Moxies....

Well, it's a restaurant.  The food was good and my mother-in-law could see nothing of the restaurant.  She also couldn't hear the conversation among my children, my mother and myself.  Although, when we got home, she polished off a huge slice of cake, cup of tea, water, frozen berries and started in on the chips.

It was weird watching the matriarch interact with my mother...my mother tries to be helpful and doesn't realize she can tick people off.  The matriarch likes the conveniences of age: being the talk of the town, people's admiration for her health.  She does not like being reminded she needs assistance because she is 98 and blind and hard of hearing.  Even the old don't like to be reminded they are old.  As I have mentioned before, my mother-in-law has an ego and is not beyond planning a rendez-vous with a gentleman; this is her nature not her age or dementia.  My mother, I think, would find it hard to believe the matriarch would still be interested in men.  It makes for tension which my mother fails to pick up on; it is hard to understand but sympathy can be suffocating.  The matriarch doesn't want sympathy and there, really, is nothing left to offer her.

At the eye specialist's, we told the doctor the matriarch's eye bleeds when the wind blows on it, when she exerts herself too much, when she goes out for lunch.  He told her not to do those things; he repeated the adage, "There is nothing to be done."
This means, my mother-in-law can no longer go for drives with the windows open; she really shouldn't go for drives at all; and lunch should be considered an event.  What life is left if she cannot do these things?  Her world is becoming smaller the longer she is in it and any sympathy just annoys the heck out of her; it is a reminder.  So, she sits in her room; although, this evening she listened to the children practice piano but then left before they had finished.