by Susan Morse
Orthodox Christianity claims to have kept closer than any religion to the original practices of the early followers of Christ. Among those early Christians were people who, in around the first century, found it difficult to keep their spiritual focus in ordinary society. So one by one they left and took to the wilderness like John the Baptist. They lived alone and fed themselves as best they could: locusts and honey, whatever. Just to be able to concentrate and avoid worldly distractions. It’s not that they considered themselves more special or holy than others—a lot of them felt quite the opposite, and that was the issue. They knew they needed a quiet, simple life to keep their faith intact.
Eventually, other Christians followed, uninvited—those who needed a living example for inspiration. Then the John-the-Baptist types had to figure out what to do with the sheep types. So rules were made. This is how the first monasteries and convents came into existence.
I’m still not converting. But I’m definitely impressed.
I’m having the same otherworldly feeling I had at the tonsure ceremony. I have known this person my whole life. I would never have predicted she’d be willing to make this kind of sacrifice. For the Ma I know to ever consider staying here in Carlisle, living on this kind of food for the sake of her spiritual sustenance—the evolution of this fascinating, complex woman, her absolute determination is awe-inspiring. It just is.
—Ask Father Nectarios, says Ma. I’ll do whatever he decides.
Ring. Ring.
—Yes, he says about the Abbey, but please bring her back for the High Holy Days if she’s fit, God willing. We’ll keep her away from candles.
Prior Planning and Preparation has truly Proven to Prevent Piss-Poor Performance. But let’s give credit where it’s due with another P-word: Ma was right. God did Provide.
Thursday
Well, the schedule today sure has changed. High on the list: Make a nun résumé quick and find Ma’s bank statements before the Abbey changes their minds. Good thing Eliza sourced that résumé sample on the Internet, because we’ll need it. But first I have a therapy appointment with Rita, who is supposedly helping me to cope this year without having to dump every thought I have on Colette and David.
In the morning, I’m jumping out of my skin, racing all over the house flapping my papers around. Colette pretty much has to shove me out the door—this appointment is happening not a moment too soon because I’m like some kind of geyser about to blow. When I get to Rita’s, I do, gulping my heart out from under a towering pile of crumpled tissues. Leave it to me to conjure up the one negative in this happy fairy tale come to life—I am inconsolable.
—What if she DIES before she GETS HERE??????
Rita is kind about my condition. Her mother is installed in a modest but decent assisted-living place Ma would not even consider back during radiation, because she once visited a friend there and it smelled like tinkle. Unacceptable. Our sessions to date have been about teaching me to reconcile with the sad facts of life for the elderly, and they’ve been incredibly helpful. Now here I am paying this nice hardworking woman to listen to my despair over a miracle—it’s like having a close friend whose kid settled for a city college downtown, making the best of things, and yours has just gotten a scholarship to MIT or wherever, and you expect her to comfort you because it’s JUST TOO FAR FROM HOME!!!
Rita should really tell me to get over myself, but she listens to all my pathetic palavering. Only two weeks ago, she was hearing me coldly calculate how long Ma would live and the costs. The subtext was practically out of ESD’s playbook: Hopefully, she will pop off before the money runs out, because the cheapest route sucks. Now I’ve got to seem like a spoiled baby:
—I WANT MY WONDERFUL DARLING PERFECT MOTHER TO LIVE, LIVE, LIVE!!!!!
I really should be ashamed.
Okay, that’s enough of that. Even I am sick of myself.
19.
Departure
March 27, 2008
HAS THE HAPPY ENDING started yet?
At one point during all the proceedings (the handing-in of the nun résumé, the submission of the financial particulars, the approval of the apartment), Georgia Brady explained the beauty of a CCRC: Kids get breathing room to sit back and enjoy their parents during the twilight years. When Lily showed me the apartment, she asked what will you do with all your free time?
—I have something to write, I said.
Ma will have her cataracts done this summer: no problem. The nurse at the Abbey will schedule visits, and appointment reminders will appear in Ma’s mail slot. Aides will materialize on cue with eyedrops. The in-house doctor’s office will be magically given all insurance information, and her transportation will be arranged, with a helper by Ma’s side if she needs one. Follow-ups will snap into place, and all I’ll have to do is share the excitement when Ma can see better. In Georgia Brady’s words: She’ll be ours.
Not quite yet. We’re still waiting for medical approval, so the future feels almost real but not quite. She’ll stay at Cloverfield for the rest of this spring at least, and I’ll have plenty to do in the meantime. I have to pack up Ma’s apartment soon; I’ve given them a move-out date. Colette and I did a lot of sorting before she left; next Ma and I have to really go over what to sell, what to give away, what to store, what to toss, what to keep, and how to fit what she keeps into one small room and a storage closet down the hall.
But first, the boys and I get to have spring break.
Every year at winter’s end, we take a week somewhere tropical with two other families. We’re really good buddies, and it’s become a tradition. Fishing and scuba diving for the men and boys; sunbathing and parading around in bikinis for the teenage girls; crossword puzzles for me and my lady friends, between long walks designing elaborate scavenger hunts and things for the group. David can’t go this time, and neither can Eliza because her break doesn’t overlap with ours. That’s very sad, but not sad enough to skip our island getaway.
I’ve pushed myself to get ahead on paperwork this week. Monthly bills have been paid in advance. The latest appeal with evil ESD has been filed, in response to their most recent denial letter:
Dear Ms. Morse,
Our panel of experts has carefully reviewed Ms. von Morphschmuckster’s case. It is our opinion, as professionals who know so much more about these things than you, that the decision to dump your mother was correct.
Isn’t that miserable woman dead yet? Time for you to get a life, Ms. Morse.
Respectfully, ESD
Coming soon: A phone hearing with a judge. I can’t wait.
The iPods have been updated; passports are at the ready. Sunscreen, bathing suits, sandals, and books for the beach are packed. Arrow the dog is suspiciously sniffing two bags of scuba gear in the front hall. The alarm clock is set for six a.m. tomorrow—we have an early flight.
I’ve said good-bye to Ma, who’s enjoying her final few weeks of attention from the priests and all her friends at church before she leaves Carlisle. Last year in March, she was deep in radiation, and David was doing John Adams. I almost sent the kids off on break without us, but a friend stepped forward and offered to take over my job for a week. This year, I think Ma can go it alone.
My only issue is that our destination, Guana Island, doesn’t have phones in the rooms, and my cell phone won’t work outside the country. I could rent one there, but the idea is I’m taking a real break. Colette is right—she can handle it from overseas. She is my legal stand-in with the Medical Power of Attorney, and Cloverfield has her contact information. I sent her a detailed email with all the names and numbers I could think of—got it off just barely in time before her Internet went on the fritz. (This always happens.)
I had a long talk with Ma this afternoon to go over all her instructions (Try to keep eating. Don’t make any sudden movements. Don’t go outside if it looks like rain. No field trips to church. Call Colette if you need anything, but don’t forget about the time difference, and please DON’T DIE). It feels n
ostalgic—one last flurry of anxious fussing. We’re almost there.
Nine-thirty p.m.:
Ring. Ring.
—Hello?
—Susie.
—Ma! Why aren’t you asleep yet?
—C’est impossible.
—What?
—Je ne peux pas dormir du tout. Du tout!
—You can’t sleep at all at all?
—Oui, c’est ça. Yes.
—Ma, why are you speaking French?
—Parce qu’elle est ici.
—She’s there? Who’s she?
—La nouvelle copine de—
—Your new friend? What—
—de CHAMBRE. Ma nouvelle copine de CHAMBRE.
—Ohhhh, your new roommate is there and you don’t want her to know what you’re saying?
—Exactement. (That’s French for you betcha.)
Ma is pretty much fluent in French. Her mother and Granjack took Ma and her sister Bobs to live in the south of France when they were teenagers in the late 1930s. They went to school and had all kinds of adventures, driving with their older half-sister Priscilla through the hills outside Cannes during blackouts at night with their car headlights painted blue. They were there for two years, making it back to the States just before the Nazis moved in up north and things got bleak.
I also went to school in France, for the last semester of boarding school. I double majored in theatre and French literature in college, so I can keep up. Sometimes I think I mainly went Gallic in order to be able to cope with moments like this, when Ma resorts to French.
The first time I can remember this happening was striking. It was shortly before we left for Ireland, so I was maybe about four. We were living in Penllyn. Daddy had probably been in the throes of hepatitis, or heart trouble, or career frustration, something. Ma was beside herself, as she put it, tipped over the edge by sinus pain—she’d been having fits of rage for days.
One morning, she woke us girls up with the Latest Answer To Everything: We had to learn French immediately; it was essential to our upbringing. She’d read somewhere that children thrive on language exposure the way plants need sun, for their very souls, and you have to start them at an early age or they’ll miss the crucial developmental sweet spot when their brains are like sponges. She wanted to saturate us—we’d learn the same way a baby learns to speak, by being immersed. Sink or swim.
Her intentions may have been good, but I think this was the moment it occurred to me that our mother was a bit of a challenge.
That episode lasted just long enough to make a life-altering impression on four-year-old me. It was one thing to be ordered around and harangued in English—by the time you’re four, it’s possible to follow simple commands. But the sight of Ma clutching the bridge of her nose and screeching unintelligibly like a frantic Pepe Le Pew was unsettling.
So, in order to reduce Ma’s frightening behavior to its usual, more familiar level of weirdness, I figured I had to somehow fix her nose. This seemed to hinge on my ability to learn French in, like, one day flat. I’ve often thought my hard-won facility for the language several years later may have been nothing more than a long-term survival project.
Good thing, because it seems now Ma has an urgent roommate problem, and it must be handled in French.
Ma recently put her foot down about her first roommate, Evelyn Sue. The nonstop TV-blasting was bad enough, but when Ma discovered Evelyn Sue’s kids would be sending her a cuckoo clock for Easter, she put in an urgent request for a change. There are no private rooms at Cloverfield, and for most residents, television is a way to take their minds off the monotony. By a stroke of luck, they found her a new roommate who at least doesn’t keep TV on from morning to night. The move was sudden, and I haven’t been up to meet this new one yet.
Apparently, the adjustment’s not going too well. What I get from Ma is that TV is not the issue this time. She can’t even bring herself to articulate it in French, but apparently The Beverly Hillbillies at full volume would be a picnic compared to whatever’s going on in the new room. Something about amputated legs and visits from a husband in the evening and crying for home inconsolably when he leaves. It’s too much for Ma—she wants out, and it can’t wait till I get back. It has to be tout de suite, like tomorrow. What complicates things further is that while the new living situation seems to literally terrify Ma, she is too immobilized, both physically and emotionally, to think of a way to talk privately to the right people at Cloverfield herself. And the right people won’t be there until tomorrow morning at nine.
I can’t be sure Colette will be able to reach Ma on the phone in the morning, or even if Ma will manage to get the problem across to her if she does. England is asleep right now. . . .
Here’s the thing, in case it’s not obvious: I’ve been a fierce mother, especially when my kids were little—one of those parents who mostly refused to spend weekends away from her children. I’d call on the way to dinner with extra pointers for babysitters as they occurred to me. The twins were breastfed longer than most women consider seemly. Eliza’s first bath was in bottled spring water; I warmed it on the stove. I once darted out onto the soccer field during a lull in a practice and reapplied sunscreen to a mortified eight-year-old Sam.
I could do a monkey about Ma’s roommate problem. I could start hyperventilating and running around, and get the boys all on edge. It might be fun.
No. We really are leaving. The bags are packed. There is a way to deal with this, just let me think for a second.
Email!
Oh, nuts, that’s right: Coco’s email’s down.
Okay, then I’ll email Felix, explain what’s up and ask him to call Colette in the morning. Simple.
Actually, not simple.
Felix is extremely smart. Yale-grad smart. He’s a whiz with computers. He’s read every New Yorker from cover to cover for decades, and he clobbers me easily at Scrabble. But he likes things to be very very very clear. When something’s not clear right away, he’ll be the first to admit that his initial impulse is usually to behave like an asshole. He always gets over it; he’s happy to help. But he likes to throw his weight around a little bit while he’s getting revved up to step to the plate. He also is easily distracted, which means conversations tend to veer off in many directions. Whenever you must approach Felix, it’s a good thing to make sure you have your wits about you. If you get anything even slightly wrong, you will definitely pay for it.
And then, of course, there’s me. Beleaguered, put-upon me: the Special Daughter Standing by her Poor Old Mum. Carrying the world on her shoulders. The Special Daughter just wants to know that everything is in order, so she can get a good night’s sleep and escape at the crack of dawn for a second or two to her luxury island retreat with the piña coladas and massages with mango body wraps in a breezy spa tent with billowing white curtains on the beach. This can’t be too much to ask. . . .
Emailing won’t do the trick. Felix will read, but he also likes to call and clarify everything, and I won’t be available for that. If I can’t email, then I have to call and talk. And that’s an accident waiting to happen.
Felix will want to know why Ma will only speak French right now (this could veer off into why Felix hated Latin and Greek not to mention French) and why I can’t email Colette (time for a sidetrack about how useless Colette is with technology). I just have to get him to agree to call Colette in the morning and tell her to call the nursing home and get the manager on the phone (another sidetrack about why he can’t just call the home himself and how I misuse the term Power of Attorney—Suse. Listen carefully. You can’t BE the Power of Attorney—you HAVE the Power of Attorney). I’ll only feel able to go once he understands Colette needs to tell the manager to wheel Ma to a conference room where she can privately explain what the problem is with the roommate (more sidetracks about what’s going on with the Abbey, and what’s all this about crying over your amputated legs and don’t you think Ma’s doing this on purpose just to keep you
here and why can’t you do it yourself when you get there and what on earth kind of island is this you’re going to for chrissake?).
We children scattered like buckshot when we left home. Felix skedaddled to New York, but that wasn’t far enough so he detoured to Vermont. Colette went to England for a semester abroad and basically never came back, and I escaped to L.A. It all seemed circumstantial, but it was awfully convenient. For each of us, there have been long periods of time when we’ve lived our lives without talking much to one another.
There has been speculation about why I’m the one who decided to move back home and then was nuts enough to ask Ma to join us here. There’s Colette’s imprinting idea. It could have something to do with horoscopes or past lives. Maybe Ma has simply put me under a spell. Most likely, it’s my caretaking habit, the result of the gardener incident in Ireland. By the time I invited Ma here, I hoped all the work I’d done on that episode in therapy had paid off enough so we could find a new way of dealing with one another.
I don’t want to think there’s any such thing as Special, it seems terribly wrong to see things that way, but maybe, being the youngest, I am just the least damaged of all of us.
Back during the cancer, I asked Ma once if she had any thoughts on how her illness figured into God’s Great Plan—if there was any benefit to be found in the challenge she was facing. Her answer was immediate: This ordeal would help to heal the family and bring us together. In our worst moments of despair, I’ve tried to hold onto this thought. More and more, I feel we’re almost there. I can’t wait for Ma to move to the Abbey where I’ll be closer, and finally maybe calm enough to help her cope. I can’t wait to see how things turn out, when the whole family has a chance to discover they can enjoy this lovely person she’s becoming.
First things first: Happy ending or no happy ending, I’m going to call Felix. Then I’m going to get on that plane, and take my boys to Guana.
20.