by Peter Wells
‘We got her into the toilet. Then she walked out with her trousers round her ankles.’
I have to laugh then. Anabel does, too. Apologetically.
‘It’s all you can do in the end. Laugh.’
I feel fear and horror. Most of all I feel shame. But also chagrin. I think back to Russell’s death and Bess’s — Bessie’s — breakdowns. Both of them took up so much space in my life (I recognise this is a selfish thing to say) with their bravura crack-ups, their showy descents into madness. Then I think further and deeper into whether this undressing is not endemic to our family, like a strain of madness. What is this writing, anyway, but a form of undressing? I undress my family, I even undress myself. It is compulsive, as if my sanity, my life, depends on it. I humiliate my family by revealing flaws, secrets.
Or is it the other side, an inextricable part of the closed, closeted, highly mannered façade we sought or seek to present? Isn’t this form of writing itself the presentation of a façade? I do not download my own pathetic untruths, failures, the sense of time overtaking me and rendering everything I’ve done trivial and senseless, worthless as a piece of space junk.
She is daily growing more and more tired. I think I recognise the look a cat has when its kidneys suddenly stop functioning. You know there is no looking back — or even forward — as the intermediate days will be taken up with the messy, sad, horrible business of preparing for death. I text a close friend: ‘Bess is checking out.’
‘It’s a shame she can’t just drift away in her sleep,’ I say to Anabel over the phone.
She doesn’t reply but I sense there is empathy in her silence.
But this is too tidy. We’re not in a tidy zone now.
THE NEXT TIME I VISIT her she is so tired I say to her, ‘You just snooze off, Mum. I’ll sit here.’ It is a very hot day and she has said repeatedly, ‘What a beautiful day.’ A variant — an especially daring variant because the words are quite difficult — might be, ‘Aren’t we lucky with the weather?’ Or, as she said to me about her own life, almost with a shrug, as if despite everything life has dealt her — an unhappy marriage, a brilliant son who died a shameful death, the absence of the many grandchildren and great-grandchildren she had probably expected — ‘I’ve been lucky. Lucky.’
I take a photo of her on my cellphone. I put it on silent and archive my mother’s face, as if to record it for when she is no longer there. For days afterwards I gaze at this image in which I can see both exhaustion and a kind of immutable dignity.
THE SHAME — WHERE DOES it come from precisely? Any son would be ashamed of his mother taking her clothes off in public. But it’s more than this. It’s the conflict between her age and the sexual acting out (if it is in fact sexual, which is not clear). I had already seen her radiance and shameless pleasure when she scored a boyfriend at the home. He was ten or twelve years younger. Her ‘toy boy’, I used to call him. She was surprisingly philosophical when he abandoned her for a younger woman. Then more recently she was hit on by a man with dementia. I was never quite sure what this meant — how far it got — but the staff were on red alert to keep him away from her. (Was he the man who kissed her on the cheek when we walked in, like celebrities, to her one-hundredth birthday party? I registered it at the time as being unusual but just put it down to her popularity.) Bess as a party girl. A girl ‘who likes a good time’. An appetite for life.
But it becomes ‘inappropriate’ as she gets so old — the mismatch between age and desire. Or is it that old people are not allowed the pleasures of sex? Or has it in fact nothing to do with sex and desire? And is the shame I feel — now this is true — because I wonder if I am infected with the same inappropriate shamelessness? One could call it desperation. In my emotionally complicated childhood and adolescence, I essentially shut down. I came out in my early twenties but my sex life, as could be expected, was chaotic. I was always searching for a monogamous relationship founded on intense, almost overpowering love — what I came later to recognise as a folie à deux, perhaps an echo of the love affair between Russell and me, or between Bess and me.
It wasn’t until much later that this spell ended. It seemed to die a natural death, and at that time in my life I became intensely interested in sex, and sex with a wide variety of men. It is not unusual for gay men from the repressive period to experiment with sex later in their lives. This is partly because the natural evolution of desire and play was stoppered by social pressure, laws forbidding it, stigma, shame. So I suddenly found myself as a man no longer possessing the charms of youth entering a sexual marketplace predicated on youth and beauty. This did not deter me. It gave me strength. And while there were humiliations aplenty (if I chose to recognise them as such), I also discovered a depth of sexual pleasure that helped me mature as a human and cast off the thrall, the frozen part, of my earlier life.
Yet the sudden eruption of Bess into a shameless sexual being (even if there was no overt sexual content in it) gave me pause for thought. Was this really what I myself was? A shameless man who had lost touch with what was appropriate? The keen pleasure I felt when I realised I could undress completely and no longer be ashamed about whatever faults my body had: this had seemed to me to be a major transition, even a key turning point in my life. I was lucky in that I had found in Douglas a partner who is loving and constant, who understood the strange malformation of my past. But I also knew the powerful allure of desire and the potential for anarchy it created.
All these complicated feelings were in my mind. The shame was about myself as much as it was about the shame of a one-hundred-year-old mother who had taken to undressing in public.
I REMEMBER A HOLIDAY AT Hicks Bay on the East Cape. It was the halcyon holiday of my childhood. I was probably nine, so we are talking 1959. We camped on the foreshore under an ancient pōhutukawa, and there was a sense of us being the only humans alive, though we were in profoundly Māori territory.
My parents had a separate tent. Russell and I shared a pup tent. My parents’ separate tent was so they could have sex, I see looking back. This explains why they had slipped into an easy, happy camaraderie. Gone was that niggling resentment, that totting up in the book of plaints, regrets, insults. Had Dad forgiven Bessie? Had he made a compromise, decided that he loved her so much that he would forgive, or absolve her, of her wartime lovers? They were happy. It was as if we had different parents — adults who were companionable, friendly. Dad enjoyed building fires and camping; perhaps it took him back to the best part of his war. But what I remember, because it was so unusual, was that we swam ‘in the nuddy’. Nuddy is a childish word that probably desexed the activity, giving it a slightly risqué emphasis. It was daring but lovely.
I still have an image in my head. The waves have made the golden sand as vast as a ballroom floor made of spun glass. In the glass is the sky overhead. We seem to be advancing into the sky itself, a form of heaven. And we are walking forward together, excited by the adventure of being naked — turned back into something almost biblical, a family salved of sin, existing briefly in heaven.
I WRITE TO A FRIEND, Shonagh Koea, also an author, on a weekly basis, sometimes even when we are in the same city. She and I tend to use personae at times of stress or occasionally in an outbreak of frivolity. She becomes Douglas Bader (DSO, retired) while I become June Opie. (Real people from our youth, both of whom wrote memoirs about overcoming their disabilities with courage and stamina. Our intention is lightly satirical, as is our change of gender.)
After the incident in the home, I wrote to Shonagh, and she replied: ‘You have said in your letter that she has suddenly been behaving outside her character, so that is a sign of an inadvertent decline due to great age. It is not really Bess doing that, whatever it is. So you do not need to worry or be embarrassed about whatever has occurred. It is not really Bess at all. It is some primeval sense of life and survival that we all may have hidden away somewhere in the recesses of our psyches, long overlaid with good manners, deportment, cultivatio
n and much else, possibly even pretension. It may be an ancient remnant of prehistoric life when we had to find a waterhole by knowing the scent of water on the wind, or to know that danger lurked in the darkness when we had invented fire and could raise a burning stick in the night to show a ring of predators’ eyes glowing in the sudden light. It is an ancient primeval thing, like a howl echoing down a dark valley, so the end must be near, I think.
‘Douglas Bader (DSO, retired).’
Doesn’t this show the beauty of a letter sent at the right moment? I opened her letter up several times to re-read her words of wisdom and comfort. I kept the letter nearby so my fingers could touch it, or my eyes glance at it, as if it were a good-luck token.
I would carry on. Isn’t that what my background told me to do? To persist. This applied to my grandfather after the 1931 quake as much as to his daughter, who at almost one hundred and one had forgotten how to die.
12 MARCH 2017
A young nurse, who is always pleasant, phones me to say Bess has vomited up something like coffee grounds. This is apparently a serious sign. Bess has some sort of internal bleeding, and the nurse seems to be saying she is entering a dying process. ‘Entering a dying process’. How absurd. She is dying.
Immediately I experience an outbreak of anxiety. It is hard to comprehend. Why am I feeling so anxious when I know she will have to die sooner or later, and some rational part of my mind celebrates the fact? It would be better for her to die rather than to enter a deeper state of dementia. Yet I feel an elemental panic. It is as if I was standing on a platform high up in the air and the floorboards under my feet have given way. Abandonitis.
I go down to visit her. She is lying on her side, asleep. She keeps murmuring, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ Gradually she rises to consciousness, sees me sitting there, and tells me not to stay, to go home. She seems to think I have just driven down to Napier or wherever she thinks she is.
Later she says to me, ‘Go, you mustn’t be late for school.’ I say I’m happy sitting there and she should just keep snoozing. I have brought a New Yorker to read and have my iPhone.
She gradually becomes more conscious and I ask her if she would like me to brush her hair. I pick up her 1930s silver brush with her initials elegantly engraved it, the silver almost black with tarnish, and I brush her hair slowly, thinking back to how I used to do this when I was an apprentice pouf. Her skull is so visible now. This seems to ease her. I make a cup of tea, put cold water in it so it doesn’t scald her, and give her a chocolate biscuit. She seems to be hungry. She sits up and sips the tea. After a while she asks me where the toilet is. She makes to get up and I panic at what I might be forced to see. Lecture myself about not being so selfish. She can’t get up from the bed, so I somehow wrestle her upwards from behind, my hands under her armpits, get her walker, and she manages to get into the toilet. I go and stand where I can’t see her. Eventually she finishes and I help her back to the bed.
‘You’re a wonderful son,’ she says. It is heartfelt.
We talk a little more. For the first time she acknowledges her own death.
‘What will you do when I kick the bucket?’
I’m not sure quite what she is asking me. I decide to say, ‘I’ll be very sad, Mum. Very sad indeed.’
I want to say, You have loved me unconditionally in a way no one else will ever do and we have had an enriching friendship. You who were worried I would always be poor as a writer have supported me. You have been a bewildering, spellbinding mother. I will be all right. And I have Douglas, and he understands me, knows what and who I am, is my rock.
But I don’t say that. I say something else, and I don’t know why: ‘Don’t worry, Mum, we’ll meet again when I die. We’ll be together then.’
It is such a curious thing to say, because I am unsure whether I believe this. One part of me, the rational part, sees it as a ridiculous statement. Some other fairy part of my consciousness holds out a hope it is true.
‘Well, let’s not think about that,’ she says in her pithy, down-to-earth way.
Later, settling down to snooze, she says, ‘I don’t know what happens.’
Finally I decided to go. I knew she didn’t want me too near her. She was too sick, probably nauseous. She complained of pains in her feet. I said, ‘I’m going to kiss you, but on your forehead.’
I kissed her on her forehead, right where the brain lies.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I said.
She seemed quite cheery when I left, or at least as if she had got some consolation from my visiting her. I am not sure if this isn’t an expression of vanity. Just before I left, a nurse came in, plumped up Bess’s pillows in a boisterous way, called her ‘darling’ and said to me as we stood at the door, ‘Knowing Bessie, she’ll probably be right as rain tomorrow.’
I got a sense of how popular she was with the nurses. Later in the evening I composed a funeral soliloquy which included the words ‘of good old pioneer stock’. I meant her peasant strength. Her ability to endure. But also something else to do with her humour, her practicality, her adaptability. Even as an old woman without power she managed to disarm by charm.
27 MARCH 2017
Bess has been shifted to ‘the special care unit’. It’s in response to her undressing. You need to press a buzzer in order to get in, then you enter a neutral zone where another buzzer needs to be pressed to allow you to enter the ‘special care’ area. This is a ring of rooms around a forecourt, the whole area fenced off so there is no possibility of escape. Everybody in the unit has advanced dementia, but they are on the whole peaceful old people who have returned to the simplicities of childhood.
This is a step beyond the hospital, which is where Bess feared to go. Anabel had taken her down there on her own, and had rung and told me, ‘Bessie was peaceful and it went surprisingly well.’
Now I face the task of emptying out her studio, selecting clothes for a single room with a double-door closet. You are encouraged to bring personal items, and there is a box on the door in which you can place family photos — certificates indicating who the person once was.
I feel exhaustion at the thought of sorting through her possessions yet again.
BESS IN THE UNDERWORLD. The place she feared to go. Bess stripped down, reduced, face naked and raw. She has no make-up or earrings. She looks like a refugee in a refugee camp. When I speak to her she has to travel back a long distance to respond, and even then it is across a deep, empty space.
We sit outside in the sun. I chafe her hands and she eventually responds with her customary ‘And what else?’ She also asks me ‘What’s out there?’, indicating with her head the rest of PA, from which she has been exiled.
On my way out I meet the young nurse who had told me Bessie was on the point of dying. I treat her as someone who has betrayed me. The nurses and staff outside ‘special care’ all ask me brightly, ‘How is Bessie getting on?’ I also feel they betrayed her. But the situation is more cut and dried. If she had not started behaving ‘inappropriately’ she would still be back in PA, in conditions which now seem to me paradisial.
Maria, the smiling matron of ‘special care’, says they will put a ‘onesie’ on Bess with a zip up the back so she cannot undo it when she wants to undress. ‘It’s to save her dignity,’ she explains.
I wish she had died.
SOMETIMES I THINK OF HER as she used to be. I see her in motion. I see her walking along energetically, on her way somewhere. She is full of purpose. She also makes small movements with her hands, as if she is in the middle of an animated conversation. She is ‘making a point’.
Packing up her room, throwing things away — I think of all the times I’ve done this — reducing possessions into ever smaller units. In all her drawers, behind cushions, in cupboards, endless tissues she has secreted ‘for a rainy day’. I find a questionnaire from PA: ‘What do you think of Princess Alexandra Retirement Village?’ She has filled it in with shaky but determined handwriting, all in capi
tals, ‘It is very boring but I suppose that is what these places are.’
Bess with her full engagement book, playing endless bridge, ‘off to a show’. ‘Let’s have a spot.’ ‘You do pour a good G & T, Pete.’
THEY HAVE CUT HER HAIR brutally short. It hangs limp around her gaunt face. She reminds me of Marie-Antoinette on the tumbril. She is outraged but keeps to a kind of brooding silence. When we are together she doesn’t say I betrayed her, but there is a kind of lost connection between us — perhaps of trust. I didn’t, couldn’t, protect her from entering the Underworld.
I go down to visit her. I dread the lack of privacy. I always used to take her up to her room so we could have tea together and talk in private. When I walk in, I ask, ‘Isn’t there a family room?’ There is. It’s not much more than a large cupboard and it has surplus equipment in it, but there are two armchairs. I get Mum in there and we sit down together. I close the door.
Surprisingly, she is quite focused.
