Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  “They’re kind of heavy. They’re, like, stones.”

  “Use the cart in the back of the alley.” He points.

  I look. It’s a rolling cart, but it has no bottom. “Uh, there’s nothing to support them.”

  So while I snip the wire off the pallets at the curb, Hal hauls plywood out of the basement and onto the front porch, sets up a work table on two sawhorses, and power-saws a rectangle of plywood to create a solid bottom to the cart.

  “Gee,” I say, as we set the wood into place, “you’re not letting anything stop you.”

  “That’s just how you have to be,” he says, heading down the alley to the backyard.

  “Unless you’re a natural quitter,” I call after him from the curb.

  “Just load the stones, Simon,” he calls back.

  Actually, I think as I start loading the stones, I’m not a natural quitter. Once Laura and I became partners last spring, we e-mailed each other every day, sharing the details of our calls with Rosalie, whom we also began phoning regularly. Laura did research, too, and found out that the sooner Rosalie started medication, the greater the chance that she could slow the development of whatever was happening. Rosalie said we were making a fuss unnecessarily, and we wondered if we were, until one day when I called and she started complaining about Gordon being out while she was home alone, confused. “Confused about what?” I asked. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m just having . . . a dizzy spell . . .” We later learned she was so disoriented that she couldn’t leave the house. “Please,” Laura said, then I said, then Laura said, “see a doctor.”

  Finally, in late spring, my mother went to a doctor. “He says I have senile dementia,” she reported in a merry voice. “He says I don’t need to come back for years.”

  We looked it up, and saw that, while we’d been worrying about the A-word, there were in fact others that were equally foreboding. Not only that, but this new one, the D-word, was sometimes used as a synonym for the other, or was a precursor. It was already getting complicated, whatever It was, or would become, and she didn’t seem to be taking It seriously.

  “Rosalie,” we said, “senile dementia is serious stuff. Did the doctor talk to you about how it might progress, or if it will progress? Did he suggest any treatment?”

  “. . . I don’t know.”

  “Was Gordon with you?”

  “He offered to take me, but I told him not to bother. That wasn’t good, because I couldn’t remember how to get home.”

  “Oh, Rosalie.”

  “But I asked for directions. I stopped at a library.”

  “Did you look up more information while you were there about what the doctor said?”

  “No.”

  “Will you go back to the doctor and ask him these questions?”

  “Oh, I hate to bother him.”

  “Will you go to a specialist, then?”

  “There is one in his building. I guess I’ll do that.”

  The second doctor said that her memory was better than his.

  “The doctors where you live have screws loose,” we said. “Please get another opinion.”

  “I wouldn’t know who to call.”

  “Get a new referral from your doctor.”

  “I don’t want to be a pest. Maybe after our trip”—a four-month lighthouse tour—“I will.”

  So not until this week—months after she started writing everything down so she wouldn’t forget, and walked out of the supermarket and forgot how to get home—did Rosalie see a new doctor. That means it’s also been months since Gordon has driven her everywhere, as well as taken over the cooking and cleaning. Only this week did that new doctor weigh in when, after the exam, he told her, “It’s not nothing but it’s not yet something.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He gave me pills for Alzheimer’s, just in case. I start them right before Laura’s visit.”

  So while Laura and I alternate between questioning our perceptions and being furious with the doctors, we’ve also moved on to practical matters—which are getting us more agitated with every call. How can we help when Rosalie lives so far away? How can we convince Gordon to move them near one of us? How can we get them to admit she’s ill? Discuss their insurance? Living wills? Will Max, whose focus is on his wife and children, ever want to get more involved? When should we break the news to Beth? What should we expect of ourselves, given that we don’t have a Mom type of relationship? What does she expect—or want—from us? What do we feel? What should we feel? How will we keep moving forward?

  “You just will,” Hal said to me a few weeks ago, after I finished a call with Laura.

  “Oh, that’s real helpful,” I said to him.

  “I’ve been watching you get more and more stressed about this. I know it’s been hard.”

  “I keep looking into the future, and it seems overwhelming. I don’t know what to do.”

  He set his guitar aside and said, “Can I tell you something that happened to me some years ago at a Buddhist retreat? It’s kind of mystical-schmystical, but it might help.”

  I was not in the mood for Zen koans about the merits of change. But he was looking at me with those big eyes of his, and then he reached up and wrapped his fingers around mine, so I sat down on the sofa beside him.

  “Buddhism tells you that the body is the great teacher—that everything we need to know is in our bodies. Well, I was on a retreat, and when you sit a long time meditating, you can get severe knee pain, and in the third hour of a four-hour sit, I felt that pain. It was intense—real suffering. But they teach that if you can stay with the pain and observe it without attachment or aversion, you start to see it for something else. You see that it’s energy, or a blockage of energy, you see subtle changes in it over time, you watch how it moves in your body. Then you see that it might be possible to get to a point where the pain breaks up, and you experience it as part of a flowing energy, and then there is no suffering. It’s gone. That’s what happened to me.”

  “What does that have to do with Rosalie?”

  “That experience changed my view of the world. I realized that I didn’t need to be bound up in suffering of any kind, if I could just stay with it with equanimity.”

  “But how can I have equanimity with this?”

  “Well,” he said, “maybe you can think about something else Buddhism says, which is that there is a fundamental interdependence of all things. Nothing exists in and of itself. Every cause leads to an effect which leads to a cause and on and on.”

  “What are you saying I should do?”

  “I don’t know, specifically. But maybe you can just do what you can do, and don’t get hung up on what you can’t do, and trust that your actions will spur consequences that will go way beyond anything you can see or know.” He smiled. “Do you think it’s worth a try?”

  So I’ve been trying. Last week, for instance, while visiting Beth, I told her what’s been going on. She listened without distress, though she was concerned. Then I bought her a phone card so she could initiate calls to Rosalie from now on. She placed the first one the moment I drove off, then left a message for me to call her the instant I got home.

  When we kids fought as children, Rosalie would say, “When you’re older, you’ll be glad you’re not an only child.” “No we won’t,” we’d yell back, but now we see that she was right. Laura has me to talk to, and I have her, and Beth has the assurance that she’s not alone.

  Now every few days I call Beth and make sure she’s okay. Every day Laura and I call each other. Sisters all, we reach across the phone lines, take each other’s hand, and squeeze.

  By the afternoon, my shoulders are screaming for mercy.

  “Want to borrow my wheelbarrow?” asks a neighbor I’ve never seen before.

  “Bless you,” I say. The wheelbarrow moves much more smoothly than the cart.

  Fortified by this Samaritan’s generosity, I heave stones up from the palette with new vigor, deposit them into the w
heelbarrow and, with Hal’s help, roll them to the back. Incredibly, he has the brawn to empty the wheelbarrow with me, as well as the brains to lay the wall. I feel such love for this person with so many talents. It inspires me to lift rock.

  “When does rock become stone?” I ask as we unload several hundred pounds.

  “When it leaves the woods and moves into your backyard.”

  “So ‘stone’ is what you call ‘rock’ when it finds civilization?”

  “Domestication, really. But take away the name and it could be the same thing.”

  I finish the first pallet with my quads and deltoids on fire. I knew that building this wall would hurt, but I hadn’t anticipated soreness inflaming my every cell. At the same time, I’ve discovered a pleasing rhythm as I load the stones—bend, lift, pivot, step, bend, release, stand—and that this fun little dance is shoring up my stamina. I’m far from saying that I’m enjoying this labor, but it’s nice to have found some satisfaction.

  There are other rewards, too, like our quick exchanges when we unload together.

  “How did you figure this out?” I ask Hal.

  “I read about it, I talked to people about it, and then I just started.”

  “Aren’t you in pain?”

  “Sure. But I’m just being fully present in the moment.”

  “Mindfulness over matter?”

  “Mush, Simon, mush.”

  Most of our conversations are this short, but we don’t only converse. We also sing Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang,” make jokes about gathering no moss, and name our stone wall Jackson.

  Then Susan, walking by, offers to assist me with the next pallet. We have a lively time, and then her husband, Jim, joins Hal in the backyard, helping him set the first two steps into place. After they leave, there are a few hours when, thanks to another neighbor, we hire someone to work with me—“a knucklehead I know.” But Knucklehead, a strapping man who appears to make his living doing construction under the table, lifts only the lightest stones, hums loudly to himself, and takes frequent cigarette breaks. I tell myself that what little assistance I’m getting might preserve my energy, though when he takes a break and doesn’t return, I decide that there’s enough generosity around to keep going.

  And keeping going is the priority—because if I stop, I’ll start thinking of Laura, who’s now with Rosalie in Florida. Then I’ll risk sliding into the new feelings I’ve been having since I went through the paint colors: a chest-thumping regret that Rosalie had so few years of a good life before her decline, and a fist-shaking indignation at injustice. If only she’d had a happier past, maybe my feelings wouldn’t pound as hard. But as I bend, lift, pivot, step, bend, release, stand, I run through all my memories of her before her retirement, and almost all of them are sad.

  I remember her story of looking out the window at her neighbors when she was a little girl, and I think, as the sun begins to move toward the horizon, about the difference between the way I surely look right now and the actual fact of my agony. I do reveal this fact to some passing neighbors, the ones who are willing to offer encouragement. But Rosalie never shared her agonies with others, nor did she find out if the families she envied were indeed as loving as she believed them to be. I wish that when I swung back toward her in the big tent of our lives together, I’d been able to grab on to her and somersault us back in time and land on the lawn outside her childhood apartment and say to her, You are not alone, and you are not unloved, and the world is open to you if you want it to be. But there is nothing I can do to heal my mother from herself. I just have to keep going, stone after stone, until this day at last comes to its end.

  When it does, and I finally call Florida, the heart of the conversation is brief.

  “She looks good,” Laura says in a whisper in the back bedroom. “She’s got energy, she seems happy. To see her, you wouldn’t know. But she’s gotten fuzzier and more forgetful as the day’s gone on. She makes little slips, like when we ran into someone she used to work with and she couldn’t remember the woman’s name. Or when she wanted to print something out of her computer but couldn’t remember how to turn it on. You could think she was just being an exaggeration of her usual self if you didn’t know. But I know her,” she says. “So I know.”

  I look beside me to Hal. We’re sprawled on the bed in the rented house, ice packs all over our bodies. In the silence as I absorb Laura’s words I give him a small nod, and he reaches out and touches my hand.

  The call continues for an hour as Laura tells me that Rosalie has been a wonderful host. She was prepared with Laura’s favorite food, and took them to an art exhibition and dinner in a seaside village. Laura knows that things aren’t going to get better, but she’s enjoying the trip.

  Only at the end of the call do I ask, “How are you feeling?”

  Laura thinks a moment. Then she says, “It’s funny. Before I got here, I couldn’t imagine that I wouldn’t get annoyed about all the usual things. But now I just tell myself that her behavior is all about her illness. It’s like, after all these years, I can finally blame it on something. And that makes it so much easier to be patient and cope with her.”

  “That’s really nice,” I say. “Maybe this whole horrible thing has something really good about it.”

  “I know. I keep thinking that. I feel guilty thinking it, but also so much relief.”

  I almost tell her about the satisfactions I’ve been finding today, too, as I’ve endured the physical torment of the wall: my stone-hauling dance, my benevolent neighbors, my Hercules of a husband. But I’m way too exhausted. I just say, “I’m so glad we’re in this together.”

  “Oh my God,” Laura says, and we laugh the same laugh of gratitude. “I am, too.”

  “Uh,” I say the next morning, completely unable to get out of bed.

  “Double uh,” Hal says. “Zombie uh.”

  “Can’t we just finish a few days from now?”

  “It’s Sunday, it’s still warm out, and I want to get it done.”

  “But we’re both comatose. How can we possibly do it?”

  “You don’t have to do it. I can finish alone.”

  “There’s still a pallet and a half at the curb.”

  “I’ll be fine. Go back to sleep. I’ll see you later.”

  He gets up, and as he showers I lie there, thinking of Susan and Jim and the wheelbarrow lender. Then I think of Knucklehead. Well, that’s another satisfaction that’s come from the wall, I think as I set my feet on the floor. I have a better sense of who I really am.

  We return to the house. One hour passes, two, three. The pain in my body gets so acute that I go into a state of numbness, which also has the effect of letting my mind fly free. Of course, most of my thoughts concern my mother, only this time I seem able to find the tiny cracks in her long unhappiness, and come upon not only good memories, but good memories that I shared. She is reading to us from picture books. She is showing us art in Manhattan galleries. After our reconnection, she is taking me to see the Salvador Dalí Museum, to tour a college designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, to walk through parks. She is telling me stories about her childhood. I remember now that even though every one of those stories ended with her feeling forlorn, I liked when she told them to me. They made me feel that she was letting me stand beside her old self, at seven or ten or fourteen, and that my listening really mattered. It’s too bad that as her memory fades, these oldest stories will probably be the last ones to go.

  But now I realize that maybe, by spending all those years listening to her stories, I have somersaulted back in time with her. I wasn’t able to change the circumstances of her youth. But I was able to be inside that apartment with her, and witness the truth of her life, and maybe just my being there made the truth hurt a little less. I might wish I could repair the deterioration in my mother’s mind. I might wish I could give her decades of happiness. But maybe when all that is left are her memories in that apartment, she will feel less pain than she once did.

  And t
hinking this, I finally feel grief about her illness. Here I’ve been having regret for the life that Rosalie will not live. But now I feel regret for the life that we will not live. Our opportunity to keep mending our relationship is coming to an end. Those few good memories of museums and walks might be the only ones I’ll get, and the only ones I’ll give.

  Does anyone, in the secret club or not, know what emotions to pack for this frontier?

  I don’t think I’ll ever know. But around the time the sun begins its arc into midafternoon, as I near the bottom of the third pallet, something of an answer comes to me. To my astonishment, I start to feel my labor getting easier. I’m sure I’m imagining it, or have just grown so used to my scorched muscles that I’ve ceased feeling them. Yet it really does seem as if the agony, the numbness, all of it, has lifted. Might Hal’s mystical-schmystical stuff be true: that by staying with my task and being at one with the pain, I am transcending suffering?

  It is in this state, a state that is almost like bliss, that I recall another good memory. It was the one time that we went to a circus, just Rosalie and Laura and me. Laura was in second grade, I in kindergarten, and although we found the circus smelly and dirty, we were awed by the trapeze artists sailing back and forth through the air in their spangled costumes, until one let go of her swing and got caught by the other and they grasped hands and swung back and forth high above the net together. When we got home, I told Rosalie that I wanted to learn how to do what they could do, and she said, “Then let’s write them a letter and ask for advice.” I was too young to write, so I dictated it to her. Then I waited for their reply, and waited some more. When we moved a few years later, I knew I wouldn’t ever hear back. But I think now about the way I reached out for Rosalie when I met her again, about Harriet reaching out for me when I lost Hal, about Laura and me reaching out for each other. That letter from the trapeze artists did find its way to me. It just wasn’t written in words.

  Right before sunset, Hal and I set the last stone step into place, then sit down. Our bodies are wrecked, but we feel light with accomplishment, as gravity holds our new wall together.