Wait Until Tomorrow (31 page)

Finally, I stop. I realize I can't make any decisions without more information. I'll figure this out tomorrow.

 

Friday is the last day that my mother is eligible to stay at the rehab center before I have to start paying a hundred bucks a day. I've called the Sanctuary to try to get her back in on Friday, but the nurse won't be there on that day so it has to happen on Thursday—if it can happen at all. So even though I'm supposed to be at work, I slip out right before lunch. I've got Mom on her way to the orthopedic doctor, who I'm hoping will say she can put some weight on that leg. In the meantime I'm calling back and forth to the rehab center to see if they'll release her, and the Sanctuary to see if they'll admit her. The hell with Medicaid.

Oh happy day when the social worker at the rehab center manages to get the right signatures and finish all the forms and says yes, she can leave. After the doctor has put mom's leg in a cast that allows her to put a little weight on her foot, I drive to the rehab center and sweep through, gathering her things, signing papers, saying sayonara. I even stop to see Miss Rebecca, who is terminally depressed but still ever so grateful for the flowers I brought her one night. I pat her on the back and say, “I hope you feel better.”

She looks up at me, her gray hair stringy, her pants baggy and stained, her eyes like the eyes of the dog you left behind at the shelter, and says, “Pray for me.”

FALL 2009

Ever since Mom got back to the Sanctuary, she's shakier than ever before. On Monday I go to visit her after my class. We sit outside to absorb some vitamin D, and then she says the inevitable: “I have to go to the bathroom.”

I grumble a bit because she was upstairs only fifteen minutes earlier, but I push her up to her third-floor room, then wheel her into the bathroom, lift her cast off the leg lift, and move both leg lifts out of the way.

“One, two, three,” and I hoist her up. “This way, Mom. Pivot this way.”

I lift her dress, move the wheelchair, support her body, and guide her around, pulling down the pull-ups, trying to get them down before she collapses onto the elevated toilet seat. Lord have mercy.

After the bathroom ordeal, we go downstairs for a game. She's lost a lot of ground in the past few weeks. She has the
q
, a blank for a
u
and an
i
. I show her where there is an available
t
, but she can't put those letters together. She cannot figure out the word,
quit
. Until finally, exasperated, I just tell her what the word is and where to put it.

Then it's time for dinner. When I wheel her up to the table and give her a hug goodbye, she clasps my arm and begins to kiss it.

That night my friend Theo from Tallahassee calls me. His mother is in the hospital. She's got a touch of pneumonia. She's only eighty-four. That seems so young to me now! But she's lost the will to live. She tells Theo, “Just kill me, please.”

I can tell that he feels like he's been run over by a truck. He's confounded by her hallucinations. “Those are common,” I tell him. “It's called hospital dementia.”

“There's a name for it?” he asks.

We engage in a dialogue I seem to have with all the friends and acquaintances in my age range: How are we going to avoid this? One of my friends plans to take a boat out into the ocean along with a bottle of vodka and sleeping pills. A nice couple I know has their suicide pact all figured out. Theo is hoping he'll get hit by a bus. My strategy is this: no doctors and no medications after the age of eighty-four.

“You have to start indoctrinating your children. My mom thought it was good to say ‘no extreme measures,' but what you have to say is ‘no measures at all.' They can keep you alive forever. They just keep patching you up. You'll never die.”

Theo's mother is on an IV for fluid, but if she doesn't want to live, should they take her off the IV and let nature do what it does? He doesn't know. Who wants to be responsible for letting a parent fade out, especially a good, beloved parent?

My mother, on the other hand, clings to life no matter how awful she feels. I think she's afraid of death. Hell, she's afraid of sleep. I told her once when she was really miserable and expressed a wish for her life to end that she could stop taking her medicines anytime she wanted. It was her choice. She answered, “I know, but when it gets close it doesn't look so attractive.” Meaning death. So perhaps I'll feel differently when I'm very old and maybe I'll want to suck every bit of juice out of my life, suck it till it's dry as
salt. But if I do, I'm going to do it without the help of their magic potions.

“You know, we're conditioned to believe that life must be preserved at all costs,” Theo says. “If your mother is depressed and wants to die, well, you give her antidepressants. Even though it's never going to get any better.”

But where is that line? Where is the line at which you say, “You're right. Better to leave the party now before the police come and throw everyone in jail.” This is what we need to figure out and we only have two or three decades to do it. Not much time. Not much time at all before you're there, before it's you.

 

The next morning I get an email from Theo. His mother passed away peacefully in the night. She was eighty-four. She'd been sick for a couple of months and Theo and his brothers each had spent some time with her in recent weeks. Now she's gone.

 

Halloween day. I'm motivated to clear out some space in Hank's office for an extra bed so that Lorri can have a place to sleep when Emmy comes home. In order to do that, I need to clear off a table covered with nails, levels, clamps, tools, and paint cans, move the table out of there, and put it in his room in the hopes that someday the half-demolished bathroom will be fixed—by somebody. As I stand in Hank's room, I am filled with an ineffable sense of sadness. I can't bring to mind all the things he said or did that hurt me so deeply this past year. I can only feel a deep regret for how unhappy he was. I have a sense that I didn't try hard enough, didn't care enough. I simply let him be. I had the life I wanted and that was all I cared about.

Of course, I couldn't force him to participate in life, in my life. I tried to get him to go on trips with us, but at some point I gave
up. We ate dinner together, we shopped for groceries together. That seemed like enough.

Standing in this large room with the poplar tree all yellow outside his big bay window, I realize I will never again celebrate Halloween with my husband and child, watching our favorite movies, making caramel apples, trying to keep the dog from sneaking off with the candy. Those years are over. I run a finger through the dust on his armoire. Finally, with my barge of a heart, with the beat of lost love still thrumming in my veins, I walk out of the room and close the door.

That night I go see a movie with a friend, and leave Lorri to give out candy to the few little groups of children who brave the wet night in search of sweets.

THANKSGIVING 2009

When I learned that my friend Michael Gearhart had died of congenital heart failure in 1996, I felt as though I'd fallen through ice into freezing waters. My phone had rung at seven that morning as I was getting my young daughter ready for school. When I picked up the phone, my friend Mary Jane said in a soft voice, “Pat, have you heard? About Mike?”

“Heard what?” I asked. I remember feeling annoyed. That was my response to the creeping fear I felt.

“He's dead,” she answered. “It's in the paper.”

“No,” I told her. “No, that's not true.”

I hung up the phone and tried Mike's phone number. I got his answering machine and heard his voice. See, he can't be dead, I thought, there's his voice. And yet I knew that only meant that he wasn't there to pick up the phone. I put on my flannel bathrobe and went outside. The night before, my family and I had stood outside in the street with our neighbors looking through a telescope as the moon turned a deep ruddy color during a full lunar eclipse.

My newspaper lay folded up at the end of my driveway on that sparkling September morning. I sat down on the concrete drive and opened up the local section. I found the article that told of my friend's death. He'd been driving his antique Ford pickup truck
and had an accident two blocks away from my house at the same time I was gazing up at the eclipse of the moon. A witness said he had slumped against the wheel before hitting the other car. I looked up at the sky. A black balloon hovered over the pine trees in the yard across the street. I watched as the balloon floated away, and I understood that my friend was gone.

It had been a long time since I'd experienced the death of someone close to me. It seemed as if a giant hand had torn a hole in the universe. A grief the size of Nebraska engulfed me. My friends and I clung to each other for days in stunned disbelief. Mike was young, healthy, funny, and handsome—admired by men and desired by women. Now he was gone. One day here. The next day deleted.

 

I think of the shock of that sudden death now, contrasting it to my mother's slow tortuous slide into the abyss.

Thanksgiving 2009. Hank and I have been separated for nearly a year, and Lorri has become a part of my new makeshift family. Emmy is coming home from college for the break. Hank never enjoyed entertaining, so I am looking forward to having Thanksgiving dinner with friends at my house for the first time ever. But I don't want to do all that work—roasting turkey, peeling potatoes, etc. Emmy hates turkey anyway, and it has been at least a year since I've eaten meat. Not to mention, I'm not much of a cook.

So I order a big spinach lasagna from Pasta & Provisions; make a salad with romaine, arugula, edamame beans, shrimp, avocado, and candied pecans; steam some asparagus; and bake pecan pie bars for dessert. One of my former students, a fantastic chef, delivers the most incredible soup (see recipe below) and broccoli gratin the day before. My friend Darryl is bringing over a turtle cheesecake. Not a traditional Thanksgiving dinner but a feast nonetheless.

The guests include four friends of mine, along with Lorri, Emmy, and my ninety-one-year-old mother. That's the Olympic challenge—getting my mother out of her assisted-living place and over to my house. She used to go a little crazy staying in one place, but now she doesn't like to leave. I know she is going to balk when it comes time to go, but I've already steeled myself for that. It's kind of like taking the cat to the vet, except that once my mother gets to wherever I've made her go, she realizes she wanted to do this all along—as opposed to my cat who goes psycho and tries to eviscerate the doctor. Mom was so happy I'd dragged her out last year to vote, and was eventually delighted when I made her go to the mall with me and my brothers last summer to buy her a dress. She loved it when we went to the symphony in the park—after we got there. And I figure this will be no different. She'll make all kinds of noise about getting in and out of the car (not easy when your legs don't work), but once she's at the house she will be happy as a bluebird in a tree.

I arrive at the assisted-living place at two thirty. My mom wears a pretty red dress and a coat—it is plenty cold outside. Although she looks spry, she has a vicious cough. She keeps hacking up phlegm and spitting into a napkin. As we approach the car, just as I expected, she panics.

“Oh, I don't know about this,” she says in a weak, frightened voice.

“You don't have to go,” I answer. You know how you can say something and mean just the opposite? She gets my drift. I angle her wheelchair inside the open car door, put on the brakes, tell her to grab the top of the car door, and help her get up. Then I deftly unbrake the chair, pull it out of the way, and help her pivot onto the car seat. I lift her legs (one of them is in an enormous black boot to protect the ankle which was fractured a couple of months
earlier), tug the seat belt around her waist, shut the door, and proceed to load the wheelchair into the back of my car.

I live about fifteen minutes away, and want to make sure I get there before the guests arrive. I pull into the driveway, extricate the wheelchair, reverse the actions, and wheel her down the winding leaf-strewn walkway to the steps at the front of the house. Standing at the bottom of the three rickety wooden steps I realize I forgot that Hank had removed the handrails to the steps in a fit of “renovation.” We are facing three steps and she has nothing to hold onto.

My mother wears the facial expression of someone hanging over a cliff.

Not to worry. My strong nineteen-year-old daughter is here, and Lorri is fairly strong as well in spite of a bum knee. Surely we can maneuver one little old lady up these steps and into the house. My mother clutches the wheelchair.

“What do I do?” she asks.

“Let go of the wheelchair first,” I instruct.

We get her up, but she isn't supporting herself at all. She doesn't know how to. The mechanics of movement have become foreign to her.

“Come on, Mom,” I say, helping her to lift one leg and then the other. Miraculously we get her onto the first step. But the next step is impossible. She can't or won't lift her legs on her own even with us supporting her. She gets heavier by the second. We're at an impasse. We have to retreat.

“Go back,” I say. My mother's rear end begins to lower but her feet stay planted on the step. Disaster looms.

“No, no!” all three of us yell.

“I meant step back, Mom!” I say, trying to hold on to her and pull the chair under her descending body. Then to heap insult
onto her injuries, I start to laugh. I can't help it. It's all so terrible, my mother is going backwards, and we can't stop her. Emmy catches the giggles from me and Lorri follows suit. Which just enrages my mother who yells at Emmy, “It's not funny!”