It's 5:30 and Mom's in the hall outside the nurses' station, strapped into her wheelchair along with all the other oldsters. I run the Wheelchair Gauntlet, slip past the "Help Me!" lady, nod at the newbie who holds a worn baby doll and repeatedly asks, "Where AM I, what's happened to me?"  Greet nervously-smiling Gwen.  "I want to go home," she says.

 They all want to go home, but for most of them home is now a nursing facility where for $6,000 per month they get 24-hour nursing care, a twin bed with plastic mattress, a small dresser, a narrow closet, a worn bedside table, a bulletin board for photos, and, if they're lucky, a window with a view of blooming roses and yellow finches feeding from nylon socks filled with millet.

At dinnertime we enter one of the dining rooms.  There is a dining room towards the front of the building where the not-so-demented patients eat.  My mom (who broke her hip rescuing her toy cats from an imagined enemy) is in the full Demented Dining Room.  (When I asked my mom, in the ER, how she broke her hip, she said, "I was running REALLY fast!) 

As you'd expect, dinnertime is pretty crazy in the DDR.  Residents are wheeled in and meals are placed on the table, but half of the diners can't remember how to use their fork.  Or they have arthritis, or their hands shake, or they can't see the plate.  I sit with Mom.  All of her food is pureed, as she forgets to chew and there's some concern that she might choke to death. Tonight's meal is hamburger, mashed potatoes, cole slaw and Jell-o.  Hamburgers look really disgusting pureed, but she doesn't seem to notice.  She dutifully opens her mouth so that I can feed her.  I try not to make the bites too big.

There is one particular patient at the nursing home who cries "AAAHHH" all the freaking time!  It makes me crazy, but nobody else seems to notice.  Still, I'll take "AAAHHH" over the hacking of Emphysema Lady, who always sounds as if she's coughing up a lung.  To my right sits Eleanor, who maintains excellent posture and endlessly repeats, "I want to go to bed. Take me to my bed."  Her eyes are wide and she never blinks.

Isabel sits to the right of Mom and has tipped over the cole slaw.  She picks it up with gnarled fingers, trying to get it to her mouth.  Her blouse is already adorned with cherry Jell-o.  The aide comes over to help her eat, but there are too many residents for too few aides.

Meanwhile, Mom reaches out to pet her imaginary cat while rambling incoherently about sand dunes and her mother.  She smiles.  "That dossy is stealing his liver," she says.  I have no idea what she's talking about, but I nod and say, "Yeah," because that keeps her calm.  When she gets agitated she says, "I'm going to slap the shit out of you!"  As far as I know, my mother has never slapped the shit out of anyone, not even people who deserved it, like my father. 

One night after I'd fed her dinner she shook her head as if annoyed, sighed, and said, "I've never liked you." Another time she said, "I'd like to see my PRESENTABLE daughter."  My sisters and I are still trying to figure out which of us she meant.

The deal is, Mom always told me that if she ever got to the point where she needed to be in a nursing home, that I was to shoot her.  But shooting your mother is not all that easy.  Granted, it wouldn't be all that hard to smuggle in a gun, but there are way too many witnesses and the escape route is clear down the hall.  I'd have to jump from the window and make a run for the Impala.  My mother, who has always been aggressively antisocial, only has one visitor on weekdays and that is me.  My only possible out would be to commit the shooting on a Saturday and frame my sister.

I feel enormously guilty for putting my mother into a nursing home, not that I actually put her into the home, she sort of ended up there by default.  Until a year ago, she lived by herself.  I lived ten miles away.  I drove over nearly every day, I took care of her finances, her groceries, her cats, her doctor appointments (which averaged 75 a year) and her medications.

But then shit happened.  Macular degeneration took most of her vision.  She contracted viral meningitis, had seizures, fell and hit her head, had more seizures, got diabetes, got cancer, and then, worst of all, lost her mind.  An expert at denial, I managed to pretend that everything was okay, it was just the drugs.  So we took her off the drugs but all that did was make her crazy with pain.

And then she got infections.  Kidney infections, skin infections, urinary tract infections, foot infections.  More hospitalization, a wound vac, a hospital-affiliated nursing home because the insurance only pays for so many days and then it's time to be shipped to somewhere covered for more than five days by Medicare.  The wound took months to heal, her mind got worse.

My mother has always been brighter and more alive than everyone else.  Charming and funny and active and a complete workaholic.  Gorgeous blue eyes, radiant smile.  Even now she charms the nurses.  She's never liked sitting still, she likes to garden and fly kites and travel the country and take perfectly composed photographs.  She likes to hang out with the grandkids and eat ice cream.  The only time sitting holds any appeal is if she's watching movies -- The King And I or The Ghost And Mrs. Muir.  (My sister likes to think that Mom is like Mrs. Muir, channeling the Captain in her imaginary conversations.)

Now she picks up the remote and tries to call us.  She punches the buttons on the phone believing they'll change the channel on the t.v.  I used to make frequent drives to her house to fix the t.v.  Once I drove over and found her watching a basketball game in Spanish.  She'd hit the SAP button on the remote and couldn't figure out how to change the channel.  I expect it was much easier to have elderly parents back when there were three channels, a horizontal and vertical, and a volume.

Everything's become worse since she broke the hip.  She sees visions now, and people moving about in her room.  It's as if she's watching a screen instead of seeing what's really in front of her.  She has nightmares about babies left out in the cold and becomes panicked and inconsolable.  Nobody can convince her the baby isn't crying in the snow.  She rambles nonsense words and puts imaginary food into her mouth and strokes the imaginary cats.

The people who work at the nursing home are extraordinarily sympathetic and kind.  I've heard horror stories about nursing homes, but at Mom's home the only real horror is the deterioration of the body and mind, and after awhile, even that simply seems like part of a pattern, that whole circle of life bullshit.  We love the idea of dying-with-dignity, but I think that's kind of bullshit, too.  Maybe we're supposed to die all demented and grasping and hacking and AAAHHHing until the last breath.  Some of us are born breach or with the cord wrapped around our neck, and others slide into the world like they own it from Day One.  Maybe it's the same with death. 

My favorite Bizarro cartoon features a man answering the door, and at the door stands Death, but instead of the usual Death, there's a cat in cowl with sickle, faintly smiling.  The man looks at the cat and says, "This isn't going to be a quick death, is it."

Sometimes I see the Nursing Home as like a Daycare, maybe an orphanage.  The residents are helpless and dependent and need to be fed and changed and cared for and spoken to kindly.  They go "aaahhh" and like to be patted and gently held.  Of course, they're not cute like babies, they don't have the sweet smell of baby's skin, and they look scary sometimes.  When a baby projectile vomits we go, "oh, ick," but a 90-year-old man projectile vomiting is more like, "Oh, shit!"

And while babies are new and have all of life before them 90-year-olds are nearly over, and we don't like to think about life being over.  We don't like to think about our nice pleasure-giving strong bodies becoming weak and wrinkled and helpless.  We don't like to think about the shitty twist of fate that might put us back into diapers or eating baby food in the Demented Dining Room.

For my own last days, I like to imagine catching a ride up the hill, up to the Sierras, where I'll find a big flat boulder with a view.  I'll settle onto the rock -- it will be sunwarmed, but not too hot.  I'll drink a bottle of really good wine, bring a little weed, some chocolate -- marijuana brownies, that would be nice -- and a pocketful of morphine.  I'll lay on that rock in the sun and peacefully die.  (Okay...I know...I'd probably choke on my own vomit and that's not so peaceful, but it's MY death fantasy so...)  Maybe the coyotes or a mountain lion will come along and feed on my carcass (and probably get a little high from all the drugs).  Thus, even in death I'll provide nourishment to my fellow living creatures.

But if I chicken out, or get too feeble to find a ride up the hill, then I want (at my nursing home) cups of tea on demand, vegetarian food, a glass of wine in the early evenings, and an occasional beer as I sit in the courtyard petting my imaginary cats, watching birds crowd the feeder, yellow roses bloom, and the sky turn colors. 

 And if my daughters don't make sure that I get exactly what I want, I will slap the shit out of them.