I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  We daughters would come charging into town, believing that our bags of fresh peaches and our homemade blueberry pies, our roasted chickens, our transport of our father from Seacrest back into their house for a visit would ease his angst. We’d return him, ever so briefly, back into his world, and we thought we knew what was best.

  One cold February day, when we wheeled Dad into the house, Mary Jane greeted us from the kitchen counter, looking so cute in pale pink slacks, a cream top, and the gold necklace Dad bought her when they traveled to Ireland, with gold earrings to match.

  “My friend Ann and I do our all errands together now.” Her voice was animated and lively. Even short trips to buy milk or pick up prescriptions were fun, accompanied by an able-bodied friend.

  I watched Dad’s face. He’d always been smitten by Mary Jane’s spirit (when she wasn’t bossing him around). He reached out his arms, to pull her into his lap. But she resisted his flirtations and slipped back behind the counter, busying herself with supper. Bobbie and I exchanged glances, sensing Dad’s rejection.

  “Let’s play cribbage,” I proposed, fetching Dad’s homemade board and a deck of cards from the living room. “Me and Dad against Bobbie and Mary Jane.” He couldn’t count the cards anymore, and I never had much patience for cribbage strategy, but I figured we’d do okay together.

  “One semester at University of Michigan,” Dad told us, as my sister dealt the cards, “my grades slipped so badly I almost flunked out. Too much competitive cribbage and not enough studying.”

  “I hope to God that is all David is doing up at Wesleyan,” I joked. We all roared with laughter, Dad too, Mary Jane too, knowing today’s college temptations were much greater than cribbage. Mary Jane stepped to the stove, lifted the lid of a pot, then replaced it. Her eyes sparkled in the light. The room warmed with the content of family and the fragrances of made-from-scratch macaroni and cheese, steamed vegetables, and pie in the oven.

  Dad looked at our three faces, one at a time, then all together, and said, “This feels kind of like home.”

  Mary Jane swiveled back to the stove. I saw her shoulders shake and I knew she was choking back her tears.

  It must have felt like a stealth attack after dinner, how we brandished his warm red sweatshirt and struggled his arms into the sleeves. It must have felt like betrayal: forcing him into his jacket, then out into the cold night. But silently, in my mind, I was calculating the set of the sun, the fall of the dark, and the time he should be returned to the facility. And the long minutes it would take to help Dad transfer from the kitchen table to the car in the garage.

  The garage was cold and smelled of old paint and pesticide. I set the brakes on the wheelchair.

  “Dad, stand up and grip the top of car door,” I said.

  “I want to, but I can’t make my body do that!” My father didn’t budge. He was too heavy, too inert, for us to lift.

  “Bob, get into the car!” Mary Jane’s arms were crossed over her chest, and her tone carried more order than advice.

  I looked at the passenger seat of the car, so close, so soft, so simple to relax into. It appeared that the act of turning and sitting was no longer in the repertoire of his brain. And yet, I thought of a certain nurse’s aide at Seacrest whose touch with Dad was gentle and magically effective. I had watched her open up her arms to Dad in his wheelchair and say, “Alright now, Bob, stand up.” Her voice was sweet and calm and filled with the assurance that he would meet her, and he did. He’d rise straight up into her hands. Thinking back, I know she believed in him; there was no doubt in her mind that he could do this thing, and so he did.

  We didn’t know what to believe about his abilities, and we were impatient and scared. When we finally hooked our elbows into his armpits and pulled him to his feet, he trembled, hunched and silent, facing the interior of the car, his body rooted to the concrete floor of the garage. It was as if he was standing his ground, what little ground there was left to stand in his life.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, as I backed the rental car out of the drive. Just like his own father, my grandpa, at the end of his life, Dad lost all sense of direction when we drove around in the night.

  “To Seacrest, where your bed is,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to call the place where he lived “home.”

  “Oh, that hateful place,” he said.

  The next morning I awoke alone at Mary Jane’s, shivering in the pull-out guest bed. My sister had left before dawn to return to Connecticut. Even a flannel nightgown and four blankets couldn’t keep me warm. My hair lay flat, without body, and my skin was parched by the winter cold. But I could see outside the sliding glass doors that it had snowed in the night, so beautiful. A dry granular snow, small flaked, as brilliant as diamonds. If I couldn’t fix anything today, at least I could love the snow.

  In the kitchen, Mary Jane was making coffee. Wrapped in a powder blue chenille robe, she looked so tiny and vulnerable. She’d dropped weight this last year, pounds she couldn’t afford to lose. I sliced cornbread from dinner the night before and slid it into her toaster oven, thinking the buttery treat might taste good to her.

  At the table, she massaged her temples with her fingers.

  “Another migraine?” I asked, cupping my own hands around a hot mug.

  “No, just awful dreams,” she replied. Dad’s visit the night before had ratcheted her anxiety.

  “Please tell me,” I invited, slicing strawberries and bananas for our cereal.

  “In the dream I had a new job in New York City. When it was time to return home, I couldn’t find the right bus. Someone told me the bus I needed hardly ever came anymore. I was desperate to get back to New Jersey, but I couldn’t find the way.”

  “Oh, Mary Jane,” I said. “This whole thing with Dad is so very hard on you, isn’t it? It’s so difficult to know what the right things are to do. And with this progressive disease, it doesn’t seem like he’ll ever return to who he was.”

  She laid the silver butter knife carefully on her plate. My gifts of food, which meant love and comfort in my own family, didn’t offer the same succor to my stepmother.

  “I haven’t told you kids this,” she said. “I’m having panic attacks again, like I did when Stan and I first moved down here twenty years ago, and we were trying to get everything ready for our children at Thanksgiving. I thought I was definitely dying. I made Stan call an ambulance for me.”

  Her eyes glassed over with memory and tears.

  “I do everything I can to control it . . . meditation tapes, antianxiety drugs, therapy. But last Saturday, I could barely get my car over the bridge to go to church. I forced myself to get out of the car, but I couldn’t stay. I gave someone the envelope with my offering, and then I just had to go home.”

  “What does it feel like when that happens, Mary Jane?”

  “It’s like I am dying,” she said. “I feel pressure in my chest, and I can’t breathe. I get so dizzy. I feel like I might pass out at any minute, and I wonder if I’m going crazy.”

  “What helps, Mary Jane, how can I help?” I wanted so much to make things better for her. I leaned across the table and took her hand, wishing I could console her. My strategies for helping Dad hadn’t fully accounted for Mary Jane’s needs.

  “I just need everything to stay under control,” she said.

  I spent that day stocking up her pantry with food. I went to Home Depot for light bulbs and Lowe’s for whatever else I could check off her to-do list. I went to a greeting card store and chose the biggest, most fanciful valentine card on the rack. “For My Wife,” it read, in crimson, loopy script. Because Dad did love her, so much, and yet their relationship would never again be the same, given the lopsided care forced onto Mary Jane by the changes in my father’s brain and body.

  In his room in the facility, I found my father holding the telephone exchanging goodnights with Mary Jane. He turned his face away from me. “Please consider my proposition—that we sleep in the same bed tonight,”
he pleaded. “I’d sleep well if your arm was across my chest.”

  He lay back on his bed with his eyes closed. I felt I was witnessing their lives at far too intimate a scale.

  Dad said, “I’m just trying to figure out what’s wrong between me and Mary Jane.”

  “Tell me more,” I said.

  “I’m afraid she’ll have another explosion of anger if I can’t do all she asks or wants me to do.” He opened his blue eyes and stared straight into mine.

  I showed him the Valentine’s Day card I had bought for him and watched him scrawl a tiny, tiny “Bob” on the blank space at the bottom. In some ways, my father was no longer Mary Jane’s husband. But to him—she was still very much his wife.

  “Look, Dad,” I said. “If this place doesn’t work out better for you, we are just going to figure out something different.” We both knew that would mean him moving to Florida or Connecticut.

  “But how can I possibly arrange to live in Florida for the rest of my life?” Mary Jane still wouldn’t discuss them moving within New Jersey, into assisted living together, or closer to one of her children. And my father would be lost without her frequent visits, were he to move to Florida.

  “That would be traitorous to Mary Jane,” he said.

  My head hurt to think about it. There was no simple or right or even good and satisfying choice for him as far as living space, not that I could see.

  “It would be easy enough for you to care for me on day one,” Dad said. “But what about day forty?” He understood his situation better than we.

  CHAPTER 7

  Typical Day

  On Halloween night, I watched my father tread a line of orange electrical tape glued to the floor of his room. A nurse had placed it there to help him remember the path from the toilet to his bed. In the hall, I could hear the voices of aides helping other residents prepare for sleep. Last to go would be the elders dozing in front of the television in the common area.

  “Dad, I just picked up a new novel you might like. Shall I read aloud the first chapter?” I had plucked Maisie Dobbs from the shelves of a bookstore in Marlton, halfway between Manahawkin and the Philadelphia airport. I often stopped there on my way to Dad’s, to buy a cup of tea and a cranberry scone and wander the aisles for half an hour before I faced whatever needed fixing on those visits. I thought Dad might like the World War I setting of Jacqueline Winspear’s story.

  After a bit, Dad settled back against the pillows. Yes, he said, the book was interesting, but he didn’t think he’d be able to read it himself. “You take it home, Sue, you’ll enjoy it.” Was it macular degeneration or damage wreaked in his brain by ministrokes? I worried that he’d lost yet another way to divert and engage himself: reading books.

  And yet he’d surprise us. Earlier in the day, he had described another resident as “garrulous.” Mary Jane didn’t know the meaning of the word. “It means she talks too much,” my father had said. I had smiled to myself, enjoying that demonstration of his vocabulary. He could still shine.

  I set the novel on the bedside table, propped my feet on the bed frame, and leaned back in the wooden chair, feeling no urgency to leave. I had helped him change into plaid cotton pajamas. The top and the bottom didn’t match, but we didn’t care. I began to hum, and Dad joined me, his eyes closed, unselfconscious. It was like being with David when he was small, reading and singing together in the near dark. Or was it my own childhood this night evoked, how Dad would sit on the floor between my bed and Bobbie’s, holding her right hand and my left, singing together before sleep. It was something we knew how to do.

  We sang songs he had taught us as children, hymns and nutty tunes that I never heard anywhere but in our home.

  There’s an old hollow tree, ’bout a mile here from me,

  Where you lay down a dollar or two,

  Then you go round the bend and you come back again

  To that good old mountain dew.

  And “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy.” “Beautiful Brown Eyes” and “This Is My Father’s World.” When I heard the clock in the common room chime nine o’clock, I knew it was time to go.

  The next morning I stopped in to see Dad before I drove north to Connecticut. The residents were eating breakfast in the dining room. A red-haired aide returned my smile and pointed to a recliner where Dad was finishing his food.

  As soon as he saw me, he spoke, immediate and unguarded as a child: “Sue, I was devastated to wake up and find myself here alone at four in the morning.” His eyes started with tears.

  The aide placed a comforting hand on Dad’s shoulder. “This is what your father eats every morning: bacon, cereal, two pieces of toast with no butter, milk, orange juice. Don’t you, Bob?”

  Even though I visited as often as I could and was as helpful and present as I could be when I came, it was only every six or eight weeks. And just as soon as I turned and walked to the heavy double doors of Dad’s facility, pressed a four-digit code on the key pad, which no one in that memory care unit could do, I’d be released back into my freely lived life. But my father would settle back in his chair, squashed by loneliness and loss. For him, it was no comfort that I’d spent the last three days with him, because I had eventually left.

  “When you are not here,” the aide had confided, “your father sleeps way too much.”

  The next day, I walked on the campus of Wesleyan University with David. It was Parents’ Weekend, and my son was leading me through his “typical” day. We sat through two advanced classes in chemistry and microbiology. Then we walked to the cafeteria, where David ordered a chicken burrito. “This is typically what I have for lunch, Mom,” he said. I was so happy to follow his lead. With our trays, we threaded through the indoor tables and chairs with our trays to a sunny deck. “This is where I typically eat lunch,” he said.

  My dad with the first two of his four children: me (left) and sister Bobbie (circa 1953). Photo by Janet Isleib.

  I smiled at my son, at the preciousness of these two short days together. From across the quad, chapel bells rang the noon hour. Unbelievably, the song they chimed I had sung with my father just two nights before. “Brightly beams our father’s mercy, from the lighthouse ever more.”

  I needed that lighthouse, I needed some kind of guiding beam, for grief again gripped me when the weekend was over and I left David at his dorm. Again I cried. If my father allowed himself, I knew that’s what he’d do too, each time we said goodbye. I thought of my own college experience, how peripheral my parents had seemed to me at that time in my life. Their attempts at staying connected sometimes annoyed me. But that was at the time of my mother’s spiraling depression, the years when she drank to self-soothe. Surely David had less reason to want to escape family and home?

  My airplane cut through a haze of clouds portending snow. Far below, I glimpsed the great rivers of Connecticut and then New Jersey. Soon I’d be back in my own home, leaving Dad in a wheelchair, melancholy, and David at college, full of joy. I thought about how my plane trips divided my life from theirs like a knife slicing a cake, severing me from a time when my family was whole and together. I knew what their typical days looked like now. How should my own be molded?

  Several days later, I sat in a circle of five close friends. Once a month, we gathered together to share our dreams and offer each other emotional support. I brought this dream into the circle.

  I stood on the deck of a huge ferry boat cabled to an enormous dam. The dam enclosed a vast body of water, a reservoir, a safe place. But my boat was anchored to the downstream side and I noticed that the ropes binding the ferry to the dam were thin and had begun to unravel. I knew what kind of ropes should have secured the boat: huge, thick, marine-grade cables. But these were not. The sky boiled with thunderclouds, signaling the approach of a huge storm. What would hold my boat in place?

  “It’s so, so hard to see David move off into his own life without me, even though he’s thriving and I know it’s right!” I told my friends. I knew the
dream was about David, about my feelings of loss now that the physical ties that bound us had been severed.

  My friends nodded. Each one was a mother herself. Each had felt the same unavoidable pain.

  “Holding on, letting go, it’s an incredible dream image,” Mary Beth spoke first. “It really mirrors the thinning of your physical connection to your son.” If anyone understood forced separation, it was this beautiful friend whose own daughter, Claire, had died at the age of fourteen.

  “On the physical plane, yes,” said Amrita. Her own two boys still lived at home. “I can feel what a weight your heart carries, Sue. To be cut loose from the mooring of your life together feels unbearable. But remember, in the spiritual life, whenever something painful is presented to us, we are being asked to grow, to stretch beyond the confines of who we’ve believed ourselves to be.” I relaxed against the back of my chair. Tears flowed over my cheeks.

  Crystal took my hand and added her thought. “Sue, you are in one of life’s biggest transitions.” Her eyes met mine, swelling with compassion. “But even when David still lived here in Tallahassee, sometimes he felt emotionally distant to you, remember? Sometimes your relationship with him felt unavailable.”

  “But it wasn’t true then, Sue, and it isn’t true now,” she cried. “Nothing can ever destroy your deep mother/son connection. Nothing can ever destroy the love between you!”

  Even as the bond with my son seemed stretched so thin that first fall he was away, the umbilical cord binding me to the natural world pulled tighter than ever. My own typical days were deeply in flux. I didn’t know what my next project would be, but I knew I would grow into it, walking alone in wild places. I decided it was time to leave the agency that had comfortably held me for most of two decades and find my way more deeply into my own writing voice.

  All those years I had worked in an office, I had dreamed of more hours and days and weeks outside in the larger home that held me, which holds every one of us more securely than any physical structure we might build: our planet, the only place we can live. It was time to return to the big sky at the coast, with its many birds. Then I would know how to speak.