The Fanciest Garden

From where I’m sitting in the living room I can see Eleanor as she sits at the table, crouched over her breakfast. Her shoulders hunched forward, hiding most of her neck. I can see myself in her glass of apple juice, my reflection just as twisted as her own posture.

I do not fear aging, nor death, for I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. What I do fear though, is my own body; it’s never done anything I wanted it to- never taken the form I work so hard at to get, never developed even the slightest shape of muscle. My skin barely tans anymore, allowing my pale Irish tones to overpower my darker Italian ones. My hair has never once been easily tamed; it’s thick, and, like every other person on either side of my family, I’ll never be bald, but it’s wavy and sometimes wiry, especially in the summer humidity. If this is my body now, what will it be like when I’m Eleanor’s age?

I eat the right foods, take the right vitamins and do the right exercises, I try to keep as healthy as possible, and after living with Eleanor all this time, watching her body prevent her from doing the things she wants, I can only wonder if all the upkeep I’m doing is futile. Will it prevent my body from hunching over? Keep my knee joints strong? Allow me to walk faster than a snails pace? I’ve seen people older than Eleanor in better shape, but I’ve never asked them how they lived their lives. Eleanor was very active and always busy in her younger years. Aside from being raised on a farm back in Canada, she maintained an envious garden around her small house. It’s interesting that Eleanor’s pride in her garden is based on the flowers and plants that she keeps out of her garden, while other people admire it for what she lets in.

The upkeep of the garden, as well as the house, is not unlike the upkeep of our own bodies. We get cracks in our foundations, a leak here and there, even unwanted weeds grow in among our more valued stems. No matter how hard we try to maintain these things, nature will always have its way.

Mel and I divide our household responsibilities in respectable ways and doing the upkeep is unrivaled experience in being a homeowner. As we begin the process of preparing both Eleanor and the house for her departure to a nursing home, we start to see the wear and tear she’s tried to hide from everyone else, a mirror to her own mental and physical condition.

Eleanor, like her house, has a leaky pipe. While we replaced the house’s pipe, we haven’t been able to replace hers. She wakes in the middle of the night to pee five or six times in the “potty chair” by her bed, and she pees out far more liquid than she takes in. Despite our best efforts to keep her hydrated, she teeters on the borderline of drying out. She’ll only drink water in parallel with her mood, a mood that does not parallel weather. Rather than an abundance of water during her miserable moods, like dark, grey rainclouds, she detests it, refusing any liquid we offer her. Only when her sun is out are we able to give her the hydration she needs, and as of late, the sun hasn’t been shining very much.

The garden doesn’t do much, other than attract attention and admiring looks from passers-by. Its orange Tiger Lilies are the most noticeable, but their subtle intensity can only be seen when standing right at her much contested property line. The moonflowers sleep during the day and bloom at night, a process Eleanor claimed she once timed at just over three hours. The blues, purples, pinks and yellows are peppered in among the green stems and leaves. And then there are the weeds. Having a vegetable garden of my own, I can successfully identify two or three types of weeds, and anything else that isn’t an herb or vegetable I pull. Eleanor’s garden, on the other hand, is a flower garden, not a vegetable garden, so I am often at a loss of what to pull, though I do water it, some by hand, for an hour every day once the sun goes down.

She once identified a weed to me as Queen Anne’s Lace, a white, flowering weed that looks like a larger version of Baby’s Breath, but also appropriately enough, looks like lace. These weeds have a quiet beauty that can be appreciated, but admittedly, they do look as if they don’t belong in the garden amongst they other flowers, so I pull those as I see them, which is easy as they have white flowers and stand very, very tall. The rest of the weeds however are varying shades of green and because I’m colorblind I can’t differentiate what’s a weed and what is one of the plants that Auntie planted, so Melanie pulls these every Monday morning, the day we have designated for garden upkeep.

Often times Auntie Eleanor will say that her garden is a mess, or a disaster or some other FEMA related tragedy. During our visit to The Good Doctor Gill, Eleanor spent five minutes complaining about the weeds in her garden, saying that no one maintains it. This untrue statement was met with quiet rage by Melanie and she excused herself from the examination room while Auntie was with Doctor Gill. Mel will spend 3 to 4 hours every Monday weeding and trimming the garden under Auntie’s watchful eye as she sits on the porch and when she’s done Auntie will shower her with quick praise on how lovely it looks, even followed by a rare “Thank You” and an even rarer smile. This happens every Monday, and yet, Eleanor tells everyone, including Doctor Gill, that nothing gets done with it. While this brand of criticism goes along with Auntie’s usual attitude of unappreciation, this particular instance really made Mel’s blood boil and rather than argue with her (as we could have argued everything she told Doctor Gill that day [and eventually he saw why]) she left the room.

As we’ve mentioned before, Auntie is convinced that if the garden has weeds, no one will buy the house. Everyone, EVERYONE, she says this to will tell her that it isn’t so and that whomever buys it will probably tear it up for a simpler and easier-maintained lawn. Yet Eleanor rejects this notion because SHE wouldn’t buy a house with an unkempt (despite the fact that it actually isn’t) garden; just another classic example of how Eleanor is incapable of seeing anything from anyone else’s point of view. Most people would target this house as a “starter home” for a young couple, as it couldn’t house anything more than a family of 3 without building up another floor.

I can say, without reservation, that even in it’s initial weed-filled form, her garden is beautiful. The flowers grow wildly and beg to be more of a meadow rather than be contained in a their moat-like beds. It has even inspired me to have a section of my own property dedicated to wildflowers someday. I’m looking forward to being able to just throw various random flower seeds into the fertilized section of soil that I’ll dedicate part of my property to. Last week, there was a breezy, almost perfect summer day, and the gentle wind carried the sweet smell of flowers on it everywhere. I haven’t been exposed to such a strong, natural smell since passing an Orange Grove by the Ocean while visiting my Aunt and Uncle in Tampa, Florida while on a trip back in 2001. 

So we maintain this flower garden as best we can, fighting the weeds each week with the dependability of a celebrity infused sitcom during sweeps week, hoping that one day Eleanor will be able to tell someone that we do “a good job” with it rather than “it’s a mess.” But, as she’s often proven, even if we used hired professionals with more experience performing a certain task than her, she wouldn’t compliment it or consider it a job well done, unless she did it herself- a facet that, since her stroke at least, she has shown that she isn’t able to do well either.

The Good Doctor

There are people in this world that give us what we want and not what we need, and sometimes, not always, but sometimes, those people, are not good for us; especially when they’re in the medical profession.

Eleanor Brophy has several doctors of varying specialties that she visits; A General Practitioner, A Podiatrist (to cut her toe nails), an Ear Doctor (who cleans her ears of wax using the tiniest, thinnest vacuum possible) a Dentist and a Neurologist, among others. She has visited two Neurologists in the past month and while both are wonderful, only one gave her what she needed even though she didn’t want it, and in the process gave Melanie and I what we both wanted and needed as well.

Strokes alter brain chemistry in mysterious ways; increased memory loss, heightened sensitivity to light, and astonishingly alarming mood swings are all part of nature’s cranial grab bag. It’s the combination of the mood swings and memory loss that hurt both myself and Melanie, as well as Eleanor.

After the first week of returning from rehabilitation in June, Eleanor began to show signs of slight memory loss and a slightly increased temper. These two traits have steadily increased since then, and one sets off the other.

Like all proud and stubborn people, Eleanor has no faults, she is practically perfect in every way, and, like all proud and stubborn people, she is completely wrong about that. Earlier today I had two conversations with her that would have usually resulted in me throwing my arms up and walking away, leaving her to resent me for the rest of the day, but thanks to a new technique I learned from the Good Doctor Jeremy Gill, things took a slightly new and welcome turn; we reached an equal ground at the end of our disagreement. That is not to say that she did not rant and rave and yell what she had to say, but at least, I didn’t.

Eleanor’s General Doctor, who will remain nameless out of respect, is a fairly decent doctor with a great personality. Unfortunately for Eleanor, he is on his way to retiring and simply doesn’t seem to give it his all. This is the same doctor who felt it wasn’t necessary to see Eleanor until over a month after her stroke, and still a month after her second one. This is the same doctor whose arm we had to twist to agree to take a urine test from Eleanor to detect a UTI that everyone (including the visiting nurses) agreed she had every symptom of. When we finally went to visit this doctor only one other person could go with her into the examination room, and as Melanie is Eleanor’s medical proxy, she was the lucky volunteer.

The Doctor asked Eleanor a few questions, took her blood pressure and sent her on her way. Before he left the room, Melanie ask him if he was going to take the urine sample he had said he would when she spoke with him previously on the phone. Before we arrived to see this Doctor we had Eleanor take two urine tests with the visiting nurses to test for this clandestine UTI. Both times the results were reported inconclusive due to contamination. At first we were called by the nurses and told she had tested positive, but the following day were told the results were inaccurate and inconclusive. In response, this Doctor told us he would have Auntie Eleanor take a clean and sterile urine test in his office during her visit.

The urine test never happened. Instead, when Melanie reminded him of it, Eleanor said she did not want it, and he simply said “I don’t think it’s necessary” and left the room sending Eleanor home. So, two inconclusive tests later with a patient who exhibits every sign of having a UTI (which also increases dementia in older people) and this Doctor thought a test that could increase her good health isn’t necessary. Okay. Sure. No problem. Actually, yes, major problem. Aside from the fact that Melanie is Eleanor’s Medical Proxy, it is an absolutely careless assessment of the situation- one that he doesn’t have to live with, one he doesn’t have to suffer the consequences of. How easy it must be to make those decisions regardless of the want or need of others.

Eleanor left the Doctor’s Office getting exactly what she wanted; a pee-pee free experience. Melanie and I left the Doctor’s office feeling absolutely disheartened and definitely feeling that Eleanor’s actual medical needs were not met. This was not the first time a Doctor had given Eleanor what she wanted or didn’t want in our presence but it is the first time it happened since Melanie became Eleanor’s Medical Proxy and Power of Attorney. This Doctor knew those facts, and yet, nothing happened according to our wishes.

There comes a time in all our lives where the decisions we make are no longer in our own best interests. They’re made out of comfort and complacency and feed into the small fears we have, turning them into self-serving monsters, but if we’re smart, we have the foresight to allow the other people in our lives, the ones we trust the most and who are capable of caring for us even when we don’t really care for ourselves to make them for us.

Eleanor chose Melanie to be that person.

Eleanor resents Melanie for being that person.

Three weeks ago we received a letter in the mail from the neurologist that saw Eleanor while she stayed at the Rehabilitation Facility after she was diagnosed as having had a stroke. He wanted to see her for a follow up visit in Worcester, MA, which is over half an hour away. Upon seeing this, Eleanor protested, saying that she has plenty of doctors here in Framingham and can see one of them. She wanted Melanie to call and find out what the appointment was for, and despite the answer cancel it anyway. Melanie called the next day to investigate the appointment and found out it was State Law that this doctor have a follow-up visit with her, so she had to go.

Before going to see this doctor, Mel and I decided to speak with him before he saw her to give him all the information we could, all the information she would deny and never bring up. Melanie made it a point to mention that she would put on the mask of wellbeing for the brief visit and nothing would be done to improve anything, just as she has done in all the previous doctor’s appointments we’ve had. A typical doctor appointment lasts about 15 minutes; after speaking with this doctor and giving him all the information he needed to know about her current condition, he spent almost 2 hours with her.

Doctor Gill knew that she would be able to put on a façade for a short time, but that eventually her true personality and state of being would show through. Sure enough, within 20 minutes, her short temper and general unpleasant disposition emerged, and finally, Melanie and I were validated. The Good Doctor Gill even went so far as to make her angry in general, so he had a sense of what her temper was actually like, and oh yes, he got that sense first hand.

After talking with her about what her life was like now as opposed to what it used to be like, he reminded her that the ONLY reason she is currently living in her home with time to settle her affairs is because Melanie and I had agreed to move in with her and be her caretakers for a time, and that without us doing that, the Rehabilitation Center would have admitted her to a nursing home NOT of her choice without a chance to go home at all. Eleanor acknowledged this, but only on the surface, and did not really let it sink in. She began her usual rant about garden upkeep and how no one would buy the house if the garden wasn’t absolutely perfect and Doctor Gill retorted by pointing out that what matters is the house itself (which Melanie and I have been working on Day and Night) and not the garden- no one would buy a house based on the condition of a garden and any weeds it may have. Auntie Eleanor immediately quipped back saying “no, no one will buy the house if the garden isn’t clean” and she and the doctor engaged in a battle of wits to prove the other wrong. To Auntie, this was an argument, to Doctor Gill, this was one of the tests he wanted to perform on her. She finally ended by saying “Well, I wouldn’t buy it.” And he reminded her saying “The garden makes no difference to the condition of the house itself. You’re the only one who thinks like you, everyone else thinks differently” and she replied by saying “Well I don’t know about that.” Doctor Gill, showing slight signs of aggravation himself, moved on to another topic; the art of letting go.

Every ten minutes or so Doctor Gill took the time to remind Auntie Eleanor that she is in a time of transition; from living on her own to moving into a nursing home, and that she needed to begin letting everything go. He would ask her if something she would complain about was actually “important.” She would reply with a “Yes” a few times before he would calmly (and believe me, this Doctor was calmer than Lake Placid… without the alligator.) tell her she needed to let go of it because Melanie and I would take care of it.

Eventually he saw that she has trouble letting go of anything and getting her to see that her state of Transition is anything but that. Personally, when I think of Auntie’s inability to let go, I think of an image from one of the short film’s I made. We shot on a vineyard in early November, half of the vines were alive; the other half were dead. In one shot, a very close-up shot, there’s a very green, very living and soft vine wrapped around one of the guiding wires. Just next to it, is a very brown, very dead vine, that is so dormant that it actually had the consistency of tree bark. This vine would never be soft again, it would never untwist or move or bloom, it was going to be this way from here on out, and that is how I see Eleanor.

Eleanor also complained that she hasn’t been sleeping well, which we can attest, she hasn’t. Whether this is due to the amount of times she gets up to pee or her inability to let things go, holding onto the neuroses even in her dreams, is unknown, but Doctor Gill prescribed her an sleep-aid/mood enhancer (an anti-depressant) and then took a urine sample to test for a UTI.

It turns out Doctor Gill also specializes in Geriatric Care, so this type of thing isn’t new to the young doctor. He gave Eleanor her best and sent us on our way.

On the way home, Melanie and I sat in silence, in awe of the experience we just had. He didn’t just help Eleanor, he helped us as well.

GPS for Masochists

Auntie has glaucoma in her left eye. When this is brought up in conversation (usually by her) she is quick to add that “it's not a normal glaucoma”. Then she proceeds to tell a lengthy story about being bundled up during chilly October weather, a visitor at the door, and secondhand information from a Canadian nose doctor fifteen years later. The story does not make a huge amount of sense, and is usually met by medical professionals with bewilderment.

Regardless of how it came to be, her vision has been deteriorating steadily in the past few decades and she is no longer capable of seeing out of her left eye at all. Despite this, her driver's license is still valid in the state of Massachusetts and up until the stroke she was still driving around. She was fortunate that her home is less than a five minute drive from a grocery store and pharmacy, and had very little need to travel further. She had routes memorized to all her regular destinations in town. But, as Raz and I would soon realize, all these routes revolved around almost never making any left turns.

I am not great with directions. When it takes some people as little as two trips to a certain destination to have the route memorized, I could still be confused and lost after the fiftieth. My parents bought me a GPS for my 23rd birthday and I use it almost every day. But I had been working in Framingham for almost a whole year before we moved in with Auntie. I can't pretend that I had the whole layout of the town mapped out in my brain, but I was familiar enough with major place and street names to navigate the area without inducing panic. I was confident in my ability to take Auntie anywhere she would need to go without relying too heavily on my beloved GPS.

Our first trip driving Miss Auntie was taking her home from the rehab facility. She was relatively quiet since the route we took was somewhat unfamiliar to her, coupled with the fact that she was thrilled to be returning home after what she undoubtedly considered “too long”. She remained in her house for most of her first week back, as dictated by the visiting nurse service, until she blindsided me by demanding to be taken to an appointment with her hairdresser. At 8 o'clock in the morning. Needless to say, I was super stoked.

Though we had only been with her a short time, I was already concerned with Auntie's memory and thus didn't want to rely on her guidance to locate the hair salon. After a quick google search, I found the place and memorized the route from our home easily – three right turns, and one dreaded left.

Getting her out of the house and into the car takes approximately eight minutes, nine if its too rainy or too sunny.  She has multiple pairs of special, eye insulating, UV ray protecting sun glasses that are so dark that she can’t actually see through them once she has them on, and needs to be guided by looking at my feet as I walk away from her.  Her car is also full of umbrellas, but she claims they are unreliable.  “I don’t trust them,” she’ll say, as she twists her wrinkly sourpuss of a face towards the overcast sky.  “Go to the basement and get one of the umbrellas hanging there.”  I do not understand why she chooses to fill her car with broken umbrellas, rather than throw them out, and to keep all her functional ones hanging in a basement.  But that is a story for another time.

With Auntie in the car, I pulled out of the driveway and made the first right turn onto our street.  So far so good.  “You know where we’re going?” she croaked.  I told her I did, and she seemed temporarily satisfied with that.  A few blocks from her home, we passed her local pharmacy.  “That’s where I get to go to pick up my medicines,” she pointed out.

“I know, I just picked up your new prescriptions yesterday.”

“Oh, did you now?”

I did.  Where did she think her pills had come from?  (Or the receipt for pills that she had reimbursed me, for that matter)  We came to the second right turn, marked by a flower shop.  “Mary Ellen used to get flowers there.” Auntie said as we drove past.  I do not know a Mary Ellen, but I didn’t ask.  That is Auntie’s way - calling people by their first name during a non-sequitor and expecting the listener, not matter how distant an acquaintance, to be on a first name basis with all the people who interest her enough to tell stories about them.

She was just finishing telling me about how the factory on our right that processed metal screws used to be a grocery store (questionable fact), when I got in a ‘left turn only’ lane and prepared to make our one and only left turn.  She sat up straighter in her seat, mid-sentence, and shouted “Careful now, the light is still red!”

“I know, Auntie.  I’m not just going to dart into the street.”

She eyed me suspiciously.  I think she thought I would.  It was a long red light, and she spent most of our wait pointed out that if I just pulled into the next lane over she could show me how to get to her hair dresser’s another way.  A way that I now realize most likely avoided this panic-inducing left turn.  I can understand how driving must be nerve wracking for her, but it was an intersection with minimal traffic and lights to indicate when we had the right of way.  I was not particularly concerned.  When the light finally turned green, I could see her grit her teeth as we looped across two lanes of traffic and over to the rightmost lane to take another final turn straight into the salon parking lot.  There was no need to go around, no need to make our trip longer.  But she was shaken none the less.

She spent just over an hour at the salon, getting the crinkled remains of short grey hairs wrapped into curlers and grousing over the poor selection of magazines she does not read.  I thought that a little beautification might placate her, but no.  As soon as we were back in the car she started her complaints.

In parking lots, it is my habit to drive around, rather than through, lanes of parking spaces - occupied or not.  It is something that I adapted after an unfortunate low-speed accident years ago, little more than a scrape and some annoyances, but I learned that the lines are painted there for a reason and so I follow them.  Auntie probably can’t see the lines, and even if she can she really doesn’t give much of a fuck.  So when I pulled out of our parking space and began traveling up the length of our row, she immediately began to panic once more.  “The way out is over there!” she shouted, pointing a finger across my plane of vision towards the clearly marked exit to our left.

“I can see it, Auntie.  That’s the way we came in.”

“But you’re not pointed at it.”

“I’m following the rules of the road.  We’ll get there.”

“God help us, there are cars coming!”

“Auntie.  I know the way home.  It’s fine.”

She glowered at me and shrank back in her seat.  Yes, there were cars.  Parked.  On the other side of the parking lot.  The shopping plaza we were driving through was generally not a hopping social scene, especially before 9AM.  I pulled around the edge of the lot and took a careful (left, gasp!) turn towards home.  After a few moments of sulking, she picked up the narration of her tour of local landmarks (“That’s the house where Jim’s grandmother lived.  She used to see his grandfather across the way.”), which I should point out that I have heard verbatim every Friday morning since then.

But her road phobias are hardly limited to measly left turns.

The area around our house has been plagued with construction.  Two local bridges are out of commission for the summer, as the town is in a mad dash to bring them up to code before school comes back into session and the buses will need both bridges in their pickup routes.  Traveling through the detours doesn’t bother me on my own, but when Auntie is in the car she prefers that we avoid them altogether.  The construction equipment, I think, makes her nervous.  That, and she hates waiting for what she deems as “no good reason”.

One morning, she had spent the better part of two hours begging both Raz and I (separately, of course, to increase the odds that one of us would crack) to take her to the bank.  She has multiple bank accounts, and struggled to articulate to either one of us which bank she desired a trip to.  I agreed, finally, and began the twenty minute process of loading her up into the car.  

It is important to note that, of her two main banks, one is reached by turning left out of our street and one by turning right.  I had already made the right hand turn before Auntie suddenly realized that she wanted to go to the other bank.  Thinking quickly (and frankly, I’m still a bit surprised that I managed it), I turned onto a side street that I recognized as a route to avoid both the construction and reorient us towards her other bank.  She had never driven down this street, so immediately she went into panic mode.  

“Where are you going?” she barked.  

“If you want to go to the other bank, this is the street I have to take,” I calmly replied.

“But you don’t know where we are!”

“Auntie, just because you don’t know where we are doesn’t mean I don’t know.”

She paused for a moment, then changed tactics to criticizing my immediate driving skills rather than my choice or route.  “You’re too close to that trash can.”  “Another car is coming up behind you, watch out.”  And my personal favorite “Be careful of that bird in the tree over there.”

Instead of answer her, I just took it.  It wasn’t worth it to argue with her, and if she made me mad I was all the more apt to crash the car into that tree - careful of the bird or not.  

We reached the end of the street, which intersected another main road that was prominently marked with both a street sign and a large red right hand arrow with the universal symbol for “no”.  Not only was this street one that I thought she would recognize, as it was a major road a mere block away from the location of her bank, but this particular street was memorable as it bore bother her maiden name and my current last name.  Living down the street from “Hardy Road” for forty years, one would think she had seen it before.

But no, she was still in panic mode.  Despite being a foot away from the “Hardy Road” sign and the “No Right Turn” sign on the passenger side of the car, Auntie had no idea what was going on.  I turned on my left blinker and edged into the street, checking and double checking traffic on both sides of the car (note: nobody was coming, even in the distance, not that it mattered to Auntie).  Auntie gripped the sides of the car in a panic and shouted “What are you doing?!”

“I’m turning left.”

“Well you can’t!”

“Why not.  Nobody is coming.”

“It says ‘No left turn’!”

“That’s a ‘No RIGHT turn’ sign.”

“No it isn’t!  I can see it and you can’t!”

I had no idea how to deal with this.  She had been difficult before, but this is the first time she had flat out denied that information right in front of her face was true.  I could have taken the time to stop the car, get out, point to the sign, and explain the nature of left versus right.  Raz says he would have, had he been in my situation.  But he has more patience than I do, and I just wanted this trip to be over with.  Ignoring her cawing, I turned left and pulled smoothly into the bank parking lot less than a minute later.  

Her trip inside was brief, merely to check her account balance and to add to her collection of those paper tubes you store coins in.  I made sure to take a more ‘appropriate’ route on the way home, but I’m pretty sure she had already forgotten the whole thing.

One day in July, Auntie had asked Raz to take her to the Oreck store to have her vacuum cleaner inspected. There was nothing wrong with the vacuum, but she had a 10 year service plan and had it taken in to be cleaned and serviced (whatever it means to service a vacuum cleaner) every year. Raz knew exactly where he was going and how to get there, but Auntie wanted him to drive the route she knew, convinced he actually did not know how to get to the Oreck store. Not wanting to sit in her cloud of misery, Raz went her way, which was unsurprisingly full of right turns through the back roads of Framingham; adding a needless 20 minutes to their journey. There was a straight route to the store from the house, but that involved a main road and Auntie is not a main road traveler.

As Raz drove through the plaza where the Oreck store was located there was a bit of a traffic jam at one of the parkinglot’s intersection. This intersection also happened to be in perfect line with the parking aisle located directly in front of the plaza. Wanting to avoid this traffic jam, Raz saw an opportunity to go around it and get to an available, close-by parking space just in front of the Oreck store (keep in mind we are still waiting for a handicap placard) so he took the opportunity and went around. He had barely gone two feet before Auntie started SCREAMING at him at the top of her half working lungs “No! You’ve gone too far! You’ve gone too far! Where are you going? It’s over there! You’ve gone too far!”

Raz calmly, but quickly said, “Auntie, those cars in front of us, they were stuck, we’re driving around them to get to the store quicker.”

“Well you’ve gone too far.”

“You’re right, Auntie, I did. Next time I’ll drive into the back of the car in front of me, that should get them to move faster.”

“Yeah, I’d say so.” she replied.

Initially Raz thought she was joking. She wasn’t.

I thought about the way Auntie chooses to “navigate” us through the side streets of our town, longing for the droning guidance of my vaguely British robotic co-pilot.  It made me wonder what it would be like to record Auntie’s voice for a GPS.  Instead of my familiar “in point-two miles, turn right onto Lexington Avenue”, one could be treated to a hazy “that building there used to be a post office, but it burnt down.  Janie’s grandmother used to go there to buy stamps.   Should you turn right back there?”  It could be quite entertaining if you don’t intend to get it where you’re going.  But then I think of the imperative, almost accusatory tone my GPS takes when it announces that its “recalculating” and imagine it replaced with the shrill panic of Auntie’s “God help us, you’ve gone too far!  TOO FAR!”

I’m not sure I could take it.

Lather, Rinse...

The snow was still resisting the gentle warmth of early spring when my mother first brought up the idea of bathing Auntie for pay. “She says she'll pay you $20.  She wants a bath,” my mother had said. Not “I want you to give her a bath...” or “It would be nice if you would volunteer to give her a bath...” but a shadowy precursor to the demands I now experience daily. Regardless of your own feelings, Auntie wanted a bath and Auntie gets what she wants.

I hate to sound shallow, but I really did not want to see a naked old lady. That was it. And it wasn't a situation where I could help her into the tub, close the curtain, and be done with it. She wanted somebody to give her a sponge bath while she sat on a plastic chair in the shower. I appreciate her desire to be clean, but I knew that experience would make my eyeballs dirty.

When we moved in, one of the stipulations I placed on our cohabitation with Auntie was that we would not deal with any bathroom activities. No helping her on the toilet, no helping her in the tub, and (should it come up for some reason) I wasn't too keen on helping her brush her teeth either. During our opening interview with the home healthcare service, both Raz and I answered the question of whether we would like a caregiver to bathe her with a resounding “Yes.” In unison.

The “bath ladies”, as Auntie calls them, are all lovely women (and some men, though we haven't met one) with a wide range of personalities, ages, races, and names. Despite Raz and I making a concerted effort to learn the name of each home health aide, Auntie refers to all of them as though they were the same individual with a severe case of multiple personality disorder. Her memory gets noticeably worse every day, but she still has trouble realizing it. Any attempt to draw out information her brain had erased would result in her accusing us of lying, as though we were somehow playing a prank on her by suggesting that any of these women were different. When asked by her case manager to rate her satisfaction with the bath service, getting her to even acknowledge that she had met multiple people was more difficult than getting a complete roster of Auschwitz from a Holocaust denier. These were people, and I can't stress this enough, who had spent time with her while she was naked.

The first morning after Auntie had come home from the rehab facility, Auntie demanded that we give her a bath. I told her that would be impossible, reminding her that the doctors and nurses who had bid her farewell less than twenty four hours prior had deemed it unsafe. She relied heavily on a walker for mobility, and had significant difficulty getting in and out of chairs. And even though she has improved (physically only, mind you) since then, she still does have trouble moving around. Not only were we unprepared for the trauma of seeing Auntie in the nude, but there was the terrifying potential that we might need to physically lift her frail, naked, wrinkly body into the tub. And what if she fell? With the immediate danger of her collapse, who knows what we might accidentally grab. It just wasn't going to happen.

It was our policy at the time to wait outside the bathroom door while Auntie attended to her “business”. We still weren't going to go in with her, but at least we wouldn't be far if she genuinely required help. No more than half an hour had passed since Raz and I declared a kibosh on her bathing when Auntie shuffled into the bathroom. From my post outside I heard the toilet flush, the sink running, and then...nothing. I waited through the silence, wondering what she was up to. After a pause more pregnant that Michelle Duggar, I heard the telltale groan of Auntie saying my name.

She calls me “Mel'nie”, which is odd because dropping the letter 'A' is not a result of her Canadian accent. I would chalk it up to ignorance, but surely in the past twenty-five years she's heard it properly pronounced more than a few times. But I digress.

She sounded distraught when she called me that morning, and so I poked my head around the doorframe to see what the trouble was. I saw a flash of wrinkly pink and realized in horror that she was standing in front of the bathroom sink, naked. Well, almost naked. She grumbled and grunted, struggling with the clasp of her ancient brassiere. I turned away in shock, at which point she called out “Come back here, Mel'nie, I need you to undo my bra for me.”

Resisting the urge to vomit, I begrudgingly turned back into the room and focused my attention on the small patch of skin on her back that had no other discernible “parts”. If I just kept staring at her back, I thought, it greatly reduced the risk of seeing anything else. Quickly I unhooked her bra and darted back towards the bathroom door. I still had one foot out and one foot in when she pressed a washcloth into my escaping hand. It was chilly, damp, scraggly, and altogether unpleasant. “Do my back now,” she demanded. Her tone implied that, were I not to wash her back at that moment, I would deeply regret it. What she failed to realize (and is mostly likely self-absorbed enough to never realize) is that I would deeply regret it if I did wash her back. But I wasn't in the mood to start a fight on the first day, so I did it quickly while sternly informing her that this would be the only time. Our home health aide service was starting soon, which meant that a professional would be there to help her clean herself and that I would never, ever bath her again.

Auntie still insists on bathing herself every day, and for the first week Raz and I were often tricked into washing her back. After I noticed an improvement in her arm mobility, I suggested one morning that she try washing her own back. A brief argument ensued, but I was right. She could wash her own back and we were free.

Although the bath service is fantastic, and has certainly reduced the amount of horrors that we are exposed to regularly, they are only able to come twice a week and often at unusual times. Her first bath appointment was at 3pm. Upon hearing this, Auntie frowned and stated simply “I take my baths at 8:30”. No excuses would be accepted, no explanations of the aide's busy schedule would be taken into account. Bathing so late in the day simply wasn't done. She sulked around the house in dirty clothes, claiming that it was hardly worth it to change if she would just have to take off her clothes again after lunch. When the health aide did arrive, she quipped “Who takes a bath at three in the afternoon? What am I, African?” To this day, I do not understand what she meant by this statement. And with a memory that becomes more sieve-like daily, she doesn't understand what she meant either.

Today a health aide came at 9 in the morning. This is an extremely rare treat, to be the first client on their long list of homes to visit. We had thought Auntie might be glad, but instead she focused her energy on complaining that taking a bath so early in the day would most likely overlap with her physical therapy appointment. She also chose to get up an hour and a half early (despite going to bed late the night before, but that's another story), so by the time her bath rolled around she had already been awake and active for over four hours and thus it was as good as midday – unacceptable.

I went to the grocery store around noon, and when I came home Raz informed me that he hadn't been able to shower yet because Auntie had spent the past hour giving herself a standing sponge bath in front of the sink. When I asked her why she gave herself a bath after her regular bath that morning, she grumbled and gave me a suspicious glare out of her one good eye. She had no idea what I was talking about.

She forgets things all the time, sometimes incredibly important things (again, another story for another time), but baths had always seemed to stick in her mind. People who happened to visit on bath days were usually treated to a full play-by-play of the event, whether they requested it or not (they didn't). But her mind is getting worse. She now forgets events indiscriminately, but remembers old habits obsessively. It's only a matter of time before I find her caught in an endless loop of shuffling into the bathroom, bathing herself, shuffling to her bedroom, dressing herself, and realizing that her clothes don't feel quite right and she should probably take a bath. Again and again. Lather, then rinse, then...