Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.
—SENECA
THIS IS WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN TO OLD PEOPLE WHO GO into nursing homes. They have secure, dull lives looked after by gentle Eastern Europeans in easy-care aprons. Their families ring when they get around to it. Their tidy, institutional bedrooms with the matching floral duvet and curtains show little sign of life, other than for the book and glasses by the bed, and the two propped cards that have arrived from old friends.
It’s two hours’ journey from the house to the home, which is a ranch-style bungalow, purpose-built, U-shaped with deep wings and a steeply pitched hipped roof. Inside it’s warm, draft-proof, with tight modern windows, wide carpeted corridors, jolly pine furnishings, and chain-store chandeliers.
We go to visit at Easter; our holiday route almost passes the door. There has been excited anticipation of our visit. Nancy and Morris are washed, pressed, have had their hair cut that very morning. Because we are en route and in a rush, we anticipate we’ll be there for less than an hour, but that seems to have been forgotten. Nancy and Morris’s lunch has been delayed indefinitely in our honor. As it turns out, we’re running late and spend twenty-seven minutes in the building. Chris speaks to the manager and asks where we can have our meeting. He doesn’t use the word meeting, of course, but that’s what this feels like, a hurried business conversation in a motel conference facility. We use an alcove designed for the purpose just by the front doors, a cubbyhole furnished with three chairs.
Morris isn’t around. He’s wheeled himself off to his room to get a birthday card for Caitlin, one that we bought and mailed to him in readiness. I go into the dayroom and see an old lady there. She’s sitting alone in a winged armchair, rubbing her hands energetically together and muttering.
“Oh, and she said, she said it was all right, so I suppose it is. It must be if she says so. She knows everything.”
Nancy. In some bizarre unexpected way I have been missing her. Her eyes are fixed unblinking on the table twenty feet away, where six residents and two staff are sitting having a conversation, desultorily engaged in nursing home activities. Playing cards. Sticking down a magazine cutout collage. I stop at her chair and stoop to touch her arm and her face shifts from its blankness briefly to a look of alarm and then into a great beaming smile.
“Oh! Hello! What on earth are you doing here?”
She seems genuinely to recognize me. Chris had this experience last month, when he came to see that they’d settled in, and his mother greeted him with “So how is the family?” Her improvement since she’s been here has been quite remarkable, say the staff. That’s why the social workers have already let it be known that they wouldn’t let her out to live in the civilian world again. Morris, a couple of weeks ago, was on the phone to Chris to say that he was thinking about returning to live with us, and Chris had had to tell him so.
“I’ve come to visit you,” I say, kissing her and offering an armful of supermarket tulips. “Look, flowers for your room. And a box of Dairy Milk, your favorites.”
“Oooh, thank you,” she says. “Gimme gimme!” Making playful grabbing motions.
“Your grandchildren are just round the corner, in the visitor chairs,” I say to her. “Do you want to come and see them?”
“Oh no. No, thank you. I don’t think so. Not today.”
“Come and see them. Just for a minute.” I hold my hand out and she takes it, getting up and toddling after me. “Well, all right, then. Seems like I don’t have any choice. As usual.”
Nineteen minutes left. I look covertly at my watch. Morris arrives in his chair with Chris, all smiles, looking well.
“Here he is,” Nancy says. She seems to know who Morris is. She tells him off when he starts talking about their new life: “Oh, hold your wheesht, you,” slapping him flirtily on the knee. We talk about our trip south, and ask about the home. They have a pretty good social life, it seems, though Morris has been reprimanded for preferring to sit with a book than join in, he tells me. He’s reading about Hitler’s last days in the bunker. He urges me to visit his room and see his certificates and there they are, thumbtacked to the wall. One is for winning at the Beetle drive, the other for being placed third in carpet bowls. The children don’t say much and neither does Nancy, but she smiles at everybody and her teeth are clean. She is altogether immensely clean, her fingernails white and her silver bob immaculate. Morris has no complaints, he says, other than about being kept waiting for meals once they’re seated in the dining hall. Their timekeeping here isn’t that impressive and it’s annoying having to wait. The food’s pretty good, though. And he has television in his room.
“How’s she been?” I whisper to Morris, while Chris is chatting to his mother.
“Pretty good,” he says. “She’s in this part of the home with me some of the time … but the rest of the time she’s in the Alzheimer’s wing, locked up.” He looks embarrassed.
“What’s it like through there?” I ask, looking toward the security doors.
“Just like this side, a bit smaller, but otherwise a mirror image of here,” he tells me.
Nancy has gone through the looking glass.
“She wanders into other people’s rooms, apparently,” Chris tells me later. “Ignores them, goes and looks out of the window and then leaves without saying anything.”
It’s time to go.
Nancy tries to follow us out of the building.
“Will you be back soon?” she asks, anxious, trying to grasp at my hands.
“Yes,” I say. “Very soon,” nudging at her arms so I can close the door.
Morris is barking instructions at her. She turns to him and she says, “Just wait till I get you home.”
ALMOST EXACTLY A year later, Morris died at the home from kidney failure. During his last illness he spent a lot of time anxious about Nancy, unwilling to stay in bed. She might be up to something. He ought to be there. He couldn’t rest.
Nancy didn’t understand or mark his passing and his funeral service was held in Edinburgh as he wished. Nancy was judged too ill to make the journey, which would have entailed spending most of a day on the train south, a night in the city, and another day on the train back. In some ways she’s very ill, and in others amazingly robust. Physically, she continues to be good for her age. The nursing home staff speak about her with touching protectiveness. She remains somebody who wants to be doing things and busy and finds it hard to sit still. If she’s awake, she’s usually on the move. She’s prone to aggression; there are long gaps between haircuts as they have to pick the right day to embark. Haloperidol (Haldol), an antipsychotic, is administered in small doses, a half teaspoon two or three times a week, on an ad hoc basis of need, and doesn’t appear to slow her down. She’s unaware who anybody is, but keen to be included in the group, despite her communication difficulties. Shrunken, but insistent on wearing favorite old trousers, she gathers spare fabric bunched up at the waistband with one hand as she shuffles about. She looks like a very old lady now. Having rejected, finally, the wearing of false teeth, her food’s mashed up for her; she eats only with her fingers, and can be insistent about keeping moving, eating a little on each circuit of the home. Often she hasn’t the patience for dealing with food at all, and steals a neighbor’s tea biscuits later. She gets dietary supplement drinks. On a good day she’ll react positively to the photographs in her room, though she can’t put a face to a name. She talks to staff about her parents sometimes. Occasionally she mentions a man she used to know, a man in a wheelchair.
As for me, I’ve arrived, already, at a state of self-protective forgetting. People are good at that, at moving on, dwindling the past into a story we tell ourselves, into parables, and choosing the future over the past. It’s true that every now and then mistakes that I made rear up in memory, like splinters surfacing out of a finger. Memories of bad days, revisited synaptically in sound and vision, far outweigh the good. But it’s also true that, as Oscar Wilde put it, “The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.”