by Susan Morse
Swish.
Beep.
Rearrange.
Swish swish rearrange beep rearrange beep swish. . . .
I fight my way back to sleep, brooding on the month Ma stayed with us after she sold their house in Florida. She had a hard time adapting to someone else’s house rules, like keeping the front door locked so burglars, rapists, and child snatchers won’t get in, or not wandering outside to tell our lawn guys to cut David’s cherished hedge down to the nubs (he’d been nurturing it for months to get it to just the right thickness and height), meanwhile forgetting she’d just left several pots of seaweed going on the stove at a very high heat and the entire downstairs was filling with smoke. Knowing her stay was temporary helped, but the kids were little then and sleep was precious and elusive. I found myself drawing the line one morning at five a.m. when Ma decided to make a phone call to Europe at the top of her lungs and woke us all up. In the wee hours, I tend to lose track of things like why it’s important to be hospitable to old people in the midst of a tricky life transition.
Smash!
I leap out of bed. Ma’s standing barefoot outside the bathroom. There is broken glass all around her on the floor. It seems she has decided she needs a special glass carafe of Holy Water by the bed. It simply can’t wait till morning and, still unsteady from the anesthesia, she has dropped it.
I storm around finding slippers and dustpans, and when she’s settled into bed, she doesn’t dare ask me, Evil Susie, reveling in all my exasperated glory, to empty the shards of glass out of the scrap basket, and I don’t stop after leaving the bathroom door open as wide as I can. I make a special trip to yank open the guest bathroom door, too, and another to take my coat out of the closet and slap it emphatically on the floor, just to make my point very, very clear.
The good news is it is now eight-thirty a.m. in England. Libras are also very accommodating about being dumped on when you need to express what you’re not going to do about the Elephant.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
6.
Obstruction
HERE’S THE THING about Holy Oil and Holy Water: They are multipurpose and they never run out.
It’s quite scientific. When Holy Oil starts to get low, you just add regular olive oil (NOT Extra Virgin, only plain), which magically makes the new oil Holy because it’s been added to the already Holy Oil. The same goes for Holy Water. You get your original Holy Water from the priest and then just refill it from the tap when it’s not quite all gone, and you’ve got a whole new batch.
Holy Water makes a very inexpensive hostess gift for a household lacking proper spiritual direction. All you need is an empty soy sauce bottle and a blank label. We have a few of these in the back of our cupboards:
If you like, you can put Holy Water in one of those spray bottles for ironing or for misting plants, and spritz the air of a room that doesn’t feel right or something. It’s a good idea to spray your car, too. If you misplace your spray bottle, you can just drizzle some on your fingers and flick it at whatever is offending you, like your daughter when she starts getting uppity. This is supposed to calm your daughter down, but it mostly makes her laugh at you, which is better than nothing. I am sometimes a little damp after spending time with my mother.
Ma uses a combination of Holy Oil and Water to float beeswax votive candles in little red glass lanterns. She places these in front of the icons she has displayed in her apartment. The lanterns are supposed to be lit all the time, even when she’s asleep or not at home. They can be only 100 percent beeswax; anything else appears to be Of the Devil and definitely won’t produce the right effect.
The family is beginning to descend.
Colette is my telephone lifeline and we talk almost every morning now, but she doesn’t like to get in the way. This is too bad since she’s really the most qualified person we have when it comes to colon trouble. Due to Crohn’s disease, her husband, Badger, has had enough of his intestine removed to decorate a good-size Christmas tree, but Colette’s been mum on details.
She’s more focused on her job as Operation Ma’s financial analyst. Colette’s collecting my scraps of numbers to make up spreadsheets about the costs we’re facing for things like the Long-Term Care’s Elimination Period (they’ll cover assisted living, but only after you’ve paid your own way for a hundred days or thirteen thousand dollars, but what if they don’t approve her at all? It can happen—Felix read about it in the Times!). On top of everything, we’ll have to keep the apartment till we know whether Ma will really be well enough to move back.
The alternative to assisted living is home health aides, also covered in part by Long-Term Care Insurance, which, thank God, I got years ago when I saw this coming (IF they approve her! Remember the Times!). The Long-Term Care has a limit. The odds are Ma will outlive it, and things will skyrocket after that. We’ll need drivers to help get her to radiation when I can’t, meals brought in if she stays home, and oh my gosh, the logistics (not to mention the costs) are insane and we’re all doing our best not to panic.
Our brother, Felix, likes to depict the women in our family’s behavior in crisis as a bunch of monkeys in a cage, running uselessly around screeching and bouncing off the bars after the winds shift and they catch the scent of the lions (who are obliviously napping, safe in their pens all the way on the other side of the zoo). We monkeys are not making any noise yet, but we’re fidgety.
Felix arrived today, his Subaru Forester covered with mud collected on the messy drive down from Vermont. He used to drive a pickup loaded with chunks of tree trunk. He’s always got pieces of trees handy for his sculpting, and they conveniently double as ballast on the highways. Felix favors Birkenstocks no matter the season, but layers them with wool socks for winter—he’s a genuine, crusty, foul-mouthed weather-beaten prep-school-followed-by-Ivy-League renegade. The ladies tend to be drawn to him. He’s been a bachelor for decades now, and his caregiving experience to date has been limited to a series of mostly self-sufficient cats, but he’s willing to try anything as long as the instructions are clear.
David’s gone to Richmond to be fitted with George Washington’s nose for the John Adams miniseries, and I can’t leave the kids for long, but I’ve postponed things like the boys’ wisdom teeth extractions. We’ve lost track of how long it’s been since Ma had a bowel movement, and it’s not looking good. She unhooked the chemo canister before it could produce any results because it made her too sick. She’s still not feeling well at all. We have to get her strong enough for radiation.
So we’ve spent a couple of days hovering and fussing around with hot water bottles, calling reports in to doctors’ services (of course, it’s the weekend), and to Colette, who mutters cryptic, ominous things like what won’t go down must eventually come up. There was an interesting episode at the apartment waiting for the phone to ring. We figured out a soothing way to rub Holy Oil on Ma’s lower back. When Ma instantly felt some relief, she swore she could smell roses. This was supposed to indicate a miraculous event.
Ma loves these sorts of mystical phenomena, and she’s always on the lookout for them. I don’t feel much need of visions and such to sustain my own faith, and can’t always suppress the urge to scoff. But this will become yet another of those memories I secretly like to hold close, and ponder.
There’s an experience Ma had at her father’s deathbed. Grandsir was a flyer, a captain in the Army Air Service when Ma’s mother left her first husband (a dull but acceptable banker type) and her four eldest children (my mother’s half-siblings) to marry him. This was before there was an Air Force at all, when the use of planes in warfare was brand-new and very daring. He flew those little planes with the open cockpits, and he used to cause a sensation landing them on the polo field at the Penllyn Club—very Errol Flynn, with the goggles and the scarf and everything. Grandsir had a treasure trove of stories to explain his collection of physical defects: He was missing two fingers (shot them off in a hunting accident, a
ge twelve) and he couldn’t straighten one arm (got it sideswiped driving too close to another car on a narrow country road). When Ma and her younger sister, Bobs, were little, they lived with their parents on army bases in Long Island, Virginia and Honolulu. Ma had a patchy on-again off-again relationship with her father after he and her mother finally divorced, but she wanted to be there for his health crisis.
Ma felt it was important to acknowledge the obvious, and pointed out to Grandsir that he was dying. He responded indignantly that he was not. When he eventually did die, Ma was the only one in the hospital room with him. She swears that she saw a transparent thing of some sort float out of her father’s body. She says it looked like the logo for Philadelphia’s ice hockey team, the Flyers: an orb shape attached to a large wing, similar to the snitch in the Harry Potter books. She is positive she saw this thing waft upward and disappear into the ceiling above him. The point she makes now is that Grandsir had an instinctive, unschooled faith in the afterlife and, for some reason we may never know, Ma was there to see real evidence: her father’s very soul on its way to the next destination.
I didn’t see Grandsir float off to heaven myself, but it’s interesting. This morning, I did think I sort of smelled the roses in the Holy Oil. I know it started out as ordinary olive oil because Ma wouldn’t allow it to be anything but. I’d bought the refills for her myself.
I arranged a visit from Michael (the reassuring administrator of the local Home Health Care service) for Ma to fill out her profile sheet and learn what they offer. Michael has an aide ready to come in anytime. The interview went like this:
Michael: I have a very nice, competent woman named Miriam who can come on Sunday morning.
Ma: Is she dark-skinned?
Michael: Um, yes she is. Why?
Ma: Is she light-fingered?
But the whole thing ends up with Ma moaning like an animal in labor, and me on the phone with the doctor on call at Huntingdon, trying to reach into the receiver and shake him (she’s not TALKING anymore, Doctor, she’s just grunting on her hands and KNEES, rocking back and FORTH, so I don’t think the milk of magnesia is really HELPING, Doctor). They have no openings but want us to meet them in the ER—then poof, they call. A bed has been made available, which may or may not have something to do with the rose-scented Holy Oil, depending on who you talk to.
Ma insists all this makes perfect sense: The Holy Oil is why it is possible for her to even consider trying to take this trip without an ambulance. There’s some confusion as to how to get her downstairs, highlighted by Felix and me debating the merits of using some bungee cords from the back of his mud-spattered Subaru to rig up one of the dining room chairs on a mover’s dolly. Luckily, we scrounge a spare wheelchair in the Mills House. Ma is maneuvered into the Subaru, clutching her phone book with the priests’ numbers and one of those bicycle water bottles with the pop-top I’ve filled with Holy Oil for the trip.
The doctor puts her on massive doses of laxatives, and Felix and I get to look at pictures of the tumor, which is behaving like an airtight cork and will continue to do so until they can get the treatment under way. We cancel Miriam. Ma’s going to be in the hospital for a few days.
The winds appear to have shifted, and the musky lion scent has died down. I even get enough time to think of stopping at the liquor store to reward the monkeys with wine to go with our pizza dinner, before morning comes and Ma and I get the cage all to ourselves again.
I think it would be good to skip the details of how two or three weeks’ accumulations of digested matter are safely and painlessly moved past a largish tumor when you are old and unable to get out of bed unassisted. Ma says the aides at Huntingdon are saints.
What strikes me right away is how much more there is to this place than I saw at first. There’s the cozy area where they get you to sign up, and then there are the treatment areas: the dreaded infusion room with its rows of dentist chairs and individual TVs to watch while you get your chemo. There’s the radiation area in the basement with its thick concrete walls. Now, we seem to have hopscotched over everything to the place with the beds, where the struggle is so much more immediate and real. In an ordinary hospital, our paranoia could be eased by happy sights: mothers being wheeled outside with newborns; flowers and bobbing balloons; orthopedic patients with casts on their legs. But this hospital is exclusively for cancer and now Ma has moved, hopefully temporarily, to the place you go when you might be dying. The hallways and rooms are very quiet and sacred, like a tomb, and they seem to go on for miles and miles and miles.
There’s a very sick old woman in the next bed who is not up to socializing with her own revolving flow of visitors: saucer-eyed grandchildren and anxious adult offspring, optimistically approving procedures on her behalf. When they all step outside, the woman moans and protests to the aides that she has had enough. This has made Ma think serious thoughts, and she’s asked Father Basil to come down from Carlisle. She wants me to meet him, so I work another quick trip to Huntingdon into my tight round of interviews at assisted-living places in anticipation of her release and the beginning of radiation.
I had been instructing myself all day to be on good behavior, and not to overreact if Father Basil turns out to be all pompous and patronizing. Not just because I’m not Orthodox and who knows what Ma’s been telling him about my heathen ways, but because I am a woman and I don’t like what I hear about the role of women in this church.
My first contact with Orthodoxy was in L.A. I was filming Deadly Intentions, a TV miniseries based on the true story of a Sweet Young Greek Orthodox Girl (Madolyn Smith, the Other Woman in Urban Cowboy) who marries a Charming Young Doctor (Michael Biehn, from the first Terminator) with a Mysteriously Creepy Mother (Cloris Leachman—my favorite in Young Frankenstein). Things go downhill quickly when the Doctor turns out to be a Raving Lunatic trying to poison Madolyn and stuff, and she has to escape with the Baby in the nick of time.
I was playing the Spunky But Loyal Best Friend Who Suspects Before Anyone Else That Something Is Amiss. We filmed the wedding scene in a gorgeous Greek Orthodox church somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. When I got into my pink chiffon bridesmaid’s gown a little too early for hair and makeup (Cloris’s character wore white to her son’s wedding, which should have been a tip-off), I slipped in to check out the church. The priest who would be performing the filmed ceremony offered a tour. This was long before Ma became Orthodox and I didn’t know much of anything, but I was really impressed by the gold leaf all over the place, the wide Byzantine arches and the beautiful, vivid colors on the walls, with fantastically detailed old icons everywhere. What sort of turned me off, though, was when I asked if I could see behind the altar.
The priest said no. No women were allowed back there. I know from Ma that the women and men are separated during church services; they stand on opposite sides. Since I am most emphatically in accord with the team in the Episcopal Church that approves not just women but openly gay and lesbian priests and bishops, I’ve got a pretty healthy grudge going about Orthodoxy’s apparent attitude toward women. I am not expecting to be disarmed by this Father Basil person. But as it turns out, that is exactly what happens from the moment he strides up to me in his sensible shoes, long black robe flapping, bushy grey beard halfway down his chest, and opens his arms to sweep me into a hearty bear hug, bumping me up against his rather substantial Santa Claus middle.
Father Basil gives off a jolly, unmistakably past-life-as-a-motorcycle-dude sort of vibe, which I take to immediately. I can tell right away that nobody’s going to try to convert me or judge my lack of whatever. When Ma is taken out for a test, we go to the hospital library for a very enlightening session of Straight Talk that clears up a few mysteries for each of us.
Father Basil tells me he used to be a rock and roll musician. He comes from a complicated family and joined the Orthodox Church as an adult. His equally devout wife, who met him in high school and converted at the same time as he, is a nurse. (Orthodox priests can
be married? Hm!) Because her father has rectal cancer, Father Basil’s wife had already been helpful on the phone when we were learning about the disease. They have no intention of steering or influencing any of our decisions along the way. Father Basil makes it very clear that he really sees that Ma would be quite a handful. Not just now because of the cancer, but in general as well, especially for her children.
What’s also fascinating is that my rather proper mother, who barely tolerated Colette’s hippy teenage phase and has an extensive collection of well-thumbed Social Registers, genuinely loves this guy. What’s more, he is truly fond of her. Father Basil and his wife put out an offer sometime recently to take Ma into their home and nurse her through the radiation. He says this offer still stands, but there is no pressure, only support of whatever she and her family decide to do. As we talk, it becomes more and more clear that Father Basil has something on his mind he’s not quite saying. So I ask him what it is.
Turns out he got the wrong impression, probably because of the funeral plans. A few years ago when she converted, Ma announced to the family that she would not be able to be buried as planned at the Church of the Redeemer. This is a lovely old Episcopal church on the Main Line where a lot of Ma’s maternal ancestors were installed, going back to the 1800s. There is a family plot kept in perpetuity. While my parents were both Roman Catholic at the time of my father’s death, we knew he didn’t care much what Ma did with him as long as she was happy. So after the military honors Daddy wanted in Florida, she had him cremated.
—Margaret thinks Roman Catholics can’t be cremated, Ma.