Tangled

by Flo Gelo

Nella, my forty-eight-year-old mother, sits at the edge of the bed. Her legs hang over the side, her feet cool as she likes them. The white, shiny, threadbare bed sheet, aged from hundreds of hot-water washes in steam boilers, lays tangled across her lap. Her dry callused feet reveal the circular indentation on the right side of her heel. I want to lift her, embrace her tightly and carry her from this bed to another time, before.

A similar late summer day, forty-two years earlier, the air is hot and humid. There are no ceiling fans to circulate the air in this Brooklyn row house. Nella, age six, hugs her beloved "Dr. Seuss" and lifts herself onto the pillow that her mother uses to cushion her elbows when she leans out on the windowsill to talk with neighborhood friends. Nella clumsily lifts her legs over the pillow to face outward, sliding down and turning to sit on the fire escape balcony. Admonished that she should not lean against the open crate of ripe red plum tomatoes that sits on the floor of the fire escape, she defies all warning, as is her nature. She leans too far, her body tipping. Her tiny arm reaches but her fingertips slip from the iron step ladder that leads upward to the next landing. She begins to fall, grabs instead the edge of the wooden crate. Time stops. The child falls through the well-hole opening in the balcony floor and plummets past the grape arbor—two flights until impact.

A tangled bundle lays in a heap on the hot cement. The slender canopy of Elm, motionless against a cloudless sky, provides scant shade for the fire rescue team that lifts and transports Nella to the Brooklyn Hospital Center that will be her home for many months to come. What is blood and flesh and what is plum tomato are indistinguishable. The child does not open her eyes. The nurse quickly removes Nella's clothing and washes away both blood and tomatoes to reveal cuts and bruises to her right side and swelling on her forehead and eye. Her knee has a large, deep gash. They clean her wounds with saline gauze and disinfect with iodine. A limp and twisted foot dangles from her tiny ankle.  

Nella's mother sits in the waiting room. She learns that her daughter will survive this fall but may never walk again unaided. Nella's right knee is dislocated. Her right ankle is broken, she has a growth plate fracture extending to the lower end of the tibia and her heel bone is shattered. She is in surgery. The doctor will maneuver the broken bones into approximate alignment and cast her leg and foot in place to hold the bones in their correct position. Nella will remain in the hospital for several months so that her doctor can monitor her recuperation, treat inflammation and prevent infection.

Months later a flood lamp brightens the center of a large amphitheater as Nella awkwardly stands, assisted by wooden crutches. News reporters are present and flashbulbs pop as Dr. G describes in detail the innovative surgical procedures that allowed this young child to bear weight and possibly walk again. I imagine her then, anxious and weary but happy to be in the spotlight on this day of her seventh birthday— happier still when a large round frosted cake is carried into the room. The cake is held by young nurses wearing white hats and holding multicolor balloons. The next day, Nella's wide eyes and smile are captured on the front page of The Brooklyn Beacon. In a smaller photograph, Dr. G. accepts an award in recognition of this monumental surgical success.

Today, I see my mother as she sits on her bed tangled in sheets and fear. No photographer seeks her picture, no doctor stands in the bright light of triumph. Ten years of living with and fighting cancer are coming to an end. A miracle no longer awaits her, only fleeting moments of comfort and fragile hope. Now I am the child falling through an opening, plunging from a great height, waiting for the impact.

Flo Gelo was born in Brooklyn, New York where she lived until her early teens. She has published a series of stories about growing up on Madison Street. This story reflects on the last days of her mother’s life. In hindsight, Flo’s mother’s illness and dying were formative and influenced Flo’s professional life. She has published numerous articles in professional journals about illness, death, and dying.

You Are Here

by Kelly Garriott Waite

The picture, taken before color photography was ubiquitous, is gradations of light and dark, bright and shadow. In it, my father straddles a three-foot log, a jagged vertical crack down its center like a lightning strike. The bark is rough and covered in places with moss. The grass surrounding it is mostly short and neat, as if the log had been dragged to this space specifically to make a seat for my father. But it can't be comfortable: Dad's right leg bends back, the toe of his shoe dug into the ground as if for purchase. His left leg is forward, his heel pressed into the grass. His pants—the seventies equivalent of Dockers–are sharply creased down the center. He wears a button-up shirt, untucked, and Converse tennis shoes, their dark laces loosely tied. Dad holds a five-string resonator banjo, its round drum resting on one leg. His smiling face is in profile, that characteristic dimple in his cheek as he looks at the middle finger of his left hand, pressed behind the D string's third fret.

* * *

Fret:

1. To worry excessively and without cease.

2. Music: One of several thin silver strips separating the fingerboard of various stringed instruments into sections. Pressing just behind a fret will divide a string in two, causing its lower half to vibrate faster, thus producing a higher-pitched note. Each fret will raise a string's tone a half-step or 1/12 of an octave.

* * *

Between certain frets, the fingerboard of Dad's banjo was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the smooth white inside of the shell of certain mollusks: oysters, mussels, and abalones. I remember swaying from side to side, studying the shimmer of the inlay, watching the colors change from violet and pink to gold and green. Looking at the photograph, I am reminded of the abalone shell that belonged to Dad's mother, a woman who fretted so often that my grandfather sometimes snapped at her, stop buying trouble, as she peered through the dashboard of the passenger seat, giving voice to her worries about weather or traffic.

Why steal the mollusk's rainbow to settle it upon the neck of the banjo? More than mere adornment, it served as position markers, grounding my father to keep him from getting lost inside the music. This is where you are, the inlay murmured to Dad. Remember, you are here.

* * *

Octave:

Used in Western music, an octave is composed of eight notes and their four half steps. The beginning and ending notes of an octave match in pitch but differ in frequency.

* * *

A mere handful of notes, a single octave is insufficient to express musically the range of human emotion. And so, using the fret-string combination, the octave is repeated three times on Dad's banjo.

* * *

A can of Budweiser rests before Dad, its label gazing off camera. A music book is open, its soft cover folded back. I hold my magnifying glass over the book and try to discern the title of the song. But all I can make out is a smattering of notes, fat circles with wings, except for the whole note, which is entirely too heavy to fly and thus has no need of wings.

* * *

Note value:

Used in music to show how long to play (or hold) each note. Commonly, a whole note is held for four beats, a half note for two. On it goes, with each previous note value halving itself all the way down to the smallest, rarest note, the 256^th, a note with six fast fluttering wings, a note so light it barely makes a sound as it briefly alights before flitting away. 

* * *

Dad often played "Cripple Creek" and "Dueling Banjos" from the movie Deliverance. Sometimes he played "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," a song featured on an album of the same name by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Dad bought this album and stored it beside the seventeen-volume collection of Beethoven's works, eighty-five records in all, which he largely ignored, but which my sister played loudly when she cleaned the bedroom we shared: sonatas, symphonies, and string quartets. I remember the scratch of the needle upon a record. The momentary silence before the room was flooded with sound. I remember, after the room was clean, my sister returning the records haphazardly to the shelves until the cabinet was so messy, Dad could no longer stand it and made us sort out the records and put them into their correct volume. Dad's life was a series of attempts to impose order on a disordered brain.

* * *

When he wasn't playing, the banjo hung on the wall next to Dad's recliner. Beside it was the four-string he'd also acquired. When he got the notion to play one or the other, Dad sat up in one swift motion, his back lifting and his legs folding down simultaneously while he reached toward the wall.

* * * 

Ängstlich:

1. German: anxious.

2. Music: anxiously.

* * *

Here's what Dad never told us: He took a prescription medication to alleviate the symptoms of Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder (OCD), a disease rooted in anxiety.

Here's what took me years to tell my children: I also suffer from OCD.

Here's what I hope my children tell my grandchildren: They have anxiety. They have learned how to manage it. There is no shame in mental illness.

* * *

Leitmotif:

A phrase or theme that recurs throughout a musical or literary piece.

* * *

I believe that the leitmotif of Dad's life was anxiety and finding a way to alleviate it. He never spoke of anxiety, perhaps because he didn't want to buy trouble. Instead, I believe he sought relief through his hobbies: photography or sailing or playing the banjo, dropping one project and taking up another, sometimes circling back to an earlier one, repeating the pattern throughout his life.

* * *

As expected, Dad gave up playing the banjo. The instruments remained on the wall for longer and longer stretches of time until they became more decoration than entertainment. With every hobby, Dad discarded its accouterments, in this case, the music books, the silver picks, the pitch pipe. Eventually even the banjos disappeared.

But I don't think Dad was a quitter. Rather, I believe that when a hobby had lost the power to distract his mind–-when, for instance, he could play a song without having to concentrate–-he dropped it for something new upon which to focus. Every new project had the potential to quiet his mind. Something to tell him: You are not lost. Remember you are here.

* * *

My younger daughter, like her grandfather, flits from thing to thing, as if searching for something to quiet her brain, something to ground her, too. She tells me she doesn't want to have children: she's afraid they'll inherit the anxiety.

Can I guarantee her this circle of anxiety will eventually be broken? No. But I try to explain the positives that accompany it: the compassion for others, the creativity, the way of finding beauty in the world where others might not. I'm not sure she believes me. I'm not sure she believes it's worth it.

But perhaps mental illness isn't so much illness than the normal about which we do not speak. Perhaps each of our brains are gradations of lightness and darkness, brightness and shadow. Perhaps if we spoke our truths rather than hiding them, we would feel less alone, braver, not as strange as we perceive ourselves to be. Perhaps the heaviness of our hearts and our minds would evaporate. Perhaps if we said, this is where I am, someone might reply, me, too. I am here, too.

Kelly Garriott Waite writes from Ohio. Her work has appeared in the Hopper, Allegro Poetry, and the Fourth River: Tributaries.

My Mathematical Father: A Life in Numbers

by Karen Galatz

My father was a mathematical genius. He could calculate long columns of numbers in his head in a flash, count cards at a Las Vegas blackjack table, and estimate the number of pennies in a jar within, well, a few pennies.

I, on the other hand, can barely operate a calculator and cannot convert kilometers into miles. Yet when I think of my father's life, it is through numbers that I can best recount his story.

7 4 31

July 4, 1931: My parents meet at Coney Island. There for a blind date with my mother's best friend, my father said he took one look at my mother and "That was it." He wooed her with hot dogs, salt water taffy, and cotton candy, took her for a ride on the Whip, and then held her hair back as she threw up all that food. There were fireworks then and there were fireworks throughout the five decades they were married.

8

Shortly after meeting my mother, Dad took off "hoboing" around the country. Not for long. He sent a telegraph to his brother asking for money to get home so he could court my mother. On his return to New York, he went straight to my mother's home. Eight months later they married.

Some fifty-four years later, as we gathered around the kitchen table telling stories after my father's funeral, my Grandma recalled meeting her future—and favorite—son-in-law. Standing at the front door for the first time, he asked Grandma to please get her "sister." After so many years, she was still charmed by that first encounter.

14 ½

That's how old Mom was when she married my father. Already a senior in high school, she told my father she was sixteen. Right before they eloped, she doctored her birth certificate to support that lie. My grandmother accompanied my parents to the rabbi, but waited outside so she, in turn, could tell her own lie: "I didn't see anything."

105

That's how many days passed before my grandfather found out that his beloved Dottie was married and would not go to college as he had hoped.

They had planned to tell Grandpa of the wedding after Mom graduated from high school. In the meantime, Dad would spend the night at the house, ostensibly in my uncle's room. But one night, Grandpa, who wasn't feeling well, looked in on all the children. Just as he put his hand on the door to my mother's room, Grandma saw him and rushed him back to bed, saying he was too sick to be up and about. When he commented that my father wasn't in my uncle's room, Grandma said he was hallucinating because of a high fever and that, of course, Julius was sound asleep beside their own snoring Henry.

The next morning Grandpa was told of the marriage. He loved my father, but still, this old-fashioned, yet somehow progressive, Eastern European immigrant had held such high hopes for his firstborn child. He was bitterly disappointed that there would be no college for his brilliant daughter. No high school diploma either.

18 16

Two years into my parents' marriage, my father got a surprise. An insurance annuity Grandpa had purchased for my mother's college tuition was available to be cashed on her eighteenth birthday. On Mom's birthday, my father went to claim the fifty dollars. The insurance man said the policy wouldn't mature for another two years. My father said, "But she's eighteen." The man put his hand on Dad's shoulder and said, "Son, you'd better go home and talk to your wife." It was only then, two years into the marriage, that my mother admitted her true age.

Here's one of my favorite stories about my parents: they were in the back of a car, doing what young people generally do in the back of a parked car late at night. A policeman knocked on the window and sternly told my father, "Son, if you cannot control yourself, you had better marry this girl." My father sheepishly replied, "We are married. We just couldn't wait to get home." The policeman walked away without giving them a ticket.

1930

Sometime in the late 1930s, mobster Meyer Lansky organized youth gangs to break up meetings of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund held in Yorkville, a section of NYC. I know from my oldest brother that my father and my mother's brother, Henry, were part of those gangs. My brother would describe with great pride how Dad and Uncle Henry would come home all bloody and beat up, but also victorious and happy.

From Lansky came this recollection: "The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Adolf Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action. We threw some of them out the windows. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults."¹

3-2-1

Street fighting was one thing, but pro sports was another. Three is the number of times my father boxed professionally. He quit because his arms were too short "from smoking cigars at an early age" (or so he claimed).

However, short arms had no effect on his abilities in track and field and he won two gold watches for setting jumping records in New York City. One of those watches hangs on my bedroom wall in an old-fashioned gold-flecked round frame with faded navy velvet backing.

Dad also could pitch a mean softball. Early in my parents' Depression-era marriage, my father worked in a White Castle hamburger joint. He and the other workers augmented the menu and sold sandwiches and snacks on the side that their wives and mothers prepared to bring in extra income. When the owner of the White Castle found out, he fired all the men except my father, who could pitch, hit, and run. The White Castle team won the citywide championship that summer. The next day, my father lost his job.

0

That is the number of times my otherwise talkative father spoke to me about his parents. From my mother, I learned a couple of sad facts: First, that Daddy's mother had been ill and hospitalized most of his life. She died when he was sixteen. My father was already working by then to help support the family, but, according to my mother, he harbored great guilt that he hadn't done more to "save her" and that whenever he woke up from a bad dream, he called out her name.

From my mother, I got the impression that my father's father was a stern man. Maybe the times required it. Maybe it was his nature. When there wasn't enough food to go around, my grandfather ate first. He was the breadwinner. He needed his strength.

And when it came to helping my teenage newlywed parents, it was my mother's family who did so. Night after night, my mother's father would sit in that White Castle while my father washed down the counters, the walls, the windows, and the floors. "My poor Julius," Grandpa would say. After my father was fired, Grandpa took him into the family electrical business.

5 17 31

Years later, working for my grandfather, my impatient father tried hoisting a massive air conditioning unit without help. He broke his back in multiple places and was hospitalized in a full-body cast for six months.

Even though I was a little girl and visiting rules were strict, hospital staff allowed me to sneak into his room to cheer him up. To pass the time, he counted my emerging freckles. First, there were five freckles; another time, we counted seventeen, then thirty-one. We measured time in freckles. Time in-between visits. Time trapped in a cast. Trapped in a bed. Trapped in a room and in his head.

7 11

No, not the convenience store, but my father's lifelong love of craps. My mathematical father could count cards and win at blackjack, but that was too easy. But craps, that was exciting, unpredictable. He craved excitement. It was the thrill of the unpredictable that held him captive.

He described gambling to a college friend of mine as "giving a license to somebody to take your money."

2

When gamblers win, they buy jewelry. It's a quick way to get rid of cash before the irresistible urge to gamble strikes again. Through the years my mother accumulated many sparkling pieces of hard-won gambling-earned baubles.

One evening my father jubilantly came home with a diamond ring. Mom refused it, saying she already had a beautiful engagement ring and that he should take it back to the store for cash. He refused and told her to give it to twelve-year-old me. Mom explained that was ridiculous. He then told her to put it away and give it to me when I was older. And two decades later, she did that, giving it to my fiancé, who, in turn, presented it to me. A family heirloom, Las Vegas style.

1 x "Y"

I don't have an accurate number here, but every time Dad needed cash, he pawned his 24-karat gold watch. That watch was in and out of pawnshops dozens of times through the years. When he died, a pawn ticket was in his wallet. We went to the store and re-claimed the watch for the last time. Now my son has it.

5

As in "I'll be back in five minutes," code for my father leaving us at some fancy "comped" hotel-casino dinner to gamble. He was always gone more than 5 minutes. If he looked flushed when he returned, it was a good sign. He had won. If he plopped a big stack of chips on the table in front of my mother, that was even better. It meant he had won and was content to quit for the night. If he was sweating and pale, well, that meant our "free" dinner had actually cost a lot of money.

21, 18

My two oldest brothers were twenty-one and eighteen when I was born. The oldest was already in law school when I arrived. Chagrined, he handed out cigars just as his classmates did—except they were celebrating the births of their children, not siblings. My brother used to say I was almost named "Surprise." My father would just smile and say I was the result of the best afternoon he ever took off from work.

22

That's the approximate number of schools I went to. We moved back and forth between NY and Las Vegas multiple times.

We moved West when my parents got sick of the relatives, the cold weather, and the traffic my father faced driving between Long Island and NYC, where he operated his electrical business.

We moved East when my parents missed the change of seasons, the family, and there was a crop of new Broadway shows to see. The other, not publicly stated reason for the moves back East, were the times when my father's gambling proved to be too big a distraction from his electrical business.

3

The most years I lived in any one place until I married.

I didn't mind all those moves. I thought it was fun. I loved playing "Hide and Seek” amid the mountains of the crumpled wrapping paper and moving boxes.

One brother lived in New York; one in Las Vegas, and the youngest brother moved with us each time. So, I had family everywhere, ready-made friends if you will.

And while I don't remember much drama between my parents about these zig-zag moves, my now-gone, oldest brother did. He said the moves became painful for our mother and that was why she went on spending frenzies at each new house. She was obsessed with getting us settled as quickly as possible. I always thought she just liked decorating. My father gambled. My mother shopped. It seemed a reasonable arrangement in my happy, clueless childhood bubble.

4

Even though gambling was my father's preferred means of making money, he had a variety of work adventures and stories. Here are four of them.

One: During Prohibition, he drove a truck from Canada or maybe just upstate New York bringing liquor to joints in NYC. He had already started going bald and always wore a hat (even at the movies), but at the time he wore it for another reason. He hid a gun inside, hoping to see and capture Al Capone and claim the reward.

Two: During WWII, my father worked on merchant ships. One night near the Panama Canal he had a premonition and slept on the deck, cradling a knife he had grabbed from the kitchen. The boat was torpedoed and started sinking fast. Dad did a running jump off the deck and floated in the water for a day or two. Rescued by a US military ship, he was brought to a naval base outside of NYC and questioned to make sure he wasn't trying to sneak into the country as a German spy. When he was released and my family went to get him, he was standing there, midwinter, barefoot, in a sailor's pants and pea coat—both several sizes too small.

Three: In the early 1960s, my father was a foreman on the Titan Missile construction project in Arizona. He hadn't even finished junior high school, but my father was smart. He pointed out a design flaw, which if it hadn't been fixed, would have been catastrophic.

The construction site was dangerous. There were rattlesnakes on the roads where the men walked and in the construction tunnels they descended to work. The men drew sticks to see who would go down first, knowing that the first down would be the one to startle the snakes. They all carried guns to shoot the snakes, but sometimes the deadly snakes were quicker than they were.

Four: After completing some basic electric work in the home of the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz, my father started to leave. Horowitz waved his elegant arm in an offhand manner and said, "Just send a bill." My father replied, "Maestro, I'll skip the bill if you would play something for me." The usually prickly Horowitz gestured for my father to sit and proceeded to play for about an hour.

My father was comfortable with princes and paupers. He was buddies with the Ambassador from Indonesia and equally close with the janitor who cleaned apartment buildings my father managed. His two favorite restaurants were the Bacchanal Room at Caesar's Palace and a short-order coffee shop on the Lower East Side. Both places had limited seating, but the service and the ambiance were decidedly different.

My father's full name was Julius David Galatz. Everybody, even kids, called him Big Julie. A boyfriend of mine gifted him with "business" cards that read:

Big Julie

Poet-Gambler

$1.25

Aside from that fancy gold watch, which he viewed more as collateral than adornment, Big Julie had only one true personal luxury: Prince Philip Macanudo cigars. I don't remember what they cost in the '80s, but they were and are pretty pricey. Christmas, Hanukkah, birthdays and Father's Day, we kids would each buy him a box. We wouldn't let him smoke the stinky stogies in the house, mind you, but we would buy them. One year, I bought him the obligatory Christmas box and also gave him a handmade coupon book "good for one box per month" for the entire year. For once, my gregarious father was speechless.

2

Cigars always for Dad, but for me, the best gifts I ever received from him were two lessons in kindness—offered spontaneously without judgement or condescension.

Once I complained that my father's brother, my Uncle Lou, had called somebody a "Spic." My father agreed it was a terrible word, but he also told me about Lou's hard life and the troubles he had faced including the loss of his wife in a horrible accident.

He added that Louie had some fun times too including a friendship with that "Red Hot Mama" Sophie Tucker. From all that, I realized an important lesson—people have complex lives and that I shouldn't be quick to judge.

My father re-enforced this lesson a few months later, when he handed me a Nazi party membership book. When I came to the page with the member's name on it, I saw it belonged to my father's close friend. "How can you be friends with a Nazi?" I fumed with all the righteous indignation only a twelve-year-old can feel. My father smiled; then said, "'Fritz' was just a little boy in a small village when the Nazis came to power. His membership consisted of wearing a hat, a tie and a pin. He marched in the town square and saluted. He didn't kill anybody. He didn't hurt anybody. He was just a little boy then. He's a good man."

Another time, thanks to my father's billiards' skills, I was "gifted" with that second lesson about kindness. Dad was playing pool one holiday with a dreadful relative. After a while the relative came into the living room, gloating how he had just beat "the Great Galatz." On the car ride home, I asked my father about it. "You let him win, didn't you? Why?" Smiling, Daddy replied, "It meant so much to him."

5 6

In fifth grade, my father played hooky from school for six months. Mornings, he went to the Bronx Zoo; afternoons, he hung out at pool halls. When the truant officer finally showed up at the house, my grandfather gave Dad a beating.

The next morning, limping into school, he met with his teacher. She gave him the six months of schoolwork he missed to study. He came back the next day asking what else he had missed. The kindly teacher said he could not possibly have studied everything in one night. She begged him not to lie and risk another beating from his father. My father swore he had reviewed all the material. She tested him. He got a perfect score and was written up as a "boy genius" in some long-defunct NYC newspaper. I never saw the article, but I'm sure it didn't reference his epic pool skills.

6

My father dropped out of school in the sixth grade to help support his immigrant family. It was a shame. Not only were his math skills astonishing, but he also had a photographic memory. He quoted philosophers and poets all the time. Each Sunday he read The New York Times from start to finish. It was his Bible and his refuge. For leisure, he would pick up a volume of the family encyclopedia and start reading from page one.

My father didn't just read poetry. He wrote it. One of my most prized possessions is a scrapbook my mother kept of letters my father wrote to her in 1941, while working construction on a military base in Newfoundland. Those letters contain quotations by Tennyson and Shelley, poems he wrote, observations about the nature of man in the midst of WWII, admonitions to my brothers to mind their mother and not be scared about air raid drills and blackouts, descriptions of the Aurora Borealis, celebrating Thanksgiving by taking a bunch of "Newfie" kids for ice cream, laments about loneliness and longing for my mother, and the need for her to control spending so they can save money for a down payment on a house.

$.05, $200, $50

"Give Gil and Mal (my oldest brothers) a nickel each for me," he wrote in one of those letters. In another, he suggested that while the two hundred dollar coat my mother wanted to buy was, no doubt, beautiful, perhaps she could make do with a fifty dollar coat.

  

6, 5.5

In those days before the Internet, my father was my personal worldwide web. Once while working as a reporter, I was doing a story about massive construction cables at Hoover Dam outside of Las Vegas. I wanted to give some context for how much weight they could bear, so, I called my father to ask him how many elephants equaled the tonnage I needed to explain. "Do you want the weight in Indian or African elephants?" he asked "Whatever," I replied impatiently. "Well, think about it. It makes a difference. Let me know in a minute. I'm on the phone with your brother. His trial is on recess and he needs to discuss a point of law." (For the record, an adult male African elephant weight about six tons, an adult male Indian elephant, about five and a half tons.)

Dad once observed that if he could have stayed in school, he would have liked to have become either a writer or a lawyer, but that knowing he had produced a daughter who wrote and two sons who were lawyers he felt satisfied he had achieved both goals.

That said, my father led a hard life and suffered many personal disappointments and, in his last years, terrible health problems.

Once when I faced a significant professional setback, I was lamenting the unfairness of it all—this while my father was in a hospital bed after a massive heart attack. "You'll try again," he said. I looked up shocked. "Galatzes don't quit," he said. It was my last conversation with my father. He died the next morning.

54

That's the number of years my parents were married. It was a tempestuous relationship. He moved fast. She was cautious. He was a "regular Joe" without one ounce of pretense. My mother was regal. She could wear an inexpensive polyester dress and look like she had stepped out of a fashion magazine. He ate onions raw, like they were apples. She had a fondness for caviar. They fought a lot, mostly about money.

They argued, but they also agreed on many things: children came first, West Side Story was their favorite Broadway musical; music and books needed to be plentiful; and having company over for dinner was a must.

And besides writing poetry, my cigar-chomping father always bought his "Dottie" corsages to wear on special occasions.

In the hospital, his last words to her were: "You are always kind to me."

72

My father died at seventy-two. "How did he die?" asked a bewildered good friend, somehow not knowing of the heart attacks, the blindness, and the leg problems. My father was an electrician by profession, gambler at heart, and also one hell of an actor. He lied equally well about his whereabouts (when unaccounted hours were spent in casinos instead of on the job) and he lied about his failing eyesight, his chest pains, and the agony of the veins in his legs closing and causing nightly, howlingly painful cramps and spasms.

137

The only time I ever heard my father say anything resembling self-pity was one night watching the news on TV. The story was about the funeral of a very famous person. The commentator observed that the chapel was filled and that the crowd of mourners had overflowed into the street. My father said that he imagined only ten or so people would come to his funeral. He was wrong. I lost count of the number of people who came up and told me how my father had helped them, saved his life, and was like a father to them. I did, however, count the number of people who signed the condolence book: 137.

100%

A few days after the services, my mother was in the garage folding laundry. She was still in a daze, moving through the task she had done countless times before without thought. As she folded my father's undershirts and socks, all I could think about was that this was the last time she would ever do laundry for my father. It was such a painful idea that to this day, the act of doing laundry is a true affirmation of life for me. But at that moment, I knew one thing for sure. There was my mother, moving forward, not complaining, doing what had to be done. Those were actions I knew my mathematical father would approve of—100%.

¹ Quotation from "But They Were Good to Their People", American Jewish Historical Society

Karen Galatz is the author of Muddling through Middle Age, which offers a light-hearted look each week at the perils and pleasures of being a woman of a certain age. An award-winning television and print journalist, Karen's national credits include the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and The Nightly Business Report. Now a Berkeley, California resident, she is a columnist for J. and a contributing writer for Humor Outcasts. Her stories have appeared in numerous other publications.

Mercy in Decline

by Connie Miller

One

Somewhere in her late fifties, my mother started telling me I had to kill her. She’d reiterate the request periodically, as if to tattoo it onto my brain. “I can’t bear the thought,” she’d repeat, “of becoming bedridden and dependent. You have to kill me before that happens.”

My mother’s end-of-life plans, emphatic as they may have been, hovered like storm clouds on a far horizon, ominous but reassuringly remote. Until she started falling. She cracked her head on the corner of a table. There was blood on her carpet. The retirement community where she had stayed on after my father died was 2000 miles away from me. That distance, manageable for occasional visits, yawned, abruptly, into a chasm.

The day before Terry McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, she moved to my city. I’m not suggesting you compare my experience with what the bombing victims endured. It’s just that I could identify with Oklahoma City. I felt as if my own way of life was exploding.

I wanted to show up, be there for my mother, accompany her with grace through the last stages of her life. But I was petrified. In search of courage, I saw a therapist. In one of our sessions, she posed a question that reached into the core of what made me most afraid. “What’s so terrible,” she asked me, “about needing someone's help?” Somehow, seeing things through that disarming lens gave me the courage to move forward.

Growing up, I heard my mother recite a couple of lines of poetry often enough for them to stick. The lines belong to an epitaph for a man who broke his neck falling from his horse:

Betwixt the stirrop and the ground,

Mercy I askt, mercy I found.

For me and my mother, what lay “betwixt the stirrop and the ground” was the treacherous territory of her decline. Could we summon the mercy we needed to help each other navigate that unpredictable terrain?

Two

I found my mother an apartment in an assisted living facility near our house. I got her a walker to prevent future falls. My help, combined with the minimal support the facility provided, sufficed for about three years. Then, pneumonia landed her in the hospital. After a miserable recovery stay in a nursing home, she returned to her apartment. Within days, I realized that basic assistance was no longer enough. I contacted the Autumn Years Network, a quality assurance and referral program for adult family homes.

A Network representative, whose sincerity and warmth brought Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood to mind, shepherded me around to several homes with a private room available. Anna's was the third home we visited. I had no clue what I was looking for but, when we walked in, I knew I had found it.

The place was immaculate and smelled of lemon cleaning oil. Five bedrooms and two bathrooms radiated out around a hub of common areas. Chairs for each resident clustered around a Formica table covered by a white plastic cloth and pink place mats. An enormous television dominated the living room.

“For the residents,” Anna told me. “Yeah, yeah. They sometimes have trouble seeing.”

Anna, the small, plump Filipina who greeted us at the door, owned the home. She lived upstairs with her husband and children. As we walked toward the bedroom that would soon be my mother's, another Filipina, Angie joined us. She was slighter than Anna with a less guarded smile. As the residents' primary caregiver, Angie lived on site and was available twenty-four hours a day.

The bedroom was clean, light, and across from a bathroom. A dark gray carpet covered the floor. A narrow cupboard stood against one white wall. The window, decorated with a colorful valence, overlooked Anna’s driveway and 148th Street. I glimpsed the tops of some pine trees about a block away. It stuck me, standing in the doorway of this stark but not unwelcoming space, that this was all my mother needed. A clean room, the single bed that we’d provide, a place to hang a change of clothes, a window showing a bit of green. At this stage, that was enough.

Anna and Angie described the services they offered and introduced me to the current residents, Kim, Everlynn, and Erma. I watched the capable way the two caregivers bustled about and communicated with one another. I smiled when Anna explained, good-naturedly, that locking the bathroom doors prevented Kim from unrolling the toilet paper. I listened as Angie, resting her hand on Everlynn’s shoulder, told me that the resident was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s.

“For the four years Everlynn has lived here, her daughter has never once visited,” Angie said. “Yeah, yeah” Anna told me, nodding. “Now we are Everlynn's family.”

They won me over. I gave Anna a deposit to hold the room. To fortify my instincts, I called the state agency that handles complaints against adult family homes. No one had ever complained about Anna's. I called references from a list the Autumn Years representative had given me.

"My aunt was an unpleasant woman," one reference told me. "Anna and Angie handled her beautifully." "Delightful place," another reference said. "They take wonderful care of their residents."

Three

Adult family home, the official definition: A home in a residential neighborhood that has been retrofitted to provide long term care services (not including nursing care) as well as room and board for a small number of elderly adults.

Adult family home, my personal definition: A place where you bargain away the last scraps of your mother's self-determination for your own peace of mind, for the assurance that she'll be safe, clean, kindly treated, and have a modicum of privacy.

When I arrive at Anna’s for one of my daily visits after work, Kim is sitting on the couch watching television. Everlynn is in her bedroom making the soft, private noises she always makes. Erma and my mother sit at the table eating. Angie is helping Erma eat. I move in beside my mother on a stool I pull over to the table. Everything is going along fine until Angie starts telling me about the night before. Then, she and my mother take up an argument they must have been having before I arrived.

"With that bed rail up," my mother says, interrupting Angie, "I can't get out of bed." She sounds indignant and pleased with herself at the same time, as if she just revealed some terrible truth that will finally enlighten me.

"It's for your own good, the bed rail," Angie tells her. "So you won't fall out of bed and hurt yourself."

"For my good," my mother spits back. "It's not for my good. It's for hers. I never fall out of bed."

Because of a throat problem, Erma can't talk. As she chews the asparagus Angie just fed her, she watches my mother and me with wide, sorrowful eyes.

"She trapped me in there with that bed rail," my mother goes on, "and then left me. I yelled for forty minutes but she paid no attention. And she had taken away my walker so I couldn't reach it. I was a prisoner in my own bed.”

“I had to go help Everlynn,” Angie says. She uses the bib that hangs around Erma's neck to wipe some food from the resident’s chin. “Connie,” she says, pointing a fork in my direction, “Connie, your own daughter, wants us to use the bed rail.”

My mother looks at me, waiting to see whose side I'm on. I try not to choose. “Why did you want to get out of bed?” I ask her. From the living room, Kim burps loudly but no one pays any attention.

"To go to the bathroom," my mother says. Her indignant tone is back, but the self-satisfaction is gone. She's unsure of me now.

"But you can't manage the bathroom on your own," I tell her.

"I can too," she says. "How would you know anyway? You've never even seen me go to the bathroom."

"Of course I have," I say. Dozens of times, I've witnessed by mother's bathroom battles. She stands in front of the toilet struggling to decide which way to turn so she'll end up facing the right direction. She cries, "I'm going to fall. I'm going to fall," as Angie patiently takes down her pants and the diaper she wears and guides her into a sitting position.

"Well," my mother says to me now. She's leaning forward over her mostly empty dinner plate. Her face has turned as pink as her plastic place mat and she's shaking. "You've just ruined me completely. Now they'll never let me do anything I want."

Four

My mother was christened Rosemarie but her small size at birth earned her the nickname Wee Willie Winkie. It stuck. She went by Winkie the rest of her life.

If you know one thing only about Winkie, know this: She was a reader. Each week, at the public library, she’d exchange one armload of books for another. After she washed and put away the supper dishes, she’d curl up on the living room couch to read.

The memories of my mother I cherish most revolve around finding her there. Whatever we started out discussing usually wound its way to one of my mother’s favorite poems. She’d quote a line or two and I’d hunt down the full poem in her poetry anthology, Other Men’s Flowers, which sits now on a shelf in my office. It was during one of those living-room discussions that I first learned about that all-important interlude “betwixt the stirrop and the ground.”

As I see it, my mother had the soul of an artist and a rebel. She loved words, both the sounds they made in poems and the stories they told in novels. She spent a year studying drawing and painting at the Three Arts Club in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood.

But, at each significant turning point, caution and convention triumphed over soul. She was a chemical reaction, full of heat and light, to which the creators had forgotten to add a catalyst. The only art-related job she had, drawing shoes for a department store catalog, ended when the war was over. She drafted a children’s book about a parrot. That draft never found its way out of her bureau drawer. She married my father, a geologist who worked at an oil company, and became a fulltime wife and mother. Her passionate defense of liberal values at company cocktail parties, so at odds with her oil company lifestyle, earned her the nickname Mrs. Oil.

My mother recognized her inertness and, perhaps for companionship, pasted it onto me the way you paste clothes onto a paper doll. We both, she explained on more than one occasion, want to express things artistically but we simply lack the talent. Maybe her perception of our shared brokenness was why she came to me, rather than to one of my siblings, to die.

My mother approached her death in that same bifurcated way she approached her life. About her end-of-life plans, she was as passive as she was outspoken. What if, instead of “You have to kill me,” her refrain had been: “At a point where I become unable to take care of myself, I’m going to commit suicide. I hope you’ll support me and even help me if you see fit.” Would this story have an entirely different ending?

Five

At Anna’s, eating meant cleaning your plate. I’m sure the practice stemmed from some section in the adult family home guidelines. Decreased appetite and physical limitations make weight loss and poor nutrition a significant risk factor for the elderly.

When my mother arrived at Anna's, she weighed eighty-six pounds. From where she had bumped herself, large bruises the color of summer plums dotted her extremities. After only a few weeks as a resident, her cheeks were round and plump as if they contained a day's worth of gathered nuts. Her skin looked healthier. She didn’t bruise as often.

Anna and Angie pointed to her cheeks with pride. "See how much healthier she looks," they said. But my mother felt overfed. "Like a stuffed goose," she often told me.

I’d never known my mother to eat three full meals a day. A snack here, a snack there, and then a good dinner was her customary approach. By exercising vigilance and control, she'd always kept her figure (not easy for a woman five foot one or two). She had nothing but contempt for people who, in her words, let themselves go to pot. In restaurants, she’d point with her fork toward generously proportioned diners. “Look at those fat slobs swilling down all that food," she'd say, too loudly for my comfort.

Initially, my mother bargained to maintain her eating habits. "I don't need three big meals a day," she’d say each morning as Angie helped her to the breakfast table. But Anna and Angie persisted. "Finish your oatmeal," they’d coax if she tried to leave food on her plate. "Just a few more bites," they’d urge if she didn’t finish her mashed potatoes. In a remarkably short time, they wore down her resistance.

"We eat all the time in this place," she continued to complain to me. But, when I was there during a meal, I noticed that she’d resigned herself to finishing her food.

Each time I visited, my mother’s round cheeks reprimanded me. I recognized them for what they were: symbols of something that had been taken away. I suggested that Anna and Angie let her eat what she wanted, that it was fine if she didn’t finish. They didn’t argue with me, but my words bumped up against an impregnable wall. If the guidelines said feed, my mother was going to be fed.

Six

My mother delivers the accusation as if it’s the punch line of a caustic joke. “Angie manhandled me,” she says. “She made my arm bleed.”

It doesn't surprise me that my mother is accusing Angie of some form of abuse. On one level, it feels valid, a legitimate lashing out against dependency, against never getting your own way.

But, by the time she makes the accusation, I have observed Anna and Angie long enough to utterly trust their care. I can see Anna's point when she asks me to write a letter explaining that I know my mother is safe and in good hands. "For our records," Anna tells me, pointing to the locked cupboard where she keeps meticulously arranged binders filled with rental agreements, living wills, medication charts, and Do Not Resuscitate orders.

I write the letter.

Anna faces periodic inspections by the state. I understand why she complies, to the letter, with adult family home regulations. I understand how her obsessive compliance benefits me by ensuring that her residents receive the highest level of care.

But I also recognize how that same compliance denies the residents freedom of choice, possibly even denies them their humanity. How it imprisons them in a system designed to keep them safe.

What if I had moved my mother into my own house? Would she have been less of a prisoner, preserved more of her humanity? In my house, my mother could have eaten as much or as little as she wanted. But wouldn’t I too have relied on a bed rail so I could manage time to myself and still know my mother was safe? Would my mother have accepted the bed rail if she decided how much and how often she ate? Is it the bed rail that bothered my mother or simply that she needed one?

A friend sent me a quotation she found on a bookmark. The quotation is attributed to a theology professor named James Keenan. “Mercy,” Keenan wrote, “is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” My friend suggested that, for a caregiver, mercy means willingly entering the chaos of another person’s decline.

Having watched my mother grapple with the conventions foisted on her at Anna’s, it occurs to me that mercy factors in to both sides of a dependency equation. As caregivers, Anna and Angie and I faced the task of entering into the chaos generated by my mother’s decline. My mother’s task was no less daunting. Her dependency meant relinquishing control over the routines that determined the rhythm of her days. Mercy for my mother meant willingly entering the order that living at Anna’s adult family home imposed.

She didn’t always succeed. Witness the bed rail revolt and abuse accusation. And yet, there were signs that she broke through. Around Christmas, Angie took a month off to visit relatives in the Philippines. When I arrived at Anna’s the day after Angie left, my mother was agitated.

"I want to know Angie's last name," she said, as I was taking off my coat. I told her the name. I'd written it on a piece of paper I taped to the wall above her bed but she always forgot to look.

"Now I need her address in the Philippines. I want to send Angie a telegram."

"A telegram?" As I begin convincing her we'd be better off buying a card to give Angie when she came back, my mother interrupted me.

"I want to tell her how much I miss her." She was quiet for a few seconds. Then, she added, "We have our troubles, Angie and I, but I've gotten used to her ways.”

Seven

Decline is a sly companion, one who patiently accompanies you down a long, gradual slope and then, without warning, nudges you over a cliff. My mother never suffered a major stroke. Instead, a series of smaller strokes ate away at her ability to stand, walk, and, finally, speak. She spent her last months at Anna's bedridden and silent. Her plump cheeks deflated. She withered into a tiny bedridden being. To move her to the table for meals, Angie winched her in and out of a wheel chair with the help of a crane-like device called a Hoyer lift.

Her left arm developed an odd repetitive tic. It arced from the bed at her side up over her face and then back down onto the bed. Up over her face. Back down to the bed. For my visits during this period of her decline, I read books out loud, the cadence of my sentences accompanied by the rise and fall of her metronomic arm.

Eight

In the end, I did kill my mother. Immobility builds up secretions in the lungs and chest, which is why pneumonia is a common health problem for the bedridden. At Anna’s, my mother suffered her second bout. Referring to my mother’s living will, in which she declined interventions to prolong her life, I refused to let Anna administer antibiotics.

Surely, I reasoned, the life my mother was living at Anna’s was exactly the kind of life she had begged me to help her avoid. But would my mother have chosen that life over none at all? How do the wishes we express earlier in life stack up against the instinct to cling to what we know, to gobble whatever morsels of life may be left us? I don’t know if my silent, bedridden mother would have chosen treatment for her pneumonia. I never asked her. And what if I had? Would she have nodded or shaken her head? Would she have gestured with her hands? How much, at this point in her decline, did my mother even understand?

I read something recently about Paul Goodman, an American novelist, playwright, poet, and psychotherapist. He claimed that silences disclose as much as speech and that not all silences are the same. He defined nine kinds. What Goodman didn’t spell out is how to know which kind of silence you’re confronting. It seems to me that the story behind a silence must reveal itself through the eyes. What silence story did my mother’s eyes tell?

I wish I could say that her eyes told a story of “peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.” Or of “awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts.” My mother did, after all, evolve. Time and experience transformed her early abuse accusations into acceptance, and even appreciation, of Angie’s kind and capable caregiving.

Instead, the story I saw in those eyes, the eyes that tracked my comings and goings and traced the restless arc of her own metronomic arm, was a fraught combination: “the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination…” mixed with the simple silence of “bafflement.”

Writer Lynne Tillman tells an interesting anecdote about an open mic event at a workshop. After a bunch of other men had stepped up to the microphone, the musician John Cage came up. He started talking from the middle of the stage without amplification. People in the audience shouted at him to use the mic. Cage said you can hear if you listen. Everyone shut up and, when he spoke again without the mic, they could hear him just fine.

My mother had stopped using a microphone. I had so many jabbering voices in my own head—discomfort with how she spent her days, my selfish desire to end what I perceived as her suffering, guilt over how I carried out her end-of-life wishes, exhaustion with five years of visiting, monitoring, and managing her life—I’ll never know for sure if I achieved what John Cage’s audience achieved: shutting up enough to let my mother’s message come through.

Nine

Throughout my mother’s stay at Anna’s, I struggled to keep her enrolled in hospice. Enrollment gave Anna an alternative to 911. Enrollment protected my mother from the emergency room with its invasive and often brutal treatments aimed at prolonging life. Instead, with the supervision of a hospice nurse, she could stay at Anna’s and receive palliative comfort care.

Hospice, though, doesn’t play well with gradual decline. Enrollees still alive after six months are dropped. My mother kept cycling in and out. At the time of her pneumonia, she was out. I rushed to sign her back up. Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, I braced myself for a delay. But the Powers that watched over my mother during her lifetime came together to help her die. Hospice reenrolled her almost immediately. So, when Anna phoned the day after Thanksgiving (“Yeah, yeah. You better come,” she told me), we had everything in place.

When I arrived at Anna’s, an inhuman sound like a metal chair grating across cement ambushed me at the door. The sound came from my mother’s chest, from her battle to draw oxygen into her fluid-filled lungs. Anna and Angie had her propped on some pillows. Her face, the way her skin molded so tightly around her bones, made me think of a grasshopper. Each gasp hoisted her away from the pillows under her back. She appeared, at best, semiconscious.

I followed hospice protocol and called for a nurse. Because of a cancellation, she arrived within twenty minutes (those beneficent Powers!) and immediately applied a morphine patch to my mother’s arm. That drug was my mother’s permission slip. Within seconds, her gasping softened and slowed. Her noise, her struggle, ended.

“Your mother is dying,” the nurse told me, “but when she might die is unpredictable. It could take hours or minutes.” Looking hard at me, the daughter, the supporting actor in this drama starring my mother, she added, “Hearing is the last sense to go.” I had a final opportunity to comfort my mother, say whatever still needed saying.

Actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith believes that you reveal the truth about yourself in those moments when language fails you, when your grammar falls apart, when you’re forced to dig deep for unrehearsed words. It’s a verbal shipwreck. You’re on your own to make it all work out.

In that small bedroom, crowded with well-meaning observers, my grammar fell apart. I approached my mother's side. Inhibited by the audience, I whispered, “Mother, I’m here. You’re not alone. I love you.”

I don’t think my awkward whispers qualified as shipwreck heroics, but maybe they were enough. Maybe, if you add it all up—inviting my mother to live in my city, finding Anna’s, visiting regularly, reading, refusing treatment for her pneumonia, bringing in hospice, overcoming my self-consciousness enough to murmur commonplace yet heartfelt words —maybe the total came to mercy.

Half an hour after the nurse applied the morphine patch, my mother fulfilled what Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius calls one of our assignments in life. She died.

Connie Miller’s essays and articles have appeared in Under the Sun, Iowa Woman, Web del Sol, a collection called Women and Stepfamilies, and other publications. She lives in Seattle. When she retired, Connie adopted an eight-week old black Labrador puppy named Victor. Her goal is for Victor and her to become a Reading with Rover pet therapy team. The process of training a dog, she’s learned, is as challenging and as humbling as writing.