Wait Until Tomorrow

by Pat MacEnulty

  The next day after the ritual gorging on gifts and before the ritual gorging on food, Hank and I left the house for a walk. We cut down an alley behind perfectly landscaped lawns and up a hill into a meadow.

  “This is the old way to the high school,” Hank said. We wandered along a fence beside the football field and into the woody edge of a golf course. We cut over and wound up inside a cemetery where we lingered, reading rows of plaques bearing remote dates: 1844–1910 and 1851–1904. I found myself reading the first names as we walked down the long rows—Margaret, Stella, Effie, Walter, Grazella, Charles, and John. Above the names were the words father, mother, husband, or sister.

  As I gazed over the grounds at the hundreds of simple plaques on the ground, I felt as if I were watching a parade that had been going on forever. All these people, I thought. All these laughing, loving, lying, hating, working, eating, and finally dying minds and bodies. All those souls, all those now-silent voices. My mother has often said she wonders where the music goes when we can no longer hear it. Those vibrations are still traveling somewhere.

  It’s an old, old truth that seems to lie in wait for us like the tree we never notice until it falls down in our path. It seems that we must acknowledge every once in a while that we are only visiting here and briefly at that.

  Now Beth’s ashes are lodged in that same cemetery, and Hank Senior’s time is short. Hank and I stare at each other in the empty house like two lost and abandoned children.

  “We have to get out of here,” I tell him. Everything about this house, the couch where we’re sitting, the coffee table where we played Clue, the two recliners where his parents always sat, the dry black hole of the fireplace, everything is a reminder of all we once had. And it wasn’t long enough. There just wasn’t enough time.

  “Here, take this,” Hank says, handing me half a Xanax. So I do. The grief lifts briefly, and we get on about our business, visiting one parent and then the other, eating dinner with Steve, and then back to visit a parent.

  The most poignant moment is when Jean is talking to her husband, her high school sweetheart, on the phone in the hospital while he is at hospice.

  “You take care of yourself,” he tells her.

  “I will,” she says. “I’ll see you soon.”

  At the hospice house, I sometimes pick an orange from the tree in the backyard. Hank Senior is not the only one dying here. A few very quiet people sit in the living room or stay in their beds. The women work hard, cleaning these broken bodies, feeding them, making them comfortable. Their activity keeps the place from feeling morose. Business as usual, people living, people dying.

  Jean’s surgery goes well, and she comes back home. It’s time for me to go home as well. While I was gone, Emmy was sick with the flu and I was not there to take care of her. My mother was alone in the nursing home and I wasn’t there for her either. But they both survived without me.

  I hug Hank goodbye at the airport. He is staying with his mother for a while as she recovers. The sky picks me up from the ground and tosses me over the continent.

  Morning. I drive to the nursing home where my mom is in rehab. Her body is a crumbling house. Her mind is worse. It is nine thirty when I walk through the corridor to her room. I find her lying in bed, whimpering.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”

  She has no answer, and I realize I am once again asking the wrong question. Somehow I assumed there was something I could fix if only she’d tell me what. But it is obvious I have made a misstep. I should not ask questions. I need to bring answers.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” I tell her. “There’s nothing wrong, Mom.”

  I turn to lower the volume on the TV, which I brought from her apartment. She keeps whimpering as I fiddle with the controls. The whimpering is an insistent tug on my consciousness, making it impossible to focus.

  “Stop it,” I say, glancing back at her, but my voice is gentle. She closes her mouth in compliance.

  “Now, why aren’t you dressed yet, I wonder? Do you want to get dressed, Mom?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want to do,” she says, clutching her hospital robe. “I can’t tell if it’s day or night.”

  I glance at her rolling table and see that her breakfast is mostly gone.

  “Mom, look out the window. See, it’s daylight, and you’ve just had breakfast, so it must be morning, right?” An azalea bush waves a meager bloom on the grounds outside.

  “Yes, yes. You’re right.” Her voice relaxes. She lets go of the gown.

  Actually, she is far more coherent than she was before I left. And the infection she had earlier is gone. Her breathing is better. Once again, she has peeked into the abyss and beat a retreat.

  “I wonder if I should dress you. Maybe they’re going to clean you up first.”

  I go out to find a nurse’s assistant.

  “Has my mother been cleaned up?”

  “No, not yet,” she says. She’s headed into someone else’s room.

  “Then I’ll do it,” I answer. She directs me to the clean towels and washcloths, but the closet is empty so I get some clean ones out of the laundry room. It doesn’t take long to know where everything is, to feel like one of the staff.

  Back in my mother’s room, I gently wash her back with the warm, soapy washcloth. I wipe down her arms and armpits and bring the washcloth under her soft shapeless breasts. Neither of us is self-conscious about it. I once nursed at those breasts. Can there be a more intimate bond?

  I dress my mother in a green dress with long sleeves, but then I discover that her diaper has not been changed. It is thick and musty with pee, so I change the diaper, promising myself I will be more vigilant about the care she gets in this place.

  I am lodged on twin peaks of grief. Emmy is away at school, growing up, growing away from me, on her way to a new life. And my mother has taken one step closer to death. I know I have to empty out her apartment. She’ll never come back to this place. I have no idea where she’ll go, but in the meantime I need to pack her things for storage. Alone in her apartment with the piano like a black accusation, a claustrophobic agony slips a pair of thick hands around my rib cage. I rush outside, gasping for air. I find the shelter of my car but the sobs are shaking me like an angry parent. I call my brother, Jo, and I cry and can’t stop for a long time.

  TWO

  SPRING 2008

  We celebrate my mother’s ninetieth birthday in the nursing home: Emmy, who is home for spring break, my two brothers, and me. We sit at a little square table in the dining room. It’s a shabby place, but we have it to ourselves except for the occasional staff person who walks through to the kitchen. I think the last time we were all together was when I was four months pregnant with Emmy. We had all gone to spend Christmas at my mother’s house in Edenton. For some reason she was living in the parish house and it was big enough for all of us and then some. What I remember is snow on the ground and tromping through the small town with Jo after David and his family left. Funny how families form and reform little alliances. That year David was constantly bickering with his wife, and Mom was a bag of worry. As a music director and orchestra conductor she was used to being in control, but we rolled out of her reach like marbles on a polished floor. Not to mention that I was pregnant and unmarried.

  “I’m tired of being the mother,” she said.

  Today we are all in alliance. I’ve brought a cake. David takes pictures with a fancy new digital camera, Jo smiles his beatific smile, and Emmy brings that light laughter with her as always. Our mother is so happy to be surrounded by her children. The scrambled jigsaw pieces of my mother’s mind now seem to be able to form half a picture of the world. I have taken her to a neurologist, who treated her like she was moron instead of a brilliant woman with brain damage. We still don’t know if she’s had a stroke—or if her mental state is just the result of the effects of the medicine. What I don’t know yet is just how long it takes for medicine to leave an o
ld person’s system. When I was a young druggie, I needed a fix every day.

  Early the next morning Hank calls me.

  “My dad is gone,” he says.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “I’ve been to the hospital twice to try to get this blood pressure under control,” he says.

  “I’m sorry about your dad. Is your mom okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, we’ll be fine.” I take this to mean they’ve gone into coping mode.

  There will be no funeral for Hank Senior. He will be cremated and his ashes placed in the cemetery next to Beth. We will each need to grieve in our own way. How am I going to tell Emmy? For a moment I feel sorry for myself that I have to be the bearer of the bad news—once again. She’ll know, of course, by the sound of my voice. And she can read my face like a text message. Besides, she’s had practice in bad news. When I had to tell her that her godmother Kitty died, she wailed in agony and shook for hours. Grief like that stunned me. I suppose I had learned at an early age to zip up my feelings. But Emmy never did that, and she’s better off for it.

  Later that morning I am in my office at the computer. Emmy comes in and sits on the floor.

  “Hi!” she says, cheerful as a little goldfinch.

  I wheel around and look at her.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  Her smile drops. Her eyes darken. She is on high alert.

  “What?”

  “It’s Grampa,” I tell her. There’s no way to do this gently. “He died this morning.”

  She is not expecting this. We probably should have told her how serious things were, but she was away at school and we didn’t want to burden her with that heartache without one of us there.

  Her sorrow floods the house as she sinks down and sobs.

  Her Grampa had been her biggest fan.

  “That girl is as smart and talented as anyone you’ll ever meet,” he would pronounce in his stentorian voice. Her face was on his screen saver. As a child it was her job to muss his dark hair and provoke his ersatz wrath. With Grampa she knew without any doubt that she was golden.

  I hang onto her, but in truth, we can’t stay like this for long. While my brothers are still here, we need to pack up my mother’s apartment and get everything we can into storage. My mother has been approved for Medicaid, which means she will move to a nursing home as soon as I can find a decent place with a “Medicaid bed.” In the meantime, if we don’t want to pay April’s rent I have to get her place emptied and cleaned out now. Once the Medicaid kicks in, Mother’s Social Security will be gone.

  So the four of us converge on my mother’s apartment. I’ve already given away a lot of her things to other residents. Now we are packing and throwing away and cleaning.

  Tears stream down Emmy’s face as she packs. When we take a lunch break, Emmy cannot eat. She puts her head in my lap right there in the restaurant and weeps.

  Her tears seem to speak for all of us.

  The storage unit is packed to the brim with furniture, art supplies, and those old moth-eaten copies of the requiem stuffed into a box. Her requiem—the one thing I’m supposed to keep alive for her, but I’ve no idea how. It’s one more thing that makes me feel guilty and inadequate.

  My brothers are gone. Emmy’s grief has abated and she’s gone back to school. In the meantime, I have cleaned every millimeter of my mother’s apartment. I scrub the bathrooms, wipe down the refrigerator inside and out, sweep the kitchen, and steam clean the carpet. I am stupidly under the impression that she can get her deposit back. Technically, she’s not breaking her lease if she leaves for medical reasons, but technically, they’ve still managed to construct the lease so no one ever gets a deposit back. In fact, they send me a bill for sixteen hundred dollars for some stains on their cheap-ass carpets. The evil that I wish upon these people is ugly. My Medea alter ego wants to send them lovely dresses, the kind that turn the skin to flame. Instead I throw their stupid bill in the trash and never hear from them again.

  The perfect solution we thought we had found for Mom is not even close to perfect because I cannot find a “Medicaid bed” anywhere. The only option is a private-pay assisted-living facility that we had checked out a few times over the years. But even though the marketing manager agrees to give us a room at the incredibly reasonable price they had offered to me a few years earlier, Mom’s Social Security check is still about $600 short; then there are all her other expenses. In the past few years I’ve been paying her credit card bills and taking care of things like eyeglasses, a new television, help three mornings a week, and medicine. According to an article in the Charlotte Observer, the average cost of taking care of an elderly parent was approximately $5,500 a year in 2007, which is about what I’ve been spending. David was putting two kids through college and helped out when he could. Jo was on disability from his cancer and didn’t have anything extra. Now I’ve got to get Emmy through college and so an extra $600 a month, plus another $300 or so for extras (phone, medicine, incontinence products, snacks, etc.) is just not doable.

  The one ace I thought I had up my sleeve is gone. I always figured we could sell the piano, but David is adamant. That piano is not leaving the family. My father’s piano is firmly lodged in his wife’s condo. It is eventually supposed to come to us, but we all doubt that will ever happen. Another family piano was sold when my grandmother died. David is not going to let the Steinway go.

  “I’m going to learn how to play the piano,” he said after I’d already found a purchaser—a man with a ten-year-old girl who would have loved that piano as my own mother had. We went round and round, but in the end he wanted to keep it more than I wanted to sell it. And so I relented. I mollified myself with the fact that I had kept the bird-of-paradise plates and I wouldn’t have given them up for any amount of money (not that they’re worth all that much). Besides, I thought our financial problems were solved. I thought Medicaid was going to provide. I was wrong.

  If it’s this hard for the middle class to take care of their elderly, I can’t help but wonder and worry about the poor. Because my mother worked till she was eighty-six, she has a pretty good Social Security check, but I imagine there must be many out there who just can’t make it. One woman I know had to quit her job to take care of her mother and they both barely subsisted on the mother’s Social Security. How many people out there have given up their jobs or work two or three jobs to take care of their parents? What does someone without siblings or with crazy, unhelpful siblings do? A woman I work with said her sister stole $20,000 from their mother. I can’t imagine. It would be so much easier if we could subsidize assisted living. We subsidize agribusiness and education and all sorts of things. But this is America, land of the $5.4-million tobacco CEO and the $86-billion invasion. What am I thinking? I should be grateful we have Social Security.

  I call my brothers with my news. Although the financial situation isn’t good, I think we’re all relieved that Mom isn’t going to a nursing home. Even the nicest ones are pretty bad. And to my surprise, my mother’s brain, after six weeks in rehab, seems to be functioning again. She no longer frets about whether it is day or night. She can form complete sentences. Her eyes, which were dull and empty, now contain a spark of light. One day at the nursing home, I wheeled her to a little crummy upright they had. As she sat in front of it, someone came by and asked if she could play Rachmaninoff. She lifted her hands, placed them on the keys, and magic happened. Rachmaninoff, Moonlight Sonata, Debussy poured from her fingers. I bit my lip to keep from crying.

  One of David’s kids has graduated from college, and Jo’s symphony pension has finally kicked in, so between the three of us we figure out that we can do it. We can afford to keep Mom in assisted living instead of a nursing home. Hallelujah.

  Between Mom’s troubles and Hank going to the emergency room every couple of weeks, I decide not to teach for the spring term. This isn’t the brightest idea I have ever had. For one thing, I need the money. For another thing, I am now faced with
“gone child grief,” which I’d been hiding from since September.

  Empty nest syndrome. What a ridiculous idea. And yet this grief that hounds me, that sits on my chest and turns a crank, wringing my heart dry, is the direct result of Emmy’s absence. I’m still not used to this adjustment in my life. Every day a new realization of something I’ll never do again hits me. I’ll never take her to choir practice or theater rehearsal again. She’s not there to go on a walk with me and Merlyn. In the supermarket I drag myself like a bag of bowling balls down the aisles. My stomach is an empty well. How do parents whose children have died ever survive, I wonder. I feel guilty, ashamed of this pain. My daughter has only grown up. A joyous event. But now I feel like I have no business in a supermarket, no reason to pluck a frozen Amy’s spinach pizza from the frosty caverns, no heart to pick up a package of her favorite pasta.

  Mom is now safely ensconced in an assisted-living facility. I don’t have to go over every morning or every night. But I am not used to other people taking care of her, so I make daily visits. In my loneliness for Emmy, I am slowly beginning to understand my mother’s constant yearning for my company.

  Thursday morning I must go with Hank to the cardiologist. He’s been to a sleep clinic and found out he has sleep apnea; he’s also been to an endocrinologist. We’re still playing with the blood pressure medication trying to get him on an even keel.

  “Stop drinking diet soda. Take more walks,” I tell him, but I’m not the kind of doctor he listens to.

  Then the weekend comes. Hank and I drive halfway across town to find the movie Double Indemnity. Then we drive up to Winston-Salem to pick up Emmy. Everything is good. This time there are no boys kissing each other in front of the building—a sight which burned the corneas of my homophobic husband. There is only our girl with her long thick hair and her wide smile as she bounds out of the building and into our arms. Suddenly it’s as if I’ve never been sad or lonely in my life.