each day brought something new: a bladder infection, an upset stomach, nausea, bouts of pain tempered by morphine. But Mimi could still watch TV—movies, cable news, and her favorite, Rachel Maddow. More helpless than she was accustomed to being, she would be alarmed when she was alone and go on tears about things she felt needed to get done around the house—most of them invented, like an overflowing septic system. For the first time in her life, Mimi had a few delusions of her own.
The longer Lindsay stayed, the more she understood her mother, or thought she did. When she wanted to get a complicated point across to Mimi, she would sometimes write her a note. When Mimi kept on refusing food and ordering something different, Lindsay wrote her, saying she believed these were her mother’s final few attempts to try to control what was going on in her life. Mimi agreed with Lindsay, but she kept on doing it, anyway.
What Mimi could no longer do, thanks to the aphasia, was control the conversation. “This is my son,” Mimi said, introducing Donald. Her oldest son had decided to visit, bringing flowers, which Mimi clearly appreciated. “He doesn’t see me very often,” Mimi said. “But we kalked today, and now go to each of them back more often to come each more. One crazy, you know.” She laughed.
In his usual cargo shorts and untucked Oxford, Donald was seated at the foot of his mother’s bed. Mimi’s condition did not seem to be affecting him, at least not noticeably. Donald was so still most of the time now, it often was hard to tell what he was thinking. But Lindsay had noted that since moving to his assisted living facility, he had stepped more lightly, smiled more. “I think the social isolation that he had at my mom’s house was really not good for him,” she said. Debbie, Mimi’s housekeeper, doubled as a part-time companion to Donald, picking him up every few days and driving him on errands, or out for walks in Woodland Park. More than occasionally, the plan would be to visit Mimi, but Donald would ultimately decide not to. “She’s too bossy,” he’d tell Debbie.
Today, though, he was here. And with Mimi unable to interject, Donald took over the conversation, uninhibited. He displayed a comprehensively accurate knowledge of the names of everyone in his family,