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ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
©Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 27
Fate Intervenes
The calendar year wound toward its end, and not only did our departure loom, but so did Louise and Mike’s move from the farm into a care home. Ray and Barbara had investigated nursing homes and made arrangements for their transition to a small, well-staffed facility with an excellent reputation to be as painless as possible, although we all accepted it would be anything but.
We strategized the logistics of their move, tried to prepare ourselves for the approaching upheaval. It was going to be a treacherous journey and every aspect of it was weighted with dread. There weren’t enough words we could tell ourselves to make it any easier.
But as frequently happens, when an ending is superficially imposed, Fate steps in and provides another ending. As if by stating your plans, you’ve invited the world take it out of your hands.
In the morning, as I poured Mike a cup of coffee, he sneezed. At lunch, I noticed his face had developed ruddy spots high on his cheekbones. He wouldn’t let me take his temperature, but I felt his forehead and confirmed he was feverish. He hadn’t been off the farm for three weeks, so we knew either one of us or one of the social services people had brought him a contagious illness. Louise was fine and so far, so were Kipling and I.
Mike had always been healthy – I couldn’t recall seeing him with a cold or sniffles. Mysteriously, his fever appeared to clarify his mind. For one long joyous day, despite his fever and a deepening huskiness in his voice, he was tender with Louise, calling her “Weezie,” responding to her conversation, and speaking in simple but coherent sentences. It was a small beacon of light.
But that night, I was awakened from a dozey sleep by Louise’s distressed voice over the intercom shouting “Operator, operator. Send an ambulance. I need help.”
When I rushed onto the sleeping porch, I found Mike lying on the floor beside his bed, feebly moving his arms. His movements were reflexive, his eyes closed. Louise had forgotten there wasn’t a live operator on the telephone to hear her frantic calls.
I made the 911 call for her while Kipling tended to Mike. Louise, terrified and panicked, tried to help him, only compounding Kipling’s difficulty at lifting Mike into bed. I led Louise to the kitchen, out of the way, repeating, “Kipling is helping Uncle Mike, Aunt Louise. Kipling is helping him.”
The ambulance arrived within minutes and as strangers moved themselves and their equipment about in her house, Louise sat silent and still in the kitchen as if they were invisible, her hands folded in her lap, suddenly and stonily calm.
“Is he dead?” she asked me, her voice a monotone.
“Definitely not,” I reassured her, “but they’re taking him to the hospital.”
“Good,” she said, nodding. And then five minutes later, “Is he dead?”
I stayed with Louise while Kipling followed the ambulance to the hospital. Later, he told me that when Mike, now alert, saw Kipling enter the emergency room where the doctor was examining him, he said “Well, it’s you,” and then asked the doctor, “Can he stick his nose in or does he have to stick it out?” Kipling remained with him all night while tests were taken and he was settled into a hospital room.
Mike was diagnosed with pneumonia, and the next day when we took Louise to visit him, a nurse led us into Mike’s room and asked him, “Do you know who this is?” Uncle Mike lit up and answered, “My lovey dovey.” We turned away while they greeted each other.
When we three returned from the hospital, we couldn’t leave Louise alone in the house because even after only a few moments, she was adamant that she’d been abandoned for hours. She claimed that no one had taken her to the hospital to see Mike, and he’d died.
After four days in the hospital with two bedside watches and a call at Aunt Louise’s request for a priest to administer Extreme Unction, it was obvious Mike would not be coming home again. His previous spark of awareness was gone. He stared without recognition, now hardly even acknowledging motions around him. His daughter arrived and kept vigil by Mike’s bed where he lay unresponsive, and then quietly left.
Although Doctor Hoffer was Louise’s doctor, not Mike’s, he dropped by Mike’s room while Louise was there and asked her how she felt about Mike entering a nursing facility. He hunkered down to her eye level.
She sat in a chair pulled tight against Mike’s bed, fussing with his covers. She’d pressed the call button to request a nurse’s opinion of Mike’s condition so often that the nursing director had taken me aside and asked me to move the call button out of her reach.
“I want to be with him,” Louise told Doctor Hoffer in a determined voice. “I’m going to the nursing home, too.”
“He’s a good guy,” he told Louise.
“I know it,” she agreed. “The best.” She was fervent but her eyes twinkled a little when she added, “And that makes me be my best.”
1933 We went to Michigan. Left home at 5 AM and got to Mother and Dad’s at noon. Had 33. No trouble. Billy let me drive the last five miles and I got stuck. Caught hell for that. I took Frank and Johnny for a ride – by myself. The weather is very bad so we can’t go back to Chicago for a few days more. I went to mass and communion with Mother and Dad. I try to be better.
We sent Dad $300 to give to Thompson. I hope he doesn’t get stuck. Beer is back! Just like Roosevelt promised. Billy refuses to work for $1. Someday he will.
We didn’t try to change Louise’s mind about joining Mike in the nursing home. We had considered a dozen scenarios about what would transpire when we physically took the two of them to a facility, and hadn’t dreamed of this result: that she’d want to go. “Love is different when you’re older,” she’d told me. “It’s not all giddy like when you’re young; it’s deeper. You’ll find out.”
An ambulance transported Mike from the hospital to the nursing home, We would bring Louise the following morning, when Mike was settled in. Louise was so excited about joining Mike that she couldn’t eat dinner that evening, and was dressed and sitting by the window the next morning when we got up. She didn’t request anything from her house to accompany her, didn’t care about which clothes I packed, didn’t look back as we drove out the driveway through a light snowfall.
Mike was too disoriented to recognize Louise, but she was oblivious. She soothed and fussed over him and pushed the call button by his bed with abandon. Each time she called, a staff member appeared to reassure her. She barely noticed when we left.
Kipling and I returned to the farm, feeling disoriented ourselves. For the first time in a year, Louise and Mike’s house stood empty, the doors locked, left behind. We didn’t need to listen to the intercom, or sleep on their sofa, or watch out the window for a disturbance. We were rudderless. I caught myself whispering. We left the intercom turned on and that night I woke to a sound and thought to myself, “Aunt Louise is awake,” before I realized I’d heard something else: the refrigerator turning on or the house creaking. Not Louise.
Four days later, Uncle Mike died peacefully in his sleep in the same room with Louise. It was unexpected; he’d been improving. We thought they’d have more time.
Ray phoned us in the middle of the night to tell us Mike had died, and Kipling and I immediately drove to the care center to join Ray. Louise was in bed. She couldn’t hold onto the fact that Mike was gone and continually asked the same questions, raising herself up to a sitting position without using her hands: “Is Mike really dead?” “What did he die of?” Or saddest, she’d tell us, “I had a terrible dream that Mike died.”
Louise asked to go home for Mike’s funeral. I offered to stay in the house with her the night before the services, but she refused. I stayed anyway, sleeping on the sofa. In the night, I heard her ask, “Are you cold, Mikey? Please answer me, dear.”
Although the memory that she’d attended slipped away within hours, she sat calmly through Mike’s funeral mass and burial, saying once to a relative, “I begged and pleaded with him not to die, but he never did anything I told him.”
The morning after Mike’s funeral she calmly asked to be taken back to the nursing home. “This place isn’t the same without Mike,” she told us.
1933 Cloudy and sultry. I got gypped on a fur piece and Billy made them give the money back. He’ll buy me another one. Mary Ford got kicked out. Oh what an awful mess. Big Mike is dead. No one was expecting that. Everything is terrible. I’m trying to get things straightened out.
Stella is visiting. We went to White City and had a good time. Then, bad luck: we went to the beach and someone took $9, Bill’s shoes and pants and my purse. Made me feel so blue.
Bill hasn’t worked from March to July. I worry myself sick. I went to Palos Park and picked blackberries. Bill leaves for New York tomorrow.
On an icy January morning, we pulled away from the little house just as dawn broke in the east. It had sleeted the night before and the driveway glistened in the headlights. I looked behind us at the dark little house and Louise and Mike’s house, where we’d left the light over the stove glowing. It had felt too final to turn it off. Everything was still and quiet.
I saw the shadows of the birdfeeders: attached to poles, hanging from branches, nailed to buildings. Kipling had cleaned each one, repaired those that needed it, and then filled them all with sunflower seed until they couldn’t hold any more. He’d hung fresh suet for the chickadees, and even set out ears of dried corn for the squirrels.
We hadn’t given Morris a farewell pat or scratch behind the ears. We couldn’t find him. His food bowl was emptied each morning but he was nowhere to be found. “He’ll come out later,” my brother assured us. “We’ll take care of him.” Still . . .
We hadn’t said goodbye to Louise, but had visited her as usual the day before, saying, “We’ll see you soon,” as we customarily did when we left the facility. Some days she appeared content, others she asked when she’d be “released,” or angrily demanded to know who had “committed” her and why couldn’t she go home, please take her home. On that final day, it was tough to simply turn around at her door and wave goodbye, and agree that yes, I’d bring her a maple bar from the long-closed Schramm’s Bakery the next time I visited.
To leave the comparatively isolated house of an antique collector empty was unwise. Its contents had been sorted and the rooms partially emptied, a task we’d begun self-consciously, as if Louise or Mike might walk through the door and demand to know what we were doing. Every item was potent with their presence. But the demands of performing a task soon crowded out the emotions – most of them. As anyone who’d cleaned a home after a loved one’s death had painfully discovered, it was impossible to preserve a shrine.
During the past year, we’d accumulated enough to fill a small trailer and it slewed a bit , behind our truck as Kipling braked at the end of the driveway before turning onto the road. We looked at each other but we didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust myself to speak and there weren’t any words that felt right.
A full year had ended; a year plucked out of our lives, one that would take me even more years to sort out, and perhaps never actually understand. As we pulled onto the road and began our trek west I felt a potent mixture of sorrow and elation. Grief at leaving Aunt Louise and my brother and his family, the relatives and friends, for leaving the farm and my trail, and the life we’d forged, even with its limitations. But also anticipation, to see my children and friends and the mountains, to walk by the ocean.
“Ready?” Kipling asked.
“I am.”
We were going home.
1933 Billy has worked all month on the post office! At last, a real job. Life will be different now, I’m sure.
Today is the last day of the World’s Fair. I didn’t go. Billy was laid off. We’re going home for Thanksgiving. I miss the farm
End of Louise’s diary.
Next Tuesday, Chapter 28: What Happened After