PART III: Whereupon Amy decides to leave her old life behind and move into an Assisted Living community (whether they want her to or not)

 Dawn rose on our first morning in Mom's new apartment. It had been a long night and we stared groggily at one another. I held my breath. Would we be teammates or adversaries today? 

We watched the geese, mated pairs, swim in lazy circles in the pond outside her window. Finally, she spoke. "So...what happens today?" Trying to maintain a calm expression, my spirits soared. This was not the woman who, hours ago, had threatened to run away like a little hobo. The woman who had gathered up three months of fear, frustration, uncertainty, disappointment, angst, anger, confusion, and loneliness and packed it efficiently into an emotional nuclear bomb to drop on her nearest living relative (although I wasn't sure how long I was for this world...I hid my sister-in-law's hammer in case Mom got any ideas while I was sleeping) had disappeared like a bad dream and my mother...my brave, strong, selfless, caring mother was back. 

First on the agenda was to set some reasonable expectations. Today was not going to be a "great" day. Probably not even a "good" day. Today, we would settle and celebrate an "okay" day. Okay? Okay.

Mom surprised me by deciding to eat breakfast in the residents' dining room. She successfully managed the lock on her apartment door and we navigated the corridors by identifying two predominate landmarks...heaven help us if that giant plant ever dies. As we walked, I compared her to Mary Tyler Moore, singing, "You're gonna to make it after all..." Mom wasn't impressed. "You know, she's dead," she told me bluntly and then mumbled something else. I think it was: "and I wish you were too" but I'm not sure. 

As we approached the dining room, I grabbed her arm. "Hey Mom, at 10:30, there's a lecture on Julius Caesar. Doesn't that sound fun? Can we go?" She stared at me, incredulous. I watched her warily eye the exits and realized that I might have a flight risk on my hands again. "Never mind," I quickly said. "No...no. If you want to go, we'll go," she assured me before disappearing into the dining room. 

She emerged, a little over an hour later, with Nancy who was similarly dressed in a little denim jacket like my mother. Should my mother stand on Nancy's shoulders, I would still tower over the two of them but they nevertheless had the makings of a bad-ass biker gang as they strolled over to me. Nancy gave us the lay of the land and invited us back to her apartment to see her hair curlers after I had complimented her meticulous reverse Quaker Oats guy style. I was, of course, suspicious of Nancy. Who knew what kind of shady things she might be up to but, as we were intent on having an okay day and we still had a half hour to kill before our educational lecture began, we threw caution to the wind. Nancy, as it turns out, has had a fiancee for the past thirty years who is currently in a nursing home in Medina. Her hobbies include reading acclaimed author Danielle Steel's novels and peeping out the window at parking lot people. She showed us her paper bag full of very painful-looking hair curlers. For some odd reason, Nancy decided to pass on the Julius Caesar lecture. "See you at dinner, " she said, sending us on our way.

"Are we in the right place?" my mother asked as we sat in the lounge with about four other people. "It's still early," I reassured her, delighted that we'd managed to score good seats. She glanced at her watch. "It's 10:40," she told me. "What time was this supposed to start?" I  stared down at the ground before answering, "10:30."

The activity director arrived, without a toga. Disappointed, I offered to grab her the sheet off of Mom's bed. She politely declined. As she shared the events leading up to Caesar's infamous death, a resident called bs on the number of stab wounds. "Did someone count them?" he asked, "It's not like they had CSI back then." Excellent point, I thought. The poor activity director faltered beneath the weight of my elevated expectations. I had mistakenly believed that I might have been eligible for additional college credits after this enlightening experience. I had been thinking about calling my curriculum director to see if I could count this as professional development.  Undeterred, I decided we should ride the wave of after-lecture traffic into the activities room for a rousing game of Pokeno. "What's Pokeno?" my mother asked. I shrugged. Hell if I know. But I was full on-board trusting Julie the cruise director to not lead us astray. I looked around for Gopher, Doc, and Isaac but they must have been busy straightening out a romantic entanglement caused by a silly misunderstanding somewhere else on the ship.

As Mom and I stepped into the room, a shriek of epic proportions was unleashed. "Where...are...your masks?!?!" a rabid resident yelled. "Does she work for the airline?" my mother asked as Julie launched herself across the room to take the brunt of the verbal bullets for us. I steered Mom out of the room. As we looked for our landmarks, Mom asked how I had enjoyed my lecture. I admitted that it wasn't quite what I envisioned (podium, PowerPoint, video montages, artifacts, ect). "What did you think, Mom?" I asked as she threw herself bodily against her apartment door, wrestling with the lock to get it open. She paused a moment in this endeavor to smile at me. "It was okay."

Et tu, mother?