Holding the Net

by Melanie P. Merriman

  Chapter 4

  “I GUESS THAT WAS OUR REHEARSAL for her old age,” Barbara said, once Mom had recovered from her broken wrist.

  “I hate that thought, but I fear you’re right. It was like she aged ten years after the fall. Thank goodness she bounced back.”

  If it was a rehearsal, I thought we’d done pretty well, but it bothered me that Mom had been alone the whole day before I arrived. And what if she had fallen at home instead of in the doctor’s office? I did a half-hearted Internet search for information on those buttons you push to call for help if you fall and can’t get up.

  “Do you think we should talk to Mom about getting a panic button?” I asked Barbara.

  She reminded me that Mom was back to all her usual activities, and wasn’t even home that much. It was almost as if that acute attack of aging had granted her an immunity to growing older.

  “How lucky are we that Mom is so independent?” I asked Barbara every time we talked over the next several years.

  “Very lucky,” she replied.

  Three years after the broken wrist, around the time Mom turned eighty-five, Barbara and Phil bought a home in New Bern, North Carolina, a small town near the Eastern shore. They still lived in Arlington, but spent long weekends at the new house whenever they could. Phil loved the sailing community there, and he and Barbara were both tiring of the hustle and traffic around Washington, D.C. They planned to move to New Bern full-time in a few years, after Phil retired from his job as Director of Photographic Services at the American Red Cross.

  Once they had a guest room set up, Barbara invited Mom and me to come see the house. I called Mom to coordinate travel plans. I was surprised when she said she was nervous about the trip and asked me to buy her ticket for her. She’d never been worried about traveling before.

  “Mom, do you want me to meet you at the Tampa airport, so we can fly together?”

  “Would you? It’s not too much trouble?”

  Flying from Miami through Tampa to get to North Carolina was a bit of a pain, but it was clear she wanted this, so I accepted the assignment without question. I was actually kind of grateful to be asked to do something for her.

  “I’ll arrange it,” I said, “and we can meet at the ticket counter. Okay?”

  “Yes. Good. I can get to the airport by myself.” I could hear the relief in her voice.

  Barbara’s house was in an older neighborhood, where comfortable three-bedroom ranch homes like Barbara and Phil’s faced super-sized houses that backed up to the Neuse River. It was April, and every yard featured a blooming dogwood or redbud tree along with bright swaths of colorful rhododendrons and azaleas. Mom and I sat in the back seat of the Honda, oohing and aahing as Barbara toured us around.

  New Bern had been named by Swiss and German settlers after Bern, Switzerland. Bern is the German word for bear, and several corners of the city sported colorful fiberglass bear statues decorated by local artists.

  On our way to the quaint town center for a bear tour and lunch in a rooftop garden, Mom pointed to an attractive brick building identified by a sign that read “McCarthy Court.”

  “Maybe I’ll live there one day,” Mom said.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but it looks like a nursing home.” Mom faced front again as McCarthy Court receded behind us.

  I twisted around in my seat, trying to get a better view of the building. I couldn’t picture lively, active Mom in a nursing home anytime soon—or, really, ever. Besides, I had always assumed she would eventually live near me, not Barbara, and I was sure Barbara assumed the same.

  “Oh, Mom, you’re years away from anything like that,” I said, trying to shake the whole thing off.

  “I hope so,” she said.

  After the trip, I kept replaying the scene in my head.

  In my hospice work, I had done research on causes of death and the use of healthcare services. I knew that, at eighty-five, Mom was in the category called “the oldest old,” but she would also be regarded as “successfully aging,” meaning that she was functioning well on every level—physically, mentally, and socially.

  “What did you think about Mom noticing that nursing home?” I asked Barbara on a phone call shortly after the visit.

  “It was weird. She seems just the same to me. Still giving me grief about my housekeeping and telling me how to cook the string beans.”

  Barb and I didn’t call each other often, but when we did, we would always talk about how well Mom was doing at taking care of herself. One of us would express surprise and gratitude that there hadn’t been a single crisis since the broken wrist. The other would say that it couldn’t last forever. And then we’d go back to our everyday lives.

  Two years after our first visit, Mom and I took a second trip to New Bern, for the October mum festival. Once again, I made all the arrangements, and this time, I even went to the condo for a night—both before and after the trip—at Mom’s request. She said she didn’t want to have to go to the airport alone. I barely registered Mom’s request as a sign of her decline; instead, I felt happy about giving her some support.

  We toured the neighborhoods, just as we had done on our first visit. This time, the trees were dressed in the reds and golds of fall. As Barbara drove us around, the talk was about recent events, and when Barbara and Phil might move to New Bern permanently. Even though Mom was now eighty-seven, the topic of nursing homes never came up.

  A year later, in November, 2004, Barbara and I visited Mom in New Port Richey to celebrate my fifty-second birthday. We invited Ginny and Lenore to join us for dinner at Bon Appétit in Dunedin. As the waitress brought our drinks, Ginny mentioned that her daughter and son-in-law were moving back to Florida to be closer to her.

  “I never want to live with either one of my girls,” Mom said.

  “Mom! That sounds awful,” I scolded her from across the table.

  “Well, you know what I mean. I just don’t want to be a burden.”

  I made my usual speech about how taking care of your family is not a burden. “It may not be easy, and it may not be fun, but it’s what families do.”

  Mom said, “Anyway, I’m going to stay in my condo until I die.”

  We’d had this conversation before, and it made me angry.

  “Why does she say those things?” I asked Barbara later that night. “Of course, we’re going to take care of her, whatever that entails.”

  “It’s not about us,” Barbara said. “It’s about her, about staying in control. What she really means is that she never wants to be dependent on us, or on anyone.”

  Barbara was right. I had missed that nuance, but she hadn’t.

  I wondered whether Mom’s hopes of staying in her condo until she died were realistic. And I also wondered what had happened to her noble, if surprising, comments about moving to a nursing home.

  Two months later, in January, 2005, I went back to New Port Richey to celebrate Mom’s birthday. She was turning eighty-nine.

  Just as she had done on almost all my visits, Mom reminded me about the preparations for her death: the will, the trust, and the living will.

  “Remember, I don’t want any heroics,” she would say. “When it’s time, you have to let me go. No surgeries or chemotherapy. No hospitals.”

  She’d had the few antiques she owned appraised. She’d made lists of the china, silverware, and family heirlooms, so Barb and I could choose what we wanted. And she reminded me, yet again, about the memorial service.

  “Speak up so everyone can hear you!”

  She was preparing for her death, but she wasn’t dying. She wasn’t even sick. Still, her preparations made me feel like I should be preparing, too. With all my hospice experience, I was pretty sure I would know what to do when she really was dying. I had a vague notion that there would be some stage between how it was now and how it would be when she was dying, but I remained halfway stuck in my myth that she would go suddenly, l
ike Daddy. How could I prepare for that?

  Then I received a letter from Lenore, who was now eighty-one years old.

  Your mother is slowing down, and eventually, she will need more help, she wrote. I know you want to do what is best for her. Lenore was encouraging Mom to think about moving nearer to either Barbara or me.

  I was mortified that Lenore felt she had to write this letter. I thought I’d been paying attention. What important cue had I missed? How could it suddenly be time for her to move? I called Barbara.

  “I’ve been watching her,” I said. “She seems fine. What am I missing?”

  “Well, you did have to go over and travel with her last time you came here.”

  “Yes, but travel is hard for everybody since 9-11,” I reasoned.

  “She told me she’s starting to limit her driving, to short distances and places she knows well,” Barbara said.

  “Listen, that’s why they call it ‘aging well,’” I argued. “She’s being sensible, and adapting to getting older.”

  “Yes, but it also means she’s doing less, and maybe getting more isolated.”

  “Do you think so?” It was hard for me to see Mom as needy; I didn’t want to see her that way. “Well, whatever it is, Lenore thinks Mom needs help, so I’m going to go see for myself,” I told Barbara.

  I called Mom. She always gave me grief when I wanted to fly over just to visit her, so my plan was to lie about having business with the local hospice. In the first moments of the conversation, even before I brought up the subject of a visit, she told me she had an appointment to have her cataracts removed. It was the perfect excuse.

  “I’ll come over and go with you.”

  I said. “You don’t need to do that. They have a van that picks you up and drives you home.”

  “But what about when you get home? Are you having both eyes done?”

  “They do them about two weeks apart. I’ll be fine.” Mom did not seem concerned.

  “Mom, I really want to come, at least for the first eye.”

  “Well, if you want to come, come. I always love to see you.”

  I wrote back to Lenore. I’m so grateful you contacted me. I’m going to visit Mom next month and talk to her about moving.

  As I wrote, I thought about how Mom had been all set to have cataract surgery by herself. To me, that looked like one more piece of evidence that she was still doing fine.

  I looked at Lenore’s letter to me, and mine to her, lying open on my desk. We were two people who loved Mom, with two very different interpretations of her situation. I needed to get to the truth.

  I arrived at about noon, and after a quick sandwich, Mom and I went to the eye clinic for the pre-op exam. I was freaked out when they propped her eye open to take some measurements, but she swore it didn’t hurt at all. She was completely calm. I was not.

  That evening, we went out to Carrabba’s for dinner. It was still light out, so I let Mom drive. She went too slowly on the highway, but it wasn’t scary.

  We sat down and ordered our usual cocktails. Mostly because I had told Lenore I would, I brought up the subject of moving.

  “Have you thought any more about moving nearer to either Barbara or me?”

  I was trying to be fair, and not just assume that Mom would end up near me, but I thought that was what would happen—and that was what I wanted.

  “Yes, I’ve been talking to Lenore about it,” Mom said.

  “So, what are you thinking?”

  “Well, I’m not going anytime soon, but when I’m ready, I’ll probably go to North Carolina, to that place near Barbara,” she said.

  I sipped my Manhattan and leaned back in the booth, trying not to look shocked or offended. This is about what Mom wants, I told myself.

  “Really?” I said. “Why not Miami?”

  “Mel, you’re never there. You travel all the time. Why would I want to be in Miami without you?”

  That hurt. Did she think I wouldn’t take care of her?

  “Well, if you moved there, I wouldn’t travel all the time. I would be around.”

  Until that moment, I hadn’t thought about the rearrangements that would be needed. I was sure I could make it work if I had to.

  She said, “You can’t change your whole life like that. I wouldn’t want you to. You love your work.”

  “Well, I love you more,” I said, “and I am going to look into options in Miami. But I’ll ask Barbara to get some information on McCarthy Court, too.”

  Mom sailed through the cataract surgery in great good humor. She insisted she’d go alone for the second eye. For my entire two-day visit, she had been completely self-sufficient, fixing her own breakfast, dressing, and even driving.

  It didn’t make sense. Lenore was smart and she knew Mom well, so I couldn’t just discount her perspective. But it didn’t add up for me.

  The day after the Mom’s surgery, I was scheduled to drive down the west coast of Florida from New Port Richey to Bonita Springs, to meet Klein at a new Hyatt hotel for a weekend vacation. I had a three-hour trip, and it was the perfect time to really think things through. I left Mom’s, went to Starbucks for an iced espresso, and got on the highway.

  I thought about what Lenore had written—that Mom was slowing down. I agreed with that, but mostly, I was impressed with how much she was still doing. What did Lenore see that I didn’t? She’d said Mom would need more help. I agreed with that, too, but we weren’t there yet.

  I turned on the car radio. NPR was reporting on Hurricane Dennis. It had hit Navarre Beach along the northwest coast of Florida, near Pensacola, just a few days before. There had been forty-two deaths. I had lived in Florida for over twenty years. I knew you had to prepare for the worst way ahead of time, when the hurricane was still over the mid-Atlantic, even before the forecasters could tell you which way it would go. I knew you couldn’t wait until the wind was high and scary to evacuate—because then it was too late. I started to see Lenore as my personal NOAA, warning me about Hurricane Mom. Even though the water had barely started to rise, the floods were coming, and it might get deep fast.

  Mom, me, and Barbara in Barbara and Phil’s house in New Bern. My brother-in-law, Phil, took this in 2008 and entitled it “Pratts in a Row.”

  Chapter 5

  I CALLED BARBARA and told her about my pitiful epiphany.

  “How could it be such a shock to me that Mom is old? She’s eighty-nine!”

  “Because she doesn’t want us to think she’s old.” Barbara’s voice was calm.

  “Is it a shock to you?”

  “No. I’ve just been pretending.”

  I got on the computer and typed “senior living Miami” into Google. I was aware of two possible options: “life care” communities and nursing homes. In my hospice work, I had visited lots of nursing homes, and I’d always had to steel myself. I’d paint on a smile and force cheerful greetings for the residents, who were bedbound or getting around in wheelchairs. No matter how hard the administration tried to make the homes look good, they remained gray and depressing, mostly because the residents were in bad shape and needed full-time nursing care. Mom didn’t belong in a nursing home.

  I had also visited my father’s cousin, Gratia, after she had moved to a life care community on a large wooded campus outside Philadelphia. The year she’d moved in, she had paid an “entry fee” of almost $50,000—about what a small house cost at the time. She also paid monthly rent, for a two-bedroom apartment which she filled with her favorite antiques—including a maple dresser and bedside table that are now in my home in Florida—and her four-poster bed that was so tall she needed a step stool to climb in. Gratia lived completely independently for several years, then added a meal plan and had dinner in the communal dining room. When she got to the point where she needed more help, she transferred to what they called personal care—a single room, three meals a day, and help with dressing and medications as needed. Toward the end, when her congestive heart failure got worse and her memory failed,
she was transferred to the nursing home on the same campus. Her monthly payments had gone up with each transfer, but the initial buy-in fee entitled her to care for as long as she needed it, even if she ran out of money. I supposed something like that might work for Mom.

  I found two life care communities in the Miami area, and both were all wrong. First of all, they were expensive, with buy-in fees of close to $100,000. Even with the guarantee of perpetual care, I knew Mom would never go for it. Though she could afford it, she preferred to live modestly. She just didn’t spend that kind of money on anything. Then there was the geography. The one closest to me was still forty-five minutes away, and way too fancy. Mom was not the crystal chandelier and French provincial furniture type. The place where I thought she would fit in best was well over an hour from my house, which didn’t accomplish the primary goal of having Mom “near” me.

  I was also concerned about Miami’s culture. Mom had spent the last thirty-five years of her life in New Port Richey, where most people are from the Midwest. I knew it would be hard, if not impossible, for her adapt to caregivers who barely spoke English and the mañana attitude of the tropics.

  I told Mom that I really wanted her to move near me, but that I was having trouble finding good options for senior living in Miami.

  She said, “Mel, I already told you. If I move, I’m going to New Bern.”

  It made me nervous that she said “if.”

  While I had been striking out in Miami, Barbara had struck gold in New Bern. She sent me a brochure on McCarthy Court, the place Mom had pointed out on our first trip to North Carolina. It wasn’t a nursing home; it was an adult congregate living facility. I’d heard the term—ACLF—but knew nothing about how they worked. According to the brochure, McCarthy Court offered one- and two-bedroom apartments for monthly rental, with no buy-in fee and no lease. The seniors playing bridge and enjoying dinner in the pictures were probably actors, but they looked so healthy and happy. I wanted to believe they loved it at McCarthy Court. Apartments came with light housekeeping once a week, and daily check-ins to be sure everyone was still breathing. (Push the button in the bathroom by 10 a.m., or somebody comes to check on you.) Residents had dinner together in the communal dining room. McCarthy provided shuttle service to shopping and doctor’s appointments, and they offered field trips to museums, plays, and concerts. Next door to McCarthy, and under the same management, was Homeplace, an assisted-living facility. If necessary, Mom could move across the parking lot to the higher level of care. All that, and Barbara’s house was only five minutes away. Another similar option, The Villages, was just ten minutes from the house. It all sounded too good to be true. Why wasn’t there anything like this near me?