The Call Button And The Daughter Who Stayed

The cord was looped over the curtain rail across the room, so far from the bed that my mother would have had to stand up and walk six feet to reach it, and my mother could not stand up and walk six feet. That was the whole reason she was in that bed in the first place.

She was reaching anyway. One thin arm stretched out over the rail, her fingers opening and closing on air, her body twisted sideways so hard I thought she would tip herself onto the floor trying to get two more inches out of a reach that already had nothing left in it.

“Mom.”

She turned her head and the fear went out of her face so fast it scared me more than finding her like that had. She had been holding it together alone for however long, and the second she saw me she let it go, and what was underneath was a child’s face. My mother is eighty six years old and for one second in that room she looked four.

“I didn’t want to be a bother,” she said. “Brandy said I push it too much.”

I got the cord down off the rail. My hands were not steady doing it, and I am not a woman whose hands shake. I clipped it back onto the rail of her bed, the way it had been every other time I had visited, within six inches of her good hand, and I set the little plastic button in her palm and closed her fingers around it and held them there a second longer than I needed to.

“You push it as many times as you need to,” I said. “That’s what it’s for.”

“I know,” she said, in a voice that told me she did not believe it anymore.

I want to tell you I called someone right then and raised the kind of fuss that gets written up in a complaint file. I did not. I sat down on the edge of that bed and I asked my mother how long the button had been out of reach, and the answer took the floor out from under me.

Three days.

My mother had been lying in that room for three days, afraid to ask for help, because the one tool she had to ask for it had been moved somewhere she could not use it, and somebody had decided that was an acceptable way to run a nursing home.