I’ve got all my accessories on,” Alice told me on the phone this morning, “so I thought I’d give you a call.”
By “accessories” she doesn’t mean jewelry, belts, or scarves. Every morning she puts on her wig cap, her wig, her dentures, her hearing aids, her glasses, and finally, like the Pope donning his cross, she lowers her Life Alert chain into place.
Gold? Silver?
No fancy materials, but useful.
“All my accessories go on or into my head,” she said. “Except for the Life Alert. And that thing always gets tangled up in my necklace, if I’m wearing one.”
“Oh, but I’m falling apart,” she added, despite having just put herself together. She says this regularly now. She started saying it in reference to her ever-declining hearing and sight, but lately she’s been overwhelmed by what has become a daily, sometimes moment-by-moment skirmish with old Old Age.
Spots showed up on her arms for the first time, and she has been trying to banish them with hydrogen peroxide, which, she insists, is “doing the trick.” But other spots have started appearing on her clothes, spots that are the result of spilling things on herself during lunch or dinner in the dining room. (She eats breakfast in her apartment.)
“How many people saw this before I did?” she wondered one day as she handed me a blouse to launder and pointed to a cream-colored stain near the top button. “Or this?” A streak of blue on white slacks, probably ink. “And this?” A pink flower edged with purple on a print top.
I held the last article of clothing close to the lamp. “That’s part of the design. Can you see it in the light?”
She leaned over and squinted at it. “Oh,” she said. “It looks green to me. That’s my eyesight. There you go.”
Spilling food on herself is new. She can no longer see the food on her plate or the fork that lifts it to her mouth. “I guess it’s time to buy me a bib,” she said on the day we sifted through that laundry.
She showed me a page filled with bibs in one of the many catalogs she gets, almost all of them featuring items for people who find their bodies drifting farther and farther from the shore of optimum functioning, things such as compression hose and reach extenders.
Other kinds of spills have been happening, too. While eating a snack one night, the phone rang. She forgot about the bowl of popcorn on her lap, talked for a while and, engaged in conversation, missed the bowl’s slip, did not hear it thud onto the floor, and spent half an hour on her hands and knees picking up popcorn. She picked it up herself, she told me, because to ask the staff for this kind of help would embarrass her.
“I should not have forgotten I was eating popcorn,” she said. “What would they think of me? That I belong in a home?” A rueful laugh.
I gently tried to argue with her. The staff at The Place would certainly assist her in such a situation. She’s lived in this “home” now for six years, and she is well-liked there.
“No, thanks,” she said, not to the caring but to the exposure of need.
Some days bring a freight train of mishaps. Yesterday was one of them. During our morning call, she reviewed all that went wrong.
“Not long after I got up, I turned on the TV and I watched about an hour of some doctors performing surgery. I don’t know what they were taking out or putting in, but with my eyesight it was just a big long smear of blood.”
“But you kept watching?”
“I did. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Horrible! I kept looking down at my legs. They seemed to be swelling up by the minute, and I started wondering what kind of surgery I might need for that. I worked myself into a state about it.”
“No surgery necessary,” I told her. “Remember? We talked to the doctor about your legs.”
“I couldn’t hear what she was saying, let alone remember what she said.”
This is not true. She has carried on several conversations with Elizabeth, who is very careful to make sure Alice hears and understands her. Sometimes Alice remembers things from her medical visits that I’ve forgotten. However, she did not want to hear that now, but she was glad to know that I would not, under any circumstances, allow anybody to operate on her legs.
“So then I was moving something on the dresser by my bed,” she went on, “and that graduation picture of your brother, Bruce, dropped down between the dresser and the wall. It took me all morning to get everything off the top, move the thing away from the wall, pick up that picture and put it back, and then put all those things in their places again—the clock, the lotions, all the other pictures, and the phone. Oh, you can’t imagine what all I have on there. I tell you, it’s a hodgepodge.”
Dresser-top hodgepodge of mostly very old photos, grooming supplies and miscellaneous equipment.
After that she took a nap in her La-Z-Boy and when she awoke it was time for lunch. “Time to go spill things all over myself,” she said.
When she returned to her apartment, she spent a good hour trying to remember the name of George H.W. Bush’s wife. “I don’t know why I started even thinking about her. I got so mad at myself, but finally it came to me. Barbara!”
She decided to write down the name of every First Lady she could remember. She came up with thirty and scolded herself for not getting more.
All the list making and self-chastisement wore her out. She took another nap, a long one. “I thought I’d stay out of trouble if I was sleeping.”
She slept the afternoon away and missed my phone calls because she can no longer hear the phone when it rings. A month ago she could hear the phone ring, and she could call someone, although it took her a long time to find and press each number. Now she cannot hear the ring and cannot see the numbers. I got her another phone and programmed in some numbers, but the new phone’s ring, which was advertised as “amplified,” is too soft.
So now she has a phone bank: the phone on which she can hear the voice of the caller (sometimes) next to the phone with the programmed numbers, on which she cannot hear the caller’s voice (ever), plus a ring-booster, which flashes brightly when the phone rings and also screeches louder than a smoke alarm. She can’t hear it screeching, but sometimes, if she happens to be looking in the right direction, she can see its orange light flashing. One of the phones also flashes red when it rings. When the phone bank is in action, it’s quite a light show.
Alice’s phone bank.
But if she is sleeping in her La-Z-Boy, no amount of ruckus or mechanical bling will rouse her, something I didn’t understand until yesterday when I tried over and over again to reach her and she didn’t answer.
Therefore, she was surprised to wake up and find an aide standing over her, checking her pulse to see if she was all right. Bibi explained that I’d sent her because I was worried when my phone calls went unanswered.
“That was not the highlight of my day,” Alice told me. “I was sorry to worry you, and sorry for her. She had to come running all the way down here to take my pulse.”
Again, I reminded her the caretakers work there. “Remember what it was like to work?” I asked. She’d clerked in a store for several years.
“Not really,” she said. “Oh, yes. I wore heels all the time. I was young then.”
“These people are even younger.”
“Now stop lecturing me and let me get on with my bad time,” she said. “When I was getting ready for bed, I felt pretty good. The really bad day was almost over. Then clunk! I dropped my dentures in the sink. I felt so afraid. What would I do if they broke? But they didn’t. At least I don’t think they did.”
“If they’re broken, we’ll get new dentures,” I said. “But you’re right. That was a really bad day. Except for remembering all those First Ladies.”
“But I’d forgotten Barbara Bush’s name,” she said, ever mindful of the glass half empty. “Anyway, I’m not done yet.”
I wondered what could possibly have happened between the denture dropping and bed. Had she fallen? My stomach fluttered. I know from my own experience the effects of a fall aren’t always immediately apparent, and she has already broken one hip.
“I pushed the walker into my bedroom,” Alice said. “I felt so tired. I leaned over to fold back the covers and right there on my pillow, like it had been waiting for me, sat a big black bug.”
Relieved to hear bug instead of fall, I started laughing. “Wait!” she said. “That’s not the end of my sad story.”
“What happened to the bug?”
“I chased him away. I couldn’t squash him because I didn’t want that on my pillow case, so I kind of shooed him off the bed. I don’t know where he is. Far away, I hope.”
I thought of her small apartment. “Yes, far away. I’m sure.”
“So finally I got into bed and fell asleep for my allotted four hours, which is all I ever get these days, and when I woke up I realized I had one hearing aid still in my ear. Thank goodness it hadn’t fallen out in the middle of the night. I’d still be looking for it.”
“But you’re wearing it.”
“Saved me some time this morning having to put in only one hearing aid.”
“No wonder you’re calling me earlier than usual,” I joked.
“Stop trying to be funny,” she said. “I’ve been telling you that I’m falling apart.”
“Yes. And I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re still strong, though. You moved the dresser. You picked up the popcorn. Some people fall apart at a much younger age.”
“It’s harder now,” she argued. “to have things wear out. I’m not sure what I mean, but it just is. Believe me.” She took a deep breath and sighed, but when she spoke again her voice struck a lighter note. “Okay, now help me remember something from a long time ago.” I felt the mood shift as we skittered like black bugs into a new time zone. “Who owned that house we bought back in Pipestone? That doctor. What was his name?”
I was thirteen when we moved into the house in Pipestone, Minnesota. I had no idea who’d owned it previously. Fortunately, I didn’t need to remember. “Chung!” she said, giddy at suddenly recalling the name. “It was Dr. Chung. I’ve been trying all morning to think of that man’s name, and now I’ve remembered. Isn’t that something?”
Old Old Age, increasingly desperate to have its way with her, had to take a back seat then because Alice felt pleased with herself, and that feeling is one of the few clear spots left to her.
