by Marra B. Gad
And then, there are the calls we wait for but don’t want to get. The night I waited for my mother to call from the hospital at the end of my father’s life was one of the longest of my life. Every time the phone rang, my heart stopped beating. My stomach started to ache. I felt sick.
But what I had never considered was a third kind of call. The unexpected one. Even that call comes in many forms. It’s lovely to receive an unexpected call from an old and dear friend with whom you haven’t chatted in far too long. Or the call from your brother, sister, nephew, or niece just to say, “I love you,” or “I’m thinking of you.”
This phone call stood in a class by itself.
“Yes … yes … I understand,” I heard my mother say. Her face grew pale, and I could see her concern grow as she silently nodded, taking in the information being thrown at her.
Nette and Zeit had apparently been conserved by the state of California.
A neighbor had noticed that the house had fallen into disrepair. What had normally been pristine landscaping was overgrown. The mailbox was rarely emptied. Garbage cans had not been taken in after the trash had been collected. Knowing that an elderly couple lived in the house, the neighbor had called Health and Human Services and asked them to do a wellness check.
Clearly, all was not well.
A wellness check meant that someone from the California Department of Aging was dispatched to the house with permission to enter. And when they entered, they found the house overrun with boxes and mail, the kitchen unclean, the whole place a mess. Zeit was apparently quite lucid, but Nette was not. She was, we would come to learn, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and her memory was touch and go. The state’s deputy, having assessed the situation, deemed Nette and Zeit unable to care for themselves, and as they did not have children, the state of California swooped in to become their legal caregivers. This meant that all of the decisions—financial, medical, personal—were being made by someone appointed and approved by the state.
The woman on the phone said my mother was Nette’s only living relative. They determined this after reviewing the documents related to Nette’s will. She and Zeit had named my mother their mutual executor many years ago and had never changed it.
“As you are Nette’s only living relative,” the woman told my mother, “we are wondering if you would like to come to California and survey the situation.”
My mother remained ashen as she drew a breath. “I’ll have to get back to you,” she said. “Thank you for the call.” She hung up and turned to me with tears in her eyes, quickly telling me everything.
We had not spoken to or seen Nette or Zeit since my sister’s wedding. While I knew that my mother never regretted cutting her out of our lives, I also knew that she still held a space for Nette in her heart. Gone is rarely forgotten, and even when a person unflinchingly shows a horrific side of themselves, a soft space remains where love was once present. That made perfect sense to me then, and it makes perfect sense to me now.
Life rarely is black and white.
And so, with this unexpected and shocking phone call came a question: What do we do now?
My family convened to discuss the situation. My brother made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with Nette or the mess in which she found herself. “I will support whatever you decide to do, but I am not going,” he said. “This isn’t something I feel the need to become involved in.” And he meant every word of it.
My sister, with two young children, was not able to travel freely or easily. “I just don’t see how I can go there anytime soon …” Alisa’s voice trailed off. Clearly conflicted but also clear in her choice.
And my mother, who was ill in her own right with a kidney issue, could not go. It was simply not an option.
I was the only person who had yet to speak, and for obvious reasons, I don’t think anyone thought I would.
But I found myself questioning. I was able. But was I willing? After everything that had transpired, what was the right thing to do in a circumstance like this? Until this moment, I had never considered what I might do if someone who had been painfully cruel to me needed my help under stressful circumstances. But when I found myself having to decide, the choice was clear. The answers came quickly.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’m in L.A. monthly as it is, so I’ll just pop up to San Francisco and see what’s going on.”
My family stared at me blankly.
I will wholly admit I have fantasized in the past about what I would like to do to the many people who have been cruel to me. I have dreamed of what I would say—of what I might do. I have had thousands of pretend confrontational conversations. I have imagined slapping certain people in the face, and as I have never struck another person, that to me is a far more violent act than it might seem to others. I have said things like, “I’ll wear a red dress to his funeral one day,” or “I’d walk over her bleeding body if it were in front of me.” But when I was actually faced with a very real moment when I could have enacted one of my revenge fantasies, I did not.
I defaulted to love.
Please do not mistake me for some sort of sugar-sweet angel. I am far from it. But I believe that before life’s traumas obscure it, as so often happens, each of us is born to love and to be loved. I believe that love is why we are here. And this was a test of that belief.
I was San Francisco–bound. And there was no talking me out of it.
“I’ll go,” I repeated.
The back-and-forth was immediate, for my mother did not want me to be the one who went there. “You do not have to do this,” she said through teary eyes. “You of all people do not have to do this.”
“But it’s the right thing to do,” I said. “No matter what else has happened, you’re all Nette has, and you can’t go yourself, so this is the right thing to do. I’ll go and see what’s going on, and that will be the end of it. I’m sure it will be no big deal.”
In spite of her clear hatred for me, Nette had been very good to my mother, and I wanted to give my mother what peace I could around the situation. I chose to go because no matter what else Nette was—or wasn’t—to me, I could not imagine simply walking away from a human being in need, much less one who had been something of a surrogate parent to my own beloved mother at one time in her life. My love for my mother in that moment was bigger than anything Nette might have ever said. It really was that simple.
I landed in San Francisco, rented a car, and drove straight to Nette and Zeit’s house. I knew from the call my mother had received that Zeit was still living in the house with a caregiver and Nette had been sent to a residential care facility for Alzheimer’s patients. But that was really all I knew. I had no game plan other than to go first to the house, then to the Health and Human Services Agency to get a better idea of what was going on, and then to find Nette.
Nette and Zeit still owned the house at the very top of the mountain on Jefferson Avenue. For a city girl like me, used to driving on very flat roads, the drive alone was anxiety-inducing, but that is where this journey began. I had only been there once, but their once pristine and quirky home was clearly now in gross disrepair. And it was heartbreaking. When I walked into the house, I was taken aback. It was silent. No dance music played. Even the television was off. The house looked like it had been ransacked. There were boxes, some empty and some full, all over the house. Garbage filled the kitchen. On the formerly immaculate countertops. In the sink. Laundry, unfolded, was heaped in several baskets. Even with Zeit’s caregiver present, it was clear that only the barest minimum of care was being given. The house smelled. Stale. Old. And like pain.
Zeit was sleeping in his easy chair, and his caregiver was puttering around in the kitchen. The caregiver pulled me outside, and we exchanged basic but uncomfortable pleasantries.
“I’m Nette and Zeit’s great-niece,” I explained, “and I’m here to see what is going on with them. Can you please give me an update on Zeit’s health?”
“You are their
niece?” As always, incredulity followed any mention of me being family.
“I am,” I replied, “and I’d like to have a full download on Zeit’s condition and plan for care. Please.”
“Can you provide any proof of your relationship?”
Annoyed, uncomfortable, and horrified by the condition in which I had found both Zeit and the house, I handed the caregiver a notarized letter verifying my identity. My mother had insisted I bring it. As ever, she was right.
The caregiver gave me an overview: Even now, in his early nineties, Zeit was well enough in mind, but his body was steadily failing. His sadness from being separated from Nette was only making his decline more rapid. Zeit did not want to leave the house for a care facility, and so the state decided to try things this way.
I went back inside to check on my uncle. “How are you feeling, Uncle Zeit?” I leaned down to kiss his cheek and to get the story straight from him.
“How do you think I am?” he said. He started to weep. He told me about how state officials had come into the house and taken Nette from him. About how they had taken away his money. His telephone. His freedom. His dignity.
“I’m here now, and I’m going to see what I can do to make things better,” I said. “I promise. I’m going to visit Nette, and then I’ll come back and see you again. Very soon.”
I could not wait to leave. My chest was tight. My heart hurt. And the tears were coming—fast and furious, like Zeit’s rant.
Tomorrow would be another day. And I needed to get some rest.
For some reason that remains a mystery to this day, I was not allowed to have the address for Nette’s facility until I paid a visit to the Senior Services office that had conserved her in the first place. It took at least five phone calls to actually get someone on the line; my many messages were not returned. And once I finally received a return call, I found that the office itself was in a repurposed middle school. It had clearly not been redecorated in at least forty years and was almost as depressing as Nette and Zeit’s house.
The tiny office was like something out of an episode of Law & Order. There was a desk overflowing with files and a visibly overworked administrator who greeted me. I had my identity letter at the ready. And, of course, I had to use it. The administrator gave an overview of how Nette ended up in the facility, but I had far more questions than she had answers, the logical byproduct of the fifteen-year estrangement between my aunt and me.
“Can you please help me to understand the process?” I began. “How was the decision made to conserve them? And how did you choose Nette’s facility?”
The administrator stopped me.
“Young lady, I have a few questions of my own,” she snapped. The judgment in her eyes was obvious. She asked me one question. “How did your mother … your family allow this to happen?”
I could tell from her tone that sharing even a small part of my story—our story—would not be well received, much less understood. And I did not think it would help my case. For even without seeing Nette, I had already decided I was going to do everything in my power to move her to a facility in Chicago to be near my mother and sister.
I told the administrator, simply, that we were not particularly close because of the distance, and we moved on. At long last, I was given the address for Nette’s care facility. I was also given contact information for a conservator the state had assigned. She was charged with managing Nette’s and Zeit’s care and finances, and she would be the contact person for anything related to them from here forward.
It took a bit of doing to find Nette’s facility, and when I finally did manage to find it, I saw that it was more a ramshackle home than anything else. I learned quickly that California was filled with care facilities that were actually homes—houses tucked away in residential neighborhoods and retrofitted to accommodate six to eight patients each. This was one of those places, and it was, in a word, bleak.
The outside of the home was in desperate need of paint and a lawn care service, and the inside wasn’t much better. The halls were dark, and the yellow-beige paint on the walls was cracked. The floors were tiled with cheap linoleum. And the stench of industrial-level cleaners was nauseating. At least, I thought, it was clean. Or at least it smelled like it was. There was minimal security, and I was able to walk in without anyone asking me who I was or what I was doing there.
I managed to hunt down someone who said she was a nurse. As she was not wearing a uniform, I couldn’t be sure. That day, I really wasn’t sure of much. “I’m here to see Nette CeKansky Wang,” I told her. “I am her niece.”
Once again, incredulous eyes looked me up and down.
“I have a letter. Here.” It had taken only a few of these exchanges for me to grow tired of justifying myself, and the letter quickly became both my introduction and my shield.
“This way,” the nurse said. Truthfully, I’m not sure that she was really a medical professional. Absent any sort of uniform or name tag, I had no way of knowing who she was or what her qualifications were. And I definitely wanted to know. My initial research made it clear that Alzheimer’s and dementia care is very specific, and I wanted to be sure that Nette was being cared for by people who knew what they were doing. I added that to my growing list of questions for the administrator and the conservator.
She led me down a dark, narrow hallway that was—at least in my mind—much longer than it should have been. I stood in Nette’s doorway surveying the room, which was also dark and narrow. Nette was sitting up in a small bed, covered in a blanket. It took her all of thirty seconds to see me standing there. Even with Alzheimer’s now officially diagnosed, she was lucid that day and true to the Nette I had always known, her filter fully disengaged. Secretly, I might have hoped to find her otherwise.
“They sent you?” she said. “As if being trapped in this place isn’t bad enough, they had to send you.”
Nette’s situation was not pretty. Her hair had not been brushed, much less styled. Her nails were bare—something I had never seen in all the years I had known her. Not a drop of makeup adorned her face, and when I dared to get a bit closer to her, I saw dried food on her shirt and in the corners of her mouth. She was a mess. In spite of her unkempt state, she retained her familiar and remarkable combination of outrage and dignity as she stared me down.
It was not the welcome I was hoping for, but it was authentic, and Nette was nothing if not authentic. But this time, I was not silent. I did not shrink. This time, we were alone. There was no wedding. I had no reason not to make a scene. And so I fired back at her.
“Yes,” I said. “They sent me. And I’m your only option. So choose. Stay here forever, or deal with me and I’ll try to get you out of here.”
“Fine,” she said.
It seemed there was something worse than black for Nette after all, and that was the thought of having to live out the rest of her days in what amounted to a one-star hotel. Her own potential salvation far outweighed her disdain for me and my blackness. Her choice was as immediate as mine had been to come in the first place, although we clearly had made our choices from much different places.
The visit lasted all of twenty minutes. It was all that either one of us could take. I drove back to the hotel crying. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it was from the sheer stress of it all. Maybe it was because the “home” Nette was in was far from acceptable. Maybe it was because I knew I had just bitten off far more than I might be able to chew.
Chapter Twelve
WHEN I RETURNED TO CHICAGO, I TOLD MY MOTHER what I had learned. What I had seen. And I told her about my not-at-all-formed plan to bring Nette to Chicago.
“If it won’t be too much for you, and you feel like that is the thing to do, then we should do it,” said my mother. “But only if it won’t be too much for you. Or hurt you. You are the most important thing.”
“I’ll be just fine, Mama,” I said. “This is the right thing to do.”
As I was already in the routine of going to L
os Angeles monthly for business, it made sense for me to tack on a few days in San Francisco each month while I was, essentially, in the neighborhood. I would visit Zeit, visit Nette, and somehow figure out how to get her sent to a care facility in Chicago. I mean, how hard could it be?
What is it that they say? “Be careful what you wish for”? Or “No good deed goes unpunished”?
I knew nothing about how to manage this kind of situation or about what I came to understand were the strict California laws designed to protect the elderly. And I do mean nothing. But knowing nothing had never prevented me from diving headfirst into a situation, and it did not stop me now.
On my next trip, I knew enough to go straight to the hotel to get myself grounded before embarking on any visits. I checked myself in to the Four Seasons at Palo Alto for a night of rest before digging in the next day. The Four Seasons would become my de facto home on every trip I would eventually take, and for me, a lovely meal, a hot bath, and a good scotch were essential to getting anything done.
The next morning, I set off to meet Paula. The conservator.
At first, I was hopeful that the conservator would be my partner in getting Nette and Zeit’s situation sorted out. God knows I needed someone who understood the system to help me understand it. I assumed she would want to release them to the care of their families. The state hadn’t known that we existed before, but now it did, and surely the conservator would be relieved to know that Nette and Zeit did have family to look after them. I assumed she would want them to live out their days in the manner to which they had grown accustomed: in comfort, elegance, and grace.
I could not have been more wrong.
We met at a coffee shop in Redwood City, close to the house but far enough away for Zeit not to be privy to the conversation. At barely five feet tall, Paula was small. Both in stature and in character, I would soon come to find. She was in her midfifties and was bespectacled, and she definitely seemed to have an overcompensation thing going on.