Free Habit by Susan Morse

collecting my scraps of numbers to make up spreadsheets about the costs we’re facing for things like the Long-Term Care’s Elimination Period (they’ll cover assisted living, but only after you’ve paid your own way for a hundred days or thirteen thousand dollars, but what if they don’t approve her at all? It can happen—Felix read about it in the Times!). On top of everything, we’ll have to keep the apartment till we know whether Ma will really be well enough to move back.
    The alternative to assisted living is home health aides, also covered in part by Long-Term Care Insurance, which, thank God, I got years ago when I saw this coming ( IF they approve her! Remember the Times!). The Long-Term Care has a limit. The odds are Ma will outlive it, and things will skyrocket after that. We’ll need drivers to help get her to radiation when I can’t, meals brought in if she stays home, and oh my gosh, the logistics (not to mention the costs) are insane and we’re all doing our best not to panic.
    Our brother, Felix, likes to depict the women in our family’s behavior in crisis as a bunch of monkeys in a cage, running uselessly around screeching and bouncing off the bars after the winds shift and they catch the scent of the lions (who are obliviously napping, safe in their pens all the way on the other side of the zoo). We monkeys are not making any noise yet, but we’re fidgety.
    Felix arrived today, his Subaru Forester covered with mud collected on the messy drive down from Vermont. He used to drive a pickup loaded with chunks of tree trunk. He’s always got pieces of trees handy for his sculpting, and they conveniently double as ballast on the highways. Felix favors Birkenstocks no matter the season, but layers them with wool socks for winter—he’s a genuine, crusty, foul-mouthed weather-beaten prep-school-followed-by-Ivy-League renegade. The ladies tend to be drawn to him. He’s been a bachelor for decades now, and his caregiving experience to date has been limited to a series of mostly self-sufficient cats, but he’s willing to try anything as long as the instructions are clear.
    David’s gone to Richmond to be fitted with George Washington’s nose for the John Adams miniseries, and I can’t leave the kids for long, but I’ve postponed things like the boys’ wisdom teeth extractions. We’ve lost track of how long it’s been since Ma had a bowel movement, and it’s not looking good. She unhooked the chemo canister before it could produce any results because it made her too sick. She’s still not feeling well at all. We have to get her strong enough for radiation.
    So we’ve spent a couple of days hovering and fussing around with hot water bottles, calling reports in to doctors’ services (of course, it’s the weekend), and to Colette, who mutters cryptic, ominous things like what won’t go down must eventually come up . There was an interesting episode at the apartment waiting for the phone to ring. We figured out a soothing way to rub Holy Oil on Ma’s lower back. When Ma instantly felt some relief, she swore she could smell roses. This was supposed to indicate a miraculous event.
    Ma loves these sorts of mystical phenomena, and she’s always on the lookout for them. I don’t feel much need of visions and such to sustain my own faith, and can’t always suppress the urge to scoff. But this will become yet another of those memories I secretly like to hold close, and ponder.
    There’s an experience Ma had at her father’s deathbed. Grandsir was a flyer, a captain in the Army Air Service when Ma’s mother left her first husband (a dull but acceptable banker type) and her four eldest children (my mother’s half-siblings) to marry him. This was before there was an Air Force at all, when the use of planes in warfare was brand-new and very daring. He flew those little planes with the