No One Tells You This

by Glynnis MacNicol

  14. The Long Goodbye Begins

  The social worker called me first and left a voice mail. “Hi Glynnis, this is Debbie from the CCAC. A room has become available at the Roseview seniors complex. If you want to take it you have twenty-four hours to make up your mind, and twenty-four hours after that to move your mother in. I’m about to call your father but wanted to give you the heads-up. Please call me back at your earliest convenience.”

  I was sitting on my bed in Brooklyn. Outside the late December morning sun had just begun to feebly peek over the brownstones on the street behind me, casting weak shadows on the brick wall across from my window. I listened to the message and then held the phone out in front of me with shaky hands, staring at it, needing to confirm that it, and subsequently the message, were real. I was so flooded with relief I nearly wept.

  But not yet. I needed to check my list to see which one Rose-

  view was again. All the homes had nearly identical names: Lakeview, Southview, Greenfield—anodyne and pastoral, as though one were going on a nice holiday. I knew it was mostly for the family’s sake. The less thinking about the reality of what this move signified, the better. Please please please. I said a silent prayer as I waited for my computer to turn on, Let it not be the bad one. My mother had continued to decline in the weeks since her hospital visit; her moments of lucidity were getting shorter and rarer. But even in this state of desperation I didn’t think I could leave my mother in a narrow, dark room with a stranger, where the smell of deteriorating bodies was so strong that during my scouting visits I’d learned to breathe through my mouth. I dialed Debbie back even as I frantically scrolled through my email looking for the final list I’d sent a few weeks before. I couldn’t quite believe this was happening, and so quickly. Doubt replaced relief. Had there been some sort of mistake? How had we gotten a room so quickly? It had been only three weeks since her last assessment; at the time, they’d told us it could be another nine to twelve months. Even the timing was extraordinary. It was the Friday before Christmas. I was set to fly home the next morning for the holiday. Oh, but where was this room?

  I froze in my desk chair and then closed my eyes in a silent prayer of thanks. Roseview was my number one choice. It had been the hope against hope, the I’m putting it at the top even though I’d been told by everyone that the waitlist was extra long, this probably won’t happen, but at least it will keep the bad places off choice. And we got it. The air around me felt as though it were wobbling, like someone had put time on pause. One thought flashed through my head: Sometimes things did work out. Sometimes timing was everything, and sometimes it was perfect.

  •

  I got the specifics from Debbie. Because the room had become available on a Friday we had an extra two days to get things ready. I flew home the next morning, and over the next forty-eight hours my sister and I scurried around in a mad dash against impending holiday hours, collecting all the paperwork we’d need to admit my mother. I was reminded of all the similar racing around I’d had to do to collect the paperwork necessary to get my apartment two years earlier. It hit me like a cold blast of air that this would be the first time in her life my mother had lived on her own; a private room with a bathroom and a window over the back garden, only slightly smaller than the little studio I lived in. I opened the car windows, letting actual cold air blast in and push the thought away. There would be time for thinking later.

  Everywhere we went there were Christmas decorations and carols playing. While driving between offices to collect paperwork, I briefly let myself consider what Christmas would be like this year. Since the kids had been born I had spent it at my sister’s in order to be there when they woke up and opened presents. My father had already signed us up for the Christmas dinner at the nursing home, but I couldn’t quite envision it. It wasn’t real yet. The only thing that was real was the folder of official paperwork I now had in my possession. Since speaking with Debbie I had asked no questions; after so much time spent racing down endless bureaucratic hallways trying to parse and translate the formal language of the health care system, I no longer cared how this had happened. Simply that it had.

  •

  At seventy-one, my mother was young for a nursing home. Even some of the medical staff I’d encountered in recent months, kind and sympathetic nurses accustomed to seeing nearly everything, remarked on it. I was also young to have a mother in a nursing home. I had a handful of friends who had lost their parents in car accidents or to heart attacks or early diagnoses of aggressive cancers, but none had yet moved into the era of elderly caretaking. I was years behind on every other commonly recognized metric for my age, but in this one instance I was way out ahead. Nearly all my friends had parents, many older than my own, who still took trips, worked, spent winters in warmer locations, still functioned as a reliable system of support, whether it be financial or emotional, or simply were able to live independently. People who were able to relate to my experience when I spoke of my mother’s condition almost always made reference to their grandparents. I didn’t have anyone I could talk to about this. Or who could prepare me for what it would be like.

  As I prepared to put my mother in a place where she would spend the rest of her life, I was consumed by the knowledge that she was at the exact point in her life we talk about when we say things like, “I don’t want to die alone.” So many women I knew made decisions in fear of that outcome. As if not dying alone were anything but timing and luck.

  At the same time, here I was having just tipped over into the second half (if I was lucky) of my life, and most of my fears and anxieties arose from long held assumptions about what it meant to be alone, a woman alone. My mother, meanwhile, was a manifestation of these fears. She would be dying alone no matter how many people were with her; her mind had cannibalized all of us, so that we were invisible to her. So many of the choices she’d made, that so many women made, had been toward the single goal of never being left alone, and now here she was, more alone than it was even possible for me to conceive.

  I had grown up thinking of life as a series of linear decisions that if made properly would land me on some distant safe shore where I would finally enjoy the fruits of my labor. Now that I was getting a glimpse of that shore I was struck by the inanity of such an equation. My mother was never going to get another chance to do anything else. She did not have the capacity for regrets, nor was she even able to enjoy the comfort of nostalgia or fond memories—her mind had leaked away too imperceptibly to allow her the clarity to look back on her life and wish she had done things differently. As I continued to worry over what sort of future I was setting myself up for, she seemed a painful cautionary tale that life was not a savings plan, accrued now for enjoyment later. I was alive now. My responsibility was to live now as fully as possible.

  •

  My mother woke up happy and clearheaded on the morning we were scheduled to take her in. This was almost never the case anymore. Mornings and evenings were the worst times for her, and no matter what time it was she was always confused after sleeping. Some days she’d wander out of bed so early it was still dark outside. She’d float into the hall, greeting the dog—she was still never confused about Medley—calling my father’s name in an uncertain voice, asking if it was time for dinner. Other times, she wouldn’t get up at all, coming down at noon to announce she’d had a long day at work and was going to take a nap. Sometimes she’d appear out of nowhere, having silently awoken from a nap, and stare at me with frightened eyes, unsure of where she was or who I was. But on this particular morning she woke up completely herself. I woke, as I had nearly every morning for my entire growing up, to the sound of her voice cheerfully calling “Wakey wakey.” In the moments between sleep and being awake it felt as though I had time-traveled, and the day ahead held school and swim practice and not the terrible tasks that awaited me.

  My parents had gone out so few times when I was growing up that I could recount with detail the evenings my sister and I had been left h
ome alone with a sitter. When I began babysitting, couples would often try to sneak out so that their children would not be upset by their absence, but even as a young child I was so thrilled at the idea of my parents being out in the world that I could still recall the sense of devastation that overwhelmed me when they canceled and stayed home.

  Now suddenly I realized I had never woken up at home to a house that didn’t contain my mother. Not once. So much of loss and grief is about shock and missed opportunities; I had no idea it was our last conversation, people say. But I did know. I knew this was the last time I would wake up in a house with my mother. The last time I would hear her voice sing out those words and know that her hand would be on my doorknob in moments, and that she’d be downstairs in the kitchen when I got there. But what does one do with the weight of that knowledge? There was nowhere to put it. I was deeply conscious of the fact that I was, at that second, inside what would become an intense memory, but that awareness did not help me understand it better. I just lay there and let it press down on me, as if by acknowledging the moment so directly I could freeze it. When the doorknob turned, I got out of bed and gave my mother a hug. There was no point in crying. I wasn’t a crier and it would have upset her. She didn’t know where she was going. We’d repeatedly told her what was happening in detail, but none of it stuck. When I came down for breakfast and said, “After this we’ll go upstairs and pack,” she looked at me in surprise. “Oh, sweetheart, do you have to leave already? It’s so nice having you here.”

  •

  Before we left the house, I lent her my lipstick. We had battled over lipstick for most of my teenage years. My mother didn’t do anything without a coat of lipstick, including taking out the garbage. I, meanwhile, had wanted nothing to do with anything I connected to a quiet, acceptable suburban life. It didn’t help matters that her preferred shades were brown and taupe pastels, completely unsuited to both my coloring and personality. It wasn’t until after I moved to New York and was introduced to red lips as bold statement, a silent, powerful declaration (as opposed to my mother’s lipstick, which always seemed to me to scream proper femininity, like the slips and purses she was always pushing on me) that I came around. It was the antithesis of her, but it had finally put an end to our conversations about makeup.

  When I came downstairs, my father was already out in the car. I waited at the door for my mother while she flitted about, the same way she’d always done.

  “Let’s go, Mom.” I could hear the old teenage annoyance in my voice. It had slipped in there out of habit, down well-worn grooves deepened over so many years of standing and waiting at the front door.

  “I’m just looking for my purse.”

  “Dad has it in the car.”

  “Oh, wonderful.” She bent down to pat the dog. “Goodbye, Medley, fret na lass, we’ll see you in a little bit.” She stood up and smiled at me. “What a lovely color you’re wearing. I just need to find my lipstick and then we can go. Now, where did I put my purse?”

  “Dad has it in the car,” I said again.

  I reached into my own purse and fished out my lipstick; I, too, was now never without it. “I’ll put it on for you,” I said. “Go like this.” I stretched my lips out over my teeth the way she had shown me to do when I was a child playing in her bathroom and waited for her to do the same. I dabbed the red on as gently as I could so the color wouldn’t overwhelm her face. When I was done, she glanced in the hallway mirror, a gesture as familiar to me as her voice. “Perfect,” she said. “Now we’re ready to face the world.”

  •

  My sister and the kids were waiting for us at Roseview. I heard Quinn and Zoe racing down the halls before I saw them. I immediately picked up Connor; he felt like an anchor. His contented weight on my shoulder, holding me down so that the reality of what was happening wouldn’t blow me away, was simply proof life moved forward.

  Everything went down as smoothly as swallowing a pill. It felt shocking how easy it was to flip my mother’s life from what it had been for decades to this new version that I had been struggling toward like a prize. The walls of the nursing home were decorated for Christmas: shiny red, green, and gold stars; Santa and reindeer cutouts; fake green holly strung up over the doors. Next to the sign about Christmas dinner being served for families in the community room—presumably the one my father had signed us up for—was a reminder that an Elvis impersonator would be performing in January. For some reason this gave me great comfort, as if my mother were simply embarking on a new, fun life, full of potential, different than the one she was leaving in encouraging ways, and not a last tedious stop.

  This respite was brief. The home was the best I’d seen, but it was still a nursing home. Everywhere was evidence of where this was all heading. Old people slumped into various chairs, mostly expressionless; a few slowly walked the halls. Next to them my mother, upright and beginning to bounce the way she did when the sun began its slide toward the horizon, practically sparkled with life. But she was one of them now. On the wall opposite the public bathroom, beside the candy machine Quinn hopefully dragged me to, was an In Memoriam frame with the pictures of two women in it. Doreen and Gladys. Names that felt like a wave rolling in from another era. In a few more decades it would, no doubt, carry a series of Jennifers and Michelles. I wondered whether it was Doreen or Gladys I had to thank for my mother’s room.

  I sat in the office holding Connor and going over all my mother’s paperwork with the staff. By the time I got to her room, my sister had unpacked and organized everything. In the scramble to prepare for the move I’d grabbed whatever I could to make the room more familiar, whether to her or me was unclear. I’d taken the photo album my sister had made for my parents’ fortieth anniversary, the quilt my mother had sewn that had been on my bed for my entire childhood. I’d taken the nativity scene pyramid my grandmother had given them as a wedding present, the sort you lit candles underneath and which spun as the heat from the small flames rose. It was a ridiculous item to bring; my mother had neither a table nor, presumably, would be allowed access to candles. But it had been on our Christmas table my entire life, and somehow having it here made it seem less impossible that she would no longer be at the table at home. I’d also grabbed a silver framed photo of Medley, which I put in the little memory alcove in the hall beside her door. I reasoned that since the dog was the one thing she always seemed to remember, having the photo in her doorway might signify to her the room belonged to her. I looked up at the room number as I went back in. She was in room 121.

  It was lunchtime by the time we left. We all walked my mother to her table in the dining room, which was already half full of residents who’d been wheeled in. “Oh, let me help,” she said and immediately walked over to the kitchen area where the staff were setting up.

  “No, it’s being prepared for you,” I said, taking her arm and leading her toward the table. “You don’t have to do anything.” And then to drive the point home, “We are paying them money to do it for you.”

  She smiled, surprise lighting up her face. “Really? Well, that’s very generous of them.”

  Zoe insisted on climbing on my back on the way out. The kids were growing impatient, but it was a relief to have their energy in the room; they felt like a crackling fire throwing warmth into a stone mausoleum. Their needs dragged us back into a world that was still full of possibility.

  My mother’s disease was so duplicitous. It had left me grieving for the disappearance of things felt, not seen, while furiously caring for what was in front of me. The person I loved, who had loved me and cared for me and filled my mind with all her big words, and learning, and gentleness, was almost gone. She’d been slipping away for months now, maybe years. A drop at a time. And with each part of her lost I’d had to ask myself whether I was imagining it. I could still hold her, after all, and hear her. And yet she was not there, too. Instead of marking the passing of these parts of her I’d never get back, I’d raced to save what remained. Her body. And now I
was leaving that, also. But again not really. I was leaving it and saving it at the same time. In some ways, I’d already been forced to say goodbye to her, and in others I was nearly paralyzed at the idea that she would stay here while we left. It was the first time in my mother’s life that she’d had a room of her own. The confusion over where I was supposed to put these different stages of grief left me with the sensation that I could see what was happening but couldn’t feel it.

  My mother always said she’d had a harder time leaving me at kindergarten the first time than I had had staying. “I was in tears but I don’t think you looked back.” And now I was the one who had to leave.

  In the end, I turned back only once. I watched briefly as my mother thanked the woman who was serving her a plate of food. I wasn’t sure if the enormity of leaving her dulled everything, as if I’d been crushed into numbness. Or if I was stunned by the fact that I had effected this great turn in my own mother’s life, and now it was as simple as walking out.

  15. Don’t Forsake Those Duties Which Keep You Out of the Nuthouse

  When I arrived back in New York ten days later, I immediately took myself out to dinner. I already knew my order: oysters, steak, and two gin martinis at the bar around the corner. I didn’t shower or change, simply thrust my suitcase through my apartment door and turned around. I walked the two blocks down to the restaurant feeling empty. It wasn’t the low, hopeless feeling that had so often dogged me after other recent trips home; I had, after all, succeeded in my goal and found a safe haven for my mother. It felt, instead, as if I’d emerged from a long battle: there was nothing left. The victory felt hollow; it brought relief but no joy.