Chapter 5
Orangeburg, South Carolina
It was after her separation, around the time that Helena moved back in with her parents, that her mother took a turn for the worse. The cancer was always coming back, always going into remission. But this time, it seemed that her mother might not make it.
Of course, her mother wasn’t one to make a fuss about herself.
With Helena reeling in the midst of a divorce she’d never imagined possible, wondering what had gone wrong and why she was still so tired, her mother used her remaining strength to make chicken soup, put on DVDs, and try to nurse Helena’s heart back to health.
It still hadn’t occurred to Helena to go to the doctor herself.
She assumed she was tired because of a broken heart or because she was getting older.
Whatever, she told herself. She didn’t care much about her body.
When the doctor told them that her mother had maybe six months to live, Helena’s mother hardly reacted.
She folded her hands in her lap as Helena scribbled notes to herself about late-in-life care and how to keep her mother at home for as long as possible.
Back at her parents’ place, she helped her mother get comfortable on the couch in front of the television, then went to the bathroom to cry by herself before dragging up the energy to order pizza online.
“It isn’t so bad,” her mother said that night, a pizza slice shining greasily on her plate. “Honestly, I think it’s going to be fine.”
They were the emptiest words that Helena had ever heard. She hated that her mother felt that she had to boost Helena’s mood in the midst of dying.
Meanwhile, her father sat quietly on the sofa, staring down at his pizza. He’d hardly taken any bites. Helena knew he was brokenhearted about his wife’s diagnosis. Her parents had always been very in love, very in tune with one another.
“Dad? Can I get you something? Maybe a beer?” Helena asked.
Her father blinked at her. For a moment, Helena thought he didn’t know who she was—a thought that terrified her. And then he said, “That would be great, honey. Thanks.”
Helena was so busy with her own fatigue and her mother’s failing body to notice, at first, that her father was heavily declining.
Nearly two months went by between the “six months to live” diagnosis and her father getting lost at the local mall.
Helena hadn’t known he was out of the house.
She’d thought he was in his study, reading, as he usually was during the afternoon.
But the nervous call from a stranger, via her father’s phone, caused alarm.
It didn’t make any sense! Her parents were in their sixties. They were supposed to have so much time as themselves. They were supposed to be healthy, still for a little while longer.
Helena knew that she couldn’t express her fears about her father’s memory to her mother. Her mother needed to focus on her own health, her own failing body. She couldn’t think about her husband.
That afternoon, after her mother fell asleep, Helena hurried to the mall to pick up her father.
Once there, he greeted her grumpily and asked what all the fuss was about.
He said he was looking to buy a pair of tennis shoes because he had a tennis match next week and his other pair had worn out.
Helena blinked at him, confused. He hadn’t played tennis in nearly twenty years.
Frightened, Helena made an appointment with her father’s doctor’s office and drove him there herself the following morning.
She told her mother that she and Dad were heading to the grocery store, that they needed a few things for the kitchen.
Her mother fell asleep again before Helena and her father were ready to go.
“I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” her father repeated on the way to the doctor.
She made a mental note to find a way to pick up her father’s car from the mall.
Maybe she could take the bus there and drive it back herself?
She didn’t feel good about asking her father if he was okay to drive.
Getting lost at a mall—a place with all manner of signage—was not an ordinary thing.
The doctor and her father were old friends, which was something Helena didn’t know until they entered the office together.
Her father told the doctor that Helena was “causing a big fuss about a misunderstanding.” Helena felt awkward saying the truth in front of her father. But what choice did she have?
“He got lost,” she said flatly. “At the mall.” She couldn’t look at her father.
The doctor performed a series of memory tests on her father, all of which he failed.
Very soon, they had their diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s.
It was going to be brutal, the doctor told her in private.
He’d never seen it move so quickly in someone.
“And I know this is especially hard, as your father was a genius.”
Helena couldn’t believe it.
Meanwhile, her own health had taken a drastic turn.
To survive each day, she had to sleep nine, ten, or sometimes eleven hours.
She took frequent naps and couldn’t put on or keep weight.
She saw no friends. She saw only her mother, father, and their doctors and nurses.
And soon, it was almost as though her mother and father couldn’t look at her back.
Not long after her father’s diagnosis, it all got to be too difficult.
Her father’s mood swings were wildly unpredictable, and her mother was too sick to do anything herself.
With a very heavy, very sorrowful heart, Helena took her mother to the hospice, and she took her father to the memory clinic down the road.
“This is a lot on your shoulders,” one doctor said to her, his tone neutral. “It’s too bad that you don’t have any siblings to help out.”
He’d really said that! Helena couldn’t believe it.
But all at once, she was alone in her parents’ house, in the house where she’d been raised.
By then, it was a little more than a year after her divorce—the most devastating year of her life—and she couldn’t believe all she’d lost. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she didn’t recognize herself.
She wondered whether Elliott would recognize her if they ran into each other. But they never did.
Sometimes old friends of Helena’s reached out.
They’d heard about her mother and father from someone in their tiny town, and they wanted to see if she needed anything.
But Helena was too embarrassed about her appearance and how lifeless she felt to see anyone.
She went from hospice to memory care, back to hospice, back to memory care.
It was unending, until, as had always been inevitable, her mother died.
Helena was too exhausted to cry. She made arrangements with the local funeral home, then went to the memory care clinic to tell her father.
He cried briefly, then completely forgot why she was there.
The next day, her father forgot Helena’s name, too.
She reminded him three times before he said it.
Helena picked out a suit for her father, thinking that he needed to go to her mother’s viewing to grieve.
It was a normal human expression, after all.
But as soon as they walked into the funeral home, as soon as they were surrounded by people who her father had known all his life, she sensed that this was a bad call.
Her father was flustered, often muttering to her.
“What are these people doing here? What is going on?” When he saw her mother in the casket, his face softened for a moment before he asked Helena, “Who is that? Is that Great-Aunt Marcia? What did she die of?”
Helena had to bite down on her tongue over and over to keep from sobbing.
Eventually, she took her father back to the memory care clinic, where she set him up happily in front of a television before returning to the funeral home to say goodbye to her mother.
She didn’t bother to bring her father back for the funeral and burial itself, as she knew it would only be the same story. She didn’t think her heart could take it.
Throughout that week of her mother’s viewing and funeral, she waited to hear from Elliott.
She wondered if he’d send flowers or send his regards.
Several friends did reach out, telling her how sorry they were about her parents.
A few came to the viewing and funeral. Too many of them asked her if she was dating anyone, now that she and Elliott were through.
She hated that. She even hung up on a few of them if they asked that over the phone.
Why was everyone so sure that she needed a man to protect her?
Didn’t they know that she struggled so much to get out of bed, too much to ever go on a date, let alone to spend enough time at the memory care clinic?
Sometimes she cursed herself for thinking she was too boring and tired to be remembered, that that was why her father always forgot her name now.
These were not useful thoughts, but they were honest. She supposed that honesty was all she had.