Exit Laughing (3 page)

When they finally left, in the wee hours of a cold spring morning, Rob, the most fanciful and sentimental of the group said, “Dan gave us all a lot of laughs. That was his last laugh on us.”

They all agreed. It was just the kind of story Dan would have loved to hear.

They hoped he had.

She must have a window seat. This, she promises, is her last phone call for the night, reminding me one more time,
“It must be a window seat.”
I tell her, “I will do my best. The plane seems awfully full, and since it’s a last-minute booking, it might be hard.”

“If I tell you I want a window seat, get me a window seat.”

Click.

This phone exchange was not long after she had been diagnosed with moderate-stage dementia. She had some scary moments—unsettling, jarring, completely-out-of-left-field confusing moments. While visiting for a long weekend, my husband, Ken, and I found her curled up in a ball, naked on the floor in her bedroom in Florida. She had absolutely no recollection of how she landed there. When I shook her from her sound sleep, she smiled and told me I looked a lot taller than she remembered. “Ma, you’re on the floor.”

“Oh. It feels comfy though; you sure it’s the floor?”

There were the middle-of-the-night phone calls when she thought it was the middle of the day; there were the panicked phone calls about her bank account. She had stopped balancing her checkbook, and believed she was being “robbed.” And then there were the phone calls wondering why my dad hadn’t
returned from the bagel place when, in fact, my father had died a few years earlier.

She was becoming much more agitated, much more impatient, and much less vain. Bathing became a chore for her. Losing her keys became second nature. Burning toast was a daily routine.

A bat mitzvah in Scarsdale, New York, galvanized her into major travel frenzy. She wanted desperately to go. A spur-of-the-minute decision, literally.

“I have to go. I have to see Gertie. I have to go.”

Gertie was her older sister. Theirs was a relationship not dissimilar to Palestine and Israel.

“I have to go. Don’t tell me I’m not going.” The thing about my mom was she was as stubborn as the day was long. God’s honest truth, sometimes it was really hard to tell if it was the dementia or my mother just being herself.

“Ma, I don’t think it’s a good idea, you traveling by yourself.”

“Oh, really? Fine. I’ll drive to Gert’s,” she proposed after she had rammed her car into a fire hydrant—a glaring sign that she should never be behind the wheel, ever again—a few weeks earlier. “It came out of nowhere,” she said. “One minute I was sitting there, minding my own business, and the next minute, there it was, crossing the street.”

What do you say?
Really?
“Ma, it can’t walk. A fire hydrant doesn’t walk.”

Unfortunately, having her car keys taken away from her required more than just a sit-down—removing them from her grip required the jaws-of-life. It is, I learned, the last bit
of true freedom and independence, and it is never given up without a fight.

I worked it out so a car service (a very kind man who lived a few doors down from her) would come and pick her up, drop her off at the JetBlue terminal, and make sure there were no seen
or unforeseen
problems. I paid the guy to wait an extra half hour. I called the airline and spoke with a reservation agent, who had just the right combination of humor and sympathy and could not have been any more cordial or kind. She promised that they would do whatever they could to accommodate my mom, but she needed to remind me that the plane was, in fact, full, and hopefully someone would be able to move, since there was not a window seat available. I asked her if there was a “companion” person—a representative—who could help my mom get settled, help her with her boarding pass, and handle the other unexpected frustrations that might arise.

“Yes,” she said, “someone will help your mom.” I hoped and prayed for my mother to come face-to-face with kindness. I thought of all the times I gave up a window seat for an elderly person, or a pregnant woman, or a wife who wanted to sit next to her husband. I was hopeful.

Standing outside her condo with a massive suitcase and an overnight bag, having packed enough clothing for an entire month or lifetime, whichever came first, she was picked up at the designated time. “Maybe I’ll stay for a few extra weeks,” she had told me the night before, when she listed all the clothing she was bringing. I heard in her voice something I had never heard before: loneliness.

She got to the JetBlue terminal and checked her suitcase
outside with baggage claim, and (the neighbor/car service driver told me) handed a crisp ten-dollar bill to the bag handler, telling him he was a lovely, lovely kind man. He deeply appreciated her gesture. Little did he know that the remaining ten or so crisp ten- and twenty-dollar bills that she had tucked ever so neatly into her wallet would make their way to others who smiled, offered a hand, let her get ahead in line, and helped her with her carry-on.

She made her way up to the counter, where a ticket should be waiting for her. Yes, the agent told her, there was a ticket, but she must go to the gate in order to get a window seat.

She went through the whole security scene, and I am told by the neighbor/car service guy about the taking off of her shoes, the removing of her belt, the telling of a joke or two about her hip replacement
after she in fact set off the security alarm
and how the sound once reminded her of the old days in Las Vegas when someone won at the slots, and it was a sound filled with “good wishes.”

“No more,” she said loudly, as if telling it to every single person on the security line. “It’s a phony sound. It has no heart. Gimme back my shoes.”

The neighbor/car service guy could not go any farther with my mom. The rules. The companion person from JetBlue now met her, thankfully.

There was no window seat available. She had an aisle seat. No one wanted to give up a seat.

This is where I get to relive the whole crazy scenario as it was repeated to me, beat by beat, blow by excruciating blow. My mother threw a shit storm of a nut-dance, flung a racial
slur at the African American flight attendant, and then, if that weren’t enough, caused another passenger who was somewhat overweight to break down and cry. “You know how fat you are? You have your own zip code.”

She was escorted off the plane, and somehow managed to get back to her condo by renting a car, even though she had an expired license. I would just love to meet the Avis rental person who gave my mom a red Mustang to tool around in.

She called me in absolute hyper-hysterics. She wanted me to fire every single one of those nasty, bitchy flight attendants, and pilots, and the copilot—he was as much to blame. And where was her luggage, her
fucking
luggage? “I bet they stole it. They stole it and you should fire them, the whole lot of them. Now. I want you to fire them now.”

“Okay, Ma. I’m gonna fire them now.”

I found out from another very cordial and patient JetBlue rep that her luggage was on its way to New York. I was in Los Angeles on business; my brother was at a birthday celebration on Long Island. Neither one of us had expected this hailstorm. I tried to deal with the airport bureaucracy and arranged for my mom’s luggage to make its way to Fort Lauderdale within forty-eight hours, barring no glitches.

The administrator on the phone told me it was like an unstoppable chaotic ruckus, a tornado, a whirlwind. “Your mother is old and frail and disruptive.”

Holy shit.

I felt sad. I felt horribly sad and, dare I say, embarrassed, wholly, deeply, immensely embarrassed, because this old frail woman is, in fact,
my mom
.

“While we really appreciate your business, we must inform you that your mother, Beatrice, will no longer be able to fly with us.”

This did not surprise me. I told the JetBlue representative that my mom has the beginning stages of dementia. It comes and goes, but mostly it’s coming these days. I gave her all the broad strokes—my dad died, she’s living alone, we know, we know, it’s time to get her settled, she’s stubborn, she’s independent, and there’s the whole question of what to do now. Move her, or does she stay? And she’s always been much more strident and righteous and defiant. Not going gently into the good night.

For the record, every single JetBlue employee I spoke to knew exactly what happened on that plane. They not only knew all about my mother’s tantrum but, just like the game telephone, each and every time I spoke with someone new there seemed to be an added bit of shocking information. I was waiting for someone to tell me she stormed the cockpit, demanding to fly the plane to New York. I can only imagine the watercooler conversation about the crazy woman and the window seat.

My mother refused to speak to anyone. She felt duped and lied to and thought that the fat girl should have gotten up. “My God, she took up two goddamn seats.” And then she said, “I always, always have to sit at the window.”
“Why,”
I asked her,
“why?”

“Fuck you,” she hung up on me.

Trying to calm my mother down was near impossible. And just like the JetBlue employees, my mother’s version of the story became more and more exaggerated and embellished
each and every time she told it—repeated it, shared it. By the time I spoke with my cousin Carol, my mother was claiming she was strip-searched and held prisoner in a room, naked … 
without a television
.

“Without a television?” my cousin asked her, feigning shock and awe.

“Yes, that’s correct, I couldn’t watch my shows.”

“I’m so sorry, Aunt Bea. That must’ve been so hard and difficult.”

“Yes, it was. But they gave me a private airplane and ten million dollars.”

Dementia is filled with surprises. Unfiltered surprises. It is an unwanted visitor with a selective memory.

Shortly thereafter, I moved my mom to New Mexico, not far from my brother, where she was about to start living in an assisted-living facility.

When we arrived at the Fort Lauderdale airport, I witnessed her interaction with the bag handler at baggage claim. After he took her luggage and placed it on the conveyor belt, she handed him a crisp ten-dollar bill, telling him, “You’re a lovely, lovely man.” He was mighty appreciative of her generosity. I witnessed her stepping through security with the alarm going off, because of her hip replacement, and her retelling the same joke about the Vegas slot machines to all and anyone who would listen and laugh. It made her feel important, valued. It added a little bounce to her walk. And as we walked to the gate, I sensed the first stages of panic; it was there, in her eyes. Right there in her eyes, a bit of worry and fear.

She stopped and looked at me. “Did you get me a window seat?”

“Yeah, Ma, I got you a window seat.”

“Really? You did?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” she said. “Good.”

As the plane revved up its engines and was about to take off, my mom took my hand and squeezed it. Staring out the window, watching the plane disappear into the gorgeous white clouds, she turned to me after a few long moments and said, “Up here in the clouds, I can dream all I want.” Then she pointed to two clouds, almost intertwined, and she said with such joy, “See that. See that. They’re dancing together. Just like Daddy and me. You can only see this kind of magic from a window seat.”

In that moment, on that plane, the lines on her face smoothed out, and her eyes filled with remembrance, as if every memory were intact. A twinkle. She started to giggle. She was so very happy, content—an awakening of sorts.

“Thank you so much,” she said. “You don’t know how much this means to me.”

It was here that my mother had always been able to see and feel and imagine clouds dancing, forms taking shape, lovers kissing, the intertwining of souls, and as her hand pressed up against the window, she could feel the kindness of heaven.

Not long after, she died.

The days following September 11, 2001, were painful for my children, made even more so by the fact that a beloved family member died just a week later at their mother’s hand. Schuyler was ten and Sam was nine on that clear, crisp morning when jets flew into the World Trade Center. We lived in a twenty-first-floor apartment on Union Square that had postcard views of the Twin Towers from our bedroom and office. It was one of the features that had attracted us to the place.

I strolled toward home after dropping the kids at school, unaware that anything was amiss. Had I looked up I would have seen it, but I didn’t. As I neared home, I ran into Susan, a parent at the school who would soon get breast cancer, although we did not know it then. Susan told me about her daughter’s new hypoallergenic poodle, a concept I had never heard of. Little did we know as we talked that Susan would never make it home that day because she lived across from the World Trade Center, and that her poodle would have to be rescued by the building’s superintendent and held until Susan and her family could get back into their apartment to retrieve him.

This is what I do after a tragedy: I think about the moments before it happened and envy my innocent self, the one that
didn’t know that her life was about to suffer irreparably and could never be put back to the way it was before.

Once home, I entered my bedroom, glanced at the TV that was on, and caught images of the World Trade Center, both towers fully engulfed in flames. In a surreal moment, I looked out the window and saw the same scene taking place just blocks away. I screamed for my husband, who was in the shower, as oblivious to the disaster as I had been on my walk home. “Mark, turn off the water! The World Trade Center’s on fire!” It didn’t occur to me that the buildings were so far apart that a fire in one would not engulf the other. My mind registered
one fire
and
one World Trade Center
, and I couldn’t begin to fathom the reality of how two separate attacks had taken place during the time it took me to walk my children to school, talk to a few parents, and return home. I crumpled to the floor and watched the TV instead of looking out the window, focused on Katie Couric explaining what had happened—something about plane crashes and a possible attack.