by Marra B. Gad
“Would you like some of my cake? It’s yummy!” she said. “And since we are friends, I can share it with you.”
I almost cried.
She considered us to be friends? She was willing to share? She was encouraging me to eat fattening cake? No abusive comments about girls like me being smart not to eat cake?
She was indeed transformed.
“I would love some cake.”
I got a fork, and we shared what was left of her piece. I don’t think I had ever in my life enjoyed a few bites of cake that much.
At the time of her death, Nette had gained almost ten pounds, which was substantial on her tiny frame. Her cheeks were full. Her belly was a bit round. And I found myself hoping she enjoyed every bite that those ten pounds represented as much as she had enjoyed the cake on that afternoon.
Chapter Eighteen
MY VISITS WITH NETTE BECAME MORE FREQUENT. I found myself wanting to spend more time with her. I wanted to see how she was changing. I wanted to see how she was, if at all, remaining the same. I wanted to see how we were changing.
I went alone to visit.
“Her room is small,” I would tell myself. There wasn’t room for my mother, my sister, and me to visit at the same time. “If we all go on different days, she will have visitors almost every day,” became another rationalizing refrain. And wasn’t it better for her to have visitors daily rather than a few times per week?
But the truth was that I wanted to be alone with her. No matter what might happen on any given day, so much good and bad had transpired just between the two of us, and I wanted these moments to be the same.
One afternoon, I decided I would go specifically because it was Ballroom Dance Day at the facility. I had found myself doing more and more research about Alzheimer’s—about what sorts of things might be beneficial to those living with the disease. Almost everything I read suggested it was worthwhile to try to engage the patient in activities that used to resonate deeply. If anyone would want to be the dancing queen, it would be Nette.
Nette studied dance during her younger years, and when she met Zeit, her dancing went to the next level when they took on ballroom dance as a couple. They competed in the senior citizen divisions of dance competitions in San Francisco. It was yet another thing that made her seem so glamorous and beautiful, and there was nothing she enjoyed more than putting on a dance show.
When my brother was around ten years old and presumably able to follow, I remember that she tried to teach him how to dance the fox-trot during one of her annual visits. Nette and Zeit had turned the basement of their home into a dance studio, where Nette often gave lessons. She believed that the ability to dance “properly” was important and that it was especially important for a man to know how to lead. I cannot help but wonder if she thought that a metaphor for the failure of many of her marriages.
As she was so petite and my brother was taller than average, their heights were almost perfectly matched, even at his young age. In a strange accent that she only used when she was dancing, she instructed him. “This is the fox-trot,” she said. “And the pattern we will do is qvick, qvick, slow … qvick, qvick, slow …”
Awkwardly, my brother did his best to oblige. It was sweet, and as ever, I found myself wishing that somehow I might be able to dance with Nette.
“May I have a turn, Aunt Nette?” I was always asking some version of that question.
“I can’t teach you the woman’s part,” she snapped. “A man has to teach you.” And with that, she turned her body and her attention back to my brother and their dance lesson.
Little did Nette know, I had recently started taking ballroom dance lessons—and had taken my own turn as the queen of the dance floor. Dancing with the Stars had become a television sensation, and ballroom dance had become quite chic for young people to learn. And, very quickly, I learned two things. First, Nette was right. It is better that a man teach a woman how to partner and a woman teach a man. In spite of myself, I had to admit that this was true. The second thing I learned was that the pattern for the foxtrot is not “qvick, qvick, slow.” It is slow, slow, quick, quick. I had gone into my fox-trot lesson armed with Nette’s voice in my head and sure that I would impress my charming teacher, only to find that Nette had taught my brother, and in turn me, incorrectly.
“Honey,” my gorgeous instructor had said, “who taught you that? She didn’t know what she was talking about!”
I laughed heartily. He had no idea how true that was.
That afternoon on Ballroom Dance Day, I thought it might be my time to twirl with Nette. And secretly, I hoped they would play the ABBA classic “Dancing Queen,” which had been one of my favorite songs since childhood. At some point in 1976, my family went on a driving vacation. While I don’t recall our destination, I do recall that our entire family stayed in one hotel room. That meant that my bubbie and I shared a cot. Yes, a cot that was brought in as an extra bed. I loved to curl up with my bubbie under any circumstance, and a small hotel cot was certainly no exception. One night during this particular road trip, we ended up watching a TV movie very late at night while the rest of the family slept. And snored.
The film was called Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, and it starred Maureen Stapleton and Charlotte Rae, who had been a classmate of my bubbie’s. The film was about a woman who had lost her husband and found solace in ballroom dance at a local dance hall. I don’t remember much, but I do remember that at the end of the film, she was named the Queen of the Stardust Ballroom and “Dancing Queen” played. When I hear it, I both miss my bubbie terribly and want to twirl under a disco ball.
I found Nette, as I normally did, in her room. Even with her belly getting rounder, Nette seemed smaller to me each time I visited. It was like her body was vanishing along with her memory, which would eventually leave nothing but a shell of each.
“It’s dance day, Aunt Nette,” I said. “Would you like to dance today?”
“I don’t know how to dance, pretty lady. I don’t know how.”
But I knew better.
I wheeled Nette down to the multipurpose room, which would be our dance studio for the afternoon. While she seemed to enjoy watching the other residents dance, she did not want to actually get up and try to dance herself. She sat in her chair and applauded.
“Look at them twirl!” she exclaimed, as ever, with the wonder and appreciation of a child.
“Won’t you come and try it with us? We will go slow.” The instructors tried to get her up and onto the dance floor, but she shook her head and declined decidedly.
“I do not know how to dance,” she insisted. It broke my heart. I took her back to her room and told her I would come back another day.
About two weeks later, I decided I would try to remind Nette that she not only knew how to dance but was also the dancing queen. I brought a boom box and a Rosemary Clooney CD with me to her facility. I wanted to see if she might engage with the music one-on-one. I turned it on at a soft volume, and I said, “Aunt Nette, you do know how to dance. You love dancing. And you are so good at it that you used to teach other people how to dance.”
She didn’t say anything. She just sat and stared at me intently, listening to every word I said in a way that I’m not sure she ever had before.
“You weren’t just a dancer,” I said. “You were a champion. You were the queen of the stardust ballroom.” Calling her the queen made her smile. “Won’t you please try to have a dance with me?”
“I’ll try,” she said.
And so, we did.
I put on “You Make Me Feel So Young.” Rosemary Clooney’s version is a perfect fox-trot. I gently helped Nette up out of her chair, lifting her shrinking body up to its full height. I took on the male position and drew her into my arms. Once upon a time, the thought of touching me, of being close to me, of being in my dancer’s embrace would have been utterly unthinkable to her. Probably even repugnant. But this Nette thought me beautiful and sweet, and I had become appealing and
comforting to her.
“We are going to try the fox-trot,” I said. “The pattern is slow, slow … quick, quick.”
After a few clumsy minutes, Nette snapped into sharp lucidity. She feebly pushed me away and said, “No. It is qvick, qvick … slow. Do it right if you’re going to do it.”
There she was. The old Nette. Fierce. Mean. And always, always, always sure she was right. I knew she was in there somewhere.
Clearly, the research was correct. There was something in the dancing that did bring Nette back. And even though she was cross for a moment, she was again the dancer (and the instructor) she had been once upon a time.
The lucidity didn’t last long, and we did not dance while it did. But once she faded back into her happier fog, I took her back into my arms, and we took a twirl.
And for that afternoon, if only for a few brief moments, we were both the queens of the ballroom.
Chapter Nineteen
“WHAT SHOULD WE TALK ABOUT TODAY?”
Nette was silent. She had been slowly creeping toward total silence for a few weeks at that point, but that day, the quiet was full. And her eyes were blank. There was no smiling. There was nothing.
I knew from my seemingly constant research that eventually, Alzheimer’s patients stop speaking because they cannot remember how. And then, their bodies stop breathing, presumably for the same reason.
It was happening. And from my vantage point, it was time to let Nette go.
So often, people cling to their loved ones toward the end of their lives. Perhaps because they are not ready to say goodbye. Perhaps because they fear what death looks like. Perhaps because they cannot imagine what happens in the life that goes on without their loved one in it. And so, they cling.
The opposite seems to happen with pets, who are put to sleep because it is more humane to send them off gently than to have them suffer. I’ve never understood why the same does not apply to humans. And I know I am not alone in that confusion.
Of course, to watch someone you love suffer with illness is a different kind of pain—and it creates an unwinnable war within. Do you choose to let them go, knowing it will mean the end of their suffering? Or do you beg them to hold on, praying for a miracle that might never come?
I am a girl who doesn’t just believe in miracles; I exist because of them. But I know all too well that there are times when death is the most humane option.
Often, it is our sick loved ones who are holding on—for us. Often, they don’t want to leave us because they know there will be pain and sadness that they will no longer be able to help soften. And that pain will be about them.
Sometimes, we have to give our loved ones permission to die.
Having seen death quite close before I was twenty-three years old, I came to believe early on that there is real compassion in this permission; it’s an acknowledgment—made together—that a new phase of life is about to begin through death.
When it was my father’s time, I did not have the words or the strength to actually say it. But I did pray, from the deepest place in my heart, for God to take him. My father had been reduced to a shadow—quiet and unable to do anything other than lie in a bed, stoned out of his mind on the opium they gave him to help manage the pain. He was not living. And he did not want to exist in a state like that.
I could not say the words to him—but I did say them to God.
When it was my bubbie’s time, I had the words. And I kept the promise I had first made to her as a child and told her it was time. We even had a laugh about it.
I decided it was time to tell Nette the same thing. She was languishing, trapped inside a body and a mind that were barely holding on. She had outstayed her time at the party, as my bubbie would say.
When I was a young girl, Bubbie would pepper our conversations with lessons about what it meant to be a lady. A lady always keeps her knees together, for example. While I’m sure she meant this metaphorically, she also meant it quite literally. To “sit like a lady” was very important to her, and Bubbie did not shrink from pointing out how inelegant it was when one did not comply. At my Hebrew school graduation, a girl in a dress sat on the bimah, which is a synagogue’s equivalent of an altar, with her legs spread wide, and to this day, even with Bubbie gone for more than twenty years, my family thinks of that poor girl and Bubbie’s thinly veiled outrage over her choice of position in front of God and everyone.
A lady always wears a slip under her dress or skirt. And that slip must be a color that closely matches the outer garment. I broke this cardinal rule at my bat mitzvah, where I chose to wear a black slip under my pale lavender skirt. Trust me when I say that I never lived that down, and for years thereafter, Bubbie did not hesitate to check under my clothing to make sure I had chosen the right slip.
A lady also, my bubbie believed, always knows when it’s time to leave the party.
To her, to stay too long at a party meant you did not have a sense of where you belonged and did not care about your reputation. To her generation, the late hours at a party were when the darker deeds took place, and that was no place for a lady. It should be said that Bubbie was right.
For Nette, the party had been coming to an excruciating end for quite some time. She barely moved, and when she did, it was with deliberate assistance. And now, she was silent. She had not spoken in weeks. Much like babies follow the voices of people who speak to them and smile, so too did she. We weren’t quite sure she understood anything we said, but I had the distinct feeling she did and was simply taking it all in. As is the case with Alzheimer’s, one never really knows what is going on inside the head of the patient.
After the silent visit with Nette, I debated discussing my thoughts with my mother and sister, but in the end, I decided against it. No one really ever wants to discuss an impending death, and we were no different. We were still living with painfully visceral memories of what happened when we lost my father and Bubbie. Really, we still are. To have to discuss another one seemed cruel and unfair. This was not my first rodeo. My mind was made up. And I knew what I wanted to say. I did not feel like I needed permission to say it.
Armed with a small piece of chocolate cake, I went for a visit, and I spoke the words I had been rehearsing in my mind. Even knowing what I wanted and needed to say, it was harder than I had anticipated to tell this silent, childlike woman that I thought it was time for her to leave the party.
We went down to the dining room, and I tucked us into a corner table and put the chocolate cake down in front of Nette. Mary Poppins had it right—I was convinced that a spoonful of sugar might help the afternoon go better for both of us.
“I’ve brought you a treat, Aunt Nette. Your favorite. Chocolate cake.”
She stared blankly at me and managed a weak, almost imperceptible smile. She allowed me to feed her tiny bites of cake, but she was barely able to chew. As she ate, I gently rubbed her back, feeling the bones poking through her thin skin, and I began to softly whisper near her ear.
“We have all been so happy to have you here with us,” I said. “To have had so much time with you. But you and my bubbie taught me that a lady always knows when it is time to leave the party. I want you to know that we will be OK if you decide it’s time for you to take your leave.”
Without warning, Nette snapped into lucidity, something we had not seen for many weeks. “Young lady,” she quipped as sharply as her weak, shaky voice allowed, “I will decide when it is time for me to leave the party.” Her eyes narrowed. “That is not for you to say.”
There she was. The old Nette. Defiant. Deliberate. She was in there.
And then, just as quickly as the old Nette had shown up, she disappeared again. Nette became silent. And waited for me to feed her the next crumbs of cake.
I’m not sure if she knew I was the person suggesting she leave the party. I’m not sure she knew at all where she was—or even what had transpired moments beforehand.
But she heard me. And she did not like what I had to say
.
Those were the last words Nette spoke. At least to me. And in that respect, she absolutely had the last word. Just as she would have wanted it.
When a family member, even a very challenging one, is gravely ill and in their final days, there is a seemingly endless wait for the phone call that confirms the journey toward death has been completed. For some reason, I had always believed that those calls came at night. The call that my father was gone came under the cover of night. When my bubbie left us, I was in the room, but even so, she left us in darkness.
But when Nette died, after years of her march into the deepest parts of Alzheimer’s, the call came in at around five a.m.—the morning after I had my chat with her about knowing when to leave the party.
Perhaps she had heard me after all.
I was en route to New York that morning, so I was already awake when the call came.
“Yes,” I heard my mother say in her barely awake voice. “I understand. When did it happen? I understand. I’m on my way.”
“She’s gone, isn’t she?” Unless someone is having a baby, five a.m. calls really only mean one thing.
“She is,” my mother said. “They said she went in her sleep. They found her when they did their early morning bed check.”
“We should go,” I said, and before there was even a drop of coffee, we went to the care facility so that we might begin to handle the business that accompanies death.
We found Nette lying lifeless in her twin bed in her room. She was petite while she lived, but in her death, she was tiny. We found her in the fetal position. Uncovered. Cold. Her skin blue.
I have seen death inhabit many bodies. And there is some truth to the notion that someone whose soul has left their body simply looks asleep. So it was with my father, who retained his warmth even after his soul had left his body; he looked so peaceful. Not so with Nette. She looked like what those who have never seen death fear it will look like. Ghostly pale. Tight. Cold. Frozen. As if one touch might turn her to dust. The sight of her left me as cold as she often had when she was alive.