She was talking to her dead brother Percy

It's been a heartrending week for my 92-year-old aunt. She fell again last week Wednesday. The home attendant who was in the home that day is an increasingly impatient woman who may not be the right person to handle my aunt's declining mental and physical condition. She is inclined to rush my aunt through everything, dressing and undressing, feeding and grooming, and my aunt does not like to be rushed. She will be sweetly compliant if coaxed, but if you try to push her she will fight you, flailing her arms and striking out and pushing back, her face crumpling into angry tears.

We've known for a while it wasn't working, but were loath to make a change. This woman is well-intentioned, and Lord knows, she weathered all those months of my addicted cousin's craziness when she was living in the house with my aunt, and we felt some loyalty and gratitude for that. But last week, when my aunt fell again during her evening routine, the home attendant called 911, took her to the hospital and then didn't let any responsible family member know she was there. She didn't even call the home care agency. She just went home. Maybe she was exhausted. Maybe exasperated. In any case we didn't realize until the next morning when the Thursday home attendant arrived that Aunt Winnie was in the hospital.

I had gone to work early for a meeting. I came out of the meeting at noon and there were missed calls on my cell phone from three of my aunts and my mother, one from the home attendant, one from the hospital's geriatric social worker, and one from Aunt Winnie's son. My heart clenched. I knew this could not be good. I started returning the calls and quickly learned that my cousin, the still-active alcoholic and addict who was removed from my aunt's home via a restraining order last fall, had called the night before and been told that her mother was on her way to the hospital. Apparently she showed up there at 7 a.m. on Thursday morning and had been sitting with her mother ever since.

I was touched by this. I thought it a poignant expression of her love for her mother, in spite of everything. Actually, I romanticized it a bit. No, a lot. But when I arrived at the hospital soon after, reality smacked me in the face. My cousin and her brother were standing on opposite sides of their mother's bed, screaming at each other. A large man was in the room, trying to calm them. I learned he was the head of security, who had been called by the troubled social workers, two small women with clipboards who I now saw standing off to one side, looking hunched and worried. Everyone turned to me as I walked in, as if I had arrived to save the day. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

I didn't even bother to be embarrassed by how my cousins were behaving. It was really way beyond that. My aunt was in the bed crying and saying something no one could understand. Her daughter was crying and yelling slurred obscenities at her brother, who now fell silent. I realized at once that my cousin was sloshed. She was neatly dressed but she reeked of alchohol, she couldn't control her volume, and there were big dark moons around both her eyes that I had never seen there before.

My first impulse was to try and calm her down. I thought everything would simmer down if I could do that. So I hugged her and kissed her and whispered in her ear, "Hush, you're making your mother cry." It didn't work. She screamed that her brother was the cause of her mother's tears and that she had been to court and overturned his restraining order and had filed her own restraining order against him. A nurse came out of the adjoining room and shushed her. The security director kept trying to talk to me and usher us all out the room. He wanted to know could we just ban the daughter from visiting. As my aunt's power of attorney, would I be willing to consent to that.

Things got kind of loony from there. My cousin started thrusting sheets of crumpled paper at her brother, slurring loudly that she was serving him with an order of protection. He just looked at them and didn't take them. He was slack-faced and untidily dressed, as if he had rushed out of his home without any sort of care. I felt so deeply sad for both of them, and for my aunt, whose last days have been so marred by the ugliness between her children.

We finally left my aunt's room and went down the hall to a supply room. My cousin, the intoxicated one, refused to come into the room, shrilling that she would not go into any room where her brother was. So we stood at the doorway and tried to talk to her, but she was much too high to be reasonable about anything. Finally, I asked her to leave and to call me or one of our other cousins when she was sober. I said we would bring her to see her mother if she was sober. She replied with a string of expletives and stalked off down the corridor to the elevators, loud and wrong. For the five days my aunt was in the hospital, she didn't return. Or perhaps she did and security declined to allow her in.

My aunt came home from the hospital last night. She now has a new home attendant, another Jamaican woman. This one has a gentle soothing way about her. The agency probably chose her for this case because she is fresh from working with another elderly patient for ten years, a woman who passed away last month at the age of one hundred and three. This home attendant seems well versed in how to handle my aunt's increasing incapacitation. And indeed, my aunt has stepped down a lot since last week, so much so that I wonder if she has quietly suffered a stroke. When the visiting nurse service came to enroll her in physical therapy earlier today, the new home attendant told them she would need a hospital bed, that she wasn't able to sit up on her own. The bed will be brought in this week. I know my aunt needs it, but my heart sank anyway, because I think that once she gets into that bed, she will no longer sit in her recliner. She will now be officially bed bound.

When I was there last night, she was curled up on her regular bed, asleep. I kissed her head, hoping she would wake up and she did. But she was different than she was even a week ago. Then, she would turn and look at me when I came in, and even if she said nothing, a light would flicker in her eyes. I realize now it was a smile, a greeting that conveyed she was happy to see me. I only understand the depth of this communication in its absence. Last night, she looked up at me blankly, nothing stirring in her eyes, and my throat felt full of sudden tears. My daughter was with me so I didn't cry. I didn't want everything sad.  We sat there and talked to her, and she tried to say something and I heard only one thing clearly. "Percy." She said his name twice. Percy was her oldest brother, the first one of her eight brothers and sisters to die. "Did you talk to Percy?" I asked her. "Oh yes," she said. I asked where she saw him, whether in a dream or in the room with her, but I couldn't understand her response.

After a while I coaxed her to go back to sleep and told her I would come back tomorrow. I kissed her, and my daughter kissed her, and at that point there was something in her eyes, a flicker of something trying to swim up to the surface of her pupils, and even though it didn't quite make it, I knew she was trying to show love.

My Aunt Winnie at 12 years is the girl on the left. Uncle Percy, 14 years, is on her right. The two children in the front are my Uncle Terrence, 8, and my mom, age 9. This is a crop from a family photo taken 80 years ago next month. 

Love Letters

My daughter is doing one of those standardized practice tests and I am her timekeeper. She just finished the reading comprehension section with six minutes to spare and she said, "Mom, I just read a whole passage on the word good."

"Good!" I said.

"No," she said. "Not at all. The writing was unnecessarily convoluted and hard to understand. Too many extra words and phrases you could just simplify."

My beautiful child is a critic.

"Check your answers," I said. "You have six minutes."

There are so many things convoluting my brain and I have to simplify, so I can address them one by one, these things that demand that I push away the rest of the agita so that I can accomplish the real world tasks required of me, like the performance review narratives I have to finish writing for my direct reports at work before our sit down and here-is-your-raise conversation tomorrow, and the highlighting and cross-referencing of receipts and explanations for my follow up appointment with the tax auditor this week, and the fifty-mile-long parent questionnaire that I have to fill out about our daughter before our meeting with her college counselor next week.

And that whole paragraph was one sentence.

The beautiful critic would have something to say about that.

We had to fill out one of those parent questionnaires for my son, too. Parents are asked to give insight on their children's strengths and challenges and special natures, to help college counselors figure out how your child can best be packaged to make a compelling pitch to the schools of choice. It's all about selling their individual story and I am starting to realize that my son's experience as an Explorer Firefighter with the FDNY helped set him apart. How many applicants had search and rescue training, how many had the experience of putting out fires using the actual garb and gear? How many had studied the patterns of how flames spread, and could navigate through small spaces with bulky equipment, finding and hoisting heavy test dummies on their backs in blinding white storms of steam to simulate real smoke?

No wonder he got into all but one of the schools where he applied. I didn't really understand that others would grasp how special he is, that others would see what I see. I thought his mediocre SATs would be a roadblock, but in the end, he leveled all the obstacles. And now I am in the same place again, not trusting that others will see how wonderful and unique my daughter is, trying to figure out how to help her stand apart from the numbing sameness of all the college applications. I feel as if I am standing in at the foot of a mountain and trying to marshall the energy to climb it again, but with more faith this time. More faith.

Our son's high school guidance counselor made approaching the parent questionnaire easy when she said, "Think of it this way: You are writing a love letter about your child." So this is how I will think about the questionnaire for my daughter. It is a love letter I look forward to writing as soon as I can clear the significantly less appealing tasks off my list of must do now.

Maybe I won't even get dressed today. I'll just sit at the computer and work. That way, I won't be tempted to leave the house, to escape my obligations. Oh right. I have to get dressed. My aunt is in the hospital after falling again. I will need to go there and sit with her for a while. What happened at the hospital on Friday with her two children is the saddest story that touches my life. Sadder still, for my aunt. Later.

Autonomy

Last night at about 9 p.m., my aunt's home attendant called and said my aunt was refusing to get up from the sofa in the living room to get ready for bed. She said every time she approached her and tried to take her arm to help her up, my aunt would flail and fight and tell her, "Don't touch me." And then she would continue to just sit, staring into to space, into who knows what thought pictures were inhabiting that space. The home attendant asked if I could come over there and help because she didn't know what else to do. I asked my husband to come with me. My aunt feels very safe and grounded in his presence. We went across the courtyard to her apartment, and there she was, still on the couch, looking very small and hunched and bewildered.

She gazed at us when we walked in, as if taking a moment to understand who we were and then she smiled fleetingly. We sat on either side of her and asked her how she was doing and just generally chatted with her. We can no longer grasp a single thread of what she is saying, but we knew she was engaging with us in conversation just the same. At one point she was trying to tell us something, and we just listened and wished we could fathom what it was, because it seemed to her important. Eventually we asked if she was ready for bed and she nodded. My husband helped her to stand, holding both her hands while I got the wheelchair and pushed it next to her. But my aunt just stood for a while, unwilling or unable to make her feet do her bidding to turn her body so she could lower herself into the wheelchair, and after a while she just sat back down on the couch.

The home attendant sat on the other side of the room, shaking her head in frustration. She doesn't have the patience of the home attendant who comes on the weekends. This woman, though well-meaning and really very funny, is more brusque, wanting to get things over with. My aunt has a visceral negative response to that. It makes her want to resist with all the force she can marshal, which is still a lot.

My aunt seemed agitated when she sat back down. I stroked her hair, which always seems to calm her. And then I had the idea of offering her money to put in her pocket, since she is fixated on her finances above all else, having once run the Office Services department at Barnard College, and having had to dole out money to her two children for one thing or another her whole life long. Now that her daughter, the addict, is no longer in the house, money lasts a long time, as my aunt's needs are few. But she likes to have a few dollars in her pocket to give to her great grandsons when they visit, or to her grand nieces and nephews. When I pulled out three twenties and handed them to her, she brightened at once. I suspect she felt as if she now had some agency. And sure enough once the bills were safely tucked into the pocket of her dress, she began pushing herself forward to the front edge of the couch as if to stand. This time when my husband helped her up, she did her little shuffle to turn herself around to sit in the wheelchair and I wheeled her into her bedroom, where the home attendant took over.

Once she was ready for bed, we kissed her and she looked at us intently, trying again to tell us something. It seemed to be a story of a time long past, and we nodded and murmured to her and found a break in the unintelligible sounds she was making to say our good nights. As we walked back home I was thinking how very lonely it must be to be so trapped inside yourself, the memory still vivid of when you were powerful and in charge, but now you are dependent on the patience and humor of paid caregivers, waiting for the arrival of relatives who might or might not happen by that day, and who even when they do come, leave much too soon and never really change a thing.

Warrior

My aunt is home from the hospital, happy to be back in her chair next to the window. It is a wet morning in New York City. Outside our windows, the trees are bowing low in the lashing rain. The leaves are almost all blown off their branches, but for the leaves on the tree outside my bedroom window, which is in a corner more protected from the wind. That tree is still a blaze of gold, like sunlight against my window despite the gray skies and rain. The effect is sort of magical. I stayed in bed till very late just looking at it and dozing.

My aunt was more clear in her speech this morning than she has been in a long time. She said, "I love you, dear," and she said, "God gives everyone such problems and hard times but he also gives us a way to get through it and he sends people to help us."

It came out clear and whole, and it reminded me of how full of rabble-rousing life she used to be. My Aunt Winnie never knew the language of defeat. This small, frail woman helped a whole lot of people through their own hard times. She was there for every one of us in the most selfless, take-no-prisoners way. She was the oldest girl of nine and she learned to rally the troops to fight for those she loved and for those who just needed someone like her to stand up for them. Now she needs us. And we are all right there, wanting nothing more than to fight for her, wishing we could do more.

April 6, 1931

That's my aunt's family of origin. My mom is on the immediate left of my grandfather. Aunt Winnie is the girl on the far left, her hand protectively on her younger brother's shoulder. She's only 12 in this picture, but you can already see in her eyes that she is a warrior for love. She has always been that. 

I lived with her for a year when I first moved to New York to go to college. Even after I moved into the dorms, her apartment was my other home. She was then just a little older than I am now. It often seems that the years have evaporated like a mist, and we have to hold fast to our memories. They are the only evidence that what we remember, actually was. 

Compensating

I called my aunt's daughter this morning. If you've been reading here awhile you know that this cousin of mine is an addict and because she is abusive when under the influence, she had to be removed from her mother's home. Her brother got the court to issue a restraining order and it is being actively enforced by the security guards at our complex and that is a good thing.

But no one had told my cousin that her mother was in the hospital. It wasn't sitting well with me so I called her cell. She complained about no one calling her, asked what had happened, and then immediately began to shake this tree for money. She wanted me to meet her somewhere and give her money so she could do her laundry. She explained that she had left the group home associated with the outpatient rehab program; it was just horrible, she said. But weren't they working with you to get permanent housing, I asked. Not really, she said, and I didn't know what the heck that meant. I think it just meant she didn't want to follow the rules at that place and so now she is back to her precarious existence, staying with a friend. I didn't ask who. Nor did I ask if she planned to make arrangements to come and see her mother. She would have to come with a police escort. All she would really need to do is go to the precinct and ask them to accompany her, but she sounded high, so she probably wasn't thinking in those terms.

She insisted she had no money at all, and she did push my buttons a little, because I was considering meeting her on the street to put money into her hand. Definitely not my brightest move, and one I would likely not share with my family. All the same, I wish I hadn't called. I preferred being able to imagine that she was making progress in her rehab, that somehow, with her usual safety nets unraveled, she was learning to walk on her own. But now I know it's just business as usual out there. And today, I'm her pawn, if I choose to give her money.

My aunt comes home from the hospital this morning. Yesterday, when I went by to see her, she was sitting amid crumpled sheets, her hospital gown falling off her shoulders, her face unwashed, her lips cracked, her undergarment needing to be changed. She was sitting there looking trapped and scared, unable to get anyone's attention because she couldn't get the words out and couldn't uncurl her hand enough to press the button, if she even remembered the button. I knew it wasn't simple neglect, that the nurses were scurrying around trying to get to everyone. And no doubt the squeaky wheels were getting the first oil. My aunt just needed a squeaky wheel to speak up for her.  I wiped her face with a warm cloth and made her gargle with mouthwash and arranged the bedclothes more modestly around her and combed her hair then went to the nurses station to ask someone to come and change her.

They said they would get there as soon as they could. I had also learned that morning that she had developed a urinary infection for which she is being treated. So I asked to speak to the doctor in charge of her case. They led me over to a nurse practitioner who didn't meet my eyes as she answered my questions and seemed indifferent to the fact that I was standing there. I didn't get upset right away. With my aunt, you always have to consider that her son might have talked to this same person and been as curt, rude and unappreciative as he can be. Trying to compensate, I was being my most polite and conciliatory self, because I wanted them to treat my aunt well when I wasn't there. But this nurse just touched my last nerve. I asked if she had paged the doctor and without looking at me and with irritation in her voice she said she had and would let me know when the doctor responded. I said with a little tartness, well I had no assurance of that.

She looked at me sort of startled and asked why I said that. I responded that her whole demeanor suggested a lack of care and she said, well, in 30 years I have never heard that. I said, well I'm sorry, but I have to go to work and I can't really leave my aunt in the condition that she is, and it's hard. And then I was crying, and I had not had a clue that tears were so close to the brim and now they just overflowed, and I felt embarrassed and undermined, and I walked away from the nurse's station looking for a place to get a hold of myself. The nurse practitioner and my aunt's assigned nurse both followed me down the hall, full of sudden sympathy. It was as if now my aunt was someone with people who cared, and that made her real.

Her nurse went straight to her room and began to change her adult diaper while the nurse practitioner stayed with me in the hallway, trying to talk to me. I wished she would let me gather myself, because her gentle assurances only made the tears flow more, but I appreciated her then. She treated me with a humanity I hadn't seen in her before. I wiped my face and thanked her and then went back in to my aunt and her nurse was almost done and my aunt looked clean now, and she was even smiling as they propped her up on her pillows and raised the head of the bed to a sitting position so that she could look out the window. The nurses assured me again that they weren't ignoring her, it had just been a hectic morning, and I thanked them again and they promised to take care of her, I could go to work and not worry.

I sat with my aunt for a little while longer and then left for the office, thinking how we are all just doing the best we can, and I still hadn't talked to the doctor, and if you have an old person in the hospital it is so important that the people tasked with caring for them understand they are connected to people who love them, and the nurses need to be appreciated, too.

Winding Down

My aunt, the 92-year-old, is in the hospital. She fell on Saturday evening. Her home care attendant had gone to run her bath, and my aunt apparently forgot she couldn't just get up and walk around, so she got up and tried. She said she was on her way to her dresser to make sure that the money she had put there earlier was still in place. She fractured two ribs when she fell and is now in intense pain.

The social workers at the hospital want to send her to rehab at a nursing home. Her sisters are divided over whether that is a good idea. My mother thinks she will get better care in a nursing home, but she worries that by the time she's ready to be discharged her current home care attendants will have been reassigned. Another sister, who visited her in the hospital yesterday and who is a nurse, says that the best thing is for her to go straight home. I am inclined to agree. My aunt gets horribly disoriented in institutions. And she starts to hallucinate men with all sorts of nefarious intentions. I don't know where this comes from. Perhaps there are chapters of her life I don't know after all.

We are trying to figure out whether to call her daughter, the addict, who is finally living elsewhere, no longer in the home where she can harass and verbally abuse her mother for money. I don't know where my cousin has got to. I haven't spoken with her in weeks. I've wanted to call and see how she is doing, but I knew she would see it as a weakening of my resolve and would set about manipulating things from there. I just didn't want to get the whole sad carnival started again.

On the other hand, her mother is in the hospital and her face is beginning to collapse on its bones. The bridge of her nose is suddenly higher and sharper, her cheekbones more pronounced, her eyes sunken deep as small caves. When I walked into her hospital room this morning she was sleeping and I was struck my how much she resembled her brother in his coffin four years ago. I had never seen any particular resemblance before, but now it was marked. The sheets were drawn up to her chin and she was so small under the covers, so pale, her hair white and soft like feathers. When she opened her eyes, she looked as if she was trying to focus them, to figure out whether I was real or if she was still dreaming. She finally decided she was awake and fixed her supernaturally clear green eyes on me. She just looked at me and said nothing. Waiting. Trusting. I wanted to cry.

I gave her water and applied chap stick and rubbed lotion into the back of her hands. Then we sat looking out at Central Park, she has an expansive view of it from her window. She wanted to know how were the finances, and I assured her they were fine. We didn't talk much after that. We just sat there, breath in, breath out, and it felt as if I was sitting with only half of her, that the other part of her was already gone, floating somewhere in the next world, biding time.

After a while I coaxed her back to sleep, stroking her hair and whispering that I would come back this evening, which I knew would make her feel less abandoned, more willing to drift back into dreams. Then I came to work and made copies of all the paperwork that I need to submit this week to certify her for home care for another year.

As I collated the pieces of paper that represent the span of her life, from her birth certificate written in 1918 to her husband's death certificate two years ago, I couldn't help wondering how many more beats were left in the pacemaker that pilots her heart. And I couldn't help wondering if that foreign piece of machinery implanted in her chest was still in fact her friend.

Did I disappoint you?

Mother, did I disappoint you? 

In the film Benjamin Button, when the character of Daisy is on her deathbed, her grown daughter asks her this question, a quiver in her voice, as if she fears the truth.

I am pierced by the question. 

It is impossible, I think, if your elder escapes cancer or heart or other sudden system failure and instead declines year by year into frail old age and eventual death, to not disappoint that elder. There is no way to make the world for them as it was when they were able to march out and embrace it on their own. There will always be the request they swallowed rather than ask us for one more thing, the moment they wanted our attention and we were caught up in our own lives, the shop, the film, the friend they would like to have visited but couldn't get there on their own. 

I live with the aching knowledge that I disappoint my mother, 88, and my aunt, 92, all the time. The true grace, the thing that brings me to tears, is that they forgive me, again and again.

Sisters

My Old People

My aunt, the one who lives in the Bahamas, sent some pieces of her jewelry with my mom, and asked her to give them to me and my daughter. For my girl there was a round, faceted crystal necklace and earrings to match. For me, there was a string of pearls so vivid you knew they were the real thing. "Why doesn't she give this to one of her daughters?" I asked my mom, confused. "She wants you to have it," my mom replied. "She said she gave other pieces to her girls."

Then my mom pulled out some jewelry boxes of her own. "I brought these for you," she said, handing me a black velvet box which contained diamond and emerald earrings and a necklace to match. "After we retired, I told your dad to give me emeralds if he wanted to give me jewelry, because that's your birth stone, and it would be going to you anyway." Then she proffered a blue hinged box. Inside was a silver tie clip with a small scrolled design that I remembered so well. It was the piece my dad wore every day, along with his decades-old round-faced watch, which my mom gave to my son some years ago. Sitting in a drawer in my mother's house in St. Lucia for the 14 years since my dad died, the tie clip had become a little tarnished. But there it was, a memento of my father, a thing he had touched every day.

I suddenly understood why my old people are trying to give away pieces of their lives. It is so that they will be remembered and thought of by those they have loved after they pass on. I recalled my Uncle Charlie offering his box of tools to my husband in the months before he died. That box of tools now sits in the back of our Jeep, and every time I look at it I remember my uncle.

I took the tie clip, and the pearls, and the diamonds and emeralds, and the crystal pieces. My aunt and my mother are not gone from this earth, not yet. Thank God, not yet. But I will cherish these offerings. Of course I would have remembered my old people without these objects. But holding my dad's tie clip I realized how much it will mean to have something they touched and enjoyed while they were alive. So I will cherish that they wanted to give these tokens to me and to my daughter, as I will cherish every moment that I still have with them here.

Rehab

Thanks to everyone for the concern about the situation with my elder aunt, who is still in the hospital, and my cousin.

My cousin has agreed to go into rehab, so my other cousin will sit down with her on Monday morning to call inpatient facilities to see who has a bed. These places want the substance abuser to make the call, as they think that shows a certain readiness for treatment. Except, we know she won't make a single call unless one of us is sitting at her elbow.

We have a list of facilities given to us by the social workers at the hospital where my aunt has been admitted to another kind of rehab, this one to improve functioning and mobility. My aunt is doing daily physical and speech therapy, which keeps her occupied in a way she misses when she's home just sitting in her chair. So that part is good. Her face looks pretty beaten up, though. When I visit her, I feel like the hospital personnel should vet me to make sure I'm not the one who did that to her. I do feel guilty that we allowed a situation where my cousin could take her out the house while intoxicated, ending with her falling out of her wheelchair.

I do hope we can find a placement for my cousin tomorrow. Most of the rehab places put applicants on a waiting list. Which is insane. Put an actively using addict on a waiting list, and by the time the bed is available, they've changed their mind, if you can even find them.

As far my cousin's older brother is concerned, his sister has had enough chances. He wants to evict her onto the street and press charges. We're trying to hold him at bay long enough to see if the rehab effort is going to work. It had better. I don't know where my cousin would go otherwise, except into the company of a very toxic and manipulative man who has abused her in the past. This is so not a good situation.

Jehovah Jireh

Just heard another editor is leaving. She took a job at another magazine. The losses pile up.

Also, one of my aunts is very sick. She just had surgery to remove a blockage of her carotid artery, and she is so very frail. Her three daughters, my cousins, are scared. They are all traveling to be with her at Christmas. I adore this aunt. She's a little OCD, like me. She worries obsessively about her daughters, all of them married women, every one of them the kind of daughter that would make any mother proud. She and my uncle raised them to be caring, funny, strong-hearted, opinionated women. The youngest shook things up mightily when she came out to her parents right after college. Her father was devastated, and left the room, but her mother, my aunt, followed him out and led him back by the elbow, saying fiercely, "This is your daughter! This is your father! Now we're going to sit here and talk! I am not going to let this break up my family!" At the time, my aunt and uncle were deeply homophobic. Now, fifteen years later, my aunt speaks warmly about how much her youngest allowed her to grow, how grateful she is, and how, when my cousin married her partner is San Francisco last summer, she gained another daughter.

This aunt is also the one who used to press crisp twenty, fifty, hundred dollar bills into our hands when we were small. When you're not yet of age and haven't figured out how to get money on your own, you remember such things. She was too generous by far.

I didn't realize until I spoke with my mom today (I had called to complain that more work was about to fall onto my already overflowing desk) just how weak and close to the edge my aunt is after her surgery last week. Now, I'm scared too. As my mom and her sisters all say, Jehovah Jireh, which means, God will provide just what we need at the time we need it. And so I pray for her healing.

Beauties in the Pool

My mom (blue suit with white straps and red stripe, hair pulled back) and my aunt went swimming in my cousin's pool on a hot day in Jamaica. My brother e-mailed these snapshots to me this afternoon. My mom, by the way, is 87 years old and her baby sister, the one sporting those fly shades, is 84. These lovely ladies know how to seize the day!

$3.49 Part Two

Earlier this year my 90-year-old aunt (above with my niece and my daughter) received a notice saying that she was making $3.49 a year too much to qualify for home care services. This excess, by the way, was the result of a cost of living increase to her social security, which is mandated by law.

For upwards of $1,000, we engaged a lawyer to defend her case at a fair hearing with the state, at which it was decided that the state would just bill my aunt for the $3.49 and she could maintain services (which she desperately cannot do without). Now the state is asking for another hearing in her home, which is apparently the law when a person is homebound and the decision in the case is not "fully favorable" (as in, they're going to make her pay the $3.49 a year).

The eldercare lawyer advises me to write a letter saying that she will simply pay as directed, rather than have him prepare for another hearing on her behalf, at $400 an hour. He says he suspects the home care agency will not even bother to bill her. I did not say, because I was too tired right then to entertain it, that this is going to come up again next spring, when the next social security increase kicks in.

I find I am dragging my feet in writing the letter. I realize I am so incensed at the lunacy of the state, at the lack of common sense, that I'm having a passive aggressive response. I wish the lawyer would just write the letter for me but that would be another $400. The state sure keeps eldercare attorneys doing a thriving business!

In related news, my son seems to be moving towards a future in some area of health care. He went to his college orientation last week and selected his classes. He's carrying a fairly heavy load for his first semester, which makes me worry since he has to maintain a B+ average. But he says he's totally stoked about his courses, two in particular: Anatomy and Physiology and Emergency Care for the Health Professional. The latter teaches hands on, in-the-field emergency techniques like splinting, etc. My husband said, when he heard his program, "Does he realize he's heading more and more in the direction of medicine?" Shhhh.

The Cool, Hip Aunt From America

That's my aunt, pictured above, in a portrait made around the time she got married in 1949. She will be 91 this September. I'm sitting here remembering her as she was, the funny, opinionated, energetic woman who used to visit us from New York in the summers, with her curly gray afro and piercing green eyes. We loved her madly. She was the cool, hip aunt from America who understood us better than our parents.

And she was a feisty. Once, when my son was three and came home from preschool with a scratch on his face, she bent all the way down and put her nose to his and said, "Did you hit him back hard?" My son, parroting his parents' instructions, told her, "I don't hit!" She straightened up, looked at him with a frown and said, "So how do you plan to defend yourself?" Her sisters say she was always like that. Figuratively, a brawler.

She was the oldest girl of nine children, a gifted pianist who left Jamaica because she got tired of having to give all her little brothers and sisters piano lessons. "They never practiced," she complained to me once. "My mother cared for them to learn music, but they didn't."

She was the fourth in our family to migrate to America. The hoards came after her. She eventually sponsored all eight of her brothers and sisters, and the multitudes of their children. We have a joke in our family: If the U.S. government had known how many of us would follow my aunt to America, they would never had let her immigrate back in 1947.

She was officially the first Black employee of Barnard College (she says she was the second, that there was one woman there before her, but she was passing for White). My aunt rose through the ranks and eventually ran the college's Department of Office Services. She was the only director who did not have a college degree.

On her annual visits to Jamaica, she lectured her nieces on the importance of getting good grades in high school, and one by one, as we came of age, she had us apply to Barnard. She stressed that our grades would have to get us in, but if we made the cut, she would help to get us decent financial aid. Eventually six of her nieces migrated to New York and enrolled. 

She employed us all. After classes, we xeroxed hundreds upon hundreds of pages of professors' lesson plans, sorted mail, made deliveries of printing plates downtown, and ran the addressograph machine. My years at the college overlapped with three other cousins', and my aunt made sure our work hours seldom coincided, because she didn't want us chatting and socializing on the job.

One cousin and I did manage to work together in my aunt's office one summer. We'd hang out till late at night with our friends on campus, then head off to work each morning. We were living with my aunt. One morning, we didn't wake up on time. My Uncle Charlie, watching my aunt gather her things for work, said, "Aren't you going to wake the girls?" My aunt responded, "Let them sleep. While they're asleep, they still have a job. When they wake up, they'll find out they have no more job." We laugh about that now. But she didn't fire us. She just lectured us and made us work that day for no pay as punishment. Work was serious business.

Ironically, my aunt is the reason we are all here in America and able to take care of her. Two of the six nieces she helped get to Barnard now act as her power of attorney and health care proxy. And when it became clear that her daughter's troubles were putting her 6-year-old grandson in jeopardy, a third niece took him to live with her family in Virginia. The truth is we would all do anything for my aunt, because when she could, she did everything in her power for us. She was so vigorous. Every one of us is who we are today because of who she is and what she taught us and how she has lived her life. She is our beloved matriarch.