They Left Us Everything (2 page)

My brain is spinning. I’m still thinking about her ophthalmologist.

“And I want you to help me with this!” she says. “Remember when I told you about the festival?”

“What festival?”

“Stratford! It’s pathetic—they’re losing money! They need to mount an advertising campaign!” She bangs the kitchen table with her fist and grabs a pen. “So I’ve come up with a new word …
Shakesperience
… Isn’t that the greatest word?”

Her old advertising copywriting experience has come flooding back and she’s written a letter to the director, laying out a marketing plan to help him out. I’m reading her draft, scribbled on the back of an old grocery list, imagining some young assistant rolling her eyes before dumping it in the trash.

“I sent this weeks ago!” Mum says. “Why hasn’t he written me back?”

“People don’t know what to do with handwritten letters anymore, Mum. They only use emails.”

She purses her lips, shakes her head, and tosses her draft back into her pile of debris. I get the feeling she’s shocked by her own lack of power to effect change.

“He’s just rude, if you ask me! No manners whatsoever.” She adjusts her oxygen tube and gasps for breath. “
Damn
this thing!”

Mum’s mind can access facts faster than Google—her memory is prodigious. She remembers more about current events than most people and can rattle off an astonishing array of historical data. But politics has always interested her most; her family in Virginia was steeped in it. Her ancestors include Edmund Randolph, who was the first Attorney General of the United States, and Bartholomew Dandridge, who was George Washington’s brother-in-law. She has ancestors buried at Thomas Jefferson’s home, which entitles her to access the cemetery, so she’s delighted she doesn’t have to pay admission when she visits Monticello.

When Mum was growing up, Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., were populated by many of her relatives in positions of power. Two of her cousins later became U.S. ambassadors and her oldest brother was director of Germany’s industrial reconstruction after World War II for the Marshall Plan—which he helped draft. He also served on various councils advising several presidents, from Truman to Kennedy, so Mum felt privy to the backroom dealings of the world stage. She was used to getting the inside scoop.

I don’t think Mum realized how unusual this was. She simply believed that if you wanted to change something— anything at all—you just had to make one phone call. To the person in charge. Who was probably a cousin. Which is why her unanswered letter to the director of the Stratford Festival in rural Ontario has, quite literally, taken her breath away.

Mum has been on oxygen for years now, ever since she quit smoking (and playing tennis) at the age of eighty-five. Thin, clear plastic tubing—miles of it—snakes through this four-thousand-square-foot house, tethering Mum to a loud, belching, institutional-sized machine located in the upstairs hall outside the guest bedroom. The tubing trails after her wherever she goes like a long, loopy extension cord. Sometimes she forgets she’s tethered and walks one too many times through the front hall, into the dining room, through the pantry, back into the front hall, past the living room, and into the dining room again, encircling herself in an impossible tangle.

“Damn this thing!”

If she sits on the chairlift to ride up the main staircase, she hauls the tubing into a coiled lasso and slings it over the armrest, as if she’s out to strangle a bull.

“Damn it to hell!”

The dials on the machine are now cranked up to what the doctors say is their highest level of oxygen output, but when this becomes inadequate, Mum plans to get two machines. “Who says I can’t? That’s ridiculous!”

You’d think her predicament would make anyone swear off smoking for life, but all I want when I’m with her is a cigarette.

After Dad died, Mum felt lonely and began talking about moving into a retirement home. She complained that most of her good friends were dead. The rest had moved into swank retirement homes nearby, but Mum refused to join them in
what she called “those hoity-toity places named after dead politicians.” She didn’t understand how anyone could arrive at old age and still be a snob. “Didn’t they learn anything in all those years?” She wanted interesting people around her, from all walks of life. Eventually she found a place more to her liking—“more down to earth.” It was miles away.

My brothers and I tried to talk her out of moving. We couldn’t imagine how she could shrink her expansive nature into one room. But when she insisted, and a two-room suite became available, my brother Victor put down the hefty deposit.

The week before Mum was due to go, I’d been home with her, sitting in the TV room. She was wedged into the upholstered recliner with her feet up. To ease the circulation in her swollen ankles she’d cut open the elastic tops of her nylon knee-highs, and they drooped like cuffs over her shoes. I pointed to a picture on the wall. It was a hunting scene of hounds chasing a fox to ground.

“You’ve always loved that picture,” I said to Mum. “Why don’t you plan to take it with you?”

Her face turned purple. “How dare you!” she shouted.

“What?”

“How dare you tell me what I can and cannot take!”

“Mum!” I said. “I was only making a suggestion.”

She pounded her fist on the armrest. “You all can hardly wait to get me out of here! You all want to send me away so you can sell this house!”

I was astonished. “That’s not true! We’ve begged you not to go.”

“How dare you!” she screamed again.

A strange voice thundered up from my soles, the first time I ever remember raising my voice to my mother. “How dare
YOU!” I roared. “How dare you suggest that we want you out. This was your idea! We had nothing to do with it! We’ve done nothing but bend over backwards … for
years
… to do what you ask … to try and make you happy … and all you do is turn on us!” Then I fled from the room in tears. I ran into the living room, sank into the sofa, and wept and wept—loud, heaving sobs. “I miss Dad! I miss Dad!”

Dad’s slow fade had consumed most of my forties and fifties, but I had more patience then, and sweetness. Now I was convinced that Mum would make it into the
Guinness World Records
as the Longest Living Mother. Friends of mine who’d lost their mothers early kept telling me,
“You don’t know how lucky you are … I’d give anything to have my mother back for even one minute!”
But I just couldn’t relate. All I wanted was my freedom. I looked into the future and thought,
Will I ever get my life back?

Almost an hour went by before Mum shuffled into the room, trailing her oxygen tubing. She looked defeated, standing there unsteadily in the middle of the hall. She waited until my sobs subsided.

“Do you think we should talk to somebody?” she asked.

I looked at Mum, surprised. “Talk to somebody? You mean, like a therapist?”

“Uh-huh.”

I stared out the window, wondering where we’d ever begin. I could spend a lifetime on a therapist’s couch trying to untangle my complicated relationship with Mum.

“I think it’s too late.”

“I think so, too,” she said, and sounded relieved.

I knew Mum was facing a cruel choice for an extrovert— to either live in isolation here, “The Most Beautiful Spot
on Earth,” or be stimulated by crowds of people in a sterile environment—but she’d made her decision: she wanted to give the retirement home a try. So a week later I called in the troops and we all drove her over there for a two-week test run.

I was proud that we’d come together, presenting a united front. It happened more frequently now, although it hadn’t always been that way—some of us had managed years earlier to escape. When Sandy was starting his career, he’d moved as far away as possible—to Hong Kong and then Saudi Arabia—and rarely came home; Robin went to the University of Virginia as a young man and never moved back; and Chris had lived in Saskatoon for almost twenty years. That left Victor and me— the youngest and oldest—holding the fort. For years he and I had rolled our eyes as Mum praised the others for their short weekly phone calls. “It’s remarkable! Do you know they call me
every
Sunday?” But whenever she’d laugh and say, “All mothers love best those children who live farthest away,” Victor and I would joke about moving to Fiji.

Each of us provided a unique kind of solace to Mum, and together we made up a whole: I provided efficiency; Robin, diplomacy; Chris, empathy; and Victor, practicality. If Sandy had been alive, he would have provided dignity. She knew we all loved her—it was just hard to show it with any patience these days. Her demanding, domineering personality seemed to gather force with every passing year—it was her way or the highway—and we were at our wits’ end.

At the retirement home, the boys had looked tall and strong and handsome, dressed in their best. Robin was in his tweed jacket and brown brogues, Chris in his green argyle sweater and Birkenstocks, Victor in his leather bomber jacket and Blundstones. They were all wearing beards and ties.

We checked in with the director, wandered with Mum through all the common areas, nodded to people in wheelchairs silently watching TV, inspected the garage where all the scooters were parked, and gazed at the pots of violets and ferns in the small alcove they called the “garden room.” It scared me. It was like looking into my own future, into a warehouse full of abandoned parents waiting to die. No potted plants could soften the image. Where was the hope? Where was the noise and clutter of grandchildren? I felt sorry for Mum—her apartment looked so empty, silent, and white. The only thing close to an animated object was her little black overnight bag perched on the edge of the bed and she stood beside it, looking lost.

But then we took her to supper.

The dining room was hushed. Subdued lighting and wallto-wall carpeting sucked the life out of conversation. Metal walkers were parked at the entrance. Waitresses glided back and forth with trays of rice pudding. A sign by the potted palm told us to wait for the hostess, so Chris took a menu from the podium and studied it.

“Hey, Mum, this looks good … Look—cottage cheese, your favourite!”

“Where’s the damn hostess?” said Mum. “That’s what I want to know!”

“I believe she’ll be here shortly,” said Robin.

Mum peered into the dimly lit room. “Why is everyone so silent?”

“They’re eating,” said Chris.

“But nobody’s talking to each other!”

“Maybe they don’t know each other,” said Victor, shrugging his shoulders.

“Then why are they sitting together?”

“The hostess seats you …” I said. “I think she puts you at a different table each meal.”

“You mean we have no choice? That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of!”

“
Shhhh
—not so loud, Mum!”

“Well, I certainly don’t want to sit beside that woman over there—look!” Mum pointed to a woman eating alone at a table set for six near the window. “She looks boring as hell.”

“
Shhhhhhh,
Mum!”

Eventually, the hostess led us straight to the window. The neatly dressed woman was eating dessert. She didn’t look up. Robin pulled out Mum’s chair.

“Why do we have to sit here?” But by then we were already seated.

“Bring me a glass of water,” said Mum to the hostess.

“Your waitress will be with you shortly, ma’am.”

“I don’t want a
waitress,
” said Mum. “I want
water
. Can’t you get me water? Surely there must be
some
water in this place!”

The woman at our table patted her mouth with her linen napkin, laid it neatly at her place, reached for her cane, and limped away.

“Thank goodness!” said Mum.

We eyed each other over our menus. This wasn’t going so well. But we stayed until bedtime, made sure Mum’s TV worked, and reminded her how to use her portable oxygen tanks. She wouldn’t be able to wander all day as she could at home, hooked into a steady supply. If she wanted to leave her bedroom she’d have to use portables that lasted only two hours, and this new reality was causing her anxiety.

We said goodnight, and promised to phone regularly.
Robin drove back to Virginia. Within three days, I got a call from the administrator.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “your mother isn’t settling.”

Mum refused to contemplate any other places, so Victor and I knew what this meant: we’d have to continue to supervise her care and make sure that loyal friends continued to visit … for weekly bridge games, Bible study, tea parties, DVD screenings, and doggie playtimes—a bigger social calendar than most institutions. Victor and I had been synchronizing our calendars, months in advance for years, ever since Dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but whereas Dad had been sweet and grateful, Mum was so caustic and demanding that she was tipping us over the edge.

We picked Mum up and took her back home.

Inside the mudroom, we were greeted by rows of extra oxygen tanks all leaning up against the woodstove.

“Anyone got a lighter?” joked Victor, laughing.