Life and Death at 'The Home'
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union 'LIFE AND DEATH AT THE HOME' BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Mother lies in a coma now most of the time, her eyes wide-open and childlike. Occasionally her eyelashes flutter and she...
...thesecret, extra-succulent words we savored together: hoopla, hosanna, lubricous, litotes', how she looked that stricken time I had to tell her Dad was dead, and how Phil and I at the funeral tried to quell her wrenching sobs...
...But of what use was j ournalism when the news was always bad...
...On and on I talk, for fear of drowning, while Lorraine just by listening keeps me afloat...
...They kept Mother well-scrubbed, put clothes on her back, gave her medicine, spoon-fed her, wheeled her through the corridors by day and strapped her into bed each night...
...She understands...
...we even, in a moment of foolish hope, sent her a datebook...
...Mother's very helplessness, her low "self-care index," consigned her from the start to a section where the smell of disinfectant mixed noisome-ly with that of urine...
...certainly they did to us...
...Paul as often as we could...
...The pain in her hip got worse, finally proving impervious to all the painkillers in The Home's capacious pharmacopeia...
...She's waiting to say goodbye to both her sons...
...It won't hurt, dear...
...the time I discovered her teenage diary and, against her wishes, read a few of the wonderfully frivolous entries (I was a teenager myself then...
...Paul Pioneer Press...
...Try as they might, they could not keep from staring at the plastic identification bracelet The Home had fastened around Mother's left wrist...
...How is that possible...
...The date is SEPTEMBER 5, 1981...
...Our little excursions became more difficult as Mother's health deteriorated...
...we maintained her memberships in sundry organizations, both local and national...
...Here's some water, dear...
...It took the generosity and muscle of three passers-by to rescure her...
...But I do not wish to be unfair to The Home, which after all pursued its own peculiar vision of excellence...
...To an extent we only half-recognized at the time, Mother had become a part of the general bedlam, another shapeless body to be deposited each morning in the TV lounge...
...One is empty and stripped down to its stained mattress...
...The supervisor was most polite...
...Yourmoth-er can still hear us...
...Sometimes we would shop at her favorite stores in Highland Park, but never for very long...
...Oh, perish the thought—it is I who should thank you...
...This is your home...
...My brother is due to arrive this very evening...
...Everything I am witness to here is a mystery...
...Where were the intimacies of yesteryear, where thecon-nections of the heart...
...I am her charge now, her target of mercy, no less than Mother...
...It wasn't that the staff had not been doing its j ob, only that the j ob itself was defined so mechanically, so bloodless-ly...
...Somehow she ended up in a heap on the leaf-strewn sidewalk, crying in panic and begging to be left alone...
...It wasn't just the walking that exhausted Mother, it was the people she kept running into, people who'd known her for years...
...Then Lorraine raises Mother's head and brings a glass straw to her lips...
...It isn't at all painful...
...Now it was her turn to read aloud, haltingly, her index finger sliding from one word to the next...
...At The Home they seemed always in full cry, pounding their trays and shouting their torments while a staff clad in white went calmly about its business, dispensing pills, giving baths, mopping floors...
...Chief among them was our initial illusion that life at The Home need not be lived underground...
...In our helplessness we doted on the difference she made...
...It was a a strangely disconcerting symbol...
...Damn...
...our wish was father to our fantasy...
...She was just two months short of being 82...
...In the course of performing such chores they must have touched Mother with their hands hundreds of times, but rarely out of affection...
...Minnie who...
...And all the time I am drawing nearer, feeling closer, to the woman has brought us together and now lies between us...
...In the second place there were Mother's public school days in Chillicothe, Ohio —where she was taught Latin, French, German, Spanish, and a smattering of Greek—and then her stint at Ohio State, which she cut short to marry Dad...
...She must have been a beautiful woman...
...Once, as the two of us sat silently in her room, Mother pointed to a book I had written years before, a fable for children that I had dedicated to her...
...As Dos-toevsky's Underground Man observed, "the formula 'twice two make five' is not without its attractions...
...Lorraine sits opposite me, on the other side of the bed, gently stroking Mother's veined hand...
...The room has two other beds in it...
...She turned toward me and touched my arm...
...The doctor says I may be able to go home soon...
...Now Mother will have to die in semi-private surroundings, as so many of her roommates have died before her...
...Against the institutional frost she posited the gentlest of thawing agents—her warm and elegant manners...
...Or, earlier still, we might have got-en the message from Banny Baer, an old family friend, after we told her t hat Mother was moving to The Home...
...I try to remember for Lorraine's sake...
...Clara," she calls in a singing voice, "can you hear me, dear...
...The staff, by and large, was cheerful and considerate (even if the philosophy often seemed obtuse and authoritarian), and the activities offered were as varied and entertaining as one could reasonably expect...
...My brother and I should have known better...
...The rituals of civility that Mother never completely abandoned were more than a reflex...
...It didn't seem to matter which one of us went there...
...Your mother won't go," she assures me now, "until your brother gets here from Michigan...
...Is the old woman lying here really my mother, the same angel-empress who anointed me a prince...
...Why shouldn't I have been smiling...
...shesaystome...
...She took the book from me...
...The nurses and their aides fussed and bustled...
...they were part of the emergency rampart she raised to make bearable a life that must have seemed beyond bearing...
...I must think about that," she said...
...Minnie was Mother's first roommate at The Home...
...Banny said, and that was all...
...But remembering is not easy...
...As I speak the memories begin to flood my brain: the funny hats Mother wore...
...I suggested...
...But a few days later she was apparently visiting her cousin Esther in Ohio...
...hardly up to...
...To be sure, the psychologists and social workers at The Home took the opposite tack...
...she said softly...
...The temperature outside is 56° These were centripetal news items designed to keep residents from slipping off the mundane coil...
...Aren't you thirsty...
...1 could almost believe she w a* content...
...There is a broader way of expressing this: Mother suffered from a type of emotional deprivation endured by nursing home residents everywhere...
...Phil and I, meanwhile, entertained some fantasies of our own...
...Rebecca, a tiny woman who never removes her pink anklets, sleeps all day atop the smooth Dacron blanket, her marionette legs and arms folded tight like a baby's...
...Did Mother blink just then, ever so slightly...
...I'm feeling much better, thank you," she informed me...
...Somewhere along the line we fell into step with The Home's own fateful scenario: We gave up the struggle...
...That's an interesting theory," 1 say politely...
...Today is TUESDAY...
...Whatisthis...
...Indeed, it seemed to me she had chosen to soj ourn at places more pleasant than any Phil or I could provide for her...
...her faith, which I could never emulate, and her singing, which no one in the congregation could ever match: "May the words of my mouth/ and the meditations of my soul/be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord...
...This is where I live, isn't it...
...Their treatment of residents was "reality-oriented," in accord with the latest gerontological theory...
...By then Mother lacked both the strength to take herself and the words to ask for a push...
...The lone word assaulted our expectations . It seemed as peremptory, as final, as the slamming of a door...
...I suggested that other residents might also benefit, and 1 offered to donate some children's books to The Home...
...You know we'll take good care of your mom.' The Director had his own way of handling our complaints: He complained right back...
...That was Mother's last outing...
...Life of a sort buzzed all around her, but it was a life as indifferent to her own as was the constantly flickering television screen —The Home's eternal light—to which no one ever paid the slightest attention...
...If children in a sandbox engage in what psychologists call "parallel play," then the aged in nursing homes engage in parallel pain...
...Lorraine never gives up on anyone...
...Yes...
...With her walker clearing the way, Mother in a flowing housecoat could inch through Bedlam like some lame celestial hostess, conferring hospitality on sufferers and therapists alike...
...If so, I am grateful...
...Esther and I are sharing aroom," shetoldme...
...It turned out Lorraine was right as usual...
...the nurses stopped encouraging her to eat in the congregate dining room, preferring to bring trays to her room...
...What good would it have done to insist that she was not visiting Ohio, or not luxuriating at some sunny lakeside spa of her youth...
...And from the very edge Mother had whispered: "Yes...
...In the first place there were her parents —her merchant father, who died of diabetes when she was four, and her remarkable mother, who was part of our own family all those years and who became a third parent to Phil and me...
...Her breathing is slow and relaxed, though once in a while she emits a great sigh—of forbearance, perhaps, or of impatience...
...They fell in love at first sight...
...She would have a cream sherry before lunch and a chocolate sundae for dessert...
...the way she felt my forehead for fever and held me when I had nightmares...
...You mean Minnie...
...It had been one of the few things she'd brought with her to The Home, but now she seemed not to recognizeit...
...Standards...
...These were shut-in costumes, the raiment of people with no place to go...
...Rebecca is no bother to anyone, yet I resent her presence...
...Mother never did read the publications we sent her...
...Well," she said, "the lake is beautiful and there's a nice clientele here, but the rooms are damp and the food is hardly up to...
...Yet we persisted in the charade...
...Seldom did I have the heart to challenge Mother's fantasies...
...sheasked...
...In time there unfurled those sunny days in St...
...At that melancholy juncture, it seems to me in retrospect, The Home simply gave up on Mother...
...Phil and 1 traveled to St...
...The next night I called and inquired again...
...It may have been the closest either of us ever came to glimpsing reality...
...She'd caught me thinking about my retirement...
...I asked...
...We are sweating out this vigil together, I the restless son, she the latest and most faithful of friends...
...Yousee...
...I don't want to go to that place," she would plead...
...Tell me," Lorraine asks, "What was your mother like when you were a child...
...nothing, that is, sufficiently real to engage Mother's feelings or to address her in ways she could comprehend and reciprocate...
...Sometimes when I look back at Mother's 52 months in The Home, I see her trapped in the eye of a storm, inside an institutional whirlwind composed equally of bureaucracy and bedlam...
...Pollack, who supervised "housekeeping" at The Home, when she gently suggested that we buy Mother "some appropriate clothes"—shifts and robes rather than dresses, slippers rather than shoes...
...Withal, Phil and I persisted in taking Mother out...
...At one time or another Mother partook of all those services and more...
...I am skeptical...
...There was a period, in fact—perhaps spanning much of her second year there—when she seemed remarkably in tune with The Home's institutional rhythms...
...and the aides stopped taking her to concerts and other events in the main hall...
...I must make an effort...
...that Mother, in this place, could stay connected to the quotidian world at large...
...Incoming calls came through a pay phone in the hall, a few feet from the noisiest lounge...
...The Home's facilities included a beauty shop on the first floor, a chapel off the lobby, and a physical therapy unit in the basement...
...We had parked as usual on the ambulance ramp in front of The Home...
...A blackboard in the lunch room got updated each morning to imbue elders with a sense of the here and now: You are living in THE HOME...
...As you know, creativity is included in our daily program...
...Our ride through Como Park might be topped off with Cokes at the Pavillion or even with more ice cream...
...Bingo, group singing, lectures, concerts and folk dances comprised the regular fare, plus bus trips for the ambulant and visits by volunteers to the bedridden...
...Occasionally her eyelashes flutter and she awakens...
...It had been a long time since I'd seen her so utterly engaged, and so enchanted...
...Where have you been keeping yourself...
...When Phil and I watched them together—when we heard Mother laugh as she let Lorraine brush the tangles out of her long, gray-black hair— we were sorry we hadn't found Lorraine sooner...
...Everyone wants a favor...
...She and Mother have what the staff here calls "a special relationship...
...We were not surprised when a nurse telephoned my brother one morning in Ann Arbor and told him that Mother could no longer get around with a walker...
...One day in October, after a particularly trying lunch at the restaurant, the aide and I were unable to coax or carry Mother into the front seat of the car...
...Esther snores...
...That has been Lorraine's assumption all along: If Mother could no longer speak, she could at least listen, and sometimes she could find ways to respond— by humming a tune, for instance, or by whistling...
...It was not until days later that I realized Rebecca, the spectral roommate, was out of the room whenMother died...
...She fought back in her fashion, especially at first, when she had the strength...
...In nursing homes as in all final refuges, no kindness can ever be taken for granted...
...The other barely seems occupied...
...In truth, as the strands of Mother's life attenuated—as she found it more and more difficult to walk, to speak, to think—her privacy ceased to matter so much, or so my brother and I must have decided...
...Snuff," she replied...
...Lorraine is certain of it...
...She would not lack for inventiveness, as I learned the very first time I telephoned her at The Home...
...In recent months, with Lorraine's encouragement, Mother has done a lot of both...
...I picked up the book and began reading aloud...
...Perhaps a considerate nurse had found another bed for her...
...her handsome penmanship and the sepia ink she unaccountably favored...
...Parked in her wheelchair in a TV lounge or in one of those long, antiseptic hallways lined with donors' plaques, Mother must have felt terribly alone...
...My head is dizzy with this grievous disjunction...
...We brought along a nurse's aide to help Mother get in and out of the wheelchair, though, and to assist with the food when Mother's hands became too shaky to wield a knife and fork...
...For some like Mother, reality's strictures seemed far less appealing than imagination's privileges...
...Incredibly, Mother had uttered a word, an affirmation, in our presence...
...Everyone thinks they're special...
...Still, those outings were glorious occasions...
...The next morning I sought out a floor supervisor to tell her how much Mother had enjoyed the storv...
...My brother arrived at six o'clock, and less than two hours later Mother passed on, gently and without complaint...
...Last night at dinner my wife asked me why I was smiling...
...We've requisitioned a wheelchair," she said...
...To Mother they must have seemed like holidays...
...Lorraine is a young artist who earns extra income as a part-time companion to residents of The Home...
...Accordingly, we kept up her subscriptions to Time and the St...
...Even the most well-oiled of institutions, alas, shares with the Tin Man in The Wizard ofOza fatal hollow-ness of spirit: It possesses everything but a heart...
...nothing...
...But such luxuries at The Home were reserved for those who could still manage by themselves...
...The doctor stopped prescribing physical therapy for her hip...
...the jewelry of someone outside the pale...
...Through the front windshield Mother gazed wonderingly at the large brick building with its massive glass en-tranceway glinting in the sunset...
...I know, Mother, I know...
...The story, about a fish's comic attempts to persuade a hungry bear not to eat it, instantly delighted Mother...
...Long after she had lost the greater part of her prodigious vocabulary, she retained a few useful phrases from the language she held dearest, the language of graciousness...
...We should have taken the hint from Mrs...
...Paul, where we held forth as a rabbinical family—days the color of yellow grass or clean white snow, before our invincible father, while preparing the Sabbath sermon one morning, was inexplicably struck down...
...the routine seldom varied...
...I have no way of knowing...
...How nice to see you...
...You can't know what I'm up against," he'dsay...
...I begin chronologically, as in an old-fashioned novel, the kind Mother used to enjoy reading...
...The following night she seemed to be back in the hospital and feeling "a little under the weather...
...A few weeks later we found Lorraine...
...Everyone who works at The Home calls Mother by her first name, but Lorraine has earned the right...
...But one afternoon the conversation took a surprising turn...
...It has been nearly a week since Mother has eaten anything solid...
...Over the years newly-inked names have intermittently appeared on the wall outside the heavy bedroom door, signaling the presence of new occupants of the metal beds within...
...Her reading skills had declined along with her memory...
...In the beginning, more than four years ago, my brother Phil and I kept pestering the Director and the Head Nurse to transfer Mother to a room of her own where she might enjoy a few modest amenities: an unshared bathroom, a telephone by the bed, more family photographs on the walls...
...Going back, of course, was another story...
...Out of all that commotion emerged...
...My Mother...
...We would take Mother to lunch at The Lex and then go for a long ride in Como Park or along the Mississippi River...
...Clara," Lorraine had called, "do you know where you are going...
...She was cared for but not, in most instances, cared about...
...Now don't you worry,' the Head Nurse told us with a smile that gave no warmth...
Vol. 69 • October 1986 • No. 14
