ETIQUETTE

[written when mom had been living with us for almost 3 years, in Jan./2023]:

“Oh no, he’s still talking,” my 80 year old mother says out loud,   not even attempting a whisper.  “Shhh” I sush her like I did to my kids when they were toddlers, but this is not a toddler, it’s my mom who has dementia. 

We’re at a community event at the high school celebrating Martin Luther King Day.  I didn’t bother to remind her who MLK Jr., was she’d forget again anyway.  I took mom to get her out of the house and because I figured she’d like the music from the student groups that performed. My son and I share a quick look knowing that we feel a little like Grandma, because every town event  we’ve gone to has maybe one too many speakers and longer “thank you” lists than any Oscar acceptance speech. But my son and I realize that all these people are volunteers and the gratitude and silence during their speech goes a long way.

At a public event you sit, you  listen, you are polite, my son knows because he learned from my example.  But the woman who taught my sister and I to sit politely at events with our hands folded in my lap,  to not chew with our mouth open, to keep our elbows off the table and to sit patiently at the dinner table until we are excused; -  now this woman sighs an incredibly…long…. sigh. ahhhhhhugh My Mom is beyond upset, because she just realized the speaker’s earned rapturous applause at the end of a very, poignant line /  about racism and taking action, /this hand clapping did not actually indicate the end to his long speech.  “Oh my God, no! It’s still going on” she agonizes.

As I relay this story, some of my mom’s etiquette lessons also come to mind, like: “an Italian American never goes to a house empty handed, always bring a little gift, you know flowers or something”.  I remember that she was such a good guest and a good host.  She was an audience member at countless Broadway shows who would stiffle a cough and nudge us if we were falling asleep - but am I really remembering how it was?  How she was?  Did she do those things? 

 I’m so scared that I’m forgetting.  It’s not even that I’m scared my sister and I are forgetting, it’s that my teens, my kids are never going to imagine how their Grandma was, the last few years of her senility are too close and their toddler years are a long reach away.

More recently, my mom’s friend from college, Colette, called me.  “It’s a shame this happened to Rossi,” (Colette talks about mom like we are at mom’s funeral, like she’s gone already, which essentially she is).  I think it’s telling of my mom’s personality that some people called her Rossi, some Roz, a few Rozalind.  She preferred Roz, but she was too polite to correct them.

Colette goes on about how my mom was always reading the New York Times: “Rossi would talk about books or plays, but I couldn’t keep up.  You know your mom was intimidating! She was so smart.”  What? My mom intimidated her friends! That can’t be, she always felt lesser than them.  They kept up full time jobs and had kids, mom “just”  decided to give up teaching and take care of us.  She’d say to me, “Oh that  Colette she’s smart she has her career, she goes to the office each day.”  Mom put all her friends on a pedestal and here they always felt less intelligent than her!

Now as I sit at this event embarrassed by my mother, I think back to how I felt so lucky that both my parents and my father in-law were around when my kids were first born.  I was heartbroken that neither I nor my kids would ever get to meet their paternal Grandmother, my mother in-law, who died before I ever met my husband.  I knew my mom would be the only Grandmother they ever knew, but I also knew that she’d step up and spoil them, indulge them, love them and do all the things a grandmother does.  I do remember.  The kids don’t.  I have to remember.

I went to mom’s house countless times when the kids were babies. When I was breast feeding our oldest we’d let my husband work in the small Queens apartment and I’d spend days at mom’s house on Long Isand.  She took care of the baby in the morning and let me sleep in and she did the same when our daughter was born..  As the kids grew her house became a second home for them filled with toys, books and all their favorite things.  Mom would drop everything in a heart beat and drive to Queens to babysit and she did the same for my sister and her twins when they lived in Massachusetts.  Always thinking of others buying clothes for our kids instead of herself.

I have to remember.  I can’t forget, but I am forgetting.