Kathryn McLeod
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

The Stuff of Life

Before the nursing home, which is a place I won’t think about now because it was two years of torture for her and me both, I would fly home on her dime to visit my mother in her seniors’ residence, which had once been my old high school. 

Amazing the conversions that can be done when there’s money to be made, eh?

I’d spend my nights on the pull-out couch in her tiny living room, which is all the square footage an older person needs, but due to my mother’s habit of getting up and dressed in the middle of the night to go down to breakfast, I can’t say I got much sleep.

This habit of hers started around the age of 90, and I figure it must’ve kicked in while she was dreaming of her old army days as a WREN stationed in Halifax during WWII.

Or maybe she was dreaming of her high school teaching days when she had year after year of perfect attendance. Whichever it was, my mother was an absolute sergeant major when it came to punctuality with us, which is why I never once met her on time for one of her “command performances” as my friend Evelyn referred to her visits back when I was a young adult living on my own in The Big Smoke.

Uncanny, really, how I never once made it on time for dinner, no matter how convenient the time or location.

Anyway, she’d wake up with a start, already in a panic about being late, and so deeply impaired in both vision and hearing, she had no idea it was still the middle of the night until I yelled into her ear, “Mom! It’s 2:00 in the morning!”

A couple of times it happened immediately after I’d turned out my light at 11:00, having finally become drowsy enough to have any hope of sleep at all. It’s the outside hallway lighting blazing bright under the door, which stands a good inch off the ground. Or maybe a neighbour on the other side of the seemingly cardboard wall watching tv at full volume.

She’d throw on a haphazard assortment of slip-on clothing – a fashionista who could no longer do buttons and zippers because her fingers had stopped working – and using her walker, push open her bedroom door to announce “Time for breakfast!”

Once I ended up staying for two weeks, a week longer than planned, and I swear I didn’t get more than an hour’s sleep all told. That was the time she had a fall and cracked a couple of ribs. Afterwards, when her friend, Margaret, dropped by for a visit my mother said to her, “I wish Kathryn had let me die.”

Margaret was a decade younger than my mother and still lived in her own home, which my mother advised her to continue to do until she died in her sleep of natural causes, the fantasy all older people have that rarely comes to pass. Later, after my mother moved on to the nursing home, I would stay with Margaret in her four-bedroom house full of antiques she couldn’t palm off on anybody come hell or high water. And I’m sorry to admit she’d practically have to force me out the front door, so reluctant was I to bear witness to the torture my poor mother was enduring, forced to keep living a life she no longer wanted, and in a nursing home of all forsaken places.

Anyway, back to my mother in the seniors’ residence with broken ribs. Margaret was Catholic, and would act scandalized by such cavalier talk of death, although in actuality she wasn’t scandalized at all. So, she said out of habit, “Oh Elta, you don’t mean that.” To which I said, “Yes, she most certainly does mean that, as you very well know, Margaret, and I would’ve let her die but she wasn’t going to die of broken ribs. Trust me, mom. I know what you want. But you don’t even have a DNR on your fridge. The ambulance guy told me on the ride to the hospital you need to put a DNR on your fridge. They probably give them out like candy here so they can turf out the body and raise the rent for the next inmate. Ask Chris the nurse for a DNR. I’d do it for you but it would look like I was after my inheritance this damnable seniors’ residence is stealing from me every living minute of your agonizingly long and unwanted life.”

Then we had to explain what a DNR was to Margaret so she could act scandalized again because her Catholicism really was hilariously performative. The truth of it is, she liked to sing in the church choir and shock the nuns with stories of the scandalous life on the outside. Meanwhile, she was as pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ as the rest of us, complete with a gay daughter and, I suspect, more than a man or two out of wedlock after the passing of her dear sainted husband who sounded like a bit of a putz if you ask me.

I miss Margaret more than I do my mother. She was just one of those people. Everyone should have a Margaret in their life at some point or another.

Oh, I should explain about my mother getting up for breakfast. The apartments have little microwaves and fridges but no stoves because, well, you know. People go into these residences barely coping on their own. Then they tend to live another decade or so and it’s not like they become more capable, although they often get healthier if they don’t die.

My mother hated every minute of her life in the seniors’ residence but her health still improved and quite dramatically. It’s the social stimulation. Even if the older person hates everybody and everything and, like my mother, doesn’t even want to be alive anymore, it’s mandatory to show up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner – or expect a knock at the door from Chris the nurse.

Chris the nurse knew all the tricks of older people. She explained to me how they’d try to get out of the appearances by requesting meals in their rooms, so it would just result in them getting a wellness check and fairly determined prodding to get thee down to the dining room. The staff really do care about the residents. You couldn’t do their job if you didn’t. Older people can be quite a handful, giant wrinkly toddlers who know their civil and human rights, but not what’s best for them.

By the way, toasters, which are allowed, shouldn’t be. I swear every other night a resident would set off the fire alarm while burning toast. I spent enough time in the blazingly lit hallway waiting for the all clear while one of the men – always a man because as the older women knew: it’s important for older men to take charge of what they can every now and again, although I always double checked anyway because it’s not like you can trust their will to live – would go down to the front desk to make sure it was just another burnt toast false alarm, as per usual.

My mother, meanwhile, like all the other very hard of hearing residents, would sleep right through the fire alarm and I’d have to yell at her about it the next day.

So yes, meals are in a communal dining room, and everyone is expected to show up for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And just like how with condos all the resident gripes are about the parking, in seniors’ residences all the gripes are about the food.

The parking is not a problem because doctors, thankfully, confiscate drivers’ licenses. Society does not need older people with nothing better to do than tool around town all day adding to climate change and traffic woes. And trust me, they have nothing better to do. 

Hey, by the way, if you’re worried about ending up in a seniors’ residence, just stop, stop right now. There’s no way in hell any of us in our 60s on down will be able to afford to live in one. There will be no dependent austerity sold as independent luxury for us. We’ll be free as birds to set our hovels ablaze trying to keep ourselves watered and fed on tea and toast, thank you very much.

But my mother was an 80-year-old retired high school teacher with a fully indexed pension when she moved in, as was her main dining companion, Barbara, whom I’d known growing up and who’d even had a brief stint as Vice-Principal of the seniors’ residence back when it was still my 100-year-old, falling-apart high school in the mid-70s.

Their other two dining companions (they were all tables of four) were wealthy widows. Florence was the widow of a pharmacist and co-owner of their store. And I have no idea where Esther’s money came from but she was rich and 103 and told such fanciful stories of growing up that Barbara referred to her as “Anne of Green Fables”.

Florence, who was unfailingly kind, would tsk a bit at this but with a bit of a smirk because she’d grown up poor, like my mother, who luckily couldn’t hear Esther’s stories to be annoyed by them, because I hated confrontations and confrontations were my mother’s favourite pastime. Thankfully, Esther couldn’t hear Barbara refer to her as “Anne of Green Fables” either, or she’d have had hurt feelings because she was very childlike and naive about what a couple of snarky old battleaxes my mother and Barbara had become.

Really, nobody could hear anybody, which I noticed cut down almost entirely on the possibility of confrontations and bad feelings because I guarantee you middle-aged Barbara and my mother would’ve been appalled by older-aged Barbara and my mother.

I’m serious. The older versions of these women bore no resemblance at all to the middle-aged women I’d known growing up. 

The Barbara I’d grown up with would’ve bit off her own lips before she’d have made fun of an older person’s fanciful story-telling. In fact, she was famous with my mother for VOLUNTARILY spending time with older people, doing Meals on Wheels and visiting them in hospitals and nursing homes. My mother even joked at one of her staff parties she was going to get Barbara a Candy Striper outfit for Christmas. And I remember her saying it because Mr. Smiley (his real name!) immediately chimed in with “Well I’m getting her a Candy Stripper outfit for Christmas!”

My younger sister and I were privy to some outrageous high school teacher behaviour growing up, let me tell you, my mother hosting staff parties a few times a year. But it was the 60s and 70s, a different era, and even though I wasn’t around in the 80s, I can assure you the parties would have been much tamer.

Chock another one up for drinking and driving laws.

Amen.

Anyway, on one of my last visits while my mother was still living in the seniors’ residence, a neighbour knocked on the door. When I opened it, she handed me a stack of my mother’s photo albums, which contained photos of her travels all over the world.

“I found these in the garbage in the laundry room down the hall. Maybe put them up on the top shelf in the closet behind the door here. Your mother can’t see well and won’t notice if you place them up high. I just couldn’t stand to see them thrown out like that. I think your mother’s a little down. I can’t imagine she really wants to throw away all these memories of her travels.”

“A little down” was putting it mildly. My mother liked to have fun, drink martinis, travel, have fun drinking martinis while travelling, and in a short period of time she’d lost her vision and hearing, the use of her fingers, and her balance. And while I know her neighbour was well-intentioned, as only well-intentioned neighbours can be, I understood completely why my mother had thrown out all her photo albums. Not only was she never one to look back fondly on the past, she would routinely turn the page on it with a speed that left us, her kids, scrambling to keep up lest we get left behind covered in the dust she’d kicked up in her haste to move on.

Really, I have no idea why she even took photographs. Ever. Of anyone or anything. She never looked at them. Just stuck them away in photo albums and put them on a shelf in the closet of the den of our family home.

“Okay, thanks,” I said, taking the photo albums from her, while I yelled silently in my head “Oh, fuck off, well-intentioned neighbour of my mother!” 

What use were her photo albums to my mother when she couldn’t see the photos anymore? I know, I know, you’re thinking we, her kids, could enjoy them. Oh stop it. No one wants to look at anyone else’s travel photos unless it’s a Facebook friend posting them and you can have a brief look and say to yourself, “There, now I don’t have to walk the Camino Trail.” And move on because those photos are NOT MY PROBLEM.

Next!

I don’t know about you but I’m drowning in digital memorabilia, never mind the real-life stuff, and it’s my fondest dream to just chuck it all and go forward in life with a clean slate and never again collect a single goddamned thing. For sure my kids have zero interest in anything from my past, nor do I want them looking back at me when I’m gone, so what am I clinging to it all for anyway?

“Life is for the living” as my own mother would say, and did, many times. Now I say it too. Over and over. And yet.

Also, “don’t look back, just look forward,” which I overheard my sister-in-law saying to at least a dozen of the people who came to pay their respects to my mother, at a memorial where Margaret had the time of her life, so happy was she for my mother to be dead. I found it both hilarious and cathartic at the time, saying “Don’t look back, just look forward” at a memorial. Now I find it brilliant, just the best: Don’t look back, just look forward.

And clearly my mother didn’t want to saddle any of us with her photo albums or she would’ve done so. Besides, I was the only one even remotely interested in looking at photos of her travels and when I did take a gander, well, it was just weird, seeing my mother out of context like that, a complete stranger, really, staring back at a camera while sitting on a camel in Morocco.

An elephant in India?

A horse in Scotland?

Oh, who cares? I’m Facebook friends with a professional photographer who takes such great photos of his travels I’ll never have to go anywhere ever again. Because I most decidedly did NOT inherit my mother’s travel gene. I love staying put. Home is my happy place. My own bed is where my heart is and usually by 9:00 p.m.

Anyway, I went down to dinner a little earlier that evening because I wanted to tell Barbara about my mother throwing out the photo albums, even though I probably could’ve told her through a bullhorn with my mother sitting right there and she wouldn’t have heard a thing.

Barbara, bizarrely, had the hearing of a bat, seemingly the only resident who had any hearing at all and so was much relied upon for passing on any staff gossip.

“So Barbara, a neighbour dropped off a stack of my mother’s photo albums she’d apparently thrown in the laundry room garbage, and I was wondering if maybe you’d like to have them.”

(My mother and Barbara had done a fair bit of travelling together, it being a well-known fact the only people who can stand to travel with teachers are other teachers.)

“Why would I want your mother’s photo albums?”

“Well, I don’t know. You’re in a lot of the photos. You went on trips with her. I thought-“

“Put them back in the garbage. Maybe not the laundry room garbage. Ugh. People are so stupid. Why would your mother’s neighbour- oh! Grace! Say no more. Put them in the dining room garbage. No one will fish them out. Your mother asked me a while ago what she should do with them. I told her to throw them out since she can’t see them anyway. I threw out all mine before I moved here. You know, the last trip your mother did with Margaret was a complete nightmare. Mostly for Margaret because your mother had some kind of spell and Margaret, who really isn’t much of a traveller, not like your mother, had to get them home.”

“What?! Margaret never told me about that!”

“Oh well. Kids think they need to know everything. What would you do about your mother’s spells? She gets spells. Just every once in a while. She sort of checks out. And she would’ve told Margaret not to say anything so don’t blame Margaret. And don’t tell your mother I told you either. She’s very private about her spells. And don’t go talking about it around here or you’ll get her kicked out. And believe me it doesn’t get better than here. And by that I mean here is the end of the line in any semblance of independence. And you know how your mother is about her independence.”

And, I guess I don’t know what kind of daughter it makes me but all I did was let Margaret know I knew about the spells, but just so she could fill me in on what was involved, which seemed to be, well, my mother just sort of, like, checked out for a bit. And thanks to me not saying anything, my mother was able to carry on living in the seniors’ residence for a couple more years before another fall (or, um, I guess it was probably a spell) landed her in hospital. After that she moved on to the nursing home, her seniors’ residence unable to take her back, and her worst fears were finally met, the complete and total loss of her independence.

And she had to leave her friends behind too Barbara and Florence and Esther. Eventually Margaret’s doctor took away her license, she couldn’t drive to visit my mother anymore.

It sucked and still does suck so I don’t like to think about it and I won’t.

The truth is, we drag around the stuff of life, our own private lost and found, from pillar to post for all our sometimes too-long and unwanted lives. But at the end of hers, mercifully with MAiD on the grounds of psychological suffering and (I’m guessing) being 95 – and don’t think for a second Margaret didn’t approve – my mother had divested herself of all of it, every last bit, and when she died – the MAiD death certificate lists the cause as “natural” – it was surrounded by her very relieved kids in a room furnished to nursing home standards with no place to put or store anything that didn’t have a medical purpose.

Anyway, I’d like to say I followed Barbara’s advice and thrown the photo albums in the dining room garbage, but I didn’t. I put them up on the top shelf of the closet where my mother would never find them, left for someone else to discover and throw out. Or maybe they’re still there. Who knows? Who cares? Life is for the living. Us. You and me. And we don’t look back, we just look forward.

And soon enough we’ll get it together, 1, 2, 3, and let it go, let it go, let it go.