The call comes when David’s at work on the tugboat. His mother, your proverbial sweet little old lady, is in the hospital, fighting the nurses as if her life depends on it. Over the line, David hears his mother yelling at the top of her lungs. “You wretched beast!” A nurse gives it right back: “Don’t you dare throw down that phone again!”
David is supposed to talk his mother down.
“You’re not my son,” his mother insists when he gets her on the line. “My son is at work.”
On top of her recent falls and her dementia, she’s now had a heart attack. The damaged muscle sends a chemical into the blood that can be measured to tell the severity of the cardiac event. This one was off the charts.
Somehow she still has enough strength to fight off those she believes to be her kidnappers. Julie is under five feet, about 90 pounds, and 94 years old, but it takes four people to hold her down. She yanks out her IVs and kicks at the nurses. Later they station a “sitter” outside her room in case she tries to escape.
The boat drops David off, he Lyfts it to San Francisco, and we jump in our car and head north. I drive fast on the 101 as David makes calls. At the hospital, they’ll only let Son in to see Julie. (The admitting clerk, talking to her colleagues upstairs, intones, “Son wants to come up, as does Son’s Wife.”) I stay in the parking lot as the sun goes down and the moon rises. I try to take an arty photo of the “Emergency” sign. I surf Facebook but can’t stomach the bad news or the good. Then David calls, saying Julie recognizes him and is overjoyed he’s come to her rescue. But although Julie’s personal doctor and the nurses say she can go home, the relief hospital doctor, who’s just come on shift, says she can’t go home until they have the hospice interview, though the nurse at hospice said they’ll do the intake interview the next day, at home.
David wheels her out of there AMA, Against Medical Advice. AMA often seems like the best option. Medical advice is too often tainted with fear of liability. It’s not about the needs of the patient but the needs of the bureaucracy.
Back home, Julie rushes to Ed, her 97-year-old husband. He pats her back awkwardly. “Have they been feeding you?” she worries. “Yes,” he says peevishly, smirking over her head at her confusion, as if he himself doesn’t share it.
I throw together a dinner of sorts. David makes calls, trying to arrange for more at-home help. I overeat and overdrink, out of touch with my own needs.
After his parents go to bed, David and I unlatch the gate between the back yard and Healdsburg’s Oak Mound Cemetery. If this were fiction, that detail would be unbelievable. But in fact their lovely yard, bird feeders and fruit trees and lemon blossoms, opens onto a clod-filled field, the only ground left for new burials. Across the way is a restful village of crypts and headstones. The land slopes up to where mature trees shade the oldest of the graves, some from the early 1800s, with markers fractured off at the base, a clean break through the chiseled span of years.
One of us, I won’t say who, smokes another cigarette, their one-a-day habit amped up by stress. Despite everything, it’s a beautiful night. Down the street, floodlights illuminate a baseball game. The cheering of the crowd comes to us as if from underwater. We’re quiet, though thoughts swirl like angry ghosts. The home aide who guilts us for not being there more, though for years it’s felt like our lives are held hostage to David’s parents’. Their stubborn insistence that they don’t need help, though that puts even more of a burden on us. Ed recently yelled at David: “It’s all your fault!” David’s brother is holed up in a Mexican beach house, waiting out his parents’ messy demise. I think briefly of my own health worries and my problems with my own family of origin. Is it too late to run away and join the circus?
It feels good to breathe in the night air, tinged as it is with cigarette smoke and the smell of dirt. There’s nothing like a crisis to get you to fully inhabit the odd moment of peace. I feel myself coming back to myself, if only briefly.
Later, in the guest room, David and I are face-to-face, skin-to-skin, on one of the high single beds, breathing in each other’s aliveness. It feels like we’re at the bottom of a rowboat in the middle of a wild, sloppy sea, a body of endlessness that asks but doesn’t deign to answer the big questions: How long do they have left? How long do we?
I think of Ram Dass’s idea that we’re all just walking each other home. I picture David gripping one of his mother’s elbows, me the other, as we walk her towards her final home.
The thing is, walking her there, we’re also walking ourselves there, all of us heading toward the end. I feel closer not just to their deaths but to my own. I know that doesn’t make sense, but neither does my certainty that below the twin bed where we huddle, sharks circle.
Later, the brother in Mexico makes his bimonthly call to check in. The brothers don’t talk. Mexico brother gets updates from other family members, though it’s impossible that he’s heard the latest. Ed answers the phone. “Everything’s fine,” he assures his other son.
Recovering in the cemetery
It feels good to breathe in the night air, tinged as it is with cigarette smoke and the smell of dirt. There’s nothing like a crisis to get you to fully inhabit the odd moment of peace. I feel myself coming back to myself, if only briefly.