The roving prairie nurses from the hospital have been alerted, and will visit Dad every couple of weeks to take blood for the lab and check his blood pressure. Most crucially of all, Dad has the 24-hour team of home helpers my sister has recruited. We feel confident that this will allow him some time of free enjoyment of his home. We can’t really be faulted for not knowing how this will pan out.
With hindsight, it is clear we should have known that people doing this homecare job are often those who cannot or will not hold down a more mainstream job. They fall broadly into categories, each more alarming than the one before. Let me organise a little hypothetical parade for you.
Meet the housekeeping slut, obsequious and charming but, when left to her own devices, incapable of cleaning a pot or a pan (and you understand why, poor thing, as they are all caked and burned on, only to be restored to useful condition by the application of some power tools). Her exit strategy when there are no more clean pots and pans in the cupboard is to walk out the front door, leaving it open, and drive away.
Next is the mythomaniac, who complains bitterly about having to sleep downstairs in the cold with the mice, because we have told her that we will not allow fat people to sleep in the bedrooms upstairs. As non-sylphs ourselves, my sister and I stare at each other in amazement when hearing this, before banging our heads against the wall.
There is the gold-digger, whose car needs urgent repair or she can’t be sure of turning up for her shift. Dad wants to help her out and starts rooting around in his sock drawer and under the bed, where he has stashes of fifty-dollar bills. This person also begins to receive mail in her and Dad’s name at Dad’s address from a lawyer. We can only imagine that she is setting up some kind of de-facto claim and hasn’t realised that Dad is still married. Her long blond locks also cast a powerful spell over any man who crosses the threshold, and tradies begin wafting about at strange hours.
Then there is the serial killer, a powerful personality of a type my father is familiar with, articulate and capable, baking the best coffee cake south of Calgary. She manages to convince my sister that my father’s diet should be revised. He takes blood-thinners and has for years avoided leafy greens full of vitamin K, which counteract his life-saving medicine. Serial killer tells us that the pharmaceutical companies have radically changed the composition of these medications and that now, on the contrary, it is imperative that Dad eat a lot of spinach and kale and bok choy.
In the time it takes for my sister to check, my father has ingested more greens than you see in the Canadian spring and his blood readings are zipping off the that-sharp-pain-in-your-head-is-a-bleed-bye-bye-now end of the scale.
As for the drug addict helper, he drinks all of the liquor in the liquor cabinet, filling the bottles with water to keep the levels where they were, and steals the flatware one piece at a time. He has a similar pattern at home, but his spoons and forks are worn and bent – he must have gardened with them – so he will take one knife or fork of Dad’s home each time he leaves the property, having carefully replaced it in the drawer in the kitchen with a beat-up one from his collection.
He will hallucinate one night, flying high all on his lonesome, and wake Dad because he thinks someone is breaking in. Dad calls the security patrol who scream up the driveway and pound on the door. Once in, they assess and wrap the drug addict in a quilt and sit on him for a couple of hours until the sun comes up, he finally calms down and the druggie’s colleague arrives for her shift. Dad goes back to bed.
But the one who will do us in is the one we trust the most, the big young former downhill skier who dealt with the fridge. She seems capable. She takes Dad out to lunch, and herself by the same token but we don’t care. She drives Dad around the foothills and takes him to meet the animals on the property where she lives with her husband and where there are no children.
When she takes Dad to see Mum in the hospital, she stands up for him, telling my mother that she cannot speak to him as she is wont to do. She steps back as my mother strikes out at her with her cane, reports my mother’s verbal abuse to the nurses and wheels my father out to the car. The last time he visits my mother and exits the hospital in this way, a day that we refer to as Nuclear Thursday, he asks this compassionate girl if they can just sit for a moment in the car.
As he weeps, he tells her that he doesn’t think he will come back to endure another visit. He says that his wife has told him to go to hell one time too many and by golly, this time he’s going. She lets him cry, tears pooling in her own eyes, and sits with him, her mittened hand on the sleeve of his coat.
He likes her and we trust her. She phones to tell us everything. Two years later, she will be the last of the original team members, and we will have come to count on her. That it will take an intervention to wrest Dad from her is not something anyone could have predicted.
But we’re not there yet. There is ice to melt and water to flow under the bridge before then. My sister and I are leaving, feeling cautiously confident that we have left him in good hands. We are tired and stressed and shell-shocked but we still, at this point, feel the hope of the exhausted worthy that our best efforts are not in vain and that we may be able to influence what will happen next.
Chapter 19
Back in the 60s, people from Western Canada would go to Mexico during the long winters, to get away from the snow and the ice. My parents started to do this after I left home, but my sister went with them. Mejico, my father would tell me gleefully on the phone, in an excruciating take on a Mexican accent. Rent a car, drive to the beach, play che-e-e-ken. I imagine him shaking imaginary maracas. My mother would spend her time buying silver and lamenting the sinking into the ground of the cathedral of Mexico City. She always had a nose for pathos.
Drug cartels, bodies in the sand and heads on spikes, not to mention kidnapping of holidaying gringos, took the gloss off Mexico and now large numbers of Albertans and Saskatchewanians and Manitobans fly to Hawaii instead.
My sister and her partner have for years spent February on Maui. They like a holiday with nothing to do but laze. They do not seek cultural input, but my sister’s partner reads a lot, all the books she doesn’t have time for during the year. They make it clear that they wish not to be bothered by anyone for anything that isn’t life-or-death.
This February then, the February of the year I am telling you about when my mother is still in rehab for her hip, is not different. The holiday is booked and they need to take it, this year probably more than any year before. I suggest that while they are away, I can help maintain the fragile new parental status quo in Alberta by stepping in as the go-to person for anyone there who needs to contact us: the hospital, the helpers, Dad’s friend, the neighbours, the guy with the snow-plough, the guy who takes the garbage to the tip, the guy who repairs the furnaces.
This is agreed. I may be in Sydney but I have a landline, a mobile, and two email accounts. Piece of cake. We notify everybody that from February 1st, I am it.
Every day, I keep a log: phone calls in and out, who says what. I email enthusiastically and in volume. Some days I call my aunt and uncle just for comfort, and I call Dad every second day. I correct erroneous email addresses, and leave messages for my mother’s doctor at the hospital, as his message bank at his rooms is always full. I get the nurse at the hospital to write a note: could he please get in touch. I need signs of intelligent life. I need to know what is happening with my mother.
Occasionally I catch him. He rambles on about families strong-arming geriatrics into a home, and tells me again about how old people with broken hips generally don’t see out the year, so maybe we shouldn’t be agitating ourselves so much over something that may not happen. I remind him we only have weeks, at best a month, before her hip rehab should be complete and she is good to go home, unless we prevent it.
Something seems cloudy and dodgy in how he talks to me, even though I sense sympathy. I wish I weren’t a million miles away. I wish I could see his face and get a take on what’
s really going on.
I soon begin to fill in the picture. He tells me he has requested a psychological competency test. This could help us, but he warns me she might be deemed competent. If so, she could go home mid-March.
Underneath my notes for that day, February 5th, I write God help us, and I’m not a believer. I start to think about how to talk to Dad about this. I don’t call my sister. Nobody is dead yet.
I call Dad every second day, but I don’t always get through. He’s asleep, or the helper is vacuuming and doesn’t hear the phone. I know that Dad no longer has a phone by his bed, because Mum was calling at all hours to warn him to watch out for ‘those girls’. That would be my sister and me, out to put him away in an ‘old man’s home’. Once I call during Ms Gold-digger’s shift and when she fetches him, he sits not on the chair but beside it, dropping onto the tiled floor on his tail-bone. There is shouting and banging and the line goes dead. I learn that he survives and try not to worry.
I have rehearsed for a full day what I want to say to him about the possibility of Mum coming home, but when I speak to him, I can’t see his face. I don’t know if he is distressed or angry or sad. I don’t even know if he has his hearing aid turned on and can hear me. I speak loudly. I insist he must think about what he wants to do. I reiterate that her coming home is only a possibility.
I imagine him sitting there, pole-axed because it had never occurred to him that he didn’t have the deciding vote in whether she comes home or not, in the same way that we can never make him understand that half of what they own is hers. He just shakes his head. Of course I’ll provide for her, he says. The best of everything, wherever they put her.
Our rock, the former downhill skier helper, has told us that he sometimes seems to shift after he speaks to Mum. He seems to start to believe again what she is saying about us.
Dad, I say, are you there? You call me anytime you want, anytime you have a question, or you are worried. Anytime, you hear? The line goes dead.
He does call me a few days later. It is 4 am in Sydney. He is audibly upset this time, and the helper tells me that he has just had a conversation with Mum. She told him that I had just phoned to tell her the following: I have decreed that she and Dad can no longer live in their house. They have to go into care; they can’t live way out there in the boondocks on their own.
Dad, listen, I say. I never spoke to her. It’s the middle of the night here. I was asleep. I wouldn’t say those things. You can live there for as long as you are comfortable, but I don’t think she can live there anymore. Isn’t that what you and I have been talking about?
He mutters. He is a pencil’s width from believing everything she is telling him.
Dad, I say. Think hard. Answer this. Have you ever heard me use the word ‘boondocks’? Can you imagine me saying ‘boondocks’?
He laughs and I relax a little in my chair.
After we hang up, I call the hospital and speak to the nurses on Mum’s ward. I ask if they have any record of me phoning my mother. They don’t. I tell them to get her chart. I tell them to write ‘manipulative’ in capital letters, right next to the letters MMA my sister wrote. I yell that they told us she would be kept away from the phones. I tell them to do it, just do it, because she is going to kill him. I slam the phone down.
A few days later I have a memorable conversation with Mum’s doctor. It isn’t memorable because of any information he gives me, because we are still waiting on the psych consult and I still sense a kind of stalling reluctance on his part to fill in the blanks for me. That day, however, he is in a discursive mode and has time to chat. The conversation is memorable for me because of what it says about my mother’s ongoing magnetic manipulation of narrative.
Your mother is a bit down today, he says. I wonder about this. My mother doesn’t do down.
What about?
She feels she deserves better, he says. You know, after all her service to the country.
During the war, he adds, when I don’t say anything.
Which war?
You know, World War II, he says.
Any idea what she’s talking about?
She’s talking about how she hid all those people, he says.
My mother, in a note she posted to my father from the hospital at about this time, described this doctor as ‘a big man, not afraid of the cold’. I picture him as a stocky, furry steer, digging his hooves into the snow and I am poking him with a stick.
What people?
The old people, he tells me. The old Jews. All the old Jews she hid.
I am glad he can’t see me.
In Southern Alberta? I say. She hid old Jews in the foothills? What from? The cowboys? The bears?
In my head, I am pitching a remake of an iconic Western. Picture this: old Jews on horseback, all in black, ringlets and skull caps, sloping down the deserted and dusty Main Street, ta-ga-da ta-ga-da, past the saloon, kvetching about the lack of decent delis in Alberta, no gefilte fish, no chopped liver. High Hasidic Noon.
With restraint, I suggest to the doctor that during World War II, the old Jews would have queued up to get to Alberta, not hiding at all, at worst just considering a relocation to Toronto when they could, because of the unavailability of kosher smallgoods in the west. I don’t laugh but something akin to hilarity must be seeping down the lines of our communication, because he signs off in a huff.
I feel mostly sad after that phone call, sad that this man is now embarrassed by having been caught up in the magic web of a story she wove for him. I’m also in a way sad that she has slipped up. Any thinking individual is going to recognise the flaws in the saga of the old Jews in the Rockies once they step outside her aura.
She is seriously off her game, because had she told her doctor that she had hidden old Japanese-Canadian people, no one could prove otherwise. During the shame of 1942, under the War Measures Act, the government interned tens of thousands of Japanese-Canadian citizens guilty of nothing more than looking ‘alien’. They took their possessions and deprived them of their citizenship. I’m sure there were white people who were outraged. I’m sure some tried to help. There was an internment camp in Kananaskis, near where we lived. She could have been one of those who tried.
But she didn’t create that fantasy, impossible to refute. She said ‘old Jews’.
Two things happen suddenly.
First, the eminent psychiatrist who sees Mum writes a three-page, single-spaced letter. Reading it is like watching a skater on a pond, push to the right, push to the left, never tarry in the middle and don’t commit to anything. He concludes that he doesn’t have enough evidence to say that she is incompetent. The next sentence states that this does not mean that he is saying he is convinced that she is competent either. He ends that sentence with an exclamation mark.
His report details agitation, aggression, delusional ideation, suspicious and difficult behaviours, decompensation and, possibly, a full-blown personality disorder. On the plus side, there is no dementia. She displays coherent and sophisticated thought, logic, and a sense of humour. In other words, she’s a charmer.
More tests, he says. More evaluation. Give her ‘enough rope to hang herself’ before deciding. Get input from family who visit on how she is. Give her day passes and weekend passes to go home and see how she goes. He concludes by saying he quite enjoyed interviewing her, and passes the buck to a competency assessment team.
Second, within hours of the psychiatrist writing his letter, we are informed by the hospital that Mum has been accorded a place in a dementia unit in the town of Vulcan. They will only keep this place for a few days. The family must inform her. She will be transported from the hospital where she is to the unit next Tuesday.
I sit and try to put these two puzzle pieces together. They won’t fit, although I now understand the doctor’s unwillingness to say anything definite. He works in the hospital where she is. He knows how frustrated they are with our refusal to talk about bringing her home. He knows how much they can’
t wait to see the back of her, even if she has to be sent to Hell – a dementia unit in a town named for the god of fire and metalwork and forges, red billowing smoke in the sky, when she doesn’t have dementia.
Now I phone my sister.
Chapter 20
Things happen before my sister returns to Canada from Maui in March.
The eminent geriatric specialist who found Mum so charming and witty, in spite of her being (eventually, possibly, perhaps, probably) incompetent, opposes the hospital’s wish to shunt her off to the first available dementia bed on the grounds that he has just written to them to say that, whatever else she may (could, might) have, she does not have dementia.
I suspect that Mum’s doctor at the hospital has alerted the expert in a bid to help us, in spite of being miffed about the discussion he and I had about Mum’s hiding old Jews during the war. He follows up with a recommendation of his own that buys us some time: that she remain where she is for more months of hip rehab, as she is choosing not to go to physio or therapy sessions, and has been incontinent since her hip surgery.
He adds that she is unable to pull her pants up or down, apparently some kind of defining criterion of one’s suitability to be unleashed onto the unsuspecting world outside.
The geriatric specialist may have believed that he was very clear in his official report, where he refused to say that Mum was competent and refused to say that she wasn’t. I personally thought that his liberal use of exclamation marks detracted from the seriousness of his discourse, but that’s just me.
The hospital team only reads page one of his report, ignores his recommendation for more tests and evaluations, and seizes upon one idea only: this expert could not say that my mother is incompetent. Ergo, the team decides, not reading pages two and three but dancing a jig and singing hallelujah, she is competent and they can discharge her. They schedule something called a ‘patient conference’ quick smart, for late March, and request that my sister attend so that they can bludgeon her with this conclusion.
The Erratics Page 10
