“I already did. But I’ve heard we are scheduled to die.” Her voice held a south Georgia lilt. “Dah” she said. “I’ve heard we are scheduled to dah.”
“You must be scared,” I said. Miss Abby turned her neck and shoulders and eyes all of a piece, and said, yes, she was, and now she was ready to latch onto me for comfort.
“I need a minute more to talk with Ms. Sue,” said Christine, turning Abby by the shoulders and easing her back out the door. Christine then told me how she’d brought her own father home to die, eight years ago. He was in his nineties, and even though she had to stay up with him straight through four days and four nights as well, it was all worth it because when he came into her kitchen on the first day and sat in a chair at the table and her little dog jumped into his lap, “It’s so good to be home” he said, and that moment carried Christine through the next ninety-six sleepless hours, the stretch of time it took him to complete his dying.
Dad wanted to come live with us so much. Often he’d say, “Sue, I want to go to your house to live.”
Or he might say: “Today, I started out walking to your house.”
“I know that’s what you wish you could do, Sue,” said Christine. “But my dad wasn’t like your dad. You couldn’t do that for him. He’s not dying, and he’s too hard to physically handle.” Still, we both knew how limited his quality of life had been lately and how great his suffering, especially last week with two episodes of painfully impacted bowels. It wasn’t acceptable for him to suffer any level of abuse on top of the disabilities brought on by his failing body.
I was very upset about my father and equally desperate about my own work. How could I protect him completely and still get my own writing done?
It was Bermuda-born Beulah—the first of the outside help I hired—who began to bring order into my life and advocacy into Dad’s. Her hair was cut into a squared-off Afro, pure white, and her eyes were as deep as coffee. She carried a big black bag, which contained a French language workbook, crossword puzzles, snacks, and knitting. She’d leave me a brief note every night, listing supplies needed for Dad’s room and any issues of concern. I’d always write back my thank-yous.
But Beulah preferred to talk things through after her five-hour shifts with my father. Surely I owed her that, didn’t I? “I prepare myself every day for what is to come in the evenings with Mr. Bob,” she had told me. She wasn’t a young woman, nearly seventy, in fact.
Midmorning, her call would come. If I was home, I would dump a load of clean clothes on our bed. I’d slip headphones over my ears and fold and listen.
“Hi Sue, good morning, Beulah here, touching base.”
“Beulah, hello, so good to hear your voice.” I shook out a green T-shirt and folded it in half on the quilt.
“Your father and I, we had a wonderful night last night. We watched the Travel Channel, a program about the country of Laos. And we really enjoyed it. He, especially. And I know you’ll be happy to hear that Mr. Bob spoke to his brother on the phone; they had a wonderful conversation.”
I was very glad to hear that; contact was important to both my dad and his brother, and Beulah made sure it happened every night.
Beulah continued. “And I tried to get him to clean his teeth, but he was confused. He definitely did not want the electric toothbrush. So I got the manual one and he still couldn’t do it himself.”
I murmured into the phone, stacking our T-shirts in two piles on the bed.
“So I said to your father, ‘Well, let me just try to do it a little bit’ . . . and girl, do you know he let me clean his teeth! And he rinsed his mouth, and then he went to bed.”
I truly was grateful for her kind pacing and told her so. I separated out Jeff’s thick black socks from my white ones.
“Then I gathered up two soiled outfits and a dirty towel that had some cereal spilled on it. I went down to the laundry and washed them. Lucy was there.”
“How was Lucy with you, Beulah?” I asked.
“She’s not happy with me being in the laundry room. But I stayed cool, calm, and collected. I’m just sort of keeping my eye on her.” Beulah laughed. She knew she was my eyes and ears, and she was committed to bringing me every detail. So far, we’d been on the phone more than twenty-five minutes. I told Beulah I needed to get back to work.
“Okay, Sue, I’ll talk to you later. Have a blessed day. Bye-bye.”
I’d hired Beulah to replace me so I could redirect attention to my work. After a time, I asked if she would record her reports in a notebook, so I could keep up more easily with her observations of my father’s evenings.
The reports from Beulah lengthened into several pages a night. She worried that the Landing staff would read our communications. I couldn’t imagine anyone else wanting or willing to read the excruciating minutia of Dad’s evenings, but still we hid them in a manila envelope on the top shelf of Dad’s kitchen cabinet. Beulah’s script was precise and elegant, and her attention to my father’s needs was absolute.
Dad couldn’t report on how his nights had gone, the good or the bad of them, not with any coherence. I hadn’t realized how much I needed Beulah for that until she had filled in the lines for me.
She’d call when things were tough. One Sunday morning, Jeff and I paddled far out on the Aucilla River. I’d left my phone in the car. Hours later, guilt twanged my heart when I heard her steady voice and the content of her voicemail.
“Hi Sue. Good morning, it’s Beulah, touching base as usual. Your father had sort of—I’d call it an unproductive night. I found him somewhat withdrawn. We watched The Lawrence Welk Show, and afterward he wouldn’t get up from his easy chair to go to bed for a long time.”
She drew out the word “long” for emphasis.
“So I didn’t press him. I just sat patiently until finally somewhere about ten minutes after nine, mind you, he made a motion to get up and I got him out of the chair and settled in bed nicely.
“And I said to him, do you want me to read? And he said, ‘No, I’m too tired. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate.’
“Then your father said: ‘I think this disease is getting to me.’ So I told him, that’s the reason why we just take it one day at a time. And then we had our prayer as usual, and he went to sleep.
“Sue, we really need to get more pullups and underpads and he’s requested prunes to eat. Just thought I’d let you know. Take care. Have a blessed day. Bye-bye.”
Before my father became ill, he documented his own life in letters exchanged several times a week with his brother, my uncle Don. Dad kept yellow legal pads nearby at all times, and high-quality ballpoint pens, whether at home or traveling. The two men reported to each other on trees planted, home projects constructed, the activities of grown children, books and ideas, and increasingly on doctors’ visits.
But my father couldn’t write letters anymore and he hadn’t been able to read a book for some years. “Sue, I can’t get any action out of my eye man,” he had complained. But in a small examining room, the ophthalmologist had explained that because of the disease, Dad’s eyes and his brain could no longer communicate with one another, not through written language. It was a terrible loss.
I’d scan Beulah’s log entries for clues: an upturn in Dad’s strength, or a good meal ingested, or a timely bowel movement. She wrote and I read for the same reason: to see if we couldn’t bring structure to the disease that was toying with and killing my father’s brain. Dementia is a chaotic place to live, filled with emotional tension and challenge.
I noticed that the spiral bound notebooks containing Beulah’s reports were piling up far more quickly than my own words in my journals or on the pages of the book I was writing. My hope had been that leaving the constraints and assignments of my agency position would free up my pen and my time and return my attention to other ways of perception and writing. But I was still struggling with my roles. Mother and stepmother to three sons grown out and away. Daughter of an aging father needing a good deal of my help. And lover of
a planet increasingly under assault.
As much as I wanted to console my father, I wanted to speak for the Earth. To do that, I needed to dedicate myself to writing. To have something worth saying, I needed to spend more time—days and weeks and months—at the coast. I needed to place myself into direct experience and intimacy with the birds, not simply digest and reword what I’d been taught or could glean online. As a child and a young adult, I was taught to be faithful to the church, a traditional education, my parent’s conservative politics, state agency organizational charts, even the language of science. The wild birds, and my love for them and fear for their fate, pulled me loose of those constructs.
One day, knowing Dad was safe in Beulah’s care, I drove down to the coast to a little Gulf access called Wakulla Beach. I took off my shoes and waded across an ankle-deep tidal inlet, making my way toward a cluster of birds I wanted to observe. Sun chased over the clear water’s surface. Up ahead, in the salt creek, something bobbled in the water. I eased closer, not knowing if it was animal or plant. The object was shaped like an old-fashioned garden dibble, avocado green, thin, longitudinally salt-wrinkled. It was a mangrove seed. And it was tracing a message in the sandy bottom.
What was it writing? I wanted to know. I watched it sway in the mild tide. It drag-floated at the exact depth to activate its writing tip, the growing cusp of the seed. It was as if a small aquatic animal tailed through the shallows, leaving its track. Wading behind, I followed its inscription on the floor of the creek. If I hadn’t caught the mangrove seed in the act, I’d never have understood the source of the story in the sand.
It drew mountains. It drew curves. Retreating and advancing, it followed the water, telling the story of the tide as it scribed a path in the sand. Staying with it, I could see that its response to the water’s pull was extraordinarily precise. A pen that free and that sensitive could allow me to pay attention to all kinds of knowing.
My voice could no longer be denied. I was flooded with spontaneous prayer: May my passage through life and my writing be as pure as the Earth’s own pen. Please, I entreated, may it be so.
And so began the writing of Coming to Pass: Florida’s Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change. When I returned to my house, I inscribed a fat black journal with a single word—COAST—and affixed images of oystercatchers and sand dunes to make it beautiful.
I didn’t know what this book would become, at first. “At the core of every piece of work is the question,” wrote David James Duncan. “You may not answer it, but you are always moving toward it. Your ability to articulate a question is what will make for a good writing. It’ll be a trail marker.”
Welcome evidence of endangered red wolves on St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge. Photo by David Moynahan.
I began to articulate the things I wanted to learn:
What is the unique nature of this coast, geological, biological, human/cultural?
How were the islands formed, and how are they changing?
When I was born in the 1950s, there were but 300 ppm carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Now it contains an increasingly catastrophic 410 ppm. How can I address that in a way that others can hear?
Was there ever a time when people lived inside the shape of this landscape, in reciprocity, not simply on top of it? What would that be like?
I copied those questions and many more onto the first pages of my coast journal, which I kept in the fashion of a commonplace book. I began to record interviews with scientists, jot notes on the tides, sketch snowy plovers, copy passages from the myriads of experts whom we really ought to pay attention to, like Orrin Pilkey and Cornelia Dean, and from poets and sages like Henry Beston, John Hay, and Leslie Marmon Silko.
Over time, I allowed my own body and my own senses to listen to what the coast might want to be said directly. I offered myself as a conduit. More and more space in the journal became devoted to the voices of the birds and the sand and the seeds. I fixed my words, my tracks, in my notebooks, just as rare shorebirds lay their footprints in the sand, and side by side with the paw prints of St. Vincent’s she-wolf and her pup on that island. I would learn to meander, to sniff, to observe, to explore, just like those wolves on the beach. In a relaxed, curious state, with steady attention, I could learn to be present. I would learn to move so that wild animals would feel safe in my presence. Taken together, maybe our tracks would say: We were here, and we found it beautiful beyond all imagining, and worth every effort to preserve and protect.
I didn’t know I’d be left with the notebooks kept by all of my dad’s caregivers, over the next four years, beginning with Beulah. They still occupy a corner in our storage shed, a stack three feet thick. I couldn’t throw them away, for it was the notes of our personal staff of caregivers that allowed me back into my own writing.
“Being good is not sufficient for these times,” said the great healer, writer, and wise woman Deena Metzger. “What you are called to do is really, really bear witness.”
CHAPTER 12
Then We Hired Jill
On the porch of the Landing, men and women gathered in oversized green rockers to enjoy the end of the day.
Tall, bald Roscoe pushed through the front door and headed toward a potted hibiscus on the sidewalk. “Where’s your babe magnet?” asked another resident, referring to Roscoe’s dog, Tigger, who often occupied the laps of resident ladies.
Roscoe didn’t answer until he had pinched a single crimson blossom and tucked it behind his ear.
“In Hawaii, this means you are available,” he grinned, aiming his remark at no one in particular. Except I noticed a pink flush bloom on the cheeks of one quiet old woman across the porch.
“That Roscoe is cutting in on my territory,” Dad grumbled in my ear as the banter continued. I wondered if the same woman had caught my own father’s eye.
“There’s a lot of drama around here, Dad,” I said.
“It’s slow moving,” he replied.
I dialed up my sister Bobbie on my cell, and as was often the case, Dad turned the conversation to the perennial problem of romance.
The Landing’s recreation therapist, red-haired and curvy, stopped to greet us on her way home. Dad’s smile opened, broad as a wedge of cantaloupe. The young woman rested a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t forget, Bob,” she said. “Sittercise is tomorrow at ten in the morning. I want you to come and join us.” Dad tiptoed the fingers of his left hand up her forearm. Gently, she disengaged, and blew him a kiss. We watched the young woman walk to her car.
“How kind she is,” I said. “You should to go to her exercise class, Dad.”
“She sounds great,” said Bobbie, through the speaker on the phone.
Dad (right) and his younger brother, Don, shared a deep, lifelong bond.
“She could stand to lose a few pounds,” our father said.
“Dad!” I chided. “That is not your business!”
“Dad, have you ever had a relationship with a woman who was just a friend?” Bobbie was exasperated.
“You can’t divorce the two, friendship and love,” said Dad.
“There you go,” said Bobbie. “You’ve put your finger right on the problem!”
“How old would you say she is?” asked Dad, ignoring my sister’s counsel.
“About twenty-eight, I guess.”
“God Almighty!” yelped my dad. Even he knew a woman in her twenties was too young for him.
My sister and I chuckled. Our father was not amused.
“Why are you two being so selfish?” said Dad. “I’m allowed to fall in love.”
“She is my daughter’s age, Dad,” said Bobbie. “Pursuing her is out of the question.”
Later in the evening, I tilted back in a black ladderback chair next to my father’s bed, my feet propped on his bed frame. The voice channeled through the speakerphone on the nightstand was Uncle Don, my father’s little brother, seventy-seven years old to Dad’s eighty-two.
“What have you got on
your calendar this week, Rob?”
“I’ve got to make contact with my three paramours, Don,” said Dad. “You know I’ve got these various love interests, and I don’t want to make a mistake. For me, our age differences seem to fade away. But I don’t think the objectives of my interest are so sure about that.”
Uncle Don replied, “Maybe you should just cool it for a while, take it easy?” His voice carried not a scrap of judgment.
“I can’t last forever, Don,” said Dad. He lay in bed on his back, eyes shut, hands folded over his chest. The corners of his mouth curved in a foxy grin, which made me smile in turn.
“And I admire that dedication,” replied my uncle, who had been married to only one woman—my aunt Carol—compared to my father’s five wives. “But it sounds exhausting to me. It reminds me of the last half mile to Camp Yaw Paw— all uphill!”
I grabbed the chance to divert my father from his fantasies.
“Tell me about Camp Yaw Paw, you guys?”
“Sue, it was a great place to go for the weekend when we were teenagers, our Boy Scout troop’s Adirondack shelter,” Uncle Don said. “There were six bunks in a row behind long sashes of glass that protected the whole front of the cabin from the weather. But you had to hike three miles uphill from the paved road trail to get there. And after you’d trudged the first couple miles with your pack and all your supplies for the weekend, that last half mile seemed to take a mighty long time.”
“Don, I don’t know if I’m capable of cooling it,” mused my dad.
I found my father’s optimism inconsistent with his situation. If he weren’t flat on his back in an assisted living facility. If we hadn’t so recently buried his fifth beloved wife. If I hadn’t just helped him into his plaid cotton pajamas, dark colors, mismatched top and bottom. If he weren’t wearing a pullup under his pants. But we were learning never to underestimate our father.
It wasn’t easy to find caregivers who could work with Dad’s special set of needs. His mind was reasonably good, sometimes, but his body was very weak. And he himself wanted companionship and respect, not just physical help.
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird Page 12
