“I don’t understand what’s happening,” I told Klein. “I always thought I’d be the one to take care of Mom, but now she says she’d rather be in New Bern, and there are great places for her there and nothing here.” I heard myself whining.
“And I can’t imagine her living with us,” I said, hoping he would ask, “Why not?” Hoping that maybe it was possible.
Klein was more in Barbara’s camp than mine when it came to Mom. He loved her because she was my mother, but he found her annoying. He disliked her verbal aggression. If you didn’t agree with her, she’d explain it all again; clearly, you hadn’t understood her the first time. He said it felt like she was attacking him. He hated it even more when she criticized me, telling me I worked too hard, or that I would look better in brighter colors. I didn’t feel criticized. That was just how Mom and I talked to each other, but I liked that he felt protective.
“Mel, if it has to be, then it has to be,” he said, “but it doesn’t sound like that’s what she wants.”
He was right. It wasn’t what she wanted. She’d made it clear she wanted to live on her own, and if she couldn’t stay in Florida, she wanted to move near Barbara.
At the time, I didn’t even think about why Mom had been so set on New Bern. Today, I wonder. Was she thinking of me and how much it would change my life? Or was she thinking that maybe this was her last chance to finally get into Barbara’s life?
Whatever it was, I knew I had to give up on Miami. Klein would have put up with Mom, but I knew how he really felt. I loved them both, but they were like oil and water. I would have torn myself apart trying to make them both happy.
I called Mom to plan another trip to North Carolina, and tried to sound casual about the plan to look at new places to live. I expected resistance.
“Barbara will set up visits to both McCarthy Court and The Villages, just to see what’s out there,” I said.
“Good. I might be moving sooner than you think.”
“Really? Like when?” I asked.
“Maybe sometime next year.”
What? I thought. Did I hear that right? Less than two months earlier, she hadn’t been ready at all. I didn’t ask why she had changed her mind. I didn’t want to dissuade her in any way.
“Okay, then, let’s go to New Bern.” I tried to sound cheerful.
I poured myself some Lillet and sat on the porch watching the reflected glow of the sunset on the houses across the bay. It was beautiful, but Mom would not be seeing it. I prayed that the places in New Bern would be nice, that Mom would like them, that she would be happy. I prayed for a sign that the trip to New Bern was the right thing to do.
Both McCarthy Court and The Villages surprised me. At both places, the apartments were cheerful, spacious, and homey, not anything like an “institution.” As we walked around, people would stop us, ask Mom if she was thinking of moving in, and say how much they loved it there. I started thinking there was something in the water. I expected old people who were confused, and maybe in wheelchairs. Though we saw lots of canes and walkers, these folks moved. We saw bridge groups and men shooting pool. We did not see anyone playing shuffleboard. I thought I’d have to look hard for the pros, and was prepared to downplay the cons. I didn’t have to do either.
At The Villages, all the apartment doors opened onto a small campus. The wide concrete walkways were lined with flowering shrubs, and there were several small park-like areas with benches and crepe myrtle trees. The parking lot was behind the buildings, and it looked like many of the residents had cars.
McCarthy Court was a three-story building with each apartment opening onto a wide, well-lit hallway with hardwood floors. The first floor smelled faintly of pine-scented cleaner. Paintings, mostly landscapes, hung high on the walls, and when I looked carefully, I noticed that the decorative molding halfway up was actually a railing you could grab if you needed to steady yourself. I was impressed. So was Mom.
“I could live in either one of those places,” she said, “But I like McCarthy Court better.”
Barbara and I agreed that McCarthy seemed more homey.
“Mom, I can’t believe you spotted it four years ago!” I was excited.
She said, “It just looked like a nice place.”
Mom went to bed right after dinner. It was only 8:00 p.m. Barbara and I took our books and some wine out to the wrought iron table on her little screened patio.
“I can’t believe this is going so well.” I said.
“Do you really think she might move here?” Barbara asked.
“After today, it sure seems like it.”
Barbara stared out into the dark back yard. “Yeah, I guess it does.”
The next day, I got up early and went jogging. As my feet ran on the pavement, possible scenarios for Mom ran through my head. We had about seven months before Barb and Phil were selling their Arlington house and moving to New Bern full time. We could wait until then to put Mom’s name on the list for McCarthy Court. They had told us it usually took three to six months for an apartment to come available. That would work.
I decided to add an extra mile to my circuit. Joni Mitchell sang “Lucky Girl” through my iPod, and I sang along.
I’m a lucky girl
I found my friend
I’ve been all around the world
Mission Impossible
Chasing the rainbow’s end.
I was feeling good. McCarthy Court was perfect, and Mom was on board. I had heard the horror stories about parents who refused to move out of their homes, or have any help come in. Their children, my friends, worried all the time. We were going to avoid all that. Mom would be moving before she really started to go downhill. Man, we were lucky!
As I slowed up to make the turn back toward the house, it suddenly occurred to me that this lovely scenario might not be feeling so perfect to Barbara and Phil. When they had bought this place, I was sure they’d seen it as a getaway, a place for a slower, more carefree life. Taking on Mom would not be carefree, and I knew it wasn’t part of the plan.
Barbara was outside pulling weeds when I got back.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked.
“Taking a shower.”
“Barb, I just realized what having Mom in New Bern will mean for you and Phil.”
Barbara grabbed the hand hoe and stabbed at the ground.
“I know, it’s not what any of us had planned,” she said.
“Is Phil okay with it, if it happens?”
“Yeah, he’ll be okay. We both wish it was you, instead, but we get it.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t think about this before.”
“It’s alright. I’ve thought about it enough for both of us.”
Four months later, in January 2006, Mom turned ninety. We planned a birthday dinner for her at Bon Appétit, and invited her friends Jane and Bill Johnson along with Lenore and Ginny.
I wandered into Mom’s room as we were dressing to go out. I always liked to poke through her jewelry to see if anything went with my outfit. She was sitting on a chair and pulling on her nylon knee-highs. She picked up the stocking and rolled it down from the top edge, using both hands, then, reaching her arms out, bent over as far as she could. Barely lifting her foot off the floor, she fitted the stocking toe over her toes, and slowly rolled it up to her knee. The right leg took a full minute. I sat on the bed with the jewelry box beside me. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her do the left leg—another full minute.
The restaurant was loud, and it was hard to hear across the large round table. I sat next to Bill Johnson. He was a talker, regaling us with funny stories about his years in the Foreign Service. I kept my eye on Mom, but never caught a glimpse of that old woman who had taken so long to pull on her knee-highs. Instead, she ordered her usual martini and half-rack of lamb, rare. She ate everything. She laughed at Bill’s stories, and threatened us with walking out if we dared to sing “Happy Birthday.” We settled for a toast to her health. May it last, at least until we get
her settled in New Bern, I thought.
The next day, Mom was up early, making coffee and cutting up fresh fruit for us. Barbara and I were in vacation mode. We took our time reading the paper, and went for a long walk. Off and on during the day, all three of us worked at the New York Times crossword puzzle. After lunch, Mom napped a little in Daddy’s chair in the sunroom. Barbara and I did some grocery shopping. We bought a chicken and lots of fresh vegetables to cook for dinner plus leftovers, and some frozen entrées for later in the week.
Over cocktails, I steered the conversation to New Bern.
“Hey, Mom, Barb and Phil will be moving to New Bern soon.” I poked at the cherry in my Manhattan. “Maybe you should go ahead and put your name on the list for McCarthy Court.”
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking I’d rather stay here.”
Oh no, I thought. Please don’t do this. I concentrated on sounding unconcerned.
“I thought you liked McCarthy and New Bern.” I said.
“I do. But I’m comfortable here.”
“Now what?” I said to Barbara when we were alone in the kitchen. “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s no making Mom do something she doesn’t want to do.”
“No, but she must see that this is going to happen, right? I mean, she’s smart, right? She just needs some encouragement, right?”
Barbara finished carving the chicken, and started serving up three plates.
“Not too much for me,”
I said. “I’m not very hungry.”
In the months following her birthday, Mom seemed like a marathon runner who had used up her last ounce of energy to get across the finish line. She cut back to playing bridge once a week. She resigned as historian of her university women’s group. She told me the guy who invented television was her hero, because the “boob tube” kept her company all day long. It was as if suddenly, at age ninety, her switch had flipped from “on” to “old.”
She had talked about giving up The Comet for a year or two, but hadn’t found anyone to take it on. Amazingly, she was still putting together every issue. Then, in April, about three months after her birthday, she told me she was resigning.
“I let the condo board know I’m serious this time,” she said, “They need to find a new editor, and soon.”
“Mom, are you sad? Or will it be a relief to give it up?”
“Both. But, I can’t keep it up. It’s too much for me now.”
“I’m really proud of you, Mom, for all those years you did a great job, and for knowing when it was time to stop.” I kept my voice calm.
Then, later that evening, when I told Klein about it, I cried.
Chapter 6
Most days, I called Mom mid-morning, after Klein had left for his office and I had finished my forty minutes on the elliptical trainer. I swiveled my office chair toward the window, took a deep breath, and hit #1 on the speed dial.
I started every call the same way. “Hey, Mom, how’re you doing?”
If she said, “Pretty good for an old lady,” I’d relax a little, knowing she was having a good day. We’d talk about what we were reading, or who she had seen at the grocery store, or her bridge game.
Once she quit The Comet, her answer was more often a down-beat “Okay.” We’d talk about how she was napping more, going to bed right after Wheel of Fortune and then waking up at 4:00 in the morning.
“I get up, make coffee and toast, and then work on the crossword puzzle. Sometimes, I go back to bed for a nap around 8:00.”
Those days, my phone felt like it weighed twenty pounds.
Every couple of weeks, I’d bring up McCarthy Court, and urge her to get on the waiting list. She’d say she was just fine where she was.
But she wasn’t fine, and neither was I. One day, I called six times over about four hours, and got a constant busy signal. Every time I dialed, my blood pressure went up a notch. It wasn’t her day for bridge. Where could she be? I imagined her trapped in her car in a ditch somewhere along Route 19, or lying on the bathroom floor with her beautiful white hair hardened in a pool of blood. Unable to concentrate on work, I called Ginny and asked her to check on Mom.
I grabbed the phone on the first ring. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Mom said, “Somehow the phone got cockeyed on the cradle. Usually it makes that be-doo, be-doo sound, but I never heard it.”
A month or so later, it happened again—a busy signal for hours, an apologetic call to Ginny to ask for help again, and the phone was off the hook. This time, I was angry. How could she be so careless? Didn’t she understand how I worried?
I told Mom, “If you’re not ready to move, then at least you have to get one of those buttons you can push for help.”
She reluctantly agreed, but two weeks went by, and she hadn’t called the 800 number I had given her to place the order. I checked with Barbara to be sure she would back me up.
“One hundred percent,” she said.
I signed Mom up for the service, had the equipment shipped to her house, and booked a flight over. Mom was not delighted.
“I’m fine,” she whined. “I do not need this.”
“I need it,” I said. “I worry about you more than you want me to.”
The equipment consisted of a single beige box, about eight-inches square with a big red button in the middle. It was basically a speakerphone that automatically dialed the monitoring company when any of the panic buttons—the one on the box or the ones on the wrist-band or neck pendant—were pushed. I studied the diagram in the instruction book, and realized it hooked up exactly like a telephone answering machine. Mom’s phone sat on top of the upright piano in the living room. I moved some of the family pictures aside to make room for the plastic box. Five minutes after I had started setting up the system, I pushed the button to test it.
“Connect America,” said the voice coming from the speaker.
“Hi,” I said, “We’re just testing the equipment.”
“Is this Mrs. Pratt?” said the voice.
Mom shouted, “I’m right here.”
Then she whispered to me, “How do they know it’s me?” I explained they could see her name and phone number on a computer monitor.
I told the voice I wanted to do a test from the bedroom to make sure Mom could communicate with them from there. It worked perfectly.
Mom and I put the wrist-banded button on the bedside table, and I put the one on the lanyard around her neck.
“It’s ugly,” she said. I told her to tuck it under her blouse.
I made her promise to wear it for a week. I hoped it would become habit to put it on in the morning and take it off at night, when she would have the bedside one.
“Wear it in the shower. It’s designed to get wet.” I was as firm as I’d ever been with her.
Then we went out to dinner.
When the waitress asked for our drink orders, Mom said, “I’ll have a glass of Chardonnay. Martinis seem to hit me too hard these days.”
I looked at Mom over the top of my menu.
“I’ll have the same,” I said.
I swallowed hard. She was still my smart mother if she knew enough to give up her beloved cocktail.
Two weeks later, Mom called me at 7:00 A.M.
“Don’t worry. Everything’s fine,” she said.
She told me she’d gotten up at 4:30 and gone into the kitchen for some orange juice when she started to feel lightheaded. She had eased herself down to sit on the floor, and then realized she couldn’t get up.
“I felt so stupid,” she said.
“No, you were smart to sit down.” My heart pounded, and I had to sit down right on the floor next to the phone. Klein brought me a chair. I stayed where I was, and grabbed his hand.
“I needed help, so I pushed the button.” Mom sounded calm. I was shaking.
She told the voice on the intercom to call the office and tell the security guard to come by.
“He was here in less than five minutes, and helped me up. This button
thing is great!” She was giddy. Finally, I laughed.
At first, I felt like we had dodged a bullet. Then I worried that this would make her feel more secure and less like moving. Maybe a few hours alone on the kitchen floor would have convinced her to make the commitment to McCarthy Court.
We were teetering on an edge here, and I didn’t know how to find the right balancing point.
Lenore’s second letter came about six months after Mom’s ninetieth birthday. I had to read it twice. She used the words “depression” and “loss of weight” and “confusion.” She explained that she now had a standing date to take Mom to dinner once a week, and that Ginny brought Mom food every couple of days—otherwise, they worried she “might not eat.” She wrote that Mom’s friends wouldn’t ride in the car when Mom drove. She described how Mom was losing her skills for playing bridge.
No one really wants to play with her anymore, Lenore wrote. My heart broke for Mom.
My hands were clammy, and my head ached. I took some ibuprofen and made myself a cappuccino. Then I read the letter again, and cried. I called Barbara, but she wasn’t home. I called Klein at work.
“How could things have deteriorated that much? I just saw her a couple of months ago, when I put in the panic button,” I sobbed.
“I don’t know, honey. Why don’t you call Lenore? I think it’s pretty clear that she wants to help.”
For work, I have a twenty-four-hour rule—don’t react to something that seems calamitous for a full day. The potential to make things worse is highest when I’m all wrought up, and good solutions come to me after I’ve had time to calm down. I couldn’t bear to wait twenty-four hours to call Lenore, but I did wait until later in the evening, when I could talk without crying.
Holding the Net Page 5
