New Life, No Instructions

by Gail Caldwell

  “Oh, yes,” she said happily. “You sounded just like a country preacher.”

  Then she told me the speech therapist had already been by that morning and was pleased by her progress. “I knew I was better when I could pronounce ‘Gethsemane,’ ” she said.

  “Mom,” I told her, “most people who hadn’t just had a stroke couldn’t pronounce Gethsemane.” It was then that I knew her departure might be a long and winding road.

  That spring I flew back to meet Pam and move Mom into assisted living, a serene place in downtown Amarillo with a resident cat and dog, as well as the usual bad food and Bingo nights. But the care was exceptional; the nurses loved Ruby, and there was no better place within hundreds of miles. We had each offered to have her live with us—I had a house in Cambridge, Pam in Santa Fe—but it was a gesture full of courtesy and ambivalence on all our parts; we knew she wouldn’t come and that she required more physical care than we could provide alone. She wanted to stay in the city she’d lived in for more than sixty years. But on moving day she grew grim and finally mute, refusing to speak to anyone, including the woman who came to greet her or either Pam or me.

  My dad had a ritual when I visited of taking me in his office and showing me his stock portfolio, which he had built from nothing over many years of smart choices and nerves of steel. Then he would say the same thing: “If anything happens to me, promise me your mother won’t wind up in a nursing home.”

  This conversation had been taking place biannually for a decade or two, and by the time my father was in his early eighties, he had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s and I had learned to shape my answers into a bearable truth. I had already taken away his driver’s license on one terrible day, when I convinced him, finally, to sign a durable power of attorney by saying, “You know I would never hurt you. You know.” And so now, faced with this promise so many middle-aged children are asked to make, I said, “I will always take care of her. I promise.”

  By which I meant I would find her the best care I could, not that I would move her into my apartment in the frigid Northeast and make both of us insane for the last few years of her life. My father’s idea of nursing homes was a realistic but apocalyptic one; what he meant was that he didn’t want her lost and forgotten in a urine-soaked warehouse. Instead we had found her a beautiful room with her own furniture and twenty-four-hour nursing care, and we hired the woman who had helped her stay at home for years to continue doing her laundry and running errands. Within three weeks of moving there, she loved the place and called it her home, relieved that the task of dismantling her four-bedroom house was now left to her daughters.

  She lived another nine months. When I went to visit I would pile on the bed with peanut-butter crackers and a Diet Coke, my mother laughing loyally at the jokes I told that she could barely hear. She had fallen greatly but not without dignity, and now she sat in a wheelchair watching the Food Network, pointing the remote so fiercely at her little thirteen-inch Sony that she looked as though she might shoot the TV if it misbehaved. The nurses adored her, so much so that occasionally they suffered her delusions, like the day she took too much pain medication for her back and became convinced that I had emptied all her bank accounts and gone on the lam. Unaware of any of this, I called from Cambridge to say hello and got a voice from the bottom of a well. “How are you doing, Mom?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m fine,” she said, her voice suspicious and darkly sarcastic. “The question is, how are you?”

  It took five minutes of my careful reassurances for her to accept that all was well and that her worries were unfounded. “I dreamed you took all my money and ran off with some sleazy guy in a pickup truck,” she said, not yet persuaded that I hadn’t, and I started laughing, probably in relief but also because the image seemed hilarious. I’d been in charge of her finances for years, and questionable guys in pickup trucks belonged to the far-distant past.

  21.

  My mother believed that my independence was inborn and crucial to who I was, and she liked to illustrate this with a story about my sitting on her lap in a rocking chair when I was three or four. “After a little while you’d say, ‘I want to get down now, Mother,’ ” she’d tell me, as if my withdrawal were evidence of the rebel girl to come. It was years before I began to view this as a partly sad image—one that conjures not just pluck but also a kind of restless sorrow. Somewhere between her version and mine, character is born: the map of experience and destiny that evolves into a self.

  When she died she cried two tears, and because she had been unconscious for hours and without water for days, the tears were like someone calling from far away. It was a winter evening in 2006, and my fifty-fifth birthday. A few days earlier she had suffered what was probably a silent pulmonary embolism. I flew to Texas and went straight to the hospital from the airport, and when I came into her room she started crying out and reaching for me. That was the last sign my sister and I had that she knew we were there.

  We moved her to hospice the next morning—a quiet, soft place marred only by a visit from the on-call physician, who dropped by during the long afternoon. By then she was completely still, a bird waiting for flight, and her body was showing early signs of the dying process. The doctor poked her knees and talked loudly. “These old pioneer women,” he said to me and my sister. “It can take them a while to die. I’ve seen them go ten days without water.”

  It was such a stupid thing to say, in so many ways, and Pam and I shot a look at each other and told him we could take it from here. But after he left I flew into a panic—a feeling of chaos and urgency that causes my chest to tighten even now. I wanted out of Amarillo: away from this terrible, airless circle of waiting. Away from the grief of burying the last parent. I felt like a sprinter, who thought she could finish the race, only to be told it was a marathon. I knew that I could not bear this for ten days, or even three, and I knew my mother couldn’t, either.

  The nurse on duty told us that things weren’t going to change anytime soon, and so Pam and I left late that afternoon for an hour or so—she to tend to things at my parents’ house, which was empty and had been for sale for a couple of months. I drove to the local gym to throw myself in the pool and get a shower. Our plan was to check in by phone and meet back at hospice.

  I have always felt guilty about the timing of that swim, even though a larger part of me believes it was the right ending, a script my mother would have approved. While I did laps in the pool I let the hugeness of my mother’s dying wash over me, a feeling that could emerge only when the world was quiet. I was coming out of the shower when I heard my cell phone ring inside the locker, and I grabbed it and heard my sister saying, “They just called—we need to get back there now.” I threw on my clothes and drove the two miles to hospice and half-ran from the car to the building. I remember the brown sweater I was wearing and how heavy it was because it was damp and how my wet hair felt in the dry Texas cold. I saw my mother’s best friend, Hylasue, just inside the door; she was waving for me to hurry.

  Pam was already there. I got to the other side of the bed and we leaned over her while our mother reached her whole self upward toward her next breath. It lasted about five minutes. I had my hands on her shoulders, and I saw a tear in the corner of her eye, and then one in the other, and they ran down her cheeks toward her ears like stars exploding. And I said, “Oh, my God, look”—and she took one last breath and then a sound was coming from somewhere and I realized it was me.

  I never understood how people were able to write the obituary of a loved one, particularly in that first corridor after death. But the next morning I woke up with a jolt of purpose and sat at the peninsula in my parents’ kitchen and wrote the death notice for the local paper. The peninsula was a short counter space at the end of the cooking area that was everyone’s favorite spot in the house. I had sat there after I was grown and looked out at the backyard and talked to my mother while she cooked. She was a good cook, patient and modest, and whenever I went home to visi
t she’d say, “Well, there’s nothing to eat,” and I’d open the refrigerator. Inside would be baked chicken breasts and fresh fruits and vegetables and maybe some leftover rice or potatoes and some sliced brisket she’d picked up from the best barbecue in Amarillo. And a couple of homemade pies, custard and pecan, on the sideboard.

  The peninsula was where Mom had served me BLT sandwiches and hot tea for breakfast when I was a teenager—when I was moody and almost impossible to please. She made them especially for me, because I was skinny and they were the only thing that sounded good. Then thirty years passed and she stood there making oatmeal for my niece, Claire, who loved the seat in the kitchen as much as I did, so much that we fought over it for years until I gave up and tried to be a grown-up about it. But still.

  Anyway that was where I wrote the obituary, where I included the fact that Ruby Groves Caldwell had been a star high school basketball player—she was five feet three—but I forgot to mention her decades-long devotion to Westminster Presbyterian Church. Then Pam and I went to the funeral home that had taken care of my dad and I typed up the notice on their old IBM Selectric, because their computers were down and I wanted to make sure they got it right. We already had the Scripture verses that she loved from Ecclesiastes and the psalms, and we needed three hymns, and poring over the hymnbook—accompaniment to so many endless Sunday mornings when we were girls—we started laughing and half-crying and couldn’t stop. And finally we chose “Ave Maria,” a suspiciously Catholic song for a Protestant congregation, but the song we most loved for my mom.

  She was laid out at the funeral home for the next two days, until the service on Monday. The first night she was there we drove over from the house. I had brought from Cambridge a small cloisonné box with a little fawn on it that I wanted to bury with her, and I slipped it inside the fold of her arm. And then Pam said, a little sadly, “She isn’t wearing earrings,” and I thought it was such a sister thing to say—my sis the fashion plate, who could make a runway item out of a potato sack. Then she said, “I’ll be back—I’m going to get her earrings.” And she drove across town, eight o’clock on a Saturday night, so tired she didn’t even know it yet, and went to my mom’s assisted-living facility and found the right earrings and came back in twenty minutes. And placed them on our mother’s ears, very gently, and said, “There.”

  My mom is buried next to my dad, in the Texas sun, with a headstone that gives the year of their births—both 1914—and a ribbon engraved between their names with 1943, the date of their marriage.

  We had picked the headstone together, my mother and I, and she had stood there with me the year after my dad died while I tended his grave. I had brought a trowel and a watering can and fresh flowers, and I arranged the flowers while she leaned against a tree. And out of the blue she said to me, “I will always be with you.”

  It was a lovely, comforting thing to say, a moment of something in the middle of nothing, and I reached for it like a little girl, wanting it to last. “Will you?” I said. “Will you stay?” By which I meant, Thank you, I love you, death is scary. And she, irritated by my need, said, half impatiently, “Well, I said I would.”

  I had been scheduled to travel that winter, and several weeks after Ruby’s death I flew out west, and in airports, when I was waiting for a flight, I found a chair somewhere and wrapped myself in my big winter coat and closed my eyes and rocked. Then I would let myself think, My mother is dead my mother is dead, and it became a kind of brutal litany that gave me enough peace to keep me from feeling crazy. Grief on the run. I felt that I’d been robbed of something, had missed the stair-step progression of grief, because when I got home she was still dead and I still couldn’t believe it. But that’s endemic to grief, I think—the feeling that we haven’t quite been able to do it right.

  When I asked my mother’s minister what he had to say about suffering, how he made sense of it, he smiled and said, “God is love.” At the time I thought it was an empty thing to say, glossing over the pain of what I had just witnessed, but I suppose he is right on so many levels: God is love and love is memory, and memory is a bruise or a warmth or a grocery list you cannot bear to throw away.

  My mother said to me, “Promise me you won’t take a drink after I’m gone.”

  She said, “I know how hard it is”—she meant life, and the usual troubles—and she said, “All I can tell you is that it gets better.”

  She said, “Those jeans are too tight.

  “That lipstick is too dark.”

  She said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be as smart as you.”

  22.

  The heroes far outnumber the villains in this story. The worst culprit here is a virus called poliomyelitis, and I’ve never taken it personally that I was one of its casualties, any more than I believe that it had me in its sights that summer of 1951. I don’t like demonizing disease, as though a bacterium or cell mutation could be capable of malevolent intent. Trees falling and viruses invading and lions stalking prey are not preoccupied with collateral damage on their march through life, however rough it may be on what lies in their path.

  People have asked me over the years if I was ever angry about the polio. It seemed an odd question the first time I heard it, and startles me still. That response tells me how fully I’ve absorbed this piece of the picture into my life story. After all, there were only a few months when I didn’t have polio or its consequences, so it is my baseline. The wall you push against. Everybody’s got one.

  I’ve also been asked if I was resentful about getting a new diagnosis as late as I did, at least a decade beyond the initial symptoms that indicated my hip was failing. The answer is no, and not because I’m trying to be valiant. I think it’s because of all the years I’ve spent in AA meetings, listening to people’s stories. They can be terrible stories, full of anguish and fear and disrepair. But the point is not to spin the narrative; that defeats the purpose, in some way, of story itself. You can’t change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn’t make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don’t get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

  So—no anger here. I don’t get to be mad at a resident or a physical therapist or an internist who was working a twelve-hour day and assumed I needed a cortisone shot or a referral instead of an X-ray. A thousand little subplots converged on the days I didn’t get what I needed, and chances are, almost none of them were about me.

  But then I found Dr. Ranere and Dr. Mattingly, and all the good people who listened and paid attention and did the right thing. This is what I like to think of as a dramatic shift in the narrative.

  I don’t believe much in miracles. Too flashy, too little empirical evidence that the glow lasts. Instead I’ll take the slower route: an apple a day, a thousand leg lifts. I do think you need to be listening when the thunder cracks, because that way you get to be there for the light show that accompanies it. Then you will have been witness to splendor, and will know how to keep an eye out for it.

  I am standing in the foyer of my health club with Chris, a.k.a. Neutrina, a woman of such natural grace and strength that I once told her she reminded me of a tree unfolding. So that became another code name between the two of us—“Tree Unfolding.” Because she teaches physics, I’ve asked her a question about momentum—about why it is that, once you have achieved a certain speed and efficiency while swimming or walking, the momentum itself begins to carry you. I have stumbled upon this accidentally, the way innocents always uncover the earth’s obvious truths. It’s happened a few times in the boat, and now in the pool, because my leg is strong enough to send me forward. On land it’s been a harder victory: too many months of slogging in slow motion, as though I am underwater. A staircase of hope and defeat, hope and defeat. Do that ten thousand times, again and again.

  Then one day I tried walking a little faster, and faster made it easier. This puzzles me—in the Law Acc
ording to Gail, everything is hard and must be earned.

  I demonstrate the slow-motion walk for Chris, and then the faster gait. Then she shows me what I’ve been doing. In my slow, careful walk, she tells me, I am pushing matter sideways, wasting energy. When I speed up, I am doing what walking is: pushing the earth behind me as I go.

  Tree Unfolding far prefers the laws of Newton to the laws of Gail. “Touch the world,” she tells me, “and it touches you back.”

  23.

  Winter 2012–2013

  When I came home from the hospital after surgery, Peter had left a welcome sign on my front door that read HIP-HIP HORRAY, YOU ARE HOME. I taped the sign to an inside wall, where I could see it while I did exercises. I love it for a couple of reasons: The Y is drawn and decorated in the form of a crutch, and the misspelling of hooray is pure Peter—ever the artist and designer, eschewing spelling for image and intent. Yes, I am home, and it can take a long time to know what that means, and to cherish the notion of it.

  The year after my mother died, I became embroiled in a property dispute with a neighbor, and for a while I thought I would just pick up and go—leave this neighborhood and these good friends, the parks and bodies of water and familiar faces on the street that make up so much of a life. When I was struggling with the idea, I woke one night with a start and an urgent thought: If I move, my mother won’t know where to find me. I was so haunted by this conviction that it stayed with me for days, as though I might have pulled up camp and left no note: the passionate, irrational feeling that I was the fixed object now, the earthbound lioness, and she the ethereal soul who needed always to know where I was.