Jenny

heliopsis helianthoides

I just hung up the telephone with my mom. She was in tears. Her dearest friend has been sent to a geriatric psychiatric hospital. For the fourth time in twelve months. The Jenny we knew seems to be gone, and Mother's heart is broken.

Jenny, a widow who always needed someone to take care of her, a gentle flower, has been in an assisted living center for several years now. But she was doing fine living at home on her own, with a lot of help from her adult children, until an incident that occurred about four years ago when she was around 79 years old. Jenny was expecting family from the Deep South to come visit her, and she was engaged in major house and yard cleaning in preparation. Her son and grandchildren came over to "help" her get her yard work done before the guests arrived.

What a lovely yard she had. Jenny grew magnificent heliopsis, or false sunflowers, among the many beautiful flowers planted in her yard. These are gorgeous tall, bushy plants with scores of lovely yellow blossoms, much smaller and softer than real sunflowers. They are perennials and had grown in her garden for years. She loved them and tended then with care, as she did all her plantings. Her small sunflowers were among the flowers that lined her front walk.

While Jenny was working inside, her son and grandchildren pulled up by the roots all the golden heliopsis and put them in garbage cans. When Jenny came outside and saw that years of flowers, hard work, memories were destroyed, she became hysterical. She just lost it. Her son and daughter-in-law told her that if she did not calm down, the authorities would be called. They told her that they had thought the flowers were weeds. They thought they were helping. Weeds?

Jenny was never the same after this, and the periodic trips to the psychiatric hospital began. She stopped looking people in the eye. I heard her say that she knew what was coming: they were going to try to put her somewhere, she said. Soon she entered assisted living, but she was allowed to keep her car and have driving privileges, and so she could go home to her house whenever she wanted. But she wasn't herself. She stopped answering her phone and returning phone calls, but she would call you when you least expected it. She had her good days, many of them. But she had many bad days, too.

Let me tell you what she was like before the incident with the heliopsis.

After her husband died, Jenny never got over it. She needed her children's help in keeping her affairs in order and in anything major or important. But she was fine in day-to-day living and was one of the kindest, most loving, generous souls I have ever known. She adored bargain-hunting and gift-giving. I have so many tops and nightgowns that Jenny found for me at resale shops. They looked like new and sometimes still had their tags on them.

The hostess role was made for Jenny. She loved to entertain. She would make placecards and treats for each guest's place setting. For Jenny, Christmas shopping started for next year as soon as this year was over; she began picking up things all year with each individual's likes in mind. She never went out of the house without all her friends and loved ones in her thoughts. She filled large beautiful gift bags for everyone she knew with her finds old and new. And every holiday, birthday, anniversary, and special occasion was a reason for a gift bag.

And Jenny loved my mom. She was so good to her. They shopped, went out to eat, came back, took naps, then sat and talked til time for one of them to go home.

When I was trying to get from Boone, NC, to Raleigh with my sick dog Duke, I found he could not make it and I had to stop in Greensboro to hospitalize him there. Greensboro is only 25 miles from my home town, so I went to stay at my mother's. Jenny was there when I arrived after dark. She cried with Mom and me over Duke's predicament. And then she took charge. She told us to sit still in the living room and rest and try to relax while she handled things in the kitchen.

In a short while, Jenny had been through Mother's cupboards and through the fridge and had decided on omelets and fruit salad. She pulled out a leaf in the dining table, dressed the table, made the fruit salad, and then made the omelets with peppers and mushrooms and cheese. And she served it all with good Southern sweet iced tea.

I didn't think I could eat, I was so upset, but the table looked so beautiful and the food so inviting that I was able to come out of myself and have a good dinner with the two wonderful elderly ladies that I so dearly loved.

But recently Jenny fell asleep driving. She was sitting at a stop light, thank goodness she wasn't in motion, and she just fell asleep there at the red light. She slept through several cycles of light changes. Traffic backed up behind her. This time they took her car and her keys away from her. There would be no more driving for Jenny. Well, she didn't take it well. She broke. Not being able to get back to her house when she wanted to was more than she could bear. She reached a point at which she didn't recognize her children. Her agitation and depression were too much for the assisted living center, and so right now she's back in the geriatric psychiatric hospital.

It's a nice place. My dad's been there. After his German Shepherd dog died five years ago, he became very depressed. He even told his doctor that he was thinking about hurting himself. "How would you do that?" asked the doctor.

"Oh, I would shoot myself," answered Dad.

"Do you have a gun?" asked the doctor.

"Oh, yes," said Dad. "I have lots of them."

And then the doctor informed my father that he could not let him go home because of what he had said. Dad was escorted by the county sheriff to the same hospital where Jenny is now, where he stayed until his depression lifted enough so that he was no longer considered a danger to himself. He was released with the provision that he move into an assisted living center and never again be left alone. He spoke very well of the hospital, and they seem to have helped him a great deal.

That is my prayer for our dear Jenny: that she be helped a great deal and become able to return to assisted living. The center's not home, but home isn't either.