I don’t like the gloves the nurses leave here. They’re rubber and have powder on the inside. The powder cakes up when mixed with the sweat and sometimes piss that finds its way past my wrist and into the fingers. They make my hands pasty white and wrinkly. In my mind, no amount of scrubbing rids my hands of their smell, and no amount of lotion or oil or cream makes my hands brown again. The gloves are much too large for my hands. I ask for smaller ones, but because this isn’t really about me, I’m told to put on two pairs and deal.
My work gloves are perfect. They’re pink with brown leather and padded palms. There’s rubber around the cinched wrists. They’ve protected my hands from dirt and water and the occasional slip of the electric hedge trimmer’s blade when I’ve ventured to remove a twig without disconnecting from the power source. When I leave the garden, I’m covered from head to toe in dust, dirt and plant fragments; but my hands, my hands are always clean. Swollen from years of piano, valved instruments, typing, and other repetitive motions, but clean.
She’s constipated. So I put on two pairs of too large gloves and lubricated the fore and middle finger of my right hand in an attempt to dislodge the obstruction. It is an uncomfortable endeavor for both of us, but necessary. I try not to think too much about what I’m about to do, and my thoughts wander to the garden, where her flowers sit, waiting for me to come and thin them out. Irises, though they spread like wildfire, and multiply like rabbits, do enjoy having a little space. Sometimes, if you give them enough space, they’ll bloom for you in gratitude.
One of the greatest things she taught me was to be a good steward of her yard. It is my refuge. No one else in this house seems to care about how the yard looks, but I do. I want it to look like she’s still out here trimming and watering and cultivating the landscape she carved out of this oddly shaped strip of earth the county overcharges us in taxes for every year. She planted bushes, flowers, and trees everywhere. They all need consistent care, and I am diligent. I cut grass every two weeks. I fertilize with the same blend of lime, 10-10-10, insect killer pellets and that brand of grass feed that she’s used since I can remember. Once every two or three months, I oil the blades of my hedge trimmer and manicure her hedges. The others grow a little slower and don’t need as much attention, but I try to keep everything neat. I spend as much of my days and evenings out there as I can. I stalk sales at home improvement stores, and search for the names of the flowers and bushes already planted, so I can know how to properly care for them, because she can’t remember. Her yard was her pride and her notoriety, and it’s now my obligation. I knew that part of being her caregiver meant being caretaker of her yard as well. So when I moved back here, the first thing I did after taking care of all the other stuff, was to go buy a pair of good gloves to get to work in her yard.
There’s no gentle way to do this. No easy way. If she would just drink more water and eat more fiber, we’d all be better off, and the frequency of these encounters would decrease. But she won’t drink too much because she hates having to wear a diaper, much less having her diaper changed, and she will only eat what she wants, like a child. But she’s not a child. She’s an old woman, and she’s lived the majority of her life doing whatever it was that pleased her, so she now refuses to take orders from the likes of me.
Once we’re finished, and I have stopped gagging, and she has stopped calling me every bitch she can imagine, I go outside. My folding chair is right where I left it, next to a small plastic bucket full of dirt and cigarette butts. I think sometimes of how many years of my life I’ve blown away and crushed under my toe. I’m sure that I won’t live to be her age, and part of me is okay with that. I need the rest.
Tomorrow is Mother’s day. And I don’t want to be bothered. I’ve always hated Mother’s day, because my mother is in the ether. Though I was reared by her mother, the void she left would never be filled. This ambiguity on my part has created a chasm of contention between my grandmother and me. She wants credit for what she did, and I want to be able to acknowledge that I sprung forth from my mother’s loins and was loved. And that I miss that love. I understand her point, but she never understood mine. I plan to make her favorite meal anyway, and have bought her some flowers, a card, and some chocolates. She’s much easier to please as an invalid. In her heyday, I went broke trying to get her something she’d be satisfied with; I should’ve saved that money.
If I’d been told beforehand that I’d have to take care of a person with dementia, I don’t know how willing I would’ve been to come back for this. It’s a nightmare. I can’t fall asleep on my own. At around 3 or 4 in the morning, after I’ve changed her for the last time on “my shift,” I down 6 allergy pills and 6 ibuprofen. Sometimes I fall asleep, sometimes I don’t. My liver hates me. I can’t blame it. I eat too much. I mean, I’ve always loved food and I’m a good cook. But something about the chaos of this situation makes me eat larger quantities of food more often than I should. She snacks all day and half the night, and sometimes I do too, because I hate to see her leftover food go to waste. It’s almost like taking care of a small child. But she’s not a child, she’s a grown woman who will never let me forget that I’m overweight. But we sit together, at 1:30 A.M., and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Or cookies and chocolate. Or maybe grits and eggs. The only clothes that fit me now are my sweats and tee shirts. I have nowhere to go anyway, someone has to be here with her around the clock and my straw is always the shortest.
She screams when she’s awake. It’s part agonizing wail and part sonar. She screams, I move. We move. So she can see who’s home, my brother, my uncle, or me, and know she’s not alone. At least that’s how I have rationalized it. The nurses say it’s because of the dementia. But they didn’t know her before so they don’t know how mean she was in her ambulatory life. Her regular life which is now, I guess, her past life. They don’t know that she’s really an angry wounded child who’s been trapped in this body for 80 years, never once allowing herself to accept or experience the vicissitudes of love and pain. She needs the attention we give because of the neglect she’s brought, the pain she’s brought, the love she tried to give but couldn’t. Her screams haunt me. I hear them even when they’re not happening. So sometimes I run and she’s asleep, or watching television, or looking out of the window at her boxwoods. I tried to get her to come outside so I could show her all the work I’ve done to bring the yard back, hoping she’d see I’d been paying attention all these years, and know I cared about what she cared about. But she doesn’t want anyone to see her in a wheelchair, so I take pictures with my phone instead and show them to her. Each spring for 3 years I bring her a cutting from her “snowball tree,” an azalea blossom or three, and the first roses. She looks at them and says they’re under-fertilized but pretty. I chuckle and leave the room.
I have always been afraid of attempting to grow my own roses. They’re so delicate and temperamental. If the soil’s pH is off by just a hair, the whole plant will revolt and rage against the lack of complete nourishment and your inadvertent betrayal. But I bought some and tried anyway. Two years and countless hours of internet research later, I had a few blooms. I had all but given up on the endeavor when, one morning, on my way back from setting out sprinklers and checking on my lilies, I saw these deep red darlings shining in the morning sun. I squealed like a little girl, and ran inside to tell her that I’d grown roses. Real roses. She looked at me with a strange mix of joy and confusion. She had no idea who I was, but was happy that I’d had such good luck with flowers because she loved gardening. Maybe one day, she said, she’d show me her prize winning yard.
*Edited by Non-Fiction Editor, Jina DuVernay
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