After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  They strapped her down like a mental patient.

  “She has to go in the ambulance,” they said, even though we were literally across the street from the hospital.

  “I didn’t know there were so many things wrong with me,” Grandma said.

  In the ER, an Indian nurse hurried in and started to roughly examine my grandmother’s breasts and arms. For what felt like the millionth time, she winced in pain. This nurse was handling her in a way that no human should be treated, let alone an old lady. I thought about what Dr. J had told me about communicating with people, feeling the boiling anger and panic start to flash before my eyes.

  “Can you please try to be gentle?” I asked politely.

  “Do you want me to take blood or not? If you don’t want me to, I won’t,” she snapped as she roughly twisted my grandmother’s arms, looking for a vein, throwing her around like a rag doll.

  “Yes, but can you please be gentle?” I asked again, exercising so much control over my voice and my tone that I could feel the anger pummeling against the backs of my teeth, rattling them, begging to explode.

  She shoved the needle in, and my grandma made a face I’d never seen before. She began to cry and look away.

  “They won’t do an x-ray without blood tests,” barked the nurse.

  My grandmother was wilting on the bed, in silent tears. “You’re a tough cookie,” I said to her as I held her hand and dug my foot hard into the floor. I began to feel dizzy, a familiar whir of helplessness and desperation and sadness and anger all whirling around inside me. I looked at my mother, desperate for backup, but got none. The nurse flipped her on her side to change her.

  “They’re torturing me, look,” my grandmother quietly said as she showed me her arm, slightly panicked. My mom began crying. Enough was enough.

  “You’re being too rough with her,” I said to the nurse, sternly but still not raising my voice.

  “Fine, you change her,” she said, throwing down the gown on top of my grandmother and abandoning us. I stood there with no clue what to do, helplessly looking at my mom for some kind of support.

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  My mother immediately turned on me.

  “I don’t know, it’s your fault she left! Are you happy now?” She cried, wiping her nose. “You don’t know how to talk to people.”

  I looked away. Dr. J’s voice moved in: Focus on what you’re doing. Don’t engage with her. She hurts you when she’s hurt.

  “Ready for the princess dress?” I asked as I held up the washed-out blue hospital gown. She nodded, and I began to change her the way she used to change me, making little noises, “ch-ch-ch” when I needed to turn her gently her on her side or move her arms.

  “You’re my little angel,” she whispered.

  “You’re mine,” I said as I gingerly moved the IV along with her body.

  “I should’ve stayed home with you, Helaina. It’s safe there,” she said, asking me to take off the swollen medical alert bracelet cutting into her skin.

  “I can’t Grandma, not yet. It’s ok,” I said. “You’re safe. I’m here. It’s going to be okay.”

  I had a sinking feeling that I was lying.

  That night, I smoked a bowl, looking through the black metal bars of the terrace, out over the trees that obscured the twinkling lights of the Brooklyn Bridge. The courtyard below seemed to beckon me, the green grass appearing as a rusty brown abyss, empty and dried out.

  Had I been sober instead of smoking weed—which I had now taken to doing on whichever nights I couldn’t drink—I would have realized that I could not afford to go to these places. The weed kept me paralyzed, paranoid, following the spiral of these darker thoughts. But the invisible girl inside me craved it, because it gave her everything she needed to survive.

  The next morning, I arrived to find Grandma’s hospital room splattered with blood. She had been trying to escape, to go home, and had ripped the IV out over and over.

  Now, they had found a way to literally attach her to the wall by a cord.

  I want to go home.

  I just have to get home.

  What does home look like?

  Feelings of desperation flashed through me.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” Grandma said. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  She thought I was responsible for what was happening to her. She thought I had hooked her up to the wall.

  “Trust me, it’s okay,” I said, taking her hands in mine. It didn’t matter how many times I told her she was going to be okay. She didn’t believe me.

  “You’ve always been a little girl who listened,” she said, catching her breath. “Today, you’re not.”

  What had once been our own happy piece of the universe, so safe, warm, and happy, was gone. That night, I tried to remember what it was like to cuddle up together as a child and read my favorite book while she smoothed my hair, but as soon as the warmness of the memory touched down, something stung me sharply, and it vanished. I was cold once again, surrounded by beeping machines and random cries coming from other rooms. The two of us lay under an unforgiving fluorescent light, shining a harsh reality on what had become of our world.

  * * *

  I felt permanently responsible for her life in a more direct way than I ever had before. I blamed myself for everything I couldn’t fix. Showing up every day after class wasn’t enough. I took her pain on and felt like everything was going to fall apart if I wasn’t physically there to control it. I felt responsible for her in the way a guardian angle would, needing to literally watch over her every second to make sure she was safe.

  The next day, she wasn’t responsive when I arrived in her room. She was sort of swaying back and forth, sitting up in bed, holding a basin as if she were going to be sick.

  “Is there a nurse that could come in here please? She’s not responding,” I said, trying not to panic, but trembling as I sat on the foot of the bed, watching her and not knowing what to do.

  A doctor in blue scrubs came in, and tried to talk to her.

  “Lucy?” he said. “Lucy, can you hear me?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “It’s probably the medication,” she doctor said, not looking up from his clipboard. “Just give it an hour or two.”

  A few blocks away, the first Taste of the Seaport event was being held to raise money for local schools, and I was on assignment to cover it. Like I had ten years before, in fifth grade, I wiped my nose, kissed Grandma goodbye, and tried to push my fears about her dying out of my head as I left to report a story for the newspaper.

  We were a few days away from my twenty-first birthday, and Anthony had rented me a room at a lounge on the Lower East Side. We had food, balloons, and champagne. I asked my mom if we should cancel it, and she said Grandma would have wanted me to have it. Anthony suggested I invite my mom, so I did. I wore a sparkly blue sequin dress, my mom enjoyed herself until Anthony put her in a cab around 11:00 p.m., and he watched my drinking, which I was great about. I barely touched anything but champagne, as far as he knew. But when he left to use the bathroom, and to put my mom in a cab, I chugged vodka like my life depended on it.

  * * *

  Grandma would have to go back to the nursing home in the west village for rehab, again.

  This time, she was smaller, weaker, and more confused.

  The Day Room had a pile of games in the corner, a couple of half dead plants, and some drawings taped to the beige wall. It reminded me of my elementary school: a smelly, scary, disgusting prison. Everyone was wearing the same red socks with little white lines on the bottom to keep them from slipping, even though they were all immobile, anyway.

  I hated seeing Grandma there, not only because it was painful to watch, but because it was like we had all failed to keep her out of there. She was not some corpse waiting to go, she was the love of my fucking life, and, in that Day Room, she was just staring into space like all of the people who were there, but weren’t there. S
he needed someone to constantly talk to her to keep her mind going, but there were no nurses in the room at all.

  When I went to visit her, I tried to make extra time to talk to the others who were cognizant enough to hold a conversation. There was a woman named Regina, a little old lady I always went over to, who told me “I’d like to put you somewhere where there is glitter and glamour.” I usually brought sunflowers or chocolate, for her, for Grandma, and for another woman named Eve. Sometimes Anthony would stop in with me, and we would all hold hands—I would hold Anthony’s hand and my grandma’s hand, he would hold my hand and her hand, like a motionless ring-around-the-rosie.

  An internal argument between me and the invisible girl started up constantly while I was there.

  You have to do something.

  There’s nothing I can do.

  You have to do something. You have to save everyone.

  I can’t.

  You should just kill yourself.

  I felt responsible for all of them, and turning my back to get on the elevator on my way out, I felt I was abandoning them. If it was after 7:00 p.m., people were in their rooms, in the darkness, screaming and crying “hello” or “help.” It reminded me of the fear I felt as a child, only it was much more horrifying for them, because their parents were nowhere to be found, and they didn’t know where they were. Or worse, they knew exactly where they were. All freedom, all ability, all choices, all hope had collapsed.

  Stepping into the cool night air, leaving the dark building, I fell apart. It never got easier. I stood frozen on the curb, ashamed to be outside. I didn’t want my freedom when so many people didn’t have it. I wished I could break it off into pieces and hand it out. How could people die this way? Why is everyone abandoning them?

  No matter how painful it was, I showed up like clockwork. I punched that square button with a picture of a blue stick figure in a wheelchair that activated the double doors, and I whizzed right through them, signing in at the desk. I waited an extraordinary amount of time for one of the two broken-down elevators to arrive so I could get to her, to Regina, to Eve, and to Grandpa, who didn’t recognize any of us anymore, but who I usually stopped to give a kiss to. My aunt stayed by his side far more diligently to feed him and talk to him, despite the fact, my mother later told me, that the two of them actually had a volatile relationship while she was growing up.

  Dr. J tried to convince me that I was doing enough for all of them, bringing them joy when I could.

  “What else can you do?” she asked, leaving me with the obvious answer.

  The fact that there was nothing else made me even more depressed.

  She reasoned that I should not drop out of college to sit with her 24/7, that missing a day or two out of the week didn’t make me a bad granddaughter.

  “Bringing joy to the other people when you have the time is more than enough. Only you can make yourself feel guilty,” she said. “You’ve done so much more for her than most grandchildren would do. Most of the people in there have nobody.”

  That made me feel even worse.

  * * *

  “The Abilify would augment the affects of the SSRI, if increasing the anxiety medication doesn’t help,” said Dr. C during our summer session. “You’ve been doing well, haven’t you? This is because of what’s going on with your grandmother, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you still smoking weed?” she asked. “Drinking?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “But you’re using it smartly, recreationally too, right? Not overusing?”

  “I don’t think so,” I answered.

  “As long as you’re not only using it when you’re upset.”

  I don’t use it when I feel bad, I use it when I want to feel good.

  I never did end up taking the Abilify, though. Dr. J explained that with everything going on, the stress of school and work and my personal life, the sadness, the anxiety I was feeling seemed appropriate: a totally normal response.

  Dr. J was trying to gently lure me into the acceptance faze, but the invisible little girl saw “surrender” as defeat, instead of freedom.

  “Half the battle is stopping the fight against things that you can’t change or control. What you can do is enjoy the time you have with each person as you have it, being present in each moment and enjoying it as it is,” Dr. J said.

  I looked at her like she was crazy.

  “Enjoy it? Have you been listening to anything I’m saying about how awful it all is?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Yes. And, you do have the choice. Be stuck in the ‘can’t’ or figure out how to live in the ‘can.’ One will definitely be more challenging, although it will decrease your suffering,” she said. “Unfortunately, there are also a lot of things you can do nothing about, and you have to work on building acceptance toward that.”

  “I think I’m going to need a lobotomy to do any of that.”

  When I left her office, I didn’t get a lobotomy, but I did the next best thing: I got wasted.

  * * *

  One day during the summer I arrived to see that they just left Grandma in the hallway, staring at the back of someone else’s head. Her hair, always coiffed perfectly, was smashed down. She wore no lipstick. Her nails were not done. It made my heart break to see her, to see all of them, lined up in this way, like they were waiting for death.

  What had all of them gone through in their lives to end up here?

  What had they faced, overcome, to end up like this?

  Why do any of us fight and fight through life if this is this how it ends?

  All of that surviving—for what?

  “Helaina!” she said when she saw me, her usual smile replaced by nervousness she tried to hide.

  “I don’t know where I am or where I need to go,” she said, a flash of panic on her face, where all the happiness had left.

  “It’s ok, you’re in rehab for your hip, but I’m here. We’re going to go up to physical therapy now,” I said.

  “I’m so scared. When you leave, I’m all alone.”

  This stabbed me like a knife.

  “You were always so good at being alone,” I said, squeezing her hand and squatting down to meet her eyes. “Please don’t be scared when I leave. I know that you’re safe. I wouldn’t leave you if you weren’t safe.”

  As if reading my mind, she said, “I’m not as tough as I think I am.” Then, like a scared child, quietly, “I want to go home.”

  I took her up to therapy and promised I would be back before she knew it. I treated every time I saw her like it would be the last time, worried that she might die before I got to say “goodbye.”

  I didn’t realize, then, that just getting to say “goodbye” doesn’t come close to being there for someone’s entire life.

  * * *

  My grandfather died fifteen minutes after I left the nursing home that day. I was already sitting down at some Mexican restaurant on West Twelfth Street with Anthony, deciding which one of the twelve varieties of margaritas I was going to order first.

  “What?” I shouted into the phone when my dad called to give me the news. I flew out of the restaurant, everything around me melting away.

  I hadn’t even seen Grandpa that day, having spent all of my time with Grandma.

  I didn’t get to say goodbye.

  One of the nurses said she saw, at the time of his death, my grandmother reaching her arms out saying, “Goodbye, see you soon,” from her own room.

  The floor manager insisted that nobody told Grandma that he had died.

  * * *

  The ride over to the funeral parlor from the nursing home with my grandmother was so painful, I thought my heart would actually just give in right there, finally reaching its natural limit, if someone really could, in fact, die of a broken heart.

  “I wish I didn’t love Lucy so I could get the hell out of here,” said Uncle John once we arrived at the funeral home in the Bronx. He was fidgeting in that gruff,
Irish tough guy way he fidgets, smelling of cigarettes, pacing, rushing three steps forward and stopping, then doing the same in a different direction, adjusting his baseball cap.

  “I didn’t think she should have come at all,” I said, fidgeting with my phone.

  Everyone huddled over Grandma’s wheelchair. She looked so small, bewildered, and confused under her lipstick and silk shirt that had become too big.

  This can’t actually be happening.

  “Do you want to see him in the casket or should we close it?” my mother asked her.

  “Why, he’s dead?” Grandma asked.

  The dementia caused her to forget the most painful details, which we had to remind her of over and over and over: the nursing home, the hospital, the funeral home, his death, feeling the impact over, and over, and over.

  “Yes, he’s dead, that’s why we’re here,” my mom and aunt said in a jumble together.

  Grandma turned to me and asked, “What do you think?”

  “I think we should close it,” I said, and everyone got mad at me.

  A month later, Grandma got to come home again. Now, she qualified for twenty-four-hour care, but was horribly depressed.

  The rotation of home health aides the agency sent made her cry, because their voices were sharp, or their touch was rough, or they didn’t let her get up to do things herself (which she physically couldn’t anymore). One of them cut her leg by accident and didn’t report it, the other one saw her cut leg and didn’t report it, either.

  “I just wish I could die already,” Grandma would say.

  Me too, I thought.

  Instead, I said, “But I can’t live without you,” and gave her kiss after kiss until she smiled.

  I started to arm myself with a bag of weed at all times, so that when I couldn’t get to a bar to drink away a pinched nerve, I could light up immediately on the terrace. I tried to hide it from my parents at first, then became reckless, leaving rolled joints on the floor of my room—which Gucci would sniff, and fortunately, decide he wasn’t interested in—and going outside to smoke while they were still awake watching TV.