Swing Low (26 page)

When we returned home, on April 4, 1997, the writing and the walking stopped. Got home to 58 Brandt Rd. in Steinbach at 5:50 p.m., reads the last entry of my travel journal. I think we should have kept on going perhaps, from one compound to another if nothing else, just staying away from Steinbach and everything it meant. But that’s a type of lifestyle that didn’t make any sense to me then, a vagabond’s life on the road, moving from place to place.

Speaking of moving from place to place, I’ve just come back from the morgue. (And how many of us can say that?) I didn’t mean to go there, but somehow I got lost, trying to find a place to walk without activating alarms. My daughter will come later and walk with me outside, but in
the meantime I felt as though I’d explode if I didn’t walk. I got on an elevator, pushed several buttons, like a kid, and moments later the elevator door opened in the basement, next to the underground tunnel that links the main hospital with the personal care home for seniors. I walked for a while through this empty concrete sterile tube until I heard the voices of children. I stopped dead in my tracks and wondered where I was. For a second I worried that I hadn’t prepared my lessons for the day. There was a slight bend in the tunnel, and the voices were coming from beyond this bend. I could also hear a sound that I thought was a toy car being driven back and forth along the concrete, something, anyway, with wheels. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. Then, from a distance of about a hundred yards, I saw a child fly up into the air in a crouching position and drop down again, unharmed. Then more children appeared, and they all seemed to be moving in circles around the inside of the tunnel, upside down and around and around, entirely unaffected by the laws of gravity. It was a lovely sight.

I stood very still and watched them. At first, I was afraid they would hurt themselves, but then, after a few minutes, I began to relax and enjoy myself. I didn’t know what was happening but the children seemed to know what they were doing and they appeared to be having a wonderful time. Suddenly, one of the children, a boy of about thirteen, looked over to where I was standing, and I could hear him call out to his friends, but I wasn’t sure of what he was saying. I panicked, thinking that by startling them I had risked their safety, and quickly looked around for a place to hide. There was a door next to me, one I hadn’t noticed earlier,
and I pushed through it, realizing instantly that I was in the morgue. Then I went through a rather sci-fi-ish episode of wondering whether I was dead and if the tunnel I had just been in was the tunnel they mention in stories of near-death experiences and whether or not the children were angels or versions of me or just what in the Sam Hill was going on. I stood in the room, surrounded by stainless steel drawers and cabinets and instruments, feeling relieved that it was over, that it wasn’t so bad after all, until I heard my name being called. Mr. Toews, came a boy’s voice from the hallway, is that you? No, I thought of saying, it isn’t! (I don’t know what’s become of him!) but instead I remained quiet, hoping that the boy wouldn’t enter the morgue and suffer the shock of finding me dead, but looking alive, or rather, finding me alive but feeling dead. Regardless, I didn’t want him to see me. I leaned, softly, against one of the drawers and closed my eyes, and waited. And while I waited, I prayed that God would forgive me for all that I had failed to accomplish, and that he would understand that I simply could not go on. I prayed for deliverance, and forgiveness yet again, and for some sign of understanding. I prayed that in spite of everything, I would be understood. That’s the last thing I remember of the morgue, but miraculously I am still alive and back in my room.

I have no idea what happened, how I got back here, or why. Am rather disappointed, after all, but grateful of course to have been helped. I will attempt to ask daughters, without alarming them, what the dickens happened to me down there.

A
t home I stayed in bed. When the girls and the grandchildren came to visit, Elvira would plead with me to get out of bed, to make an appearance at least and say hello. I’d gamely throw on a bathrobe and stumble down the hallway towards the living room like a modern-day Lear, wild hair and eyes, unshaven, and barely coherent. Eventually even that became too much for me, and the girls and the grandkids came to my bedroom to say hello, though often I was unable, or unwilling, to respond at all. They’d sit on the edge of my bed, chatting about their lives, offering to bring me a glass of water or a roll with butter, which, in addition to Snickers bars, was all that I ate. Elvira would stash several of the bars in the cupboard next to my pills where she knew I would find them. I had long ago stopped sitting at the table with her at regular mealtimes. If I wanted to get up and eat something I would do it at night, while she slept.
She continued to prepare the meals I had enjoyed before, however, hoping that I’d change my mind, which I rarely did.

Sometimes, in the evening, she was able to persuade me to sit on the loveseat with her for half an hour or so, and we’d hold hands and look out the large living-room window and talk about happier times and the possibilities for fun that lay ahead. Well, she talked about them and I nodded occasionally or smiled. She told me there would be more happy times, that we would weather this storm together just the way we had weathered all the others. Remember, she said, when I used to hide your alarm clocks so you’d stay in bed with me just a little bit longer?

I played with her gold bracelet, a gift I’d given her a year or so earlier, while she talked. It was all I could do to show her I was listening, that I loved her. Later in the evening, Elvira would join me in bed and take my hand and put it on her wrist and I’d move the fragile chain around and around and Elvira would say I love you too, Mel. Try to have a good sleep. At night, often, I would wake her because something had frightened me, a sound, a bad dream, or a premonition that something had happened to her, or the girls, or the grandchildren. She would reassure me that all was well and go back to sleep until I woke her again, fearful of yet another imagined threat or impending disaster.

During the day she continued to work as a therapist, seeing clients in her small office, Marj’s former bedroom, while I lay in my bed and waited for her to be finished. More irony: Elvira had earned a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy and was now helping other people get their lives together, even as ours were falling apart. I was unaware
of her own increasing level of exhaustion. I needed her too badly for that. There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.

My youngest grandchild loved to bring me my pills in a small painted eggcup, and I forced myself to smile and thank her each time. I wanted her to stay with me and sing her crazy, impassioned songs or to tell me one or many of her stories. Grandpa, she’d say, I’ll give you a choice: scary, sad, funny, or scary. I knew she loved to tell the scary ones. How about scary, I’d say. But not too scary, I’ll have bad dreams. Okay, she’d say and launch into the most bizarre and violent tale you could imagine coming from a six-year-old. Sometimes she would wander around and around my bedroom as she told her stories, in a type of creative trance. Sometimes she would jump up and down lightly on the bed as she told them, and as my heavy body moved up and down to the gentle rhythm of her bouncing, I would close my eyes and pretend I was on a boat at sea. I wanted her to leave immediately, to switch off the light and close the door behind her, to stop torturing me with the lightness and beauty of her being.

I had stopped going out for walks. I was too ashamed of myself, of what I’d become, and the very idea of discussing my so-called health or retirement with other robust and working men and women of my age, terrified me. I stopped going to church. Understandably, many friends and relatives had given up on me as an interesting person to visit, although their prayers, they assured me, would continue. But my minister kept coming by. He came to the house often, even after I’d begged Elvira not to allow any visitors
inside. He sat on the sofa and told me many things, that God loved me, that he loved me, that my faith would see me through this time, and though I didn’t say a word save for the rare whispered thank you, I appreciated those visits more than he will ever know.

In the meantime, I kept my doctors’ appointments, and continued to tell the doctors that I was okay. I might mention that my energy was low, or that it wasn’t what it should be, or that retirement can be a difficult time in a man’s life, or other vague complaints along those lines, but nothing more. I managed to pull myself together for these appointments and if I simply couldn’t, I asked Elvira to cancel them. Otherwise, I would arrive at the clinic washed, shaved, friendly, and well dressed. And then I’d act the part. If Elvira attempted (going to great efforts not to embarrass me) to convey the truth, for instance by telling the doctor, Well, he’s not entirely okay, really, I can’t get him to eat, or, This is actually the first time he’s been out of bed in several weeks, then the doctor would look to me for confirmation and I would only smile. I don’t think it was clear to him exactly what was going on. He didn’t know whom to believe, and I, after all, was the patient. If I said I was okay, only a bit tired now and again, well then … It was an awkward situation for all of us: Elvira was growing desperate and exhausted, wanting some type of help taking care of me, keeping me alive, but at the same time not wanting to admit defeat and afraid that I would misinterpret her request for outside care as a lack of love.

She was also trying to protect my privacy and my extreme pride. She knew I loathed the idea of anybody, other than
her, taking care of my needs and feared that my depression would get even worse if that were to happen. She had taken care of me for forty years and wasn’t about to quit. In this town, a good Mennonite wife is always more than capable of taking care of her husband. It’s held to be her duty and her life, and Elvira, in spite of her independence and liberal views, couldn’t move from under that yoke. And I said nothing to the doctor, nothing that might have lightened her load and given her an out, because I didn’t want her not to be there with me every step of the way. It’s clear to me now and I wonder: Who takes care of the good Mennonite wife?

Aha! My daughter has informed me that indeed I got “a little lost” in the hospital tunnel. She doesn’t say in a psychotic state, my daughter, she says I was “a little confused.” And the children? I ask. Dad, she says, do you know what they were doing? No, I answer, they were flying around the tunnel, happily, that’s all I really know. My daughter, smiling, says, Those kids were skateboarding! A couple of them were students of yours and they recognized you!

Horrors. I smiled and said, Oh really…

Continue plan to creep up on brain. Organic shock treatment, all natural. Recall the words of Ulysses S. Grant, in his attack at Vicksburg: With speed and audacity, men, we will win.

T
he situation at home became critical. Elvira’s own health had begun to suffer. Once, in Arizona, she was hospitalized briefly with dangerously high blood pressure. (Her sister, who was staying in a trailer nearby, had insisted that she go to the doctor after Elvira had passed out at the end of an uphill hike in 105-degree heat.) The doctor diagnosed her chest pain and shortness of breath as angina. He prescribed nitroglycerin puffers and patches and pills. Her gait, once brisk, slowed to a shuffle, and she stopped talking about better days ahead. She cried often to the girls, to her friends, to herself, but never to me.