Where Art Meets the Heart

   I didn't want to break Momma's heart, but I had no other choice.  That's the way it is  sometimes when someone is dying.  Decisions must be made that leave us on the edge of a crumbling cliff with no possible retreat.  That's where I was last May.

    Seated sidesaddle on the carpet, bogged down in the heaviness of what I must do, I applied more Pledge to the handle of Momma's bedside dresser table, wondering if I needed a  stronger cleaning agent.  A white substance, drooled down the front of the dresser, clung like dried on pancake batter.  The master bedroom of the small farmhouse was papered with a floral print, a white background and bright flowers.  I felt anything but bright.  Only the emptiness of the house without Momma, without most of her things, was real to me.

    Instead of spending her last days in the home she had loved for sixty years, Momma was dying in a nursing home, a place she insisted she never wanted to be.  I hated leaving her there.  I could barely tolerate all the other things I was forced to do to make sure she was okay.  I certainly never thought I'd have to empty and sell her house before she died.  Cleaning it out without help from the rest of the family was an anathema.  My loving mother was all about family.

   Two of my sister's adult children showed up once to help.  No one else bothered or even asked if I was okay.  I wasn't.

    Scrapping off the most stubborn of the drippings with my thumbnail, I squirmed my fifty-eight-year-old body into a more comfortable position in the place that once held my five-year crib.  It was the same spot Momma fell in the middle of the night, nearly nine months earlier, when she got up to pee, wedging herself between the bed and cedar chest.

    I should have moved the bed so it would be a straight shot to the bathroom.  I had thought about it.  I even asked Momma.  But she said the furniture was fine the way it was.  I honored her choice.  Choice is primary in helping the elderly cope with their ongoing losses - loss of mobility, loss of independence, loss of family members and friends.  There were so many cumulative losses.  I had not wanted to add to them.

    Sitting on my mother's floor I considered all the fail-safes I put into place to protect my frail eighty-eight-year-old mother so she could remain independent.  That was what she wanted.   It was the only thing she wanted.  They all failed that August night.  She lay on the floor for seventeen hours before managing to free an arm so she could press the button on her Lifeline Bracelet.  The series of unacceptable decisions began then.

    Over the years I had repeatedly encouraged Momma to exercise.  She got enough exercise gardening, she said.  Unfortunately, she had been unable to garden for years.  As recently as the week prior to her fall I suggested she practice daily getting in and out of her easy chair to strengthen her muscles.  I mentioned resuming trips to the mailbox.  Out of fear, her friend, Betty, stopped Momma from retrieving the mail.  Betty also discouraged her from making slow walking laps around the driveway.  Both activities were within the range of the bracelet.  I informed both Betty and Momma of this.  I gently warned Momma that if she fell and could not get up, if she became too weak, she would need to live with my husband and me or go into a nursing home.  While I was growing up she was adamant about not wanting to do either.  To Momma "nursing home" was a four letter word.  My dad's mother lived with us when I was very young; Momma hated it.

    That August evening when emergency personal had finally arrived they transported her to the one local hospital.  Several times after her admission she appeared near death, her skin smooth and expressionless, her eyes rolled back.  During periods of clarity she reinforced her opposition to a nursing home.  It was like going to jail, she said.  When she improved slightly she was transferred to the rehabilitative section of a nursing care facility.  She worked hard to build up her muscles so she could return home.  Unfortunately, because the fall severely compromised her preexisting health problems - congestive heart failure, COPD and arthritis that rendered her right arm nearly useless, my husband and I were told she could no longer live alone.  We decided to move her in with us.

    We checked out prices of wheelchairs, walkers and handrails for the bathroom and hallway and were considering other ways we could adapt our house.  During one of her bouts with sepsis, in a rare conversation with Momma's doctor, he nixed our plan.  A geriatric specialist, he said her health was fragile.  If my husband and I brought her to live with us, her needs would soon overwhelm our ability to care for her.  In October, two months after her fall, he told us she had less than a year.  A nursing home was the only workable choice.  The minimum cost was close to $5,000 per month, $1,500 more than my parents had paid for my childhood home.

    The one level farmhouse, built in 1940, became my mother's home in 1946, the year she, Daddy and my siblings moved in.  My sister, Anita, was five, my brother, Wes, seven.  I was born three years later.  I barely remembered Momma, Anita and Wes digging out the basement using only muscles and a shovel.  They wheeled out load after load of clay and dumped it over the side of the hill.

    On rainy winter days laundry clipped to clotheslines hung over the kitchen table.  Before there was enough money for a furnace my parents burned wood in a potbelly stove.  When he could, Daddy brought home wood ends from the lumbermill where he worked.  Even so, in the winter the corners and floors of the house were cold.  I remember reading worry on his face when there was barely enough money to cover the bills.  Each day he returned from work exhausted.  Momma raised cows for milk and beef, chickens for eggs.  She grew a garden, pruned the orchard and harvested apples, canned produce and stored it on makeshift shelves in the newly dug-out basement.  That was back then, when I was a child.

    During the last few months while cleaning out the cupboards I discovered carefully saved receipts for cow feed from 1946, Dad's pay stubs starting in 1937 and my cousins' graduation and wedding announcements from the '50s on through into the new century.  There were stacks of photograph albums, ones Momma assembled and those of the ancestors, and two old family Bibles, one from Dad's family, another from Mom's.  Stuffed into dresser drawers and cupboards were numerous projects which remained unfinished because of Momma's arthritis.

    After Daddy died in 1983 I began thinking about Momma's death, how I would handle it.  Whatever needed to be done I planned to do with my sister, Anita.  Unfortunately, Anita died of cancer due to HRT in 2005.  In 1980 my brother, Wes, became mentally ill because of prescription drugs.  He was a danger to others.  Locked away, he would be no help.  That left my dear husband and I to carry out Momma's final wishes.  But carry them out, at least the most important ones, was something we could not do, thanks to Medicaid.

    Heartsick over the state's requirements, I debated what to tell Momma.  Some said it was best not to tell the elderly and infirm of bad news.  Since I did have power of attorney, she never needed to know if I sold the home and property she loved.  Even so, I valued honesty.  Anything built on lies did not, could not last.  As I grew up she taught The Golden Rule - about doing to others what you would like them to do to you, even if they never reciprocated.  I'd seen too many people treat their elderly family members like children, even those whose minds were still clear.  I wanted her to know she could trust me.  In her position I would want to know what was happening to my home, my former way of life.

    So I told her what I learned.  The house must be sold to pay for her care.  A Medicaid worker informed me that forty-five days before she exhausted her savings I needed to sign her up for Medicaid.  A professional appraisal and the listing of her house with a real estate company for the appraised price were required.  In the interim Medicaid would pick up the cost of her care.  I was required to reimburse them once her house sold.  When the money from the sale of her house was spent down to $2,000, Medicaid would permanently assume the cost of her care.

    One of Momma's greatest hopes was that the house and property would remain in the family.  For years my brother's son, Glenn, planned to buy it.  He loved the French windows with beveled glass, the coziness of the house, the view of the pastureland and slough below.  Years earlier he told me his plans for the house.  He would finish the basement, turn it into living space.  He wanted the old piano, too, the one Momma's parents scrimped and saved to buy.  Initially, Glenn's girlfriend, the mother of his son, feigned interest in the house.  She even mentioned learning to play the piano.  Once she and Glenn married her interest evaporated.  Shortly thereafter, they no longer came to visit.  Months after Mom's fall, when Glenn informed me he did not intend to buy the house, I debated whether or not to tell Momma.  I knew it would hurt her.  I didn't know how to broach his decision.  I decided to wait until she brought it up.

    In the meantime I told her we had to clear out the house.  First, I said, we needed to distribute the keepsakes, things she wanted various family members to have.  Caught in an emotional vice, exacerbated by doing it prior to Momma's death, I sorted through everything, agonizing over what to keep and what to throw out.  The dreaded chore took my husband and me from January until the middle of May.  We then listed the house.  The realtor told us a buyer was likely to bulldoze Momma's home.  The thought cut into my heart.

    On a day in May, when I informed Momma the house was finally listed, the opportunity to tell her about Glenn arrived.  With resignation in her voice she mentioned she still hoped he would buy it.  Seated beside her in the courtyard of the nursing home, I told her that Glenn's wife had ruined his dream, manipulating him into a series of investments which negated his ability to purchase the family home.  I also told Momma that I believed he underestimated the housing market, having no idea how much the house and nineteen acres were worth.  He lived out of state.  The prices in Oregon had recently skyrocketed due to out-of-state buyers.  I even mentioned I had not wanted to tell her that he could not buy the house.  She asked why.  I said I did not want to upset her.  I also asked if she wanted to know when the house sold.  She said yes.

    What a person wants to know can hurt them.  With Momma, the ache, she so carefully hid away, appeared in her dreams.  The previous night, she said, she dreamed someone bought her house, and she cried.  She cried.  There was no need for her to suffer this way.  None whatsoever.  To strip the old and helpless of their security, their peace of mind, their ties to their past is wrong.  Immoral.  There is always money for war, always money to kill people.  Currently the government is borrowing multiple billions from China and other countries for that purpose.  They do this to protect us, they say.  But if they truly wanted to protect us, they would make sure there was enough to money to care for those who have given so much, a generation who valued honor and integrity - values subsequent generations, including my own, seem to have forgotten.

    From August through May Momma' health stabilized with periodic recurrences of sepsis and pneumonia.  Just before Mother's Day I told her how I agonized over placing her in the home, reminding her of what she drilled into me as I grew up, "Never put me in a nursing home."  She told me she hadn't known what it would be like in the home.  She was happy, she said.  Happy.  She made new friends.  She met a man, a fellow resident, she loved.  The staff involved her in activities and treated her well, doing for her what she could no longer do for herself.  In a moment of peace she had said it was better than sitting at home staring out the window day after day.

    Sun rays streamed into Momma's bedroom.  A rag in hand, I peered up from my task and out the window at the huge flowering cherry tree resplendent with pink blossoms.  Sunlight kissed the painted flowers on the wall beside me.  The carpet basked in a golden glow.  Alone in the house my family moved into before I was born, it suddenly seemed right for me to be the one closing this chapter in their lives, all their lives.  I felt Daddy with me and my sister, too.  Their warmth touched me.  I was the different one, the one who worked my way through college, became an artist and an author in a family of hardworking country people.  Early on, I decided to use every heartache as fodder for growth.  This was just one more.  In 1946 Momma, Daddy, Wes and Anita moved into the house without me.  The cycle would soon be complete.  Only I remained to wrap it up and move on - without them.

    With an ache of love and acceptance in my heart I sprayed more Pledge onto the night dresser and removed the grime, one last time, for Momma.