Mom’s new apartment is beautiful.
The walls are painted her favorite colors — robin’s egg blue, and that green, celadon, the color of light through the glass bottles she’s always collected. Her easel is in the sunniest spot. Her writing desk, set up and ready. Her little collections already on the shelves. She’s feeling her way home.
I walk in and start to cry, kind of quietly.
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” Mom pats my arm. “I’ll help you get a nice place for yourself, too.”
I don’t know what to say to that. It has absolutely nothing to do with why I’m crying — not that I know why the tears have come myself.
We sit at the small table by the window with the salad she’s bought for us — walnuts, goat cheese, cranberries — and I try to find the words. Something about fierce pride in her, watching her reinvent herself so late in life. The light through the windows. The easel with its just-started study of color and shape. She’s painted the walls with her favorite colors, chosen the tiles, the fixtures. Soon enough she’ll be making things again — paint and feathers and buttons and poems written in gold ink across a new clean white canvas.
I tell her my tears have something to do with that. And with Dad.
“He has nothing,” I say. “Just the world of the bed in which he lays, day after day, waiting for the world to change.”
“I know it seems that way,” Mom says. “But your father never wanted anything. He tried to live like a monk, with less and less. He didn’t want beautiful things around him. He didn’t care about nature. Anytime I suggested something that would make our life better, he refused it. He wants it this way. I don’t know why. But he does.”
It makes sense, but I don’t know how — mainly because I can’t imagine making that choice myself. The help we offer is never right or good enough. Always perceived as disempowering, controlling. But his demands on our time and energy are all hard work, without any heart in it.
The phone rings. A nursing home has a bed. I listen to the coordinator, try to write down the details, try to breathe. Too far. Not right. I tell them I’ll call back and hang up.
Mom weeps. “I feel so sad that he has to go through this,” she says.
I just feel relieved. And empty.
“Is there anything I can do?” Mom asks.
“I could use that deed,” I remind her.
“Oh, yes,” she says — and miraculously produces it. Three weeks we’ve been searching. She’ll fax it to the Medicaid coordinator today.
—
This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter, Darling, is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.
Adam :)