One widow’s mother-in-law story, part 2

(... continued)

All, every, only: this is the extreme language of my mother-in-law story. It was a period of absolutes everywhere and most of the time, we were alone. Why does everyone abandon grieving people? Why are you afraid? Don’t answer that, I know why, it just hurts like hell to be abandoned by people who you know are perfectly healthy, across town, and have a choice. That's alone.

Compared to my mother-in-law, at least I had a job to get out to. On the other hand, I knew what was going on. There were days that Audrey was obviously disoriented, even before I intervened in her care, straightened out her medications and hired a care manager for her on the sly, on my own dime. Before the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and the first of two long-term living arrangements, two hospital stays and a rehab facility.

I knew her thyroid was off. There was a day in April, two months before the end, when she was acting really crazy, talking to a stuffed animal about some red dress of mine. Short Stack knew something was up and wouldn’t play with her alone. I asked Gavin to speak to her and ended up accompanying her to her doctor. She wasn’t taking her thyroid medication correctly. We tried to straighten it out.

I don’t know if Gavin ever spoke to her about needing more help or brought up any topics that threatened her independence. She’d been so realistic about it in the past few years, but plans had dissolved as he became ill. She did have an episode, shortly after moving near us, of near-kidney failure due to some error with her prescriptions. After the thyroid incident, of course, that fit together: she was doubling up on some and omitting others randomly, accidentally playing pillbox Russian roulette.

And the visible signs of her decline started to accelerate as his condition worsened. She crashed her car the day before he died; we tried to pretend none of us noticed the cut on her nose but he was too out of it to ask about it anyway. The day after he died I went to her apartment briefly to help her open a stubborn bedroom window and ended up checking her fridge. A pot of special diet cabbage soup on the bottom shelf was full of gray-yellow mass, brimming over with spores. At least we found out that her garbage disposal, newfangled and misunderstood as it was, did work.

Without Gavin around, her cover-ups were removed: she had very little mental capacity left. She didn’t seem to understand how to take her dozen or so medications and insisted to me that if she was someone who needed medicine, she wouldn’t be out walking around.

You can say that I pounced on her in my grief, but she had been losing weight over the past two years. I’d left her largely alone until the thyroid incident because I was overwhelmed, but I knew her history better than she did.

But of course she was hostile to my suggestions that she fill and take her prescriptions.

So Gavin was dead, I was a wreck, and she had no car. To my credit (with her) and my detriment (in terms of good judgment and responsibility to the world) I loaned her my Corolla, the same make and model as hers. It was clear to me she couldn’t have handled any vehicle with differently laid-out controls. It was not clear to me that she should have just been off the road altogether.

Finally some friends talked me into taking my car back from her. She was, after all, most likely to run over my child in my driveway. I had a friend who’d lost a child the same age this way.

Audrey continued to walk over to our house every night for dinner in our grey silence, to enjoy the blessed child, but she was getting weaker and weaker. She’d complain her stomach hurt and then not remember if she’d eaten anything. A block was a long way for her to walk, and her bones were showing through her skin where she’d been round and saggy just a few years before. Conspiring with her doctor, I hired a private care nurse to check in on her once in a while, under the guise of weighing her. She’d refill the prescriptions and check the pillboxes each visit and provide her good ears.

I don’t know why I didn’t understand how dire her situation was during this period. There was nearly a year when the nurse would stop by and update me, but the word “Alzheimer’s” was never mentioned. And every cognitive test, Audrey could fool: she’d do fine and even joke with medical providers, familiar or new. Maybe the nurse was protecting me, maybe she thought the decline would be slower, maybe I just couldn’t hear, again. Maybe I was burned out on caregiving and medical situations overall.

It was clear to me that caregiving an elder, even with no acute medical threats, was different from caring for a young cancer patient (even a “December” spouse) who might, even with a miracle, be cured: Gavin wanted so badly to live. Audrey didn’t even understand that she was old.

Once as I tried to convince her (O rationality! How futile thou art!) that she would benefit from a little help she told me that she was perfectly healthy. She had no idea what all those medicines in her pillboxes were for but she was sure she didn’t need them. In astonishment I tried to echo to her: “So, are you asserting that generally, as someone gets older, they tend to get stronger and healthier?” “Yes!” she asserted with a confident nod.

It was a different world and I just wanted OUT of it, but I felt, absent my husband, that I was responsible for her. I didn’t know how I could do it, but I did know that if I failed, I’d feel a hit I couldn’t manage along with everything else.


(to be continued)


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One widow's mother-in-law story, part 1

Before










After





Our stories are intertwined, hers and mine, in life, in love and in grief. We even share an old-lady name: her first name, Audrey, is my middle name. An only child, an Irish son, Gavin lived with her into his forties, and then I stole him, made his home mine, ate his cooking, bore his child. He was all she ever had, more than she wanted or expected, I think, until Short Stack came along, and you know what they say about grandkids.

She is a big part of my story of loss, my mother-in-law, because when Gavin died, we were all she had left. She had no family, he had no siblings, the only cousins a good ten-hour drive away and preoccupied with their own rapid changes.

When he died, this old woman and I were pointed straight at each other: two of the three most important people in his life, three females, two of us fighting in some sense over the third, the little one, the joy in our dark days.

Someone wise pointed this out to me early on in that first year and I didn’t believe it: Audrey wished it had been me who died, and I wished it had been her. To both of us, that would have been natural and just. She was, in secret, dreaming of stealing away with my little girl and making a new life together. That is crazy, I thought. No way. She loves me and I love her! She’s always been so good to me! And surely, she doesn’t think she can take care of a kid in diapers.

As the year wore on, I saw that this interpretation of our lives was not only true but inevitable. We each had the arrow of our entire life pointed at Gavin. When he fell from the picture those missiles hung tense in the air, wobbled for a moment, then found their straight aim. Of course, he had eyes only for our little girl, and responsibility for Audrey, aging rapidly. Despite my sacrifices, my sharing of everything I was and all I loved, I had to be a distant third to him as his light faded. Some stories, some favorites, write themselves.

But Audrey was not simple, though she wished to be, and Gavin, loyal and honest, was not the diligent one in our household.

My mother-in law-had dementia and when Gavin died, I was the only one she could turn to, had she wanted to turn. I was the knob on which her independence fell and bumped its head. I helped her more than she wanted, less than she needed, and I said it more than once -- heck, I probably said it more than once a week -- during the two years she outlived him: my mother-in-law was killing me.

Caregiving Gavin shattered my soul, into a thousand pieces it went down, and then caregiving his mother stomped the bits and left them in mush. Nonetheless I fulfilled the obligations I felt so heavy on me, full of rage at his refusal to deal with her, at their mutual stubborn independence and their calm ignorance, parenting another, one with no hope of progress or cure. There were two people in diapers in my life: one age 3 and on the way up, and one age 90 on the way down, and I’d already lost the one closest to my age, the one I leaned on. I felt acutely the irony of being the most competent in a household of a toddler and a senile elder, as I was grieving and trying to hold down a job and heaven forbid, find the light ahead. But hell, I was the one who could drive.

Alone, desperate, broke, shakily in charge, I would have been happy to kill my husband then, if it would have saved my daughter and I, but, as is the case in every story of dementia, it was too fucking late.


(continued...)


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An abundant stump

I’ve been thinking a lot about the new-ish age-ish interpretation of “abundance.” I see and hear "scarcity mentality" in every nook and person of my church while we work to raise our annual half-mil, and it repels me. But I'm not qualified or secure enough in my own "abundance" to get everyone all at once, POOF!, to adopt this major shift of mindset. Yes, changing minds is hard... but despite my desire to move forward, some segment of my brain rebels because anything so easy has got to be bullshit, right?

But a way to understand that "enough is a feast," and "I already have everything I need" popped up as clear and true when we had some work to do in the garden, and my 6-year-old got it right away.

I could have explained taking down an old tree my old way, by poor-mouthing: "We had to remove this tree. Yeah, kill it. It was like 50 years old. It had been dying for at least five years and no one wanted to take care of it because did you know it costs like more than a thousand dollars to take down a big tree like that? Hard decision. But the insurance claims would be a way lot more if it dropped on our neighbor's roof!" We can talk about costs, death, risks, and it's all negative, even as you watch the skilled man dangling a chainsaw 30 feet up, better than any circus act.

My daughter, though, loved the abundance as soon as she saw the result of his work: "Look! We got a new stump! We can have tea parties on it, jump off it, and plant things on it AND around it!" She even knew her fish would want to watch the man climbing the tree with his stirrups and harness. We moved the fishbowl onto the windowsill so he could see.

My girl apprehends a whole, beautiful world with a new toy around every corner or at the base of every lost garden asset.

And it clicked just a bit for me then. One click.


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Wordless Wednesday: Brutal pruning exposes 3 fresh robins

(Words tomorrow, I swear.)

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Kitty

It was an ordinary Sunday at church. (Not really, but let’s pretend it was.) Sunny and emotional. We had just sung “Morning Has Broken,” a favorite of mine from the summer camp I hated.

“Now is the time in our service when we share joys and sorrows, the significant events which have touched our lives.”

Up comes a young woman I know a little, with her mother. They have a joy to share, and a sorrow. The young woman has had several operations for a brain tumor, but has been stable a long time. She’s in college. The pair look down, then up, then seek each other’s hand. I brace myself.

“We have a wonderful cat who we love, I grew up with her, and she has had a good life. She’s nearly 16. Earlier this week she didn’t seem to be eating so we took her to the vet.

He said she has terminal cancer. We don’t know how long she has.

She’s been losing weight. She still purrs, and she still wants to go outside, but we can tell that she’s leaving us. It’s just very hard to watch her suffer.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself, this was exactly what it was like during the last months of Gavin’s life. I know the humanity of someone who is losing everything, cat or human, and I remember my husband still could purr, still would have chased birds if it had been his birthright. I’m grateful that even though the cat might understand what’s ahead, she isn’t asking them to say otherwise. I can see how this family is living with and sharing the dignity of not pretending there’s hope. I’m a little envious, I’m flashed back, and then I am just plain sad.


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We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming

I was supposed to talk about how, today, I planted some of my late husband’s ashes with a new elm tree. But it’s not my day. A young mom in my church community was killed in a pedestrian-car accident. The younger of her two sons had his first playdate with my daughter, who’s a little older, two years ago. He’s a ball of joy and talked about going to "Shortie's house" for weeks. Her husband gave me some important dating advice. They both did. We weren’t close friends, heck we tangled sometimes, but we were part of the same church family.

Holy crap. She organized the childcare for my late husband’s memorial service, which took place at church. That makes it hit home. I will never forget the warm honest hug she gave me a few weeks later when things slowed down. Almost four years ago.

No matter how many times I hear about a loss, now matter how much I tell others “what to say, what to do,” or how much I really do help widowed people and their friends and families, it doesn’t get any easier for me.

I think of all the other accident widows and widowers I know. Two people in my local support group lost spouses as pedestrians. If I take a step back, I can wonder at the shock when we all know that driving is the most dangerous thing we all do. But then, I am still transfixed and befuddled at how I faced my dying husband every day for two years without really seeing him. Some information just can’t soak in, it just isn’t right for it to be understood, we say we want it to make sense but it can’t. And I can’t take a step back from this one, yet.

The friend who told me, as I started to cry on the phone, mentioned briefly not wanting to tell her daughter what was wrong, why she had been crying reading her email. “Something really bad happened… uh…. with a meeting Mommy went to,” she joked.

No way, I would be honest and age-appropriate. My daughter is learning a little at a time and she’ll empathize, in some way, with a kid losing a parent. Crying, I went in to the bathroom. My girl was in the tub, doing some kind of mermaid rocking. A rivulet ran nearly to the doorway. Crying, grabbing at towels and throwing them on the floor, I told her the sad news.

It didn’t go the way one might expect. I should have known, we’d just talked about it the other day. I didn’t involve her in the ashes thing yesterday, I treated it very casually, because she’s been indifferent to death lately, uninterested in talking too much about it. Maybe it’s the same protective mechanism that we adults use every time we get in the car or smoke a cigarette.

My crying sounded, to her, like laughter. In trying to cry in front of her, an activity I used to avoid, I sounded like I was laughing. Same blubbering, wiping of eyes, only with my head down instead of back, I suppose.

No, no, I am crying, it only sounds like laughing.
But… I never seen you cry, Mommy.
Yes you have. You used to tell me to stop when you were little. It was very upsetting to you, so I used to hide my crying from you, but it’s healthy to cry and you’re old enough to see it now.
Oh yeah. Now I remembering. You are crying.

A minute later we were both laughing. The emotional extremes are so close together. She turned her back and started drawing on the back wall of the tub with a green soap crayon.

Why did she die? My daughter asks, from the tub. Do they have pictures? Did her body break in two pieces?
Honey, we don’t talk about things like that.
But what happened to her body?
The police might take pictures but they will only show them if there is a way to prevent someone else from having the same accident. We don’t look at that kind of pictures.
But I WANT TO SEE THE PICTURES!!!!!
(I know, it’s normal. She’s learning how the body works.)
Nobody can ever look at those pictures, I’m sorry if you want to, but we can’t do that.
(What happened to open, honest, age-appropriate?)

Death is always going to be a morbid business, even if we're open about it, even if it's part of the cycle of life. Not that I care about any of that today.

As she put on her pajamas, on her own, like a big girl without me, I cried for being a widow, for enjoying reaching out to people in pain, for being able to deal with it most of the time. But not now. All I could imagine was the two little boys and the man, bereaved, numb, receiving casserole upon casserole upon bouquet. And imagining them in the heat of summer, their feelings starting to come back. A bereaved Dad facing the questions from his little one, the same questions I've heard from mine.

There's no way around it. It just plain sucks a giant rotten egg every single time.


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The only one.

This is the only picture I have of my daughter from near the time that Gavin died. I think I took this the next day, or two days after we all left the hospice facility, broken, relieved, disoriented. June 2006. Of course I know the anniversary, but not exactly when the picture was taken because, of course, the digital camera calendar was a few weeks ahead, or behind, or somehow mixed up the entire time.

I looked for this picture for a long time. There are a few others from that year but none that were memorable, and this one, only because I’ll always associate the moment this shutter clicked with my desire to preserve one still moment in the blur of everything the days and weeks before and after he died. I was happy to forget the few months leading up, when a few pictures had been taken of him weak, lying on the futon in the living room, and a few bland shots of Christmas we sleepwalked through.

There are pictures of the trip she and I took right after the memorial service, and some from her first days in day care, later that summer. Most of that time was lived in a fog, some of it with others around, most of it alone, overheated, praying someone would take a nap, wishing I were paralyzed. These pictures tell some fuzzy story about loss and then short tales of change, trying to escape, new experiences. This one, I remembered, was the only one to simply record a moment of life, an actual mood or memory.

And I wanted, increasingly as I got stronger, to remember what I’d felt like, how we’d lived then. It was easy enough to share some narrative: one about the loss (horrible, inevitable, sad in the proscribed way), the second about how we were learning new things (positive, brave, led by a secure child). The stories were sociable and appropriate. I wouldn’t learn anything from seeing the pictures of those days.

Any picture of her at age two and a half would help validate me as a survivor. I craved that proof. I mean, she’s wonderful, but we were alone in hell: grieving, the diapers, no naps, the heat of summer, the fights to get into the carseat… did it really happen without any visual record? I needed it but didn’t have the energy, I suppose, to find it.

I browsed, almost aimlessly, wondering if I’d imagined taking this single candid, looking in vain.

About a year later I was doing much more sophisticated things with iPhoto and paying more attention – and in a generally more awake state. I spent days cataloging, editing, and titling the scans I had made from Gavin’s lifetime portfolio of more than 1,000 drawings and paintings – actually using the application as it’s intended, at last, I opened a tab in the menu. The year “2006” was unchecked – toggled “off.”

I checked the box. A minute later all of 2006 – only 20 or 30 pictures – came back. Had I turned it off on purpose?

And here she is – the only picture of my only child, my little girl, coming in from the sun one summer day. You can see meaning in it, or a slice of one day. With gratitude at finding it, I choose the latter.


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Wordless Wednesday: Some Kinda Cherry Abundance

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