Among the things we did before the move was to attend a St. Patrick’s Day dinner. Tish’s daughter, Patty, hosted it, and she is a terrific cook. There was corned beef and cabbage, and carrots, and parsley buttered potatoes, and a beautifully rustic soda bread, and a pear tart for dessert. Mostly, though, there was a small group of older people, a stark reminder that there are so few from that big crowd that used to gather together for donuts and coffee. My parents and Aunt Lala, who still calls me Bethie—that’s who’s left of the six sisters and one brother (and their spouses) that were my mother’s family. On the ride back to her house, my mother asked Lala what she had done that day. “Well, I dusted the living room and the bedroom,” she said. Such a small circle our lives can get put into. I wish Lala would move, too.
In advance of the move, my parents and I went to their new home to take care of a few things, and while we were there, we attended the weekly ice-cream social. We sat with Lucille, the woman who is going to be my parents’ next-door neighbor. She is a warm and friendly woman, feisty, too. She wrote to the president of the company that runs the complex to complain about the television service being screwed up. She was steamed because she wasn’t getting sports and she wanted to watch baseball and football and the hockey games, too. “Everybody was complaining about the television service, but no one was doing anything about it,” she said. “So I wrote the president—just mailed the letter yesterday.” She widened her eyes and covered her mouth and I said, “Good for you.” Lucille is the one responsible for getting tickets to the symphony: if you want to ride the bus to go and hear music, why, just let Lucille know, and she’ll sign you up.
When we drove home from the place that day, my dad was very quiet in the backseat. Then he said, “Well, the bill at Herberger’s is going to go up. I’m going to have to get some new clothes. Those people dress to the nines!”
I told my friend Wanda about this—her ninety-five-year-old parents live at the complex, too; in fact, she’s the one who told me about it. When I met Wanda, I was twenty-three and involved with the guy who lived downstairs from her. She and I were young and a little wild and we rode on the back of our boyfriends’ motorcycles, and when Wanda laughed, she laughed really long and loudly. She had long blond hair and I had long black hair and I think it’s safe to say we both thought we were hot stuff. We’ve kept in touch intermittently over the years, and now here we are meeting again at this place where the old people live. “Who would have predicted this?” Wanda said.
Anyway, when I told Wanda what my father said about people dressing to the nines, she laughed and laughed, and I was happy to see she still laughed long and hard. Then she said, “You know, I was going out shopping for my parents the other day and I said, ‘Okay, you two. I’m going out for diapers for both of you. Do you need anything else?’ My dad said, ‘See these black suspenders? I could use some khaki ones.’ So I went right over to Kohl’s and I got him some khaki suspenders.” I know how she felt, doing that. There is something about doing such things for aging parents who can’t do for themselves any longer; there is a unique sorrow but satisfaction in it. I suppose there’s some real exhaustion in it, too, but I live far enough away that I don’t feel that. I don’t run errands for my parents all that often.
After Wanda told me about getting the suspenders, she got quiet. Then she said, “You know what? We both of us should buy stock in whatever company makes Depends. Seriously. We should buy stock in Depends.”
On the day of the move, I took my dad over to the new place right after the movers came. The house he was leaving was crowded and chaotic: no country for old men, so to speak. The new place was empty but for the birds we’d brought over the day before. Their cage was on a TV tray, positioned before a window. I’d brought along a folding chair for my dad to sit on; I set it up right next to the birds. Before he sat down, though, before he even took off his coat, he stood before his beloved budgies, his hat in his hand, and he leaned forward and spoke gently to them. “Do you think you’re going to like it here?” he asked. “Do you?…Frieda?…Fritzi?” Then my dad took off his coat and sat down and began his wait, displaying a patience he was never capable of before.
When my mother arrived she was enraged, which is to say that her heart was breaking because her house was being taken from her, which is to say that her life was. She was not thinking that she is an eighty-eight-year-old woman whose circumstances will be made better by this move; she was grieving the fact that she is no longer in her forties and standing on the sidewalk outside the house her husband just bought her and admiring the bay window. She was incensed that her sister Tish was no longer there. She sat defiantly silent, scowling, as the movers brought things into the apartment, and when we asked her if she’d like to go for lunch, she said nothing. When we asked again, she said, in a kind of muted, vicious way, “I don’t care. I’m not hungry.” And I glared at her. I glared at her and got pissed off at her and thought, What do you want? You said you wanted to move here! We all worked so hard to get you here, and now you don’t want to be here?
I know that was wrong. Cruel and unfeeling. I know such a reaction betrays everything I have learned about the human heart and suffering and defense and the various disguises of pain and the need for patience. But I wanted to reach over and slap her and say Stop it!
The new apartment came together beautifully, and by Saturday, when we had the party, my parents both seemed in high spirits. We invited not only relatives, but a couple who live down the hall, Kay and Bit, my dad sat happily kibitzing with Bit the whole time. My dad was a lifer in the Army; Bit was a major general in the Air Force, so you can just imagine. At one point my brother, who came from Hawaii to do his part in the move, showed a bunch of old military magazines from World War II to Bit, but he barely looked: they were Navy.
On the day I left to go home, Vicki was at my parents’ new place, and she asked our dad to come with her to the exercise room, right down the hall, so that she could show him how to work a machine he might use. Nah, he said, he didn’t want to. Earlier, I had asked him about taking a walk with me and he said, Nah, he didn’t want to. So when I heard him refuse Vicki, too, I said, “Hey, Dad. You know how you keep saying you can’t thank us enough for our help, financial and physical, you just can’t thank us enough, blah blah blah? Well, here’s what you can do to thank us: you can take care of yourself, and part of taking care of yourself means getting a little exercise and trying to build up your strength and being able to walk a bit. Come to the exercise room with us! Let Vicki just show you something! Spend five minutes there, that’s all! Try!”
Both my parents dutifully followed my sister and me to the exercise room and we put my mom on a bike type thing and my dad on something that would work his legs, and we gave them a three-minute workout, and when we left, we were all smiling. I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that my parents had a bit of fun. That seemed very clear to me.
But when it was time for Vicki to take me to the airport, and we said goodbye, I closed the front door of the apartment and I looked at Vicki and put my finger to my lips. Then I stood in the hall with my ear close to the door. I heard my dad say, “You know, I love them, but sometimes they drive me nuts!” He must have looked at my mother for agreement then, saying, “Huh?” and I heard her say a tentative “…Ja…” I told Vicki what I’d heard and she laughed and said, “Yeah, well, right back at you.” I was happy. I thought, Good! Be allied against us. Be allied. And be energized, even if it’s only in anger.
* * *
Tuesday night, my father accompanied my mother to the basement of the complex, to the recycling room. He had wanted to ride his mobility scooter, but my mother made him walk. In the basement, he tripped over something and fell. At first, he seemed okay—just a skinned elbow, my mother said, which she said she fixed up. Later that night, though, he asked her to call the paramedics—he thought he was going to die. He was admitted to the
hospital and diagnosed with pneumonia and there are some concerns about his heart, too. He’ll be okay, but he may need to stay in the hospital for a couple of days.
Naturally, I am guilty. Walk! Vicki and I said. Exercise! So he walked, and look what happened. I’m thinking of changing my tactics and saying: Stay in a chair with a blanket over your knees! Don’t get up! But the truth is, he fell in part because he’s not used to walking. He did so little in the old place, he got weak. He can get better.
So for the time being, he lies in a hospital bed and he is very worried about my mother. His nurse told me he kept saying he had to get home and make sure she was all right. I called my mother that afternoon and told her to call him and reassure him that she was fine. “You are fine, aren’t you?” I asked. “I mean, at least you have people around you now.”
“Oh, I’m just putzing around here,” she said. Kay had called to check on her. Lucille had called. My mother asked me what time it was. I told her two-thirty. Okay, she said. She would call my dad and talk to him, and then go down to see if she could catch the end of the ice-cream social—she knew Lucille was going.
The first night my parents moved into the apartment, my dad asked my mother, “Does this hotel change the towels?” Also he asked her, “Isn’t it nice to be here and not have those people sneaking around?” But that’s all he’s said that would indicate any paranoia or confusion. I know he has dementia, but I have seen that he does better when he’s around people, and I think he will improve, living there. He told someone at the party that he loved it there. I hope he hurries home from the hospital.
Here the sky is gray again, but the flowers of spring are defiantly here. The buds are swelling. The great cycle of life presses on, whether we are ready or not. There is a quote I read today, something author Louis Adamic’s grandfather said: life is like licking honey off a thorn. Well, yes. And what a thorn. But, oh, what honey.
APRIL 16, 2011
My mother hates the new place. When I called to ask how it was going, I hardly recognized her voice. “Mom?” I said, and she said, “What.”
“Are you…What are you doing?” I asked.
“Unloading the dishwasher,” she said, in a way that sounded like she was saying, “So yooou thought a dishwasher would be swell. You thought I’d just loooove having a dishwasher.”
One can’t leave a telephone conversation the way one backs out of a room where one senses one isn’t welcome. So I plunged in and said, “Not so crazy about the place, huh?” And she said, “Not so crazy about living anymore.”
“Ah,” I said. And when I asked her for specifics, she answered in the dull and vague way of the depressive: What difference does it make what I say? I am drowning forever.
I spoke to my father, and he told me he liked it there, that he hadn’t met anyone he didn’t like.
I thought, It’s a good thing I’m going to be there on book tour in a few days. I also thought, Oh God, what now?
When I arrived in Minnesota, I went to see my parents between a television interview I did that morning and a reading I would be doing that night. When I came into the apartment, my mother made no move toward me; she did not smile. I sat with her at the little table in the kitchen and we chatted a bit about the television interview, which she had watched. I offered her the many books I’d bought for her, providing a tempting synopsis of each, like a publishing house sales rep. My father wandered in and he embraced me and asked how I was and I said I was fine, I was fine; how was he? “I’m okay,” he said, and he did indeed seem to be. Every time I hear my father say he is okay it’s like seeing a flag get hoisted to the top of the pole, where it snaps in the wind.
I had brought some cookies, and I asked my parents if they wanted some. Yes, they did. “Milk?” I asked, and my mother said yes. I went to the cupboard to get a glass to pour her some and saw some dishes out on the counter. “Do you want me to put these away?” I asked, and she waved her hand in annoyance and said something about not being sure where they went, that she needed to reorganize the cupboard again, things still weren’t in the right place. I surveyed the shelf where she had glasses and said, “These shelves are pretty high for you, huh?” and she said angrily that she didn’t know why they built shelves so high in housing for seniors. “We can get you one of those plastic things with two steps,” I said. “Lightweight, so it’s easy to move around, rather than your step stool.”
“Not so fast,” she said, “I may be moving back to the house.”
“Still thinking about that?” I asked, and she said yes and then began going through expenses, saying that for the amount of money she was paying there, if she moved back, she could hire someone to cut the grass, shovel the snow. “I lie awake at night thinking about all this,” she said.
But what about transportation? I wanted to say. The lack of interaction with people? The difficulty you had with the stairs going to the basement? Navigating the outdoor stairs in the winter? But I had no time to get into it. I had to go and do a reading. I left my mild-eyed father and my enraged mother and I had an awful feeling going out the door, like I was leaving a child in the care of someone who had made no secret of the fact that she didn’t like children.
Early the next morning, my sister and I were going to accompany my parents to the VA hospital, where my father’s cognitive skills would be assessed in a more thorough way than they had been before. Before, he had been told that he had a mild cognitive disorder. But, “He’s worse,” my mother had mouthed to me when I arrived for this visit, and she had intimated the same on the phone before I arrived. There seemed to be grim pleasure for her in thinking that her suspicions would be validated. She seemed to want him to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Indeed, on the first day they moved into the apartment, my mother had asked me with ill-disguised eagerness, “So do you think the next step is to get the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s?” I suspected that she thought she could then have him put away. I said that, then asked, “And what do you think you’d do then? Where do you think you’d live?”
“Oh,” she said. “I guess I couldn’t stay here, huh?”
I said icily, “No, you couldn’t stay here. You couldn’t afford it.” The truth is that she could afford it, because I would help her. She knows that. But I wanted to take it away from her, even if I was only pretending to take it away from her. I wanted to take it away from her because she was being cruel to my dad in so many ways—wanting to push his diagnosis, pretending not to hear him when he spoke to her, refusing to go down to the dining room to have dinner with him when he suggested it—and he doesn’t know why. How strange the world must seem to him now, how wavering and unreal. Like living underwater.
When I was there, my father asked, almost shyly, almost as if it were a first date, if my mother would like to go down to dinner with him that night. And she chastised him, saying that they would have had to have signed up by eleven, you couldn’t just go to dinner, you had to sign up! To me, sitting there listening, the tone of her voice implied three things: their dinners are stupid and the rule for signing up is stupid, and he is stupid for forgetting about the rule. I suggested that there may be room, anyway, for two more, that two more people is not so much. “Would you like me to call and see?” I asked, and my mother stared past me. “No,” she said. “No.”
“Do you have a menu so that you can see if you would like to make reservations for another night?”
“No,” she said. “Uh-uh.”
Menus are readily available just outside the front office—a big stack of them are kept in a wooden holder. There is also a board where the menu for the day is posted, stationed right beside the sign-up sheet near the dining room. Also the menus are in a weekly flyer that gets delivered to each apartment. But “No,” my mother said. “Uh-uh.” Which I think might have been her way of saying, “You want to know what you know, Elizabeth Ann Berg? Nothing. That’s what you know.”
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I looked at my dad. He shrugged. He forgets that he forgets; he doesn’t know why the woman he still adores has turned on him so. I know my mother has suffered mightily. I know she’s had enough, that she is sad and frustrated and still grieving her sister. But I will not be in cahoots with her in pushing my dad to be more compromised than he is. He is still himself. Failing in slow motion, yes. But he is still himself. And he is my dad, my imperfect hero, then, now, always.
Still, later that night, I lay in bed and tried to see things from my mother’s point of view. She is trapped again, in an unfamiliar place that in her words “does not feel like home.” And she’s right: it doesn’t feel like home. It isn’t home. Her home is the white house on the corner with impatiens in the window boxes, the house she lived in for forty-five years, with the pantry in the basement and the dining room where so many dinners were held, so many parties given. The house where her sisters and she sat around the kitchen table or on the patio outside, smoking and talking; the place where, at Christmas, even the bathroom was decorated. She wants to go back to her house and she can’t. It sits empty, and I think all of us in the family anthropomorphize, thinking the house weeps, too.
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