The land that time forgot

I've been living in the land that time forgot, or, more accurately, the land where time has been forgotten. There is a timelessness—or, rather, too much time—in the San Francisco duplex apartment of my aged parents. For there are three time zones here: Pacific daylight savings time downstairs, where we spend most of our day; Pacific standard time upstairs, where no one has gotten around to setting the clocks back; and Eastern daylight savings time on my various electronic devices that do not automatically reset. And then there's the way one day slips into another when you're engaged in a monotonous, slow-motion cycle of tasks (shuffle along beside your mother's walker as she makes her way to the bathroom to the bedroom to the dining room to the bathroom to the bedroom to the bathroom; prepare a meal, eat a meal, wash dishes, prepare a meal, eat a meal, wash dishes), and you don't go outside for days on end. "Who needs the outdoors?" says my mother. "I grew up in New York, where nobody ever goes outside." And the lights are never fully on ("What a waste!") and never fully off (since there are many trips to the toilet in the night).

My mother struggles with aphasia—she lost her nouns in a stroke five years ago—and she can get stalled on a word for several minutes or an entire day, so thoughts start off brightly, flicker, then gutter out, sometimes to be relit later, sometimes days later. Conversations course along a verbal mobia strip, stretching into eternity.

Food, too, follows its own clock. There were so many possible origins for the bad smell that ranked up the kitchen whenever my dad or I opened the fridge that finally we spent an afternoon sniffing every item, and threw out a third of the contents. Most appalling was a plastic container of six-month-old boiled beans that emitted a sinus-clearing stench. Most dramatic was the eerily beautiful cream cheese draped with mold. 

The hierarchy of needs is inverted here. The old advice about putting on your own safety mask first, then your child's, doesn't apply. The fit are second-class citizens. The feeble come first. The weak have inherited the world. If you, say, need to use the bathroom at the same time that your elderly infirm parent does, it doesn't matter how many bathrooms there are in the house, you have to hold off till you've taken her to the loo. To do otherwise would be to risk embarrassing her, and having to clean up after your selfishness.

My father used to describe war as incredible boredom interspersed with sheer terror, and that's what eldercare is like. Repetitive mindless tasks, punctuated by the horror of watching your mother teeter in her walker, knowing her bones are so hollowed out by osteoporosis that one more fall could turn her into a sandbag. 

And so it goes for eight days a week, a Saturday-to-Sunday visit.