Snow Angels (18 page)

A few weeks after my father’s death I was at my mother’s house helping her plant annuals when she stopped with her trowel in midair. At first I thought she was listening to the wren family chirping on the fence. Then I thought she was admiring the bright blue sky. I could see her mind traveling.

“Mom,” I said. “Mom, what are you thinking about?”

She turned to me with a contented smile and said merrily, “Michelle, honey, run inside and tell your father to come look at our flowers. He really loves marigolds.”

She started back to turning dark dirt as though the matter were settled. On my knees, moist ground seeping into my jeans, I wondered at my mother. Had she misspoke or was she confused?

“Go on,” she said and hummed to herself. I turned to look at the backdoor, nearly convincing myself that my father would come walking out with a glass of tea.

That started my early morning calls to her on my way to work. At first she was up and moving around, but after a few weeks I could tell that she was just waking to my call. She still seemed fine when we spoke, but her housekeeping started to slip, which I took as a sure sign of depression. She began to leave piles of newspapers strewn in the corner by the lounge chair, not even bothering to bind them with string and collect them in the recycling bin as she’d always insisted my father do. I found less and less in her kitchen cabinets and the refrigerator grew smelly with food I’d brought her weeks before.

“Mom, what do you do all day?” I asked her as I threw away curdled milk and rotted lettuce.

“Oh, I watch
Oprah
and I do a little piecework on my quilt and…oh, I don’t know. I sleep a lot now. I’m just so tired all the time.”

She did seem lethargic. And increasingly strange. Like the time I pulled up to the house to see her flower garden bursting with color. Curious I walked over to see how this miracle of horticulture happened overnight and found that my mother had taken every plastic and silk flower she owned, a substantial amount, and shoved them into the ground in her failing fall garden. When I asked her about it she had no recollection of having done it, but she said it didn’t matter, that they were just gathering dust anyway.

Another day I found her sitting in the shed with my father’s small toolbox balanced on her lap. She was wearing only a slip, its shiny cream fabric smeared with mud. Her feet were bare and dirty. Her hair was messed as though she’d just gotten out of bed and wandered into the shed.

“Mom?” I said gently to her. “Mom, what are you doing sitting in the shed?” She never acknowledged me. She only stared out of the small grimy window with a forlorn look that made panic rush my chest and my eyes fill with tears. I went into the house to get shoes, a cloth and a pan of warm water to wash my mother’s feet.

I tried to talk to Randy about my mother’s situation, but he had no advice. He’d never been in a caregiving position and his first and only idea was to put her in a nursing home. But nursing homes to me were for people in much more need than my mother. She could still cook herself a small meal. It was remembering to turn off the stove that was the danger for her. She could bathe, but she could also easily find herself sitting in cold water, shivering, unsure how long she had been there.

I worried that perhaps my mother had more problems than just depression and loneliness, but things seemed stable until the day a neighbor called me at work.

“Edwina is wandering around outside in her nightclothes,” Mrs. Smith said. “I think you need to come see about her.”

I had just closed a big shipment deal with a real estate developer and was filling out the paperwork when the call came. By the time I got to her place my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with the neighbor drinking tea and laughing over something that had happened twenty years ago.

“Mom, how are you?” I asked.

“Oh, pooh. How am I? I’m perfectly fine,” she said. She tucked a loose strand of gray behind her ear and crossed her legs as if she were at high tea, her baggy pajama bottoms flopping down around her muddy house shoes. The neighbor shrugged and raised her eyebrows at me.

Within the week the neighbor called again to say that my mother was wading in the creek behind her house and this time she was totally naked. As I drove over there I allowed the word dementia to finally become a part of my vocabulary. I had not used that word, nor the word Alzheimer’s, as long as I could. I couldn’t avoid taking her to the doctor any longer.

My parents had gone to Dr. Johnson for thirty years and he was himself so old that I wondered if his faculties were intact. But when he spoke his eyes were clear and his wit sharp. He told me he’d long suspected this would develop, that my father had come to him with some concerns over Mother’s behavior before he died. Dr. Johnson drew her blood and told me that I should start considering how I intended to care for her.

“She won’t be able to live by herself forever,” he said.

When had this happened? My father had known this was going on and yet he hadn’t told me anything. My parents were always leaving out bits of information so they wouldn’t worry me. It would have been so much easier to have my levelheaded father around to help me make decisions, but I was on my own. An only-child with a failing mother. What a lonely feeling.

My mother was so agitated by the doctor’s visit that he suggested I take her home with me. I packed her suitcase and the neighbor agreed to watch her ornery old cat. Our guest room was at the top of our stairs with a view into the woods behind our house.

“Look, Mom. You can see my birdbath from here,” I said. I couldn’t tell if she’d heard me or not since she didn’t move from her spot on the end of the bed. Her attention would leave for a while and then return unpredictably. She was always pleasant, one thing the doctor had asked me about. He’d said as long as she remained docile that he wouldn’t recommend medication.

I pulled out a drawer and arranged her clothes inside. “Just let me know if you need anything.”

When I came downstairs Randy was sitting in his chair watching the news. He followed me into the kitchen and poured himself another cup of coffee.

“So what’s wrong with your mom?” he asked.

I looked out behind our house where gray clouds played against mountains bruised purple in the dying light.

“Dementia,” I said and lowered my face into my hands and sobbed. Randy took me into his arms and gave me a soft squeeze before he let me go.

“So what’s the plan?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t have a plan.”

“How long is she staying here?”

I was shaken by the directness of his question.

“Well, I don’t know, Randy. Does it matter? We lived with Mom and Dad for six months when we were first married. Don’t you think you could return the favor and let her stay here a while until I can figure out what to do?”

“Yeah. Sure. I didn’t mean anything by it.” He pulled a thin smile for my benefit, but I had the feeling that Randy had no intention of permitting for long-term care of any sort.

I took a week off from work to be with my mother and to figure out exactly what would be best for her. At first all she did was watch television. I quickly noticed that she forgot to eat, which was one reason she had been dropping weight.

“Mom?” I asked her. “Why don’t you come downstairs and help me make supper?”

Always agreeable, she shuffled into the kitchen and dutifully peeled potatoes like she had done ten thousand times before. I watched to see if she was functional and she remembered to stir the green beans and check on the roast. I decided then that she needed a job and cooking was something she could almost do on automatic, at least with someone around in case her mind wandered. Randy always loved her cooking, so I thought this would be a way for her to contribute something he would appreciate.

I arranged for a young woman to come stay at the house with my mother while I went to work. I knew this was a temporary fix since she was actively looking for a job after being laid off, but I had to take what I could get. I bought groceries for the week and instructed the help to assist my mother in making dinner each night. Soon I was coming home to warm meals and we were having dinner as a family.

That worked well to bring us together during the week, but on the weekends I usually took care of my mother alone, since Randy had started spending more time kayaking with his friends. Nearly every Friday afternoon I watched my husband pull out of our drive with his boat strapped down in the bed of his truck, fishing poles dangling silver lures. During evenings of the work week, Randy stayed with my mother while I went to the grocery and ran errands, but the weekends were mine alone. He didn’t have the patience to deal with her unusual behavior and he said it made him sad how she sat and looked out the window at nothing.

Once he realized she was missing and found her wandering the woods. Another time I came home to see him carrying her back into the house in her sodden nightgown. He put her to bed upstairs and then came downstairs with a look that said he had been pushed far enough.

“Michelle, you’ve got to find somewhere to put her. She was out near the highway. She was almost roadkill!” He fought tears. I wondered if they were tears of frustration or compassion. “We can’t take care of her much longer.”

“I’m doing everything I can, Randy. Just be patient. We can’t jump ahead on the waiting list.”

My research into long-term care revealed a strange new world. There were nursing homes for residents incapable of “self-care” as the professionals put it. Then there were assisted-living facilities where residents functioned at their own levels. The care in assisted living ranged from couples in small apartments who still kept cars and social dates, to those less mobile, yet still functional when it came to basic needs like laundry. The director at Black Knob’s only assisted-care facility told me that residents who weren’t a danger could have full kitchens, although they were always welcome in the dining hall. My mother, with her bright smile and her moments of clarity, didn’t need to live with more severe cases of disability. She seemed too functional for a traditional nursing home.

I was feeling good about her options when reality set in. There was a waiting list of nearly a year for assisted living and those vacancies only opened when someone died or moved into a total-care facility. And worse, unlike a nursing home, where Dr. Johnson could write an admission and Medicare would help, assisted living wasn’t covered. My parents had pinched pennies their entire lives, had never gone on vacations, never had hobbies. They had let life pass them by so they could save for this. Now it was time to turn my accounting skills to the task of sorting out my mother’s finances and seeing what options would be open to us.

I wasn’t being completely honest with Randy. What I hadn’t told him was that Dr. Johnson had offered to help move my mother up on the list for the nursing home. I just didn’t want to see her there. I wanted her in a more homelike atmosphere, a place where we could both still feel like we were at home.

The tipping point came with Randy on a Saturday morning when I was at the grocery. Randy went to get the mail and one of our neighbors pulled into our drive to talk. Randy said he wasn’t out of the house more than twenty minutes, but when he opened the kitchen door short flames ran across the floor in a line to the sink. My mother stood frozen in the middle of the room, her nightgown terrifyingly close to the flames. Randy grabbed a throw rug and beat the fire out on the floor. In the sink he saw the smoking skillet with charred strips of meat. Mother had been frying bacon and when it caught fire, her instincts made her move the skillet to the sink. But she had strewn flaming grease across the floor on her way. Luckily, she hadn’t been burned.

When I pulled into the drive Randy was loading out.

“Hey,” I said as I pulled a bag of groceries out of the backseat. “I thought you weren’t going boating this weekend.”

He slammed things into his truck.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, then I thought of my mother. “Is something wrong?”

“Why don’t you go inside and see?” he snapped.

A burnt stench washed over me when I stepped into our kitchen. Randy had cleaned up the grease, but our floor had melted slightly in a line where the flames had touched it. My mother was sitting at our table as if she had been waiting for me to come home for days.

“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened,” she said. I was stunned by the clarity of her thoughts. “I just panicked.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine, but I can’t remember.” Tears filled her eyes. “Oh, Michelle, what’s happening to me?”

I gathered her in my arms. “It’s okay, Mom. As long as you’re not hurt we can take care of everything else.”

She nodded her head and dabbed at her eyes with a wad of tissue.

“Randy’s
so
mad. You need to go talk to him,” she said.

“But, Mom…”

“No. Don’t worry about me. Go talk to him before he leaves.”

When I got back outside Randy was slamming the back cab door and climbing into his truck. I walked up to the driver’s window and put my hands on the sill.

“Is she okay?” he asked, gripping the steering wheel.

“Yes. Thank God. She seems fine. But she’s worried about you.”

“Michelle, I can’t take this. When you get her situated we’ll talk. I’m not coming back until she’s settled somewhere else.”

“Come back? What do you mean? Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I’ll find somewhere to light for a while.”

“You’re leaving me here with this mess? This charred kitchen and Mom to take care of by myself?”

“It’s the only way I’m going to get you to do something with her. She can’t live with us from now on.”

“I know that. I’m trying to find something.”

He cranked the engine and sat there staring out at nothing.

“Randy, please don’t do this. Don’t leave me.”

Those big blue eyes were torn, I could see that.

“I’m sorry,” was all he said.

He pulled out of the drive. I figured he would go shack up with some of his friends at one of the outfitters. His cell phone didn’t work that far out, but he’d call eventually after he cooled off. At least that was what had always happened when we’d fought before.