My sister is blindsided by this. She has taken her courage in both hands and fronted up here in Alberta to explain to Mum, in front of this gathering of doctors, admin staff and hospital directors, therapists of all stripes, why the family thinks that it is unsafe for her to go home, now or in the future.
The record shows that, during this conference, Mum’s doctor concurs that she should not go home but that my mother rejects this ‘vehemently’ and takes over the proceedings, talking law suits, civil actions, and stressing the fact that she has enough money to buy and sell the doctor, indeed all of them in the room, at any time, and she will.
The hospital personnel try their best bully tactics on my sister and keep pointing at the expert’s report and chanting: ‘but she is competent’, to which my sister chants back, ‘He doesn’t say that. Read page three, read page three.’ It’s like a Greek chorus. My sister’s partner leaves the room at some point, and strides down the wide hallway to inspect the elevator my mother takes to the lobby every morning to buy her newspapers and flowers. My sister’s partner is a handy person and wishes to inspect the elevator doors to see if there is any way to rig them to open onto a void when my mother pushes the button.
Back in the conference room, the hospital staff has executed a strategic retreat and, now pointing to page two, hammers at the idea that Mum should go home for day visits, weekends, (this is what the expert refers to as ‘giving her enough rope to hang herself’). My sister counters with the following tale. Since his last visit to Mum, on ‘Nuclear Thursday’ some months before, my father has remained true to his pronouncement that he will not see her again. He refuses offers to drive him to see her with a polite, Not today. He never speaks of her.
Neither does he speak of his shock and despair, but we have the helper’s testimonial about that day, and documentation from Black Diamond Hospital where he is admitted with congestive heart failure shortly after that last visit and where he stays for two weeks, his body betraying how badly he is hurt, his heart broken and his sodium reading 20, which is the last stop before death.
My sister shakes for weeks after the conference, but she has fulfilled her mission. My mother is not free to leave this place and go where she will.
The hospital understands that we will not take her away but neither will we allow her to be sent to inappropriate places. They expedite the second report by the competency assessment team, the one the specialist wants done before he pronounces conclusively.
To what I imagine is their considerable consternation, the report, once done, concludes that she is mentally incompetent, cannot go home, and needs to be looked after in a suitable place. This place will turn out to be one floor up in the very hospital where she is for her rehab, a locked ward with a pleasant colour palette, airy common rooms, one with a grand piano, comfortable armchairs upholstered in florals and wide views over the fields to the mountains.
My mother does not give up. It will take years for her to stop campaigning for her release, during which time she refuses all contact with family and tries to institute divorce proceedings. She writes heart-rending letters to people she knew or thought she knew decades earlier – dentists and city officials, perhaps long-since dead, whom she begs for help.
Her doctor, the big man unafraid of the cold, leaves the hospital soon after she is ruled incompetent. My mother wins over her new doctor, a young person from the Middle East, with tales of her money and her fabulous life. This person believes my mother and calls us when we are visiting Dad over the next summers to demand that Mum be allowed to come home. Why can’t she, given that there are eight live-in servants? Mum’s stories of privilege make sense to her, and of all the hospital staff who hate me and my sister and do not believe a word of what we say, she hates us most.
When the conclusion of the assessment team’s report which seals my mother’s fate is communicated to my sister, the first thing she does is phone me. I lift the receiver of the phone to the sound of jubilant crowing. And singing. My sister is singing something about the wicked witch being dead. She tells me she is organising a party. I believe she is deeply disappointed that I do not join in; she is shocked by my shocked silence.
I feel only grief. I think of everything my mother will never see again, the view over the foothills to the Rockies from the windows of her house, the animals in the dusk light, fawns gambolling unsteadily, coyotes pausing to give you the slightest of nods before loping across the lawns that go on forever, all the way down the rise to the spruce trees she and my father planted in the seventies and that have grown straight and tall, shiny and strong.
She will not see again the things she found beautiful and bought and bought, and hoarded and hoarded, the silver and the crystal and the full sets of porcelain, the antiques shining with the patina of age, these things that were a rampart against her anguish, her fear, her anger and her desperation. How will she live on, I wonder. How can she?
Over the next summers when my sister and her partner and I stay with my dad, getting repairs done on the house, keeping him company and giving his helpers a few weeks off, I will salvage a few things before the dispersal of my parents’ belongings.
My sister doesn’t want my mother’s first set of china, or what remains of it, Royal Albert Old English Rose, the old pattern, with much more gold than they put around the edges of it now. I remember it from my childhood, how it only came out on very special occasions, how those were my family’s versions of good times, and I claim it. My sister packs it up with newsprint and takes it to the post office to send to my address in Sydney, where it arrives mostly broken. I imagine customs officers dropping the box because it has a label that says ‘Fragile’, satisfied at the sound of something delicate breaking.
My sister cries on the phone when I tell her about the breakage and now, years later, I am still angry, mostly at myself, for not insisting on a safer passage for something I wanted to preserve.
I do arrange a safer passage for a friend of my childhood, a large wooden rocking horse, painted shiny black, with a leather saddle and stirrups, a cool eye, red dots for nostrils, and a long black horsehair tail. When I was little he also had a matching black mane, but my sister gave him a haircut.
This magnificent fellow was made for me during the war. Time weighed heavily on the minds of the Air Force flight crews my father served with and, to lessen the burden, they would whittle things, repair things, make things, trying to balance out the destruction they were being trained to wreak with small creative acts.
To celebrate my father’s new status when I was born, his comrades designed and constructed my marvellous horse, who today stands straight-legged and patient on his red and black wooden base near my bookshelves, still shiny and smiling, waiting for my granddaughter’s next visit.
I salvage a few other things: a vase in the shape of a tulip, robin’s-egg blue, and a ceramic cat, a Siamese, looking fixedly into a fishbowl, things from my childhood.
When the time comes to choose, my sister takes only things acquired by my mother after we had left home, heavy crystal goblets, silver serving plates, full dinner sets of translucent china. I want only the connection to the past, she wants never to feel it again.
But we aren’t there yet, at that time of dispersal of the possessions that tell the story of two lives. Before my horse journeys, secure in his polystyrene peanut bed to his new home in the company of a Siamese cat and a tulip, several years will pass.
Chapter 21
During the northern hemisphere summer after my mother’s committal I fly again to Canada, swapping the short, snappy Sydney winter for the long expanses of Alberta prairie summer sun that go on forever. At my father’s, I stand in the living room at 10.30 in the evening, looking west at the sun setting behind the fir trees, slipping behind the mountains and gilding the pollen and the clouds of tiny insects hanging in the warm air. Everyone else in the house is asleep: my sister, her partner, my father. I stand there dazzled, thinking that I have never felt so alone in my
life.
During that visit, there is a follow-up patient conference scheduled for my mother at the hospital. My sister doesn’t want to go and neither do I but it is compulsory for family, and we are not about to put my father through it.
They tell us that my mother will not attend, presumably since she hijacked proceedings at the previous conference that so bruised my sister. We will represent my father and my father’s friend, chosen by her and named in her personal care directive, will be present for her.
I worry we will see her nonetheless, in the hall or in the elevator. It turns out to be worse.
We all wait to file into the conference room: me, my sister, her partner, Dad’s friend, the physio, the social worker, the chaplain, the diversional therapist, the ward supervisor, the counsellor and people in scrubs, maybe doctors. We are milling unenthusiastically when the head nurse rounds a corner at speed, pushing my mother in a wheelchair, and cuts in at the head of the line. The wheelchair perplexes me. Isn’t she reported to be walking up and down the corridors every day and every night, carrying her walking frame horizontally to poke at people in her way and wearing her Bally pumps?
My sister freezes on the spot in the split second it takes her to see Mum. I fear she may bolt. She wheels around like a horse catching the scent of a bear upwind and I grab her arm. Don’t move, I whisper. It’s ok.
But it’s not. I stand stock still, holding on to my sister, as my mother is wheeled in first, dressed in black and wearing a sombre, wide-brimmed organza hat appropriate for a state funeral, glaring straight ahead of her, with venom but in a general way, deigning to acknowledge no one as she passes before us.
The nurse installs my mother at the head of the table and sits next to her. She places my mother’s hand on the table and puts her own over it. We learn later that the nurse has coached my mother: she may attend this meeting, as she has demanded, on condition that she behave. If she begins to cross the line into crazy irrational abusive, as she did at the last conference, the nurse will tap on her hand. If my mother takes no heed and does not dial it down, the nurse will wheel her out. Thus the wheelchair.
My sister and I sit near the opposite end of the long oval table, not facing her. I try to catch her eye. It seems so wrong not to greet her. The one time she looks at me, she stares fixedly with maximum intent. I try to smile and I raise a few fingers. She snorts and turns her head with a vigorous shake to rid herself of me.
I mercifully remember little about the conference itself, a slow-motion extrusion of time punctuated by the shuffling of papers, as paraphrase and euphemism and exegesis and repetition suck the oxygen from the air and I sink deeper into a slough of dread and despair.
I know my mother speaks and the head nurse taps on her hand a lot. I don’t remember words. Everyone speaks, except my sister, her partner and me. My mother must insist that she does not ever wish to be subjected to visits from family again although I have no memory of this, because when it is over and my sister and I are standing like stunned mullets in the hallway, trying to process not so much what has gone immediately before but the quaking, liquefying dread we were both flooded with on seeing Mum in battle mode, the chaplain approaches us with what she probably believes are words of comfort.
Your mother will come around, she says. She will want to see you again. I bite back my reply. I know she won’t. I know I have seen my mother for the last time and this is not the memory I would have liked.
My sister, however, dabs her eyes and says, Thank you. We know she will. And when she does, when that happens, you call us and we’ll be here.
I stare at her in amazement. I open my mouth to ask if she is out of her mind, to ask why she would say that. She knows it won’t happen. Maybe she is just trying to ingratiate herself with the staff. They will still hate us, I want to yell at her. This woman, this religious person, is the only one speaking to us you may notice, and only because it’s her job.
I’m wrong about nobody else speaking to us however. The physio comes over to tell us that Mum is still walking a lot, maybe too much, and that she wears her high heels while doing it. We’d be happier, she says, if she wore more appropriate footwear, but we don’t want to discourage her from exercising.
My sister amazes me again. She looks the physio earnestly in the eye and I hear her say, Of course not. She goes on. So much has been taken from our mother. We must leave some things up to her. She and the physio nod philosophically.
I wander off toward the elevator, wondering if my sister may harbour a hidden seam of malice which allows her to say these things when I suspect, I am almost sure, that her dearest wish, as it is mine, is for an unfortunate combination of circumstance – a recently mopped floor, impatient speed and stiletto heels – to put an end to this saga.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we settle in for our visit with Dad. My sister’s partner repairs the things she can, and she is capable of a lot. The house has been without regular maintenance for a couple of decades and she does all she can, sitting cross-legged on the balcony to reattach the cedar shakes that are working loose from the wall, yipping only mildly when a bat flies directly out at her in response to the taps of her hammer.
She has a go at the bathrooms but there is no stopping the seeping. I lean on the doorframe and compliment her on her can-do spirit. She tells me good-naturedly that I can wade in anytime and help, but I explain my theory of economic labour distribution. I go to work to make money to pay people to fix bathrooms. She tells me this is all very well and good, but no tradesman will give us the time of day. Every plumber and carpenter and roofer in the area has been out here, once, fixed something and submitted an account, only to have payment refused because my mother wasn’t happy with the job, or alternatively to receive a cheque for 25 dollars in the mail with a note saying that this sum is what their work is worth.
We smile. This is banter. She knows I am helping where I can, making dinner and going through dozens of drawers, throwing out scores of old toothbrushes and sorting what I can.
She is kind to me, cutting huge bouquets of lilacs in the garden to put in the living rooms and my bedroom because she knows I love the delicate perfume, the scent of fleeting summer and a reminder of callow youth and first loves.
My sister has given Dad’s helpers time off while we are here and I wish she hadn’t. We shower Dad in his ensuite where in spite of recent efforts at repair, the water still runs unpredictably hot and cold. We have to stand outside the shower with the screen open, ready to turn the knobs to adjust the temperature every few seconds, so that he is neither parboiled nor flash frozen.
One evening I watch my sister as she crouches, trying her best to unplug the shower drain as I man the taps and Dad hunches over, seemingly unaware of how ludicrous this situation is, under the feeble and fickle output of the shower head, his man gear dangling above my sister’s head.
I refrain from shouting at her but I want to.
Here is what I would say. Why can’t the helpers work while we are here? How is it our concern that they might need a break? They are used to showering Dad and massaging his feet. Are we trying to save money? He has lots of money. What’s it for if not this? Do you want this level of intimacy with Dad, because I sure don’t. He’s our father, for crying out loud!
I say nothing and watch her stand up, narrowly avoiding a collision of the most inappropriate type, her hair dripping. I send her to dry herself off and I put Dad to bed in his new pyjamas, with his pillows plumped up and his quilts piled on because he is always cold, even now, in high summer.
He holds my hand for a moment before I go and gives me his best Paul Newman smile. He shakes his head, as if in wonder, squeezes my hand and says, All that you girls do for me. All that you do.
Chapter 22
One year later, I make my last trip to the house on the edge of the foothills. This visit is not tinged with pathos because at the time, as we spend the long sunny days sorting and ferrying Dad to and fro to the dentist, the podiatrist,
the hairdresser, the audiologist, I don’t know that I will never see this house again or that it will disappear. I don’t know that I will never see this landscape I love from this exact place again.
So I am not sad. This trip feels familiar. We did this last year. We will do it next year.
I have flown to Vancouver from Sydney and rested overnight. We leave in the morning, fresh, and drive east through the lower mainland into the Rockies, up the long incline of the Coquihalla Highway, through the Great Bear snow shed that protects the road where it crosses a particularly tricky avalanche run near the Coquihalla Pass at the top.
There are gun turrets along the highway from which specialists used to shoot shells into snow on the slopes in winter, creating an avalanche when they wanted it, and could close the roads. Now they drop the explosives from helicopters.
This is still one of the most dangerous highways in the world in winter, when an out-of-control semi can materialise coming sideways at you on black ice, as you clear the top of a steep grade with a rock wall on your left and nowhere to go but down on your right.
In summer, it’s different. The road is six lanes wide, the vistas humbling, and we are driving and not flying because I prefer this and said so last year. My sister’s partner obliges, driving skilfully for hours through all conditions so that I can see the mountains. This year, I am even braced for the shock of seeing whole slopes of fir trees yellow and dying, victims of the Japanese beetle, an insect that used to be killed off by the brutal cold of a normal winter, never in one season having enough time to damage a tree. With warmer winters, the beetle hunkers down under the bark and endures the cold, surviving to kill its host in the spring. There may be hope. Some species of conifers are more resistant to this bug than others. There is talk of replanting, sometime, maybe.
The Erratics Page 11