NEW YORK CITY
Summer 2014
Last spring, when we sold the apartment on Central Park South, Dana had to find a place of her own. She found one in the Chelsea section of Manhattan: the studio from hell, as she calls it. The stripper bar Score’s is down the street; so is the High Line, with its crowds of tourists. There’s grinding, relentless noise until 4 a.m., and then at 7 a.m., construction starts next door. Dana works at the restaurant each night, gets back to her studio late, and puts the pillows over her ears. She would still be living in Washington, D.C., in an apartment she liked, with friends nearby, if not for her mother’s Alzheimer’s. She’d still have the job she liked, too, as catering manager of B. Smith’s in D.C., if B. was well and we’d managed to do enough business at the Union Station restaurant to keep going. Alzheimer’s has turned her whole life upside down.
I think B. knows and appreciates that Dana is at the New York restaurant each night. She knows Dana is living on her own again, too. She just can’t remember the neighborhood, and she keeps thinking Dana is sharing her apartment with three or four other girls, as she did in college. Now that Dana is gone, I’m the keeper of the drugs again. I’m better at it than before. Used to be, with a thirty-day supply, we’d get to the sixth day and B. would have only twenty-one left, which meant she’d taken three extra pills. Now I’ve got that under control: the drugs stay on my side of the vanity, and I personally hand them to her each morning.
I guess if there’s any good that’s come from all this, it’s seeing Dana step up to the challenge. Alzheimer’s does that to every family: shows you who’s in and who’s out, whom you can depend on and who gives you a pass. So it seems especially unfair that fate has socked Dana with a second blow.
Since childhood, Dana knew that her birth mother, Jocelyn, was not to be counted on, and would, by her own choice, play an insignificant role in Dana’s life. By the time Dana was a teenager, she understood that Jocelyn wasn’t just flighty. She had serious issues with drugs and alcohol. Dana still saw Jocelyn, but not often. She hadn’t talked with her for two weeks when she got the news that Jocelyn had killed herself.
Of the many things I love about my daughter, one is that she’s really wise, and another is that she’s tough. These have been hard weeks for Dana, coming to terms with her birth mother’s death. Was it a “fuck you” to all of us? A cry for help unheard? Or just the ultimately irresponsible act of a woman who lost her way long ago? I don’t know. I feel bad for her family, but angry, too, at how she left Dana, and how Dana has had to be even stronger than she’s been this last year.
I know Dana regrets her mother’s passing. A part of her life has fallen away. But she’s clear on this: B. is her real mother. B. is the mother who cooked her dinner every night of her childhood and helped her with her homework. B. is the mother who’s still alive, and sick, and needs all the help Dana can give her. Dana is there to provide it. I couldn’t be prouder of her.
Quite honestly, Dana has become a caregiver to me as much as to her mother. By that I don’t mean just helping out. She’s my reality check. “I can’t help it!” I’ll say after raising my voice to tell B. she’s forgotten something I told her an hour ago.
“What did you expect?” Dana will shoot back at me. “People don’t want to forget things.”
For months now, Dana has told me to hire some outside help: a trained caregiver who can come in at least two or three days a week. B. is the one who says no. Only she doesn’t say no exactly; she’s too smart for that. She says she isn’t against having someone in to help. It just has to be the right person. I’ve come to realize that no one, in B.’s mind, can be the right person. That’s the point. She feels guilty that I’ve given everything up to be her full-time caregiver. She packs those bags for the drive to Pennsylvania—the trip back home she never takes—because she says she wants to stop being a burden to me. But she won’t accept a stranger in her home, doing whatever it is home health-care workers do: helping her dress, cooking her meals, maybe cleaning that clothes closet. What she really resists is someone invading her personal space. She has done so much, and done so well. Surely she’s earned her privacy, right? Well, yes, she has—until now.
To be honest, I’m part of that problem. I, too, balk at calling in someone to help. Why? Because I think I can do it all myself. Because I love my wife, and can’t stand the thought of someone else caring for her. And maybe—this is a hard one to face—because my whole life, for these last twenty-two years, has been lived in relation to her. I don’t mean just in the romantic sense. I’m the other half of the B. Smith brand; I’m the businessman behind it. That’s who I am; it’s what defines me.
So I keep on being the caregiver myself, with all the feelings that that entails: love, irritation, sympathy, impatience, exasperation, guilt, until I can’t take it anymore. That’s when I head down to the beach with Bishop, look at the bay—and scream. “I can’t stand this!” I’ll shout to no one. “I just can’t stand this anymore.” Sometimes I get down on my knees on the sand and just pray.
I fear that I won’t be able to do this on my own. Yet I also fear that whomever I get in to help won’t give B. the level of care I want her to have.
My biggest fear is that I may succumb to a heart attack, or get into a fatal car accident. Maybe the chances are slim, but these things do happen, and even if they don’t, I’ve had multiple health challenges. Along with prostate cancer, I’ve had a hip replacement and will almost certainly need another. I’ve had two back surgeries, and despite that, I have a lot of pain. What if I’m gone? Who will protect my wife from strangers intent on preying on her?
Just the other day, I came back home to find two real estate agents at the door. B. was about to invite them in without the slightest idea about why they were there. They said they were there to check out the house for some client who’d taken a fancy to it and might make an unsolicited offer. At the least, if I hadn’t showed up, B. would have started a back-and-forth I didn’t want us to have. What if the next set of strangers are burglars, posing as real estate agents and casing the place? What if some psycho takes advantage of my absence and attacks my wife? How will B. know not to invite him in, much less be able to say later what happened?
These are the film loops that play in my head as I lie on the beach, until finally I pick myself up, shake off the sand, and tell Bishop it’s time to go home.