The Feel of Steel (17 page)

Our Mother's Flood 1

O
ur mother is eighty-one. She has a husband, a son and five daughters. In her youth she was modest, even shy – a sportswoman, small, slender and graceful, with beautiful legs and quick physical reflexes. I have to remind myself of this, because she's in a nursing home now, with shattered bones, chipped teeth, incontinence, and the alternating rage, euphoria and stupor of Alzheimer's disease.

Each of us has a different version, but we all agree, looking back, that it came on slowly, and that she was depressed for a long time.

I am ashamed to recall how harshly we witnessed the years of her decline. When she told the same anecdote over and over, in exactly the same words and with the same intonation, we would roll our eyes at each other behind her back, or joke about it on the phone afterwards. We were impatient with her growing fear of
the physical world, her refusal to drive, her stubborn slowness, her resentful timidity, her inability to take pleasure in anything.

We thought it was just Mum growing old. We exchanged our brisk theories: she should get more exercise; she should drink less wine and eat more raw vegetables; she should see a psychiatrist; she should have more of a social life.

Then, wandering round the dark apartment one New Year's Eve, she fell. Dad woke and found her on the floor near the front door. Her collar-bone was broken. She needed surgery. The morning after the operation, the Orthopedic ward called: ‘Come at once – we can't handle her.' Our mother, the most law-abiding person in the world, making trouble?

Dad and I rushed to her bedside, expecting to see a little old lady sitting up neatly in a nightie and a sling. Instead we found a raging virago, fully dressed, who took one look at us, muttered an insult, and stamped out the door. We ran after her. I corralled her in a visitors' lounge. There she stood, oblivious of her broken bone, blazing, exhilarated, in florid hallucination. She pointed in wonder at the swarms of insects that filled the room. She raved about a terrible flood which had washed people off their feet in the city and carried them away down the gutters. She cried out that she had seen a hundred Spanish galleons under full sail go sweeping down St Kilda Road.

Dad panicked. ‘What the hell are you talking about? There are no insects! There's been no flood!'

Her face went blank and her body jerked back, as if she'd been slapped. Some old hippie instinct whispered to me:
Don't fight it
.
Go with it.
Hiding my alarm, I said, ‘A flood! Tell us more about the flood!'

She relaxed, and let us lead her back to bed, discoursing all the while on strange nautical themes. She was on a ship. The captain had a moustache and smoked a pipe. ‘When did
you
come on board?' she asked Dad. ‘What's your cabin number?'

Shocked and moved, I sat with her that day and the next, while the anaesthetic left her system. As she dozed and raved, I realised that for the first time in my adult life I was thrilled by my mother's company. I could not get enough of her poetic flights of fancy. I held her hand, I stroked her hair, and she let me, this woman who had always been so reserved about touching or expressing affection. I opened my ironic intellectual's mouth and out of it came the incredible words ‘I love you, Mum.' Sometimes I laughed at things she said, and so did she, gently, looking me right in the eye. Sometimes I would find tears running down my face. They were tears of joy, at the release of tenderness.

Once the violence of the anaesthetic had worn off, she went home to a sort of normality, but the break had damaged nerves in her right arm, and she could no longer knit, write or cook.

Over the next year, in fits and starts, the illness crept over her. She and our father had always travelled a lot – to Europe, to Western Australia, to the Mallee to look at the crops, or just to the RACV Country Club at Healesville for a weekend. But now her fragile equilibrium could not tolerate even a short trip away from home. In a hotel she would sink into sullen lethargy, or wander the passageways after midnight, or grow obsessed with looming disasters. She would come home disoriented. She lost her physical confidence. Instead of walking she shuffled.

Some of us floated the dreaded word Alzheimer's. Others, furious, rejected it outright. We began to squabble among ourselves. We didn't know where to go for help. Her female GP struck some of us as passive and uninterested, but our parents liked her and resisted pressure to change. We took Mum to a psycho-gerontologist who tested her short-term memory and found it almost obliterated. She was angry with him for confusing her with his silly questions.

She tried busily to invent little stories and excuses to cover her growing inability to cope with ordinary life. ‘My husband usually does that!' she'd say brightly, when asked to fill out a form or write down her address, and someone would do it for her, at her dictation. We began to suspect that she could no longer read.

She fell again, broke a hip, needed to have it pinned. This time the Orthopedic ward could not handle her mania at all. It was plain that she would not be coming home: that her care was too much for our father.
Desperately the family searched for a nursing home. Our father inclined, in his distress, towards a hollowly luxurious up-market establishment in a remote suburb. We urged something further down the scale, more accessible, where even if there were smells she would have warm attention. Again we quarrelled.

At last we found a nursing home. Mum went straight there from the Orthopedic ward. We called the Alzheimer's Association. They sent out a kind man who sat with us in Dad's living room, listened patiently and spoke carefully, managing to ignore the fact that the air in the room was zinging with tension.

When he'd gone we started to draw up a roster. ‘She must have a daily visitor!' trumpeted one of us.

Another, dull with misery, suggested that she wouldn't know whether we had come in or not: ‘You're only doing this roster out of guilt. It's got nothing to do with what
she
needs.'

‘I go in there evvvvvv'ry single day,' said our father, over and over, till someone exploded: ‘You're her
husband
! It's your
duty
! We've got
children
! We've got
jobs
!' People wept and raged. Each of us suffered a different version of the general horror, guilt and grief.

The whole dynamic of the family changed. With Mum no longer a presence, we split into shifting factions. Our relations with Dad, always complex, became strained and broke – then, as we organised ourselves round our adversity, they grew richer and more affectionate than they'd ever been.

The ability to visit Mum flickered unpredictably
through our ranks. People checked up on each other. Resentments boiled over. Sometimes I'd go every other day; then for a fortnight, a month, I'd think of her hardly at all, and only distantly, as if she were already dead.

I still can't bear to picture her in her single room, with her hands clasped and her swollen feet placed side by side on the carpet, doing nothing, just sitting there staring dully into space. I'm afraid that this vision of her will drive me crazy. It paralyses me, until the guilt gets strong enough to force me back to her.

She has got used to being in the home, though she has no idea where she is, or why. Many of the carers are heroic in their gentleness and patience – with her, and with us. Others are offhand, even hostile. Possessions vanish. The ludicrous staffing levels leave her, at times, neglected in the physical squalor of her condition.

Her moods are wildly erratic. Sometimes she knows me at once, smiles, and calls me by my childhood nickname. If Dad walks in, she'll switch gear, sob with relief, and pour out rambling paranoid tales about cleaners who leave bombs rolled up in the fresh towels, or men with guns who have already shot and killed her. Next time she's one of two spoilt little princesses, or a station-owner's wife who has to cook for the shearers. For a whole week it was a matter of brooding urgency to get a train ticket to Geelong.

There are days when she grumbles so relentlessly that the drone of her voice gets into my bones and drains the joy out of everything. Then it's all I can do not to smother her with a pillow, or tip her out of the wheelchair into the lake and hold her head under with my boot. She is as unaware of my mutinous fury as if she were an empress on a throne. Her children confess these murder fantasies to each other, and double up in silent spasms of relief: without laughter it would all be completely unbearable.

With Dad she is often sulky and beetle-browed, taking out on him the suppressed anger of a long marriage. Faithfully he bears it. But then one day he'll bring her a salmon sandwich he's made at home, and she'll eat it with gusto and proclaim it ‘the most delicious thing I've ever tasted'. We enter the nursing home with trepidation, never knowing what we're in for, whether we've got the emotional stamina to handle it one more time. Like her, we crash up and down, elated, disgusted, despairing, but somehow struggling on.

And there's something miraculous about the stories she comes out with – their emotional colour, their dreamlike ingenuity. They are a game we can play. Imagination is the only hope we've got for communication with her.