Inside the giant rabbits warren of the Newbridge Center dwarfing its vast, lovely coniferous acreage, the deer and turkeys sidling up to the doors ringing the outer apartments fool you into imagining you’re at a summer resort. You wouldn’t know you were entering a home for the aged unless you were visiting someone there, since everyone is aging wherever you look.
But here we all are, plunked down with the rents at their request. Doubtless at this very moment in this colossal last residence, folks in the adjoining apartments, or anywhere in the building, possibly across the continent and extending around the planet are having similar conversations.
I couldn’t bear to be a fly on those walls, so it seems ungenerous to foist the one we are having on you. Yet I am compelled to speak of what may not improve the lives or imaginations of those who believe that “truth is beauty, and beauty truth and that’s all ye need to know.” Not all that Keats said, but if that were all you needed to know, there’d be far less writing in the world.
So I watch, barely able to breathe, stuck to the squeaky leather couch in the living area of one of these commodious apartments, my mother shrunken in her leather recliner, my stepfather holding forth some distance from her but exactly parallel to her in his matching one, except his is front and center exactly in the middle of the room like a podium and my mother’s is pushed off to the side as if she is already an afterthought.
I note the distance between them. It seems significant somehow, a declaration of something one is not supposed to mention.
All the time he speaks, he speaks over her, waving his hands, perhaps dismissively or perhaps it is a tic that means nothing. He has always had the air of one who knows better than you about everything.
My mother has been afflicted by an incurable palsy, one that makes movement, speaking, eating, swallowing, eliminating, painfully difficult. She raises her arms up weakly trying to speak. My stepfather talks over her.
I remind myself, he has always done this, and now that she is enfeebled why would anything change?
He is talking about the end of life, her life in this instance, as if she is already gone.
No matter how many times I tell him, Mom is trying to speak; she has an opinion on this, please let her speak, his talking; steady, nasal, unnuanced, “reasonable” sounding, never lets up. He is holding the floor as if he were giving a lecture on something he may be expert on.
He is the Expert on everything, including anything anyone is lucky to get a word in edgewise about, so we must always cede the floor to him.
After all, we are neither as educated, experienced, nor knowledgeable as he is on many levels. But he has asked us here today for our opinion on his plans, or rather his plans about her as they might include us.
She will donate her body to Science, what little there is left of it. Even now she appears to be shrinking as he speaks, and then he says she will be cremated, her ashes poured into an urn. He is quite concerned about where the urn should be buried.
I ask her, “Mom, should we fling you off a building in Boston, you know, near one of the places you walked to every day for thirty years for work?”
She appears to agree with me, struggling to get her words out. I pause waiting for her answer, feeling the silence, the awkwardness, the sadness that should be here but goes unmentioned, seemingly unfelt by her husband.
Then I venture, “ Or Danny could put you in his backpack and take you on a climbing journey to Switzerland. With all his frequent flier miles, you could finally get to the Alps, a place you’ve never been before.”
She says, haltingly ” Yes, do that.”
“Stop asking her,” my stepfather the born again evangalist insists, balling up his fat, white, doughy fingers as if he is about to bang his fists on a podium for emphasis, “she doesn’t believe in the afterlife!”
She makes a motion that appears to dismiss him, and the entire subject. Having known her for my entire lifetime, I’m almost sure of it. She has never suffered fools.
He appears shocked at my two siblings unwillingness to speak about it, yet he drones on. But I’m aware that he has been informed many times about our families stance on death and funerals if he had been listening. Its some one’s fault, he would be glad to name, but we don’t argue with our stepfather’s point of view.
I ask him what he would like to do? He seems oblivious to the possibility of distributing her ashes in a forest or a garden or an ocean, or perhaps considers them impossibilities, because these are things he has never heard of before and as such, they simply cannot be done, are not the done thing.
He wants to bury her with his first wife in a place inconvenient for all of us to visit including him. In fact despite asking our opinion about this inappropriate choice he insists upon it, too late we realize that was always his intention.
There is no arguing with him. She will be buried with the woman he cheated on while she lay on her deathbed unbeknownst to either of these women according to my mother, a woman she has replaced but never met, in a cemetery that doesn’t allow Jews, in a town our family doesn’t know. This man who has assigned himself the role of Pater familias, arbiter of all that is right, good and appropriate has the last word as usual.
Still, I ask my mother’s opinion on the subject, feeling she should be the tiebreaker despite her not being particularly invested in the outcome.
Not a woman to waste words, I am pleasantly reminded of what I have always admired about my mother; still sharp as a tack at 87, she’s not afraid to speak her mind to me, or anyone.
She says, ”Surprise me!”
