Us (6 page)

But we got to where she could take a bath by herself and then I would help her towel dry and get dressed. She wore clothes that she could pull up her legs or button up around her front so that she didn't have to pull anything off over her head. She started to walk back and forth to the bathroom without me holding onto her. There were enough things for her to hold onto along the way there—walls, chairs, doorways, the edge of the bed.

It was weeks later that we were able to sit down at the dinner table again and eat a slow dinner together. She cut her food with a slow knife and moved a slow fork up to her mouth. She opened her mouth and chewed slowly too. But eating that dinner was the first thing that we had done together again in the way that we had always done things together, even if I did have to help her back to bed after we were done.

We knew that she wasn't going to die from her ear surgery and that she was probably going to get her hearing back. She began to hear sounds that had a low pitch—the hum of the refrigerator, the tumble of the dryer, the cycles of the dishwasher, the bass line of a song that she had always liked but never fully heard before.

But we also knew that she was going to die sometime, some years from then, or that I was going to, and that it might be something like all of that—one of us waiting in the waiting room while the other one of us was in the operating room, both of us in the hospital room with one of us waiting for the other one of us to wake up, one of us helping the other one into our car so that we could drive back home, one of us helping the other one sit up or stand up or walk, one of us helping the other one into and out of the bathroom, one of us changing the bandages on the other one and cleaning the blood up with a washcloth, both of us trying to slow that dying down.

We woke up for her first morning back at home and we were both afraid. We looked at each other and looked around the room. We were still old, but neither one of us had died during the night yet. But neither one of us was too sure where we were either. We weren't too used to our bed and our bedroom anymore. There weren't any machines or IVs around our bed. There weren't any doctors or any nurses going into and out of our bedroom. There wasn't anybody else dying in another bed and there wasn't anybody else to help us get up or get out of our bed either.

I got out of our bed and went around to her side of it. She turned the bedcovers back off her legs and turned her legs out so that they were hanging down over the side of the bed. I set her walker down in front of her legs. She pulled and pushed herself up with her arms so that she could stand up. She walked with her walker into the bathroom and I waited for her outside the bathroom door. I listened for the water in the toilet bowl and for the water in the bowl of the bathroom sink.

She opened the bathroom door back up. I carried a chair from our bedroom into the bathroom and set it down in the bathtub. I turned both the hot water and the cold water on until the water got warm enough for us. She tried to lift her arms up so that I could help her lift her nightgown up off her body and over her head. I took my nightclothes off too.

I held onto her arms for her so that she could step over the edge of the bathtub. I waited for her to sit down on the chair before I climbed into the bathtub after her and pulled the shower curtain along the length of the bathtub.

She could make the bar of soap lather up in her hands, but she couldn't wash most of her body with it. She couldn't reach below her knees to her feet or around to her back. Her arms and her hands still felt too heavy for her to hold them up to her head so that she could wash her hair. I lathered the shampoo up in my hands and worked it into her thick gray hair. I rinsed the shampoo out of her hair and off the rest of her body.

I turned the water off and pulled the shower curtain back. I stepped out of the bathtub and held onto her arms so that she could step out of the bathtub too. I held the bath towel out in my arms for her and she stepped out into it. I stepped back and she held her arms out so that I could dry them off for her.

I wrapped the bath towel around her legs and patted them down with it until they were dry too. Her skin was too dry. There was dead skin on her arms and her legs and her back and her face. We had to peel all of it off her so that she wouldn't die any faster than she already was.

I hung her bath towel up on the towel rack and dried myself off with another bath towel. I helped her step into her underwear and pulled them up her legs. I helped her get her arms through her bra straps and hooked her bra together in the back. I helped her push her arms through the sleeves of her housecoat and zipped it all the way up to her neck.

We walked her over to her dressing table so that she could sit down on her chair at her dressing table. She wanted to brush her hair out. She could hold onto the hairbrush for a few brushstrokes, but then her arm would get too tired. Her hair was almost dry by the time that she was done brushing it out.

I walked back into the bathroom and got her walker back out for her. She walked down the hallway and into the kitchen with it and I walked behind her. I pulled a kitchen chair out from the kitchen table for her and she sat down to eat.

Nobody had brought any trays of hospital food into our bedroom, but there wasn't any bread or fruit or milk or anything else fresh in our house either. We were going to have to feed ourselves things that didn't get too old too fast.

I got a box of dry cereal down from the cupboard. I got spoons out of the silverware drawer and cereal bowls down from another cupboard. I filled the bowls up with cereal and I waited for her to start to eat first. I watched her put the spoon in the bowl and then bring the spoon up to her mouth. I watched her chew and swallow the food and then I did it with her too.

I put the cereal bowls and the spoons into the kitchen sink and rinsed some water over them. I sat back down at the kitchen table with her and we looked around the kitchen. We looked at her walker and we looked at each other. We knew that it didn't matter what or how much we ate. We knew that we wouldn't be alive and be together for much longer.

We found ways to make our days longer. We followed the sun around our house—from our bedroom and the bathroom in the morning, to the kitchen through noon, the living room through the afternoon, and the dining room for the evening.

At night, we turned all the lights in every room of our house on. We turned the lights on the front porch on. We turned the lights on the back porch and over the garage on too. We wanted to keep the darkness that surrounded our house and us as far away from us as we could.

We wanted it to be daytime all the time. We didn't need much sleep anymore anyway. She had saved so much of it up while she was sleeping in the hospital and I wanted to be awake for the rest of the time that she was going to be alive.

We unplugged all the clocks and anything that had a clock on it. We used our extra time awake to slow the rest of our time down. We cooked and ate and sat and talked and waited and moved and walked and we did it all slowed down. There wasn't anything else that we wanted to do but be awake and alive with each other.

I would rub her back and her arms and her legs and her feet. My hands could rub the wrinkles out of her skin and make her feel younger, so that she could stay alive longer. We were trying to stretch the rest of our lives out.

We were afraid to close our eyes to go to sleep so we stayed awake for those days that we were back at home. We tried not to look away from each other too much or even blink and we did other things to help us stay awake too. We kept touching each other on the arm or the hair or the face. We kept sitting up or getting up and standing up. We kept setting this egg timer that we had so that it would keep going off and keep us up too.

We ate to stay alive and awake too. We ate all the food inside the cupboards and the pantry and all the food inside the refrigerator and the freezer. We ate everything that we had that was in boxes and jars and bottles and cans and plastic bags. We ate boxes of cereal, cans of fruit and cans of soup, bags of frozen vegetables, and packages of frozen meat. We ate packages of cookies, boxes of crackers, and bags of potato chips.

We boiled water to make coffee and tea and to cook boxes of pasta and bags of rice. We defrosted frozen orange juice and frozen lemonade and drank it from pitchers. We baked layer cakes and loaves of bread with the flour and the sugar that was left in the jars on top of the kitchen counter and with the packages of yeast that made it all rise up.

All of it was food that didn't get too old too fast. But it took us a long time to get up and get to the kitchen to make our food, to sit down and eat our breakfast and our lunch and our supper, to get back up and clean up the pots and pans and the dishes and the silverware and to put everything away again. We moved through our house and our lives so slowly then.

But my wife wasn't getting any better anymore for those days that we were back at home. She began to forget how to live in our house or with me anymore. She forgot what things were or what they were for. We made labels for the refrigerator and the food inside it, for the doors to the kitchen and our bedroom and the bathrooms, for the things that she used in the bathroom, and for the couch and the chairs and the other places where she could sit down. We wrote instructions out for the things that we used around our house—the telephone and the television, the microwave oven and the stove, the toilet and the sinks.

But she still tried to dial the telephone on the touch pad of the microwave oven and put her dirty clothes away inside the dishwasher. Sometimes she sat down on a chair and peed on the cushion and other times she would throw trash away in the clothes hamper.

We moved through the rooms of our house slowly so that I could show her what things were. We turned doorknobs to open doors up and looked into the different rooms of our house to show her what they were for. We turned water faucets on and off. We turned the coffee maker, the lamps, the television, and all the other appliances on and off too.

She was still surprised that turning a switch on made the ceiling fan turn on or made the living room fill up with light. She was still surprised when she heard somebody's voice through the telephone, or when the people on the television started talking or the voices on the radio started talking or singing. She forgot more and more about our house and us until she couldn't always remember my name or why I was helping her get up or eat and then she forgot how to stand up or open her mouth up or say my name or move her arms.

She couldn't get up out of her chair for our walk across the living room to the dining room with her walker. I couldn't help her enough so that she could do it either. So I brought a small table from our spare bedroom out to her in the living room and set it down around her legs. I brought her food out to her too and set it down on the small table in front of her.

It was still too hard for her to sit up and she couldn't lean forward either. Her head had gotten too heavy for her neck and it would fall back against the headrest of her chair and her mouth would fall open a little bit. I would sit down next to her to hold her head up for her so that I could feed her food with a spoon. She couldn't open her mouth very much anymore and she could only chew slowly, but we still had all those long meals together. She would smile as much as she could after she had chewed and swallowed her food.

Our house had gotten too old and started to die too. The paint was peeling off it so that the wood was showing through in places. The wood had gotten soft in places too and there were too many moldy age spots growing on it to replace it.

Some of the shingles had come off the roof and I would find them in the bushes around our house and scattered around the front yard and the backyard too. There were cracks in the windowpanes and the drafty wind that came through them made us feel as if we were back in the cold air of the hospital.

There were also cracks in the ceilings and in the walls. Our house was settling down on its foundation after all those years that we had lived inside it. Our house had started leaking too—through the roof and the ceiling, but also through the basement walls where there were cracks in the foundation. There were water marks on the ceilings and the walls and our house never dried out.

We had roofers and builders and a handyman come out to look at our house, but none of them thought that it should be fixed. They all said that our house was too old and that too much of it needed to be replaced. They didn't say that we shouldn't keep living in it, but they were afraid that part of the roof or the ceiling might fall down on us. They were afraid that our house might flood in a heavy rain and that the foundation might be washed away.

But we couldn't see any sky or anything else except for darkness through any of the cracks in the ceiling and we didn't worry too much about too much rain. We wanted to float away from all of this anyway.

My wife moved less and got worse, but she didn't want to go back to the hospital. I got her to go to a doctor, but she couldn't walk enough with her walker to get out to our car and I couldn't lift her up to carry her that far either. She didn't want me to call an ambulance again, so I tried to think of ways to move her.

I thought of things that would roll. I had a wheelbarrow out in the garden and a dolly out in the garage, but she wouldn't have let me help her get in or on either one of those. So I rolled an old desk chair out of our guest bedroom and into the living room. I helped her move from the seat of the living room chair to the seat of the desk chair without her needing to stand up. I raised the seat of the desk chair up so that her feet didn't touch the floor or catch in its wheels. I turned the desk chair on its swivel, held onto the armrests, and pushed her across the living room floor, through the kitchen, and out the back door.