Who's driving this train?

My mother has always been a tiny person and in the hospital bed she looks shrunken, but when she gets the notion to move, you'd better not stand in her way. She wants to be up and out of here but she's not quite sure where here is and she's certainly not capable of getting anywhere on her own, so they're keeping her in gentle restraints.

She used to come home from her hospital shifts and talk about how she had to move a big stubborn patient around or climb up on top of another patient so she could thump on his chest when his heart stopped, and now she's the one being moved around and poked and prodded--and refusing to listen to the nurses.

She asks about things she's lost--her shoes, her purse--and wants to make sure she doesn't lose any more. "Let's just keep everyone together," she says. "We don't want to lose track of the kids."

"Where is the Gray Goose?" she asks, and I ask her who the Gray Goose might be. "Your son the pilot," she says. "He's the Gray Goose."

"I never took the time to figure out what I wanted to do," she says, but in her alternate reality she's doing some amazing things. "I tried deep-sea diving," she said, "but I didn't take to it."

And later: "Who but me would stand here trying to direct this train?"

And when someone calls on the phone, she speaks coherently but can't quite figure out how to sign off. "Happy....happy....happy goodbye!" she says, and she seems delighted.

Other times she is less delighted. I hate to see her so confused and confined and unable to cope with the way her body and mind are betraying her, so it's a relief to see her smiling and laughing.

But you'd better not stand in the middle of the tracks when she's trying to direct the train.