Day nineteen: eighty-three
Today Trudy turns eighty-three. She spends her birthday behind a locked door, short of breath, with ten minutes of phone time — and four words that say everything.
Today my mother turns eighty-three. She will spend the day behind a locked door in Amsterdam.
Yesterday I spoke with her. Ten minutes — longer is not permitted. Ten minutes a day, at a fixed time, through the ward line. That is what remains of a lifetime of talking with my mother: a timer that starts the moment she picks up.
She was so short of breath that every sentence cost her something. My mother has severe COPD; breathing, for her, is labor. She searched for air between her words, and she finished her sentences anyway, because she had something to tell me.
This is what she told me, between breaths. That she has asked for her medication, more than once, and feels unheard. That she has done nothing wrong. That she wants to go home.
She has been saying it for three weeks now. To anyone who will listen. The answer is the same every day: a locked door.
Then I told her that flowers and a card are on their way for her birthday. The line went quiet for a moment. Then she said: “I don’t need that anymore.”
My mother — who in seventy years never forgot a single birthday, who had a card on the doormat for every grandson, every neighbor, every old friend, always on the day itself — said she didn’t need that anymore.
I am writing those words down and letting them stand. Everyone who knows my mother knows what they mean.
The flowers are coming anyway. By courier, because that is what is permitted. I will call her this morning at the appointed time, because that is what is permitted. Ten minutes. Then the line drops, and she is alone again, and between her and her family stands a decision that, she says, no one has ever explained to her.
Eighty-three years. She was a child in the war. She raised a family, spent a lifetime caring for others, never wronged a soul. Today she celebrates her birthday without family at her side, in a facility where she asks, again and again, to go home.
More happened yesterday than I can write here. All of it is in the file. Dated. Complete.
This is day nineteen. I write down what happens, every day, because my mother cannot — and because a day will come when people ask how this was allowed to happen.
Happy birthday, mama. I love you. We are not done.