There is little sign in the elevator of the psychiatric hospital that says “High elopement rate on Geri Psych,” and underneath it a clip art STOP sign. They are serious about this elevator. You can not just push the button and get on and go. You have to pick up a phone in the lobby and tell an operator where you want to go, and they will send the elevator down for you. The buttons don’t work if you push them from the outside. This, I’m sure, is because of the high elopement rate. It sounds so romantic and campy, like you and I will steal away, and not tell anyone, and get in this elevator, and leave this psychiatric hospital, and be in love, and get married, and be happy. We will elope. We will experience elopement. 

No one is eloping out of here like that. The windows are protected in a serious way that made me feel exhausted just trying to imagine how someone would try to bust out of them. The people glassed into the nurse’s station are serious too. I figured that our quickly when I asked if I could bring my guitar in to play for my mother, and had to answer their barrage of questions. There are many security pieces in place to keep the geriatric patients from hurting themselves. From eloping. I couldn’t help but admire the strategy of it all, and how it paid respect to how crafty you could be if you really put your mind to it. Even if you were old. Even if you had dementia.

The geriatric psych ward is where my mother lives now. She won’t stay there. She was moved there after falling at her foster care, again, and after being violent, again, and again, and again, until she finally was unmanageable. It was easy for us to blame her first facility when she acted out there. But we are facing another eviction, and it has become clear to us that when she moved out of the first facility, she took her Alzheimer’s demons with her.  And so she is in the geri psych where they are trying different cocktails of psychotropic drugs to control her moods, and her violence, and her seizures. The director of her current home told my sister “Of course!” they would take her back, IF she is properly medicated. We have no other choices. This was discussed as we met as a family with her geriatrician, who told us we are definitely at End Stage now. This is where we are at. We are under that big tack in the map of this journey that says You Are Here. The journey, now much shorter.

We met with the Hospice person yesterday who detailed for us how important it is to stop thinking about long term, and commit to what is right here, right now. It won’t matter if the medicine she is on causes liver problems down the road, if it makes her more comfortable today, that is what we need to do. Strawberry ice cream for breakfast? Yes. Ice cream all day? Yes, she can absolutely have that. And as she gave that example I remembered how for years I had warts on my finger tips as a kid, and after the doctors would burn them off my mother would buy me Dove bars to comfort me from the agony.

The meeting room we sat in to talk to Hospice was better lit with natural light than the room we sit in at the geriatrician’s office. That one makes me feel claustrophobic and sensitive to the acrid smell of old coffee reheated in the microwave in there. This room felt airier. Like I could breathe. Like I could walk out of there and see clearly.

I walked out of the meeting with the Hospice person and saw my mother and she saw me, and beamed. So much happier than the last time I saw her at her home, when she twisted my fingers and dug her claws into my arm and stuck her tongue out at me and rolled her eyes in disgust at me. Her psychotropic cocktail is working. It is better. And truthfully, she was delightful when I saw her. “Better living through pharmaceuticals,” my sister would say. And better dying, I suppose.

The patient rooms in Geri Psych are barren. My mother has a bed and a chair, and a 24 hour person by her side. That’s it. And Geri Psych smells like you think it would. Like old people. Like peppermint and wood soap and antiseptic and freshly washed linens. I walked out of the meeting with the Hospice person and breathed in deeply as I walked down the hall. Everything. I breathed in everything I could with both nostrils, deep into the bottom of my lungs, not afraid of the smell of institutionalized old people. And when I found my mother in a large open room, I sat next to her and wrapped my arm around her, pulling her closer into me so I could press my face into her hair, and breathe her in too.

The Hospice person reminded us that just as there is a process to being born, there is a process to dying. I marveled at the straw texture of my mother’s hair against my face and thought that there was a time when her parents pressed their faces into her little baby head, her fine hair then thin and satiny, and breathed her in too. 78 years prior. Her scent. I wanted it to live inside of me as I undertook the long process of trying to navigate the elevators to leave the geriatric psych ward where my mother lives. Until she doesn’t anymore.