I was hopeful as I drove my parents’ snow-covered car from their house in Shaker Heights to the Judson Park Retirement Community, where they now resided, at the edge of downtown Cleveland. After several months, Judson still seemed satisfactory to me. The apartments for Independent Living were light and comfortable, overlooking either a landscaped hillside or the downtown skyline. In the spacious Fisher Dining Room, with its crisp linens and fresh flowers on every table, friendships and love affairs flourished, inspiring the same gossip and backbiting as anywhere else. Even in Nursing, where the rules were restrictive, the aides seemed competent and kind, the administrators responsive to their charges’ needs. I considered my parents lucky to be able to afford such a place, though I knew it made my frugal father suffer to see the savings of a lifetime sucked rapidly into Judson’s coffers.
I parked in the Judson garage and rode the elevator to the top floor, where Dad was waiting in his apartment with papers for me to sign. He was still managing his and Mom’s affairs and paying bills, but he wanted to give me their powers of attorney, just in case.
We had all been glad when, after a month-long trial in a furnished suite, Dad had signed a lease on an apartment in Independent Living so I could prepare to sell their house. Now, as he opened the door at the sound of the bell, I was again pleased to see the pair of airy rooms I had furnished with their favorite items from home. How perfectly everything fit: the antique secretary, the Persian rugs, the swivel chair ridden by generations of squealing grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the marital bed, the cloisonné lamp they’d purchased on their honeymoon. The art from Mom’s collection fit so well on the walls where I’d hung it that even she, with her still-exacting taste, had approved.
Dad took my coat and kissed me gently on each cheek with a tenderness that seemed to be growing with his frailty. His once red hair was now pure white, but, aside from the color and the depth of the widow’s peak, it was still the hair of his youth, so thick and wavy that to tame it he wore a stocking cap to bed, made from Mom’s cast-off hose. He was dressed formally, as always, in a suit and tie, though we were only going to visit Mom, who now occupied a room on the fifth floor of the adjoining Breuning Health Center, in the dementia ward.
They had been together in their apartment only a few weeks when suddenly, in the middle of the night, Dad had found himself unable to breathe. He’d pulled the emergency cord beside their bed and been rushed to the hospital with congestive heart failure — probably due to the higher level of salt in Judson’s cuisine. Mom, alone and distraught, had wandered the halls in her chiffon nightgown, one satin mule on her foot, the other one in her hand, searching for Dad and asking each person she encountered to please get her husband on the phone: “His telephone number is 911.” Since she could not be left alone, she’d been moved to a room on five, which the death of the previous occupant had just made available. And when Dad had returned to their apartment from the hospital the following week, Mom had remained in Breuning.
In Dad’s kitchen I found a sinkful of dirty dishes. Though for several years he’d been doing all the dishes in their Shaker Heights house, here, without a dishwasher, he seemed not to know what to do. I filled the sink with soapy water and instructed him. Afterward, he sat me down to sign a pile of documents relating to power of attorney and, with lawyerly authority, affixed his notary seal beneath each signature.
“Ready?” he said brightly when he’d put on his hearing aid. Then he took up his walker, locked his door, and led me on the arduous route he followed daily to visit Mom in Bruening: a long walk to the elevator, down one floor, and another hike to a second bank of elevators, down another floor, then through heavy double doors and past rows of patients lined up in their wheelchairs, their eyes glazed or their heads lolling on their chests, some cuddling teddy bears, some calling out, some dozing before the TV.
At ninety-three, Dad, who hadn’t closed his law office until he’d turned ninety, was a man of such ebullient energy that even in repose he’d be either drumming his fingers or tapping his feet, burning off every calorie he’d consumed in steady between-meals snacking. Yet by the time we arrived at Mom’s room, he was puffing. “I’m told the exercise is tonic,” he assured me comfortingly.
After my first visit to Mom’s room, I’d wept. For a long time I’d watched her growing confusion without acknowledging what it meant. But in the dementia ward it had finally come clear to me: that strong, capacious, worldly mind that had once led a federation of sixty women’s organizations, though sunny still, was gradually shriveling, even as her dominion had shrunk from the whole of greater Cleveland to a single small room.
Not that either of my parents complained. Each time I arrived from New York City, they greeted me cheerfully with kisses, smiles, and reassurances. The nurses were touched by Dad’s loyalty, which brought him daily to visit Mom, and by my parents’ open expressions of affection. Declining all group activities, Mom and Dad stayed to themselves in her room, sitting in adjacent chairs and holding hands until sleep overcame them or it was time for him to go back up to the Fisher Dining Room for lunch. Often, he returned to her room in the afternoon, somehow managing to heave himself with a groan onto her high hospital bed for his accustomed nap, while she sat in her chair gazing quietly off into space until the winter light began to fade and her chin dropped to her breast and she, too, dozed. Sometimes they expressed gratitude for having come this far relatively undamaged.
Still, I wondered how they really felt about their sudden relocation to the country of old age — of frailty, weakness, heart failure, dementia, and the inescapable approach of death.
When we entered Mom’s room, I was surprised to find her perched on her bed listening attentively to an attractive, silver-maned man with a leonine head, who was volubly holding forth from his wheelchair. Seeing us at the door, Mom, ever the gracious hostess, made the introductions. “I’m Dorothy Kates. This is my daughter Alix,” she said, waving toward me. “And this —”
But before she could introduce Dad, he laid a proprietary hand on her arm and interjected, “I’m her husband, Mr. Kates.”
The visitor, undeterred, continued his animated talk. It took me a few minutes to realize that his words made no sense. The language was English, with its familiar inflections, but the sentences lacked any discernible meaning. Still, Mom listened with seemingly rapt attention, nodding periodically and using all her finely honed social skills to make the stranger feel at home.
She seemed so self-possessed that I wondered whether she really belonged here. To me, she appeared nothing like the other dementia patients, some of whom unzipped their flies to flash their organs or clutched at me as I walked by. We had balked at the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease — just because she repeated herself, lost her way, and refused to take her pills? When we sat talking in her room, she was herself: interested in everything we said, full of detailed reminiscences, all her grace and beauty intact. There was still only a trace of gray in her fine, dark hair, her bright eyes were responsive, and her skin was surprisingly smooth and taut over her dramatic Tartar bones. Like her own mother, who in her nineties had passed for seventy at the Golden Age Lounge, Mom looked strikingly younger than anyone else on five, though, in fact, at just shy of eighty-eight, she was older than many by a decade or more.
Dad had begun to tap his foot impatiently when a nurse burst into the room: “Oh, there you are, Mr. Feingold! We’ve been looking all over for you. Time for your medicine.” As she wheeled the stranger’s chair around toward the door, he waved and smiled at Mom, uttering sounds I took to mean that he intended to return.
I wasn’t surprised that, even on the fifth floor of Judson, where memory was at a minimum and the ratio of men to women was one to ten, Mr. Feingold had singled out my mother to court.
Dad and I left Mom’s room to have lunch. In the elegant Fisher Dining Room, en route to the booth where Mom and Dad had been a fixture during their first weeks at Judson — but where, since Mom’s move to five, Dad now regularly ate alone — we were invited by three women to sit with them. Dad declined.
“Do you ever eat with them?” I asked when we were seated.
He shook his head. “Bunch of old ladies.”
“Then do you ever eat with the men?” I gestured toward a large table of a dozen men at the far end of the room.
Dad curled his lip and shook his head. He’d never had a social life apart from Mom.
After we ordered our lunch, Dad told me he was reading my newest book out loud to Mom. She’d tried to read it herself but had been unable to get through a single page. Always a passionate reader, at some indeterminate moment, without acknowledging it, she had stopped reading altogether. “Not yet, but I will,” she’d say when I asked if she had looked at the magazines and library books I’d brought her. I’d also brought an album of family photographs and some books about her favorite artists, and sometimes I’d sit beside her on her bed, slowly turning pages as she studied them and called out in recognition the names of her beloved siblings and painters — as if they were her alphabet and she a child excitedly learning to read. But she never picked up the album or the books on her own. “Maybe later,” she would say when I suggested it. Even her mail remained unopened beside her bed.
Dad and I skipped dessert in favor of birthday cake back in Mom’s room. She wouldn’t turn eighty-eight for a few weeks, but since I was leaving for New York that night and was uncertain when I’d be back, we’d decided to celebrate today. (It hardly mattered, as Mom had lost her sense of time.) I’d bought the chocolate cake at a bakery that morning. Whenever I came to visit now, I brought my parents chocolate, which they usually devoured on the spot. Though Mom’s appetite had so diminished that she was nearly as thin as Dad, the two of them could consume an entire pound of Oreos in a single sitting.
After we finished singing “Happy Birthday,” Mom asked me tentatively, “What birthday is this?”
“Guess.”
“Eighty-five?”
“Pretty close: eighty-eight.”
“Eighty-eight!” she said, amazed. “Can it be?”
“Do you find that hard, Mom?”
“Do I find what hard, dear?”
“Everything — turning eighty-eight; being here at Judson.”
Mom gazed far off beyond the snow-filled window and didn’t answer. We had convinced her to move to Judson Park by telling her that Dad’s health required it. This was true, in the sense that caring for her at home, cooking her meals, getting her to take her medicines, helping her to the bathroom, arranging for snow to be shoveled and groceries to be delivered — in short, doing all the tasks that she could no longer do and he was unable to delegate to the aides I’d hired to care for them — had become too much of a strain on his failing heart. For his part, Dad believed the move to Judson was for Mom’s sake, which was also true, and daily growing truer as she lost more and more brain cells, and needed more and more care.
When Mom didn’t answer, I tried another tack. Choice was beyond her now, so I broke my question down. “How does it feel to be here at Judson?”
Mom turned to Dad, whom she had appointed her voice when her memory and judgment began to go. “How do we feel?” she asked him.
I gave my father a warning look. I’d been encouraging him to let her speak for herself, though it made him feel he was letting her down. “I can’t answer for you,” he said sheepishly. “How do you feel?”
“How do I feel?” she repeated. She filled a pause with ardent thought and then, snapping her head in a familiar, decisive gesture, said, “I accept it.”
Both my parents were accomplished accepters. Adaptation and acceptance were their priceless legacy to their children.
“And how does it feel to be eighty-eight?” I asked.
“I like it,” she said. “It certainly beats the alternative.” She’d been giving the same answer since her seventies, but this time, leaning forward, she added a new caveat: “Though, if the truth be known, I’d rather be eighty-two.”
Of course she’d select eighty-two. She had still been game at eighty-two, singing at my wedding in an elegant gray silk suit. She had still been tough at eighty-two, searching out cancer cures for my brother, Bob. Then, a week after the wedding, Bob had died, and everything had changed. “What a cruel hoax of fate that he is dead and I live,” she’d written to me bitterly. Gradually, she had stopped bothering to answer her mail, then to comb her hair, brush her teeth, put cream on her face, or take her pills. Finally, she’d stopped showering or getting dressed.
Dad took a bite of cake and a swig of decaf and wiped his mouth. “Don’t forget,” he said to Mom, “your mother lived to a hundred. Mine lived only to eighty-seven.”
Then, flashing what Dad had been calling her ten-thousand-dollar smile ever since she’d had her teeth capped a few years earlier, Mom said, chuckling, “Imagine! Here we are trading longevity stories.”
“You sound pretty happy,” I observed.
“I am,” she said. “I’ve never been depressive. None of us has. We’re pretty lucky that way.”
Judson’s residents being overwhelmingly Christian, I was surprised to see nearly forty people gathered in the auditorium as my husband and I wheeled my parents in for the Passover Seder. Six large tables were festively set with candles, wineglasses, and plates piled high with matzoh. We sat at a table with another fifth-floor resident, who was accompanied by her daughter and granddaughter.
As the men donned yarmulkes and the candles were lit, I realized that not since my childhood had I been to a Seder with my parents. Except for my brother, we were all nonbelievers. Now, as the prayers were led by a hired rabbi and the songs by a young cantor with a blond ponytail and beard, who circulated among the tables strumming a guitar, the distant Seders at my grandparents’ houses came back to me.
To accommodate the residents’ short attention spans, the service was brief; even so, some people ate the ceremonial foods and wine as if they were the meal. Mom so enjoyed the haroset — a concoction of chopped apples, cinnamon, walnuts, and red wine meant to symbolize the mortar used by the enslaved Jews to build cities for their Egyptian captors — that, instead of passing the dish for all to sample, she kept it to herself, polishing it off with her fingers after dropping her spoon.
During the Four Questions, the other resident at our table suddenly began to weep and wail. Her daughter, Terry, apologized, explaining that her mother was grieving for her own long-dead mother.
“When did she die?” asked Dad.
“Oh, fifty years ago.”
For some reason, Mom found this amusing. Every few minutes thereafter, she’d lean over to me and exclaim with a chuckle, “Imagine that! That grandma is mourning her mother who died fifty years ago.”
When the food arrived, the weeping woman sat before her matzoh-ball soup and roast chicken with clenched teeth. The more Terry urged her to eat, the louder she refused, sometimes addressing her daughter as “Mama.”
“At the Chanukah party four months ago, she was as fine as your mother,” Terry confided to me. “But now half the time she doesn’t know me. She barely eats, and she often cries.”
In a mere four months? I was shocked. “How old is she?”
“Ninety-one. And your mother?”
“Eighty-eight,” I whispered.
“Really! I thought she was in her seventies.”
Mom periodically pulled my sleeve and repeated in my ear with a snicker, “That grandma is mourning her mother who died fifty years ago” — until Dad said to her, “You know, one can mourn for someone no matter when they may have died.” Then Mom turned sad, and I thought of Bob.
When the wails at our table began to draw stares, Terry wheeled her mother out. Immediately, the atmosphere lightened. With the help of song sheets and guitar, the cantor led us through the familiar Passover songs, like “Who Knows One” and “Dayenu.” Dad sang melody while Mom hummed harmony. After their own parents had died, my atheist parents had dispensed with Seders altogether, resuming the practice only in deference to Bob, who from his bar mitzvah on had grown increasingly observant, even fasting on Yom Kippur. But now they sang with gusto, as if they had never stopped.
Back in her room, Mom asked my husband and me if we were married.
“Mom, you were at our wedding,” I said. “You did your imitation of Marlene Dietrich singing ‘Falling in Love Again.’ You wore that wonderful gray silk suit.”
She thought a moment, then said, “I don’t remember the suit, but I’m glad I looked nice. The song, though, I do remember.” And, dropping her voice to her lowest register and tilting her head at a rakish angle, she sang again, with all the old charm, Dietrich’s signature song.
Afterward, she said cheerfully, without a trace of irony, “It’s nice to recall those memories, don’t you think? What’s life, after all, if not our memories?”
At such moments I basked in her good spirits. But sometimes — as when, nodding in her chair, she looked up with astonishment to see me coming through the door and cried out in an ecstasy of relief, like a sprung prisoner, “Oh, my darling Alix! You’re here!” — my heart contracted with guilt.
Not that I hadn’t done my best for her: I had seen that her nurses were kind. I’d installed a radio tuned to her favorite classical-music station. I’d supplemented the institutional fluorescent light with two exquisite porcelain lamps that had sat on her bedroom dresser, and hung on her walls bright works of contemporary art and her signed picture of Bill and Hillary Clinton. I’d bought knee-highs to replace her pantyhose, now so difficult to yank up over her diapers, and replaced her silk blouses and woolen skirts with sturdy new clothes that could survive the institutional washing machines and dryers. Yet, despite her obvious pleasure as we gossiped and reminisced during my sporadic visits, left to herself, my mother sat staring into space, rising only to push her walker to the bathroom, grunting, “Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.” Once, I heard her ask Dad in a whisper, “Suppose we wanted to leave here, Sam. Could we?” With the house now under contract, I’d rushed to answer, “But, Mom, where would you go?” After that, I was often stricken by the question, blinding as an interrogator’s beam: Was she a prisoner? And if so, a prisoner of whom?
Several months after Mom had made what her nurses in the dementia ward called a “reasonable adjustment” to Breuning, she suddenly began to balk. She grew angry over any disruption of routine — a bath, a beauty-parlor visit, a nurse’s overstrenuous urging that she take her pills at bedtime. One night, in a rage, she demanded that her husband be called at once. When Dad was on the phone, she said, “Take me home, Sam. Come take me home.”
Dad calmed her down by promising to see her first thing in the morning. But by the time he arrived the next day, she’d forgotten all about her feelings of the night before, believing that the whole episode — her fury, the phone call, Dad’s promise to return — had all been a bad dream.
“What did you dream, Mom?” I asked her.
“It was awful,” she said. “I dreamed Sam was angry with me because we were out of sync — I was living in the 1940s, and he was living now.” (How astute her unconscious was!) “I called him up and begged him, ‘Please don’t be angry with me.’ And he said, ‘Don’t you worry. I’m not angry.’ But I knew he was.”
A few days later, Mom again grew agitated, refused to take her pills, and complained that she was being held prisoner. “Sam,” she said when the nurse got him on the phone, “they’re keeping me here against my will. Take me home, Sammy. Please, I want to come home.”
It was more than he could bear. The next day, he commandeered a wheelchair and kidnapped his wife of sixty-five years. He helped her into the chair, piled her nightgown, slippers, and toothbrush on her lap, and then, huffing and puffing, wheeled her out the double doors of Breuning to the elevator, up a ramp, onto another elevator, and on through the halls to his apartment. After putting her to bed, he returned to her room for her clothes and her indispensable medicines.
When he reported this to me, I was thrilled by the news. My frail but indomitable father, dependable as always, had once again come to the rescue. Now they were back together. I rejoiced, though I knew it couldn’t last.
Within days, Dad reported that she was refusing to take her medications.
“Mom,” I said when he handed her the phone, “Dad says you’re giving him a hard time about taking your medicine. Is it true?”
“Oh, no!” she answered. “Sam and I never quarrel. Never! Of course I take my medicine. It’s nothing: one tiny pill in the morning, one at night.” Then: “Oh, it’s so good to be home! Everything looks so beautiful. I know all this furniture so well — except one small chest.”
She was right; she had selected everything in that apartment to furnish their Shaker Heights house except a small chest that had come from Dad’s office.
“Oh, if you could see how lovely it looks here,” she said, her voice pleading. “That picture — what is it? The Kent Rockwell. It looks as if it were made for this place.”
What did it matter that she had reversed the artist’s first and last names? She was happy. Indeed, it was almost like old times, as Dad prepared their breakfasts and lunches in his small kitchen, then chivalrously gave Mom his walker for the trip to the Fisher Dining Room, where he ordered dinner for two.
Soon, all of Judson was in an uproar — meetings, consultations, evaluations. I strenuously took my parents’ side, though their physician, Dr. Murphy, was skeptical. “This will be too much for Sam’s heart,” he warned me, and I feared that without his approval the arrangement couldn’t last. But no matter what anyone said, Dad refused to let Mom go.
When the staff called a special meeting to deal with the problem, I flew to Judson. It was summer; the geraniums and begonias were in riotous bloom, and beyond the windows of Dad’s apartment, a blanket of flowering shrubs, dotted by pockets of flowers and lush ornamental trees, stretched up the long landscaped hillside. An interior person in every sense, Dad barely noticed the scenery as he sat reading in his favorite chair beneath the slow turning of the ceiling fan. But Mom was filled with joy at the sight. I shared her joy — not for summer, but for her happiness, however fleeting.
At the meeting, the staff decided to wait and see. Two weeks later, Dr. Murphy examined my father and pronounced him too weak to care for Mom. After many long-distance skirmishes, Judson’s administration and I reached a provisional compromise: Mom could spend every other day at Dad’s apartment from midmorning on, after she’d had her medications, returning at night to her room on the fifth floor of Breuning, to which an aide would wheel her after she’d dined with Dad in Fisher Dining Room.
“How’s the new arrangement working out?” I asked Mom after a week. “Is it OK sleeping in Breuning?”
“Of course,” she said. “Breuning is like a second home to me. It’s very familiar.”
Not, however, familiar enough to prevent her getting lost as she bumped her walker to her room. Every step or two she’d ask, perplexed, “Now where should I go?” It was a short walk from the fifth-floor lunchroom, but not till she got to the D Wing — marked by a large letter D on the wall — did she know where she was. “D is for Dorothy!” she’d proclaim with delight, and turn right, toward her room.
“It should be familiar, Mom,” I said to her over the phone. “You sleep there.”
“Sometimes, I guess.”
“Every night.”
“I do?” she asked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, Mom, quite sure.” But so, I reminded her, had she and Dad slept in separate bedrooms in their own house.
“We did?” she asked, incredulous.
This question signaled a subtle change for the worse. Until then, it had been mainly short-term memories that had deserted her. But the separate bedrooms she and Dad had maintained for forty years were housed in long-term memory. And unlike events she might well have wanted to forget, having a room of her own had been a source of constant satisfaction to her. So now long-term pleasures, too, had begun to go.
It was the rapid deterioration of my parents’ health within months of their move to Judson that made me unsure whether I had rescued or condemned them. Perhaps their decline would have happened anywhere: no one lives forever. But with my mother’s mother having lived to a hundred, our family was spoiled. Each birthday, my parents would speculate about whether or not they would make it to a hundred, as if that were the undisputed goal, and death were for other families.
As always, they adapted to each new crisis, with its subsequent slip toward dependency: the falls that put them both on walkers, then in wheelchairs; the increasing incontinence that brought the indignity of diapers. How volubly they loved me then! Mom seemed to become more affectionate with each regression. Was it her nature ripening, or her need? Her stories of the past were mostly undamaged, yet she was unable to make the simplest decision in her present life. So complete was her disorientation that she could no longer find her way to the bathroom, though it was only steps from her chair. “Now what shall I do?” she asked when, feeling the urge, she rose to her feet.
“Just keep going straight ahead, Mom. Take another step. That’s it” — until she’d ask again, “Tell me what to do next.” Sometimes I wondered if her incontinence was merely an inability to find the bathroom.
When Dad had kidnapped Mom, I’d counted among the benefits her being able to dine again in the Fisher Dining Room — so much more suitable, I thought, for the woman who had once been said to have set the most exquisite table in all of Cleveland than the shocking fifth-floor dining room, with its plastic table pads, terry-cloth bibs, set meals, and unearthly screams. But after three weeks, Mom was barred from Fisher because she kept throwing her diapers down the toilet or leaving them on the floor of the women’s room, where Dad could not go to assist her.
After that, she was permitted in Fisher only when I came to town and could take her to the bathroom. Appalled by the alternating silence and ruckus on five, I thought that eating in Fisher with Dad and me would give her as much pleasure as it gave me. Hadn’t she herself been embarrassed to the point of apology by the strange outbursts of some of the fifth-floor residents? But as time went on, she grew accustomed to the disruptive sounds — or perhaps she no longer noticed them. Soon, Dad was joining her for lunch, then for dinner, too. They both seemed satisfied. After my first meal with them on five, I had to admit that, after all, having to choose from a menu only confused Mom, and they both did better with a bib.
It was in the fifth-floor dining room, halfway to Mom’s table, that my father collapsed to the floor from a second cardiac arrest. At first, no nurse could find a pulse or feel any breath. Then, after two full minutes, as suddenly as he’d fallen, he sat straight up, gasping for breath, with his back erect and his twigs of legs stretched out in front of him.
On my New York answering machine, I got a message with the news that he’d been rushed to the hospital. I was frantic at the words cardiac arrest. Part of me had been expecting his demise every day. I knew his heart was shot. But when I heard those words, I began to fall apart. It was irrational: At ninety-four, with all his mental faculties still intact, Dad had probably lived long enough. Yet I astonished myself with my uncontrollable grief.
Frantically, I telephoned Judson. “He may be all right. It was a completely spontaneous recovery,” said the nurse, whose orders were “DNR”: Do Not Resuscitate.
In the hospital, a pacemaker was installed in Dad’s heart to forestall further blackout falls. And when he returned to Judson, it was not to his apartment but to a Nursing room on the sixth floor for rehabilitation. He needed it: the hospital procedure and his new medications had finally reduced him to dependence. Massive doses of Lasix, a diuretic, rendered him incontinent; the drug that regulated his pacemaker blurred his mind, speech, and sense of balance; his glasses never made it back from the hospital; and concern about his falling landed him in a wheelchair with a buzzer on his leg set to go off whenever he tried to stand unassisted. Then, after a month of rehabilitation, he was judged no longer fit for Independent Living, or even Assisted Living.
I disagreed. True, he was weak and for a while continued to fall, but he kept coming back, responding with his customary acceptance and dignity. He removed the buzzer whenever he went to the bathroom or rolled his wheelchair through the halls to visit Mom. Once, he made his way all the way down to Security for a spare key to his old apartment, to which he repaired for the night. His aide and a nurse found him there, asleep in the marital bed, his clothes folded neatly on a chair. They promptly woke him and brought him back to Nursing.
As soon as my father’s drug dosages were adjusted, however, his mind came back, and during my next visit he dictated to me three thank-you letters with his usual aplomb. Though he had stopped reading books, with the replacement trifocals I’d procured for him he read the newspaper every morning at breakfast and the Ohio Bar reports that arrived regularly in the mail. He was not permitted to keep cash in his Nursing room, but he refused to get a haircut without having money to tip the barber. To solve the problem, he asked me to mail him a check for twenty dollars, which he cashed at the banking office on the way to the barbershop. Thus, he scrupulously maintained his standards.
On the other hand, he now often smelled of urine, no longer bothered to insert his hearing aid, could barely keep his bridge attached to his gums, and sometimes fell. Despite his graduation from confusion to clarity and from wheelchair to walker, the staff judged him in need of permanent nursing care. So, when a room became available, he was moved from the temporary rehabilitation room on six to a permanent Nursing room on four. I flew to Cleveland for a long weekend to clean out the Independent Living apartment and get him settled into his newly reduced quarters. As I once again emptied drawers, closets, and cupboards, culling the indispensable personal records and precious papers preserved over generations, I sensed that each successive move had distilled my parents’ lives like a long-simmered sauce reduced to its essence.
After I’d moved into Dad’s new room the few pieces of furniture that could reasonably fit, he looked around and said, “This is a pretty small room.” In a mere six months my parents had gone from their six-bedroom house to a single ten-by-ten-foot room each, and were lucky to have it.
“Would you like me to try to have you moved to a bigger room when one comes open?” I asked him.
“Not really,” he said. “I don’t require much. I never have.” Indeed, I believe that, without Mom to spur him on, he would have been content to spend his entire life in the small rented duplex where I was born. He did not measure his life in real estate.
After that, my conversations with both my parents grew more and more perfunctory. Their lives had become so circumscribed that even Dad had little to report. When I tried to enliven the exchange with questions about the past, his poor hearing often kept him from making out my words. If I did manage to make myself understood, though, he answered me fully and precisely, down to the middle initial of each of his office colleagues on the tenth floor of the Hippodrome Building back in the 1940s.
His memories were so vivid, he sometimes slipped into the past. His suite-mate’s wife told me that, one day, Dad had walked into her husband’s room and asked her to send birthday checks for five dollars to each of his great-grandchildren — as if she were his trusted secretary, who’d kept his checkbook and would have known exactly where to mail the checks.
When I next flew to Cleveland, the house had been sold and the apartment closed, so I stayed in a Judson guest room. That visit coincided with the worst blizzard of the century, which closed down the airports for days, and I had to stay much longer than planned. With my chores finished and no possibility of leaving the building, I had nothing to do but visit with my parents and observe. So it happened that I had meals in three different dining rooms, as if to recapitulate my parents’ tenure at Judson: on Sunday, Dad and I went to the Fisher Dining Room on six for a fancy Christmas dinner; on Monday, I lunched with him in his fourth-floor Nursing dining room; and at dinner that night, he and I joined Mom on five in the dining room for dementia patients. I was amazed at the contrasting outcomes.
In civilized Fisher, we were seated at a table with another family: a resident, her son, and his wife. Aware of being Jewish and inappropriately dressed — Dad’s jacket was stained, and I was wearing sneakers — I felt awkward at this formal Christian dinner. Our conversation, though polite, was painfully artificial and rife with the subtle self-promotion of society.
But at least we talked. The next day, in Dad’s dining room on four, where the patients suffered from physical rather than mental disorders, there was not a word of conversation at our table throughout lunch. All four residents were so focused on the difficult task of transporting their food to their mouths that they never looked up from their plates. I wondered whether they were silent because of the hopelessness of their conditions or because, like my father, they had a hard time hearing. Whatever the case, in that entire dining room, the only conversation was among the aides, who chatted with each other between the tables while they fed their wards.
At dinner that night in the dining room of the dementia ward, where Dad and I joined Mom, the conversation was warm and lively, despite its many impenetrable patches. The three elderly residents who shared our table were considerate listeners and interesting talkers, if not always coherent. Each made allowances for the lapses and strange quirks of the others, politely accepting one another’s delusions. One woman told stories of her romantic triumphs as a Smith student at Ivy League football weekends as if they had just occurred, and the rest jumped in with sisterly advice. Another woman delivered wry, exasperated commentary on the selfish outbursts occurring at other tables. Everyone laughed. Her stream of low-key barbs, delivered straight-faced and sotto voce out of the side of her mouth, were so on target and witty that I wondered why she was on the fifth floor at all, until I saw her use her fork to open a tear in her bib, which she then spent twenty minutes picking apart, thread by minute thread, before she was able to eat. No one mentioned her odd behavior, even though she was just getting started on her appetizer as the rest of us were finishing our main course. We so enjoyed ourselves that we lingered over dessert and were the last table to leave the dining room.
By the time the snow stopped and the planes were again taking off, I was beginning to feel familiar and comfortable with the other patients and their families, the staff and their routines. The residents’ individual characters and personalities had begun to emerge. Mostly they appeared to me much older and worse off than my parents. Yet I could see that, to the aides and nurses, who saw them daily and laughed amiably at everyone, each resident was uniquely and equally strange. The woman at dinner picked apart her bib, someone else heard voices from the past, the flasher flashed, the screamer screamed, Dad puffed through the halls, and Mom said, “Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh,” all the way home. My extra days with nothing much to do had enabled me to see that there was a daily life at Judson not unlike any other place, albeit slower and with less hope: rise in the morning, toilet, eat, rest, another meal, then another, toilet, medication, bed, with a flurry of activities in between, just like outside. Only here, everyday chores became the big events: a haircut, a trip to the bank, a doctor’s visit, an exercise class. Since, despite everything, Mom seemed to me pretty much her old quirky self — no less affectionate or fun to be with than before, with most of her character traits and memories intact — I had to concede that the same was probably true of the other residents: that whatever their disorders, to the end they remained, for better or worse, themselves.
The morning I was to leave, Dad asked if I would mind cutting his fingernails. The nails he had cleaned at least twice a day for most of his life had now grown long and clawlike. I found a nail clipper and took his hand in mine. His hands seemed huge for such a tiny man — now a mere five-foot-three and ninety-six pounds, though at one time he was five-foot-seven and 140. His hands were broad and veiny, with large knuckles and stubby fingers, rather like my own.
When I had finished clipping the nails of both his hands, he rested one on my arm, cleared his throat, and said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you that, though I don’t always thank you for each of the many kindnesses you do for me, I appreciate every one of them.”
“Oh, no, Daddy,” I protested, “you needn’t thank me. I’m just grateful that I’m able to do it. I do it because I love you.”
“Nevertheless,” insisted my father in his soft, formal, yet caressing voice, “I want you to know how much I appreciate all that you do for me.”
Then, smiling and weeping, we sat together in his room holding hands until it was time for me to leave for New York.
“A Good Enough Daughter” is excerpted from A Good Enough Daughter, by Alix Kates Shulman. © 1999 by Alix Kates Shulman. It appears here by permission of Shocken Books, a division of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
