Driving Home: Making Sense of Mom's Confusing Mistake
Where were you when you realized you were running out of time with someone you love? A doctor’s office, a nursing home … a gas station?
My cell phone rings as I am crawling into bed. Mom is calling; I left a message for her earlier, but it is unusual for her to call me back after 9 p.m.
"Hey, you're up late," I say. Silence. Then a stranger explains that my mom is fine, but she can't remember how to get home, and would I please come to get her as the gas station is closing up.
How come she can't remember the way home is not even my first question. How is she there at all?!?

"Where are you?" I keep repeating into the phone, trying to make sense of why my 83-year-old mother is alone, two hours from her condominium, in a town I didn't know existed. The stranger, a kind gas station employee, found my name and number under the emergency setting in my mother's cell phone and is trying to answer my questions.
"I'm on my way. Please don't leave her," I beg, pulling on my clothes. Nothing makes sense. My mom is bright, savvy, lucid. A playgoer, a book group hostess, a world traveler. Active and independent, she drove herself to her doctor's appointment that morning, as she did every few weeks for maintenance immunotherapy. The drug is administered through an IV line and keeps the cancer, which has been in remission for five years, from spreading.
But today, unlike all previous appointments, she left the doctor's office, got in her car and instead of returning to her condo … she just kept going.
Confusion and Concern
Forty-five minutes later, I pull into a small, lonely gas station situated at an intersection mostly populated by corn. At a picnic table lit by a neon Beer & Wine sign, I spy my mother wrapped in an oversized jacket sitting between a woman and a teenage boy. As I jog up to her in relief, Mom smiles at me; it takes me a long moment to realize my charming, intelligent, beautiful mother doesn't realize who I am.
There is no Googling this situation: "Mother appears healthy and cognizant but forgot she has a daughter."
In disbelief, I make some quick decisions. There is no Googling this situation: "Mother appears healthy and cognizant but forgot she has a daughter."
"Let's go," I say, my voice brusque with worry. Mom stands to follow, pulling her jacket close against the night air. I realize it is a high school varsity jacket and look past my mother to the teenager standing just beyond. Gently pulling the jacket from her shoulders, I hand it back to the boy who had offered it up to keep my mother warm.
"I've been driving," Mom says vaguely as I lead her toward my Jeep. "I did just fine," she adds, pointing at her parked Equinox. "But I had to stop for gas."
I take in the side of her white car, streaked with yellow paint, and add it to the growing "not fine" list.
"You've been driving all day," I say slowly, piecing together what happened and the enormity of what could have happened. "You've been on the road for nine hours! Mom, where were you going?"
"Home," she answers simply. "I was going home."
Familiar Hospital
It is a dark, surreal drive to the hospital that is located close to her condo. Somewhere along the interstate, Mom clicks into focus and becomes her old self — joking, self-aware, and just as puzzled as I am over her strange, confused trip far into a rural part of the state.
I desperately want to drop her off at home, pretending her episode is a funny glitch and laughing about it tomorrow over the phone.
I desperately want to drop her off at home, pretending her episode is a funny glitch and laughing about it tomorrow over the phone. Instead, we check into the emergency room at 2 a.m. where I'm surprised when they immediately put my mother in a wheelchair and take us to a curtained cubicle, bypassing the waiting room full of people haphazardly patched up or quietly puking. Mom sits up regally straight, thin as a rail, and charms the transport aide, the nurse and the emergency room doctor who exudes tired, third-shift gravity.
Thirty years earlier, my mom worked as a nurse in the same hospital where we wait, the same hospital where my two brothers and I were born. Trying not to touch the privacy curtains or plastic chairs, I mentally debate my chances for going home with MRSA or hepatitis, but Mom is in her element.
I dully realize I am emulating the way Mom has lovingly taken care of me throughout time
Smart and stylish, Mom is friendly, chatty and so very likable. Disheveled and bleary-eyed, I stand grimly ready to run interference, a much less likable bodyguard on full alert. The nurse and doctor ignore me; they know what masquerades as shock and fear and I'm only bluffing myself by acting like I'm the one in control. It makes me feel better to ask for warm blankets and cups of juice with crackers, like I can heal my mother by balancing her electrolytes.
I dully realize I am emulating the way Mom has lovingly taken care of me throughout time, but adult imposter me has no idea how to handle what comes next.
We have a month. One month after I pick her up at the Marathon gas station, my mom will be gone. After the scans and the bloodwork and the hospital stay, we are told the cancer has strayed out of bounds. The memory lapses indicate brain involvement, and her physical reserves are on empty. It is suggested to me and my brothers that we enlist the support of hospice. We are told Mom has months left and would probably live to see Christmas, but when the hospice nurse arrives two weeks later for Mom's intake evaluation, she shakes her head.
"Maybe four days," the nurse says, leaving all of us shell-shocked. She isn't wrong.
Silent Heart Attacks
I sit with Mom in her cozy, hygge-inspired living room after the nurse leaves. "Well, this is depressing," Mom says simply, hugging her knees. I say nothing. I am terrified. Adult imposter is in hiding; I am 8 years old and I want my mom … I am 8 years old when I experience my first "heart attack."
Sprawled on my grandma's living room floor, watching her boxy old black-and-white TV and half listening to her gossip with a neighbor, I feel a sudden stabbing pain in my chest.
My heart attacks became a semi-regular thing, leaping out unexpectedly to fill me with dizzying pain and panic and the sureness of imminent mortality.
It hurts wildly to take a breath and I break into a light sweat under the terrifying realization that I am probably dying. Grandma and her three sisters talk a lot about who is going into the hospital and who isn't coming out and it usually has something to do with the big "C" — or a heart.
I clutch my chest, lower my head and do what little kids do when our fear is bigger than our words: I shut up. After the attack passes, I turn my back on my much-anticipated overnight with my grandma, the one who makes me brown sugar sandwiches, and demand to be driven home.
My heart attacks became a semi-regular thing, leaping out unexpectedly to fill me with dizzying pain and panic and the sureness of imminent mortality. It is my secret. I don't know any other third graders in my new hometown and I can't bear to explain my pain, to confess this fearful thing to an adult.
The adults in my life are busy people. By the time I reach age 8, I have lived in six houses, attended three schools, gained two little brothers, lost one dad in my parents' divorce and gained two extra parents through two remarriages.
'You Are OK'
One night, my mom dozes off while reading next to me on my double bed when I feel the familiar shock of chest pain. I go rigid, taking tiny breaths, barely able to move.
"Mom," I whisper urgently, glad I have her close in case this attack will be the one to kill me. "Are you awake?"
"Breathe deep and very slow and it will go away."
"Hmmm," she murmurs.
"Sometimes I get a bad pain in my chest," I say, pressing my hand over my heart.
"You are OK," she answers calmly, eyes closed. "It's just a muscle pull. Breathe deep and very slow and it will go away."
You are OK! Magic mom words. I breathe deep and slow, comforted by my mother's sleepy warmth, taking in her signature Youth Dew by Estee Lauder and blowing out feelings I have no words to describe. The pain slips away and I am not dying and it is not a heart attack after all. It is simply my anxious heart trying hard to get someone to listen. I am relearning to breathe, and it's going to be OK.
We carry knowledge in our bodies; under my shock and fear I sense my mother is leaving us before we are given a final timeline, maybe she knows, too.
"Mom, where were you going?"
"Home," she answers simply. "I was going home."
Maybe her crazy, scary, nine-hour road trip really is the beginning of my mother's journey home. And perhaps the angels keeping her safe on the busy freeways know what they are doing by first guiding her back to me at the Marathon station, so that we face her going home together. So I can take my turn to tell her, "It's OK, Mom" while we drive in the darkness, taking deep slow breaths, her saying goodbye and me letting go.
