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.

My Summer Mother

                                                             “Elders” Contest Honorable Mention

by Sharon Frame Gay

The corridors in the nursing home were quieter than usual. It was a Saturday, only a skeleton staff striding the halls.

I slipped into her room and found her sleeping. Nodding at her new roommate, I set up a small table from home, fitting the little Christmas tree on it, lighting it, and fetching decorations from my bag, I placed them around the tree.

"Mom," I whispered, "Wake up. See what I brought you.” Her eyes opened slowly, then widened with happiness as she looked at her surprise. "So pretty,” she murmured.

"It's your own tree, from home, Mom," I reminded her, and she nodded, staring at the fiber optic tree that she had bought several years ago. She smiled sweetly, drinking in the sight, then turned and peered up into my face.

"I want all my money, my checkbook, bank account statements, and credit cards, right now," she hissed, " I am canceling Medicaid, leaving this place, and I am completely finished with you. You're a liar and a thief, and you have even tricked your poor brother into believing the things you say."

So begins another day, channeling through the sundry personalities that morph like the lights on the Christmas tree, daily, hourly, minute to minute. My mother. My jailer, my muse, my genetic partner, and my childhood fairy princess, now turned into an evil witch who smears poison apples against my teeth and begs me to swallow.

Stumbling out the nursing home door in tears and rage, I was like a dog hit by a car, wanting to bite whoever comes near.

At home, I crumpled into tears, keening as I rocked back and forth in exhaustion from spending months handling my mother's medical affairs, finances, household, and pet, while she languished in the nursing home in a flurry of psychotic dreams.

"Your mother is suffering from delirium, visual hallucinations, delusions and confusion. She has progressive dementia and failure to thrive. She is likely terminal."  I nodded thoughtfully as the doctors and nurses, practitioners and psychiatrists gave me their diagnosis, but inside I thought, "Oh no, she's not. She is far from terminal, only a dream away from coming back into the swirling world where she has always reigned. She is going to rise again, for she is immortal.”

I was first introduced to my mother under a bright white hospital light on an oak-lined street in Chicago, pulled from her womb, wet and squalling. But I did not truly meet her, nor fall in love with her, until I was four years old, as we left the city behind one day on the way to our lake house in Michigan. I was bundled into a small red sweater, stuffed into the back seat with our old spaniel. Peering up at the front door of the bungalow, I saw my mother emerge in a flash of long legs, her sneakers skipping down the steps, hair in pigtails under a cap, with the brim snapped over her Nordic blue eyes. This was not the Ice Queen who came home each night from work in the dark, trailing the cold of January on the hem of her long, grey coat. Nor the enigmatic young woman, seated with her parents and my brother and me around the kitchen table in the golden lamplight after dinner. Then, she was more like a bigger sister, sharing her day with her two young siblings and her parents. No, this was the Lake Fairy, gliding into the car with a grin plastered on her face, her troubles left behind in the rearview mirror, as we departed the curb in a flurry of joy and laughter. My Summer Mother. I felt a flash of excitement and mystery with just a hint of fairy dust as we headed to the lake.

"Come with me,” my mother smiled, one hot July afternoon. "I am going to give you the greatest gift in the world. Books.” I followed her down the dusty road to the public beach, where a dingy tan Book Mobile sat, low on its tires in the shifting morning, the lake in the background like blue silk. Inside the musty bus, a treasure trove of books waited on shelves, motes of dust in the sunlight glinting off the spines as though they were enchanted. On the bottom shelf were children's books. "May I borrow one"? I asked tentatively. "You may borrow as many as you can carry", she grinned, and I filled my tiny arms with volume after volume, excitement rising as we hurried back down the lake road and into the cool glade of the front porch. She read to me into the evening, sharing pirates and ponies, puppies and faraway lands. I hung on each word, my head on her chest, hearing the rumble of her voice and knowing I would recognize it anywhere.

And so began the enchantment and bewitching, the blessings and the curse that came with being my mother's child.

One day I walked into the nursing home and found her in tears. "What's wrong, Mom?" I asked, alarmed. She sobbed, "I am thinking of Troy". Troy. My brother who died a year ago, but until yesterday, my deluded mother thought was on a ferry boat with her on their way to Germany in happier times, he forever nine years old. She had been sending me out into the facility hallway for days now, to call him in for supper. Now, she remembered the truth. I nodded in empathy, as she raised her sorrowful blue eyes to me. Then, she began to cry again. "Look at me", she sobbed, "I'm a cripple." She reached out her hand to me. I clasped it between mine, staring down at her. "What have you DONE to me!" she wailed, and I felt every word like an incantation, hexing me, driving me down with her into an abyss so dark that the night seemed bright by comparison.

She had been lying in a pool of misery for over three months. The doctors and physical therapists had given up on her, recommended only comfort care. Mom did not eat, she did not drink, and needed round the clock assistance. I called my brother to discuss if we wanted her to be tested for a cancer. The doctor said she was declining, and not wanting to add another layer to her grief, we agreed not to have her undergo painful biopsies and procedures.

Two days later, a physical therapist called me. "It is a miracle", she trilled. "Your mother suddenly stood up by herself, and walked! The aides came running to my office to bring me in to see it. Your mother can WALK after nearly 3 months bed ridden."  I thought, "No. It is no miracle. She has simply decided to wake from her dark dreams and start moving again".

When I was twelve, she married a terrible man. A man so rank and evil that ravens began to nest on our roof tops, so dark that even now when I tell the tale my heart skips and I tremble inside. And for eight long years we lived like paupers in a snake's nest, going from town to town in hopeless abandon while my mother alternately tried to kill herself, then him, and succeeded only in killing the spirit of my brothers and me.  Beneath the terror and the heartache, Mom was sweet and guileless. We thought she was a victim, too. We gathered around her, shielding her from coming storms. At all costs, we protected her, we as drones and she as the Queen Bee. Protect. Get hurt. Protect again with our young bodies, our frightened souls. Still, the scales did not fall from my eyes. I returned again and again to drink at the pool of confusion, as she was the only adult now in my young world. I thought all families were like this. I rejoiced at the magic, and cowered at the curse, losing myself in canyons so vast, that it took me years to find daylight again.

I can remember her on a summer swing, her laughter trailing softly in the coming dawn, singing songs with me as trout breached the still waters, the smell of wood smoke in the air. Mom was a nymph, skirting in and out of my consciousness like quick silver, while my grandmother was the one who held my head over the toilet, washed my hair in the bath tub, or brought me lunch while I lay, prostrate in bed, too terrified to go to school, afraid that when I returned, it would be to an empty house, and I would be left behind down some dusty road with no map, no way to find my family again

.

I can remember her screaming at me, her hands like talons, reaching to grab and scratch at me like a trapped cat. And I remember her calmly beside me, my heart broken over a lost love, her hand cupping my head like an eggshell, as I find solace at her knee.

Now we bring flowers and candy, promises of spring, all to lay before her feet as she travels first down one road, then another in her delirium. I am left forever behind, always trying to catch her long enough to gather some warmth on a sunny day, or to turn the corner and find her waiting for me, hand outstretched, as she says, "Hurry down the road with me, for the moon is coming up and the hills are awash in starlight."

I had followed her through canyons at midnight in the Arizona high country, my small legs barely spanning the back of an old mule, as her horse picked its way through the gullies, heading true north under a promising star. I had hid in terror as she ran through the house screaming with a shotgun, had felt my heart thud when I found her standing on a chair with a noose around her neck, threatening to jump.

 My brother and I rode in the back of a pickup truck as we moved from town to town, stopping by the side of the road to cook. We left pieces of our souls from one end of this country to another as she chased demons up and down the highway. We were in limbo, ghosts passing through town after town, pausing each summer to return to the lake, finding our reflection in the water. Our love for her was fierce, our gypsy spirits held in her thrall, children of her rebel soul.

"It was magical,” my brother said one dreary afternoon, and I paused. Yes, I think. It was magic. And still is. For how else can she rise from her bed and enchant the entire nursing facility? How else can she drive me to my knees in fear and distrust, and keep me wandering through so many sleepless nights? How else can I hate her and love her all in the same breath, while she continues to dance in the shifting change of darkness and light, sweetness and cruelty, while the world spins on in stoic indifference?

My brother sighed. "Nobody would ever understand.” I nod. Nobody can. For it has been a lifetime of colors and threads, wafting and weaving into something so beautiful, so cruel, that my eyes burn if I stare at it too long. "She can't live forever, you know,” he said. "Life's impermanent. This, too, shall end.”

I scoff, take a sip of jasmine tea. "Oh no, you're wrong, my friend. It stays with us forever,” I say as I hear the sound of laughter and tears trailing down the nursing home corridor, across time, to the dusty road by the lake.

Sharon Frame Gay grew up a child of the highway, traveling throughout the United States, playing by the side of the road. Her dream was to live in a house long enough to find her way around in the dark, and she has finally achieved this outside Seattle, Washington. She writes poetry, prose poetry, short stories, and song lyrics. Her work can be found in Puppy Love 2015, bioStories, and Romantic Morsels.

"Elders" Contest Winner Announced:

John Messick of Homer, Alaska has won the Spring 2015 contest with his essay "The Fisherman and a .410 Shotgun".

Honorable mention selections went to: Sharon Frame Gay, Susan Lindsey, and John Scrimgeour. Many thanks to all those who submitted. Watch the bioStories website for publication of their fine essays.

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.