Shoreline of Wonder

Memoir is flourishing these days with aspiring writers who have a story of their own life to tell – and proficient writers inspired to turn their hand to this genre. Jane Gross is a New York Times reporter. She launched and still contributes to the Times blog called The New Old Age. Her mother’s final years of failing health, starting in assisted living and ending in a nursing home, are described in a memoir titled A Bittersweet Season. It was a time of nightmarish challenge, unwelcome revelation, and unexpected reconciliation. This is a blisteringly honest book. Elderly mother, dutiful daughter and not so dutiful (or rather, differently dutiful) son didn’t go into this with warm, close relationships. And Ms. Gross made understandable mistakes with disastrous results. Fortunately for all concerned, she found an excellent nursing home. This book has a great deal of candid and vital advice for anyone in the same boat the Gross family found itself in. Recommended, although not necessarily recommended at a time in your life when it hits too close to home. It’s hard to read if your own nerves are raw. I recently heard Jane Gross speak here in Houston.  That was a tremendously effective way for her advice to connect with people who needed to hear it.

A Bittersweet Season by Jane Gross, published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf in 2011.

Nursing homes can be expectedly awful.  Nursing homes can be unexpectedly wonderful – like how the Nurses’ Aides dress Mom so that her clothes match and carefully comb her hair.  She looks better coordinated and more kempt than when she was in Assisted Living and dressing herself with Alzheimer’s eroding her ability to do so.

There is a certain little old pillow that stayed in her closet in Assisted Living, and which I put in her closet in the nursing home.  It’s nearly as old as Mom herself – ninety years old – because it was hand made for her by my grandmother when she was a little child.  I thought a time would come when that little old pillow should go onto the bed although I think she has forgotten the significance of it (and almost everything else.)  But she has been sleeping more and more as she loses the ability to talk or even smile.  Two afternoons ago when I visited her, she was in bed, comfortably asleep, with the head of the bed raised somewhat and extra pillows to help prop her up – with the little old pillow tucked over her shoulder for her head to rest on. God bless those Nurses’ Aides.

Music is something people remember and respond to when almost all else is lost.

Yesterday there was a singalong at my mom’s nursing home.  It is at least a weekly event, when a lady brings sheet music and song word books and plays the piano in the downstairs event room for those residents who get there on their own or who are brought by the staff.  The songs are golden oldies like “Red Red Robin,”  “Grand Old Flag,” “Sidewalks of New York” and others familiar to these folks from their youth or adulthood.  Wheelchair-bound and more or less feeble, a couple of the residents knew just about every word of every song by heart and could sing along.  Other residents wordlessly enjoyed the songs.  My mother seemed pretty far out of it, half asleep and nearly motionless.  But I noticed one of her hands gesturing in time to some of the songs.  And she took her foot out of the wheelchair’s footrest and put it on the floor and tapped her toes for “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

Memento mori was something of a Medieval motto.  How could it not be?  They had Black Death and other plagues, climate change and crop failures, and numerous wars including civil and Thirty Years’ and Hundred Years’.  Modern American culture, on the other hand, denies death with all the might and main of the medical establishment and the advertising industry. Death denial has a really long run for many of us.

Death denial runs aground on the rocky shore of reality when you have a loved one in a nursing home.  Assisted living has more or less graciously given many of the infirm elderly a safe haven. The people who have to remain in nursing homes are very sick, in ways that medicine can’t fix. If every day there isn’t the day of the dead, it’s close.

In that situation, sudden death starts to look good. I’ve heard people who have loved ones in nursing homes, or who themselves are in poor health, say as much.  It’s been on my own mind . There is much to envy about people who die doing what they love, pass away in their sleep, or even die in the bosom of an assisted living facility. Less than before, though, and probably less than ever in human history, sudden death is not the norm for the aged in America.

Mom’s nursing home had a Halloween party for everybody in both the Assisted Living and the nursing care sides of the facility.  The décor involved what you expect at Halloween and staff were in costume.  In the back of my mind I wondered about the propriety of having that kind of party theme in that kind of place, but everyone seemed to enjoy it.  One of the nurses told me that it always perks up the nursing care residents to get out of their usual floor to a different area with different people.

Maybe Halloween in a nursing home works like the skeletons in Mexico’s Day of the Dead.  As I understand it, the dancing skeletons and sugar skulls reminded people of the inescapable truth, more like the Middle Ages than America, that death was part and parcel of daily life.  The Roman Catholic church fused an Aztec death festival onto the Church’s own Days of the Dead – All Hallows Eve, All Saints, and All Souls. Those days existed on the Church calendar for good reason and had European Pagan roots as well. The paradoxical and vitally important effect is that remembering death affirms life.

There are times and there are places where you can’t deny death.  A nursing home adds the twist that some of these frail, sick, demented, slowly dying elders seem to be  neither fully alive nor finally deceased but some of both.  Half dead is one way that can strike the visitor.  Another way it can strike the visitor is halfway home.   A year from today  on All Souls’ Day, many of those  old souls in Mom’s nursing home will be gone: out of pain and indignity, out of dementia, rejoined with Mother Earth, returned to the nearer presence of God – however you describe this ineffable hope.

This is a collect for the Commemoration of All Souls from the 1929 Scottish Book of Common Prayer:

ETERNAL Lord God, who holdest all souls in life: We beseech thee to shed forth upon all the faithful departed the bright beams of thy light and heavenly comfort; and grant that they, and we with them, may at length attain to the joys of thine eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

My mother has been failing slowly all year.  Then she had a health crisis in the summer. After two ambulance trips to the emergency room and a five-day hospital stay, crisis turned into catastrophe and landed her in long term care in a nursing home in Georgia.  Since she is ninety years old and has had Alzheimers for years this was not exactly a surprise.  It grieved me, though, and I think it grieved her while she still had hold of that part of her memory,  that she couldn’t return to the wonderful assisted living facility where she was safe and happy for four and a half years. But there was an up side:  no more reason not to bring her to Houston. I was able to get her to Houston and into a reputable facility called the Treemont.

As soon as the first mildly cool front of the year blew in, I took my mother on what may have been our last walk together. She was in the wheelchair she can never again not use.  I pushed her on the sidewalks around the grounds of the Treemont. We looked at the flowers and acorns, leaves and oak trees.  I plucked a morning glory flower from a bed of ground cover.  She held onto that little purple flower all the way back into the building and upstairs to her floor.

She’s in worsening shape.  Last night, it was all she could manage for me to push her to the end of the hall to look out the window at the clear cool sunset sky. She told me she wants to go home.  I have no idea if she meant Assisted Living, or the modest little house on Mayfield Drive where she lived for f thirty years, or the farm where her family lived when she was a child.  She is hardly articulate.  I told her that she is very sick and has to be where nurses can take care of her day and night.  And then I prayed with her, because now her once and future home is the nearer presence of God.  May she get there in God’s good time soon.

Snowy Egrets are elegant shore birds with plumy white feathers and black bills and legs. Bright yellow feet pattern-interrupt the elegant impression only when said feet are visible, and they’re usually below the water. However, I came along behind two Snowy Egrets at the edge of Braes Bayou when they were avidly investigating whatever goodies the recent flood had churned up, and from that perspective the Snowies looked like the business ends of Q-tips balanced on oddly angled black wires!

The last six or eight months have been remarkable for shore birds on Braes Bayou, including White Ibises and a Tricolor Heron.  For a while there was a Roseate Spoonbill in the vicinity of the Kirby Drive bridge.  Roseate Spoonbills are usually Pepto-Bismol pink;  they use their wide-tipped bills to forage in mud flats for little crustaceans, eating which makes their feathers pink.  The one on Braes Bayou looked not very pink and rather misplaced.  I’ve seen them  in tidal marshes and on Clear Creek near Galveston Bay, never this far inland.  The drought may have driven brackish water much further up the waterways than usual.

There’s one sure-fire way to get Episcopalians to pipe down and listen up. I’ve seen it work at potlucks and now at an organ concert Friday night. The concert was by Dr. Philip Kloeckner, who teaches keyboard at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and directs the choir at my church, which is why the Shepherd School organ hall filled up with Episcopalians happily and loudly nattering. When it came time to begin, the emcee said, ‘THE LORD BE WITH YOU!” The audience instantly chorused “AND ALSO WITH YOU!” and awaited the emcee’s next words in perfect silence!

And what a concert it was.  The Shepherd School organ is a magnificent instrument with 5,000 pipes. It can sound like any of several eras of historical organ.  Philip gave us at least three distinctly different organ sounds in music by various composers.  His last piece was an improvisation on two Christmas carols given to him on the spot.  After thinking about it for all of half a minute,  he wove “Joy to the World” and “Angels We Have Heard on High” into an incredible fabric that seemed to involve pulling out every stop on the organ and sounding every pipe from the tiniest tinkling one to the massive pipe that sends a vibration through your chest if you’re in the audience.

Yesterday was the Twelfth Day of Christmas – the last day of the liturgical Christmas season;  today is Epiphany.  The days of Christmas definitely had their delights as far as I am concerned.

• The Blue Christmas service at my  church, St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Houston, was designed for people who might be grieving, bereft, or just grimly stressed, and was reverent, thoughtful, beautiful and holy.
• Everybody in Houston got what we wanted for Christmas:  RAIN!
• An owl in a university tree:  when my Rice Alum friends Becky and Marc and their son Beto came to town, we walked around the Rice campus and located one of the Screech Owls that roosts in the trees outside the West entrance of the Library.  The treetop was swaying in a stiff breeze.  Becky commented, “For the owl that must be just like sleeping in a hammock.”
• My dear friend and former colleague Ola gave me P. D. James’ Pride and Prejudice murder mystery, Death Comes to Pemberly, for Christmas.  What a joy to have an enjoyable  and distracting book to pick up and read over the holidays!
• My friend Kristin came from Washington DC to stay a few days.    She nested in my guest room a.k.a. the better half of my living room.  She enjoyed turning on the lights in the Christmas tree at night and when she had to get up early a couple of mornings for meetings.  Not many guest rooms come with a full-size Christmas Tree!
• I like my tree too.  According to my friend Bethe, whose family came from Poland, a Polish Christmas tree is one so decorated that you can’t see any tree. After upgrading to a 7 1/2′-footer this year, since I now live in a condo with high ceilings, I have a Texas Christmas Tree: bigger than it has to be, with spots of local color and lots of elbow room.

• Another friend, Lila (and there’s a theme here:  I am wonderfully blessed with friends!) is recuperating from surgery and, being an industrious person, itching for constructive things to do.  She’s proofreading the dark fantasy novel I just finished.  Wow!  Proofreading a book is a long and detailed job, and almost impossible for the writer of said book, who is much too close to the story to see the typos.
• I read the novel too as a prelude to the last editing pass.  I only caught about 20% of the glitches Lila did, but I found a slew of structural fixes to make, and I enjoyed reading it.  It’s a dark fantasy set mainly in the 1880′s Nevada and Utah Territories.  Now, on about the overall fourth (and in places six or seventh) draft, I think it really works.
• New Year’s Eve was a delight with Kristin and Lila and Lila’s husband Jim and my friend Eileen and her husband Gene at their home in Friendswood.   They live in a residential air park and just being there ups the quotient of fun had by all.  Jim made eggrolls, Eileen made Chinese dumplings and hot and sour soup, we greeted the New Year on Bermuda time, and everyone got home before midnight and before the local revelers hit the road.
• I made a pecan pie from a recipe in the November issue of Southern Living Magazine.  The Holidays are a grand time for modern takes on traditional food;  and  Southern Living, when it really connects with a New Southern recipe, hits it out of the ballpark.  I was wondering about some of the recipes in the December issue which tilted toward more avant garde fare.  My eyebrows shot up at the recipe for Sweet Potato Latkes in a section of new Hannukah food. But a good friend and colleague assures me that sweet potatoes make for extremely tasty latkes. Mazel tov!
• For those of us who didn’t have to go out of town, the holidays mean time for home improvements if desired.  I tackled a stack of memorabilia, some of it from Mom’s house when we sold the house, and the rest of it remembrance material from my adult life.  This was all stacked in a corner with some full plastic tubs holding up part of the stack – meaning no way to assess the contents of said tubs without taking down the stack.   That problem is no more.  I integrated a small file cabinet and four plastic storage cubes into the stack and now it works (and looks!) much, much better.
• New Year’s Day came with a morning of crystalline coolness and clarity. I was driving back from Church and saw a hawk thermalling over Greenbriar and Rice Boulevard.  I had my car’s sun roof open.  While parked at a red light I saw the hawk’s  flight feathers shining at the edges of its wings and its red-tinged tail glowing in the sun.  The hawk thermaled higher and higher.  What a great good luck sign for 2012!

Amazing plant matter- between rains it looks as dead as long-fallen leaves;  after a rain it flourishes.  I’d wondered if this year’s drought would kill off the resurrection fern in the Rice University oak trees, but not at all!

Walking to work, I was startled by being smiled at from the branches of a tree.  It was two mylar balloons – one of them bright gold with a smiley face.  The other balloon had little smileys all over it plus the words FEEL BETTER SOON.

OK, it’s not too surprising, that close to Medical Center, to see a couple of get-well balloons on the loose. On the other hand, it was very apt because  Houston has had severe drought for a year.  Even on a prosperous residential street like Greenbriar many trees (especially magnolias) look wilted. Over in Memorial Park there are so many dead trees it looks like Agent Orange fell out of the sky. The land itself has dried out to the breaking point. Greenbriar has buckles and potholes that could wallop a small car.  And on nearby Braes Bayou the asphalt hike and bike trail developed terrible cracks over the past year.  Cracks big enough to break a jogger’s ankle or take out a bicycle.  So the city put up warning signs and outlined the cracks in white, after which they looked like a crime scene where dead bodies had lain.  Maybe the dead bodies of a year’s worth of hopes for rain.  FEEL BETTER SOON is a great wish for the trees and the rest of the natural fabric of our city.