Long-Term Caring
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union LONG-TERM CARING BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS I'm getting rather too old to live alone in winter and I'd rather live in community. At Oxford, I should be missed if I failed to turn...
...But now the script looked unfamiliar, angular, and the columns in the checkbook never seemed to add up...
...Paul...
...One evening she went to bed without turning off the oven...
...There followed a sad procession of "companions"—practical nurses, teenage sitters and part-time "homemak-ers" supplied by commercial enterprises we'd found listed in the Yellow Pages...
...We began telephoning our old friends, asking them to look in on Mother from time to time...
...At least she would not go hungry...
...It wasn't what she wanted—after more than half a century in St...
...You said you'd be here...
...Did they offer home care services that Mother could use...
...Paul she couldn't picture herself anywhere else— but her choices were narrowing...
...When I walked into the house six hours later, Diane was on the telephone...
...They were sympathetic, and they tried their best...
...I reminded her of my visit, of our parting that very morning, and for a moment she seemed to get it all in focus...
...Worse was to come...
...he flexed her limbs and tested her reflexes...
...No matter what happens, never condescend to me...
...Something had to be done—but what...
...We went to the hospital...
...The Home...
...For us she was always "on...
...AgainstMoth-er's will, we ordered Meals-on-Wheels for her...
...For as long as we could remember she had taken scrupulous care of her accounts, sitting at the maplewood desk and writing checks with her favorite pen, the kind you had to pump ink into...
...Paul were taking on greater importance...
...She might have died, but around midnight the tenants upstairs smelled smoke and banged on Mother's door...
...Mother, don't talk that way...
...None of us ever saw her again...
...It wasn't just the bills any more...
...No single agency, it seemed, and certainly no one individual, sufficed to fill all the time-slots...
...At first we were very careful: We interviewed each applicant and sought Mother's opinion...
...She lay in the gray water for five hours, until Anna, her once-a-month cleaning woman, let herself in with a key we'd given her and rescued Mother...
...Phil took her to the airport...
...I like my privacy," Mother told us...
...Phil called Mother's family doctor, Milt, another friend...
...Her closest friends were gone: Alice and Harriet dead...
...Whenever he sees me coming he puts his head in his hands...
...Early one morning I got a long-distance call from a St...
...Mother had charged the Israeli woman with stealing her jewels...
...Then he asked her some questions: What day is this...
...Why would he care when I was born...
...Phil and I had grown up in that social-service milieu, yet now we did not know where to turn...
...She gave me a funny look and handed me the receiver...
...The paper boy found her in her nightgown, lying in a puddle of vomit on the cement porch floor...
...There was always the possibility that Mother would consent to live with one of us...
...I stayed up half the night waiting...
...We called local agencies...
...It came one Monday morning...
...They were mourner's tears, for I felt that a part of my mother had died...
...She smiled at Mother, who did not smile back...
...Phil or I sifted through them once a month...
...We went back to our scheduling circus and awaited the inevitable...
...People went there when they had nowhere else to go...
...Or did she...
...Milt's advice jolted us into action, though...
...W.H...
...We knew that Anna's fortuitous appearance could not be counted on again...
...We noticed it first with the bills...
...A close call...
...How could we tell...
...lean just hear him muttering, 'Oh, God, here comes that crazy old lady again.'" The walk to the bank was only three blocks, but for Mother that was a great distance...
...Her hip pained her—calcium deposits, her doctor had said—and she had to use a cane...
...She laughed...
...I hung up and dialed St...
...Very slowly, as in a cortege, we drove out to The Home...
...We noticed that the telephone, which in our youth had seemed a veritable extension of Mother's personality, rarely rang...
...The neurologist was very thorough...
...Josephine and Saul in a Florida condominium, and Saul dying of cancer...
...Her brain cells are dying," he said...
...After that, when I went to St...
...Paul and took mother back with him to Ann Arbor...
...Where ever are you...
...Still, Mother would return from those Sunday visits shaking her head...
...I know how busy you are...
...But she let us have our way...
...In time a second cane became necessary, and then a walker...
...Sometimes the refrigerator was empty...
...He asked me a lot of silly questions...
...It was March and still cold in Minnesota...
...What had become of all those caring organizations Mother had once been a part of—the auxiliaries, the sisterhoods, the charities that had kept her phone ringing all day...
...At Oxford, I should be missed if I failed to turn up at at meals...
...The living room remained dark, the drapes drawn tight...
...Once she gripped my arm and demanded: "Promise me one thing...
...SuddenlyMoth-er's daily routine, all the little domestic acts the rest of us took for granted, seemed freighted with danger...
...Gottschalk," she would say...
...Her Wednesday canasta game with "the girls," a social occasion she had relished, was a thing of the past...
...Mother was all right...
...We guessed that the arithmetic of the cards had become too much for her...
...That afternoon my brother and I were back in St...
...Your mother can't take care of herself," Milt said...
...The bills accumulated...
...Well, yes and no: yes for short-term care of the sick, no for long-term care of the frail...
...We would stay long enough to help Mother write the checks, and to take her to "The Lex," her favorite restaurant...
...More and more she found herself walking over to the Grand Avenue bank and asking Mr...
...But afterward, when Phil had returned to Michigan and I to Connecticut, and she was alone again in those silent rooms, she must have had plenty of time to think about it, and to worry...
...Her bags were packed...
...She seldom went out now, not even to buy groceries...
...It was thought to be the best in the state—the finest doctors and nurses, the most up-to-date services, the cleanest corridors...
...And if any had, would it have mattered...
...I tried to picture a billion fireflies inside Mother's head...
...What could happen to you...
...Her life seemed to be shrinking before our eyes...
...Then we called a college in the area and got a graduate student, a woman from Israel, to live with Mother rent-free in exchange for a few services—shopping, cooking, just being there...
...Then we got into our rented car...
...Oh," she snapped uncharacteristically, "they all talk too much...
...When wereyou born...
...In situations like this wasn't the community supposed to help...
...Fearing that Mother might have caught pneumonia, the police took her by ambulance to the hospital...
...yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of humanpride...
...It happens sometimes...
...We knew, but never let on, that in the long run neither Mother nor we could afford the around-the-clock services we were so frantically seeking...
...She could stay as long as she wished...
...Just promise," she insisted...
...They had been up all night, and the stunned woman had left the house at dawn, in tears...
...They say it's irreversible...
...Another time she was unable to climb out of the bathtub...
...Then she lost it...
...Why should it...
...She must have walked in her sleep...
...Poor Mrs...
...Mail and newspapers lay in a pile on the front porch...
...Paul police sergeant...
...The homemaker had failed to show up Sunday night and Mother was alone...
...The Home, I had learned early on, was nobody's happy ending...
...She and her friends had been proud of the institution they had helped to build...
...Phil called me the next day...
...Phil and I decided to take regular turns going to St...
...yes for once or twice a week, no for every day...
...How did it go at the doctor's, Mother...
...Gottschalk...
...Poor Mr...
...You boys have been putting it off too long...
...Paul...
...Our trips to St...
...She should try it, he told her...
...Why would anyone care— it happened so long ago...
...Paul...
...Mother was asking...
...She belongs in The Home where she can get the best of care...
...William James She may have known she was slipping long before my brother and I found out...
...I shed tears that night on Diane's shoulder...
...Our visits did more than brighten her hours—they sharpened her wits...
...Paul I tried to stay an extra night or two...
...but they had much else to do...
...The next morning he found her standing in the front vestibule, impatiently tapping her foot...
...Poor Delia," she would say...
...Rose in California, living with her daughter Phyllis...
...My brother is a doctor...
...She had been proud of her rounded, graceful script, and of her bookkeeping talents...
...And lam for those tiny in visible loving human forces that workfrom individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets...
...Phil pressed harder than I. He went to St...
...Mother had served on its boards and committees, had raised money for it, had called on its residents many a Sunday...
...The young woman seemed pleased to have found us...
...Wasn't it their turn to give something back...
...No more visits to Mr...
...Naturally, I'm disappointed," she informed me in rational tones, "but I do understand...
...And I promised...
...I couldn't stand that...
...Poor Celia...
...The next day, or even that same night, we would return to our wives and our children, plunging back into the main currents of our lives...
...One by one they were winking out...
...Buxbaum...
...One morning I kissed Mother goodbye, got a taxi to the airport and boarded a plane homeward...
...One of us would show up near the first of each month...
...Auden at age 65 lam done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success...
...But soon the circumstances overwhelmed us...
...On one of his visits he took Mother to see a neurologist, someone my brother had gone to medical school with...
...Gottschalk—"that nice young man whose desk is on anig"—to balance her totals...
...it was something harder to deal with—a mysterious change of rhythm, a turn in Mother's personal weather...
...Our goal by then was to have someone in the house with Mother 24 hours a day, seven days a week...
...From thousands of miles away, by telephone, we tried to piece together the splintered logistics of home care...
...Once I asked her why she didn't play anymore...
...Mother was spending a lot of time in her bedroom now, the room furthest back in the house...
...To us she made a j oke ofit...
...He took pictures of Mother's brain...
...And they began to turn up in unexpected places—in kitchen drawers, inside magazines, beneath pillows...
...Who is President of the United States...
Vol. 69 • March 1986 • No. 6
