On that day in November, when Mom enters a nursing home to live out the rest of her life, she tells me she wants to go home.

“I want to go home to my mother,” said Mom.

Sudden fear makes me want to throw up.

My head flips to Nanny’s house.  I want to go there, too, with Mom.  The place that is safe.

I can’t think.  I don’t think.

The thing is, is that home as we know it is gone, that mother is gone, and my mother is gone in a way, too.

It’s as though Uncle Pippi’s sod roller violently rolls over the right side of my brain, where the creative, free-thinking thoughts, the thoughts where I am able to see the big picture, are crushed down into the earth, broken pieces all junked up.

Much later, as my right brain slowly, slowly, slowly, recovers, I think that maybe it was a possibility.  Maybe nitpicky Mom could have lived in Nanny’s house, where Aunt LaLa lived with a caretaker.  Maybe Mom could have gone home.  Maybe I could have made it work, not junked it up.

And yet?

“You’re so fickle, Marie,” said Aunt LaLa.  The two sisters bickered over every other thing when I was a kid.

“Too bad they don’t get along,” said a cousin of mine.

On that day in November, when I believe in the right-brain dominance theory, and read Mom’s emotions, my imagination shuts down, rollered off so I can push ahead and try, try, try, to ignore my pain.  Dear, Sweet, Jesus, I try to ignore that pain.