Habit (8 page)

Our guest room is on the third floor, which wouldn't work for Ma: too many stairs. My office is on the second floor, and it has an attached bathroom outfitted for an old person with grab bars and things.
I could move my desk up to the guest room and put a bed in the office . . . we do get along remarkably well when Ma's sick for some reason. What a feeling of accomplishment, to do that for her. And think of all the bother I'd save myself if she were right there instead of at her place. I think we might possibly be able to do this. . . .

By three a.m. I've managed to tune out the beeping smoke detector, so I'm finally dozing when a noise in the kitchen rouses me. The dishwasher is going, and it sounds like Ma's in there rearranging the cabinets or something. I listen for a while, not unaware of the behavioral contrast between my eighty-five-year-old mother in the kitchen tonight and the saucepan-rattling fifty-something Ma of my childhood. That Night of the Fork, you could tell she had a healthy head of steam building. Tonight, despite the odd hour, I sense no imminent eruption.

Swish.

Beep.

Rearrange.

Swish swish rearrange beep rearrange beep swish. . . .

I fight my way back to sleep, brooding on the month Ma stayed with us after she sold their house in Florida. She had a hard time adapting to someone else's house rules, like keeping the front door locked so burglars, rapists, and child snatchers won't get in, or not wandering outside to tell our lawn guys to cut David's cherished hedge down to the nubs (he'd been nurturing it for months to get it to just the right thickness and height), meanwhile forgetting she'd just left several pots of seaweed going on the stove at a very high heat and the entire downstairs was filling with smoke. Knowing her stay was temporary helped, but the kids were little then and sleep was precious and elusive. I found myself drawing the line one morning at five a.m. when Ma decided to make a phone call to Europe at the top of her lungs and woke us all up. In the wee hours, I tend to lose track of things like why it's important to be hospitable to old people in the midst of a tricky life transition.

Smash!

I leap out of bed. Ma's standing barefoot outside the bathroom. There is broken glass all around her on the floor. It seems she has decided she needs a special glass carafe of Holy Water by the bed. It simply can't wait till morning and, still unsteady from the anesthesia, she has dropped it.

I storm around finding slippers and dustpans, and when she's settled into bed, she doesn't dare ask me, Evil Susie, reveling in all my exasperated glory, to empty the shards of glass out of the
scrap basket,
and I don't stop after leaving the bathroom door open as wide as I can. I make a
special
trip to yank open the guest bathroom door, too, and another to take my coat out of the closet and slap it emphatically on the floor, just to make my point very, very clear.

The good news is it is now eight-thirty a.m. in England. Libras are also very accommodating about being dumped on when you need to express what you're
not
going to do about the Elephant.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

H
ERE'S THE THING
about Holy Oil and Holy Water: They are multipurpose and they never run out.

It's quite scientific. When Holy Oil starts to get low, you just add regular olive oil (
NOT Extra Virgin, only plain
), which magically makes the new oil Holy because it's been added to the already Holy Oil. The same goes for Holy Water. You get your original Holy Water from the priest and then just refill it from the tap when it's not quite all gone, and you've got a whole new batch.

Holy Water makes a very inexpensive hostess gift for a household lacking proper spiritual direction. All you need is an empty soy sauce bottle and a blank label. We have a few of these in the back of our cupboards:

If you like, you can put Holy Water in one of those spray bottles for ironing or for misting plants, and spritz the air of a room that doesn't feel right or something. It's a good idea to spray your car, too. If you misplace your spray bottle, you can just drizzle some on your fingers and flick it at whatever is offending you, like your daughter when she starts getting uppity. This is supposed to calm your daughter down, but it mostly makes her laugh at you, which is better than nothing. I am sometimes a little damp after spending time with my mother.

Ma uses a combination of Holy Oil and Water to float beeswax votive candles in little red glass lanterns. She places these in front of the icons she has displayed in her apartment. The lanterns are supposed to be lit all the time, even when she's asleep or not at home. They can be only
100 percent beeswax
; anything else appears to be Of the Devil and definitely won't produce the right effect.

The family is beginning to descend.

Colette is my telephone lifeline and we talk almost every morning now, but she doesn't like to get in the way. This is too bad since she's really the most qualified person we have when it comes to colon trouble. Due to Crohn's disease, her husband, Badger, has had enough of his intestine removed to decorate a good-size Christmas tree, but Colette's been mum on details.

She's more focused on her job as Operation Ma's financial analyst. Colette's collecting my scraps of numbers to make up spreadsheets about the costs we're facing for things like the Long-Term Care's Elimination Period (they'll cover assisted living, but only after you've paid your own way for a hundred days or thirteen thousand dollars,
but what if they don't approve her at all? It can happen—Felix read about it in the
Times!). On top of everything, we'll have to keep the apartment till we know whether Ma will really be well enough to move back.

The alternative to assisted living is home health aides, also covered in part by Long-Term Care Insurance, which, thank God, I got years ago when I saw this coming (
IF they approve her! Remember the
Times!). The Long-Term Care has a limit. The odds are Ma will outlive it, and things will skyrocket after that. We'll need drivers to help get her to radiation when I can't, meals brought in if she stays home, and oh my gosh, the logistics (not to mention the costs) are insane and we're all doing our best not to panic.

Our brother, Felix, likes to depict the women in our family's behavior in crisis as a bunch of monkeys in a cage, running uselessly around screeching and bouncing off the bars after the winds shift and they catch the scent of the lions (who are obliviously napping, safe in their pens all the way on the other side of the zoo). We monkeys are not making any noise yet, but we're fidgety.

Felix arrived today, his Subaru Forester covered with mud collected on the messy drive down from Vermont. He used to drive a pickup loaded with chunks of tree trunk. He's always got pieces of trees handy for his sculpting, and they conveniently double as ballast on the highways. Felix favors Birkenstocks no matter the season, but layers them with wool socks for winter—he's a genuine, crusty, foul-mouthed weather-beaten prep-school-followed-by-Ivy-League renegade. The ladies tend to be drawn to him. He's been a bachelor for decades now, and his caregiving experience to date has been limited to a series of mostly self-sufficient cats, but he's willing to try anything as long as the instructions are clear.

David's gone to Richmond to be fitted with George Washington's nose for the
John Adams
miniseries, and I can't leave the kids for long, but I've postponed things like the boys' wisdom teeth extractions. We've lost track of how long it's been since Ma had a bowel movement, and it's not looking good. She unhooked the chemo canister before it could produce any results because it made her too sick. She's still not feeling well at all. We have to get her strong enough for radiation.

So we've spent a couple of days hovering and fussing around with hot water bottles, calling reports in to doctors' services (of course, it's the weekend), and to Colette, who mutters cryptic, ominous things like
what won't go down must eventually come up
. There was an interesting episode at the apartment waiting for the phone to ring. We figured out a soothing way to rub Holy Oil on Ma's lower back. When Ma instantly felt some relief, she swore she could smell roses. This was supposed to indicate a miraculous event.

Ma loves these sorts of mystical phenomena, and she's always on the lookout for them. I don't feel much need of visions and such to sustain my own faith, and can't always suppress the urge to scoff. But this will become yet another of those memories I secretly like to hold close, and ponder.

There's an experience Ma had at her father's deathbed. Grandsir was a flyer, a captain in the Army Air Service when Ma's mother left her first husband (a dull but acceptable banker type) and her four eldest children (my mother's half-siblings) to marry him. This was before there was an Air Force at all, when the use of planes in warfare was brand-new and very daring. He flew those little planes with the open cockpits, and he used to cause a sensation landing them on the polo field at the Penllyn Club—very Errol Flynn, with the goggles and the scarf and everything. Grandsir had a treasure trove of stories to explain his collection of physical defects: He was missing two fingers (shot them off in a hunting accident, age twelve) and he couldn't straighten one arm (got it sideswiped driving too close to another car on a narrow country road). When Ma and her younger sister, Bobs, were little, they lived with their parents on army bases in Long Island, Virginia and Honolulu. Ma had a patchy on-again off-again relationship with her father after he and her mother finally divorced, but she wanted to be there for his health crisis.

Ma felt it was important to acknowledge the obvious, and pointed out to Grandsir that he was dying. He responded indignantly that he was
not
. When he eventually did die, Ma was the only one in the hospital room with him. She swears that she saw a transparent thing of some sort float out of her father's body. She says it looked like the logo for Philadelphia's ice hockey team, the Flyers: an orb shape attached to a large wing, similar to the snitch in the Harry Potter books. She is positive she saw this thing waft upward and disappear into the ceiling above him. The point she makes now is that Grandsir had an instinctive, unschooled faith in the afterlife and, for some reason we may never know, Ma was there to see real evidence: her father's very soul on its way to the next destination.

I didn't see Grandsir float off to heaven myself, but it's interesting. This morning, I did think I sort of smelled the roses in the Holy Oil. I know it started out as ordinary olive oil because Ma wouldn't allow it to be anything
but
. I'd bought the refills for her myself.

I arranged a visit from Michael (the reassuring administrator of the local Home Health Care service) for Ma to fill out her profile sheet and learn what they offer. Michael has an aide ready to come in anytime. The interview went like this:

Michael: I have a very nice, competent woman named Miriam who can come on Sunday morning.

Ma: Is she dark-skinned?

Michael: Um, yes she is. Why?

Ma: Is she light-fingered?

But the whole thing ends up with Ma moaning like an animal in labor, and me on the phone with the doctor on call at Huntingdon, trying to reach into the receiver and shake him (
she's not TALKING anymore, Doctor, she's just grunting on her hands and KNEES, rocking back and FORTH, so I don't think the milk of magnesia is really HELPING, Doctor
). They have no openings but want us to meet them in the ER—then
poof,
they call. A bed has been made available, which may or may not have something to do with the rose-scented Holy Oil, depending on who you talk to.

Ma insists all this makes perfect sense: The Holy Oil is why it is possible for her to even consider trying to take this trip without an ambulance. There's some confusion as to how to get her downstairs, highlighted by Felix and me debating the merits of using some bungee cords from the back of his mud-spattered Subaru to rig up one of the dining room chairs on a mover's dolly. Luckily, we scrounge a spare wheelchair in the Mills House. Ma is maneuvered into the Subaru, clutching her phone book with the priests' numbers and one of those bicycle water bottles with the pop-top I've filled with Holy Oil for the trip.

The doctor puts her on massive doses of laxatives, and Felix and I get to look at pictures of the tumor, which is behaving like an airtight cork and will continue to do so until they can get the treatment under way. We cancel Miriam. Ma's going to be in the hospital for a few days.

The winds appear to have shifted, and the musky lion scent has died down. I even get enough time to think of stopping at the liquor store to reward the monkeys with wine to go with our pizza dinner, before morning comes and Ma and I get the cage all to ourselves again.

I think it would be good to skip the details of how two or three weeks' accumulations of digested matter are safely and painlessly moved past a largish tumor when you are old and unable to get out of bed unassisted. Ma says the aides at Huntingdon are
saints.