Jo Dereske

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 16

We Make a Decision

The end of our six months hung over us like an upcoming storm. Even though Ray and Barbara and Kipling and I had given ourselves a few more days to subdue our waffling and graduate to real decision-making about Louise and Mike, my mind became absorbed with the practical: change-of-address cards, lists of magazine subscriptions to cancel, more lists: electric, gas, and phone companies, nurses, meals-on-wheels. What about Morris, the garden, the bird feeders?

It didn’t take long to realize I was using the nitty gritty to postpone thinking of the inevitable. Deciding Louise and Mike’s future was too big, too painful. I wanted somebody else to do it so I wouldn’t be complicit in wrenching them off the farm and “committing” them to a nursing home, so I wouldn’t suffer the guilt. I even descended into wishing nature would intervene.

I called Susan for her thoughts and the receptionist told me she was gone for a week and by the way, the Alzheimer’s group meeting was canceled, too. Kipling was preoccupied, saying little, and I felt he too was shifting his mind back to Washington, to what awaited him in his job.


1931 This is the worst snow storm I’ve ever seen. It’s been blizzarding for three days. Schools are closed, roads are drifted shut. High winds and dark all day. I helped Frank dig the snow away from the garage so it wasn’t any higher than the roof. Dad was afraid it would collapse.


Ray planned to drop his son Jonukas off for the afternoon. He was seven and I looked forward to a good dose of Boy. When I told Louise, she gave me “the look” and said, “Ray doesn’t have any children.”

“Yes, he does,” I said.

“Oh, that’s right. He has two daughters.”

Without thinking, I corrected her, “He has sons.”

Her face reddened and she said in a cold voice, “Daughters.”

I backpedaled. Here I was again, arguing over nothing. In ten minutes she might insist just as stubbornly that Ray had six children. What difference did it make?

Before I could agree that Ray had daughters, she caught something in my expression and up came her chin, defiant. “You can go about your business now,” she said.

“I’ll be in Stella’s Garden,” I told her and hastily escaped.

At one time Louise had carved out flower gardens all over the farm: multi-shaped patches of bright color: the sublime mixing with the ridiculous: exotics nurtured in sheltered corners to petunias planted in a defunct porcelain toilet. I lacked her skill to revive her gardens, but there was one tangled oval behind her old antique shop that I hacked and dug at. Louise called it “Stella’s Garden.” It was choked by weeds and canes of wicked thorns.

Stella was Louise’s younger and much-loved sister, a great favorite in the family who’d died of throat cancer in middle age nearly twenty years ago. Louise, benumbed by sorrow, had created the garden after Stella’s death.

I understood sisters. Stella had been ten years younger than Louise. My own sister was twelve years younger, and a world without her was inconceivable. So this was the one garden I’d accepted as a personal mission.

I had charged into the mass of hay-like, grass-throttled greenery without telling Louise what I was doing, working out of her sight. It was a hands-and-knees job, and long sleeves weren’t sufficient protection from the thorns that stabbed and scraped my arms, and caught in my hair.

I hadn’t paid much attention to this garden years ago and didn’t know what to expect. What slowly emerged was a lovely arrangement of pale-colored old roses and fanciful slabs of rock carefully pieced between the plants
.
Digging around a mica-laced slab, I’d unearthed a rusted chain the size of a bracelet wrapped in rotted cloth. I carefully reburied it. I removed the broken statue of a small girl and replaced it with a concrete flower I found in Louise’s antique shop.

When I’d pruned and shaped the rose bushes, cut the grass and dug around the rocks, I set a chair in the middle and walked Louise across the yard on my arm and helped her sit down. It was a sunny day, the roses were fragrant, even a butterfly put in a well-timed appearance, fluttering past Louise’s knees.

“Ah,” she sighed in satisfaction. “I’ve worked so hard on this garden.”

I could tell she had forgotten its deterioration, that it had remained well-tended and sumptuous in her mind, a loving memorial to her sister.

“It’s beautiful,” I agreed.

“You go,” she told me, motioning me away. “I’m tired. I’ll sit here a while and rest.”

I looked back after I reached the little house and saw her wiping her eyes.


In the middle of the night, while we both tossed and turned in the humid darkness, Kipling said, “I was reluctant to come here in the first place.”

I knew that. I didn’t say anything, waiting.

“But now, I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to see Louise and Mike in a nursing home, not while they can still enjoy this place and each other. I can’t imagine them living anywhere else.”

“Me, neither,” I agreed, “but what else can we do?”

“If you’re willing,” he said, “and if it’s possible, I thought I’d call Ethel and talk to her about extending my leave.”

Ethel owned the business where Kipling worked. I admit the thought of his extending his leave had crossed my mind but it was too much to ask. Six months was already generous, but to ask for more?

Maybe we were again postponing the inevitable, but I didn’t care. We spent the remainder of the night sitting up in bed with the lights on, each of us with our own pencil and paper, mapping out a plan. To stay, to truly ease Louise and Mike into leaving, each point, preceded by one of us saying, “If it’ll work . . .” or, “If we can stay . . .” By four in the morning, we’d more or less settled the near future and we fell into a deep and grateful sleep.

I was awakened by pounding on the door of the little house. It was nine o’clock, when we were always up by seven.

I pulled on my robe and hurried out to the porch. Louise stood on our front step in nightgown and robe, holding out an empty cup. “Could Mikey have a cup of coffee and a piece of bread, please?” she asked. “He’s hungry.”

Kipling made a few phone calls. As if the gods had approved of our decisions, Ethel extended his leave another six months and offered him a raise and promotion when we returned to Washington. He hung up, a quizzical expression on his face. “Maybe I should have left sooner.”

“We’ve decided to stay until the end of the year,” I reported to Susan.

“Good.” Her voice was warm and approving. “I think you made the right decision, not just for your aunt and uncle, but for you, too. I promise you, if the situation becomes unreasonable, you’ll know it’s time to move them. You will know.”

Our life suddenly had shape, parameters, and with Susan’s help, we made several other decisions, the greatest being that Ray would finish applying for Mike’s guardianship. We were ebullient with relief.

Susan rarely spoke of her personal life but explained why she’d postponed our last Alzheimer’s meeting. All we’d been told by the receptionist was that she was absent, tending to “family matters.”

But now she shared that her grandmother had suffered a severe stroke and been hospitalized, on life support. Her grandfather had made the wrenching decision to disconnect her machines. “They’d been extremely close their entire married life,” she said. “Hardly ever out of each other’s sight after he retired. He told her goodbye and went home and had a heart attack himself and died. She died the next day.”


1931 I couldn’t stand it and took the bus to Chicago. It took over twelve hours with the bad roads. Billy has a nice place at 6434 Kinbark. I’m SO happy to be with him again. We went to the south side.


At Ruhlig's Nursery I bought more petunias, daisies, and Nicotiana. Robin, the owner's wife, was a friend of Ray's and recognized me. Over the years she'd stopped many times for Mike's vegetables and remembered his beautiful gardens. "He could make things grow that no one else could."

She ran after me as I was climbed into the car. In her arms she carried a huge hanging basket of impatiens. "Would you give these to your aunt for me?" she asked. "You don't have to tell her who they're from. I don't care if she remembers me, just so they give her some pleasure."

Robin’s gift set me to thinking. Where were Louise's friends? All my life, despite her sense of privacy, I'd been aware of the number of people who contacted Louise and visited her and wrote and sent cards and gifts. "She has so many friends," was a common comment.

Well, where were they now? Beyond close relatives, an arthritic younger friend stopped by occasionally with homebaked goods. The people buying seventy acres of the farm on land contract brought their payments monthly and visited fifteen to twenty minutes. Don and Terry across the road kept an eye on the farm. If we were gone and they saw unusual lights or a strange car drive in, Don investigated.

"Where are they all hiding?" I ranted to Kipling. "All those people she used to drive here and there, all those friends who attended auction sales with her, people from church? Where is everybody?"

"Maybe they're in the same situation she is," he offered. "You're forgetting she's in her 80's."

"She had younger friends, too," I reminded him. "What about the woman she taught how to appraise antiques? Or the two women who used to stop by and ask her advice about refinishing furniture? Remember when I told you about the summer she spent comforting her friend who lost her child? The woman practically lived here. Where is she?"

Nearly every time we were in town, someone asked, “How are Louise and Mike?”

"Why don't you drop by for a visit? They’d love to see you."

"I will," We were told. "I will."

But rarely did anyone. Not the people she’d counted as her friends. We’d intercepted two realtors and a timber cruiser, scoping out whether Louise and Mike would be moving into a nursing home and if the farm would be sold. With the creek and the ravine and forest it was prime property, probably easy to sell in a soft market. An antique dealer dropped by wanting to buy Aunt Louise's antique stock "now that she's out of business."

But there were signs that Kipling was at least partially right. Laura, who delivered Meals on Wheels passed messages to Louise from Alice, to whom she also delivered meals , a friend of Louise's since they were 14. Alice was housebound and through Laura, invited Louise to visit. “I’ll take you,” I told her eagerly, but she refused to go out, saying, "No, I'm not strong enough to visit," so they continued to pass messages back and forth.

A friend named Sylvia from Chicago called from her nursing home room, wondering why she hadn't heard from Louise. "I miss her," she told me in a voice thick with tears. They hadn't seen each other in almost forty years. "Is Louise's mother still alive?" she asked me twice.

I offered to write letters for Louise. "I'll do it myself when I feel better." But I wrote notes anyway to acquaintances who did drop her a note or a card, briefly explaining the situation, telling them how much their letters meant.

She wouldn't go visiting, she wouldn't talk on the phone, she didn’t want me to write letters for her. She was wrapping herself in isolation and I didn't know how to unwrap her.

But summer was gentle, for all of us. We experienced a night that was as soft and luxurious as a dream. At ten-thirty, the phone rang and it was my brother Ray. “Go outside and look up,” he urged. We did, just as a flash of green streaked across the sky.

The Northern Lights. We carried a blanket along my trail beyond the orchard and settled on the grass to watch the show. The fireflies blinked on and off across the field so thickly they appeared as flocks at the edge of the woods, a whip-poor-will mournfully called.

All of this accompanied by green and pinkish lights shimmering and flashing to the north and overhead. They shifted constantly, first a flat bright light near the horizon, then streamers of green that fanned out overhead, then the entire northern portion of the sky lit up like phosphorous curtains, fading to black while another section of the sky began to shimmer and flow, sometimes pale green, sometimes the color of dusk, sometimes dawn.

Morris found us and curled up near our heads, purring so loud we could barely hear the whip-poor-will. Bats darted over, and the sky to the south was glossy in its comparative blackness, thick with stars. We stayed out until the lights faded and the mosquitos gathered extra forces to attack us and then reluctantly went inside to bed.

In the morning when I made coffee in Louise’s kitchen, I found a yellow note on Mike’s placemat. Written in Louise’s crabbed handwriting, it said, “Dear One, Go back to bed.”

I was still puzzling over it when Louise entered the kitchen. “Did you see the Aurora Borealis last night?” she asked me, as clear-eyed as any time I’d seen her.

“Yes,” I said, surprised. “Did you?”

She nodded. “Mike and I sat in the swing and watched it.” And she described it in detail, smiling the entire time, the same phenomenon Kipling and I’d watched the night before.


1931 Overslept and missed mass. I’m a naughty bird! Billy said I’m so hot he can’t keep up with me! Tee hee. Cold but no snow. I want new clothes. I need them and can’t have them.


Next Tuesday, Chapter 17: The New Doctor