“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m getting used to it.”
My sister has told her she’s wallowing in self-pity. My brother has told her it’s selfish of her to expect other people to take her everywhere when she now has other options for transportation. We are all beating the puppy.
The next day, I spoke to my sister, who had taken my mother out shopping. “Did she go down to breakfast with Dad?” I asked. No. She had not.
All these suggestions I make, that others make, too. What do they amount to, anyway? Anne Boleyn, being told she would get to be beheaded by the sword rather than the axe. But life is a minefield at any age. At the VA, I watched a young woman missing a leg try to learn to walk again using the parallel bars, and you could tell it was hard in every way. I saw a young man in a wheelchair yelling out something unintelligible every now and then. He wore a helmet, which I suspected was because he had frequent seizures. Head injury, I thought, another young man who went to war and came home so hurt. He was accompanied by his mother and his wife. His mother was a study in forbearance. His wife was strikingly beautiful, well dressed, her hair up in a complicated arrangement one might see at a prom. Her face was full of sorrow. She pushed her husband in the wheelchair, and then she waited at his side when they stopped. I saw a car pull up for them, and I wondered what they’d do when they got home.
Yes, life is a minefield at any age. Sometimes we feel pretty certain that we know what’s coming. But really, we never do. We just walk on. We have to. If we’re smart, we count our blessings between the darker surprises. And hope for a fair balance. When I look at my parents’ lives, I know they were lucky. And still are.
MAY 1, 2011
At last spring is out in full force. Blossoms abound, nearly painful in their beauty. People are out: joggers, walkers, young mothers pushing baby strollers. I call my mother for an honest discussion, aimed at asking her what she really wants. When I was there, she said in front of my father and me that she accepted the fact that she couldn’t go home.
“Well, we should sell the house, then,” my father said, and she said, “Not yet.” I think her plan is to go back there when her husband dies or is put someplace, and she has talked about him being put someplace where the VA would pay for it, and this enrages my sister and me. But. We hold only one piece to a gigantic puzzle.
“You can go back,” I told my mother yesterday. “With or without Dad. But you have to realize that you’ll have the same problems regarding how to take care of yourself there. Say it’s winter, and icy, and you need to take the trash out to the alley.”
“Well, I had begun just leaving the trash on the porch and Jeff would take it out,” she said.
My nephew lives a good distance away from my mother. He helps a great deal, but he also works at more than one job. Sometimes three.
My mother told me that when she thinks of home, she remembers it as a serene place.
“It wasn’t so serene when you left,” I said. “You were miserable.”
What isn’t said is that a lot of that misery was from my father losing it. If she were there alone…I don’t know, I tell her. She can decide. If she wants to move back, she can move back. Right now, we just have to take this one day at a time.
She mentions that my father won’t do much, not today, not yesterday. His breathing is rapid when he sleeps—does that mean anything? His feet and now his legs are swollen. When I was there, I saw that the nurse had told my mom to switch to frozen vegetables rather than canned, to reduce the sodium in them. “Are you cutting back on his salt?” I ask, and she makes some sort of vague response that means not really. She says it’s cold in the apartment, and that she had put a blanket over his feet.
“Is he depressed?” I ask. My sister told me that my mother had told my father he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
“But why did she tell him?” I asked Vicki.
“She said he asked, but I don’t believe her,” she said.
Now my mother tells me that my dad saw the book about Alzheimer’s that the doctor gave her and asked if he had that. “But I just told him he had memory loss,” she says, and I don’t believe her either. I think she wants him to know.
I think his lethargy today has to do with him giving up. His depression is fueled by the knowledge that he has Alzheimer’s and that things will only get worse.
My mother tells me she’s been thinking about the things that my brother and sister and I are telling her. “I made a list of my faults,” she said. And I said, “Oh, Mom, we all have so many faults. We’re just trying to make our way though this.”
She talks again about how she doesn’t like it there, how the people are too religious, quoting Bible verses to her all the time. The music they offer is hymns. In retrospect, maybe the other place they looked at would have been better, the one where the bus took them to the casino, the one where they seemed to have more programs, more speakers coming in.
“Maybe we can find the House of Sinners and move you over there,” I said, and my mother laughed, and it was so wonderful to hear that.
“Tell me the truth,” my mother said. “What did you think of that bingo game we went to?” After my parents moved in, my mother, my sister, and I had gone down for the Saturday night game of bingo, joining the tables full of white-haired people, mostly women, some of whom asked repeatedly, “What number did she call?” You got a quarter if you won. Coffee and cookies were served afterward.
“Not my ideal way to spend time,” I said. “But it was kind of fun, and it gets you out of the apartment.”
I know she thinks the activities at the place are generally infantilizing, and I think she’s right. I tell her I’ll call the activities director tomorrow to suggest maybe a men’s group, and a current events group, something more challenging than what they have in place.
“Well, wait and see what I’m going to do here,” my mother says, but I think she knows what she’s going to do. She lives with a man who, she told me, is beginning to not recognize people he knows. She revealed that the reason she doesn’t want to go to dinner with him is that she’s afraid he’ll say something to embarrass her.
I said, “But one of the reasons for living there is that you’re among your peers. Everybody there has some problem or another. And anyway, I’ve been with Dad when he’s with other people there and he’s always just really nice.”
But my mother sees my dad as someone who is failing before her eyes. She thinks he might say something inappropriate and his behavior will be associated with her. He cannot tolerate walking far. His memory continues to deteriorate. She said again that she feels as though she is constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Meaning?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. But I think she does know. And it will drop soon enough. Yesterday, when we talked frankly about her living without him, I suggested she might miss him more than she knows. They’ve been married for sixty-eight years.
But what do I know? How do I have the nerve to even open my mouth to say anything about how relationships work when I’ve always done so poorly in my own? One day I want to slap my mother; the next I want to apologize and apologize and buy her roses and fancy face cream.
“Why do you think that doctor wants to have a family meeting next?” my mother asked.
“Maybe because everything that’s happening to you guys is happening to all of us,” I said. And she said, “Oh.”
MAY 2, 2011
Last night, Bill and I went out to dinner to an Indian restaurant, and I kept thinking, I get to go out to a restaurant for dinner, and it’s so easy. I ordered a Kingfisher beer and took a long swallow and thought about my mother sitting in a chair or maybe at the little desk, making a list of her faults, and I felt suddenly as though my chest had caved in. My eyes filled with tears, and some spilled over. Bill looked questioningly at me and I pointe
d to my throat. “It’s up to here all the time,” I said. “My parents. Sometimes it spills over.” I laughed, then asked him, “Are there any black stains on my face from my mascara?”
“No,” he said. Tenderly.
I wanted to tell him that I needed to go home and have a long cry. Instead I ate more saag paneer, and it was delicious. Later, I learned that Osama bin Laden had been killed, and the first thing that came to me was that I couldn’t wait to tell my dad. I imagined him saying, Who? not quite remembering who bin Laden was. And if that happened, I was going to tell him who bin Laden was. Patiently. Matter-of-factly. I was going to tell him everything I could, understanding that my own limitations are significant. Breathtaking, really.
Imagine there’s a God in heaven. Imagine Him asking everyone who comes, So. What did you learn in your life? even as He braces Himself for the answer He knows will come: Not enough, I guess.
MAY 23, 2011
Out of the blue, or so it seems to my sister and me, my mother decides to meet at the house with a realtor. On a Saturday morning, my sister takes our parents to the meeting, and later she calls me to tell me about it:
When they pull up to the house, they see that the crabapple tree in the backyard is laden with blossoms. The perennials in the garden are coming up. The lawn has been newly mowed; I assume it carries that spiced-green scent. Before my mother even gets out of the car, she says, “I’m coming back.” “She mutters it,” my sister says, “but she mutters loud enough for me to hear.”
I imagine my mother feels punched in the stomach, seeing those blossoms on the apple tree, seeing her peonies and lilies rising up in their beds, and her not even there anymore to appreciate them. I imagine it takes more than muscles for her to get out of the car and walk into the house to meet with a realtor who will put a dollar value to something so dear to her. I imagine her swiveling in the seat of the car to better plant her feet on the ground, then using the door handle of the car to hoist herself up and out. I think that as she walks toward the house, her feet might feel numb, and that the air around her might feel insubstantial. I imagine a great confusion in her sympathoadrenal system: she is walking toward something she also wants to run away from.
But my sister tells me that once inside, my mother speaks quite willingly and politely to the realtor, asking the woman—Mary is her name—what she thinks they might get for the house. Mary tells her (gently, I imagine) that the house is dated, but it is a charming house. She thinks they might ask $175–$200,000. And when my sister tells me that, I myself feel punched. It’s not enough. I know the realtor knows what she’s doing, but it’s not enough. I think of a friend of mine who, upon learning that my parents were going to sell, told me, “Don’t you buy it!” And I thought it was such an odd thing to say, because why would I buy it? But my friend knows me better than I know myself, because that is exactly what I thought when I heard the amount. I thought, Well, hell, I’ll buy it! But I can’t. I shouldn’t. And I won’t. Although if I did, I’d rip out the carpet, repaint, fix up the kitchen and the bathroom, take down the PLEASE KNOCK LOUDLY sign on the front door, and voilà.
Vicki tells me that our mother waits upstairs while Mary and my sister go to explore the basement. A little water is down there, leaked in from a window. And I am glad, because it might make my mother think, Oh, that’s right. The maintenance. Do I really want to be responsible for all the maintenance?
It’s hard to think that when my mother was upstairs alone, she didn’t walk around, looking in all the empty rooms; and it’s hard to think that each room didn’t whisper to her. I think it’s easier, sometimes, if you can’t go back. My mother and I talked recently about how, in some ways, she has too much choice now. If she sells the house, that will be one less thing for her to worry about when she lies in bed at night, awake and fretting, her fingers working as though she is saying the rosary. But if she sells it, it will also be as though she’s leaning down and hacking at the roots that have for so long kept her anchored in life as she knows it. And if she doesn’t sell the house, she will have to worry about what will become of it, sitting there empty, and how she will continue to afford where she is. And if she moves back into the house, she will not be able to cope, even if my dad does not survive much longer. You have some choices, and they’re all bad! What’ll it be?
Wars come in all shapes and sizes. Battle gear, too. Sometimes it’s a khaki uniform and an AK-47. Sometimes it’s a cloth coat worn over an aching heart.
When I call my mother later, she tells me about the crabapple tree, about what the realtor said. She doesn’t seem to know what to do. She tells me, “Your father is getting worse faster and faster. I wish someone else would spend a month with him. I know you and Vicki don’t believe he’s as bad as he is.”
I want to say, It’s not that. It’s just that we don’t want you to be cruel to him for something he can’t help. But I know I wouldn’t need a month with my dad in the shape he’s in to feel like I wanted to pull out my hair. A day or so would probably do it. Maybe a few hours.
I tell her again that I know it’s hard. But here we are. “There are no good choices,” I tell her. “You just have to kind of pick your poison.”
“Well, if something happens to him, or if he goes away,” my mother says, “you and your sister have to promise me you won’t make me live here.”
“You would want to go home?” I ask.
“No, not necessarily.”
“A place like the other one we looked at, where the people were a little livelier?”
“Just an apartment, maybe.”
“With a mix of people,” I say, and she says yes. And I think she’s right. I think a mixed-age community is right. As it turns out. While she sits in her “morgue,” the lilies at her abandoned house rise up and open to the sun.
It’s hard to know how to rescue someone. It’s hard to know how to help them in the way they need to be helped. But I’m learning. We all are.
Meanwhile, my dad’s ninetieth birthday is coming up. “Do you want me to order dancing girls?” I ask him.
“Just one will do,” he says. “Don’t think I could handle two anymore.” I feel like we’re all of a sudden in an Irish pub pressed up against a mahogany bar, raising a mug to each other. You still here? I’ve asked him, and he has said, I’m here, I know you, I’m your dad.
Clink.
MAY 29, 2011
My cousin Patty sends me an email saying that she has invited my mother and my aunt Lala to come to Tish’s condo to see if they want any clothes or other things. They seem to want to come, she wrote. And I’m sure they do. I’m sure, too, that it will be heartbreaking for all three of them.
My first impulse is to say that I’ll come, too. In case my mother needs me. And to bear witness. I make tentative arrangements to do that. But after another couple of days go by, I wonder if it’s such a good idea after all. For one thing, I am suspicious of my writer self, who surely will exploit this memorial service, part two. If I go, I won’t be able to not write about it. But there is a difference between writing about an event to which you are invited and writing about one to which you invite yourself. My mother going to her late sister’s condo is part of a story I’m trying to tell. But it belongs to her and not to me. Still, Lala will have her son to go home to, after that sad visit. Patty will have her husband. Who will my mother have? Will my father be able to help her in the way she needs him to? Will he be able—that hardest of things—to leave her alone when she needs to be? When my parents, my sister, and I all got home from Tish’s funeral, my mother seemed to be given very little latitude for her grief.
I call my mother to ask if she’d like me to come. She hesitates, then says, “That would be too soon.” She means I’d be less than a week away from the day of the family meeting. “I would just come up for the day,” I say. “I’d fly in and out on the same day.”
“No
,” she says. “I’ll get through it.” And I don’t know if she’s objecting to the expense or if she really doesn’t want me to be there. Maybe she doesn’t know that herself.
When I was forty-three, I lost one of my best friends to breast cancer. One of the things I remember most is sitting on the little balcony off her kitchen with her one evening at sunset, looking out over the acres of land she could see from there, the hills and the winding roads and the houses nestled into their lots as though settled on their mothers’ laps. I remember her saying, “I just want to be here.” Earlier that day, I’d sat at the kitchen table and listened while she spoke to someone on the phone, making her own arrangements for a burial plot. She told whomever she was speaking to her name, her address. When she gave her age, she said, “Well, I’m only forty-four. Which is really terrible.”
Everything was impossible then; every day brought a new intolerable thing that needed nonetheless to be tolerated. That phone call was right after she had told me she would be going to her parents’ house in Arizona to die, and she told me when I went home that night to take some things from her place that she knew I loved: rocks and sea glass she’d gathered from various beaches, birds’ nests, her cookbook featuring dozens of ways to prepare chicken breasts. “No,” I said. “I’m not taking anything. Because maybe you’ll get better out there and you’ll come back.” We were lying on her bed together, and I was holding on to her and weeping, and she looked around her room and tears came to her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t think I’m coming back, though.”
She didn’t come back. She died not long after she went to Arizona. Some of her other friends and I were invited to come to her place, to pick up what she had left for us in her codicil. She stipulated that I should have the rocks and the birds’ nests because I loved them, and she did, too. Other things were given to me: pottery she’d made, books. I went home with these things and set them around my house just so, and then I sat in a chair in the living room and bawled. Because my having those things meant she really wasn’t coming back, and because I had been in her place without her. And every painting on the wall, every lamp and rug and wineglass and perfume bottle, seemed suddenly as though they once had been alive and now were as dead as she was. I had gone to her place that day with a sense of dread, yes, but with an odd kind of excitement, too, feeling somehow that it would be one more chance to visit her. But she wasn’t there.
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