Henry Bemis (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} hot_house) wrote,@ 2008-07-23 15:16:00 |
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Fittings
by Floyd Skloot
My wife Beverly and I arrive at the nursing home shortly after noon. We enter the access code for the Memory Impairment Unit and walk down the hall to my mother’s room. She is standing where she usually stands: in her bathroom, hands on the sink, gazing into the mirror, smiling at her image there.
She looks remarkable. Gone is the lacquered golden pouf, rouge and darkened eyelids that long defined her presentation to the world. Her hair is its natural gray. It’s clean and soft, and smells like human hair rather than a chemistry experiment. Instead of layers of gauzy fabric and elaborately swirled capes, she wears cotton lounging pants and an unpredictable mix of undershirts, tee shirts and sweaters. She is braless and sockless. Her feet, which have lost much of the swelling caused by a lifetime of elegant high heeled shoes, are encased in suede sandals held in place by velcro straps.
According to everyone involved in her care, my mother is a happy, jovial woman. No one has ever said that about her before. As transformed in spirit as in fashion, she’s cooperative and serene, provided someone can tell her exactly what she should do at every moment. Triggered by stray words, she routinely breaks into song. Say It’s a beautiful morning, Lillian and she will respond with a few lines of Rodgers and Hammerstein: Oh what a beautiful mornin’ oh what a beautiful day. Tell her there’s a full moon out and she’ll croon Fly me to the moon. Just don’t ask her where she comes from, or where she is, or what her two husbands’s names were, or what she had for lunch today.
Since she forgets our weekly visits the moment we leave, she’s aggrieved whenever we show up because we haven’t been there in months. Years. But joy in seeing us magically appears like a golden thread within the tapestry of her distress.
“Do you still write?” she asks. Then adds, “aren’t you the one who writes?”
“Yes, mother. I’m still at it.”
“Then it would be nice if I ever had one of your books.”
I pick up a few from her bedside table. “You’ve got them all.”
“Oh, so nice of you to bring them at last.”
I know that this little exchange is just another example of my mother’s inability to form memories. She’s not forgetting me or my books, she hasn’t been able to place or keep them in memory. They’re not there to be forgotten. Still, for all my knowing, it’s frustrating to feel that our visits and our gestures offer my mother no lasting sustenance. In the most literal sense, she is oblivious of them as soon as we leave.
There is a counterbalance to that frustration: I’m amazed to hear her let go of perceived offenses so readily, to see things in a positive light. Now that dementia has ravaged her memory, she no longer hoards and seasons her indignation. This has to be as good for her as it is for me. She lives in the moment–in the instant, really–and is more cheerful than I have ever known her to be. Except for rare bursts of anger or frustration, as when she knows she cannot remember something, she seems content.
As David Shenk says in his book The Forgetting, “When introspection begins to break down, so does willfulness.” This change in my mother is almost more than I can handle. No brooding, no defensiveness or moody tirades. Who is this woman? Where was she when I was young? I wonder if this might have been my mother’s “true self,” hidden all along under some combination of psychological forces that I will never discover. The happy little girl buried in a rubble of wrongs. The idea fills me with sadness for her. Or perhaps my mother has truly been transformed. Perhaps her memory and the gothic theater it always housed–she never seemed to remember joy--was the very thing that tormented her. Now that memory is gone, so is the torment. Her mind seems more at east.
And what is most on her mind now is marriage. Hers, mine, the aide’s, the social worker’s, the rabbi’s, the tv newscaster’s, the sons and daughters of her compatriots in the nursing home.
As she looks at herself in the mirror, she asks, “how old am I, dear?”
“You just turned ninety-one.”
She turns to look at me, to see if I’m joking. “Don’t say such a thing.” Returning her attention to the mirror, she says she hopes to find another husband soon. The men in this place don’t know what they’re missing. Then, as she always does when we show up, she asks, “when are you two going to get married?”
I hold up my hand and let the light sparkle off my wedding ring. “We are married.”
“Oh, yes.” She looks back into the mirror, trying to fit the pieces together, trying to connect that image with her sense of who she is, trying to figure out how Beverly and I belong in the picture that refuses to cohere. “I remember now.”
I was present when my mother, widowed five years, met the man who became her second husband. It was a New Year’s Eve party in the basement of her apartment building, as 1965 turned into 1966. I’d come home for the holidays during my freshman year of college, and been hired to work the party as a waiter. Minimal salary, but they said the tips would be great.
My mother’s escort was an old boyfriend named Teddy, the man she’d abandoned in 1938 to marry my father. Teddy had re-surfaced in her life after my father’s death, first showing up as a contestant on To Tell the Truth in its next-to-last season. Posing as a
By New Year’s Eve, they’d been dating for over a year. I remember liking Teddy the few times I met him, a dapper little man the same size as me and my father, given to wearing striped sport jackets and loose slacks in pastel shades, his graying hair slicked back. He reminded me of the old Yankees shortstop, Phil Rizzuto. My mother said he was good company, which meant that he still wasn’t husband material.
So it wasn’t a surprise when my mother left that New Year’s Eve party with someone else. Julius, recently widowed, was visiting his sister and brother-in-law for the holidays and had agreed to tag along with them. Fate sat them at my mother’s table. By the time I served their soup, I could see what was happening.
My mother and Julius danced. Teddy sat, smiling, nodding to me or to the occasional neighbor who recognized him, growing smaller as he nibbled on a roll. My mother and Julius danced some more. He was lean and handsome, six inches taller than my mother, correct in posture, serious in demeanor. At midnight, she kissed Julius first, then pecked at Teddy’s cheek and–quite publicly–the poor man was once again abandoned.
When the party broke up, Teddy left without saying goodbye, not even to me. My mother walked out arm-in-arm with her new beau, beaming. She forgot about rallying everyone to leave their waiter a tip, and I ended up with five dollars from the table for my night’s work. They were married in early March.
“Yes, I remember when you met,” my mother says now, walking over to us. “I was there. Some kind of party. Floyd, you came with somebody else, what’s-her-name, your old girlfriend, the Italian. Then you met beautiful
That is not, of course, how Beverly and I met. But such confabulations are typical of the way memory and identity and time have grown fluid for my mother now. Within the space of a moment–the time it takes for her to lift a cup of coffee to her lips–she might see me as her son, her late brother, her first husband and her last boyfriend. Oh Floyd, it’s so good to see you. How is your house on the lake? (this is addressed to her brother, whose house on
I’m trying to learn how to drift in time with her, to let go of my yearning for a genuine conversation or connection, for the things she says to make sense. If I can do that, it becomes possible to witness her rediscovery of things I’ve never known about. Suddenly, there’s a touch of warmth in these stray memories, and a veracity that convinces me they’re real. Passing a friendly Weimaraner and her owner as we approached a coffee shop, I expected her to recoil and curse the man for exposing her to potential filth. Instead, she said oh, what a nice doggie! and stopped, hands lifting from her walker, to add, we had a dog when I was a little girl. Its name was Wee-toy but Papa called it Pee-toy because it always wet the carpet. Huh? My mother had a dog? In a
Mostly, though, her memory fails utterly. When two students from
“Your mother is so sweet,” she said. “She didn’t remember anything, but she kept asking me if I was married and if my husband was kind to me.”
***
We’ve learned that our visits create agitation in my mother unless we take her on an outing. If we stay at the nursing home with her, if she feels that she must host us, things deteriorate quickly. Like a child welcoming adults to her room, she will show us her bed, the clothes in her closet, her bathroom. But it’s apparent that she doesn’t recognize much, and isn’t sure whose things she’s finding. Or she will grab a photograph off her bureau and get confused over the image. Though we’ve placed labels on the backs to identify people, she forgets that the labels are there. Once, we discovered that she’d rearranged the labels, so that the photograph of my daughter and her husband said Floyd (your son) and his wife Beverly. She will point to the armchair we bought when she moved to the nursing home and announce that it’s been in her family for years. Then she will come to a halt, look around her in alarm, race into the bathroom and, after a brief tinkle, stand in front of the mirror for a while. If we walk with her to the nursing home’s plush lobby or to the solarium at the end of her unit, places where “visits” happen, she gets tangled in loops of failed conversation and grows increasingly confused.
“Your girlfriend is gorgeous,” she will say. “You two should get married.”
“We are married.”
“You are? For how long?”
“Almost nine years.”
“Nine years? Was I at the wedding?”
“No. You were still living in
“I lived in
“For ninety years.”
She will shake her head. “You two should get married already.”
Social interaction and conversation may wear my mother down, but trips in the car delight her. The various neighborhood Starbucks, where we take her for coffee and an assortment of cookies, she proclaims my favorite restaurant. Let’s come here for my birthday. People smile as she makes her way inside and stops to look around. Within the gate of her walker, she beams and waves like Harry Truman at a whistle stop, pleased with the welcome she’s receiving. Best of all are errands, when there’s something the resident care manager has suggested that we purchase for my mother. We spent an hour together in a drugstore trying to buy lipstick and eyebrow pencil. She loved looking at the red tubes, but wasn’t sure she needed anything special for her eyebrows since she’d started using a #2 pencil and had plenty of those. We spent two hours with her selecting those sandals she loves.
During a quarterly care meeting with the nursing home staff, we got a note saying that my mother needed bras. When she’d first arrived at the home in late winter, the nurses welcoming my mother told us she would be much happier without a bra. They gave us the old, tattered one she’d been wearing and said they couldn’t wait for the day when they could trash their own as well. Now, though, as she is helped to dress in the mornings, my mother apparently wonders where her bras went. She forgets about it once her shirt is on, but a recent rash under her breasts seems to have convinced everyone that she could use a bra after all.
Beverly, a hospice social worker, asked her colleagues where the best place was to take an elderly woman for a proper fitting. The advice was unanimous:
We planned this outing to coincide with a visit from
At
“Good,” my mother said, blinking at all the lights and colors. “I’ll take one of each.”
Jenny smiled and said “we can put you into anything you like. And in any style or any color. We could even do hot pink.”
“That’s very nice, dear. What’s hot pink?”
As we made our slow way to the back of the shop, my mother–probably in response to seeing all the lingerie--asked “How many husbands did I have?”
“Two, mother. There was my father Harry, and then there was Julius.”
She shakes her head, stops, leans her weight onto her walker, and I can see she’s trying to figure something out. She points toward Beverly and Elaine, who are working together within the racks, gathering a selection of bras. “I’m just trying to remember who those lovely women are. I’m going through the alphabet: A for Al, no: that was my brother; B for
I lead her toward the fitting room. Beverly and Elaine have several bras ready for my mother, who looks at them, looks down and says “how did I get such a big bazoom?” Then she goes into the room with her two daughters-in-law and the door is shut. “Stay right there,” she calls to me, as though I were six and apt to get lost.
I take a seat in the small nook between changing rooms, holding my mother’s walker folded in my lap with my cane across the top to keep it in place. I look very small. Behind doors to my left, a woman is trying on panties, dropping the unsatisfactory ones in a small pile at her feet. I don’t know where to turn my eyes.
Amid the laughter and murmuring from inside my mother’s changing room, I can tell that things are not going well. Nothing fits, not even close. Elaine exits, returns in a moment with another armful. It’s like a skit from “I Love Lucy,” underwear in mounds all around. Jenny keeps bringing new models back to the changing room; she has a thong draped over her forearm and I’m relieved to see her hand it to the customer in the room to my left. Jenny is losing hope and interest. Apparently,
“Try the Lane Bryant shop at the other end of the mall,” she says and I race ahead to procure a wheelchair for my mother. This is going to take longer than we’d thought.
After a stop at the rest room, we’re all relieved to discover that Lane Bryant has what my mother needs. It takes about a half hour of trying on various models, but she is pleased.
“I’m so lucky to have my two daughters with me,” my mother says at one point. “But who is that man right outside the door, sitting in a wheelchair?”
We buy two bras, and she leaves the store wearing one. Within thirty seconds, as we move toward the rest rooms again, my mother is squirming in the chair, reaching around to adjust her bra and complaining about the fit.
“We’ll take them back after you go to the bathroom.”
“Stupid brassiere.”
Back at Lane Bryant, my mother has run out of patience. Nothing fits. Bras dangle over the top of the changing room door. Elaine, ever cheerful, has found something in every size, shape and style, but always the fit is wrong.
“That’s enough,” my mother finally says. “Just give me the bra I came in and take me to the hotel.”
“Is this the one I came in?”
“Do you like it?”
“Of course. That’s why I always wear it.”
After one more bathroom stop, we leave the mall. My mother is tired but smiling. As I drive, she takes a deep breath, looks out her window, and listens for a moment to the quiet discussion happening in the back seat. “Excuse me,” she says, “who are those nice women behind us?”
***
For more than twenty years, neurologists have recognized the phenomenon of retrogenesis at work in Alzheimer’s patients. The sequence of their functional losses reverses the sequence of functional gains in childhood development. They lose their capacities in precisely the opposite order in which they gained them–the ability to hold up our heads, to smile, crawl, walk, control our bowels, our urine, to dress ourselves–are removed in inverse order.
This harrowing pattern is obvious in my mother’s case. Although she hasn’t officially been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, her dementia has been progressing and capacities regressing in the classic manner. She sounds like my mother--her smoky contralto voice and
She also exhibits some of the innocence of a seven year old. When we tell her we’re taking her for a ride, her eyes widen, her hands come up to the sides of her face and she says oh goodie! A ride. She is open to experience, at least in the moment it occurs; everything seems fresh to her and filled with wonder. There is little of the adult or even adolescent irony in the presence of simple goodness, so that when she sees a couple holding hands in Starbucks she is charmed. What nice looking people. I wonder if they’re married. In the past, their mixture of races and discrepancy in ages would have brought immediate censure. Her skepticism has diminished along with her cognitive hold; there are flickers of simple genuine joy that are astonishing to behold. She is trusting and she is elemental. She often feels relieved of great burdens, pleased not to worry about managing her hair or having her fancy clothes dry cleaned. I don’t have to do that anymore.
The things that she does worry about, such as when I will return or when I last visited, seem most often connected to my presence: I worry her. I am her chief source of agitation. But the form of her worry no longer is that of a mother for a son. Rather, she worries as a child worries about its father. When will I be there again, what have I brought for her, how long will I stay, when will I leave?
Still, for all her childlike qualities, my mother is quite obviously ninety-one. There is no ignoring her thin parchment skin, her limited vision, diminishing mobility, dementia. She is shrinking in body as well as consciousness, fading before our eyes. I try to think of her situation as a liberation, since her lifelong sense of disappointment caused her such misery and now she appears so content. But the idea of liberation keeps transforming into imprisonment; she is a child trapped in an old woman’s body and just at the point where she might finally feel free she is losing hold of herself. No wonder she is compelled to gaze at what remains in the mirror.
This time in our life is a labyrinth of role reversals and reorientations. I feel both protective and frustrated, the way I often felt as a young father. But there is also a long, dark shadow of history that comes with being in my mother’s presence, with being her sole surviving son, her only surviving connection to a past she no longer remembers and that I cannot forget.
As we leave her room, my mother stands in the hallway trying to make her impressions fit. She is perched between the rails of her walker, one hand raised to wave goodbye, the other stretched as though to stop us. Her tone alternates between pleasure and panic. This was the happiest day of my life! Wait, I have to go to the bathroom! You’re coming back in how many days? Bring one of your books already. Marry that girl.
