ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
c Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 26
Drawing In
All that lingered in the vegetable garden were a few still-viable cold-weather plants: brussel sprouts, carrots. We’d suffered our first frost and a single pumpkin vine, its leaves limp and some blackened, still nourished four decent-sized and nearly orange pumpkins. Kipling dug and cleared away the dead and dying plants, piling them beside the garden in a makeshift compost pile. Would there be a garden next spring? If so, it wouldn’t be planted by us.
Two lawn chairs sat side by side at the end of the garden for Mike and Louise to sit and watch. Tending to the garden or caring what happened on the farm had slipped away from Mike. He was most attentive to movement now, it didn’t matter the source, even running water, a flapping towel on a clothes line, a passing car. Except for sudden, unexpected flights into fluency, he rarely initiated or responded to conversation, and then haltingly in simple English or even in Lithuanian. Sometimes Kipling built a bonfire near the garden and Mike stared into it so intently he rarely blinked. On good days, Louise pulled her chair closer to Mike’s and held his hand.
I showed Louise a photo in the newspaper of a local women’s group, knowing she was acquainted with several of the women, and had known them since they were young.
But one of the women in the photo reminded her of a relative who’d visited her in Chicago and whom she suspected of stealing her best black silk slip. Louise glowed with the heat of her memory.
“She thought she was too dainty to do any work. Every time I asked her to help me, she was full of excuses so thin you could pee through them.”
That was just the beginning. For the next day, the relative claimed every fiber of Louise’s attention. Louise listed her faults: greed, vanity, sloth, dishonesty, hypochondria.
“If I saw her today, I’d tear her hair out.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Forgive me, God, but I can’t hide my feelings.” Then to me: “I can’t lie about it, can I?”
“It probably wouldn’t help,” I agreed.
“When she dies I won’t cry for very long. In fact, I probably won’t shed a single tear.” She tapped her finger on the table and said quietly, “I may even smile a very thin smile.”
Louise saw this woman as a menace capable of dispensing venom as deliberately as she had as a young woman. I knew for a fact the women lived in a nursing home, several strokes having withered her mind and body.
“I think she’s in a nursing home now,” I told Louise. “She’s not doing very well.”
“I’ll bet she’s faking it,” and she was off on a retelling of the Chicago-black-slip story. She didn’t want to hear that her old enemy had been disarmed. Acknowledging that might force her to acknowledge her own dwindling life. Her anger gave her fire and I was reminded of that Robert Burns line: “nursing her wrath to keep it warm.”
1933 Al and Sylvia came over. They made up – what a wonder. Later we went to the south side. Bill bought a new suit. Very spiffed. We got into an argument over straight line, and the battle is on. He’s the one who made the mistake last week. He drove to Gary to deliver instead of Cary and when I told him he was wrong he shouted that I should keep my f—ing mouth shut. I’m so hurt.
We still experienced a few days warm enough to sit outside on the patio and drink coffee or lazily rock in the swing in the afternoon sun, but in the main, the seasons had changed. Winter was crowding out autumn. The final Vs of geese had passed overhead. There would be no more thunderstorms until next year. Leaves lay matted and rotting on the ground, colorless. Without the leaves, my trail opened up, still beautiful, but losing its cloak of sanctuary, now open to the sky and views.
The seasons shifted not only outside, but inside Louise and Mike’s house. As if guided by age-old instincts, they both went to bed when darkness fell and if Kipling or I didn’t encourage them to get up and dress, might stay in bed until noon.
Doctor Hoffer had advised letting Louise sleep all she wanted, but I couldn’t do it. The crisis had passed and slipping into a twilight of unconsciousness was too criminal a waste of life. If I could out-strategize her into getting dressed and sitting at the table for a muffin and coffee, and then into the living room to gossip and watch the goings-on outside, I counted the day a raging success. It wasn’t so tough on sunny days but on gray and rainy days, days that Louise called, “wet, sad and gloomy,” she’d have no part of it. They napped all day long, blearily waking to eat, then returning to bed.
“I couldn’t smile for a thousand dollars,” Louise told Kipling as a relentless autumn rain pounded against the windows.
“I could,” he replied, and she laughed, forgetting the weather for a few minutes.
Mike mimicked Louise, staying in bed while she was in bed, following her to table or living room, as if they were attached by a short cord. Out of the blue, when we were sure he’d never speak again, he might suddenly and lucidly describe how to graft raspberry canes or recount in detail how he’d helped ring the school bell when he was nine years old.
1933 I went downtown. I feel so blue and nervous in such a way that I’m afraid of myself. Am I going crazy? Billy said he isn’t sore at me although I think he is and won’t say so. I can’t stand to have anyone sore at me. I want him to stop what he’s doing. Mother sent eggs. Nothing unusual – same thing every day: eat and sit home and wait for the day to end.
On a clear and sharp day as October waned, I sat in the living room with Louise. A large red Buick pulled in and a realtor/antique dealer I recognized climbed out. Louise groaned in disgust. "I don't want anything to do with that guy." Her anger was indisputable; there was a history here, although I wasn’t party to it. "Get him out of here."
I hurried outside and met him halfway to the house, feeling Aunt Louise’s eyes on my back. He wore a black suit and carried a zippered plastic case. A gold ring glinted on his pinky.
“I’m here to see Louise,” he told me, skipping the formalities of a greeting. Firmly, as if he’d made an appointment. He took a step to the side to pass me but I moved, too, blocking his way.
“She’s taking a nap,” I told him.
He wasn’t deterred. "How about Mike? I ran into him a few weeks ago and told him I'd be glad to make an offer on some of the better pieces around here, take some of the junk off your hands."
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. "You talked to Uncle Mike?" I asked incredulously.
"Sure, we've been close for years. He was pretty interested in my offer." He reeled back on his heels and would have looked at me from the bottom of his eyes if I hadn’t been five inches taller than he was.
"My brother is Mike’s legal guardian so you'll have to talk to him."
He stiffened. "Do you mean Ray?" he asked, clearly deflated by the idea of negotiating with my brother.
After that, he was a cinch to get rid of. I stood in the driveway until his car was a hundred feet down the road traveling over the speed limit.
"Is he gone?" Aunt Louise asked when I returned to the living room.
"I told him you were napping."
"That's the best lie you ever told. You don't even have to go to a priest to confess it because I'll give you dispensation myself."
Uncle Mike, awakened by the car and strange voices, entered the living room and looked at us, a blank expression on his face. “Well. Hi, hi, hi,” he said and promptly turned and left, heading back to the sleeping porch.
“Who was that?” Louise asked, frowning toward the doorway.
“Uncle Mike,” I told her.
She harrumphed. “Well, it didn’t look like him.”
She sat huddled in her robe with an afghan around her shoulders and suddenly looked so tiny and frail that I said, “Aunt Louise, you look like the tiniest little thing right now.”
“Well, look again,” she said and puffed her cheeks and chest and lifted her arms like a hulking wrestler. “It’s those calisthenics you force me to do.”
When she allowed me, which wasn’t often, we lifted hand weights together; her sitting and raising one-pound dumbbells, me standing with five pounds. She called it ‘basic training.’
The winter birds returned. Chickadees, nuthatches, juncos, cedar waxwings, orioles, and of course the raucous bluejays. The veterans flew directly to the peanut butter log and the sunflower feeders, even before Kipling had a chance to fill them. Mike paid no attention to the birds’ arrival. The bully blue jays that had previously enraged him, now scavenged at the feeders ignored and unmolested.
1933 Billy went downtown to work for Big Mike. I went hungry for a week and gained a pound. Al and Sylvia came over, like lovebirds now. We all went to see Boris Karloff in “The Mummy.”
I walk nearly every day, sometimes for hours. It helps calm me. But today it was 19 below zero – coldest in 34 years - so I stayed in. I worry. Billy said I worry too much, but he doesn’t worry enough!
We were awakened one night by a crow calling very close to the house. It was past midnight and eerie to hear that usually throaty caw in darkness so late in the year. It sounded melancholy and out of place
“I think it’s in the orchard,” Kipling said, sitting up. "Something must have scared it."
"We're okay if there's only one," I assured him, "The superstition is that if two crows come calling, you're in trouble."
At that moment the first crow was joined by a second. They screeched simultaneously and flew over the farm and into the distance, still cawing.
We fell back to sleep but in the morning we awakened to an inch of snow on the ground and the sun brilliantly shining. A few flakes drifted lazily downward even though I couldn’t spot a cloud in the sky.
When Louise was late getting out of bed, I checked on her. She opened one eye. She knew that signature light. “It’s snowing,” she said without even rising from her pillow to look out the window. “I’ll get up later.”
1933 Went to Cottage Grove Polo and enjoyed it very much. Then I stayed in while Billy went to see Tom Jones. He’s sick. Billy doesn’t trust me.
Our presence was no longer a benefit to Louise and Mike. Their lives grew narrower and narrower, punctuated by food and the tragedy of deterioration. Aunt Louise was depressed. Uncle Mike grew more and more vegetable-like. He couldn’t dress himself and rarely had a thought of his own – and when he did, it usually meant an episode of Alzheimer’s confusion was imminent.
The intercom was a godsend for averting tragedy but it was horrible when it allowed us to hear how meaningless their lives had become. Louise believed Mike was a confused wreck, but she bedeviled him, asking eight to ten times a meal if he was going back to bed after he ate, telling him it was morning when it was actually evening, growing irritable and frustrated when he didn’t respond, blaming him for ignoring her. It was too sad.
Either Kipling or I began sleeping on Louise and Mike’s sofa, leaving on a low-wattage lamp so we wouldn’t be a complete shock if one of them awakened and wandered the house during the night. On those nights we slept fitfully, only napping, always waking to the slightest bump, rustle, cough, or step.
There was a three a.m. when I sensed a presence. I opened my eyes from a shallow sleep to find Louise in the doorway silently considering me. Her eyes were piercing, clear of confusion. We both froze, gazing at each other, and my first thought was: She knows. She recognized the truth of why we were there and what was happening: this accumulation of loss, the dark cloud of ending.
Neither of us spoke and after a few moments she turned and I heard her slow steps back to the sleeping porch.
The days assumed a surreal sameness, all of us trapped by circumstances. We didn’t dare leave the farm; they wouldn’t leave the farm. We bullied them awake when they only longed to sleep. We cooked, and hoped they ate. Watching, waiting.
Kipling and I began a slow dance of irritation around each other. Moody touchiness struck both of us. Neither of us was ready for winter and what we knew had to happen next. I felt he wasn’t helping me make plans for the future.
He loved the farm. It had soaked into his being: the wild animals, our closeness to the seasons and forest, the phases of the moon. Once, forgetting our reality, he’d deliberated whether to plant new strawberries next year. I blamed him for hiding from our deadline to leave.
But, just as I had when we approached our six-month mark, I’d failed to prepare Louise and Mike for a nursing home; instead we’d spent all our energy struggling to maintain their lives as normally as possible, even when it was utterly abnormal.
There was a popular term: magical thinking. Useless thinking was more apt.
“We need a strategy,” I told Kipling irritably.
He sat in the rocker, with Morris purring on his lap. “A strategy,” he repeated, sounding too much like Mike.
‘Yes, a strategy. You’re not listening to me,” I accused him. “You pay more attention to Morris more than you do me.” And when he didn’t answer, I added, “And Morris kills things.”
He looked up at me. “Morris can’t help the way he is.” Implying of course, that I could.
“We have to prepare them for a nursing home,” I said flatly.
“You know how you have to spring it on Louise that she has a doctor’s appointment an hour before the appointment?” Kipling asked.
“I don’t dare give her time to think about it or we have a royal battle,” I agreed, realizing a second too late where he was heading.
“So what would happen if we began talking about nursing homes?”
I slumped back on the sofa. “A disaster, an unmitigated disaster. She’d go into a frenzy. Are you suggesting we keep it a secret until the morning we put them in the car and move them?”
“Something like that.”
He was right. It sounded crushingly cruel, but I had to admit the same strategy had crossed my mind. Was it actually kinder to spare them days, weeks, of tension and sorrow for one horrible morning of feeling deceived and betrayed? Could we actually pull off such a maneuver?
When we met with Susan to discuss Louise and Mike’s move, she offered to look for a highly rated care home that would keep Louise and Mike together, where his Alzheimer’s wouldn’t be an issue.
“He’s not violent; he doesn’t wander,” she ticked off on her fingers. “He’ll stay close to Louise. There shouldn’t be a problem.” Until this time, her emphasis had been on helping us care for them, and her shift to finding them care was seamless. She recognized it was time, too.
Kipling and I bowed out of inspecting nursing homes, leaving it to Ray and Barbara and Susan. We would leave once Louise and Mike moved. Until them, we decided, we would concentrate on their daily care on the farm.
1933 Bill bought a new Studebaker coupe and gave me a new hat. He says it’ll make the trips to Michigan easier.
Next Tuesday, Chapter 27: Fate Steps In