Few Kinds of Wrong (18 page)

And it worked. Mom returned, just like he wanted. Returned to a changed family, to a lesser one than before. As I sit here in this family room, staring at my mother, I want to be able to go back to the small child in that living room and speak the truth to her. “She loves you,” I want to say. “She called and she would do anything for you, even make herself unhappy.”

Mom does not know the truth and I can't find the words to tell it to her. I don't even know where to look for the words. Only three of them keep going around in my head, a continuous loop of “Maybe she forgot.”

Uncle Chuck opens the door to the family room, bringing me back here to this new, awful chapter in my life. Mom and I both wipe our faces again, ensuring no remnants of tears.

Chuck says, “The doctor is in with Mrs. Collins. He wants to talk to all the family.”

We walk towards Nan's room. Mom places her hand on my shoulder.

I let it stay there.

In Nan's room, the doctor holds a chart in his hand. Nan is moaning again but less so.

“Your mother has had a stroke,” he says to Aunt Henrietta. “A very severe stroke on the left side of her brain. Her speech has been quite severely affected as has her right side, which is paralysed.” Nan's moaning gets louder.

“My God.” Henrietta puts her hand to her chest. “But I thought people with strokes don't have permanent damage anymore,” Henrietta says. “There's medicine for that.”

Nan's moaning gets louder again.

“Let's go to the family room,” he says and nods to the nurse who is standing next to him.

We walk to the family room again. My stomach tightens as we walk through the door.

The doctor motions to the seats and puts on the practiced sad doctor look. I wonder if they teach it in medical school. He shakes his head and I know this is not good. I drop to the overstuffed vinyl seat, making the air push out of the chair. The chair sounds like it grunted.

“There are medications for your mother's kind of stroke.” He looks to Mom now and then to Bryce. I can tell that he's not sure who in the room is this mother's child. “But there are a couple of reasons we won't use them. Because she was sleeping when she had the stroke, it took a while for staff at the nursing home to notice her symptoms. Too much time has elapsed for the treatments we have to work. Also, your mother has an advance healthcare directive, a living will, and it is very clear that we are to use no life-saving measures at all in the case of a catastrophic illness. No medications. No anything.” “But you have to,” Henrietta shouts. “You can't just let her die. I never agreed with that living will thing. She wasn't of sound mind when she made that damned thing. That was you crowd came up with that.” She points at Mom, wagging her finger.

“It was what your mother wanted, Henrietta. She was always clear about that. And she signed that long before she got sick. She signed that not long after your father died. She didn't want to live without him.”

“Well, she wasn't in her right mind then. Jack agreed with me. It was you and Jennifer that got that signed.”

I remember sitting around the kitchen table with Aunt Henrietta while Nan answered questions from a checklist Nan's lawyer had given Mom.

I want to have life-sustaining treatment if I am terminally
ill or injured. Yes or no; I want to have life-sustaining treatment
if I am permanently unconscious. Yes or no.
It all seemed so impotent there at the table, Nan in good health, the idea seeming sad but not plausible. Aunt Henrietta had argued against the whole living will idea, reminding us that God should and would decide when Nan should go.

“I think that's the point of the living will,” I had pointed out. “It just says that no one except God will intervene.”

“God made the machines and medicines that help keep people alive,” she said, but Nan cut into the conversation.

“This is about me. And I'm telling you right now that I don't want one second on one of those breathing machines like Hope was hooked up to when she had her car accident,” referring once again to her favourite soap opera. “I don't want none of them shockers to the chest or nothing. I wants the Lord to take me if He wants me, and God help the man that gets between me and my garden.”

And that had been the end of that. Nan answered all her living will questions with a resounding no and signed everything, witnessed by the legal secretary in the office of Nan's lawyer.

“So what will happen to Nan?” I ask.

The doctor turns to me and says, “That's what we need to discuss. She appears to be unable to swallow.”

No one speaks.

“That means she cannot eat or drink, but her wishes are not to have a feeding tube so—”

“What?” Henrietta says loudly.

“Without the feeding tube she will die.”

His words hang there, loud despite how softly he spoke them. “I don't think you can let her starve to death,” Henrietta says, standing up then flailing her arms.

“She won't starve,” Bryce says. “Thirst first.”

The doctor nods and Aunt Henrietta starts to weep.

“Everything we know tells us that she will not suffer if we don't provide this for her. If we do provide IV fluids and then a feeding tube, she could survive indefinitely. But we have to remember her Alzheimer's. Her life would be,” he pauses, “very difficult.”

“Nothing she's not used to,” Henrietta says too loudly for the size of the small room.

“She's had a stroke,” the doctor says, looking directly at Henrietta now.

“Yes,” Henrietta says. “I know.”

“That doesn't take away her memory loss. She will regularly and routinely forget that she has had a stroke. She will not understand why she cannot talk or move or swallow or why the feeding tube and IV are attached to her. She will insist on trying to remove them from her body and will have to be constantly restrained to prevent this.”

The horror of this strikes me hard, the idea of Nan being startled by her own imprisonment both inside and outside her body. I can't picture anything but the moaning person in room 2 who looks more terrified than I have ever seen.

“But if you give her the stroke medicine she won't be paralysed,” Henrietta says.

“I suspect there would still be damage, based on the severity of the stroke and the length of time now. But this is not an issue. The will is clear.”

I want to have food and water provided through a tube or
an IV if I am terminally ill or injured. Yes or no.
She checked no. Her decision was made.

“How can you let this happen? How can you not fight for her to live?” Henrietta screeches at us.

“How can you not let this happen?” I ask. “You know what she wanted.”

More than anything, I want what Henrietta fears.

The doctor puts his hand out in a calming gesture. “I can only go by this legal document. I can only do what it says.”

“No, this is barbaric. Well, we'll take you to court,” Henrietta says, standing up. “Come on, Chuck, let's go. We're going to get a lawyer.” She stares at Chuck, waiting for him to go with her.

Uncle Chuck stays in his chair, his eyes focussed on the floor.

“Chuck, I said, come on.”

He looks to her slowly, this man who has been run by her their whole married life.

“No,” he says, his voice firm.

“No. What do you mean, no? Come on, I want to go.”

“No. We should let the doctor do what your mother wanted.”

“My mother didn't want to die of thirst surrounded by doctors and nurses who should help her.”

I open my mouth but Mom lays her hand on my arm. I look at her, see her warning to stay out of it.

Chuck looks up at Henrietta. “Your mother didn't want to be paralysed and not able to talk and not able to remember who she is or why she's like that.”

I watch Henrietta struggle with herself. I know it will be hard to give into Chuck, but I also realize the power of the word “no” coming from someone after a lifetime of “yes.”

“Doctor, is there anything else we need to know?” Henrietta pulls her cardigan tighter around her broad body.

“Do you have any questions?” he says softly.

“Will we know when it's close?” I speak up, my voice sounding foreign to me. “So we can make sure she's not alone when—” The lump in my throat stops my words.

“We'll see signs of dehydration but we won't know for sure. Perhaps it's best to have someone here for the next few days if you'd like someone to be with her when she passes.”

When she passes.
Such a nice, melodic line to refer to the end of a person's life, to the end of a person who created and raised two children, who baked wonderful bread, collected stamps, gardened with a passion, bluffed in Scrabble with a wry smile, and lived through seventy-nine trips around the sun.

Henrietta starts to sob on Chuck's shoulder and Mom rubs her sister-in-law's back. Sadness and resignation fill the room.

“We'll move her to a room as soon as we can. We can provide medication to calm her down and ease her …” He pauses again. “Discomfort. Although we don't feel she has any discomfort. At least not physically.”

“Please,” Mom says. “As much as it takes. Don't let her suffer.”

We sit in the family room for minutes, crying and sitting and talking. This reality starts to wash over us and we struggle in different ways. Henrietta clings to Chuck. Mom tends to me, seeming to want to make sure that I'm okay. Bryce tends to Mom but I can tell he wants to make sure that I'm okay. I'm not ready for it yet and don't acknowledge his presence. He leaves and in a moment returns. In the doorway, behind him, I see Jamie, and just like the last time I saw him in the doorway of a family room, I go to him, relieved he is there.“ Bryce told me,” he whispers. “I'm so sorry.”

“Me too,” I say, not referring only to what has happened to Nan.

Later that morning, with less than two hours of sleep, I turn into the almost empty parking lot of the garage. There is one familiar car there, besides all the cars that belong to customers.

I unlock the garage door and walk through, turning on lights as I go. In the office Bryce is sitting at the desk, but stands up when he sees me. He passes me before I can make it to the office door. He says nothing as he walks past.

“I need to speak to you.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” he says, standing still, his back to me.

“You don't have to say anything. I said I have something to say to you.” I start to walk. This is why I came here before I go home to sleep. I need to get this said.

He follows me into the office and I close the door even though there is no one else around. He picks a piece of lint off his pants.

“Were you and Mom together when Dad was alive?” I stare straight into his eyes, looking for his reaction as much as his words.

He closes his eyes and I clench my fist. In my mind the answer is as clear as if he said “Yes.”

“You said I didn't have to talk.” Eyes still closed.

“I lied.”

“Is this what this is all about?” He opens his eyes and the blue pierces me. “Why didn't you just ask that in the first place?”

Because I was afraid to, I don't say. I shrug.

“No, of course not. Your mother and I were never together when your father was alive. Never.”

I want to ask how but can't. I want to know, but my desire not to know is stronger. My need not to picture them together. A tender touch, a gentle kiss, him touching her, him taking off her clothes, caressing her breasts, him inside her. It makes me sick. And yet I want to know.

“The first time we kissed, we pulled away and didn't speak to each other for eight days. We both felt so guilty. I couldn't sleep or eat. I felt sick all the time. Like your father's ghost would come back and haunt me. Like I was betraying him. And finally I realized that I also couldn't eat or sleep because she was all I thought about. When she laughed, it made everything good. And I told her. And she felt the same. The not eating or sleeping, the guilt, the knowing that being around me made her happy. But mostly she was afraid of what you'd think. I told her that you'd want her to be happy. I guess I was wrong.”

Happy. My mother sought it and I took it away. Even when I hadn't known about it, I had been used by Dad to rob it from her. At least the potential of it. Every moment of her life that was not happy had been, in some way, as a result of me. The man I adored and trusted had taken it away from her too. Just as surely as I had with her second chance at happiness.

I sit down, my back to him, and look out the window to the garage. “There are some things that are hard to accept. Almost impossible. But I'm doing the best I can. I'm here, aren't I? And so are you.”
And I haven't beaten you over the head with anything yet, I don't say.

“Humph.” I feel his hand on my shoulder just before I hear the door open. As I watch him walk across the floor to a car up on a ramp, I wish I could talk to him about how I'm feeling. He was always the person I'd tell if someone hurt me, and he would make me feel better. I mourn the loss of that person to turn to and wonder how much longer I can work here, with all these bad feelings all around me. For a second I feel a strong urge to visit Nan in the home, at least until I remember what it is I'm trying to forget.

14

T
HE AFTERNOON OF
the day Mom left, I went to the garage after school to find that Dad was not there. Bryce told me Dad had to attend to some business, which I found odd as Dad rarely left the garage for any business. Others came to him, and Bryce did any external business that needed to be done. But Bryce had a couple of windshield wipers for me to replace so I got down to work.

This was one of the only times I was at the garage without Dad. I wasn't there very long before I realized I didn't like it so much without him there, without seeing him somewhere, without a smile from him or just the attention he gave me by answering a question or even signing my work order. Without Dad, it seemed, the garage ceased to be a magical place.