Mom: Shakespeare

Shakespeare August 18, 2008

The old woman came in quietly on the arm of her daughter. She wore beige capris, a white button-down and sturdy moccasins. Her hair was curly and thinning at the forehead and temples. Her eyes were the most distinctive of all: They were the eyes of the un-dead, seeing but not caring. There was no response as I greeted her and motioned to a chair. She stood still until her daughter moved her toward the chair. I asked the old woman how she was. She just looked through me. I looked at the daughter and asked her to tell me again what had happened that brought them to my office.

She began.

The daughter had arrived home from work two days ago to find Mother sitting in the swivel chair in her office, distracted and repeating a phrase as though she were a stuck record – “A horse.” In fact, Mother was pulling on a piece of thread and swiveling slowly back and forth repeating “a horse” while staring out the window. She didn’t respond to the daughter’s greeting. Daughter tried to get Mother’s attention by swiveling the chair around and away from her focus on the window. But to no avail, Mother just swiveled it back and stared out the window. The daughter feared some kind of stroke. She called EMS and Mother was transported to the hospital. Mother’s response was to cooperate, but she spoke not a word. She responded in a stiff, almost unnoticing manner. She hadn’t had a stroke. No problem could be diagnosed, so she was released from the hospital. The attending physician had recommended a psychologist for an evaluation and the daughter called, i.e. the appointment we were now having.

Mother didn’t respond to my questions. “A horse.” She sat stiff, looking out the window and whispered “a horse.” So I interviewed the daughter. Her mother was a writer with three books to her credit – romance novels by literary classification, but not young romance. They were romances for the elderly. According to her daughter these novels were not Fabio-Harlequin romances but funny, down-to-earth stories of love among the elderly. It was a fairly undeveloped field as most readers think romance belongs to the young. Mother’s main characters were elderly, sexual, hungry, and viable; loving life in ways not available to the young. I have to admit Mother’s topic made me a little uncomfortable as a picture of my own grandmother came into mind. I pushed it out: The idea of my gran naked, sexual, and on the prowl. Mother made a living with this topic. However, the daughter said that recently Mother had stopped typing. Her computer was on but the white screen remained blank. Twice Mother forgot to plug in the power cord and the daughter had come home, only to spend the evening re-booting the machine.

“A horse.” Mother had turned her head to look at the wall. The only things there were theatre posters and licenses.

I asked the daughter questions that might have indicated a possibility of Alzheimer’s. But the daughter seemed to believe that Mother’s condition was too sudden. I asked about any other recent events in Mother’s life. The daughter had to think. Nothing suddenly she said, but some things that had caused a change in Mother’s lifestyle. I asked what. Mother’s husband, daughter’s dad, was still alive, but suffered from cancer and arthritis. He recently went through chemo which had been unsuccessful and his body was now advancing toward death, with a lot of pain and need. The bills were mounting for his care. The daughter lived with them to help take care of Daddy and Mother and she had been a help, but the daughter had a son who recently came for a visit. He did drugs and to pay for his habit stole from his grandmother. The pearl and sapphire brooch her husband had given her on their 25th anniversary was gone. The loss was never discussed out loud. The son, grandson, disappeared. Then, Mother had gone to the bank for a loan to help with the mounting expenses. She was a long time customer of this bank; they only gave her a thousand dollar loan. Only enough to make the late payments on the medical equipment she had rented to care for her husband. But she had been robbed coming out of the grocery store. The thousand was gone, along with the few groceries she had managed to purchase.

Mother was now staring at one particular poster on the office wall. “A horse?” she said.
I looked at the daughter, “A horse?” I asked.
The daughter shrugged her shoulders.
“A horse.” Mother repeated, getting out of the chair slowly, her focus on the one poster. It was a poster of a play that I had enjoyed in my student days, a Shakespeare play – Richard III, about a king who possibly killed his brother and two nephews – rightful kings of England - to gain the throne for himself and started a civil war.

The office was deafeningly silent. I looked up at the poster, then back at the old woman and her words suddenly made sense. She was telling us all the time what the problem was in those fateful words: “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.”