The World According To Anne Arky

Mother had several days of delusional moments while they tried to get her heart rhythm back where it belonged, and many of those moments were tinged with paranoia. After four days, she went into respiratory failure, and I was told on the 12th that if I wanted to see her alive, I needed to get my ass to Florida ASAP. I made arrangements to be away from both jobs for the next few days, although when I called my boss at the bookstore, her response was something I considered to be somewhat less than charitable when I told her I would have to miss working Thursday night and Friday night because I had to go see my mother, who was very likely dying. “Well, this IS my busiest time of year, you know.” “Well, gee, honey, I’m sure my mother didn’t realize she’d chosen YOUR busiest time of year to die on us; maybe she can schedule a little better next time. By the way, you DO realize that I would rather be working at the store during YOUR busiest time of year than going to Florida to possibly bury my mother, don’t you?” She never apologized for that remark. BITCH! But that’s okay, because I doubt if I would have accepted her apology with any serious spirit of forgiveness, anyway.

My fun meter for this trip got pegged pretty early on when I was rolling happily down I-75 on the south side of Atlanta before the real rush hour got underway, still driving in the dark of O-Dark Thirty, and my left front tire began to shred at about 75 miles per hour. I somehow managed to get to the shoulder and called Triple A for a rescue. They took forever to find me for some reason. Granted, I didn’t know the area well, since I live north of the city and, as stated before, stay pretty much in my own little orbit up there, so I was only able to give them a general idea of where on I-75 I was, but even based on that, mine was the only little red car pulled off to the right with lights ablaze and flashing in the dark, so that should have been a lot easier than it was. Finally, he got the doughnut tire put on and I was able, with the help of a coworker, to find a WalMart in the neighborhood where I could buy a replacement tire and went on my way, sans $80 and one hubcap. I later found out that somewhere along the way, my right headlight went the way of the errant hubcap and I had to get a replacement for that in Florida. Yeehaw!

That day (Thursday the 13th), about 45 minutes before I got to the hospital, my sister got to the hospital from Fort Lauderdale, where she and her husband had gotten off the ship as planned, with the original intent of flying back home to DC. Instead, after putting her husband onto a plane for DC, she rented a car and drove to the Tampa area where Mother was in the hospital and got there just before me. After we visited with Mother for a little while and got caught up on things, we went back to our uncle’s house. There, we found out that on Friday before Mother went into the hospital with heart problems (she had congestive heart failure anyway, which should always be taken into consideration), she had gone shopping with Charlotte, and while they hooked up her portable oxygen tank for running around, she ran around with it all day long with the damned thing TURNED OFF! God damned son of a bitch, what the FUCK were those people thinking?! No wonder she tanked!


One night over the next few days (I can’t remember which), they raised the sedation they had Mother under (because of the respirator) and I showed her the scrapbook of her 80th birthday party that I’d been working on for six months. (I wish to God I had taken it with me to the Marietta Diner and showed it to her then, but I didn’t think there would be time, and I was afraid a restaurant environment was not the best place for keeping a scrapbook in presentable condition.) Otherwise, the only time she hadn’t been sedated was when they were trying to wean her off of the respirator. The first time they tried, she lasted about five hours before they had to put it back, and she said when they try again, if it doesn’t work, she didn’t want to go back on it a third time – she’d rather go and be with Bob (my dad, who died in 2004). I had to leave on the 17th to go home to my house, my cat and my two jobs, and when I went by the hospital to tell her goodbye, she was semi-sedated and couldn’t talk because of the respirator, but there was a tear rolling down her right cheek. That was the last time I saw her alive, and walking out of there was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my whole life, until the next week.