This Is Running for Your Life (13 page)

*   *   *

The Melville complex, conceived in the recent tradition of elder care, gives a graduated structure to inexorable human decline. For the freshman they offer “independent living,” a proto-dorm with dollhouse attractions including an on-site hair salon (shampoo and set for fifteen bucks; updo for twenty-five), a game room, and nurses roaming the halls with the day's meds nested in little plastic cups, like Mother Pharma's eggs. On another floor of the same building is the next level of care, for those who need assistance with the business of living. Across the road and down the way is Melville's nursing home, which makes no bones about its form or function and is therefore little mentioned.

My mother and my aunt settled on Melville in early 2007, when Rita's depression was proliferating beyond the means of their phone calls, meals deliveries, and biweekly visits. Toronto, though closer to her home and most of her family, was beyond consideration financially, with a five-year waiting list and starting rates in the vicinity of five thousand dollars a month for some five hundred square feet. The market is growing as steadily as the population is aging, and people like my parents are already planning for an independent dotage, refusing to be nursed into death in a curtain-lined cot, and never considering that their children might take up the cause.

Almost four years after that move, Rita is on the verge of being kicked out of independent living for various bodily insubordinations. The terms have an existential vagueness: if you can't take care of yourself, you can't stay. My own independent lifestyle couldn't stand the scrutiny.

*   *   *

On this, Palm Sunday, the lobby is trimmed with secular displays of psycho bunnies, mutant eggs, and an insinuating pink plastic moss. The elevators, papered with cheery reminders about the weekly meetings of the bridge club, the cribbage club, the “news and views” club, the men's club, the knitting circle, egg painting, and something called Red Fridays, tend to make me melancholy. Your every theoretical desire anticipated and presented back to you in bubbly script.

The elevator doors, also tailored to the slow-moving residents, are programmed to hang open an extra ten seconds. The halls are wide and have bars along the sides for unsteady walkers, whose ranks my grandmother has recently joined. After a knock at number 407, I open the door and peer in. Inside I see the top of Rita's head at the other end of the apartment, beyond the galley kitchen. She is sitting in a favorite chair, one of a long-lived, velveteen husband-and-wife pair. It's just the one now, the second chair having recently succumbed to an accident. Last year she was moved from a one-bedroom into a studio, her surroundings seeming to whittle in ruthless sympathy with her flesh.

“Ohhh,”
she says, a light, wobbly sound of agreement. Rita repaints her new favorite word every time, not with new colors but a whole new palette. She watches with interest as I hump my luggage through the door.
“Hello.”

Even more frail than I remember, Rita's body is reduced to the joints beneath her black slacks and gray cotton top. Only the toes of her purple, embroidered velvet slippers touch the ground, a dainty effect that reminds me of the pride she was known to take in her appearance. Raised up tough and superthrifty in every other respect, Rita has no memory of ever washing her own hair; after her mother stopped doing it, she began a lifetime routine of weekly visits to the salon. French to her core, she ate and dressed simply but very, very well. An accomplished chef whose kitchen turned out well-distributed pots of soup and pans of muffins, her modest parcel of extra weight in later years was a constant source of resolve.

I used to puzzle over her letters, typically a newsy log of minor complaints and small but potent comforts. She would spend a paragraph describing the baking and eating of a single pineapple-coconut muffin, split and topped with cut strawberries ($1.47 a pound at Price Chopper) and cream whipped by hand, then savored with a cup of peppermint tea as rain sluiced down her balcony doors after her return from a matinee. Though I was often warmed by these private contentments, the greener, more impatient part of me—the part that was more confused all the time about how to please myself—would think,
Why is she telling me this?

Hailing the arrival of Vidalia onions from the south in a 2004 letter, she laid out her dinner plans—calf's liver with piles of fried Vidalias and finger slices of green pepper. “It doesn't take much to please me these days,” she wrote. “And I take great pleasure in all the good produce we are able to get from all over in the winter.” How strange that these kitchen dispatches should read as almost radical to me now.

Today her uneaten lunch is draped with a napkin on the kitchen table. Days of upright dozing in the copper-colored chair have pressed her white-blond hair into a tufted corona. The rain is marine, soaping the windows in tidal, car-washing whorls. I first saw her like this in early 2007, during a trip to London to help clean out her apartment. I remember her drifting through the rooms, already twenty pounds lighter in her cotton nightie, as we apportioned her life's belongings. I can see Rita hovering in the kitchen doorway as my mother succumbed to the desperate mood and began shouting about uneaten pizza in the fridge, a misunderstanding that left us all spent. Beyond the shock and heartbreak of that day, what I have felt in the face of my grandmother's suffering is humility. Only a fearsome and disarming force could account for that kind of transformation, and perhaps as often as I begged it to leave her be, I prayed that it would spare me on its way.

I fill the candy dish and place it by her with a fresh glass of water. Rita leans over, ever cordial, and lifts a single chocolate-covered raisin to her mouth. I take a seat across from her, on the hard-cushioned couch she'd had re-covered in royal-purple twill a few years back, and watch her chew. We haven't really been alone since her move to Halifax. My letters are neatly filed on a nearby shelf, their envelope tops lightly frayed in the old style, back when correspondence was an art with its own set of tools. Her expression remains dazed but attentive, and I realize I had hoped for too much.

I had told myself I'd be happy just talking about the movies and would settle for the weather. But the hope that Rita would relent—the belief that she
could
relent—lingered. Part of me still believed I could make her feel the play of time working against us—that it would become unavoidable, and it was a kind of sin not to acknowledge it. It's a weakness of mine, and not only with ailing ninety-five-year-olds.

When I was twelve years old, while saying goodbye to my perfectly lively paternal grandmother under perfectly normal circumstances, I became certain, in a ghastly instant, that I would never see her again. The scene has slow-motion clarity: my dad behind the wheel, Margaret riding shotgun, and me in the back. She was heading to the train station after my drop-off at school. I thought I might draw one last hug, but Margaret remained in her seat, twisting over her left shoulder as we idled in the staff parking lot. I never lost the toddler's impulse to plank out with grief when a loved one leaves the room, or the city; like most of us I just learned to hide it better. But the awful twinge bracketing the bright, brow-lifting smile and
Goodbye, dear
she gave me—the shutter release of memory quietly engaging—was different. Six weeks later, Margaret succumbed to the gallbladder cancer that was at its steady work that morning, and throughout the days she had spent babysitting my brother and me.

That week I had taken to recording her secretly, with the Dictaphone I had requested, after coveting the one in my mother's briefcase, as a Christmas present. It felt a little sordid, but I couldn't seem to stop. During our early breakfasts, before my brother woke up, I would slip it out of my housecoat pocket—one always dressed for toast with Margaret—under the kitchen table, easing down the record button as she launched into one of her soothingly discursive stories. I didn't mention these recordings until after she had died, when everyone was too distracted to think much of it.

From then on, interrogating parting moments for signs of the inevitable became a kind of personal safety issue, like buckling up or checking the stove before you leave the house. I was always turning back to rinse a last glimpse of a loved (or, frankly, barely liked) one in developing fluid—just in case. I wanted to be on top of every story, a step ahead, and fancied I had the gift. I have a digital voice recorder now, my job requires it, and I brought it with me to Halifax.

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Life at Melville is meal oriented. Once a week, a sheet of printed foolscap is slipped under each resident's door: seven days, seven dinners, five components (appetizer, entrée, starch, vegetable, dessert) per dinner, at least three options per component. A morning could be parceled to settling the forthcoming week's menu. The idea that we revert to a childlike state in old age feels condescending, too simple to be human. Illness and infirmity are unwilled dependencies, after all, and even infants, I reminded my mother when she characterized Rita's latest decline as a regression, will cry when their diaper is full.

Yet structure—particularly feeding structure—takes on a devotional strictness in the elderly that most plainly suggests the cherished routines of childhood. If life is bookended at all, it may be by the assertions of the body, and the demands that we push into dormancy as adults, believing they can be mastered, subjugated, or separated from a nimble, developed psychology. Even in depression, even when she refused much of what was on her plate, mealtime called to something basic in Rita. A two-inch stack of menus from weeks past sits on her ottoman. Unwilling to throw them out, she turns to the pile often, as if for comfort. That page of foolscap is the last evidence of preference or appetite in Rita's life; her visitors tend to examine it like an illuminated text. I was to join her that night in the dining room, a culinary battleground I had visited before. If I had any remaining innocence I left it there: it's been fifteen months since my last Melville meal, and the words
vegetable medley
still make me flinch.

Rita's stunned but pleasant look has been turned my way for fifteen minutes when she asks about my flight. I make it brief; it seems perverse to bring news of worldly monotonies into that room. This is my first mistake. A disappointed flicker in her expression confirms that a solid air-travel epic calls to that same something basic in even the semicatatonic among us. I think it's because these stories reinforce a common and yet still mildly exotic experience, making folklore of a particularly Western concern: this is what happens when you relinquish control.

During our vigil at the gate, my standby comrade had turned to me as soon as his phone call ended and repeated, in perfected narrative form, what I had just heard. This is standard introductory behavior in airports, and elsewhere, should the topic arise. Language is no barrier: the story of stranded passengers, refused vouchers, and fat-ass seatmates will be pantomimed, if it must be. Witnesses to these oaths repair to a boredom-proofed place inside themselves, politely waiting out each unexpurgated detail, then seizing the moment to reciprocate with a butt-numbing misadventure of their own.

So I go back to the beginning and give it to Rita in chapters, with character arcs and a strong moral finish. Her thin, chugging coughs signal appreciation along the way. Then the quiet returns. It's the dead air I find toughest, despite being a longtime proponent and regular practitioner of comfortable silences. Rita, on the other hand, was the most Italian French Canadian I had ever known: for her silence was death. If something about her smoke-bombing monologues was disconcerting, beyond the lack of interest in or mercy for the person trapped in their blast radius, it was the sense that they formed an offensive line against some unseen pursuant. To see Rita mute was like looking at a woman just robbed and still standing in the street, stripped of everything that identified her as an actor in the world.

My last trip to Halifax was a heartbreaker, a winter voyage marked by every available impediment, yielding only a sense of its own uselessness. Rita's surpassing indifference had been painful—usually she rallied a little—but the larger frustration was more abstract. Her company
did
have a new, childlike quality, but she was not the source of it. The point at which the elderly and the infirm slip from protagonists in their own story to players—or even pawns—in the stories of others had arrived. There but not there, she was cognizant but more withdrawn than ever. It seemed we had only our bodies and their proximity to offer, yet I felt myself malignant somehow, as though every syllable of the talk that went on without her endorsed her living disappearance. My mother had come to think of the trips as support for my aunt—there was no return on any other kind of investment—and suggested I do the same. But who was this phantom sitting among us as we chattered with forcible gaiety, supporting each other until our gums ached?

I was defeated by that trip. Though I kept up the occasional letter and phone call, when the next year's visit came around, I passed.

With two and a half hours to go to dinner service—garden salad, roasted chicken with rice and broccoli, and lemon meringue pie—I begin recording. After twenty minutes of silence and the production of a sour feeling—the deceit of experiencing a personal moment with one eye on posterity—I press stop. The rain is a CGI sea creature thrashing against the apartment's picture windows. I owe the rain money and slept with its best friend. The wind, a wingman, judders the glass in its frame. There's an electric-blue bunny in my lap, a stuffed animal mistaken for an infant by the nurse who sweeps in with the afternoon's dosage of I don't know what.

Shortly before the nurse's appearance Rita had made the effortful series of facial expressions that signal she is about to speak. We had been contemplating each other openly for a stretched-out moment. “You look like the Madonna, sitting there,” she said.