15
If you’re going to be honest when you tell the story of what it takes to take care of an old person, then you have to admit that it takes a certain amount of lying.
I didn’t particularly like lying to Edith, but I didn’t particularly like not having any life whatsoever, either. So when I wanted to get away with my buddies once in a while, maybe I didn’t exactly tell Edith the truth about where I was going. So sue me.
For example, a little while after I started taking care of Edith pretty much full-time, I had to take an OSHA safety class. The state doesn’t require them, but most of the outfits you work for like it if you’ve taken those classes and have those credentials, because then if something goes wrong on the job site, they can say, well, we’ve taken all the safety measures you can take, including hiring a guy who has taken all the OSHA classes. Some firms you work for, including Ledcor, even require it. For me, I also liked knowing what was considered the safest operating procedure, because ultimately I’m responsible for the health and safety of everybody on the job site; and not to make too much of it, but that’s a pretty darn big responsibility.
It was the previous spring that I told Edith I had to go off and take the class. She seemed to accept that. Evie and my daughter and a friend of Evie’s came over to her place while I was away, and it was good to get a little break.
So this spring, some buddies were headed down onto the Columbia River to fish for springers. Springers are king salmon. They hit the river in the spring, and have the largest fat content of any salmon. And they just melt in your mouth like butter. Every once in a while you can buy them in the store, but they’re like $29 a pound. You know how many are running over the dam at Bonneville because the state keeps count, and when I heard how big they were running I had to figure out a way to get there. So I told Edith that I needed to take another OSHA course, and that was that.
Like I said, sometimes lying is just easier.
I could go to that well only so often, however. I did have to give up the shrimping season that spring. We didn’t go clamming, either. But I sure wasn’t going to give up Memorial Day if I could help it. It’s another big family tradition of ours, to go up to Pearrygin Lake State Park. We go with a bunch of different families, and we’ve been doing it for fifteen years. I’d told Edith about it too many times to pretend there was an OSHA meeting that weekend, so I just started preparing her, about a month ahead of time, that I was going to be gone for a few days.
Things hadn’t been going all that well, lately. As the weather got nicer, it seemed like Edith was going in just the opposite direction. Every day her world got a little smaller. She’d pretty much given up on writing; once in a while I’d still walk in and find her sitting at the chair in front of the Whisperwriter, trying to peck something out on the keyboard, and it was just painful to watch. I’m not sure what she was trying to write, but it was pretty clear that she wasn’t going to get through it. Clear to me, anyway.
Then there was the sedation. They had given me some drugs that I could give her when the pain got too great. We were both kind of cautious about using them, but it seemed, that spring, that I was having to sedate her more and more often.
So with all that going on, I was feeling pretty trepidatious about my Memorial Day trip, as much as I was stubbornly clinging to the idea that I wasn’t going to miss it. I think when you’re taking care of an old person and everyone’s telling you what a great sacrifice you’re making, what you’re really thinking is, it might seem that way, but I’m drawing this selfish little line in the sand, and come hell or high water I am not going to let this old lady cross it. Or drag me across it. For me, Memorial Day was that stubborn, selfish line in the sand. I’d done this every Memorial Day for more than fifteen years, and probably will the rest of my life, so I don’t know why I was so dead set against missing it one time, but there it was.
The big question, of course, was who was going to take care of Edith while I was away. Edith’s friend Gail would have stepped in to help, but she was out of town for the weekend. Leslie, one of my neighbors, took pity on my plight, and said she’d step in for the weekend.
“How hard could it be?” she asked.
* * *
First off, we needed to have Edith meet Leslie, because if Leslie didn’t get Edith’s seal of approval, the whole thing wasn’t going to work. We arranged a meeting on a Saturday, a couple of weeks before Memorial Day. It went about as well as you could expect. I showed Leslie all of the routines—how to make sure Edith had enough water, how to do the pills, and all that. When Edith was out of earshot, I told Leslie the little trick about pretending to preheat the oven for half an hour. I also told her to make sure Edith didn’t take any extra pain medication. We’d just had to double the dose, because her pain was getting worse, and I was getting worried that she’d wind up overdosing, like she did with the sleeping pills. Who the heck knows where that could lead. I told Leslie to blame me—to tell Edith that Barry only left so many pills, and she didn’t have any extras.
Edith really seemed to like Leslie, which was a big plus. Leslie, for her part, was intrigued by Edith, having heard me tell a few of the stories. So when Memorial Day came, I crossed my fingers and headed for the state park.
Somebody told me that John Lennon was the first one to say that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure was the theme of that weekend.
The calls started a few hours after we got to the lake, and they never stopped. At first they were just petty things—where did I leave the denture liners, Edith wants to take an extra pain pill, that sort of thing. But as night fell the calls got more serious. Edith started doing the I-can’t-breathe routine, and Leslie was freaking out. The calls tapered off for a while, but at 1:30 in the morning, my cell phone rang again. It was Leslie. She was beside herself—Edith was saying, again, that she couldn’t breathe, and Leslie was about to call 911, but she decided to call me first.
I had her put Edith on the phone. “Just take a deep breath,” I said in my most reassuring, trying-not-to-sound-pissed-off voice. “Leslie’s there. I’m camping. Even if I left now I couldn’t get there for five hours. So you’re better off dealing with Leslie than trying to get me to come back.”
“But you are coming back, aren’t you?” Edith asked. Her voice sounded almost like a child’s, and I realized what this was all about.
It’s all about coming back, and not coming back.
Someone told me once that playing peekaboo with babies is exciting to them because it touches their fear of being abandoned. The mother or father disappears, and then reappears, smiling, and that’s kind of reassuring. I don’t know about that, but I know there was something going on with Edith—the fear of being abandoned—that really resonated with me, as a parent. You know, in your gut, that the best thing you can do for your kids is to just let them know that you’re always going to be there for them, no matter what. And it took me a while to get it through my thick head, but that’s the one thing Edith needed to know, as well. That whole question she used to raise, when she’d yell at me—“I knew you couldn’t stick it out!”—was her complicated, old-lady way of dealing with a little-kid fear of being abandoned.
“Of course I’m coming back, old woman,” I said. “I’m always coming back. I’m just off on a camping trip. I’ll see you day after tomorrow. Now get some sleep.”
The next thing I knew, it was morning. The grass was wet with the dew, the sun was climbing over the hills above the lake, and my cell phone wasn’t ringing. I checked it: no messages. We got up and made breakfast, got out on the lake and caught some fish, brought them back to clean them, cooked them up for lunch; and still, no call. I figured this was either a good sign, or the two of them had killed each other. My curiosity got the best of me, so after lunch, I called.
“Everything’s fine,” Leslie told me. “We had a nice morning. We watched this movie, Waltz Time. You won’t believe it—there’s a guy who sings in that movie? It’s Edith’s first husband!”
“See if you can get her to tell you the story” is all I said. “It’s a doozy.”
* * *
The days after I got home were rough. The pain didn’t seem to be subsiding as much after Edith took her medications, and it came back much more quickly. By the middle of the week, I told her we had to go back to the hospital. She tried to fight me on it, but for once I asked her, “Do this for me, not for yourself but for me, because I just can’t do this on my own anymore.”
It’s a card you shouldn’t play too often. You have to really be at that place. I was really there—and I guess Edith understood that. She gave in, and I had her in the hospital by that afternoon.
I wasn’t so happy with what was going on in the hospital. They’d give her a shot of some stuff that would knock her out for eight, ten, sometimes twelve hours. You could have set off a bomb in that room and I don’t think she would have woken up. And then, by the end of the weekend, they gave me a call that I could come get her.
I just about went through the roof. “What do you mean, come get her?” I shot back—then, realizing how loud I was talking, tried to tamp it down a notch.
But this is what happens when you’re taking care of an elderly person in a lot of pain. You just feel, at some point, that the people in the hospital, or the doctor’s office, good people that they might be, are just overwhelmed and too busy and aren’t really paying attention, and that you’ve got to get their attention, and you’ve got to get it now.
Which is what I guess I decided to do at that moment.
“She’s not okay to come home. She’s not any better than when she walked into the place,” I said. “You haven’t figured how to manage the pain. Every time she starts to squawk you give her something to knock her out so you don’t have to deal with it. Now, I’m not taking her home till you figure this out. All I know is to keep giving her more of the pain medication, and I don’t know at what point I’m giving her so much I’m going to kill her. Now, I don’t think that’s a very good plan of attack. Can we agree that we need to do something else, or do I need to come down there and talk about this some more?”
There was silence on the other end of the line. I didn’t know if that was a good or a bad thing. I was worried that maybe she’d hung up on me.
Finally, she spoke. “Sir, I think you need to speak to the charge nurse about this,” the woman on the other end of the line said.
“Well, then I need to speak to the charge nurse.”
A good twenty minutes on hold didn’t get me anywhere. I was planning to go back that afternoon to see Edith anyway, so I figured I’d just deal with it when I got down there.
On the drive down, I had some time to think. What on earth do people do, I wondered again, who don’t have someone to advocate for them like this?
What if Edith was just alone there?
Suddenly I had this overwhelming feeling—like a rush of energy, building up behind my eyes. For a second I thought I was going to have to pull over. It occurred to me how many coincidences had to have taken place for me to be here, in this time, right now.
What if the company I’d been working for hadn’t gone out of business? What if the guys from that company hadn’t gone to work for Ledcor, or hadn’t called me? Or what if I had decided to stay with the other job I’d found, instead of coming to work for them? What if the permits for this job hadn’t taken so long to clear, so that I wasn’t setting up camp next to Edith’s house right at the moment she needed me? Or what if we had put the construction trailer on the other side of the lot, so I wasn’t right next to Edith’s house? When I started to count up all the dominoes that had to fall, just right, for me to be in the right place, at the right time, it was overwhelming.
Overwhelming, because there was a big part of me, a growing part of me, that didn’t feel like it was a coincidence.
Some people like to say that things happen for a reason. I’ve never been one of those people. I never was before, anyway. But the feeling that there was something else guiding all of this, moving all the pieces around, was hard to ignore. I’m not sure I was ready to give a name to that feeling, but I knew that it was the feeling that most people have when they think of God.
I took a swig from a water bottle I had sitting on the passenger seat. However it was that I came to this place, I was there now. And I had a job to do.
I had to go show a charge nurse exactly who she was dealing with.
The charge nurse was a lot younger than I expected her to be, and a lot nicer, as well. It was just what I thought: these folks have so many patients to deal with, they just develop systems for getting through it all—automatic by-the-book responses. But if you can grab their attention and get them to focus on your particular concerns, they’re actually pretty clever, and really know their stuff.
Someone must have warned her I was coming, because she seemed aware of what I was going to say before I could say it. I got about halfway through my I’m-not-taking-her-home-until-you-figure-this-out speech when she started laying out the options for what we could do next.
It only took a day or two to figure it out.
They tried her on a morphine drip—one of those things where you hit the button and it gives you another dose. Edith was awake, mostly, when I saw her for the next day or two. She was doped up, I’ll grant you, but awake and alert and not in pain, which was the main thing.
I took her home a few days later, and called the hospice care nurse to set up the morphine. She came with the whole shebang. A bag that went on a high pole, a small rectangular tan-colored machine with a few knobs on the front, and then the line that went to the port they’d placed in Edith’s arm. Even with that port, the whole thing bothered her to no end, and even on the morphine she still had the gumption to try to tear it out. We wound up having to strap it on so that Edith couldn’t fuss with it.
I’d already made up my mind that I’d have someone there twenty-four hours a day. I guess I could have had less help, just for the hours I wasn’t there, but I was too worried about having to leave her alone, even for a minute, with that apparatus.
“We don’t have a choice this time,” I told Edith. “I don’t care if you don’t like the person or if you think they’re lazy or they smell bad. We just have to have twenty-four-hour care now. End of story.”
This was the first time I’d really tried to take a big decision out of her hands. I wondered if this was a slippery slope I was going down.
But I didn’t think about it too much. It would just be morally wrong to leave an old woman alone with a morphine drip. I didn’t know how much time she had left, but I was determined to make sure she wasn’t in pain for any of it, and if I had to be a little authoritarian, well, that was the price we were both going to have to pay.
I looked at Edith, and she didn’t speak, right away, and I noticed the tears starting to form in her eyes. I started to speak again, but couldn’t think of what to say.
“So that’s it, then,” she said after what felt like a long time. “So now I’ll have twenty-four-hour care and I won’t see you anymore. That’s it, then,” she repeated.
I don’t know if it would have been different if I were her actual son; I don’t know if she would have had this fear of abandonment if we were flesh and blood. I guess some folks do, no matter what. We’ve all known grown children who put their parents in a nursing home and promise to visit every few days, and after a while the visits trail off, and if the parents are coherent enough to understand it, they must feel the same way Edith did. I couldn’t imagine any of that, right in that moment. I couldn’t imagine not being there, not making sloppy toast in the morning, not putting on Richard Tauber at night. I didn’t know how to tell her that she had nothing to worry about. But I knew it was true, like I know my own name.
“Of course I’ll be here, you crazy old woman,” I said. “I haven’t finished watching all of your movies yet.”
Something in her eyes told me she understood what I was trying to say. “Do you want to watch one now?” she asked.
I fought the urge to look at my watch, and I fought the urge to think about all of the things I needed to do back at the trailer. I knew she’d fall asleep in just a few minutes, once the TV was on and the morphine hit. For all we’d been through together, I figured I could spare a few minutes.
“Let’s put on Waltz Time,” I said. “We haven’t watched that one in a while.”
“I just saw that with Leslie,” she said. “Go see if you can find Heart’s Desire.”
* * *
Edith and I didn’t talk about her will much, but one morning, when I was over there, she was being her ornery self; something went wrong—I can’t remember if the sloppy toast wasn’t just right, or I poked her wrong when I was giving her her shot, but something was a little out of whack, and she snapped, “You know, I’m paying you a lot to do all this, so the least you could do is get it right.”
“You’re not paying me a thing to do this,” I snapped back.
“The hell I’m not. I’m leaving you everything, you son of a bitch.”
I dropped whatever I was doing. I’d never counted to ten before in my life, but I decided I’d better take a minute before I said anything.
“Whoa, back up,” I said. I actually heard my voice quivering, so I took a deep breath. “I was doing all this long before you put me in your will. I’m grateful that you did but I never asked you to, and if you want to take me out tomorrow, you go right ahead. I’m taking care of you either way, so you make up your own mind.”
I don’t think I ever saw Edith speechless before. But she didn’t say a word. She just turned back to the TV, and we left it at that.