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.

Hallmark Moment

by Joseph O’Day

Another Saturday afternoon and I’m sitting with my ninety three year old mother in her parlor watching TV. She’s in a cushioned chair in one corner; I’m to her left on the couch. At the end of the room facing Mom is her wide-screen Toshiba HD television propped atop a Quasar console. She had me buy the Toshiba a few years ago when the Quasar wore out.

We’ve managed to keep my mother at home by hiring caretakers who alternate shifts with my sister, my wife, and me. I learned quickly that this job of caretaking requires lots of sitting and watching: Mom watches TV and me, I watch TV and Mom. I’ve tried to make the time productive by cleaning and tidying up, doing bills, or attempting to read or write, but I get sidelined by the loudness of the TV and by her repeated requests to rise and walk around. Even with a walker, she’s unsteady and at risk for falling, so I’ll assuage her concerns, for example telling her the milk definitely was returned to the refrigerator and promising to check again to make sure. I’ve figured out tricks to get me out of her sight, out of her mind, like staying in another room, but near enough to respond. However, I’d rather she knows she’s not alone, so I’m back on the couch.

There’s an obstacle to my being productive, though, that’s more disruptive than my mother’s demands to get up three times in an hour. It’s not the temptation of the peanut butter crackers on the kitchen counter or Snickers ice cream bars in the fridge, or even my wish to lie back on the soft couch for a nap. Rather, it’s a TV station, the Hallmark Channel, and its afternoon movie romances, with titles like Puppy Love or The Wish List or Recipe For Love, and story lines like “A perfectionist makes a list of qualities she’s looking for in a mate, finds an ideal guy, but is instead drawn to a kooky barista who encourages her to loosen up.” Predictable, sentimental, addictive as hell.

When I mentioned this to a co-worker, he reacted badly—“If I watched Hallmark I’d never admit it”—making me wonder if he might be a closeted Hallmark guy.

In front of guests at a dinner party, I asked another friend if he watched. An ex-Marine, he glared at me and let out a two-tone low-high “Nooooooo!”

My own habit started last summer. I arrived at my mother’s to find that the previous caretaker had left a Hallmark story on. It was about a woman attracted to a brilliant astrophysicist, unaware an aneurysm had caused him to have short-term memory impairment. He’s kind and gentle and one evening directs her attention towards the clear sky, explaining fascinating facts about star constellations and the universe. They’re young, shy, and falling for each other. He conceals his impairment by recording their conversations on an electronic pen for later review and by scattering post-it note reminders around his apartment. His sister warns that if he cares for this woman, he’d better reveal his problem. But he fears he’ll lose her. When she inevitably discovers the notes and recordings, she’s repulsed and breaks up before he can explain. This causes me to jump at the screen; they’re so right for each other!

I realize the story should end well—it’s Hallmark after all—but I want to see them reconcile, to witness their embrace. Problem is, the show has thirty minutes left and it’s Saturday and my wife’s turn to stay with my mother and my turn to get to church for the 5:30 mass. Since it’s ridiculous to miss church for a TV show, I plead with my wife to stay focused and fill me in later. After church, she tells me “yes they got back together” and mentions that there was “also something about brain surgery to correct his memory problem.”

“Did they perform the surgery?” I ask.

“I think so, but I got a call and don’t remember much else.”

Many of the Hallmark stories have a similar path: two people are right for each other but something interferes. In the end, they realize how much they care and their love overcomes all. They’re attractive, often rich, successful … this can get monotonous and boring. I’m usually seduced anyway, but sometimes left with the feeling that I’ve wasted my time.

So I’ve tried to avoid the TV. I’ll mute it—Mom only grasps the visuals anyway—and turn away to read from my iPad or key my laptop or clean the kitchen or tidy up the dining room. But I’ll see the show’s characters reflected on the iPad and laptop screens. Or I’ll take an inadvertent glance at the TV from the kitchen or dining room and wonder what’s going on. I’ll grab the remote, press the info button, and I’m done.

During my teen years, I had a friend at the YMCA, an elderly guy, who’d discuss everything with me. He’d attended law school, was incredibly well-read, loved discussing politics, was a proud liberal, had strongly held opinions. He could be tough with someone espousing anything but harsh reality. I once told him that there’s someone out there, one special companion, for each one of us. He smiled and said “Joe, you’re a romantic and I love you for that.” He may have rubbed my shoulder or given me a hug, as he’d done on occasion, but he was saying I was young and naïve, and would learn in my own time about the harshness of life. He wouldn’t be the one to bring me down to earth.

---

I’m sitting in my mother’s parlor. The colors of this room, once a vivid mix of white and aqua, have faded since her renovations forty years ago. The wall-to-wall carpet is darker and threadbare in spots; the couch and chair, though well-kept, show wear, their edges frayed. The white paneling that made Mom so proud seems outdated, as does the white drop ceiling with its built-in light. However worn this room may be, the bright color scheme and five windows and cushiony furniture lends a cheerful, cozy ambience.

On top of a white table next to Mom’s chair is a phone, a box of Kleenex, and a framed 3 x 5 photo, circa 1980, of my parents. They sit at a restaurant, shoulder to shoulder, looking up to the photographer, Mom smiling, Dad savoring his meal. When I hand it to her, she rests it on her stomach, holding it with both hands and silently focusing on it. After several minutes, she asks me to return it in place next to her.

Dad and Mom loved watching TV in this parlor, laughing at the shows, discussing the news, cheering the athletes. When Dad died, the TV reminded Mom of these moments. She told me that watching it lessened the loneliness. She took over Dad’s chair until it was replaced by one that assists her up and down and elevates her legs. The corner spot is hers now, and the couch, her old spot, is mine. I turn my head from the TV and catch Mom looking at me. When I match her gaze, her eyes remain undeterred. I don’t know what’s in her mind, but her face is calm, content.

A Hallmark movie is playing: Meet My Mom—“A divorcee falls for a soldier who has become a mentor to her son. They’re hesitant to start a romance in light of the soldier’s upcoming deployment overseas.” My mother is comfortable and seems to be admiring these pretty people and assessing their hair-dos and manner of dress. I’m hoping the divorcee and soldier take a chance and allow themselves to fall in love.

Joseph O’Day obtained his BA and MBA from Salem State University and BS from Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. He has served as the Director of Pharmacy at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital since 1998. He has taken several graduate writing courses and is a long-standing member of Salem Writers’ Group. His writing focuses on the personal essay form, exploring family relationships and life transitions. Besides pharmacy and writing, he enjoys athletics and spending time with his family.

Hidden in Plain Sight

by Kirk Boys

Don’s group home is painted the same yellow as a sunflower. And it strikes me as odd that a place that holds so much sorrow within would be so bright on the outside. To see it you need to be willing to get off the main road. You need to know where to turn.

I volunteer for the library. My job: select and deliver books to people who can’t make it in on their own. My client, Don, is one of those people. He lives near Renton, Washington. There is no sign; you have to know where to turn off the county road, maneuver down a long, steep driveway at the bottom of which you take a sharp right, and the group home is there, hidden in plain sight.

Four other people live with Don. His caregivers are all from the Philippines and they are very good at what they do from what I can tell. The other residents at the sunflower colored house are there, like Don, for medical reasons. They all require full-time care and more often than not, this is the last place they will live. This past July, Don turned ninety-seven. My father would be the same age if he were alive.

Don can’t see very well and his hearing is even worse, so I end up shouting at him. Not angrily of course, although, it is frustrating when you have so much to talk about and it’s so hard to communicate. I know this.

When I walk into Don’s room he smiles. That causes me to smile too.

The first and most important thing I noticed about Don is that he has an open mind. I find this remarkable for a man with ninety-seven years of living life a certain way. For example Don had not read a lick of fiction since his high school English class. So I bring Don fiction. He is open to reading anything though. I brought him Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume on my third visit. When I asked him what he thought of one of America’s most avant-garde authors, Don said with a smile, “Pretty good.”

He appreciates the smallest kindness. He spends most every day in his room, sitting in his wheelchair reading or napping. I usually find him facing into his closet, a book in his lap. He likes that spot because the light pours through just so.

I visit Don every three weeks. He causes me to experience aging in a very personal way, to consider how it must feel to need someone’s help to use the bathroom, someone to clean you up after, to wear a bib when you eat. To make the simplest decisions like taking a sip of orange juice knowing it will cause you to choke. That is the kind of person Don is though. The kind who is willing to take that risk for the sweet taste of reconstituted orange.

I had three library clients before I got matched up with Don, but each has passed on.

My volunteer coordinator at the library warned me, “Try not to get attached.”

I didn’t believe her. After all, I just deliver books.

Each of my clients has been different, their taste in books, what they wanted or expected of me. Diane was eighty three and was very specific. “I don’t want any romance or suspense. Don’t bring me biographies or memoirs or nonfiction of any kind. No sex or violence, I only want books on tape and I am most fond of cat mysteries.” Diane’s home had stuffed animals on display. A moose head was mounted in the home’s community room. There was a cougar on the prowl. A wild boar and a lynx stuffed in life-like poses prowled above the dining area. There was an elk head, a deer and buffalo too, their eyes glassy, as if unsuspecting of their fate. Diane never complained about the dead animals that stared menacingly down at her while she ate her meals. They would have bothered me.

Diane’s request for cat mysteries on tape seemed a tall order, but I looked around and found Lillian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who Had Sixty Whiskers and The Cat Who Read Backwards on tape and I took them to her. Mostly though, Diane and I would talk. In her tiny room she told me stories about her life. She bragged about her grandkids. 

“Both girls are exceptionally bright,” she said.

We’d known each other about a year when I got a call. A lady told me Diane had died and the cat mystery tapes had all been returned. She said, “There is no need for you to come back.” And that was that.

Don is only able to read large print. I go to several libraries and scan the large print stacks in hope of finding something I like and Don might enjoy. I want to believe this is not self-serving. That pushing my personal literary taste on Don is not a way of validating my own taste in books. But I must say, Don is one of the best read ninety-seven year olds in King County.

This is how it usually goes. I gather four or five books and I head over to Don’s. I knock on the door and wait, after a minute or so, Cynthia answers. She is petite with short hair and kind eyes. Cynthia almost never smiles, her demeanor is deadpan, but there is something about her. She has this warmth, a confidence, a knowing that shines through.

“Hi, is Don here?” I always ask. This is a stupid question of course. Don’s not able to go anywhere. So I guess I am really asking, is Don still alive? I hold my breath for that split second. It makes me sad to tell you this, but it is the truth. Bringing books to Don a few undeniable truths jump out at me.  They come unexpectedly and they are powerful.

“Back in his room,” Cynthia says, turning and pointing with a sort of made-up annoyance. I think Cynthia actually likes seeing me, but doesn’t want to show it, thinking it would be unprofessional. Cynthia is one of those matter-of-fact people. The ones who have the attitude you probably need if you are going to spend your days with people nearing the end of their lives. Cynthia wears a light blue caregiver outfit. She likes Don and Don likes her too. I can tell.

In the living room I see five brown recliners in a semi-circle, facing the TV. Only two are occupied. In one, a man sits, his head is laid back and drool is streaming from the corner of his mouth. His name is Joe. When Joe is awake, he screams and groans. No one is quite clear why. Maybe he wants something or he is in pain or just wants people to know he is alive and pissed off about it. Or it could be, he just wants someone to take notice of him, but that’s mostly me just guessing. Don told me he found Joe irritating.

The TV is always on the Filipino channel. A game show or soap opera of some sort blares in the background with beautiful Filipino women talking fast or singing. Just behind the recliners, out the living-room window, I can see Lake Washington. No one else can. They are faced the wrong way.

In the other chair, Lily sits with her black and silver hair knotted in a bun atop her head. She is missing a good part of one leg, from the knee down. Her stub is wrapped in heavy bandages.

“Hi there,” I say.

“Hello,” she answers politely. “He’s in his room.” She points.

I have offered to bring books for Lily, but she declines. I guess she would rather watch the Filipino channel. I don’t believe she understands Tagalog. It is as though Lillian is marking time and it breaks my heart.

I head back about then, past the table where the residents eat, their places set for the next meal. There are no lights turned on, instead, natural light fills the room with a dull gray. There is a faint smell of urine. If you were to ask me what color is sadness? I would say it is gray, without question.

“Sure you don’t want me to bring you a book?” I ask Lily, one last time.

“No thanks,” Lily answers. I feel bad for Lily. I feel bad for Joe too. It looks to me that getting old is frustrating, lonely, painful and hard. I can see it in her face. I see it in her weak excuse for a smile. They both look miserable. Then Lily looks at me as if to say, “Why are you acting so jolly buddy? Don’t you see how we are here? Don’t you see I am missing my leg, or that the guy next to me is drooling all over himself? Don’t you see this existence we’re living, here, in front of the TV and the Filipino channel? What the Hell are you doing here with your books and smiles?”

I find Don in his room, his back to me, hoping to catch enough light to read. It’s hard to tell if Don is reading or asleep, so I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Hi Buddy,” I say, trying to catch his attention.

Don smiles, “Well … hello … there,” he answers. That smile of his is worth a million-billion dollars. That smile is worth all the trips to the library and the long drive and the sadness of watching people trying their hardest to live out their remaining days in dignity. That smile of Don’s lights up the inside of the Group Home.

“How are you doing?” I shout. Then I wait. It takes a long while for Don to answer.

“Pretty good, I guess,” he says ever so slowly.

“How did you like the books I brought you?”

Don stares back at me, silent, our eyes locked. I feel uncomfortable at first, then, my patience begins to wane. There is so much I want to say, so many things I want to ask Don. Among them may be things I wished I had asked my dad before he was suddenly gone. But Don’s response is painfully slow. He can only hear half of what I say, so I repeat the question. “Did you like the books?” I shout louder this time.

As I wait for his response, I look around his room. There is a twin bed with a faded navy comforter. A single white pillow lies at the head. Next to it, on a small table, sits a Big Ben alarm clock. I notice how its ticks fill the long pauses. I observe what Don has brought to this room after nearly ninety-seven years on this earth. An old computer monitor rests on a small desk, its hard drive fan whispers, nearly imperceptibly. Two flannel shirts hang in the closet, next to some tan pants and a sweater. There are a few pictures taped to the wall. His kids, his sail boat, his wife, the pictures are old, tired, their color nearly gone, the people in them appear to me as ghosts from Don’s past. I wonder if he has somehow outlived them all.

“Life is more than one room,” Don says finally as I stand to leave.

It’s easy for me to forget, in the sparseness of his room, how smart Don is. He did research at MIT, worked on perfecting radar during the war, and then as an engineer for Boeing. He begins to cough. It happens every time. His torso heaves and his eyes water as this deep, rattling, choking, cough takes over his body. He coughs so ferociously that I begin to go for help. For I fear this to be his last cough. Then it stops, as abruptly as it began. Don swallows hard and looks at me and smiles, as if to say, “Fooled yah.”

I sit back down and begin going through the books from my last visit. I show him the cover and ask, “How did you like it?”

“Good,” he answers to a few, “Not so much,” to others. “You haven’t let me down yet,” he adds.

I don’t always have the endurance needed to stay long with Don. I don’t much like that flaw in my character. I don’t flatter myself believing that my visits are that big a deal in Don’s life or that I impact the quality of his days. It’s more convenient for me to think that way. Maybe the truth is that I don’t want that responsibility. I always feel different leaving Don’s group home. Three weeks from now, when I go back, I will have forgotten that feeling. I need to be reminded how fortunate I am. The group home does that.

When Don and I are finished, I walk past Joe and Lily and out the front door and into my car. There is a cold breeze. The air smells new, fresh and clean. I make the hard turn, then straight up the driveway and out onto the county road. I think about what the coordinator at the library said, “Don’t get attached.”

Kirk Boys is a writer living outside Seattle. He holds a certificate in Advanced Literary Fiction from the University of Washington. His work has been published in Storie-all write, an Italian literary magazine, in The Springhill Review, and was recently honored as a top twenty-five finalist in a Glimmer Train short story contest. He has two daughters, and four grandkids under the age of five, including twins. In addition to his library outreach service, he is a volunteer mentor for young writers at Richard Hugo House in Seattle.

Just Interesting

by Jonathan Mack

Tokyo, 2013

It sounds odd to call Taro my student since he was eighty-seven when he died and already over eighty when he started attending my English class. He was old enough to have been a soldier in World War Two—a very young, near-sighted, and perhaps slightly eccentric one.

I can report that although Taro’s English was slow and halting, he didn’t make many mistakes and he could say what he wanted to say. He did not, however, participate in discussions. While the other students related their ailments, holidays and grandchildren, Taro sat still as a statue, without seeming to move even his eyes, so becalmed you could be excused for thinking that he’d maybe gone a little soft in the head.

Each week, when the discussion had slowed a little, or when I saw that class would soon be over, I’d turn to Taro and ask, “So, Taro, any news?”

If it sounds like I wasn’t a very good English teacher, that’s the truth. I was lazy. I was too tired and too busy, like everyone else in the city of Tokyo. On the plus side, I was not very important in the lives of my students. A focused and energetic English lesson would only have gotten in the way. I was just an excuse. I was an excuse and I knew it. Just as the English language was an excuse.

Tokyo is the number one loneliest city in the world: I will arm-wrestle anyone who says otherwise. But these old people, sitting in a community center beside Akagi Shrine in the elegant district of Kagurazaka, were not lonely. They were having a good time and, if their grown grandchildren sometimes laughed because grandma was taking English lessons, and maybe had been taking English lessons since the Occupation though her English never improved much and she continued to say “I go to shopping” despite being corrected three times every Wednesday, still, I’m telling you, these old people were clever: they knew a thing or two about living.

Just because some people remain immune to wisdom all their lives does not mean that wisdom can be ruled out. Some people do become wise in their old age and some of those people, it turns out, go to English class, even when they are eighty-five years old.

Whenever I called on Taro, his magnified eyes would blink behind the heavy lenses of his glasses and he would rub his lips together to moisten them. Then he would open his spiral notebook and cough to clear his throat. Using his notes to assist him—there were always a few words he’d needed to look up—he would tell the class a story.

In my life so far, Taro is my favorite storyteller. If I tell you one of his stories, you will be disappointed and you will think that I am not a good writer. That is the truth—but I know, too, that I am not important and knowing such counts as a skill nowadays.

Taro’s stories proceeded as slow as tortoises. A sentence was a creative endeavor and, as such, deserved its full allotment of time and space. Each sentence ought to be allotted its own page, as in the storybook of a young child.

For example, when Taro traveled to Paris with his wife. They went to celebrate their 50^th wedding anniversary.

“Wonderful, Taro! How romantic! What did you and your wife do in Paris?”

Taro explained that it was raining in Paris. They did not feel energetic. The chambermaid was a single mother raising two children on her own. She taught Taro and his wife to count to ten in French.

“That’s great, Taro! And what did you do in Paris!”

At that point Taro nodded to the other students. They all smiled broadly to each other. I think it actually pleased them that their American teacher understood nothing whatsoever about life.

It was a long time before I understood that . . . nothing special needed to happen. Taro and his wife went to Paris to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. It was raining and they didn’t feel well. They stayed in the hotel and the friendly chambermaid taught them to count to ten in French. That was it. And that was enough.

Or the time Taro found a dead cat on his roof. A cat corpse saturated in cooking oil. Taro’s wife thought she smelled something. Taro got on his ladder and, sure enough, there was a large dead. oil-soaked cat on the roof. There were a lot of restaurants around where he lived. They poured used cooking oil into a barrel, but they didn’t always put a lid over it. The cat must have been lured by the smell and fallen in, then been overwhelmed when it tried to clean itself.

“Oh, Taro! I am so sorry! That’s terrible! That’s disgusting!”

For that matter, what the hell was an eighty-five year old man doing on a ladder?

Again, Taro looked to his classmates. Again, the knowing smiles and nods. Like I said, I think they really appreciated the fact that I could be relied upon to be dumb and insensitive.

The point was not that the cat was disgusting—it was all just interesting. Whether it was a dead cat on the roof or learning to count to ten in French, here was reality, and Taro attended to it.

Nothing bad ever happened to Taro. I was his teacher for years and I can attest to the fact. Nothing good happened either. Everything was just interesting. Whatever it was, he took care of it and wrote an account in his notebook, always with a few new words which he forgot almost as soon as he looked up from the page.

What a very interesting world it was. For example, it was interesting that he was constantly being arrested by the police. As a young man he’d never been arrested, not even once. Now he got arrested all the time.

This was because of his bicycle. He liked his bicycle very much, although it was just the ordinary heavy kind of bicycle which the Japanese use to get back and forth from the grocery store. He had built it himself, from the parts of many different discarded bicycles, and it was several different colors.

In Tokyo, when something breaks, you get a new one. Even if just one small part is broken, you get a new one. It is not usual to fix something, much less to make something from what others have discarded.

The police took one look at Taro’s multi-colored bicycle and assumed that he had stolen it, part by part. They put him in the squad car, drove him to the station, and accused him of being a bicycle thief. It took him a long time to convince him that he was just a person who liked to fix things.

This happened multiple times. It happened so often that the police chief, the moment he saw Taro, would rush over and start apologizing. The chief would apologize profusely, then lay into the patrol cop for having nothing better to do than accuse an octogenarian of stealing a bicycle.

The truth was Taro didn’t mind. He didn’t mind being arrested any more than he minded finding a dead cat on the roof or traveling to Paris. He was not at all displeased. He was not neutral either and certainly he was not unfeeling.

Taro lived to be 87. He was a painter and a teacher of art. For half a century he participated in annual exhibitions. His canvases were abstract and enormous and people who saw them invariably said that they seemed like the work of a much younger man.

As often happens in Japan, his final illness was hardly discussed. He retired from English class, then returned to it. Death, he said, would come when it was time -- it was not necessary to wait for it at home.

Taro lived several years longer than the doctors expected. Despite long friendship, no one in the English class was told he when he took turn for a worse, nor was anyone notified when he died. Someone heard of his death from a neighbor, a few weeks or a month later. This was neither unexpected nor rude—it is how death is done in Tokyo. It is considered polite to just slip out and not make such a fuss about it.

If there was a memorial service, none of us heard about it. It is not known, either, what has become of his paintings: they were so sprawling and ambitious that almost nowhere in Tokyo could a space be found to display them.

Jonathan Mack was raised on a family farm in New Hampshire, but has spent most of his adult life in India and Japan. Stories and essays have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Quarter After Eight, Eleven Eleven, Gargoyle, Epiphany, Zymbol, Hippocampus, Mary, Jonathan, Quick Fiction, The Tokyo Advocate, Japanzine and elsewhere. His blog is Guttersnipe Das.