Home Free

by Marni Jackson

  A year later,my sister, the gentlest, kindest person in the world, was shocked to discover the anger she could feel toward someone she loved. My powerful mother was teetering through the house like a stilt walker on Benadryl; any day she was going to fall and break something. So the glacial process began of researching homes, along with the endless paperwork and scheduling of social worker visits, while we convinced my mother that this was a good and necessary decision. It was too hard for Jori and her husband and son to be a family with my mother still trying to rule the roost. The three of them spent most of their time sequestered down in the rec room while she sat alone upstairs. Everyone was living under the same roof in deepening estrangement.

  My mother remembers this phase, dimly. “Jori and I had different ideas about decorating”is how she puts it. Or “I’ve never known anyone who loves to shop like Jori,” to explain why my sister had to regularly flee the house to avoid committing matricide.

  It is to my sister’s credit that they both survived the transition from the tensions of the family home to the flat horizon of the institutional bedroom. Jori continues her kindnesses, visiting her almost daily. My sister paints, as well. One of her pictures, a watercolour of blue hollyhocks, hangs opposite my mother, and although her eyesight is almost gone she still takes pleasure in it. Jori is the hero of this story.

  My brother Bruce and sister-in-law Kathy take care of my mother’s financial and medical details, and visit every Saturday. They monitor her 17medications. I show up on Sunday afternoons, having spent the hour’s drive from Toronto playing loud music to get pumped. You need to bring energy into this place or it will take it from you. I have to keep reminding myself that this is only normal, and we were lucky to find a bed in such an affordable, pleasant place.

  “She’s ready for you now,” says Samuel, the easygoing male attendant whom my mother rather likes. I go back into her room. Someone has dressed her in a pink plaid shirt today, with the blue fleece vest and the stretchy grey pants that don’t quite hide the dread ruffle of the diaper. I pull her vest down to cover that, more for my sake than hers. It’s not an outfit my mother would have chosen, but it means that someone here is paying attention. Someone wants her to look nice.

  The line between night and day, inside and outside, life and death is blurring. The staff used to lace her feet into her old walking shoes every day. Despite her not walking. Now she wears a pair of shapeless blue slippers. We’re not even sure where they came from. When I point this out to my mother and ask about her lost shoes, she waves a hand and says airily,“Oh I don’t care about that. I don’t care about anything anymore, except my children and my grandchildren.”

  I kiss my mother on her dry forehead, noting as usual that her eyes and the skin around them look inflamed. Nobody can figure out what the problem is. Her blues eyes stare into the middle distance, unfocused; she has just enough vision left to dimly register what I’m wearing.

  “You’ve had a lot of wear out of that top,” she’ll say. Or “That’s a good colour on you.”

  But she can no longer scrutinize me too closely, I realize,with a guilty sense of relief. Her fading vision maroons her in long days unrelieved by books or TV. A year ago, she broke her hip shortly after moving here. She survived the surgery but never walked again. She still plans to, though, every day.

  “I was up for a while this morning,” she’ll report, or “If I use the railings in the hall I think that will get me going.”We don’t contradict her.

  The staff wheels her into the dining room for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She eats them all. Everyone revels in her appetite. She sits at a table with Mary, a totem of sadness who never speaks, and with Windy, a handsome old man with beseeching eyes who dearly longs to speak but can’t. She likes Windy. In between the meals, she sleeps, her head supported by a horseshoe-shaped neck rest, or she sits in her wheelchair facing the open door of her room, “waiting for some action,” she says, and “watching everybody else work.”

  She’s learned the drill here: don’t complain, stay on the good side of the staff, and count your blessings. The Celexa and clonazapine don’t hurt either.

  I keep my mantra going: my mother’s not in pain. And after a bout of depression after her hip surgery, she’s no longer in anguish.

  “The staff is friendly here,” she says. “It’s amazing how you can get used to having men dress you.”

  Or “I’m lucky that I can always nap,” she tells me gamely. Then, with more anger, “I nap, and nap, and nap!”

  My mother is frighteningly cogent at times and confused at others. This is a boon. It doesn’t pay to be completely alert in her situation. She is the oldest person in her wing and yet one of the most responsive. She can still evaluate her decline.

  “My brain’s going,” she tells me. “I can feel it. It’s terrible.”

  Sometimes she complains about her eyes, that they feel gritty. Today I decide to try the Chinese herbal eye drops again, standing behind her with the tiny vial. This is always the cue for her to squeeze her eyes shut.

  “Open this eye, just a bit.”No response.

  “Mom, you need to open your eyes so I can get this stuff in.” One eye blinks open for an instant. I pinch the plastic bottle, the eye snaps shut again, the drops roll down her cheek. I try the other eye, and the same thing happens. Oh well. Maybe some got in. Mentally, I shrug. It’s difficult not to, in this place of decline. I imagine the staff must think this too.

  That’s good enough.

  “Shall we go for a spin down the hall?” I ask, as if this were a new and brilliant idea, instead of the only thing we can do in here. Going outside, into the pretty courtyard, is too bright for her, too disorienting.

  “Yes!”she says firmly. I find myself almost excited by the prospect of these miniature expeditions—trundling to the end of one hall, then the other. I look forward to them. It’s as if we’re setting out to view Victoria Falls.

  After the voyage comes tea time. I roll her into the dining room and position her with her dominant hand, the left, close to the table. I pour two inches of coffee with milk in a cup—more and it will spill. Her hand moves tremblingly and in slow motion toward the cup, and she raises it to her lips. She always squeezes her eyes shut as she drinks for some reason. Then the hand with the cup slowly, slowly, moves back toward the edge of the table. A moment of suspense as I watch her navigate the edge of the table, but she locates the saucer with the bottom of her cup and it’s done. The sip is accomplished. I place a cookie where her hand will find it.

  “The cookies are always good here,” she often remarks. It’s true, sometimes they are homemade, although I don’t know by whom. Her feet are elevated in the wheelchair; I stroke her swollen ankles, which are taut and swirly with pale colours, purple and red. I make mindless small talk. Real talk about my real life doesn’t engage her any longer. When I talk about Casey, she might rally. “Oh, isn’t that wonderful,” she’ll say, or “Be sure and give him a big fat kiss for me.”

  But this afternoon, she is drifting more than usual.

  “Do we have a mother?” she suddenly asks, looking straight at me. Okay, a not-cogent moment.

  “No, your mother died some time ago,” I say, not adding, “And you’re my mother and you’re still alive.”

  “Yes, I know, but did our dad remarry?”

  “No, he didn’t. He died too. Actually, he died before your mother did.”

  “Oh. I thought he might have remarried.”

  Over by the budgie’s cage, the new resident begins her gentle chant.

  “Help me. ”

  I get up and clear the dishes, to make some noise.

  “Shall we go for another walk?”

  “Sure,why not!”

  I propel her all the way down to the end of the east wing,where two of the staff are sitting in the empty nook.

  “Hello, Olive!” says Samuel.

  “It’s odd at first,”my mother remarks when he is out of earshot,


  “but you can get used to a man taking care of you. And sometimes they’re gentler.”

  Other times she will say, “I keep thinking there’s a man around somewhere.”This is not surprising, after spending 68 years with my father. “I still wake up in night and try to move quietly, as if he’s beside me in the bed,” she adds, wistfully. Another staff member, a woman with curly black extensions, detours over to my mother. “Hello, grandma!”she says, coming in close to her face. “Hello,blue eyes!” She chuckles and walks away. I pivot my mother’s chair around, and we begin the journey to the other end of the hall.

  “That’s how they all talk to you here,” says my mother in a carefully neutral voice. It doesn’t pay to complain, it’s best to be a good sport—but I catch the subtext. The staff banters with the residents who can still respond, but sometimes it’s like they’re ruffling the fur on a dog or talking nonsense to an infant. With so many residents to care for and the rapid turnover, it’s easy to lose track of who’s still inside their body or who has fled.

  I start to push her toward the west wing,where the daycare kids next door are out in the playground. This is a big draw for people out shopping for a facility; they imagine their mother or father sitting at the windows, drawn by the sound of children nearby. It’s a nice concept. But no one looks or cares. The noise and bother of children is behind them now. Even the “therapy cats” that wander the halls go neglected. The staff hangs cat toys from the railings for the resident pets so they don’t get bored.

  Instead, the residents mostly sit, trundle, or assemble like ghosts for dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon. Their eyes follow you like runaways hiding in the woods. Most are on sedatives of some sort. Which makes sense.

  “They’re all very friendly in here,” my mother keeps telling me, as if I’m here for the first or second time. “They treat you quite well,” she says, “although you have to wait. You have to wait for everything.”

  “Well, there’s not enough staff to go around,” I say, as I always do. “I guess you’ve had to learn how to be patient in here.” I start to push her back toward her room.

  “I’ll say. I’m so patient now it’s ridiculous.”

  My smart, salty mother.

  When I was three or four, our household went through a flurry of entering contests. With my father’s help, I entered a contest to name a blond cocker spaniel (which was the prize). But the name Blondie proved to be not creative enough. Then my mother entered a contest to name a new Betty Crocker cake mix and she won. She called it “Candle Glow Cake Mix,” and before long a box containing a mink coat was delivered to our door. It was what was known as a “shorty” coat, waist-length, a lustrous brown, with deeply cuffed sleeves and a cool, silky lining. My mother wore it as her “good coat” for the next 15 years.

  By the time I was in university the fur on the cuffs had worn thin, so she cut off the sleeves and turned the coat into a vest for me. These were the days of Sonny and Cher, with Sonny’s fur bolero. Or the Mamas and the Papas, with John Philips’s ridiculous Dr. Seuss fur hat. The politics of wearing animals hadn’t yet arrived.

  My mother had left the vest unlined. It was nothing but many small pelts stitched together. When the seams began to shred, I relegated it to canoe trips, where it became indispensable, slightly fetishistic, and not at all out of place in the woods. I have snapshots of me wearing the fur vest over a plaid flannel shirt, with a large compass hanging around my neck, as I study a topographical map. Très sauvage.

  Eventually the stitching on the vest gave out, but once again my mother salvaged more bits of the Candle Glow coat and transformed the discarded cuffs into an old-fashioned muff for me, a kind of open-ended purse. Out of other scraps, she sewed a fur headband and a detachable fur collar. I occasionally wrapped both around my head, turban-style (Simone de Beauvoir’s worst legacy to women). Then she cut the bedraggled remnants of the vest into thin strips of mink. These she glued onto a black wool waistcoat, creating a strange and wonderful fur-striped garment that was part Star Trek, part Art Deco.

  I wore it over a black turtleneck when I was feeling particularly antic. There was no other piece of clothing in the world like it.

  Then, in a spasm of good taste, I pushed the vest to the back of my closet. It didn’t surface until one weekend when Casey was home from college and I was editing my old clothes. Throwing out the 1973 blue corduroy Betsey Johnson jumpsuit finally. I handed him the fur vest. This might be something the Rock and Roll Doctor would like to wear on the air, I joked. Casey immediately saw the potential juju in this item and took possession of it.

  He went back to Montreal and wore it “live” for his next radio show. The fur vest, he reported, had definitely boosted his musical healing powers.

  Then Halloween came along; once again the garment was pressed into service. One of his roommates borrowed it and was tagged wearing it in party photos. The vest looked pretty good on him too.

  I know my mother would be happy to see this last bit of her imagination and handiwork, still out there, dancing.

  During the week, I phone each night around 7 p.m. Sometimes she feels compelled to call us during the day, but it’s not often she can navigate the buttons on the phone. She has an ongoing sense that I’m never at home; it’s true, sometimes my work takes me away for weeks at a time. This is faintly scandalous to her and has left a residue of anxiety about my whereabouts and my marriage.

  But there are days when she manages to push the right buttons on the phone. Brian took a call from her recently.

  “Oh, Brian, it’s Olive. I just wanted to let Marni know where I am,” she lightly informed him.

  “Hi, Olive,” he said, unflummoxed. “And where are you?”

  “I’m in the Presbyterian church,” she went on, “in case she comes looking for me.”

  The next time I saw her, I gently corrected her.

  “Why did you tell Brian that you were at the Presbyterian church?”

  “Well, I was!” she said indignantly.

  Maybe one of the staff had wheeled her downstairs to a church service, I thought.

  “But we belonged to the United Church. That’s where we used to go,when we did go to church. Why wouldn’t you go there?”

  “The Presbyterian church always had more going on,” she explained a bit sadly. Ah, the road not taken.

  Lately she has been talking about her own mother and father.

  “More and more when I wake up or go to sleep, I find myself thinking about Mother and Dad.”

  “Good thoughts?” I’m always scavenging for family secrets.

  “Oh, all good. I think they were wonderful parents.” Then another question occurs to her.

  “Is the big white house still there?”

  I know what she means; the big white house is the house she grew up in, on 10th St. in Saskatoon.

  “Yes, it’s still there,” I say.

  “That was such a good house,”my mother says firmly. “I always think that if ever I wander off and get lost here, I’ll just make my way to the white house.”

  I tell her this sounds like a sensible plan.

  Another time I am visiting in February. My mother’s gaze drifts away from my face more often now. “And how are you liking married life,”she once asked cheerily, forgetting that I’ve been with Brian for 31 years.

  Today I find her, sleeping in her wheelchair, the padded support around her neck. I take a moment to just look at her, before the role-playing begins. Then she opens her eyes and registers my presence. I bathe her face with a washcloth, like a baby. I like any bit of physical comfort I can give her because the social part gets weird. So I water her, then I water the azalea and poinsettia on the windowsill. On the dresser is a giant Valentine’s card from my sister— so big my mother can still see it, or at least the shape of it, from her bed. Smart.

  “Your nose is running a little,” I point out.

  “Oh it always runs now,”she says. “It’s going to win all the races.” We go
down the hall, to the windows and the sitting nook. The light sometimes hurts her eyes, but today there is a soft February light, with clouds in a blue sky—puffy, perfect Simpsons-cartoon clouds. Two streets over, the suburban development stops and there are real trees, even a few tall white pines. Scraps of the old rural Burlington are still visible here. I babble inanities about the weather, the traffic, the houses in the area.

  “Look at those beautiful clouds in the sky,” my mother says. I wasn’t sure she could see them.

  “Yes, they are beautiful.”

  Then I talked about Brian’s mother, who is 91. Doing well, but plagued by chronic back pain. Having to spend half her days in bed now.

  “Well, it’s the same for all of us,”my mother opines, “it’s just old age. We’re on the edge.”

  “That’s right. Nobody gets out of here alive.”

  “We all come to the same bitter end,” she said with a proud little toss of her head.

  “Well, you know, it could be quite pleasant. You might be sleeping and one minute you’re dreaming and next minute, whoosh, you’re outta here.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  At 7 p.m., when I make my nightly call to my mother, it feels like I’m lowering a rope and a bucket down a well—I never know if she’ll manage to bring the receiver to her ear. Often, the staff has already settled her for the night. They raise the bars on the sides of the bed. This means she’s not always within reach of the phone on the night table beside her. Rolling over, stretching her arm, lifting the receiver—it’s all epic for her. So whenever I call, I let it ring seven, eight, nine times. Often, if she gets the phone out of the cradle, she will drop it. A period of noisy fumbling and laboured breathing follows, as she hauls the thing up by the cord. I feel a vicarious surge of pride when she gets the receiver to her ear, like a parent watching her child perform on the parallel bars.