Dying Isn’t Just for the Young #3
“You need to accept the facts,” Diane said. “Don’t make this harder on me or yourself. You heard the people at the hospital. Someone has to take care of you. You’re not supposed to be on your own yet. And I can’t stay in the city.”
“Take care of me? That sounds ominous,” I told her, already thinking back to the paperwork in the hospital. “I am sure I can manage. I can order groceries. Have my pills delivered.”
“You’re being unreasonable,” Diane told me, her voice stern, as though she were the parent now.
“I warned you about falling,” David told me, although he had done no such thing.
“I don’t see how living anywhere else would have made a difference to my sense of balance,” I said tartly.
“I’m sorry, Mom.” David put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re right. We’re just upset because of how worried we got when we heard you fell.”
“You might be able to come back here in a few weeks,” Diane said, but I could hear the lie in her voice.
I leaned heavily on my new cane.
I haven’t been entirely truthful in this journal about what it was like to live with Nigel.
Not that I didn’t love him. Of course I did!
And it wasn’t as though he meant to be cruel, although sometimes he was.
It was just hard for Nigel not to see what he needed as more important than the needs of anyone else.
And it was hard for Nigel to see a thing he wanted as anything but rightfully belonging to him.
Mostly, that was fine. But sometimes it wasn’t.
Sometimes it went too far, usually when the thing he wanted wasn’t going to be given up easily by the person who had it.
Going too far had cost him professional relationships in the past. It had cost him personal ones too.
That was the way of moving through the world he’d modeled for our children. And there they were, taking that lesson to heart.
July 14, 2014
My daughter’s house is in a place called Belchertown, which, as names go, is just embarrassing. It’s a perfectly lovely town, though, and Diane has an acre of green grass surrounding her home and a view of a tree-covered valley out the back, near a rusted firepit.
Inside, white shiplap covers most of the walls. Beneath the detritus left by my three grandchildren, a large beige sectional rests on top of a greige rug. Nothing with much color, really, as though Diane sought not to draw the eye to anything at all.
She and Keith, her husband, installed me in a ground-floor bedroom with my own television.
I managed to pack a few of my favorite dresses, along with art supplies, some costume jewelry, and books.
They brought my laptop and phone but “forgot” both chargers.
They’ve promised to get me new ones, but so far those have not materialized.
What they did give me a lot of was pain medicine, which helped.
And wine, which, combined with the pain medicine, knocked me sideways.
When I wasn’t sleeping, I got to spend more time with my grandchildren.
I supervised them sewing fresh garlands of garlic, which we hung along the windows.
My eldest granddaughter, Mary, was very serious, while her two little sisters, Susan and Willow, obviously believed they were playing a game.
They complained about the stink of the garlic and begged to go outside, even though dusk was coming on.
“Nana, are the vampires going to come here?” Mary asked me later that night. At thirteen, she was full of the kind of restless energy that created poltergeists.
“No,” I said, gesturing toward our creations. “We’ve got garlic on the windows.”
Someone probably gave her that answer before. She looked unsatisfied. “Maybe I want to be a vampire.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Oh?”
She shrugged, looking defensive. Waiting for me to scold her. “I’d get to do what I wanted. Forever.”
That made me smile wistfully. I imagined myself as the ambitious young woman that I was in my twenties and thirties.
Writing into the night, espresso shots and—admittedly, look, I don’t recommend it—a few bumps of cocaine for company.
Working in a restaurant as a server by day, so we had something to live on.
Running from work to one of Nigel’s performances with barely enough time to wipe the sweat from the hollow of my throat.
Barely enough time to put on a fresh coat of lipstick and slick back my hair.
Back then, plastic cup of wine in my hand, laughing backstage, I wanted everything.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I told her. “We all dream of that.”
“And I could make you a vampire too,” Mary volunteered.
I smiled and opened my arms for a hug. She smelled like cherry lip balm and the faintly oniony underarm scent of a teen who wasn’t diligent about putting on antiperspirant. She felt so alive in my arms that it seemed even sadder that she was dreaming about death.
“Then you wouldn’t have to go anywhere,” Mary went on.
“When I go back to the city, you can come visit like before,” I told her.
Mary looked confused, though. A chill went through me. “Sorry—where am I going, honey?”
Mary shrugged. “Because you’re getting older…I don’t know.”
That night I didn’t take my pain medicine. I didn’t drink wine. And I didn’t sleep.
July 15, 2014
Tonight, sober as a church mouse, I managed to overhear one of Diane’s calls.
“You got it listed yet?” She stood in her upstairs hall, pacing back and forth near the top of the staircase. “Harry can’t do that!”
Oh, I wasn’t going to like this.
Diane went on. “I faxed him the power of attorney she signed. Again. The guardianship papers. What else can he possibly need?”
She listened for a few minutes, making noises of agreement. “No, we’re doing the right thing. What does she need the place for—or all that money? Dad meant for us to have it.”
So David was on the other end of the line, then.
“No, I haven’t told her about the home yet.”
Right up until that moment, I hadn’t accepted how bad the situation could get for me. In my defense, she’s my daughter. I knew she loved me. I just forgot that people can love you and still convince themselves to do some truly terrible things.
“Yeah,” I heard Diane say with a sigh. “But once it’s happened, she’ll accept it. What choice will she have? We’re her kids. She wants what’s best for us, right?”
Fine, I admit it. I cried after I heard that. I cried a lot.
July 17, 2014
In addition to the windows being hung with garlic, they locked mechanically. The door locked that way as well. I found that out by attempting to go outside this afternoon, only to have an alarm go off.
I managed to seem confused by the whole thing, so I don’t think Diane believed I had any intention of escape. I don’t think she thinks of me as a prisoner, exactly. She didn’t let me see her punch in the code to turn the alarm off, though.
July 18, 2014
All those British murder mystery shows must have been good for something. How annoyed Nigel would be if he knew.
I hid my pain pills in my cheek and flushed them down the toilet. I even managed to log in to my email on one of the grandkids’ iPads. From there, it was simple to send a message to Harry. We were able to schedule a Zoom over the Wi-Fi, with my television turned up to cover the sound of my voice.
“Tell me my options,” I said as soon as he came on the screen.
He tried, although it was difficult for him to be brief or inexact.
I had signed a financial power of attorney and appointed Diane as my health care proxy while I was in that hospital.
She’d used that to get a guardianship—which meant power over my health care—but so far, the trust Harry put in place kept Diane from being able to get at the bulk of the money.
(It did, however, allow for the sale of the apartment.) Unfortunately, she also had power over me.
And she was applying for a conservatorship, which would give her even more.
I noted that David was really trusting Diane to manage the whole thing and give him his cut. I doubted that was going to go well, but it was clear that neither of them were interested in my opinion.
“What do you want me to do?” Harry asked.
I told him, although I admit, I let him believe I had different plans than the one already forming in my mind. Maybe I wasn’t ready to admit what I’d decided, even to myself.
July 20, 2014
There was no point in delaying any further. I waited until everyone else in the house was asleep, then put on the least pajama-y looking pajamas I owned as well as the slippers with the thickest heels.
Then I went into the little bathroom and used a razor blade and a safety pin (sterilized in peroxide, don’t worry) to make two marks in my throat.
The process was painful and not particularly convincing, but blood from my leg (hence the need for a razor blade) helped add verisimilitude. I trusted panic to cover the rest.
Then I got a meat tenderizer from the kitchen and used it to shatter the glass of the window in my bedroom.
The house alarm bleated loudly, and I stashed the tenderizer under my pillow, thinking of all the reasons why this wouldn’t work. But then Keith rushed in. Diane was beside him, yelling.
“It bit me!” I screamed as loudly as any actor playing to the cheap seats.
“Is it gone?” Keith demanded, looking around the room as though there might be a vampire hiding behind my shower curtain.
“I don’t know!” I shouted, because more confusion is better. I turned toward Diane. “The kids! You have to keep them away from me. They can’t see me like this.”
She must have realized that they would eventually come down the stairs.
Already, the twins cried out for her, demanding to know what they’d heard.
Their voices alone probably would have propelled her into the hall, but I like to think that what I said helped.
Diane turned back to Keith in the doorway.
“Cover the window with something. Nail up some wood.”