Writer in the Forest

Chapter 17

My windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the water on my drive across the west side of town and over the bridge. The puddled water slopped up my leg on my sprint across the parking lot to the ER. On my way down the hall I glanced at the bored/stressed people waiting in the ER with some small regard to what their situation was. They looked back with the same slight interest. The difference was, they just sat there. Me, I knew the drill. The ER receptionist knew me by name and ushered me through. I hit the wall door opener with authority and marched right in to the inner exam area. I had been here so many times in my work clothes that people thought I worked here. Even people who did work here.

Emergency rooms are cold. The doors open and close all night long. Everyone sits there for hours, cold and hungry. When you get sort of lucky, your patient gets called back into the inner exam area, Trauma rooms 1-9. On any night, after about four hours people start standing in the doorways, as if a doctor will walk by and say, “OH! There’s a patient in there? Well, if I’d have known that…!” But I was a regular here, and I knew it didn’t work. You would remain cold, tired, hungry and worried. And one thing was certain: It was a big secret as to where hot coffee lived.

Harry couldn’t breathe. His pale face surrounded panicked eyes, his usual calm gone with his breath. Should I pray? Would God listen to me now?

He had pneumonia. No guilt there. He told me he was freezing in that Assisted Living apartment where I made him live after he tumbled down the basement steps. They were telling me it was time for a ventilator and I panicked from confusion. Wasn’t that life support? We had an agreement, a Living Will. Those helpless eyes looked at me with such trust. Dad’s eyes were huge and I think mine were huge in return. The doctor repeated: Did I want the ventilator? We’ll do what we can and undo it later if I made a wrong decision. The chicken way out, but the best I could do in nano time with those helpless eyes asking me to take care of everything.

The first thing I learned about ventilators was that you have to be heavily sedated or they can’t put it in. He was out in a flash. More panic: What if these are Harry’s last moments of life, and we can’t say goodbye? To be unconscious was blessed relief for him, holy hell for me. As if to make up for his suffocation, I started breathing faster and faster. I leaned in to where my breath would have mingled with his, if he had any. I was as close as cold is to ice, but I couldn’t reach him to let him know I was doing my job. I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t know you were going to get pneumonia. This is a new path for me. I don’t know my way.

I thought of the night two weeks earlier, when he fell down the basement stairs. I’d taken Mom to a nursing home and took a week off to convince Dad that he needed to join her. He wouldn’t listen. Instead, he fell off the top step, crawled through the basement to his car, where he opened the door but could not pull himself up to reach the horn. He cried for help for three hours before a passerby heard him and went to a neighbor’s house to inquire about the noises coming from the garage at the little white house with shutters.  Leaving my card with a few neighbors in case of another emergency paid off.

I raced up the street in my Honda and swung around the corner to find a crowd gathered. My brain snapped a photograph in the time it took to register the pajamas and robes and slippers on people I’d never seen dressed in their nightclothes. It only took a second to realize they never come out for heart attacks anymore, but they’re out this time because someone’s trapped. Two or three ambulance rides a week for the last year, but on that night the marquee was all lit up and they were all going to watch the drama play out.

Ambulances were waiting. As I unlocked the front door and ran in, I was dimly aware that a cheer went up. I leapt down the basement steps. Harry, Harry, where are you? I found Dad on the floor of the garage, bleeding but conscious. I opened the garage door for the stretcher while a team of paramedics flew down the stairs behind me. Like angels, only real.

Two weeks later I could say for certain that our old basement floor had no heart for the man who religiously swept it and I had no religion period.

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Chapter 16

Old people save everything. I was an archaeologist, digging through the basement of the former dwelling of Mom and Harry. What did this eclectic pile say about my parents? These were a few of the artifacts of Harry and Adella’s life:

–        14 empty candy boxes

–        23 empty margarine tubs (in case they paint)

–        2 bags of old, dusty beer bottles Mom hid from Harry about 20 years ago

–        A pile of old clothes that filled half the spare bedroom in the basement (including my cousin Sue’s prom dress circa 1963)

–        Two drawers full of old purses from the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter eras

–        One drawer full of hot water bottles and broken heating pads

–        One drawer full of folded up, used plastic wrap and wads of used string

–        Three and ½ pounds of narcotics hidden in shoes (properly disposed of for free courtesy of the pharmacy that sold them to her)

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Chapter 15

It was me, a radio, a clumsy pile of empty cardboard boxes from the liquor store like Mom taught me, a donut, and a cup of steaming coffee.

All my life I wondered what this would be like, only I thought they’d be dead when I got to this point. Instead, I needed the money to pay their nursing home bills, which meant I had to break their hearts and sell my mother’s little cottage. All around me were the mementos of our lives: our pictures on the wall, the old coffee table book about Jesus, and the dining room chairs with the seats still covered in their original plastic.

I set down my coffee and plugged in the radio, as alone as I’d ever been. I squinted through watery prisms at the doorstop screwed into the wall above the archway where we used to hang our dry-cleaning and ironing.

Fourteen year-old me made a skirt in Home Ec. It was easy, and the material only cost about $3 because it only took a little scrap to make a mini skirt. I’m on a chair in the archway, slowly twirling around while Mom pins the hem.

With my parents as reference points I always knew where and who I was, but today I felt lost. I hummed Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” as tears ran into my mouth like rain. I unscrewed the doorstop and stuffed it into my purse, then grabbed a role of toilet paper, blew my nose, and started moving.

In the kitchen, I opened the door to the little wall-mounted ironing board that was tucked into the wall disguised as a spice cabinet. This was where I learned to iron by practicing on pillowcases and hankies.

I was in California again, standing at the utility sink dunking Bob’s shirts into the warm blue starch. I  ripped the cover off the ironing board and threw it away.

In the refrigerator I found all the fruit and vegetables I’d bought them for the last three or four months. Brown lettuce and soupy radishes were afloat in their own rot. I carefully picked them up and ran the liquid down the drain. I filled the first of many garbage bags. What in the world they were eating was explained later when I found several dozen Oolong teabags–the kind you get when you buy Chinese take-out.

I opened the cupboards and examined the Melmac dishes I bought my folks two years ago. “I can’t hold the heavy kind anymore,” Mom had said. That Christmas I had shopped all over and finally found the dishes. Who in the family will want brown plastic dishes that taste like cigarettes?

After a few hours of packing, I sat on the old movie loveseat and unrolled the toilet paper for a good nose blow. My throat burned. I could see the bedroom doorway and there was Mom, holding out her pillbox to me, a reminder of why they weren’t here anymore.

I was so floaty with fatigue I wondered for a moment if I’d become transparent… unaware that somewhere down in the depths of my DNA the strength of a forest was behind me, my ancestor’s roots intertwining with mine to hold me up straight as the winds blew through.

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Chapter 14

Mom’s first nursing home experience was an eye opener. I chose one close to home where the daughter of a friend worked. John and the kids helped me settle her in comfortably and with as much forced cheer as we could muster. When we left her she was smiling serenely. It was weird, but it was just what I needed and I went with it. A few hours later, a nurse called. “You’ll have to come get your mother,” she said. “She’s screaming about bugs under her skin”.

Mom was in a home that had pets to keep the residents company. When you’ve been without your Oxycontin, cats and dogs remind you of fleas, which translates to bugs under your skin. The screaming lasted fifteen hours. A psychologist was called in, and it turned out to be an acquaintance of mine. Please help her. I’m so afraid she will die like this, fearful and angry.

I was back and forth trying to work and get her settled in. I refused to take her home because, quite frankly, I didn’t think I could ever go through putting my mother in a nursing home again. My brother came and got his very first eyeful of Mom in withdrawal. He was shocked and hurt, completely undone by the wild behavior of his mother.

She screamed throughout the night and tried to call herself a taxi to escape, but no dice from the cab driver. She called me every few minutes and screamed at me for the horrible daughter I was. I could rot in hell. In the morning they finally set her in a wheelchair by the front door and told me to pick her up. She was kicked out in less than 24 hours. I took her home in despair. What could I do to help her now? I felt like I broke my Mom.

While I worried about what to do next, she stood on the porch screaming to the world what a hateful daughter I was. Then she went in the house and turned my photograph upside down, where it stayed for three weeks. “It’s ok Mom, it’s ok. I know you don’t feel good,” I whispered to her while she screamed.

“You’re addicted, Mom.” There. It was out. We would fight this together, and I prayed that God, some god, any god, would let her live long enough to find peace.

It was up and down for months. In her second nursing home, she was paranoid. They were watching her, spying on her. She wouldn’t eat the food. At one point she was so out of her head she threatened to run away and I would never find her, and I visualized what a victim an elderly woman was on the streets. I spent two days with her in the ER, trying to get her into the psych ward at the hospital. The young freckled social worker knew Mom needed to go to Psych for the help she needed and to get into a rehab program, but she didn’t meet the criteria. It was unfortunate for Mom’s well being that she wasn’t in danger of harming herself or others. After two days I went home and Mom went back to the nursing home.

Friends said it was doing me in; it was time to give up. But I knew something they didn’t know. My Mom was still in there. I see her every now and then. And I will never, ever give up on my Mom.

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