That Went Well: Adventures in Caring for My Sister (9 page)

The only person without something to do or someone to talk to was Irene. This did not faze her for a moment.

The next thing I heard was the crowd being told to be quiet. Maybe the bishop was going to speak. I turned to see Irene standing on the stage with the bishop, who was announcing that it was Irene Harris’s birthday, and now everyone joined in to sing to her. She was simply beaming.

When she climbed down from the stage amidst all the friendly and loving applause, I finally reached her. “Irene, look at me. When is your birthday?”

“March twenty-fourth,” she replied.

“Is this March twenty-fourth? Shame on you!”

She was looking at the food table. “I could have ice cream now?”

I just had to let it go, with all those people around us.

But later, I did have a T-shirt in her size printed up. It said in large letters on the back, “My birthday is March 24th.”

She wore it to parties until she figured out what it said.

Over the years, she has been sung to in restaurants probably once a month. She finds a way to alert the waiter in the split sec
ond when we are not paying attention. We are totally surprised when the waiter brings a cupcake with a candle in it. If all her fake birthdays were real, she’d now be about five hundred years old.

Meanwhile, our Bammy was dying. Her cancer had spread. Mom, weak as she was, refused to put Bam in a nursing home and changed the soiled sheets on her bed twice a day. Finally Bam was hospitalized, and Mom and I sat at her bedside while she wrote us notes telling us to go home and get on with our lives. She had a tube in her throat and could not talk after her latest surgery.

A few weeks earlier, I had said to her, “Bammy, when I get to this point in my life I will not be able to take the suffering you’re going through. I will find a way to do myself in.”

She smiled at me and said, “Wait till you get here. You’ll see you’ll cling to life with all the strength you have. Now get me the newspaper and let’s look at the brides and see which is the ugliest.”

The days in the hospital wore on. Although she was mostly sound asleep, Bammy indeed was clinging. Mother sighed and said, “You have no idea how long it takes to get dead.”

One morning while she was awake, Bammy wrote a note saying, “You be sure I’m dead.” Mother read it, patted Bam’s hand, smiled, and turned to tell me, “When she was a little girl, Bam heard a story about grave robbers digging up a grave. When they opened the wooden coffin, there were scratch marks on the lid and splinters under the fingernails of the dead man. He had woken up in his coffin and clawed it.” She looked at Bam and said, “It’s haunted you all your life, hasn’t it, Bam?” She nodded.

Irene Armstrong Brainerd, whom I had tried to call Grammy but it came out Bammy when I was a baby, finally closed her eyes
for the last time. She had built the little house on J Street as a widow, and then, being too lonely, begged my parents to buy it from her and let her live with them. She had been housekeeper, cook, and loving grandmother to Irene and me all our lives. No matter how you are expecting it, it’s still such a loss when you have been loved the way Bam loved us. Sometimes people tell me they marvel at how kind and loving I am to my sister. The old saying “As you’re done to, you will do” seems right on to me. When that kind of love is passed to you in a family, you pass it on. The nurturing, the caring, the kindnesses come naturally to you, because that’s all you’ve known.

Irene had come to see Bammy in the hospital several times, and when it was over and we were planning the funeral, we remembered that Bam had once dreamed that at her funeral we danced in the aisles to “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” It had made her so mad that she wouldn’t speak to us for hours.

When we began humming it and then singing it, Irene brightened. “We could play that for Bammy?”

No. We couldn’t.

We weren’t into being haunted.

Eviction, Again

Irene got along fine in her apartment for a few years with Debbie, but when Debbie finished her degree, she had to move on. We hired another companion, who never cleaned the apartment, so we let her go. Then we hired another, who gave Irene her meals on the floor. When I dropped in one evening and saw this scene,
I told this companion that Irene was not a dog, and we let that companion go, too.

Finally we found the woman of our dreams: a single, middle-aged woman named Dana, who’d just returned from a Mormon mission to China. She loved Irene from the moment she met her. She had the main ingredients we needed: kindness and compassion and good cheer.

It did not go perfectly, but Dana learned quickly. For example, she immediately changed the décor of Irene’s apartment: no glass on picture frames, and pretty baskets on the walls, since they don’t injure people or property when being hurled about the room.

Irene went to Columbus Community Center during the day and took the bus home to Dana, who had nutritious meals waiting for her. The meals were even served at a table! Dana and Irene had beauty rituals together: coloring each other’s hair or doing manicures and pedicures. They were real buddies. Despite Irene’s periodic tantrums, which alarmed the neighbors, Dana and Irene managed for three years at that place, until the day they were evicted. And it turned out to be my fault.

Irene was already on probation with the manager of the apartment because of her tantrums. The neighbors could hear her through the walls, and the manager had called to warn us that one more infraction and it would be over. One day Dana called me to tell me Irene was having a real doozie. I could hear it in the background. Furniture was being turned over, the screaming was nonstop, and I heard her elbow go through a window, one of her favorite drama tricks.

Well, I had had it. “I’m on my way, Dana,” I said.

Forget behavior mod techniques. Forget ignoring bad behavior. I had had it. This was going to change Irene’s behavior once and for all.

When I got there, I barged in and launched into my routine. I was going to outdramatize her. Grabbing a newspaper and rolling it up and screaming at the top of my lungs, I pushed her down on her bed and whapped my open hand with the paper, yelling that I’d be damned if I’d stand for any more of this. A rolled-up newspaper makes an impressive noise.

Looking back on it, I wonder why I chose to forget the behavior lessons of Glenn Latham’s about this. “If you yourself resort to yelling and hitting, you have lost the ball game. You are dead meat. The kid has won.”

But would I recall this? No. After a minute or two of screaming and hitting my hand, the headboard, and the bed, I was getting hoarse, and it was a real effort to keep up the drama. I was using all my skills as an actress. I wasn’t proud of my performance: yelling at your mentally disabled sibling is not ever one’s finest hour, but there isn’t a sibling in the world who hasn’t been tempted. And she had driven me to this.

Was I noticing—no, it couldn’t be—a slight smile on her face?

And then I realized: she had won again. All she wanted was more attention. Negative or positive didn’t matter. Look what she had achieved: I had driven all the way out to her apartment, and she had my full attention. She was enjoying every minute of it.

To top it all off, the neighbors called the main office, saying they were trying to be kind and withstand Irene’s tantrums, but now her
sister
was having them. They requested we all be re
moved permanently from the property. Eviction is such an ugly word, don’t you think?

There used to be a sign on the bulletin board at the Texas offices of the National Association for Retarded Citizens. It said, “Starting over builds character.” I copied it and put it on my desk, too.

Okay, I said, back to the drawing board. Irene needs a free-standing house, with fairly thick walls, so neighbors won’t hear her screams when she decides to have a tantrum. I found a cute little brick bungalow for rent, and we tried that. Of course this would be the answer for Irene’s life.

Once they realized that this grown woman wanted them to talk to her dolls, the neighbor children taunted her and made fun of her. On top of all that, Dana had to put a chain and padlock on the fridge, because she had heard Irene rooting around in it at three in the morning and found her eating frozen, raw chicken.

But Irene’s situation had to wait. Mom and Dad, their health declining at an alarming rate, sold their lovely home and bought a condominium in a building right next to the one they had started their marriage in, sixty years before.

Their little apartment was perfect for them. The bay window overlooked the elegant fountain on the grounds near the Salt Lake LDS temple. Their balcony was lined with window boxes, so they could still plant tulip bulbs in anticipation of another spring. Meanwhile, Dad’s lungs were giving out. I would visit him and pound his back for him. With people with emphysema, you have to pound their backs with the outer edges of your hands, whack, whack, whack, for a long time, to loosen the phlegm that builds up in their lungs.

“I have this idea about Irene,” he said, his voice sounding bat
tered through my pummeling. “I know it may be impossible, but in the long run I envision her living in a neighborhood in her own place, being able to take the bus downtown, go shopping, take in a movie, and live like a normal, retired lady.”

“Dad, that’s almost what we have now. The neighbors are not as kind as we’d like, but eventually I can find a neighborhood that would work for her. Everything’s going to be all right, really.”

“Righto, Albert,” he said.

I stopped whacking him. He lay back on his bed and said, “Did you hear Paul Harvey’s broadcast today?” I shook my head no. And then he told me Harvey’s ending story for the day.

Man goes into supermarket with a two-year-old boy, puts the boy in the grocery cart, and begins his shopping. The boy begins to yell and throw things out of the cart onto the floor. “Listen, Albert,” the man says, “this will be over very soon. We just have to get a few items and then we’ll be out of here, okay?” The boy continues misbehaving, throwing cereal boxes out of the shelves onto the floor, grabbing cans and throwing them, yelling all the while. Again the man says, “Everything’s going to be all right, Albert.” Finally they get up to checkout, and the little boy hurls all the mints and chewing gum to the floor. “Albert, we’re going to be out of here and in the nice car in just a few minutes now! You can make it! Everything is going to be all right, Albert.”

Finally a woman behind him says, “Sir, we’ve all been watching you with this boy. Your patience is just amazing. Little Albert is so lucky to have you for a father!”

The man looks startled and replies, “But, madam.
I
am Albert.”

Dad and I cracked up. His laughter started a coughing fit that took a long time to calm down. I could see he was really in pain, and so very tired.

When he could talk again, he said, “Listen, honey. I may need you to do me a favor.” He pulled out the drawer near his lounge chair. It was filled with vials of Mom’s morphine. “I am going to have to get myself out of here soon. I can’t stand struggling for breath every minute. I really want it to be over. I have these things at the ready, and may inject myself this week. But the damnedest thing is, I’m afraid I’ll shake so hard that I’ll botch the job. I want to be able to call you and have you come finish it.”

“Oh, Dad, I know how much you need to get out. But that’s murder! I would be put in prison for it.”

“They’d never have to know.”

“Dad.
I’d
know.” I knew I could never do it, and I knew for sure then that we need to have a legal way to get out of this world ourselves if we’re in that much pain and it’s the end of our life anyway.

He just sighed and looked at me, as if I had failed him. “You’ll whack me every day to keep me alive, when all I really want is for you to whack me once and for all?”

“But you don’t want to leave Mom.”

“Of course I don’t. But you can’t image how strong she really is, even in her condition. I think Bam and I have done her a disservice over the years. Since I’ve been so darned sick, she has climbed on a step stool and hammered nails in the wall to hang a picture. She gets her breakfast and mine every morning. She seems stronger every day!”

“Well, okay then. Now Dad, you do me a favor. If there is any
way of your contacting me from the other side after you die, will you please do it?”

“Okay. I frankly think everything just goes black, but if I’m wrong and you’re right, I’ll do what I can.”

“I just have this sense that there is something over on the other side, and that you will hang around me, at least for a while. So promise me.”

He smiled. “I promise.”

“Sorry about not being able to whack you for good.”

“Me too.”

But just two days later, on a Sunday, Mom called. “Terrell, come quick. I think your father’s dying. I called 911 and they’re on their way up, but meet us at the hospital, will you?”

Sure enough, Dad died two hours later in the emergency room. Irene came there, held Dad’s hand, and told him she loved him. She was calm and hugged Mom, and then said she wanted to go back to her place. She was totally grown-up about it all. Go figure!

When I took Mom back to their apartment, I went straight to the drawer he had shown me. All the morphine was still in place. Nature, God bless her, had just finally taken her course.

Dad was seventy-eight, and a class act to the very end. I admired him more than anyone in my life. I think he could have been a fine novelist, but he chose instead to use his talent in advertising, which was a lot more financially secure, so that he could be sure Irene would be cared for after he died. I will always miss getting his phone call on June 25th. “Only six more months to go! Start your shopping list!”

Irene gave the closing prayer at his funeral. “Heavenly Father, please say hi to my daddy in heaven. He might play bridge with Bammy! Name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”

Hell in Hawaii