I'm home, at last. It was a more productive trip than many, but also more involving. I felt more trapped by my relatives than I had since I was a teenager.
First, the good news. Nanna went—well, Marina and I took her—to both a cardiologist and an orthopedist. She tried awfully hard to get out of the cardiologist appointment (lack of sleep, indigestion, general orneriness), but I won that battle, and the other appointments were easy after that. Both specialists think she's in terrific shape for 89. Sure, the rapid heartbeat is worrisome, as is the fact that her spine can scarcely be seen in X-rays. Oh, and her her weighing 79 pounds. She's promised to take the tiny dose of Atenolol the cardiologist prescribed, and to start taking her Fosamax. She's having much less back pain that she was a week ago, thank goodness.
Ricky and I had a little showdown over the telephone situation in the apartment. He attributes mystical powers to the ancient and primitive kitchen wallphone, on which he gets late-night calls for early-morning airport runs. My attempts to install a cordless phone/answering machine were thus interpreted as direct attacks on his livelihood. It's all ended well. I was there long enough for a phone company technician* to come re-activate the other extensions. Now there's an answering machine and two cordless handsets: one next to the chair where my grandmother reads, and one next to her bed. And the sacred kitchen phone remains undisturbed.
Next, the bad news. Annajane's condition deteriorated badly the last couple of days I was there. For several days she had been lying in her room staring at the ceiling, except when I visited, but she was able to converse when I got there. Not just converse: as ever, she would spot what I didn't want to talk about, and hammer away. "Emmy, you know, I think most women in your situation, with a husband who's so sick, would want to have a child. Just as a gift of love."(At least she's forgotten Beaker's azoospermatic; if I ever do end up pregnant, she won't be wondering how.)
By the end she wasn't getting dressed and would scarcely speak, even to me. She had bad tremors, too, in her arms and legs and eyelids. She was scarcely eating or drinking. I trust this hospital as much as I trust any of them, and they've been working with her for a long time, but it's hard not to notice that the snap to depression coincided with the reintroduction of antipsychotics.
I was able to find various bits of paper (like her Social Security card) that will make transferring her to the adult home easier, if it can ever happen. And I went over to Daisyfield a couple of times. It's not great, but certainly not awful, and the other residents were younger and more aware, somehow, than at the last home. A place is being held for now, but the current hospital has reactivated her referral to the big state hospital; they're uncertain they can stabilize her.
Finally, the complicated bits. Shortly before I left, Marina gently suggested that I go through the closet in the tiny room she and Ricky share: it was full of my mother's stuff. I ended up going through another closet full of Annajane's stuff, too: for two days, the living room was blanketed with bags of yellowing paper and piles of mildewed clothes. In the end about 3 cubic yards of stuff got tossed or given away. I was brutal with clothing. Annajane had a bad thriftstore habit. Nice wool suits are just not going to cut it, though, when institutions are doing her laundry and she has so little self-awareness that she can't not wipe her fingers on her clothes when she's eating. What was found, though, amongst the rot:
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The seventies were a pretty good decade to be a manic clothes shopper. Everything outrageous enough, and everything I remember her wearing, got saved. (It was all polyester, and made it through a wash cycle just fine.) I wish I'd had a camera with me; everything's gone into boxes now.
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Boxes I'd packed up back in '97, when Beaker and I got her stuff out of the last apartment she managed to live in on her own. Kitchen stuff, small appliances. Much of it got integrated back into Nanna's household—it had been collected there to begin with, after all.
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Unloved presents I'd sent: a muumuu from Hawaii. A couple of rugby shirts I'd given Ricky, still with tags on. (I find it interesting that he'd hidden them in her stuff.)
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Ricky's little stash. This caused a bit of friction with Marina: she says she had no idea he was still smoking and wouldn't have married him** if she had. I don't get it. I smelled something illegal coming out of their room one of the nights I was there, like, when she was in there, but, whatever. (Again, very interesting that it got hidden in Annajane's stuff.)
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A box of 16-millimeter home movies shot between 1970 and 1975. Most of the film was loose and tangled in the box. Almost all of it appears to be of my very early childhood. I was left dumbfounded; the photo albums from that period have all been lost. I held the strips up to the light: Nanna with dark hair and a big fox collar? Is that me, playing catch with whoever's filming? And Annajane, of course, bringing in each birthday cake.
Beaker assures me the film can still be projected; I think the goal, though, will be to get it digitized.
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Sad collections of bills and junk mail from the mid-90's. Pay stubs, correspondence with employers who had fired her, the portfolio from when she tried (at the age of 40) to become a hand model.
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A diamond ring. Nanna had no idea where it had come from.
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Pictures of her dogs. Their adoption papers. Their hospital and cemetery bills. Dog calendars. Mementos from charity dogwalks.
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Newspaper clippings, about either the failures of psychiatry or travel (San Francisco, New Orleans, Quebec). Books by R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz.
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Cards and valentines I'd sent, including the tense Christmas cards from the years we weren't speaking to each other. Old report cards. A couple of class pictures.
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Her correspondence and poetry. Letters she'd written my foster father but never sent. Very odd things scrawled on scraps of paper. (Absolutely nothing from before my birth, though, except for a single odd love letter from 1960. Nothing about college, or her marriage, or...)
It was all very intense to go through, and I didn't have time to read even the handwritten stuff. It felt sort of awful to be going through it at all: that's what you do when someone dies, right? But, but, if I don't take charge, then someone else who cares less will do it sooner or later. I can't see how Ricky and Marina live in that room at all. They need the space.
Most of it went into boxes and back into the front hall closet. I brought the interesting papers back to Ohindinois, though.
*Ricky was shocked, when he called to make the appointment, to learn that there would be a charge for any work inside the apartment. See, he'd seen the phrase "local service" on my grandmother's phone bills...
**Her exact wording was the highly suggestive, "I wouldn't have kept up my end of the deal, you know, and married him..." Apparently the only problems with her work permit are standard delays in processing; they're just waiting now.
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