Whispers In Words That Make No Sense

Non-Fiction
Location – Adelaide, Australia
Written – May 2009
[This wasn’t an easy piece to write. I discovered a trick of writing to music - playing particular music on the stereo that fitted the mood and then riffing off of it like a guitar player. It remains unpublished though I personally think it’s one of the better things I’ve written about my mother’s dementia. It isn’t a happy story.]

I was blind to my mother for many months. I was away in India. Thoughts of her would come to me in darkness and in dreams but I haven’t seen her since Christmas. In my mind’s eye I saw her content in the Parklyn Aged Care Facility. I saw her as I remembered her. But the plot always thickens. You’re not swallowing enough of what goes on around you if it gets any thinner.

The last time I rang my mother she didn’t speak a word into the telephone.

“I’ve been in India, Ma. I haven’t seen you in a long time. I’ll come over and see you...”

She didn’t say a word. I could only hear her sobbing.

Then I start getting the calls from the doctors and the nurses. They tell me that I’ll need to make a decision. They say I’ll need to decide whether I want Mum to continue getting the tests and medical procedures, or whether I want her to be ‘comfortable.’ The head nurse of Parklyn tells me about the need to draw up a plan for Palliative Care. I’ve never heard those words before but I get the idea. My mother is dying.

I drink a bottle of scotch and then I sit down to think it through.

_____________________________________________________________________

I catch the bus to Adelaide. I don’t know what I expect to find - a zombie, perhaps, or a shiny surgical tool to incise my deepest misery. I’m afraid to see.

When I walk into the Parklyn ward I don’t just see the bent back and the skinny arms. I see the light and the presence of my Mother. I rush towards her. She’s sitting in a chair with her head down. I throw my arms around her and put my head on her shoulder. She smells old like a book. I can feel the upheavals of her breath. She wears an Indian dress and runs the fabric through her fingers. Her hair, like her skin, is gray. My mother is fifty-eight years old.

“Do you remember me Brenda?” Says my Aunt. “Bren? It’s your sister, Gail. Do you remember Gail?”

Mum doesn’t look up. She whispers something. Garbled. Her back is hunched forward so she doesn’t meet our eyes. The doctors call it ‘severe spinal degeneration.’ As the Alzheimer’s takes her mind so it takes her body. After some time she raises her head. Slowly. For just an instant our eyes meet and dazzle with recognition, or love.

“Where did you come from?” She asks clearly.

“I came from you Ma.”

We walk together. As I hold her hand I can see her pulse beating through her skin. She walks hunched over. She can’t see where she’s going. I guide her away from the walls and the closed doors. She walks as if inspecting the ground just in front of her feet. Leaning in close. Looking for something she’s never going to find.

She walks and then rests. She doesn’t see the nearby chairs. If you don’t guide her into one of the chairs then she crouches on her heels. I crouch with her, like her, inspecting the same things as her - the hem of her Indian dress, embroidered with a golden fabric that glints in the sun. We explore this tiniest of miracles together. When she’s ready to stand I ease her into a chair. There’s always a chair nearby in Parklyn.

I need to rest myself. I haven’t eaten or slept since last night. I give a nod to the pair of Punjabi blokes who work the afternoon shift and they take Mum by an arm each to lead her away. If you don’t do this she’ll never leave your side.

“I’ll see you tomorrow Mum.”

I clasp my hands in the prayer-sign before I go, in a wordless prayer to no-one and to no-thing. I’ve never done that before. Going to Parklyn isn’t the hard part, I remember now. It’s leaving that’s hard.

_____________________________________________________________________

Gail and I go back to her place and talk, using beer bottles as microphones. She’s still trying to get off the booze. I tell her I don’t want to be a bad influence, but tonight she’s having what a woman of clarity would call a moment of alcoholism. The nurses have told us that Mum still has life in her and we’ve seen it with our own eyes. She isn’t dying in a medical sense. She’s still on her feet. Part of us is relieved. But as the night grows long the guilt starts soaking into Gail’s voice. She used to care for Brenda before having a breakdown.

“I could have done more,” she says. “I should still be caring for her.”

“Don’t feel guilty Gail.. Mike and I tried too.”

It took my brother and I a long time I to realize that no matter what we do for our mother we can’t save her. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza. A hole. And no matter what we do to fix it there’s still a hole.

“I tried to warn you and Mike. I knew what would happen.”

“We needed to Gail. We needed to understand.”

We thicken the plot with breath and cigarette smoke. She brushes the contours of her guilt onto the table with fingers tracing the ashes.

“But you don’t understand,” she says. “My mother never wanted a third child. When I was born my mother couldn’t hug me. She left. Took off to Sydney for a few years. Left raising me to Brenda, who was eight. She changed my nappies, bathed me, sang me to sleep. Brenda was like a mother to me, and I always looked up to her like a mother. She took care of me when I was helpless. So when she developed Alzheimer’s, I felt a duty to repay her. To look after her as she looked after me. But I failed.”

I don’t know how to reply. I take a swill of beer.

“I failed.”

“Barbara cared for Mike and I in a similar way,” I say. Our mother was lost then in the caverns of schizophrenia. “I guess both our mothers weren’t always around.”

“It was hard on you kids. You needed your real mother. One time I rang up your stepmother, Barbara, angry that she bought you a copy of a Stephen King novel. It was inappropriate for a kid.”

“Barbara did buy me that. Skeleton Crew. But it wasn’t the first Stephen King novel I’d read. You wanna know who bought me the first?” I take a drag on my cigarette. “Mum. I convinced her to buy Firestarter for me in a Melbourne book shop when I was eleven. She didn’t realize what it was. But I’d been reading Edgar Allen Poe before that. That kind of writing just made sense to me. You should have thanked Barbara when you called her, for helping to spark my love of reading and writing.” I stub out my smoke. “Sometimes the best way to help someone seems odd to other people I guess.”

Gail coughs. I’m changing the subject. I’m cursed with the blindness of day as Gail is cursed with the blindness of night.

“I’m a failure,” she repeats. “A failure. Your mother was educated and travelled the world. But look at me here. I can’t look after your mother. I can’t even look after myself.”

“Fuck, Gail,” I say, “you’re one of the few people I can talk to about this stuff, you’re one of the few people who understands. We don’t have much family left.”

But I’m drunk, there’s nothing I can say, and perhaps there is no antidote for guilt anyway.

_____________________________________________________________________


Gail wakes me.

“Tom! Get ready. Sam’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“What? Sam?”

Sam was my mother’s first husband. Mum used to talk about him a lot but I’ve never met him. I still getting dressed when he knocks on the door. He’s out of place in Gail’s broken home - a portly, middle-aged, successful man. A lecturer of Philosophy. The dogs bark at him. Gail takes a mug from the sink of dirty dishes and washes it to pour him a coffee.

He says that he’s in Adelaide for the weekend. He flew from Sydney for a high-school reunion. Yesterday he went around to 3 Godson street, the old family home, and found strangers living there. He couldn’t find Brenda in the phonebook. After some effort he tracked down Gail’s number. He speaks quietly as he slips down the tunnel of guilt.

“It was my fault the marriage ended. I cheated on Brenda.”

He speaks with his head down - presenting himself for our judgment. The room falls silent. He hasn’t seen Brenda in thirty years.

“Mum never expressed anything but fondness for you. There was no bitterness. And, on a selfish level, if you and Mum and stayed together then I wouldn’t exist.”

“I’d like to see Brenda.”

“It’ll be distressing for you to see her. It might be easier for you to remember her as she was.”

“I’d like to see her anyway.”

Perhaps he needs to go for his own reasons. So we go.

_____________________________________________________________________


We take his rental car.

I suggest that he resists the urge to play the ‘Do You Remember Me?’ game. It distresses Mum to put pressure on her, to fire questions at her that she can’t answer. Sometimes I have dreams where I find Mum in the wilderness - standing in a river, or crouched in a cave - and I embrace her, and as I embrace her I’m crying and I’m asking, “you remember me Mum, do you remember me...?” So I know the impulse to ask. But I don’t. Mum is a sunset that will not be the same tomorrow. And to clutch at an image of how the sunset was, or how it might be, is to lose your clear sight of what is happening right now.

We find Mum being spoon-fed her lunch. I rush towards her and rest my head against hers. Sam sits opposite her at the table.

“It’s Sam, Brenda. Sam? Do you remember Sam? We were... married. We lived in Glebe. Glebe? Do you remember Gracus and Claude? The cats??”

Mum says nothing. She’s inspecting the hem of her dress again, cradling the fabric in her fingers. Her hand moves to hold mine. The slightest movement, so small that the others don’t notice, and I don’t draw attention to it. Sam turns to Gail and begins asking questions about Brenda’s Condition.

“Is she always like this?”

I break from my hug with Ma.

“I’ll give you a moment alone with Mum. Hugs are better than conversation,” I say, and go outside to smoke a cigarette.

When I return Gail and Sam are in Mum’s room talking. I walk with Mum hand-in-hand doing laps around the ward. We stop to look at things - red flowers, Holly the cat, pictures on the wall. An old man knocks on one of the pictures. “Is anybody in there?” He says. “Is anybody home?”

Sam has to go. He needs to return the rental car and catch his flight to Sydney. He looks stunned. He hasn’t gotten whatever it was he wanted from Mum. I remind myself not to be harsh. He’s never seen anyone with Alzheimer’s before. He’s a lecturer of philosophy but he doesn’t understand.

Gail thinks differently. “When we were alone in Mum’s room, Sam seized upon a photo of Mum,” she says. I know the one. It’s a large print on her dresser. In the picture she’s twenty and beautiful, with Mona Lisa eyes. “‘That’s how I remember Brenda,’ he said to me. Tears welled in his eyes. He browsed the room, slowly.” Chewing. Searching for something he’ll never find. “He walked over to Brenda’s bed, and picked up the stuffed snow-leopard toy. Mum’s favourite possession. I could feel the love in the room. He picked up the toy and cradled it a moment then set it down exactly as he’d found it. Perhaps it was his way of saying goodbye.”

_____________________________________________________________________


I go to Parklyn in the morning alone.

I enter the office to speak with the head nurse. As she finishes some paperwork I look around the room. There’s a sign on the wall that reads, ‘Respond To The Need, Not To The Behaviour.’ Fair enough. I take it to mean, as a reminder to staff: ‘these people will send you fucking insane with frustration if you don’t keep your cool, and see through the ranting, rocking, crying, spitting, sobbing, self-hitting, bed-wetting behaviour to whatever it is that the patient actually needs.’

But I don’t have that job any more, not since my brother and I arranged the Parklyn placement. I was never too good at caring for my mother. We didn’t have these snappy platitudes of wisdom on the walls of 3 Godson Street. And I could never get to a point of slick professionalism as a Carer, for I also happen to love Ma. Now I come in without the shield of occupation. Not as a worker but only as a person. And as a person you feel things - love, pain, your own needs. I write my own sign on the wall of my mind: ‘Respond To The Person, Not To Your Own Needs.’

I need the love of my mother. I need to know that she remembers me. But, in this place, my needs are epitaphs written in sand. In the wind of time they mean nothing.

Joy emerges from her filing cabinet clutching the blank Palliative Care document. She regards me with old tired eyes.

“Do you want your mother resuscitated?”

I don’t meet her eyes. I stare through the photocopied document with an unfocussed gaze.

“No,” I say. “If her heart stops beating then I don’t want her resuscitated. I don’t want her to go through any more tests. I don’t want to put her through any more medical procedures.”

Joy pushes the document towards me to sign.

_____________________________________________________________________


My mother walks and then crouches. We don’t talk much. I show her a copy of National Geographic with pictures of Proboscis Monkeys. She isn’t too interested in them. She keeps turning to the back cover with a picture of a wolf. She wraps the magazine into the folds of her dress and carries it around with her like a treasure. I hold her other hand in my own, trembling. As we’re walking she raises my arm and kisses the back of my hand. I close my eyes and weep without tears for the smallest of things. Like a kiss, or a signature.

There’s so many things I’d like to say to her, so many things I’d like to ask. But I don’t. She whispers something to me that I can’t understand.

“I know, Mum. I know. I love you, Ma.”

A kiss as small as a signature on a photocopied document.

_____________________________________________________________________


The plot always thickens. The sound from its many mouthpieces becomes so dense that it rises to a screaming. But perhaps too, in the din, there are echoes of a simplicity. So faint that it cannot be heard no matter how hard you listen, and so far that it cannot be found no matter how hard you look. Just whispers in words that make no sense. You could cast words to call it love but it’s a love so streaked through with the pain and the guilt and the longing of being alive that the colours all blend into white. An every-thing that is also no-thing. Like the whiteness of the morphine patch on my mother’s arm.

I don’t really know if she remembers me or not. And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it doesn’t matter all that much.

“I love you, Ma. I love you...” The words spill from my lips so easily it’s as if I haven’t spoken at all.

She touches the fabric of my shirt before I turn to go. That’s enough.