by Miriam Toews
In the meantime, I kept my doctors’ appointments, and continued to tell the doctors that I was okay. I might mention that my energy was low, or that it wasn’t what it should be, or that retirement can be a difficult time in a man’s life, or other vague complaints along those lines, but nothing more. I managed to pull myself together for these appointments and if I simply couldn’t, I asked Elvira to cancel them. Otherwise, I would arrive at the clinic washed, shaved, friendly, and well dressed. And then I’d act the part. If Elvira attempted (going to great efforts not to embarrass me) to convey the truth, for instance by telling the doctor, Well, he’s not entirely okay, really, I can’t get him to eat, or, This is actually the first time he’s been out of bed in several weeks, then the doctor would look to me for confirmation and I would only smile. I don’t think it was clear to him exactly what was going on. He didn’t know whom to believe, and I, after all, was the patient. If I said I was okay, only a bit tired now and again, well then … It was an awkward situation for all of us: Elvira was growing desperate and exhausted, wanting some type of help taking care of me, keeping me alive, but at the same time not wanting to admit defeat and afraid that I would misinterpret her request for outside care as a lack of love.
She was also trying to protect my privacy and my extreme pride. She knew I loathed the idea of anybody, other than her, taking care of my needs and feared that my depression would get even worse if that were to happen. She had taken care of me for forty years and wasn’t about to quit. In this town, a good Mennonite wife is always more than capable of taking care of her husband. It’s held to be her duty and her life, and Elvira, in spite of her independence and liberal views, couldn’t move from under that yoke. And I said nothing to the doctor, nothing that might have lightened her load and given her an out, because I didn’t want her not to be there with me every step of the way. It’s clear to me now and I wonder: Who takes care of the good Mennonite wife?
Aha! My daughter has informed me that indeed I got “a little lost” in the hospital tunnel. She doesn’t say in a psychotic state, my daughter, she says I was “a little confused.” And the children? I ask. Dad, she says, do you know what they were doing? No, I answer, they were flying around the tunnel, happily, that’s all I really know. My daughter, smiling, says, Those kids were skateboarding! A couple of them were students of yours and they recognized you!
Horrors. I smiled and said, Oh really…
Continue plan to creep up on brain. Organic shock treatment, all natural. Recall the words of Ulysses S. Grant, in his attack at Vicksburg: With speed and audacity, men, we will win.
twenty-nine
The situation at home became critical. Elvira’s own health had begun to suffer. Once, in Arizona, she was hospitalized briefly with dangerously high blood pressure. (Her sister, who was staying in a trailer nearby, had insisted that she go to the doctor after Elvira had passed out at the end of an uphill hike in 105-degree heat.) The doctor diagnosed her chest pain and shortness of breath as angina. He prescribed nitroglycerin puffers and patches and pills. Her gait, once brisk, slowed to a shuffle, and she stopped talking about better days ahead. She cried often to the girls, to her friends, to herself, but never to me.
She was becoming depressed too, she said, she was utterly exhausted and was on the verge of giving up and joining me in bed. The girls again insisted that she go on a holiday, and she wearily agreed, not caring where she went. When she was gone, Marj would stay with me and essentially play the same role that Elvira had, trying to get me to eat, to exercise a little, to talk. But even with the occasional visit to friends in the States or to Minneapolis for a ball game, during which she felt guilty for not being at home, Elvira was coming apart. By this time, I refused to leave my bed, other than to use the washroom, and for how much longer even that would last, I didn’t know. I was eating, at most, half a bun a day, although bizarrely I continued, without fail, to take my medication, which had been increased to twenty-two pills a day. They had been prescribed to me, after all. The diagnosis: dementia, due to small strokes, exacerbated by underlying organic condition of manic depression, or vice versa, paranoia, I can’t remember. Call it madness. Elvira asked me: Mel, do you want to die? No, I’d whisper. Then won’t you eat a little? she’d ask. Silence. I was afraid of life and death, stuck in an excruciating limbo that seemed eternal. I had stopped keeping my doctor’s appointments, and I had stopped going to church. So much for my perfect attendance record. The girls became alarmed and made several appointments of their own with my doctor, trying to explain to him the urgency of the situation, that something had to change, that this could not go on, that Elvira was going down and needed rescuing, that I would starve to death, and soon.
Eventually I agreed with them. I managed to tell Elvira that I felt as though the lights were going out, that my life was coming to an end, and that I probably should be hospitalized.
Well, we’re not sure, the doctor would say, I mean he’s depressed, but other than that, I mean other than making sure he’s fed, I don’t know exactly what … I could increase his medication, I suppose, although … I’m just not sure what we can do.
That would be something though, said my daughters, feeding him, don’t you understand? It would be a good start. Please, please admit him. My doctor, whether he believed them or not, agreed to have me admitted to the hospital, where in order to appear well enough to go home again, and because I was afraid of what the people I encountered in the hospital, so many of whom I’d known for years, would think, I ate, washed, shaved, and “acted normal.” Again, many of the doctors and nurses felt sure that my wife and daughters had been overreacting, that perhaps they were just tired of the inconvenience of having to be with me, that perhaps they themselves had brought on my depression.
Elvira, after bringing me here and sitting beside me on this narrow bed, holding my hand, and telling me everything would eventually be fine, went to my daughter’s house in the city to rest. Please don’t go, I begged, following her into the hallway. Mel, she said, grabbing my wrists and bringing my arms around her in an embrace, I’ll be back.
The next day, after persuading the nurses to let me go, I went back to the house, and she wasn’t there. My files were in boxes and there was blood on the kitchen floor and I had lost my mind.
But you talk to her on the phone every morning, say my daughters. You know she’s alive. How do I explain to them that I don’t know anything anymore, and that in my mind I hear Elvira’s voice often, not only on the phone in the morning but all day and all night long.
Daughters tell me I’ll be transferred to the city, to a place where I’ll get help, in a week to ten days. That’s not long, Dad, they say, you can do it. How to tell them it may as well be ten years. And tomorrow you’ll see Mom, they’ve agreed to let us bring you into the city for the day and she can’t wait to see you. By June for sure you’ll be living with her again and she’s found an apartment that you’ll both love, there’s an activity room, and a swimming pool, and it’s close to a library, and the new ballpark, won’t it be good?
My plan to gradually sneak up on my brain by remembering the past and then by seamlessly tying it into the present has not been successful. I had meant to catch it off guard by sneaking up from behind, by surprising it into submission. No such luck.
I have given Miriam some notes to give to the children, Keep up the good work in school, I hear you’re a baseball hero, Would love some more art to add to “Summer Memories,” Love …
For days I have told the girls that I love them and they have assured me they will pass my best regards on to the menfolk. Have told Elvira, I love you. I love you. I love you. What more can I say to prepare them?
This extended stay at Bethesda has given me a lot of time to think, and even though I’m not the best at that these days, I feel I’ve reached a conclusion or two because of it.
What I would like to say to Reg but can’t is that he’s not to blame for being born or for being loved, and my anger a
nd my jealousy mean nothing, but I want what he had. I’m sixty-two years old and still wanting my mother to hold me in her arms just once and tell me that she loves me. I’m a ridiculous old man. It’s not her fault, either, how could it be, with ghosts and demons circling round her brain and no weapons to fight them off, nothing but a Bible, a bottle, and a perpetual grin. It’s just something that happens sometimes, a story as old as time, and this time it happened to me.
If Elvira is not dead, if I have not killed her, if she is still thinking about freedom or insanity, mulling it over in the city where she’s resting, I would say to her: Freedom, sweetheart.
Develop a new life strategy.
Like this, through the wall, Mr. Toews, tuck your head in so you don’t break your neck, through the walls and out, it will feel so good to get some fresh air.
Patient granted Leave of Absence. Has promised to return to hospital for medication, would like to see his “pink house” (?) again. Refuses to elaborate.
Number of days in hospital: seventeen. Will dress for walk. 8:27 a.m. Beautiful sun. Re May, date? Find newspaper and insert.
(And best of luck to Hercules. Avoid peanuts and ice cubes.)
As Ever, M.
epilogue
On May 13, my father got out of bed, dressed, ate breakfast, and left the hospital. He may have taken one last walk through town, past his school and church and home perhaps, but maybe not. If he had met anyone he knew I’m almost certain he would have greeted them in his loud, friendly voice and wished them well. At some point after heading down the highway that leads out of town, he became tired of walking and hitched a ride to a pretty little town called Woodridge, about thirty miles southeast of Steinbach in the heart of Sandilands Forest. There’s a café in Woodridge and a small church with a steeple that rises up above the pine trees, a cemetery, and rail tracks that run behind the café.
The waitress at the café said my father spoke to her through the back screen door. “How long before the next train?” he asked, polite as ever. “Just a few minutes,” she answered. “Yes,” he said, “I can hear the whistle.”
Some say he knelt on the tracks, facing the little church, with his back to the oncoming train, and others say he waited until the last minute before throwing himself on the rails. An item in the next day’s Winnipeg Free Press described him as “an unidentified, tall, older man.”
Several weeks after his death, my mother went to the café to talk to the young waitress. The two of them went out back to the tracks for a look at what would have been my father’s last “picture” of the world. The waitress hugged my mom and said, “Isn’t it a beautiful place to leave this Earth and meet God?” These words were an amazing gift from a perfect stranger, who would have had every right to be angry and upset, and I’ll always be grateful.
The only certain thing we know about that day is that the sun was shining beautifully, and that it was exceptionally warm for May 13. And that, even after his body was removed, there remained scattered on the tracks and in the ditches on each side of it several bright yellow recipe cards. For as long as I can remember, he wrote notes to himself on cards like these before going to bed, carefully arranging them on top of his shoes where he’d be sure to find them the next morning. That day, the yellow cards that fell out of his pocket and onto the tracks were blank.
In the end, words couldn’t save my father, but his lifelong faith in the power of reading and writing will live on. In the summer of 2000, the brand-new Melvin C. Toews Reading Garden opened in Steinbach, adjacent to the public library that he was so instrumental in founding, courtesy of the Friends of the Library committee and others who contributed time, ideas, and money. And, in the same year, the Elmdale School grade six students planted dozens of red and white petunias at the Reading Garden on May 31, my father’s birthday. It is beautiful, and “Mr. Toews,” if he could see it, would be tickled pink.
Dad, you’ve earned your rest. Schlope schein.
MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of three novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck (nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award and winner of the John Hirsch Award), A Boy of Good Breeding (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award) and A Complicated Kindness (winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and finalist for the Giller Prize). Swing Low: A Life received the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction. She has written for CBC, This American Life (NPR), Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian Geographic, Open Letters, and The New York Times Magazine, and has won the National Magazine Awards Gold Medal for Humour. Miriam Toews lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
VINTAGE CANADA EDTION, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Miriam Toews
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Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd. in 2000. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Toews, Miriam, 1964–
Swing low : a life / Miriam Toews. — 2nd ed.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37561-2
1. Toews, Melvin C. 2. Manic-depressive persons—Canada—Biography. 3.
Toews, Miriam, 1964–. 4. Novelists, Canadian (English)—Family relationships.
I. Title.
RC537.T638 2005 616.89′5′0092 C2004-906976-4
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