Sunday was Helen’s 87th birthday. It was also the the first time I can remember that I didn’t send a card, or flowers, or a present, or make a phone call. But no, I didn’t feel guilty. Just incredibly, impossibly sad…
The sadness of Helen is overpowering. She has no friends at all. She hasn’t communicated with her own family back East for years. She’s effectively driven her own children away. Just TV, naps, and stale Fig Newtons. Tick, tock, tick, tock… Imagining her there in that miserable excuse for a trailer she now occupies is horrible, so I try not to. Her other home where I’d been staying, luxurious by comparison, is falling into slow decay: beautiful mementos gathering dust, trees and bushes dying for lack of water, pots of flowers turning brown in the Arizona sun.
Doves in the old carport
You can’t help her, no one can. Nowhere in the whole insane mess is anything resembling a thread of sense or possibility of healing. It’s like watching an old blind whale beach itself on broken glass. There isn’t going to be another birthday. No way, no how. She belongs in a nursing home but will not go, too bad: Arizona law protects the right of lunatics to die in misery, their families be damned.
My wife’s mother died in the agony of full-blown Alzheimer’s, too sad to bear, yet she was a cosmic engine of love. Her children miss her every day. She cried when told she had to move to nursing care (“Oh no, NOT Stonehill!”), but she went. Her son in Atlanta sent her roses every week, and her daughters visited regularly until the end.
Helen’s fall will be the final unconscious cruelty to my siblings. I wonder when it will hit them that way, how by descending into self-destructive isolation, she’s closing off all possibility of sharing her last days on earth. Even considering our beat-up wreck of a family, there could have been some kind of closure or at least a little dignity.
I have to write her brother soon — whatever will I say?
