Nursing Home Blues

They had been married sixty years, though the question remains: aren’t they still married? Because they are both alive, and were never divorced: the marriage remains, right?

Ummm…not so much.

Or maybe it does, because the wife has learned, well in her 80’s, to use a tablet computer. And given that she never learned to drive, that’s quite an achievement for an aged lady. But she did it, because even though the nursing home is supposed to be excellent, and is definitely expensive, well, who knows if they are treating her husband right? So she lies awake most nights, and looks at the tablet that is showing her the live feed of her husband. He’s in the nursing home, and sleeping: she’s at home, and monitoring his care.

Nothing about old age is easy, but this particular scenario is especially heartbreaking. Twenty years ago, there would have been no way to know what the night shift was up to in the nursing home, and that might have been a good thing. But now, the elderly wife—who is only technically not a widow—is calling the nursing in the middle of the night, to say that it’s been several hours since her husband has been turned in bed.

I had assumed, by the way, that the nursing home business is booming: happily, I am wrong. According to an article in the Huffington Post, the nursing home industry is projected to decline by 20% by the year 2021. Why? Well, the Baby Boomers haven’t quite gotten to needing nursing homes, and the federal government has gotten the message: it can be cheaper to keep people in their homes.

In fact, 90% of nursing home revenues come from Medicare and other government programs. So what about the other 10%? Surely it has to come from the pockets of the elderly residents, right?

Well, yes, generally speaking, but the question is how. Because consider this quote, from The New York Times:

In a random, anonymized sample of 700 guardianship cases filed in Manhattan over a decade, Hunter College researchers found more than 12 percent were brought by nursing homes.

The human interest in the Time’s article concerns an Italian-American man who was locked into a dispute with the nursing home in which his wife lives. The man, Palermo, had been dealing with Medicare, which was dragging its feet. In the meantime, the bill for his wife’s care kept rising, and eventually reached $10,000. That’s when, on one of his daily visits to the home, he saw a six-page legal document on his wife’s bed. The nursing home was asking the court, in the name of a Carmelite nun, to be appointed legal guardian of Palermo’s wife’s assets.

The court may or may not go along, but that’s hardly the point. Palermo is 82 years old, and has never been sued in his life. And now, all of a sudden, he had to find a lawyer, supervise a legal strategy, and fend off sharks, hiding behind the habit (if not the skirts) of a Carmelite nun. So even if the court says no, Palermo is being strong-armed.

In the case of my friend, monitoring her husband in the nursing home…well, she’s moderately well off. She doesn’t, however, feel well off, but then, who does? So she has strategies for saving money: she has decided, for example, that the coffee from the coffee machine at Walgreens is really much better than the espresso from the café. So she save 63 cents on her cup of coffee, or some such, and better yet, grabs a handful of napkins, since they’re right out there for the taking, and Walgreen’s doesn’t actually say how many napkins you can take. See? So she hasn’t bought napkins for several years now, and that’s a saving of about $10—maximum—per year!

This is, of course, how the rich get rich, and stay rich, and very likely get richer. But it’s also how poor people stay poor. And while the wife is liberating napkins from Walgreen’s, the nursing home is charging somebody about $7,000 a month for her husband’s care. Yes, the same care that the wife is monitoring every night via her tablet.

The daughter of the man and wife comes from overseas to see her father—and console her mother. I know how it feels: I had to visit my mother in a nursing home, but only because she was recovering from operations, and needed physical therapy. But you take a deep breath, you square your shoulders, and you tell yourself that you will leave in….wait, how can you even think that? That’s your mother in there, and you are calculating how long you must spend before you can decently leave? What kind of beast are you?

And so you stay, and it’s not so bad, especially since your mother has wrangled a private room. Well, actually, I wrangled the room, since I had called the nursing home from Puerto Rico, and my mother had been there before. So they knew her, and they liked her, and they agreed: as long as they could, they would not give my mother a roommate. But then the day came when they had to use that bed, and the roommate was a perfectly nice lady, with a perfectly nice family. And the first thing the roommate did?

Turn on the TV!

Well, you don’t want to miss your soaps, do you?

Well, in my mother’s case…yes. But she was wise in the ways of the world: she knew that if she complained to the staff, it would fall on deaf ears. Yes, I had wanted to bring in a boom box, and all of the Wagner Ring Cycle that it could play, but my mother demurred.

Yes, it was a nightmare, but as nightmares go, it wasn’t too bad. I didn’t have it as bad…

…as Mr. Palermo!  

   

Nursing Home Blues

They had been married sixty years, though the question remains: aren’t they still married? Because they are both alive, and were never divorced: the marriage remains, right?

Ummm…not so much.

Or maybe it does, because the wife has learned, well in her 80’s, to use a tablet computer. And given that she never learned to drive, that’s quite an achievement for an aged lady. But she did it, because even though the nursing home is supposed to be excellent, and is definitely expensive, well, who knows if they are treating her husband right? So she lies awake most nights, and looks at the tablet that is showing her the live feed of her husband. He’s in the nursing home, and sleeping: she’s at home, and monitoring his care.

Nothing about old age is easy, but this particular scenario is especially heartbreaking. Twenty years ago, there would have been no way to know what the night shift was up to in the nursing home, and that might have been a good thing. But now, the elderly wife—who is only technically not a widow—is calling the nursing in the middle of the night, to say that it’s been several hours since her husband has been turned in bed.

I had assumed, by the way, that the nursing home business is booming: happily, I am wrong. According to an article in the Huffington Post, the nursing home industry is projected to decline by 20% by the year 2021. Why? Well, the Baby Boomers haven’t quite gotten to needing nursing homes, and the federal government has gotten the message: it can be cheaper to keep people in their homes.

In fact, 90% of nursing home revenues come from Medicare and other government programs. So what about the other 10%? Surely it has to come from the pockets of the elderly residents, right?

Well, yes, generally speaking, but the question is how. Because consider this quote, from The New York Times:

In a random, anonymized sample of 700 guardianship cases filed in Manhattan over a decade, Hunter College researchers found more than 12 percent were brought by nursing homes.

The human interest in the Time’s article concerns an Italian-American man who was locked into a dispute with the nursing home in which his wife lives. The man, Palermo, had been dealing with Medicare, which was dragging its feet. In the meantime, the bill for his wife’s care kept rising, and eventually reached $10,000. That’s when, on one of his daily visits to the home, he saw a six-page legal document on his wife’s bed. The nursing home was asking the court, in the name of a Carmelite nun, to be appointed legal guardian of Palermo’s wife’s assets.

The court may or may not go along, but that’s hardly the point. Palermo is 82 years old, and has never been sued in his life. And now, all of a sudden, he had to find a lawyer, supervise a legal strategy, and fend off sharks, hiding behind the habit (if not the skirts) of a Carmelite nun. So even if the court says no, Palermo is being strong-armed.

In the case of my friend, monitoring her husband in the nursing home…well, she’s moderately well off. She doesn’t, however, feel well off, but then, who does? So she has strategies for saving money: she has decided, for example, that the coffee from the coffee machine at Walgreens is really much better than the espresso from the café. So she save 63 cents on her cup of coffee, or some such, and better yet, grabs a handful of napkins, since they’re right out there for the taking, and Walgreen’s doesn’t actually say how many napkins you can take. See? So she hasn’t bought napkins for several years now, and that’s a saving of about $10—maximum—per year!

This is, of course, how the rich get rich, and stay rich, and very likely get richer. But it’s also how poor people stay poor. And while the wife is liberating napkins from Walgreen’s, the nursing home is charging somebody about $7,000 a month for her husband’s care. Yes, the same care that the wife is monitoring every night via her tablet.

The daughter of the man and wife comes from overseas to see her father—and console her mother. I know how it feels: I had to visit my mother in a nursing home, but only because she was recovering from operations, and needed physical therapy. But you take a deep breath, you square your shoulders, and you tell yourself that you will leave in….wait, how can you even think that? That’s your mother in there, and you are calculating how long you must spend before you can decently leave? What kind of beast are you?

And so you stay, and it’s not so bad, especially since your mother has wrangled a private room. Well, actually, I wrangled the room, since I had called the nursing home from Puerto Rico, and my mother had been there before. So they knew her, and they liked her, and they agreed: as long as they could, they would not give my mother a roommate. But then the day came when they had to use that bed, and the roommate was a perfectly nice lady, with a perfectly nice family. And the first thing the roommate did?

Turn on the TV!

Well, you don’t want to miss your soaps, do you?

Well, in my mother’s case…yes. But she was wise in the ways of the world: she knew that if she complained to the staff, it would fall on deaf ears. Yes, I had wanted to bring in a boom box, and all of the Wagner Ring Cycle that it could play, but my mother demurred.

Yes, it was a nightmare, but as nightmares go, it wasn’t too bad. I didn’t have it as bad…

…as Mr. Palermo!  

   

Lady, as Always, Takes Charge!

Well, I knew what it was the moment I happened upon it. But since I hadn’t seen it in six years, why did I know what it was?

I tell myself—that morning six years before was drenched in emotion. It had been only two months since my mother had died, and now my two brothers and I, with our spouses, were standing in the wildflower garden my mother had made in the twenty-acre woods which she owned, and in which she had lived.

OK—correction. The garden was a small affair, smaller than my mother’s living room. And since most wildflowers tend to be rather inconspicuous, as well as fleeting, it was really difficult to tell where the woods ended and the garden began.

My mother had begun the garden after my father died, and thus had called it “Jack’s garden.” He, of course, barely knew a trillium from a dog-tooth violet, and would have snorted at having a garden named after him, but my mother had been a strangely wonderful, practical sentimentalist. He was dead, after all, so if she had wanted to make him a garden? Well, he wouldn’t mind…..

So it had been therapy for her: I could imagine her visiting all her wildflowers—she knew where everything was—and deciding which ones to transplant. It’s therapeutic, after all, these mundane things you do. Clearing out the closets, for example, and facing the inevitable questions: his favorite sweater, he wore it seemingly always, but now fresh eyes see it. And isn’t it a bit ratty? What about those holes on the elbows—had they always been there? Why hadn’t you noticed them? So is anyone at Goodwill likely to buy or need this sweater?

So you are there, weeping a bit over the sweater, which is dumb, really, since your father had no particular love for clothes of any kind. You must do one of two things: discard (read: throw in the trash) or donate (read: give it to Goodwill, who will throw it in the trash). All of a sudden, the decision seems momentous: are you crazy? Who could possibly throw away Jack’s sweater? So there you are, seriously considering taking a sweater back to a tropical island, where sweaters are about as needed as fireplaces.

Now you know you’re crazy….

So she had made a garden for a man who had no need or even love for gardens, and that was the point. Grief is in one sense a stupid emotion: love will make you donate a kidney to your brother, or give a stern dressing-down to your son. But once a father dies, well, what use does he have for your tears? Or a husband, for that matter: the joke in the family was that Franny was going to find herself a gigolo named, of course, Juan. And why not? She had loved my father for fifty years—half a century! Why not have a fling with Juan?

So that morning, a month or two after my mother’s death, we had been in “Jack’s Garden,” and we were not there for Jack. Because later in the day, the memorial service would begin for my mother, and then the next day, we would all disperse. We were picking up our lives again, after the disruption of seeing our mother off, and much of that “picking up” meant going on, emotionally. There is, after all, a time to stop crying. There is a time when your friends really don’t want to hear that you spent the morning sobbing, since you had had the first dream of your mother after her death. And so real had it been that the dream seemed to be real just after you woke up! No, you think, she had been alive: you were dreaming that she was dead!

See?

Right?

It hits you again, just as hard as it hit you all that time ago, when the nurse had his stethoscope on your mother’s chest for a solid minute—you checked, since you were a nurse, too, and knew that it was state law….

But you have work to go to, or a breakfast to make, and you pull yourself together. If you’re a woman, you know that everybody will see your puffy eyes, this morning, but they’ll also see your bright smile. And hear you say, “just fine!” Because you are, after all, just fine. Know what? In six years, you won’t miss her so much. In fact, I am weeping now, just thinking about her, but I also have to confess: for the first time in six years, I forgot the anniversary of her death. Yes, May 3 went by, and not a tear did I shed. So I’m paying her back, with interest….

So I am going on, and we were going on, that day of the memorial service, though we have all gone on a lot more, nowadays, then we had gone on that morning. Which means that everybody was in tears, since my brother, who doesn’t so much make decisions as he herds his brothers, like a sheepdog, into doing the right thing. Which was, that morning, standing in Jack’s Garden. Remember? That garden that Jack didn’t much want, and probably wouldn’t have proclaimed just a piece of damned foolishness, but guess what? Dead men get no votes, Jack!

So why were we standing in the wildflowers / probable-and-or-presumptive poison ivy? You know, the stuff that will send my eldest brother—who inhaled the smoke of a fire burning the weed, and turned hyper allergic—to the Emergency Room? We are there because John, my sheepdog / brother, has decided to get my mother’s ashes, and to bury them, where else? Among the wild flowers and poison ivy of….

Somebody dug the hole. Then, we lifted the bag out of the box. And then came this:

      

“Crem” must mean ‘crematorium.” “Serv” is what, “service?” “SP” is a mystery, as is the “12954,” though I highly suspect the corpse before my mother was “12953….” Anyway, it was on the bag that held my mother’s ashes, and it both secured the bag and identified the ashes.

Which, as you may know, are not really ashes. They are roughly the size of small-grained rice, and it would take a quite a wind to scatter them. So John had taken the tag off the bag, and then looked at it. What to do with it? He turfed and handed it to my eldest brother. And what did he do?

Why me? Had it been because I had been there all the way through her death? Had it been because I had, a bit more than the others, masterminded her death? Or perhaps it is simply the case: the younger child is given the last of everything, from his mother’s milk to his mother’s ashes. Anyway, I held the thing in my hand, and then slipped it into my pocket.

I should have put it, of course, in the hole, along with the ashes. That would have been logical, but had my mother enjoyed the services of Juan, the gigolo? Of course not, so it felt, somehow, totally, totally, important to have this disc that had sealed up the remains of “12954,” or rather….

…my mother.

And so I got to Puerto Rico, after having placed the disc along with the small change into the security bowls at airport security. I pulled off my Wisconsin clothes—the six layers of needed clothing even in June—and pulled on my shorts. Then I emptied my pockets and said, “what in hell….”

Well, I had lost my mother: was I now to lose “12954?” Of course not, so I put the disc under the candleholder in the guest bathroom, and hoped against hope that some guest would find it valuable enough to steal….

And so I discovered it today, after six years, since cleaning is not quite cleaning in my house. It is, in fact, more akin to an archeological dig. And so here I am, as befuddled today as I was six years ago, because you know what? I lost a mother and then substituted her through a book, but I still cannot, I really cannot, bear to throw away….

Lady comes by….

“Take this,” I tell her. “And keep it utterly, utterly safe, because I will never see it again.”

I hand her the disc.

“But…” she begins.

I purse my lips towards my computer: it’s a Puerto Rican thing, why be so rude as to point, when you can purse your lips?

“Tomorrow,” I tell her.

She kisses me, pats me on the head, pockets the disc into the purse that shelters the thousand mysteries, relics, and memories of her life, which is everybody’s life, and my life as well, and now “12954’s” life, as well as, now…

….my mother.

  

Silence in the Poet's Passage

“I have utterly no idea why I did it,” I told Lady, “except that it seems to be an occupational hazard of mine. Remember my obsession with the Polish Papal Nuncio to the Dominican Republic? Or the time that I could leave poor Martha Argerich alone? Well, this weekend it was Kathleen Battle, though I’ve no idea why….”

“Whatever happened to her,” asked Lady. “She was everywhere for a while in the early 90’s, and then she disappeared.”

“The old story,” I told her. “Every opera singer knows: it’s not just about getting the engagement, it’s about getting the call back….”

“And she didn’t get the call back?”

“Worse, the Metropolitan Opera fired her, and then she was dead in the water, operatically speaking. Nobody would touch her….”

“Wow—what did she do?”

“Well, you could make a sort of children’s book out of it. You know, ‘A is for Arrogance, B is for Bitchiness…’ She didn’t, for example, like her dressing room, so she simply moved into another singer’s dressing room. Bad enough, but she also threw the singer’s clothes out in the hall. So when Carol Vaness—that was the singer—came back…well, Vaness is a lady, so we don’t know what happened. But we do know that when they were taking their final bows together, Vaness assured Kathleen Battle that, speaking for the entire company, she heartily wished never to work with her again.”

“Dear me, and I though poets were bad….”

“The stories are go on and on. The best being, of course, when she called her management company in New York, from the back seat of her limousine in California. She wanted the company to call the chauffeur, and instruct him to turn down the air conditioning….”

“What! She couldn’t tap on the window and ask?”

“Miss Battle does not address chauffeurs…”

“Good Lord,” said Lady.

“Or the time she checked out of the Ritz, in Boston, because the put peas in her pasta…”

“Clearly a major no-no….”

“So she got fired from the Met, and when they announced that, the entire company cheered! In San Francisco, they actually made t-shirts, after she appeared there, saying ‘I Survived the Battle!’”

“Wow!”

“So I began obsessing about that, since the Met has decided to invite her back, but just in recital, and of spirituals. But it doesn’t sound like she’s had much of a life. One post in an—admittedly rather bitchy—forum said that she’s back in her home town of Portsmouth, Ohio, and that she shops in the Walmart, there. Oh, and she returns stuff, without receipts, which doesn’t make the staff happy….”

“Marc, you really have to curb the tendency…”

“I know, I know…it’s a curse, these obsessions of mine. Remember the time I actually spent 20 minutes listening to Joyce DiDonato give an interview in French? All under the guise of brushing up the language from High School?”

“Out of control,” said Lady, “and what you really should be doing is tackling the strange case of the disappearance of Pablo Neruda.”

“Well, I thought it was the known parrot rustler, young Montalvo, when I first about it….”

“So did we all. In fact, we all hoped it was Montalvo, since the bird would have been well taken care of. But he’s in the clear—the bird disappeared on a Wednesday afternoon, and Montalvo was nowhere in shight….”

Neruda was—or hopefully is—a green Quaker parrot, who lived in a cage with Maya Angelou and Robert Frost. Maya met a natural end in both senses—that is, both the poet and the bird did. Curiously, well, here’s what I told Lady….

“You should have thought about that when you named him,” I said, ‘since everybody has suspected that the poet Neruda’s death was hardly accidental. Remember, they exhumed him, a while ago?”

“Well, I could hardly have imagined…”

“Anyway, the videos should tell you…”

“That’s just it,” said Lady. “Do you know, when I finally got into my brother’s apartment upstairs, where the camera monitors are located, and when I finally convinced the se3curity company that I was authorized to look at the videos, the videos for that day were gone! Poof! They said they were doing a reboot, or some such thing, and there was nothing recorded for that date! So why have a security system if stuff like that happens?”

Theories abound. Montalvo, last night, speculated that someone was trying to frame him. After all, almost no one could touch Neruda without getting his hand shredded: Montalvo, though, could hold the bird in his hand, and even get the bird to lie with his belly facing up.

“The bird is dead,” said Mr. Fernández, though he declined to give a reason why.

“The bird is probably very depressed,” said Maritza, “since birds are very emotional.”

“I think the parrot guy—the same one who had the famous blue macaw that formed that powerful attraction top Montalvo—has him,” said Lady. “So all we have to do is go down, and see if he has any Quaker parrots, and then call out ‘Neruda!’ And if he comes, then we’ll know it’s him.”

Would that stand up in court?

“You really should have trained him to recite some of Neruda’s poetry,” I told her. “Maybe, ‘I, a dead man, want to leave my grave….’”

And so we have no Neruda.

What do we have?

A great and terrible silence!