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Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067
781-784-3652
E-mail UCS
Stewardship Testimonial
By a Member
Good morning! My husband and I have been coming to this church for about 8 years. I still feel “new”, even though we’re not. I know all the “regulars” by name. I still worry I’ll forget those names when I hear “Can you say good morning to someone nearby?” We pledge to the church each year – midrange. A touch more each year. I still catch myself thinking, this time of the year, “Enough already! I’m not increasing that pledge.”
When the minister emailed me last month asking if I’d be one of the Stewardship Testimonial (sub theme: “Inspirational Financial”) four minute speech makers I thought “Geez. Why me? I’ve got a lot on my plate what with mom having a stroke last month, visiting, figuring out what do” and, “What can I possibly say that’s different, or inspiring?” My next thought was “Well, this probably means I won’t be asked to be a visiting steward. OK.”
Here goes.
We’re not a family with a lot of extra money. I retired from my job two years ago, and my husband’s been an at home dad since our oldest child was born twelve years ago. The last new car we bought — family van, Chevy – was in 2003. No power sliding doors. We don’t have cable tv. We have three college tuitions, I hope, coming up. But, our annual income always seems about one penny more than our annual outgo. Happiness.
.
However, last year around this time, when the capital campaign for the elevator addition kicked off, and they suggested our family could donate, over a 3 year period, the jaw-dropping, knee-buckling sum of …oh…25, or maybe 30, thousand dollars – that’s on top of, additional to, our annual pledge to fund the church’s budget, I thought –
Well, I’ll get back to that.
First, what does UU Sharon – this community – mean to me? Why did coming here 8 years ago feel “right”, when just before, returning for a six month period to the Catholic church of my youth had felt – not wrong, but not “right,” not right for the person I’d grown up to be? Thinking about this recently, as I visited my mother at hospitals, and at the “skilled nursing facility” she stayed at for a month, I had some insight.
If I were going to commit to something, I wanted it to be my free choice. If I were going to commit to something, I wanted it to be part of a caring community that tolerated many view points, and wasn’t run by a top down hierarchy. I didn’t want a lot of rules. I didn’t want it to be a sin if I missed a service. I wanted people to understand me when I spoke. I wanted friends and intelligent company. I wanted autonomy. I wanted to feel like the organization to which I belonged was helping its members and the greater world.
My mom was most definitely not at the nursing home by choice. The stroke had left her aphasic – mixing up her words – so nobody understood her. She couldn’t make friends. I don’t think anyone in the place was being particularly “helped” by being there, much less the greater community. As for rules and hierarchy, well, think kindly fascism. With drugs. Few get out. In her month long stay, my mom got depressed, stopped eating, and tried to escape.
They have something called a Roam Alert. It’s a black plastic transmitter thing about an inch square. They threaded one onto her sneaker lace. Then when she got near the exit door a recorded voice would start – really loud — “Roam Alert! Roam Alert! Front Door!” and someone would run to come bring her back. When she figured out the little black thing on her shoelace was the problem, she unthreaded it. When they reattached it with an unbreakable plastic tie, she put on her other pair of shoes. When they took away those shoes, she was stuck. “Everything is wrong” she kept telling me.
It was clear the skilled nursing facility wasn’t a good fit, and the therapy she was receiving didn’t outweigh the driving her crazy things. And after a while it became clear to me, also, I was stalling getting her out of there. I told her it was because she deserved more therapy, she was entitled to stay. But it was really for my own convenience. The alternative was my home.
Like other times when you consider doing, or not doing, something—the choice that eventually felt right, and inevitable, was the one that at first seemed harder, or even impossible. I asked she be discharged from the skilled nursing facility to my home. You could call it the unskilled facility.
I booked the “training” I needed so I’d be on top of what drugs she took, and how much, and when to give, and what measurements and tests she had to have. And last Sunday I shared in Joys and Concerns she would be leaving the nursing home to live with us, and it would be exciting. Well, it was exciting. Right after church last Sunday I went to visit, and take her for an afternoon out. She was glum, scary thin, and weak from not eating. Like every time, she didn’t want to go back. I told her to hang in just a few more days, the Discharge was coming! I don’t think she believed me. She may not have understood me. Goodbye! I said, and left. I could walk out.
Ten minutes after I got home, a supervisor called me. “She’s wailing, she’s throwing herself down, she’s a danger to herself, I’m calling the ambulance.” Oh no, I thought — ambulance, hospital, confinement, i.v.s, confusion, agitation, stress. “Can’t you just give her an Ativan (a sedative) and wait a few? She only has a couple more days at the place – don’t make her go to a hospital now!” “NO! We can’t! I’m calling right now.”
….
I spent the evening at Good Samaritan hospital in Brockton. No one was happy to see me. The doctor, because I wanted the patient discharged “against medical advice”; and the patient, because …well, I’d stolen something from her, I’d done it before, I was doing it again, and I could just get the hell out because she was staying put til the doctors gave it back to her. The only moment she wasn’t teed off at me was when I took one of her sneakers from the plastic bag under the bed, borrowed a nurse’s scissors, and ceremoniously snipped off Roam Alert. “Good!” she said.
Eventually the doctor gave in. After talking with the place from which my mom had been ejected, she wrote me a stack of prescriptions for drugs my mom may, or may not have been, getting; suggested I fill the prescriptions at the 24 hour pharmacy across the street and go home to await my mother’s delivery, via ambulance. Since I’d run out of the house without my wallet, this was tricky. I decided to just get the three drugs I recognized, and thought I could administer without killing her: the anti-depressant slash appetite stimulant they’d started her on, that hadn’t done squat; the Ativan they’d used a few times when she was really agitated; and the blood thinner drug.
Our house is back in the woods, at the end of a long, long dirt driveway. Last Sunday it was warm during the day, though by Monday dawn it chilled down enough to snow a little. But at 11 pm Sunday, the driveway was really muddy. When the ambulance got stuck, after a fancy turn trying to back nearer, I walked out and peeked in the back window of that lit up red and white box. If you’ve ever tried to give a cat a bath, you’d recognize the look I got from the person wrapped and strapped on the stretcher within.
The EMTs decided to walk her stretcher to my house right from where they were. The lady EMT was doing well on her end, at my mother’s head, until she tried to walk backward up the porch steps. She tripped and suddenly sat down. The look, from my mom’s lowered head, got madder as the foot end stayed up. The guy EMT offered to switch. “I’m pinned under the stretcher” said the lady. He dropped his end so he could help. My mom went the other direction. Somehow they switched ends, and made it up the stairs and in. Our house has a narrow entry hall with a washer/dryer on one side and a door into the kitchen on the other. The stretcher couldn’t make the corner into the kitchen. The guy got trapped between the stretcher and the washer. They tried standing up the stretcher to get it around the corner. It was too tall to go through the doorframe. The guy was still stuck in the laundry room.
I told the lady she should just unstrap my mom and let her go on her own. Off came the straps, down came the mom. Tottering, baleful, clutching the hospital gown behind her, bouncing off two door jambs, she made it to the bedroom. Maintaining a stony, furious silence she collapsed into the bed and yanked the covers over her head. I dropped the bag full of clothes and sneakers by the side of the bed and retreated.
At midnight, all was calm. It wasn’t perfect, it hadn’t been easy, but I felt certain mom would wake up in the morning happier, start eating, and we’d work it out. I thought, usually, once you commit, a hard decision just works out right. I went to bed at five minutes past midnight. I fell into the best, most welcome, sleep.
About that $25 or $30 thousand dollars request? Well, sometimes, once you commit, a hard decision just works out right. We didn’t have much extra money, but we had extra time. We figured if one, or the other, or both of us just took a little part time job, we could make it. Twenty five thousand, or course, no way could we do thirty. So, school days since last May, you’ll find my husband driving one of those little white vans, transporting Sharon school kids to special programs. $12 an hour, four hours a day, 180 school days a year. $12 x 4 x 180 = $8,640 per year. Believe it or not, over 3 years, you can fund a $25,000 pledge with a $12 an hour job, working part time, school days only. If someone had only one extra hour per day, and used it working a $12 an hour job – babysitting, housekeeping, typing? – and kept at it, just 180 days a year, that would be $2,160 per year. That could be a $5,000 pledge– easily – over three years. We thought small, and multiplied. It’s a good feeling to commit to a hard decision, and to start carrying through. You won’t regret it.
…..
The phone in our bedroom rang at 1:30 am. After a while – it had been such a deep, restful sleep – I picked it up. “Jean, it’s Ellie. Sorry to call so late, but we have your mother.” Ellie? Someone at the nursing home? “Have your mother?” Ellie? Our next door neighbor, half of Ellie and Kelsey, my Unitarian friends, who lived way down the end of that long, cold muddy downhill driveway? Oh my god. Oh my god. I ran downstairs, jumped in the car, and tore down the driveway. “Roam Alert” I thought. “What a great idea.”
Inside Ellie and Kelsey’s house, was a weak, skinny, completely dressed lady sitting on a bed and rambling. I heard “Just let me stay, you’re so nice, don’t make me go back to her.” Seeing me, she added, passionately, “Don’t let her take me! She looks nice, she talks nice, but she’s no good!” I stepped out of her line of sight. “Of course” Ellie said “We’d never met her, but we knew it was your mom. You’re so much alike.”
Around the corner, I heard Kelsey — kind, compassionate Harvard Medical student she is — saying “Well, maybe you could both could sleep here tonight.” “No, no, no!” I said “It’ll just be worse.” I called my husband on Ellie’s cell, forgetting I’d run out of the house with the bedroom phone. I think he’d gone back to sleep! By the time I got him on a phone, the whole house, including his sister, who had come for a pleasant overnight visit, was awake Finally, he got down to Ellie and Kelsey’s house, we got one on each side of her, frog-marched Mom to the car, and got her back to our house.
Once inside, it became apparent she had a lot to say, and preferred no one – especially me – go to sleep until she had her say. I thought “An Ativan certainly would be helpful.” I cracked open the new prescription, got a glass of water, and pleaded. “Remember, Mom, this makes you feel better…Goooood pill.” “No, Poison Pill!” she replied. “No, goooood pill.” “No, Poison pill.” I had an inspiration. “Look Mom, I’ll cut it in half. I’ll take half… Not poison!” “NEVER!” Well, in that case… I took the other half.
I got a camping mat, a pillow, and a big blanket, and lay down on the floor by her chair. My husband and son stacked chairs and bookshelves by each of our four doors to the outside. In what may have been my last coherent thought that night, I suggested taping colanders over the doorknobs. I don’t remember much more. But the night passed and it’s been better ever since.
Later that week our visiting steward came to call. For many reasons — the kindness of neighbors; the sweetness of family; the shortness of life; the possibility of improvement; and the realization that sometimes, following through may be hard, even on good decisions — we upped our annual pledge, a bit; and committed to a fourth year of capital fund payments. I hope you all find yourself in a position, maybe with less drama, to do the same. Thank-you.
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