Mystery solved

So as I mentioned in my last post, my old lady (yes, she is mine - it is way too late to return her) is still alive thank God, and in a rehab facility after a short hospitalization, just as I suspected. She called me one day, out of the blue, from an unfamiliar number. I must have known on some level that it was she who was calling because I do not answer calls from unknown numbers. 

I was glad to hear her voice and glad to see that she wasn’t mad at me, not that I’d have cared much because what complaint could she possibly have against me? But it did cross my mind that she might have blamed me for calling the ambulance. I wasn’t the person who called the ambulance, but I did call the police when she didn’t answer the phone or the door for two straight days.  

She seemed much better than she had been the last few times we’d spoken. She acknowledged that she was feeling better but she didn’t (nor will she ever) connect the improvement in her health with the medical attention - as far as she’s concerned, she’d have gotten better on her own. Meanwhile, she had authorized her attorney to hire a cleaning service and some contractors to get her house back in shape during her convalescence, and she was outraged that they had spent over $10,000. Having seen that house, I can tell you that $10,000 would be an absolute bargain. The cleaning alone had to cost at least half of that. But this happens when people get old - their financial memories are fixed at a point in the distant past, and nothing should cost more than it did at that time. I’m guessing that this lady’s fixed point is sometime around 1985. That’s where my mom’s financial memory is stuck, and they’re about the same age. My mom is shocked every time she buys a coffee and it costs more than a dollar. 

*****

She called me again a few days later. She still doesn’t have a date for her return home but wanted to see if I would be willing to get some groceries for her. And yes, I am willing to do this but I’m not willing to follow ever more arcane and difficult and confusing instructions for how the items should be bagged and organized and placed on her doorstep. Nor am I willing to enter her house when she’s not home. She spent 15 minutes complaining to me about “perfectly good” luggage and household items that the cleaning crews had apparently discarded. She was sure that valuables will also have gone missing, and she said that she’d be looking carefully through her house and making a list of items that the cleaners and her attorney would need to account for. And then in the very next breath, she said that she’d call me in the next few days with a grocery list, and that the house was unlocked and that I could just go right inside and put everything in the kitchen so that it would be there when she arrived home. 

Needless to say, I nixed that plan immediately. Much to her disappointment, I told her that I’d wait until she was actually home, and that I’d drop the groceries off out front like I used to do. She told me that if I “didn’t feel comfortable” going in the house by myself, that I could call her neighbor to come and help me. I’m sure that this neighbor, whoever they might be, would be no more enthusiastic about this suggestion than I was, and I politely but firmly reiterated my refusal to enter her house without her in it. I don't want to go in that house even when she's home but I'm certainly not going in there when she's not home so that she can later accuse me of stealing her Hummels or her 1977 Samsonite luggage. 

And so we wait. As I said, she sounded much better when we spoke than she had earlier in the spring. But she also gave me some background on the health issues that put her in the rehab in the first place and so I don’t think she’s coming home quite as soon as she thought. I wish her a full recovery, and will be happy to resume my weekly shopping trips as soon as she’s back up and around.