Swing Low

by Miriam Toews

  Have just been visited by Reg and Diana. She tells me that I will have to make up my mind about how I want to live — spend my time in bed or face life. I want to ask if there are any other choices, but I smile, nod, wait, stare out the window, will the world, including them, to leave. Brother tells me he has hired a man to take care of my flowers. That explains it. Would like to say, Hire a psychiatrist to take care of your brother, but don’t. Muster up the words to thank him. Would like to see my flowers one more time, very much so.

  twenty-seven

  November 30, 1993. My heart stopped functioning properly and gave the idea to my brain.

  My last day of teaching, brought on by a heart attack while hanging up Christmas decorations in the hallway at Elmdale School. I suppose I should have known it would happen there. As I descended from my stepladder, doubled over in pain and hung with garlands, Gary, the principal, happened by and asked me if I needed help. I just might, I said, hoping not to alarm the young man, I just might. He brought me here, of course, and the doctors prescribed two aspirins. Not a heart attack, they said, we’re certain of it. That evening Elvira asked why, if it wasn’t a heart attack, I was in so much pain and receiving large doses of morphine. The doctor upgraded my condition to a mild heart attack and said I’d be home in two or three days.

  But several days later, I went into heart failure. I was rushed by ambulance to the intensive care unit of the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, where they told my family I had little chance of surviving, and where I was immediately intubated, unable to breathe at all on my own. And we think, added the doctor, that he may have sustained some damage to the brain. How is that? asked the family. Loss of oxygen, said the doctor simply. We would have liked to have seen him put on a respirator sooner.

  I remember lying naked in the ICU (I had a high fever and they were trying to keep me cool), hooked up to tubes and wires and IVs, unable to speak because of the hose in my throat and unable to move at all, and listening to the beautiful high voices of the Elmdale school choir singing Christmas carols. The radio station in Steinbach had taped them singing especially for me. They said, this is for Mel Toews, if he can hear us, from the students of Elmdale School who miss him very much, who want him to get well and come back to school, and who wish him a very Merry Christmas.

  There was a cantankerous man recovering in the area next to mine whom the nurses jokingly called Sunshine. He was a homeless man who refused to tell anybody his name and was brought in by the police after he collapsed in the street. He frequently pulled out the tubes they had attached to him and the nurses were continuously reprimanding him and telling him he might die if he didn’t lie still and keep his tubes in. Do you want to die, Sunshine? they’d ask as they re-tubed him each time. Do you want to die? Go to hell, he’d say. You know you’ll die if you do it again, they’d say. Good! he’d answer. I’ll see you there! When the nurses had set up the radio right next to my head and turned the volume up high so I’d hear my kids singing, Sunshine hollered, Christ, turn that damn radio off! The nurses quieted him down, saying, That’s okay, Sunshine, it’s for Mel. I couldn’t actually see Sunshine in my position on the bed but I lifted my hand slightly and waved. Go to hell, he said. But I was able to hear my students above the noise he made, singing the songs we’d rehearsed so many times for the big Christmas concert, and they sounded perfect to me, like a professional choir of angels. Even Sunshine acknowledged that they weren’t half bad, but said they made him feel he’d already died and gone to heaven.

  Eventually Sunshine left. For where, I have no idea. Reg had brought Mother all the way in from Steinbach to visit me in the hospital, and I did something I had never dreamt I’d have the courage to do. I refused to see her. I told Elvira I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to see the look on her face when she saw me hooked up to all the machines and wires and to know how disappointed she would be. Now Mel’s heart fails on top of everything else! Is there no end? That sort of thing. I just couldn’t do it. Elvira informed Mother that I wasn’t up to having visitors, and Mother, grin fastened to her face, sat in the waiting room until Reg showed up to take her back home. My one and only act of defiance shocked Elvira and she said she was proud of me, even though the only thing I was of me was sick. Elvira and the girls took me home on Christmas Eve. They wrapped a green woollen scarf around my neck and ears and helped me out to the car, one daughter on each side of me and Elvira waiting behind the wheel with the engine running. I hadn’t made a full recovery but nobody told me that then. Why ruin Christmas?

  I’d like to forget the last three and a half years of my life, and, at this rate, I probably will. After a long and often fruitless search for help, Elvira finally found a specialist who gave me devastating news. He told me that I had suffered and would continue to suffer from small strokes and that I would very likely come to a point where I had no regrets and no hopes. No memory of the past and no plans for the future. What does one say? Elvira and I went for a long drive through the countryside after that particular appointment. She tried not to cry, tried to look at the bright side of things, held on to my wrists like the old days. We can travel now, Mel, we’ll have fun. But I didn’t say a word. Needless to say, my teaching days were over. In the beginning, for the first few months, I tried to imagine a life without teaching. My memory was bad and I easily became fearful and confused, but I tried to exercise regularly and to carry on with the work I’d been doing outside of the classroom, which included my never-ending research on important Canadians and my book on the prime ministers. I asked myself continuously how this could have happened. I was doing what I do, I thought, I was teaching school, hanging up Christmas decorations, how could this have happened?

  Elvira and the girls and the grandchildren did their best to cheer me up, to keep me busy, to keep me out of bed, but gradually, and inexorably, I succumbed to the deepest, darkest depression I’d ever experienced in my life. I was nothing if not a teacher, and there was no other explanation.

  Mother’s drinking finally stopped the day she died, age eighty-nine, in this hospital shortly after my “retirement.” When Elvira tiptoed into my bedroom to give me the news, I pretended to be asleep. Mother’s gone, Mel, she whispered. And I remember thinking: Then I have nothing else left to prove, have I?

  If a depressed man can grieve, then I suppose I did. I grieved for what might have been. I felt guilty for not having had the courage or the love necessary to forgive her. Somehow, I thought, that might have made a difference, but of course everything was too late now. That my wife and my daughters and their partners and various children were still very much alive, and that they loved me, and that they were becoming more desperate and worried about me with every day that passed, was a fleeting, abstract notion, compared to my all-consuming obsession with what I had lost in my life and what I had failed to accomplish by waiting too long. There was never any doubt in my mind that it had been my sole responsibility to build a relationship with my mother, and that I had failed to do it.

  In the beginning of this three-and-a-half-year period, Elvira managed to persuade me to travel with her to Arizona, to one of these gated communities in the desert where white, middle-class, retired folks go to get away from the cold winter. Naturally, this was not Elvira’s idea of an adventure, but she knew it was a compromise she might pull off. It was a very safe, very conventional, very familiar place, but away from home at least. Her sister and brother-in-law went there often and so did a few other couples we knew. I agreed to it. As always, when away from home, I managed to function normally and even enjoy the odd moment here and there. While Elvira swam, played Scrabble, went on desert hikes, and took off to watch spring-training baseball games, I researched the lives of Canadians (Emily Stowe, Emily Carr, Henry Pellatt, the King of Casa Loma, and Cora Hind, to name a few) in the small library that had been set up in the common area of the “compound.” (My daughter’s word for it. I’d call it a trailer park.)

  I made a few phone calls, one to Llew, my
mechanic, to tell him how well the car was running, and to Elmdale School to make arrangements with Miss Hill that she would put chocolate bars on the staffroom table when she thought the time would be right, and that I’d reimburse her when I got back. I updated my diary. I visited with other compound-dwellers, I sat by the pool in the sun and attended the occasional lecture on holistic health or whatever was being offered. From time to time the activity director would arrange for a nurse to ride around on what looked like a Dickie-Dee ice cream bike from trailer to trailer offering the oldies various medical tests and advice. Oh my, hooted Elvira the first time she saw the nurse on the bike, it’s come to this! I read up on the Reichmanns, the Bronfmans, the Cronkites, and the Gores, and Arizona: a cavalcade of history. And I walked.

  Elvira decided it would be great to have the grandchildren come and visit us during their spring break, and she immediately went about making the arrangements. We all had a wonderful time. Elvira and the kids flew about from one activity to the next and I, in my usual way, watched them from the sidelines, amused and bewildered. I particularly enjoyed sitting by the pool and watching the kids swim. The oldies rarely swam. They stood, like storks, in waist-high water, wearing straw hats and working at crossword puzzles, while my grandchildren darted around them, underwater, like electric eels. Eventually, one of the oldies would glance meaningfully at me from under his or her boater, and I’d casually suggest to the kids that we head back to the trailer for some lunch.

  The kids were hugely amused by the type of activities and games we residents participated in. My grandson suggested we throw all our medication into one big pile and, when signalled, run towards it, scramble to find our own, and run back to the starting line — the objective, of course, to do it in the least amount of time. I assured him that I’d bring it up with the activity director that very afternoon.

  When we returned home, on April 4, 1997, the writing and the walking stopped. Got home to 58 Brandt Rd. in Steinbach at 5:50 p.m., reads the last entry of my travel journal. I think we should have kept on going perhaps, from one compound to another if nothing else, just staying away from Steinbach and everything it meant. But that’s a type of lifestyle that didn’t make any sense to me then, a vagabond’s life on the road, moving from place to place.

  Speaking of moving from place to place, I’ve just come back from the morgue. (And how many of us can say that?) I didn’t mean to go there, but somehow I got lost, trying to find a place to walk without activating alarms. My daughter will come later and walk with me outside, but in the meantime I felt as though I’d explode if I didn’t walk. I got on an elevator, pushed several buttons, like a kid, and moments later the elevator door opened in the basement, next to the underground tunnel that links the main hospital with the personal care home for seniors. I walked for a while through this empty concrete sterile tube until I heard the voices of children. I stopped dead in my tracks and wondered where I was. For a second I worried that I hadn’t prepared my lessons for the day. There was a slight bend in the tunnel, and the voices were coming from beyond this bend. I could also hear a sound that I thought was a toy car being driven back and forth along the concrete, something, anyway, with wheels. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. Then, from a distance of about a hundred yards, I saw a child fly up into the air in a crouching position and drop down again, unharmed. Then more children appeared, and they all seemed to be moving in circles around the inside of the tunnel, upside down and around and around, entirely unaffected by the laws of gravity. It was a lovely sight.

  I stood very still and watched them. At first, I was afraid they would hurt themselves, but then, after a few minutes, I began to relax and enjoy myself. I didn’t know what was happening but the children seemed to know what they were doing and they appeared to be having a wonderful time. Suddenly, one of the children, a boy of about thirteen, looked over to where I was standing, and I could hear him call out to his friends, but I wasn’t sure of what he was saying. I panicked, thinking that by startling them I had risked their safety, and quickly looked around for a place to hide. There was a door next to me, one I hadn’t noticed earlier, and I pushed through it, realizing instantly that I was in the morgue. Then I went through a rather sci-fi-ish episode of wondering whether I was dead and if the tunnel I had just been in was the tunnel they mention in stories of near-death experiences and whether or not the children were angels or versions of me or just what in the Sam Hill was going on. I stood in the room, surrounded by stainless steel drawers and cabinets and instruments, feeling relieved that it was over, that it wasn’t so bad after all, until I heard my name being called. Mr. Toews, came a boy’s voice from the hallway, is that you? No, I thought of saying, it isn’t! (I don’t know what’s become of him!) but instead I remained quiet, hoping that the boy wouldn’t enter the morgue and suffer the shock of finding me dead, but looking alive, or rather, finding me alive but feeling dead. Regardless, I didn’t want him to see me. I leaned, softly, against one of the drawers and closed my eyes, and waited. And while I waited, I prayed that God would forgive me for all that I had failed to accomplish, and that he would understand that I simply could not go on. I prayed for deliverance, and forgiveness yet again, and for some sign of understanding. I prayed that in spite of everything, I would be understood. That’s the last thing I remember of the morgue, but miraculously I am still alive and back in my room.

  I have no idea what happened, how I got back here, or why. Am rather disappointed, after all, but grateful of course to have been helped. I will attempt to ask daughters, without alarming them, what the dickens happened to me down there.

  twenty-eight

  At home I stayed in bed. When the girls and the grandchildren came to visit, Elvira would plead with me to get out of bed, to make an appearance at least and say hello. I’d gamely throw on a bathrobe and stumble down the hallway towards the living room like a modern-day Lear, wild hair and eyes, unshaven, and barely coherent. Eventually even that became too much for me, and the girls and the grandkids came to my bedroom to say hello, though often I was unable, or unwilling, to respond at all. They’d sit on the edge of my bed, chatting about their lives, offering to bring me a glass of water or a roll with butter, which, in addition to Snickers bars, was all that I ate. Elvira would stash several of the bars in the cupboard next to my pills where she knew I would find them. I had long ago stopped sitting at the table with her at regular mealtimes. If I wanted to get up and eat something I would do it at night, while she slept. She continued to prepare the meals I had enjoyed before, however, hoping that I’d change my mind, which I rarely did.

  Sometimes, in the evening, she was able to persuade me to sit on the loveseat with her for half an hour or so, and we’d hold hands and look out the large living-room window and talk about happier times and the possibilities for fun that lay ahead. Well, she talked about them and I nodded occasionally or smiled. She told me there would be more happy times, that we would weather this storm together just the way we had weathered all the others. Remember, she said, when I used to hide your alarm clocks so you’d stay in bed with me just a little bit longer?

  I played with her gold bracelet, a gift I’d given her a year or so earlier, while she talked. It was all I could do to show her I was listening, that I loved her. Later in the evening, Elvira would join me in bed and take my hand and put it on her wrist and I’d move the fragile chain around and around and Elvira would say I love you too, Mel. Try to have a good sleep. At night, often, I would wake her because something had frightened me, a sound, a bad dream, or a premonition that something had happened to her, or the girls, or the grandchildren. She would reassure me that all was well and go back to sleep until I woke her again, fearful of yet another imagined threat or impending disaster.

  During the day she continued to work as a therapist, seeing clients in her small office, Marj’s former bedroom, while I lay in my bed and waited for her to be finished. More irony: Elvira had earned a master’s degree in marriage and fam
ily therapy and was now helping other people get their lives together, even as ours were falling apart. I was unaware of her own increasing level of exhaustion. I needed her too badly for that. There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.

  My youngest grandchild loved to bring me my pills in a small painted eggcup, and I forced myself to smile and thank her each time. I wanted her to stay with me and sing her crazy, impassioned songs or to tell me one or many of her stories. Grandpa, she’d say, I’ll give you a choice: scary, sad, funny, or scary. I knew she loved to tell the scary ones. How about scary, I’d say. But not too scary, I’ll have bad dreams. Okay, she’d say and launch into the most bizarre and violent tale you could imagine coming from a six-year-old. Sometimes she would wander around and around my bedroom as she told her stories, in a type of creative trance. Sometimes she would jump up and down lightly on the bed as she told them, and as my heavy body moved up and down to the gentle rhythm of her bouncing, I would close my eyes and pretend I was on a boat at sea. I wanted her to leave immediately, to switch off the light and close the door behind her, to stop torturing me with the lightness and beauty of her being.

  I had stopped going out for walks. I was too ashamed of myself, of what I’d become, and the very idea of discussing my so-called health or retirement with other robust and working men and women of my age, terrified me. I stopped going to church. Understandably, many friends and relatives had given up on me as an interesting person to visit, although their prayers, they assured me, would continue. But my minister kept coming by. He came to the house often, even after I’d begged Elvira not to allow any visitors inside. He sat on the sofa and told me many things, that God loved me, that he loved me, that my faith would see me through this time, and though I didn’t say a word save for the rare whispered thank you, I appreciated those visits more than he will ever know.