“What made it back up, I wonder?” I say, and my mother answers in the tired and aggrieved voice I am beginning to get used to. “Oh, Lucille [her neighbor] says it happens all the time.”
“But this is the first time for you,” I say, and she reluctantly agrees.
“And there is a handyman here who can fix it,” I say.
“On Monday,” she says.
“On Monday, yes,” I say, and do not add, “At least now you have two bathrooms.”
My sister and I are going to take my father out to lunch and to get him some new pants, which he says he doesn’t need, but he does—his old ones are hanging off him. We schedule the day as we would a toddler’s: first, we’ll find a restaurant close to the store where we’re going and feed him, so he’ll have enough stamina to try on clothes. Vicki picked a small men’s store where there would be a big selection and where someone would actually wait on you.
When we get to the mall, I ask my dad, “Would you like to go to a soup-and-sandwich place for lunch?”
“What’s your mother going to eat?” is his response.
My sister and I look at each other. “Mom has a sandwich all made,” I tell him. “She’ll eat that. She’s all set.”
“Okay,” he says, and it is in that gentle and accommodating tone that I am getting used to. He used to be the yeller and my mom the soft-spoken one. Now she’s the yeller, though her yelling is quiet, which is worse.
We eat lunch on the patio of the sandwich place, and my sister feeds the birds crumbs from her sandwich, and my dad does, too. Put any animal in front of my dad or my sister or me and we will cotton to it.
After lunch, we head to the men’s store, and my father is put into a dressing room. It’s arduous for him, pulling off trousers and pulling them on, but finally he is given something that fits well, and we buy him the same kind of pants in two different colors. I point to a shirt that I think would look nice on him, but my sister shakes her head—he’ll just refuse, and anyway, he’s good on shirts. However. He likes the shirt I found, too. We walk out of the store with two pairs of pants and two shirts, one a kind of floral Hawaiian one that’s just for fun and that I tell my dad he’ll look swell in when he’s sitting out in the gazebo.
“Okay,” he says.
We’ve tried to stay gone for as long as we can so as to give my mom a break, but we’ve reached our limit; our dad is visibly tired.
When we get back to the apartment, my mother is sitting on the sofa, sleeping. She awakens when we’re right behind her. My dad sits close beside her; he missed her.
“Anything happen when I was gone?” he asks.
My mother snorts. “Yeah. Right.”
My sister and I look at each other. My dad says nothing more.
The plan now is for my sister to take my mother to the grocery store. One of the reasons we picked this residence is that there are free buses that go to two grocery stores and to Target, which also has groceries. But my mother wants to go to her old grocery store, so my sister takes her there. Every Saturday, after having worked at her full-time job that more often than not requires overtime, my sister takes my parents to see my father’s brother in the nursing home, and then she takes my mother to get groceries. Every Saturday. (Last time she took my mother to the store, my dad came along because he can no longer be left alone. While my mother lingered—and lingered—over the dairy department, my father asked my sister, “What is she doing?” And my sister said, “Just leave her alone, Dad, she likes to take her time.”)
We have a nice dinner that night, and my father is very complimentary, inviting me to move in with them and sleep on his sofa and be his personal chef. He has agreed to play bingo with me that evening, and so right after dinner we head downstairs, he and I, and my sister stays with my mother to help her clean up.
We arrive late to bingo; they’ve begun playing already, but we are given cards and chips by a very kind person who welcomes us there, late or not. Soon we are playing opposite two ladies who seem not all that friendly; they don’t say much and their expressions are dour. There are different varieties of games that are played here: four corners, coverall, the letter T. The formation for whatever they’re playing is put up on a sample card off to the side of the room. My dad can’t see that far; indeed, he has trouble seeing the large numbers on the bingo card before him, so I make up a sample card to put right next to him. “See this?” I tell him quietly. “This time, we’re making the letter T.”
He keeps playing regular bingo, though, and I don’t want to keep correcting him. But then he shouts out excitedly, “Bingo!” when he has made a straight line across. Kay, who’s calling the numbers, asks him to repeat, to confirm the win. “It’s…We had a false alarm,” I tell her. My father looks at me, confused. “They’re making the letter T,” I tell him again.
“Oh,” he says, and he is visibly embarrassed. But at that moment I feel the whole room warm in sympathy. The women we sit across from gentle their expressions and talk about how it’s hard, sometimes, to keep up with what’s happening, hard to see the chips, the numbers. And my dad stays and tries again. Later, he wins for real. Twenty-five cents feels like a million dollars.
My sister and I have agreed to help my father fill out the forms for a living will, and that’s the last thing on the list for today. After my dad and I return from bingo, we get started. My mother won’t help him do it because she doesn’t agree with his choices. “I had one he filled out that said what I think it should,” she told my sister, and Vicki said, “This isn’t about you. It’s about what he wants now.”
My father, my sister, and I sit at the dining room table to fill out the forms. Every time my dad answers affirmatively to wanting measures to be taken, my mother mutters angrily. One question begins, “If you are incapacitated mentally with Alzheimer’s disease or some other…” Here my mother mutters, “Like you are now?”
She is in the kitchen, puttering around, when she makes this remark and I glare at her back. “Excuse me?” I say.
She says nothing.
“Mom. Did you have something you wanted to say?” I ask.
Nothing.
At one point, my father is meant to list the people who should be charged with the decision about whether to pull the plug. He has decided that if there’s any hope for improvement, he wants to be kept alive, unless it makes for financial hardships. My mother, on the other hand, wants no measures taken at all for any reason. When I was trying to explain to my dad what this question meant, I said, “For this question, what you need to decide is how much you want done to keep you alive and under what circumstances. Basically, if Mom gets a hangnail, she wants us to kill her. But how about you?” (Three of us smiled at a not-very-good joke.)
Earlier, when I thought of filling out these forms, I imagined—hoped for—a kind of flavored-coffee commercial scenario: my sister and I helping my dad with tenderness and humor as sun streamed through a window, as bluebirds sang outside. Difficult questions, perhaps, but good ones. Necessary ones. And, in my imagination, when we completed the forms we would be both relieved and bound a little closer in love. I had no idea the questions would often be so utterly confusing, or that my mother would be fuming in the background, as though in our helping her husband, as she’d asked us to do, we were conspiring against her. It reminded me of a friend who told me about her mother and sister, who live together and like different movies (no surprise there). When the daughter recently put on a movie she’d rented that the mother didn’t like, the mother told my friend, “It was just a slap in the face!”
Now, after being asked if it’s okay if his three kids make the decision to pull the plug—and by the way, we must all be in agreement with one another—my father looks at us in confusion, then turns in his chair, seeking out his wife. “Shouldn’t your mother be involved in this decision?”
“I won’t,”
my mother says, at the same time that I say, “She doesn’t feel she can, Dad, because her beliefs about this situation are so different from yours. So Jeff, Vicki, and I will be the three, okay?”
“Okay,” he says.
I’m going home the next day. Before my sister and I leave my parents’ apartment that night, I ask my mother if she will honor my father’s request to go downstairs to dinner. “Just one night a week,” I say. “Can you do that, just one night a week?’
“We’ll see,” she says.
“And he would like to go down to breakfast, too,” I say. “How about breakfast one day a week. It’s free!”
“You have to sign up for the Sunday brunch, and it’s too late to do that now,” she says.
“How about Monday?” I say.
“The nurse comes Monday.”
“Tuesday?” I say.
She stands there. She has no excuse to offer, but she won’t say yes.
My sister leaps out of her chair. “Jesus Christ!” she says, and leaves the apartment.
When I am on my way out a few minutes later, my mother says, “I suppose Vic’s mad at me.”
“Well, it’s frustrating, Mom,” I say. “It doesn’t seem like so much to ask, that you would go downstairs for breakfast one time a week.”
And now my mother explodes. “You people just leave me alone!” she says, through clenched teeth. “I’ll send you a check for the freezer, and you just leave me alone.”
“Okay,” I say lightly, and hug my father goodbye.
After I close the door, I stand listening, and I hear my father say, “You want me to leave you alone?”
“Not you,” my mother says. “Those two! ‘You do this, you do that!’ I’m going to send her a check for the goddamn freezer, and I want them to leave me alone!”
I walk quickly down the hall. I’m glad I’m going home tomorrow. I think about my friend Marianne, who is dealing with problems all the time with her mother, who is suffering from dementia. Last time I spoke to Marianne, she said, “Every day it’s like Anything Can Happen Day on The Mickey Mouse Club.”
I find my sister in the hall and we talk about how my mother has said she won’t weigh in on my father’s care if he can’t make decisions for himself; we talk about how mean she is to him, how we are sick of her chronic bad moods and spitefulness, her muttering and unwillingness to just try, her ingratitude for all that is done for her. “If she sends you a check, cash it,” my sister says.
“I can’t do that,” I say.
“Well, keep it, at least,” Vicki says. “Let her think you cashed it.”
“Okay,” I say, but I think we both know it’s highly unlikely any such check will appear.
I’ll be back on Friday for my father’s ninetieth birthday. My uncle Frank recently said he wished he could go back to the old neighborhood, to see the house where he and my dad were born. We decided that on my dad’s birthday, we’d take them both there; the house is still standing. We asked my dad and he said yes, he’d like to do that. My sister says she’ll find a handicap van so that he can roll right in. Frank’s son wants to come, and will follow in his car. My mother is not coming. That way she can have some time alone. You’re welcome.
JUNE 15, 2011
“How you parents?” Mary, the woman who cleans my house once a week, asks. Mary and I talk about almost everything: Men. Children. Our waistlines. Politics. Recipes. Once when she came, I had a shower cap on my head, some egg-and-honey mixture on my hair. “My hair is getting so thin!” I said, and she said, “Me, too!” and pulled strands of hair out from the sides of her head. “My hair used to be so thick!” I said, and she said, “Me, too!”
“Egg yolks are supposed to help,” I told her. “Yes,” she said, “my friend put.” “Coconut milk is supposed to help, too,” I said. “Oh, yes?” she asked. I nodded solemnly and then I said, “I don’t really know. I just read it in a magazine. Basically, we’re just getting old. I am, anyway.” “Me, too,” she said, and sighed. “We need to get rid of all our mirrors,” I said, and she laughed and I did, too, and though I guess it’s impossible, I do think it’s an excellent idea. Imagine how freeing that would be, and how much fun to see everyone walking around with poppy seeds stuck between their teeth. What a great equalizer that would be.
But today, when Mary asks, “How you parents?” I tell her the truth.
She nods, then says, “In Poland, we say old people like trees. Not like to move.” She looks down at her feet, as if there are roots there.
“I know,” I say. “But they had to.”
“Yes,” she says. And then we both get to work.
Later in the day, I call my mother and she tells me she wrote down “what you people think of me. Maybe someday I’ll show it to you.” I would like to see it, but I don’t know how to say those words to her. What I would mean is, I would appreciate your telling me the truth. What she would hear, I fear, would be something else.
She tells me she tried to call the Alzheimer’s Association and my father “had a fit.” I can’t quite understand what he had a fit about, but she says he had a fit. So I say I’ll call.
For relief later that day, I take a walk with Gabby through my neighborhood, relieved that it’s my neighborhood, far away from the places I’ve been. I see a little girl walking along with a dollar bill folded over in her hand. A woman licking an ice-cream cone. A guy making a scalloped edge for the garden. Two teenage girls on a bike, one on the seat, the other pedaling. I try to sneak Gabby into the library and the security guard stops me. He points to her. “Is that a…”
“Service dog?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Sort of.”
“She can’t come in,” he says.
“I’m afraid to leave her outside. She’s just a puppy.”
The guard is unmoved.
“All I have to do is pick up a book I reserved,” I say. “I’ll be so quick.”
“All right, but just this once,” the guy says. He’s in a wheelchair, and has some kind of disability, maybe cerebral palsy. I like taking orders from him. It’s nice to see that someone who might under other circumstances be helpless can now be in a position of authority.
The next day, I call my mother and she says she tried to take my dad to breakfast but he refused. When he heard that “this hotel” did not serve bacon and eggs, and that he would have to wait in line for breakfast rather than be served, he didn’t want to go.
“Okay, well, at least you tried,” I say.
The truth is, I’m suspicious about how she tried. I imagine her standing over him, saying, It’s much earlier than you usually get up, but if you want breakfast you’ll have to get ready right now. We’ll have to go down and stand in line forever for that god-awful oatmeal. No doubt all the rolls will be gone, so don’t count on having them. And you know, that’s all they have, is rolls and oatmeal. And weak coffee.
“At least you tried,” I say again.
JUNE 17, 2011
It’s my father’s ninetieth birthday. I’m driving up to Minnesota again, and this time Bill is coming with me. There’s a dinner tonight at a restaurant my parents like, and Vicki and her husband, Derk, will be joining us. We arrive at my parents’ apartment just before it’s time to go to the restaurant.
My mother comes out of her bathroom and points to her fancy black flowered blouse, saying, “Tish is joining us for dinner.”
“Good,” I say. And then, “You look nice!”
My father is dressed up, too, and seems genuinely excited about going out. For one moment, it’s like opening a door to a better time: my parents dressed up, going out for the evening. Period.
The restaurant seats us at a square table where it will be nearly impossible for my father to hear. I think about asking for a round table, where he seems to do better, but then I see that he is settlin
g right in; he’s used to this. He won’t be able to hear? So what? He is out to dinner with his family, seated next to his wife, who is wearing a pretty blouse and dangly black-and-gold earrings and is in possession of the same dimples that practically killed him dead when he first met her. He has his light-up magnifying tool to peruse the menu. He is wearing a suit and he walked in the restaurant by himself and will walk out of the restaurant by himself. He will go home after dinner and sleep in his own bed. His cup runneth over.
When the waitress appears, my father looks up at her and, really rather expansively, I think, says “I’ll have an old-fashioned.”
In keeping with the theme, I order a Bacardi cocktail. When it comes, I taste it, and it’s awful. But what care I? I’m out to dinner with my family. I can read the menu. I can drive home. I’ll have someone to talk to before I fall asleep. My cup runneth over, too. Goodness and mercy may not follow me all the days of my life, but it is here now.
Someone once told me she thought of life as being stuck inside an airless little cabin, constantly near asphyxiation. But every now and then a rush of fresh air came under the door and kept her alive. And I told her it seemed clear to me that everyone’s job was to get on the floor and lie right by that crack.
* * *
On Saturday morning, I stand in the kitchen with my mother, talking about Vicki, Bill, and me taking my father and his brother to their birthplace. I confirm that she does not want to come, so that she will get time alone. But when I say, “Okay, then, you’re not invited,” as a kind of joke, it comes out unnecessarily cruel.
We meet a handicap van at the nursing home, and Frank is wheeled into it, in high spirits. He’s offering us his wide smile, and despite his missing teeth, it’s a beautiful smile, a light-up-the-room kind.
And then we’re off, taking the scenic route through the park. We’ve had to hire a driver for the van, and he’s a cheerful and accommodating man. He is also, as we will come to see, a man who notices things, who pays attention. He chats with my sister, who’s riding in the seat beside him. I’m sitting in the back with my father and my uncle. They stare out the window, and I wonder how much they’re able to see, or if there isn’t some pleasure just sitting in a moving vehicle, going past things, even if what they see is only blurs of color and texture. Their silence, their stillness, seems to indicate so.
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