Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Berg
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Berg, Elizabeth, author.
Title: I’ll be seeing you : a memoir / Elizabeth Berg.
Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019041943 (print) | LCCN 2019041944 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593134672 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593134696 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Berg, Elizabeth. | Adult children of aging parents—Biography. | Authors—Family—Biography.
Classification: LCC HQ1063.6 .B455 2020 (print) | LCC HQ1063.6 (ebook) | DDC 306.874—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041943
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041944
Ebook ISBN 9780593134696
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Victoria Allen
Cover photograph of Jeanne and Art Hoff, courtesy of the author
ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
October 30, 2010
November 28, 2010
January 29, 2011
January 30, 2011
February 9, 2011
February 21, 2011
February 23, 2011
March 6, 2011
March 23, 2011
April 16, 2011
May 1, 2011
May 2, 2011
May 23, 2011
May 29, 2011
June 2, 2011
June 8, 2011
June 9, 2011
June 11, 2011
June 15, 2011
June 17, 2011
June 21, 2011
June 22, 2011
July 18, 2011
July 19, 2011
July 23, 2011
July 27, 2011
July 28, 2011
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Elizabeth Berg
About the Author
Or it might be, she thought, having lived long enough, she’d come to think of everyone close to her with a helpless tenderness, accepting that life was hard and people did their best.
—STEWART O’NAN, Emily, Alone
Prologue
I am seventy years old. I am astonished to be writing this, as doubtful of the truth of it as if I had just written, “I am a peacock.” I remind myself of the two old ladies (as I thought of them then) I saw in the grocery store one day, their carts angled companionably next to each other. They were enjoying a nice chat, and as I passed them, I heard one say to the other, “I still feel like a girl inside.”
As do I. I still feel like a girl inside, someone with grass stains on her knees and a roller-skate key around her neck. Someone who catches minnows in a jar and practices kissing on a pillow and finds joy in the smallest of things: the weight of a parakeet sitting on my finger; the smell of sun on grass; donning new shoes for the first day of school.
The outside me is another story. I have gotten to the most-days-are-good-some-days-are-bad portion of my own show. I am used to having various aches and pains. I am used to not having flexibility or good balance. I am used to losing a word or a name, then eventually finding it—or not. Losing objects, then finding them. Or not. I am not at the point where I find my hairbrush in the refrigerator, but I suppose it’s possible that that, too, is coming.
It’s been gradual, these changes I’ve experienced, and so it has been merciful. I have adjusted to them pretty well, I think, and in fact oftentimes I find symptoms of aging less painful than funny. Just last night, a friend told me about an eighty-something friend of hers saying he was great except he couldn’t get up off the toilet seat. We found that hysterical. He did, too.
Mostly, I feel grateful to be the age that I am now. You lose some things, growing older, but you gain other, more important things: tolerance, gratitude, perspective, the unexpected pleasure in doing things more slowly. It’s not a bad trade, except that you are increasingly aware that your number will be up sooner rather than later. I know that it’s probably time for me to see a lawyer, to have The Talk with my daughters about how I want my worldly goods divided, how I want a pod burial in which my ashes will nourish a tree. I’m putting that talk off, though. I still feel like a girl inside.
I think as long as a parent is alive, it’s easier to feel young. It’s easy to feel that in some respects you are still being taken care of, even when it becomes more you who takes care of them. But parents don’t stay alive forever, and the period before they die can be uniquely difficult. What helped me most in dealing with my own parents’ fading was to hear what others were going through. And so:
This book is a diary of my parents’ decline. When I experienced them losing power and independence, as well as the home they were loath to leave (to the extent that I did; since I was the faraway daughter, my sister did nearly all the heavy lifting), I learned a lot about them, and just as much about myself.
I learned that the frustration and anger that come up in these situations go both ways: you’re frustrated and/or angry with your parents and they’re frustrated and/or angry with you. I saw how deep the despair can be in realizing that you can no longer properly care for yourself, but I also saw how accepting the love and help that are offered can foster a whole new level of appreciation and understanding between parents and children. I learned that in the middle of what can feel like a gigantic, painful mess, there can suddenly be the saving grace of humor or the salve of a certain kind of insight.
I also learned that I am at the in-between place, having cared for my parents and now soon to need help from my own children, no doubt. I’m not yet old, but I’m certainly getting there, and I am more aware every day of what can befall me, my partner, and my friends, all of whom, I think, still feel inside like the girls or boys they used to be. So when I consider the story of my parents’ failing, I am picking up stones on the path to put into my pocket. I hope what I learned from them will help me and my children.
But I have to say that the biggest thing I learned in caring for my parents is that their life together, despite its hardships and frustrations, was a love story—deeply, wholly, and completely. It was the kind of love story you hardly ever see or hear about anymore. I was privileged to bear witness to it. I am bearing witness to it still.
OCTOBER 30, 2010
The failing of an aging parent is one of those old stories that feels abrasively new to the person experiencing it. At eighty-nine years of age, my father has begun, in his own words, to “lose it.” This is a man who was for so many years terrifying to me. He was tall and fit, a lifer in the U.S. Army whose way of awakening me in the morning when I was in high school was to stand at the threshold of my bedroom and say, “Move out.” He was never quick to smile, he put the fear of God into every young man I dated in high school, and if he said to do something, you did it immediately, no excuses. He yelled at us a lot, and, like many men of his generation
, he believed in corporeal punishment. Over the years he mellowed, though he was still quick to rise to anger, if the occasion seemed to call for it. But he mellowed, and none of us who really knew him could help it: not only did we love him, we liked him. The most striking thing about him was his truthfulness: the man would never lie. And he was a big softie when it came to animals and to my mother: she was the place where he put his tenderness. He had a dry sense of humor, and he was vastly intelligent.
But now. My mother says he sits sometimes with his hands over his face, unmoving, and she thinks he is depressed. Also, she has noticed things happening more and more often: a repetition of questions that she has already answered many times over. A kind of paranoia: he claims things have been taken from the glove compartment of the car he no longer drives. My mother finds him in the closet of the TV room and he says he is looking for someone who came out of there to mess with things on his TV tray. When the lid of the garbage can goes missing (after a day of high winds), he says it must be hooligans in the neighborhood—better call the police. The last time I talked to my mother on the phone, she said, “This is the best one yet. The other day, your father said, ‘What’s the matter with us? We don’t get along like we used to. Are you seeing someone else?’ ” My mother and I laughed together, but I think it’s safe to say that her heart was breaking a little, too. She said, “I asked him, ‘Have you seen my wrinkles lately?’ ”
It wouldn’t matter if he didn’t have macular degeneration and could see every line in her face. My father continues to adore my mother. Always has, always will. On every occasion that called for gifts, he lavished her with beautiful things: clothes, jewelry. On one memorable Christmas Eve, he gave her a full-length white mink coat. She didn’t want it, but how could she tell him, him grinning and taking pictures of her wearing it as she stood next to the Christmas tree? She rarely wore it after that day, and when he asked why, she said, “It’s too warm.”
They kiss when they wake up in the morning, they kiss before they go to sleep. When my father worked, they kissed when he left and they kissed when he came home. He’s a man whose mother died when he was around three years old, and he was raised by an emotionally bankrupt father and a cruel housekeeper. He found everything he needed in my mother, and that was always clear to me: she was his love. His pal. His partner. His confidante. His North Star. He does not want to be without her, not in the daytime and not at night. When I once suggested that my mother should probably have time away from him every now and then, he said, “I don’t have much time left. The time I do have, why, I want to spend it with her.”
My mother’s views are somewhat different: when my parents stayed with me in a house where the guest room had twin beds, my mother exclaimed, “My own bed!” Her absolute delight was kind of heartbreaking.
Over twenty years ago, when my father had a heart attack, it was a whopper—his heart stopped twelve times in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and at first it wasn’t clear that he’d make it. I flew to Minnesota with a black dress in my suitcase, and went directly to his bedside. He was sleeping, surrounded by monitors, hooked up to IVs, pale in his hospital gown. When he opened his eyes, he said, “What are you doing here?” “Oh, I was just in the neighborhood,” I said, and he smiled. Then he said, “Where’s your mother?”
I have heard this question all my life. It is like a brain tattoo, my father wanting to know where my mother is, because he wants her near him always.
These days, my mother says, he follows her around the house. She will say, “I’m going in to change the sheets,” and he will come in the bedroom and watch her. She doesn’t get out much, but she does have a standing weekly date to go shopping with her sisters. When that happens, he sits by the kitchen window, where there is a view of the street, to wait for her. She brings home his dinner; he will not eat without her. She worries about what will happen if he becomes more compromised, if she cannot leave him alone.
But my father’s question, “Are you seeing someone else?” Oh, that was a good one. My mother later said, “You know, when I was in high school, I went out with Bob Harrington—I think we went to a powwow or something. And that was it. One date. I saw his obituary in the paper last week, and today your father said to me, ‘You haven’t been the same since you found out Bob died.’ ”
“Oh, God,” I said, when she told me that. Tenderly.
It was on my mother’s birthday when I spoke to her, and she said, “Your father felt so bad that he didn’t get me a gift. And I told him, ‘You know what you could give me for my birthday? Go in the den and do your Sudoku, or a crossword puzzle, or listen to one of your books on tape.’ ”
“Did he do it?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
When my mother told me how bad my dad felt about not getting her a gift, I thought, Whatever was I doing that would have been more important than taking my dad out to get his wife of sixty-seven years a birthday present? I should have driven up from Chicago, or flown up, and taken my dad to the fanciest department store in town. I should have stood near him, guiding him as unobtrusively as I could; I should have said, “So whaddya think, Dad? What do you want to give her?” Apart from the full-on adoration you’ve given her since the day you met her. 1942. The back of the dime store. By the parakeets. You home on leave from the service. An introduction by a mutual friend.
Growing up with a father who was besotted with his wife lay down the gauntlet. I have not met the challenge. I failed in my marriage, and I have failed in relationships since, including the one I am in now; I fail a lot in the one I’m in now, but my partner, Bill, is patient. Sometimes I sit quietly to ponder why I have such trouble in relationships. “You just want to be free,” an old boyfriend I’d run from told me when I saw him after many years. It was true then. I guess it still is, in a way. I want to be with someone and I want to be free, too. But sometimes I look at the fantastically outsized and romantic love I witnessed all my life between my parents and I think, That’s the reason. Who could measure up?
NOVEMBER 28, 2010
Three cardinals on the black, bare branches of the tree just outside my window: nature’s ornaments. Now that Thanksgiving is over, Christmas is unleashed like paper snakes from a cardboard can. There are plenty of reasons to despair over the gross commercialism of the holiday, but I confess to loving this time of year. I have put up my modest decorations, and I sit in the kitchen drinking coffee and looking at the little tree I have in that room as though it is Michelangelo’s ceiling. I have the radio tuned to the Christmas station and tolerate every single song but the one by the Chipmunks.
For Thanksgiving, Bill and I visited my parents. I wanted to look in my father’s eyes and see what I could see. So much about him was familiar to me, and unchanged: His blue eyes and the hair raked over his head and the still formidable width of his shoulders. His chuckle. His leaning forward to hear you better, his head slightly tilted, an expression of such earnestness, such willingness, on his face. The cucumbers and sour cream he makes and sprinkles liberally with paprika, stored in their usual spot on the second shelf of the refrigerator and covered with a shower cap, some freebie from a hotel that works just dandy and saves on the use of plastic wrap. His cache of pill bottles and Kleenex and small screwdriver and pad of paper and pencil (with T-shaped, two-headed eraser) in a basket at the side of the kitchen table.
But. “Do you want some wine?” he asked maybe fifteen times in the space of about half an hour, putting the question to Bill and to my mother, both of whom continued to patiently refuse. “I don’t like red wine,” my mother said. “I’m fine, Art,” Bill said. Every time.
My father would sometimes tell a story about something I was quite certain did not happen, the type of story that was a reflection of a certain kind of paranoia that was taking hold, and I didn’t know whether to interrupt and say, “Dad. That didn’t happen. It seems like it
did, but it didn’t,” or just sit quietly and listen to the exploits of the juvenile delinquents who like to do things like break into my father’s car and sit in there. I elected to remain silent, but all the time I sat listening, a voice inside me was whispering to my father, No, come back.
On Thanksgiving afternoon, after I’d stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven, Bill and I took my father out to run errands, to give my mother some peace. It wasn’t easy to get him to go. My father didn’t want to leave my mom alone. She might need him to get something from the basement, he said. Or to take out the trash. Or something might happen to her. “What?” my mother said. “What might happen to me?” Here he drew himself up into what might be the best illustration of righteous indignation I will ever see, and began listing ominous possibilities: “She could fall” being primary among them. Finally, though, we convinced him to get into the car, and drove over to see his older brother Frank, who lives in a nursing home.
It can be a trial to visit such places, as everyone knows. The old people lined up in the hall in their wheelchairs, most sleeping, some staring vacantly ahead, some looking up hopefully at you as though you have come to rescue them. And in walking past them, you tell them you have not come to rescue them. And therefore it seems cruel to walk by them; it is hard to walk by them. “Hello!” I said, again and again, as kindly and cheerfully as I could, my meager compensation. “Hello!” to the woman clutching the teddy bear, to the man being held in a standing position by some sort of mechanical device that looked like it might have been used for medieval torture, to the one who startled awake from sleep with his neck at an odd angle and appeared completely bewildered by what he saw before him.
I'll Be Seeing You Page 1