The Erratics

by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

  Chapter 26

  My sister’s life is difficult. She is afraid of another attack, afraid she will die if she has one. She is terrified of going into hospital, into that environment where for years she worked and felt in supreme control, making the best possible decisions for other people, and where she now finds herself just another patient. Worse – a patient they don’t know how to help. She doesn’t like what her life looks like from here on. It makes her testy.

  She is dozy from antihistamines; she complains of feeling fuzzy and not being herself when it comes to multi-tasking. I tell her nobody ever multi-tasked like her, that if she is even half of what she was, she’s still ahead of us all.

  She does research, calls in favours from doctor friends to get new opinions. She learns that there is congenital angiodema and acquired. She has the second. This knowledge is of no help as nobody knows how to prevent attacks or treat either one effectively.

  The attacks have a trigger, they must, so she follows an elimination diet, just in case. She can have pears and rice. Maybe fish. Meat is fine. No shellfish, potatoes or tomatoes or spinach. No spices or nuts or additives, colours, preservatives. No commercially prepared food. No airplane food.

  She and her partner, who are in the habit of eating out every day, socialising in restaurants with their friends, and travelling, now bake their own bread and eat plain at home.

  When I call, I don’t probe but I ask how she is. I listen to details of tests, my head awash with acronyms I have never heard, trying hard to comprehend the hypotheses of the week. What I actually retain is that nobody has a clue. She lists what she can and cannot do, and I vehemently wish that she wasn’t suffering constraints on all sides as soon as she wakes up.

  She is convinced that the weeks spent whipping my parents’ house into shape with her friends, in preparation for the estate sale, exposed her to toxins that are at the root of her problem. I’m sure she was exposed to toxins but I think they may have been more psychological than physical, as she busied herself in our mother’s space, dismantling our mother’s life. Maybe she senses this underneath. She is adamant she can’t talk about our parents as it upsets her.

  She is sure stress is a trigger. She drops into the conversation that when her GP asked what stress she had been under before the attack I was present for, she mentions my arrival for a visit. My silence must alert her to a possible stress on my end of the telephone line, because she adds defensively, A good stress of course, but a stress nonetheless.

  I listen. She is my sister and I care about her. She’s sick. She is my link to my father. I listen.

  Our conversations end abruptly. She tells me suddenly that she doesn’t want to talk about all of this. The next time we speak, she wants to talk about something else. She hangs up.

  I want to talk about other things too. I want her to ask how I am. I want to know how her partner is faring, off in the kitchen, kneading. I want news of Dad, because when I phone him he is never wearing his hearing aid or it isn’t working and all I get are generic remarks.

  It’s good to hear your voice, he says, which I know is code for I can’t hear anything at all.

  How’s the weather where you are, he asks, a Canadian conversational staple. You can’t go wrong with that one. I tell him. Drought and bush fires, tornadoes and waterspouts, torrential rains and flooded lawns alive with funnel-web spiders, wolf spiders, trapdoor spiders, all water-skiing at speed from their muddy burrows towards drier ground in my garage, where I await them with my ladies’ gardening spade. That’s good, he says, after what seems to him a suitable pause.

  And everyone is fine in your neck of the woods? Yes, I answer. Everyone in my neck of the woods is dandy. I can’t even contemplate telling him the truth, although when I think about it, I could. I could tell him all manner of appalling things and after another calibrated pause, he would just say, That’s nice, I’m glad.

  Over time, my sister’s health stabilises, and my father’s declines gently. I am the mobile one, so I go to visit.

  Dad has now left his airy, self-care two-bedroom apartment for a large studio with ensuite in a separate part of the complex. There are twelve studios arranged around a spacious living area with tropical fish, a piano, overstuffed upholstered furniture and a huge flat-screen television. There is a dining room and a walled garden to walk in. This part of the complex is called Halcyon House.

  The director has been urging this move upon us for some time, saying that my father will benefit from the constant care available, that of course he can bring his cat, that it is time.

  I don’t believe a word. I don’t think it’s time. I think she needs his apartment for somebody else. I resisted her last efforts to instigate this move.

  It does seem to make sense to downsize now, however, instead of hiring private nurses to live with him in a roomy flat where he has never even sat on the balcony, and where he wears a path in the carpet from bathroom to bedroom to his favourite chair in the living room while his carer does sudoku. The director has pushed hard this time, urging us to take advantage of an unexpected vacancy, the pleasantest of the studios, with large windows and good light. This may not be available again.

  I feel it would be a downer to call to her attention that this studio will be available again. This place is the last stop before the end of the line. You may be able to climb down from your carriage and stroll the platform, sit for a while on a bench in the sun watching the swoop and glide of the eagles flying high above their nest in the tallest oak, but you will get back on the train to complete your journey. The next vacancy is never far away.

  So where he lives now is a place with a locked door that opens with a code. As she is selling the move to us, the director emphasises that this is a higher-care option and definitely, absolutely and totally not a dementia unit, although people with evolving cognitive difficulties can safely dwell there. Dad can have the code and come and go as he wishes.

  He goes along with the idea and I hear that the move goes smoothly. My sister takes him out to lunch while her partner and some helpers move his furniture. He returns mid-afternoon to nap in a new place and they all go home exhausted to lie down.

  He takes change like a trooper. When the health of his old cat fails, he discusses the options with my sister and concludes, reasonably and sadly, that it wouldn’t be right to try to keep her going any longer. He is calm and sits with the cat before my sister puts her in her carry-case to go to the vet’s. But he doesn’t get out of bed the next morning, or the next, or the next. And in this ‘high-care’ facility, where in fact my father’s standard of care will decline gradually and drastically, they do end up noticing.

  My sister and her partner go to the rescue animal shelters and find Calico 2, another female, not as portly as the pet my father is grieving and with a rat-bag personality of tiger proportions quite unlike the other, but outwardly similar to Calico I. They take her to my father, who gets out of bed to look after her and help her settle in.

  For a while, he keeps her jealously to himself, always asking us, when we leave his studio with him, to check that she is inside. The cat is, of course, craftier than anyone in the place, and is soon feted at every table in the dining room at meal times. After a season or two, my father decides that he could let her go outside into the walled garden in the daytime. Unimpressed by walls, she goes over or under or through, makes friends with the priest of the parish in the church next door and invites his cat over to Dad’s for snacks and sleepovers.

  When I visit, I see Dad declining in tiny increments. He is almost the way I saw him months before on my last visit: just a little stiffer, a little slower, a little deafer. He feels the downward slide though. He tells my sister he needs to contact the Royal Canadian Air Force to tell them that something has happened to his body. He feels that it is probably the result of his wartime experiences and he thinks they should know about it. He’d like some answers.

  My sister suggests that he can hardly sue the Air Force for
premature ageing or untimely demise, given his age. He agrees and says that he doesn’t need the money anyhow.

  We wonder if he is losing it when one day he tells us that he cannot find the clock with the luminescent dial that is always on his night table. He says he woke in the night and reaching for it, encountered the hand of someone standing there, stealing his clock.

  My sister and I look at each other. She crawls under the bed and finds the clock cushioned in wreaths of six-month old dust. My dad insists. I grabbed someone’s wrist, he says. There was someone in here.

  He is telling the truth. The stylish lady in the studio next to him has taken to roaming at night, convinced that she needs to get dressed since someone is coming to pick her up and take her home. The staff are invisible, and since none of the studios lock, she opens doors, looking for help. She absentmindedly picks things up as she goes and puts them down elsewhere. Dad must have given her a fright when he grabbed her wrist.

  She is partial to Dad’s room because she loves the cat.

  As she sinks into confusion and incomprehension, and leaves her room less often, the cat begins to go to her. When you glance into her room, you see this lady lying stiffly on the bed so that she won’t crease her outfit, as well turned out as ever in her pantsuits and blazers and pearls, one arm curled around Dad’s cat, asleep beside her. In company of the cat, she waits patiently, as do most here, for people who never come.

  My father gazes mildly upon this lady, upon the fellow who professes effusively, every day of the week, that he is so pleased to finally meet us, upon the grinch who gives the waitresses serious grief every meal about the temperature of the food, and upon the staff, holed up on the nurses’ station, texting. He says, Do you ever get the feeling that you and I are the only sane ones in here?

  My sister answers, All crazy except thee and me.

  They finish the joke in unison, And I’m not too sure about thee.

  Chapter 27

  My mother’s death takes me by surprise. It feels sudden and unexpected, against all logic, in spite of her great age. I haven’t been expecting her to bury us all, as the saying goes, because I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t bother, but I have expected her to outlive us. In my mind, she has remained indomitable, cast in bronze.

  We are warned. Dad’s friend informs us three days before that she has taken to her bed and is not eating. The staff believe the end is nigh. My sister, from Hawaii, questions him about how nigh is nigh, and wants an estimated time frame. I don’t know why, because neither of us is rushing to be there. We cannot legally get in to see her. We can’t even phone the hospital for news.

  My mother goes peacefully in her sleep, against all odds. If anyone was going to rage against the dying of the light, I would have put my money on her. She has beside her a companion person hired many months ago to aerate her self-imposed solitude, so she does not die alone. I find this comforting.

  My sister keeps me posted about how she is. I thought I would feel happier, she says. Why? I ask. After a few days she tells me that, while she has sad moments when she thinks of good things about Mum, she is now back to her normal self. Laughing and functional, she says.

  I look in the mirror. I say ho ho ho to myself, just to try it out. My reflection shrugs. I’m functional though. I have that.

  We begin to disagree about telling Dad. As long as my sister is in Hawaii, we agree he won’t be told. Neither of us wants a casual care worker with limited English to break the news between mopping and sneaking out for a cigarette.

  Once my sister is back in Vancouver, I bring the issue up again. She thinks he doesn’t need to know. She tells me she will just follow his lead. If he asks for news of Mum, she will say, What would you like to know? Ask me what you want to know and if I can tell you anything, I will.

  How often has he brought her up in the last years? I ask.

  That’s what I’m saying, my sister says. Once, maybe twice. He’s erased her from his life. It would just upset him to know. He might get confused. He might think you died.

  She feels she knows all of this, but who ever knows what is in someone else’s heart? Who is even sure what is in her own?

  I am diplomatic in expressing my distress at her position though, because she could just tell me that if I think I know best, I should get myself on an airplane to Canada and participate in the process.

  So I say I’m not completely comfortable with not telling him. I say it isn’t ours to decide, that I would feel angry and betrayed if people who thought they knew best kept something important from me just because I was old. I say, How would you feel?

  I tell her that I feel differently about Mum’s story now that the last page has been written. Only a bit. It’s subtle, nothing dramatic, but the difference is there. Dad should be allowed to feel this too. What would give us the right to decide he shouldn’t? I bring myself to use the word ‘closure’.

  I trot out the clincher. What, I say, if he gets a condolence card from somebody and we haven’t told him. What if he finds out that way? What if someone phones? Why would he ever trust us again?

  He won’t find out like that, she says. Nobody will know she’s died and he has no contact with anyone in Alberta. Who would write to him? And anyhow, I’m having his mail held until I can look at it.

  It’s his mail, I say. That’s illegal.

  She trots out her clincher. Dad is happy to let her look after things. Here’s an example, she says. We bought him a new coat. The lining wasn’t attached properly. He saw me repairing it and asked what I was doing. I explained and he was happy to let me repair the coat.

  Has he had the coat for over seven decades, I ask. Has it made his life hell and nearly ruined him, as well as giving him, we hope, the happiest moments of his life? Has he put his feelings for the coat deep in his chest so that they won’t inconvenience anyone, and won’t hurt so much?

  The next morning I get an email from a former neighbour of my father’s in the foothills. She tells me she is sorry to hear of my mother’s death, as are all the other neighbours who knew my parents. She asks if I could confirm Dad’s address so she can send him a card. She tells me how she heard. A woman who moved from the area a few years ago has kept an eagle eye on Okotoks, its environs and inhabitants, by trawling the websites of the town halls, the retirement homes, the hospitals and funeral parlours. Even though Mum specifically requested no funeral and no notices in the press, this woman knows and has alerted everyone. I forward the email to my sister.

  She and her partner speak to the Director of Pacific Peace, and ask her advice. She tells them that she has seen families go both ways, either keeping the secret of a loved one’s death from an old frail person, or sharing the news. Hoping to keep this secret is, in her words, a recipe for disaster.

  My sister’s partner prints a recent photo of my mother, sent to us by Dad’s friend when he wrote to tell us she was gone. On the back, she writes my mother’s full name, her date of birth and the date of her death. She goes with my sister to see Dad, and they break the news. He seems to understand. He smiles sadly as he looks at the photo. She was a nice gal, he says eventually. Never had children though.

  He lifts his head after this last remark, and looks at my sister. He adds, Except for you and your sister, of course.

  My sister’s partner writes to me. She says that it is sometimes hard to gauge exactly what is going on in my father’s mind. And if I am honest, I have seen him in moments of blankness, when a fog seems to encroach. In those moments, there is no panic in him, no anger. It looks almost comforting, liked the fog rolling in over the bay to blanket San Francisco, filling in the awkward spaces and levelling everything, cottony and soft, feathers or fairy floss. Every time I see him, I tell myself that there aren’t many of those moments, and that you can’t begrudge a person of his age a few minutes of confusion once in a while.

  I don’t want him to go. I want him to know me the next time I see him.

  And he probably will. He tells my si
ster he is frustrated living in a place with goofy people who don’t know what is going on. He asks my sister if he is in the right place. She explains that he is but that unfortunately, there are confused people with nowhere to be, so they have to live where he is for the moment.

  She says, I know it is frustrating for you. Is there anything I can do to help? He shakes his head. No, he says. She asks if he would like to take a minute before giving such a definitive answer. He smiles at her and shakes his head. No, he says.

  I look into my own future, perhaps not that far off, when I will be aware of banks of fog on the horizon, coming my way. I think of a world where people will have emails delivered directly onto a permanent contact lens, scanning content as they walk, a discreet pinging noise in their frontal lobes alerting them to new communications. A world where supermodels photoshopped in the flesh and wearing outlandish underwear, with feathered wings attached to their shoulder blades, stalk the streets in small flocks, teetering awkwardly on five-inch heels like adolescent giraffes. A world where Canada is no longer on any map, because of what the US calls, after a short and surprisingly bloody period of ‘readjustment’, the 49th Parallel Energy Rationalisation Impetus, and what the Canadian underground fighters, the few who are left, call the Great Water Wars, or the Oil Sand Wars, or the Fracking Wars.

  Bring on the fog, I say.

  When I speak to my father on Skype at Christmas, he is silent. He looks at me as I talk to him, my sister and her partner hovering in the background, and he smiles. He looks pleased but he doesn’t speak. Days later, when I tell my sister how sad I was that he didn’t know me, she tells me I have it all wrong. They talked about it afterward, and he was amazed to see me so clearly.

  When my sister asks him why he didn’t respond or answer my questions, why he was silent, he scoffs. She was on TV, he says. I was watching her on TV. Who talks to a TV set? That would be crazy.