My mother went into a nursing home in my small rural community in November of 2003; she died there in 2007, also in November. It was a very challenging time; my dad was depressed and suicidal, worn down by my mom’s dementia. He wanted so much to do the caregiving himself, which he saw as his duty, as well as to save the money nursing home care costs in this country (ginormous). But. Her illness was killing them both, as well as profoundly negatively impacting my life as their primary source of support. My anxiety was through the roof; my father had a loaded shotgun propped up in the corner of the kitchen, and – he was a farm boy at his core – I knew his solution to the problem was a bullet, one each for them both, starting with his wife.
Finally, after the second or third time he suggested he just end it, I called in the public health nurse, whose assessment of my parents’ situation would give a green light on my mother entering the nursing home facility. Done. The nurse even suggested my dad needed admittance, but I dissuaded her, ‘He’ll be fine. He’s depressed and exhausted.’ He lived another seven years, not long enough, but he did so having bounced back, even if his life was never the same again.
My dad was having trouble separating himself, however, going to the nursing home to sit and have three meals each day with my mom, the habit of all most fifty years. I said, no, dad, you’re going to stay home for dinner. You’re exhausted. I’ll do dinner. Given his mental and physical state, and the winter roads, this was the best idea I could come up with, and – for the next six months plus, I did dinner in the facility with my mom every night. It was not fun. I had already been doing meals with her, usually lunch, to give my pop a break, but to go into a nursing home nightly, oy gevalt. If you have spent time in a nursing home, you know why.
But, if you haven’t, ah, you few, you lucky few, you band of blessed brothers and sisters. There is the smell, of urine or the noxious cleaner that can’t quite get the urine scent out; the stench of over-cooked vegetables lingers too, along with the many wafting stinks of folks in various states of decrepitude. There are the residents rocking in the corner, standing or stuck in a chair, reaching for comfort in repetitive motion with, perhaps, verbal tics as well; there are the folks parked in various places in hallways in wheelchairs in differing states of consciousness or unconsciousness; there are the invariably overweight aides and nurses oozing decency (some, not all) along with exhaustion, boredom, inchoate rage and even (a very few) an almost pathological degree of cheer, given the circumstance. There is the false cheer of the death-trap we all know this place is; the weighted food for residents who have stopped eating; the never turned off, blaring TV in the ‘lounge’. Fox, of course. Music of the 1930-40s blaring. Kill me now.
And there is the obese man in his forties (around my age at the time) who had a stroke ten years earlier. He will roll up behind me when I’m getting ice cream for my mother, a disembodied voice saying, ‘Is that real ice cream?’ (I have already discovered that the facility only serves iced milk, a pale imitation). When I turn to respond, yes, yes, it is, his eyes light up, widening with joy and lust, and suddenly I’m struck with a vision of myself at a full run, tearing down the hall as he chases me on his motorized wheelchair.
I did not give him any ice cream; he was not permitted real treats of any kind, plus it was the only thing I could consistently get my mother to eat. He was in there, a youngish man amidst folks thirty and forty years his senior, unable to perform basic functions for himself because morbid obesity had led to a stroke while he was in his thirties. His pain was so overwhelming (he was the youngest and longest-term resident in the place), it was suffocating, suffocating for me, but what was it like for him, trapped here, trapped inside that body? Clearly, he was bright (he was a former Episcopalian minister), but given the state of him, what karmic debt is that?
Should I have given him the ice cream? Should I have snuck in and put a pillow over his face one night, as an act of mercy or, instead, fiendish cruelty? I was tempted to do this to my mother, believe me, had long been telling my dad to leave the cellar door open, maybe she’d fall down and end their co-dependent marital struggle to the death of one, or both. Embrace to the death. Sorry. Embrace! They did really love one another, a lot – but this exit ramp shit was capital H Horrible. Hard. Hideous.
There were residents in that facility who, in their dementia, thought I was their daughter. There were residents who never had visitors, not once in the four years I went there, visits that on my part became less frequent as time went on, as my mother’s ability to recognize me or my dad faded, then disappeared entirely. There was a resident who clung frantically to a baby doll, standing or sitting in the hallway in the largish foyer of the 3rd floor. This perturbed me, not that I can say why, exactly, but it was odd and noticeable. She loved that baby doll, swaddled in blankets that were, if not clean, all encompassing, pink and white.
Six or eight months in, maybe more, I asked, what’s the deal with the baby doll? What’s up with that? Did you guys or her family provide her with it? I don’t recall if they had given her the doll or not, but, the supervising nurse explained, this resident was a holocaust survivor; when she was taken by the Nazis, her infant daughter had been snatched out of her arms, its head smashed in on the pavement in front of her. She didn’t say, but I knew that the heavily swaddled baby doll was a source of comfort in her old age, her trauma resurfacing, I guess (I am not a psychologist), yet finding an object of substitution? Restitution? It was her lodestone made of plastic and paint, a positive or at least effective embodiment of what was lost, all those years ago. This information shut me and my petty judgements right the fuck up, necessarily chastening and humbling me.
What we don’t know about others’ lives is legion, and that includes our parents. My mom and dad, their marriage and years together wove a tapestry of which I was just a small part, a couple of square inches in all that they had been and were to one another. What we don’t know – what we cannot judge, should not judge – about other peoples’ lives is legion. If I had to do it all over again, I’d just give him the damned ‘real’ ice cream. I’d praise her beautiful baby.