By Wendy Victora
CRESTVIEW -- On a day in early March, Johnnie Kay Ealum and her mom, Patsy Poss, colored pictures together at the
assisted living facility where Poss had lived since November.
Poss,
who was almost 88, liked to color. She liked it when her daughter sang
to her and played the piano. She couldn’t remember how to sing or even
her daughter’s name, but she’d hum along and had a new name for her
daughter, one she could remember.
She called her “Pretty.”
“To her, I was the probably the most beautiful thing in the world,” Ealum said.
Poss, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease 15 years earlier, had been in a slow decline for years.
Pretty would be the last intelligible word Ealum heard her mom speak.
“I love you” and “We can’t give up” were her last sentences, offered during a surprisingly lucid conversation on Mother’s Day.
Both were over the phone as Ealum struggled to maintain contact with
her mom after visitors were shut out of Shoal Creek Rehabilitation
Center in mid-March. The same thing was happening around the state and
the country, as officials struggled to protect the elderly and infirm,
particularly those in assisted living facilities.
But in Poss’s case, they failed, Ealum said
Not only did her mother contract the coronavirus, but also lived the
last months of her life alone and confused. By the time she died
Saturday, she’d lost all connection with reality, spending her days
agitated and yelling gibberish.
“What good did it to to keep my
mama from me?” Ealum said. “She ended up dying from somebody else giving
it to her. I tested negative. I would not have given my mama COVID.
“Somehow COVID got into that facility.”
Ealum
had always promised her parents that she would never put them in a
facility. She did her best to keep that promise, making sure her mother
was cared for 24/7 as the older woman lost the ability to follow simple
commands. She poured her tea on her food, sat down where there was no
chair and stayed up all night talking.
By late 2019, Ealum knew she could no longer continue to keep her mother safe at home.
Making
what she says was the most difficult decision of her life, she placed
Poss at the facility in Crestview. Five or six times a week, Ealum drove
from DeFuniak Springs to visit.
That decision transformed Ealum
from a full-time caregiver back into a daughter. Her mother seemed
content. It worked as long as they could still spend time together.
But on March 12, the day after they colored together, Ealum got the call that family members were no longer allowed to visit.
“I didn’t know that was my last time to do anything with her,” Ealum said.
The next months were difficult and frustrating. Ealum tried
talking to her mother on the phone, but her mother couldn’t concentrate.
They tried Zoom once, but Ealum was confused by it and the nursing home
staff had to prompt her responses.
In mid-May, Ealum’s sister, Joy, died unexpectedly. Ealum got the
call in the middle of the night and all she wanted to do was talk to her
mama. Instead, she called the nurses’s station and sobbed.
“I
just babbled to the nurse, ‘I can’t talk to my mama,’” Ealum said. “She
said, ‘Honey, I’m the closest thing you’ve got right now.’”
Although
Poss was never told about her Joy’s death, Ealum believes she sensed
it. From that point on, she spiraled rapidly into full-blown dementia.
It
got so bad by the end of May that nurses dressed Ealum in full personal
protection equipment and brought her in to try to calm Poss. As she
sang, her mother quieted. But when Ealum stopped, and as she walked out
the facility’s doors, she could hear her mother wailing again.
She wouldn’t see her again until July 15, the day after her mother’s COVID test came back positive.
By
then, there was nothing anyone could do. Nothing left to protect her
mother from. Ealum was allowed to visit her mom, as long as she was
covered from head to toe in protective clothing.
She held her mother’s hand wearing plastic gloves.
“She
opened her eyes to me and she moved her hand and she squeezed my hand,”
Ealum said. “I sang to her. I believe she knew I was there.”
Two days later, Ealum went back.
“I
told her goodbye. I started down the hallway. I turned around and went
back in. she opened her eyes. I told her I loved her and that she was
going to be OK, and I was too,” she said. “That it was her time.”
Twenty-four hours later, Poss was gone.
As
of Monday, the facility where her mother died had 53 active cases of
the virus among patients and another 15 among staff, according to the
state’s COVID report.
In the days since her mother’s death, Ealum
is grieving the loss of the woman who’d loved to laugh, who’d stayed
home to raise five children, who could cook anything and who tried to
take care of her husband even after she was no longer able to care for
herself.
And she’s angry.
Ealum believes her mother died of a
broken heart every bit as much as she died of COVID. She died wondering
why she had been forgotten and abandoned. She died without the comfort
of human touch and the power of feeling loved.
Poss had long ago signed documents giving Ealum the power of attorney over her affairs, including her medical care.
In
those last months, Poss had no voice. She literally couldn’t understand
words or speak them. She needed Ealum more than ever, both as her
daughter and as her medical advocate.
“I understand the need to
protect the elderly. I understand what COVID is. I understand they’re a
vulnerable population. There has to be some kind of measure that we take
to protect them,” she said.
But that measure should include access to loved ones.
“If
they can screen workers and vendors that come and go every day, family
members can do the same thing. If our parents are possibly going to get
sick and, God forbid, die then what good has it done to protect them
behind closed doors?”
Full Article & Source:
Woman whose mom died of COVID-19 in Crestview assisted living center: ‘What good did it do to keep me out?’
