Sweet Surrender (16 page)

Margaret's carer from the Philippines was due to arrive and I had concerns about how it would all work out. At this stage Margaret didn't readily warm to new people and she could be tricky to manage if she decided not to cooperate. Getting her out of bed involved literally flicking the covers away before she had time to react and swinging her legs onto the floor while in the same instant lifting her upwards onto her feet. The idea is to get her moving in one smooth action. Her local carer, Bev, developed this technique and it usually worked, although not always for me. Sometimes Margaret would grab onto the blankets and hang on for grim death. I always left her to relax for a while before making another attempt. I hated to feel I was battling her, but I also knew it was vital to get her up and moving in the mornings.

Fedema was the name of our new carer, and she arrived with the woman from the agency that facilitated this live-in arrangement. Fedema was very small and had a wonderful open face with a wide smile. We had a cup of tea and I quickly discovered a lot about her education and training for this job.

In the Philippines, all schooling – infants, primary and high school – is conducted in the English language. The government has known for
decades that their greatest export asset is their people, and they have been supplying workers for a wide range of practical and caring jobs overseas for more than fifty years. The Filipino government identifies where the overseas job opportunities lie and then helps to train and educate its workers accordingly. In Canada, there is a tremendous lack of trained geriatric carers willing to put in the hours to support elderly and frail people who want to remain living at home. To qualify for the scheme, Fedema has been required to spend at least two years working with a family that includes an elderly person in need of care. In her case this involved moving to Hong Kong to live in with a family of five – middle-aged parents, two teenage children and a grandmother in a wheelchair. As she described this period of training I realised that it must have been tremendously difficult for her. She was not simply a carer but the household domestic, doing all the shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry while also taking care of her elderly charge.

Ken had signed Fedema up on a two-year contract. She would live in with full board and pay for her six-day week. After the agency representative departed we did our best to make her feel welcome, showing her the room that had been so carefully prepared for her and giving her a guided tour of the house and garden. Fedema was obviously keen for this arrangement to work. She immediately made herself as useful as possible and I warmed to her, although Margaret was a little less than enthusiastic. Ken and I made it clear from the outset that caring for Margaret should be her number-one priority. Housework and laundry came very low down on our list of requirements.

I saw my role as teaching Fedema everything she needed to know to make the transition as smooth as possible. I was to go home in a few weeks and I hoped she would have settled in by the time I left. We chatted amiably as we got on with the various tasks at hand and I discovered that she had left behind a husband and four children in the Philippines. She proudly showed me a photograph of her lovely family. The children ranged in age from three to ten.

I could barely contain my dismay. It should have been obvious but it hadn't occurred to me. Fedema was making an enormous sacrifice, living without her husband and children for two years, to try to improve their lives by gaining Canadian residency. She told me that two other family members had done the same thing, and both of these women now lived happily in Vancouver. Neither of them had children to leave behind, but they too had been through this same trial period before being accepted into the country.

I was very troubled by the situation. I knew full well that Ken could only keep Margaret at home if she had a live-in carer. And I also appreciated that this might well be Fedema's best chance at making a new life for her family in a more affluent society. Yet it seemed a tragedy to me that the world worked this way. A woman from a Third World country had to leave behind her precious children so that people in a wealthy country could have affordable aged care. I was appalled and deeply saddened, and that night in bed I wept not only for my sister but also for Fedema, even though she seemed so happy to have this opportunity. It was not lost on me that she had already been away from her children for two years, in Hong Kong, before she came to us.

From the first day Fedema fitted into the family and exceeded our expectations, although there were some interesting adjustments to make. I hadn't anticipated that she would never have cooked European meals, and while we all loved Asian food, Fedema needed to learn the basics of some simple meals that Ken and Margaret are more accustomed to eating. I started by teaching her to make chicken soup with vegetables and then shepherd's pie and sausages with onion gravy. She was used to eating rice three times a day so I tried to include several rice dishes along the way. We stocked the shelves with chilli sauce and various Asian condiments so she could prepare some of her own favourite meals as well. One night I roasted a chicken with bacon and bread stuffing and lots of crispy baked potatoes and gravy. Fedema loved this, and wrote down every step in great detail so she could prepare the same
meal for the family after I left. She also enthusiastically offered to assist Ken in planting out his spring vegetable garden and helped me weed the ornamental garden I had planted with bulbs and perennials to give Margaret some cheer. Fedema had never gardened before, but took to it immediately. Indeed she was willing to do anything and everything to help, and her attitude was unfailingly positive and supportive. I could tell that her presence would make a tremendous difference.

David learned to operate a computer less than five years ago, and before that time he relied on various production assistants or members of his family (mainly me) to type his correspondence for him. So I was tremendously relieved when he decided to master keyboard skills. It lifted a burden from my shoulders and also made him much more independent, running his filmmaking business from home. Communicating by email has in fact made life easier for us both, given that we both travel so much and spend so many months of the year apart.

Initially, David's emails to me were very brief and to the point because his typing was still very slow and laboured, but gradually he gained speed and confidence and long messages seem to flow effortlessly from his computer into mine. While I was with Ken and Margaret it was wonderful for me to have someone to talk to about the difficulties I was experiencing in dealing with the situation. I usually waited until the evenings, after Margaret was settled, to write to him about how the day had gone. In particular I needed to express my feelings – the sadness I felt, the fears I had for the future and the pain of coping with a state of affairs that was only going to get worse as time went on:

It was with great relief that I let David know the new medication had been dropped:

David had been my sounding board throughout, and the person who really understood what this journey had been like for me. For many years he was long-winded in letters when someone else was typing them for him; now his missives were concise and went straight to the heart of the matter. They kept me sane, they made me laugh at times and they also comforted me enormously. I told him so:

A few years ago I read a very moving article in the
New Yorker
magazine, written by an elderly man who had just lost the love of his life, his wife of fifty-four years. He was lamenting that he had nothing tangible from her; no letters or even notes that spoke of how much she loved him or how wonderful their relationship had been. They had been side by side for all their lives and there had never been a need for letters to be exchanged. Unlike couples separated by work or war, where heartfelt greetings and words of love travel back and forth, this couple had never written to each other at all. Not once. And now he was distraught that there was nothing he could hold in his hands, nothing to read and read again, to comfort him in his time of grief.

This article stayed with me, and I thought of it while David and I were writing to each other every day, week after week, month after month. I realised that our letters were a valuable part of the healing process in our relationship. That reading his thoughts, expressed so simply, had made me feel closer to him once again. I can't explain it any more clearly. I saw aspects of him I hadn't noticed before. I appreciated his constancy and devotion, against the odds.

The internet has certainly changed the way we all communicate. There is an immediacy about it – you can respond instantly and know what the other person is thinking and feeling. For me, David's letters were a lifeline during this troubling period, and when I got home I intended to print them out and treasure them always.

On the day I turned fifty, I was living in a small French village, revelling in the life of a single woman with a gang of new friends and a stimulating social life. I had been exploring the glorious countryside, discovering fascinating new villages almost every day, acquainting myself with the joys of shopping for food in the local markets, and generally indulging myself in a carefree, self-focused lifestyle.

To celebrate my birthday, I was taken out to a five-course lunch in a rustic village restaurant, then spent the afternoon partying in my friend Jock's courtyard, breaking open several magnums of French champagne and generally behaving in an outrageous fashion.

My fifty-eighth birthday found me in an equally beautiful part of the world, but my sense of recklessness and irresponsibility had long since departed. It had been a busy and rather chaotic morning at my sister's farm, with workmen arriving unexpectedly and disrupting our demanding routine, so I was feeling more than a little frazzled by the time I managed to coax Margaret from her warm bed and wrangle her into a deep, hot bath for a relaxing soak.

I was gently massaging her legs under the water as she floated dreamily, lost in her own world, when I remembered.

‘Guess what, Margaret? It's my birthday today.'

Her face instantly changed. She opened her large, pale green eyes and looked up at me with her beautiful smile. She wanted to say something, but was struggling to find the words.

‘Well, Merry Christmas to you,' she beamed.

Ken believed that Margaret should be encouraged to continue with as many of her old routines as possible. He still took her shopping at the supermarket and, although she sometimes seemed overwhelmed by the large numbers of people and all the activity, on the whole I thought she still enjoyed these outings. She would push the trolley while we did
the run of the aisles as quickly and efficiently as possible. A strange thing had occurred as part of her illness – she had developed a sweet tooth. It's not uncommon, according to the specialist. All her life Margaret had avoided overeating sweets and desserts, yet now she craved them and in the supermarket her eyes lit up at the sight of the cakes and biscuits and tarts.

Indeed Margaret's appetite had increased to the point where she was gaining weight and many of her clothes had started to become very tight around the middle. She was by no means fat – still a small size 12 – but I had to start moving buttons and slipping some extra elastic into waistbands so that her clothes would still fit.

Margaret could no longer dress or undress herself and her arms and hands became uncoordinated and very stiff and awkward. Getting clothes onto her could be very complicated and when I found myself doing this alone I invariably got into a terrible tangle of arms and legs. She looked exasperated and I was generally covered with sweat by the time I got her dressed in the morning. Fedema and Margaret's part-time day carer, Bev, had much more success and I started leaving it to them whenever I could.

Fedema or I took Margaret for a walk at least twice a day. Until recently she used to stride out confidently, but now she tended to shuffle along slowly, as though her feet were no longer connected to the rest of her body. She was often reluctant to go, but once we were out of the front gates she became a little more motivated. I linked arms and sang to her as we walked along, songs I knew she would remember from childhood. Songs I knew my mother would have sung to her as she later sang them to me when I was growing up. There was no doubt Margaret connected with the lyrics and tunes, no matter how bad my rendition. She seemed particularly taken with the songs of Paul Robeson that I knew by heart from an old family record album. She didn't sing along, but she smiled as we wandered in our lurching fashion past farms and woodland.

Last thing at night, after dinner and a wash, once she was dressed in her pyjamas, I sat with Margaret as she settled into bed. I massaged moisturisers into her face and she obviously loved this little bit of pampering. What we all wanted was for Margaret to feel safe and well loved. This next part of her life must be comfortable and trouble-free.

Leaving Margaret and Ken had become increasingly heart-wrenching, but I knew that I needed to get back to the family and finish various work projects that had been temporarily put on the backburner. I also believed that Fedema must be allowed to manage on her own for a while, to gain her confidence and put her own stamp on this job she has embraced so enthusiastically. Back in the Philippines, Fedema's mother was caring for her children while her husband worked every day in a factory. Here in Canada, Fedema was caring for my sister and holding it all together until I had a chance to come back.

I still found the whole concept sad and difficult.