By Bea's Bedside

Update for Recent Visitors

2009-02-15T18:55:00.000-08:00

Recently there have been a number of visitors to this site. For their benefit, I would like to mention that I stopped writing this blog shortly after my mother died. However, I am working hard on a book, based on the blog, and hope to find a publisher. If you would like to reach me, the address is chezsven AT comcast (dot) net.

Words to Say to Help Someone Pass Away

2009-01-07T17:38:00.001-08:00

I have not blogged here for months but was moved by a search which my stat counter revealed today. I always check Internet searches. It is interesting to me to know how many people throughout the world search for information on end-of-life issues and the process of dying. There is not much data available online. Often, strangers come to Bea's Bedside for clues. The most frequent searches seem to be clothing and gifts for elderly bedridden people and inquiries about coughing phlegm. Today someone googled "Words to Say at a Bedside to Help Someone Pass Away," so I would like to share my experiences in this domain. Bea's nurse Jane Otis was the one who actually gave Bea permission to leave. All she needed to do was acknowledge that perhaps Bea's time had come. Bea passed away several days later. I also have experience with my dad to share. He was 97 when he died. I told Bea, seven years younger, that she needed to give him permission to leave. She thought it over, and finally did so. He passed away shortly thereafter. Here is what she wrote in her journal two years later: "At the time of his death, I had come to realize that maybe people appreciate an acknowledgment of their right to die. I forever remember the look in his eyes, which expressed such love and somehow conveyed departure. He was a fine man, and I am glad I was able to have two children with him. I miss him. Experiencing the death of a loved one I find to be the most traumatic experience of a lifetime. In my experience, only giving birth, in its extremity of feeling, comes close."

Great New Blog To Read!

2008-07-18T09:44:00.000-07:00

I have not posted to this blog in many, many months. Today I am writing simply to alert readers to the existence of the New Old Age blog, published by the New York Times. I wish it had existed when I was caring for Bea.

One Last Poem

2006-12-23T10:35:00.000-08:00

Holiday festitivies ring strangely out of tune. Like a member of an orchestra, I sit ready for the Christmas concert, only to look around and realize with surprise that the conductor has gone missing ...

For those faithful blog readers of the past few months, I offer one last poem from the thirties, which I found among my mother's papers:

I love to show that I
am well-informed
I always feel so spry
when I've performed.
I chatter sotto voce
of Benedetto Croce
and mention with esprit
Paul Valery.
I talk with intuition
about the art of Titian,
and revel in the Beaux-Arts
and minuets of Mozart's.
I pounce like any vulture
on gents of lesser culture.
The sculptured gods of Myron,
the light-heart loves of Byron,
I speak about with ease and will
for all is grist unto my mill.

Bea's Memorial Service

2006-12-21T16:47:00.000-08:00

My brother has graciously provided a summary of remarks during Bea's memorial service:

NICK: We’ve gathered here this evening not to mourn my mother’s death but to celebrate her life. She had more influence on me than any person I’ve ever known, and her main quality in this regard was her capacity for expressing love. The name Beatrice means "one who blesses.

I remember her sitting and listening for 45 minutes while I sang the entirety of a musical performance I was rehearsing. I remember her taking me to my first baseball game. I remember when she invited a troubled officemate to come live with us for a while. And I remember that she was the only one of my son Ben’s four grandparents who could connect with him. Her love for me was so intense while I was growing up that she had trouble placing limits on me.

She was a complicated woman. She participated in the 1963 march in which Martin Luther King articulated his dream, but she was afraid of street crime and suspected our maids of drinking her wine and putting water in the decanter, so she wouldn’t notice. She was a highly paid professional in an era when most women were putting all their energies into homemaking and mothering, yet by the time most women were working, she regretted not devoting more attention to her children. She embraced my father’s ancestry - saying Good Night to me in Russian, observing the custom of sitting quietly before a departure, and co-authoring a book on the tsar and his family - but her New Jersey roots kept showing. I could never figure out why my father’s ancestry seemed to matter so much more than my mother’s. She loved to enter contests; I remember helping her with a Dial soap contest that involved praising the product with phrases beginning with D-I-A-L. Once she actually won a mink coat in a contest.

My mother never drove a car all her life, but she could be eminently practical. She saw that in Washington in The Sixties success in your field often depended as much on contacts as on ability and hard work. When I was struggling in school, she invited my teachers over for dinner - and invited some single women over, too.

I was struck that the headline writer at the Provincetown Banner, challenged to sum up my mother’s life in a few words, chose "writer and editor." I thought, "Wow, that’s what I am, too." She taught me to play Scrabble, and shared my love of Shakespeare. Whenever I said that one person did something better than another, she would say, "Comparisons are odious."

For my mother, psychoanalysis was a saving grace, a life raft after some traumatic experiences in her early years. She considered Freud to be the most important person of the 20th century. In the fact of all the craziness of modern life, she managed to project a warm, welcoming love that became a life raft for me. I’ll always remember her fondly.

BETSY: Beatrice was my mother-in-law. Unlike all the jokes, we had a good relationship. In fact, over the years, I came to love her dearly. I admired her and she taught me many things. Nick says that at first she may have found me a bit too prim and was unsure I could make her son happy. (You know Beatrice!) Near the end of her life she said she thought I had improved! Ultimately, I felt included in the circle of her love.

I remember how one of the first areas where we connected was about the importance of soil, of earth. Beatrice believed in building up the fertility of the soil and in composting. At one point, I think, she urged Nick to consider a career in soil agronomy. And there was, I thought, a deeper, metaphorical/psychological/spiritual dimension contained in this interest of hers. At any rate, being an organic gardener and composter, I resonated with it.

Mother had studied Italian at one point in her life. She loved to roll phrases of Italian over her tongue. One summer she was fond of the phrase, "Dolce fa niente" which she translated as "It is sweet to do nothing." Since I am always busy to the point of workaholism, and am challenged to balance my activity with time for rest and relaxation, Dolce Fa Niente is medicine for what ails me. Another gift from Beatrice!

Like all of us Beatrice had her struggles and her faults. Sometimes when we were visiting, Mother would get extremely frustrated with Father. One morning I was in the kitchen and she came charging in and poured herself a glass of wine. "That man!" she fumed. After a while, calmed and fortified by the wine, she returned to continue the conversation with Father.

As others have mentioned, Mother was able to relate to our son Ben who has Down syndrome and autism. Of all his four grandparents she was the one who really forged a connection with him. She met him where he was at. If he was obsessed with hamburgers, she made sure she fixed him a hamburger on his first night at Wellfleet. She rolled with his odd behaviors and found things to talk about with him. She had real conversations with him. She was comfortable with him in a physically affectionate way.

And Ben is only the most extreme example of Beatrice's ability to connect and to pay attention to the people around her. She listened and gave good attention to her children and her grandchildren (and her friends and acquaintances.) She was warm and interested in what we each were doing and what we were thinking about. In the spotlight of her attention she made us feel seen and that we were important and loved. Beatrice communicated her love in ways that reached us and fed us. And we loved her back.

NAN (niece): Her mother Dorothy and Beatrice had a rivalry..."Auntie Bea was the most exotic character I was related to"...At her wedding, Beatrice threw rice under her skirt and said, "That’s for fertility."...She was emblematic of something that was radically different.

ELLEN (grand niece): You had to be on time for Beatrice...She was a crucial person at a difficult time in my mother’s life...She remembers Beatrice running naked into the water.

MARGOT (niece): She worked, she traveled, she lived in a cool Washington house, and she’d say something you didn’t expect...Beatrice sent her mother, Dorothy, exotic food for the holidays, like a jar of whale water, baby bees, and was it bull’s testicles?...Remembers fights with Dorothy and saying to her mother, "You two are too old to be fighting."

NATALIE (granddaughter): Learned it was normal to be a highly paid professional and go to the best school and have friends all over world. She wanted to know if she had had "a screaming-mimi orgasm....She never made us feel like kids. She set an example that you can have your own thoughts and don’t have to be ashamed.

NICK (son of best friend): She could say things that shock you...She was not averse to bridging gaps...She was very thoughtful in helping with his mother’s illness.

IRIS: (local cook, friend, former tenant): "She was one of the most beautiful women I’ve seen in my life" and called her "regal."

JULIAN (architect): Asked him to put cabins together as one cottage. She was project manager and agreed to his suggestion to make the deck bigger. She invited him to Wellfleet in the fall and always had an agenda for every visit. Compared her to Katharine Hepburn and said she would be comfortable on the African Queen.

STEPHANIE (granddaughter): Was present at fights between Beatrice and Dorothy, often accompanied by drinking; she remembers Dorothy saying, "No wonder you don’t have any friends" and Beatrice running after her with basket of Christmas cards to refute that statement...She was not a good cook...Once cooked Thanksgiving turkey with a plastic bag of giblets still in it...Gave us vodka when sister had her first period. She paid attention to people as individuals...

SANDY (daughter): She’d get people in cars and feel she had a captive audience. She’d ask my husband specific questions about Swedish politics...

ELAINE (librarian): Treated her as an equal...Gave feeling life is interesting. "Taught me how to talk to all the countesses in the world." "They don’t make them like her anymore."

Paul's Tribute to Bea

2006-12-15T06:38:00.000-08:00

After Bea passed, my son Paul, in Los Angeles, sent me this film. I hesitated to put the tribute online because it takes forever to load. You may have to cut and paste. For those with patience, the wait is well worthwhile ...

http://lesboutin.com/bea

Why This Blog Must End

2006-12-14T06:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I decided not to post anymore of Bea's writing. She would have loved blogging had it existed when she was younger. Yesterday, for the first time in over seven months, I did not post a By Bea's Bedside blog. I find myself grieving for both my mother and the high, produced by recording this intimate journey that was the end of her life. As we prepare for the memorial service, I want to again thank the strangers who cared enough to read the blog every day and send comments. Most blogs do not end unless the writer gets lazy. This one is different. It has no reason to continue. I hope, however, to create a book out of the writing Bea inspired and have begun a search for an agent who recognizes its value.

Tomorrow a special treat, a film my son made in memory of his grandma ...

A Progression of Shelters

2006-12-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

“An umbrella can be a home,
if the rain is thick enough to make walls …”

In our house we weather the pulse of rain
against shingle; stars fizzle
like damp cinders against the window.

People depart, one by one (looking back)
two-faced as the moon; diminished by time.
We who remain deny moon-madness
and are pared away by slivers …

I braid my hair for sleep (a thick coil).
You dream of serpents.

“Remember the turtle when talk turns
to shelters; he carries
his own umbrella.”

P.S. I found "A Progression of Shelters" among Bea's things, in her handwriting. It turns out she had painstakingly copied over the poem which was written by a young friend, Lisa, who recently expressed pleasure that I included in this blog.

Bea's Books (11)

2006-12-11T06:10:00.000-08:00

I open a copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima. On the first page, Bea has put a quote: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” This book is heavily underlined. Bea has also written comments in the margins. I find a post-it, “Of 245,000 population, nearly 100,000 killed or doomed at one blow. 100,000 hurt.” Bea knew John Hersey personally. I know because I find one of his letters. At the end of Chapter 4, Bea has underlined, “Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result?” At the bottom of this page, she has written, “I would say that the author certainly profoundly agrees with Father Siemes and gravely deplored use of the bomb. B.G.”

Why Choose Alternatives to Nursing Homes?

2006-12-10T04:08:00.000-08:00

Today I had a lovely visit from Joe, an early reader of this blog. We had tea and discussed life, his Christy, and my mom. Joe homecared Christy, who passed away peacefully at home last spring.

Also, there has been a flurry of blog information regarding elderly care and nursing homes, which I would like to pass on to By Bea’s Bedside readers.

First, FATE, Foundation Aiding the Elderly. Founder Carole Herman’s goal is, "Assuring our elders are treated with care, dignity and the utmost respect during their final years when they can no longer take care of themselves."

The Boomer Chronicles post "Beware of these Nursing Homes" with its link to a September 2006 Consumer Reports article on what the situation in nursing homes is today in America.

Finally, Ronni, at Time Goes By, whose blog today features reference to an article in the AARP Magazine, which you should all read. It is called Embedded.

Bea's Obituary

2006-12-09T05:59:00.000-08:00

WELLFLEET – Beatrice (Chinnock) Grabbe, 97, of Old King’s Highway died Nov. 29 at home. Born Oct. 4, 1909 in Belleville, N.J., she was the daughter of the late Harry S. and Bertha (White) Chinnock. She attended Montclair High School, then Kent Place School, and graduated from Vassar College. She worked in New York for Time-Life publications and as a producer for CBS Radio. She was the head of the radio section of the Office of War Information in Washington, D.C.

She also worked in public relations for the Manufacturing Chemists Association and as the editor of American Studies News, a publication of the Fulbright Scholar Program. She married Paul Grabbe in 1944 and in 1970 they moved to Wellfleet where she did volunteer work for Amnesty International. In 1984 they co-authored “The Private World of the Last Tsar,” a collection of photographs of the royal family of Russia. Her husband died in 1999.

She is survived by a daughter, Alexandra of Wellfleet, and a son, Nicholas of Amherst; five grandchildren; one great-grandchild and three nieces and one nephew.
There will be a private memorial service in Wellfleet on Dec. 16. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations in her memory to Hospice & Palliative Care of Cape Cod, 270 Communication Way, Hyannis, 02601.

Missing Bea

2006-12-08T07:09:00.000-08:00

Thank you to all readers who sent emails of condolence. Today’s blog is about recovery. Karyn wants to know how I am faring. The answer is as well as can be expected. The house seems very empty. Even when Bea was asleep, we felt her presence. My brother called this evening to say he has not been able to concentrate at work this week, so I guess he is grieving, too. My daughters call to see how I am. Losing someone who played such a large part in one’s life for 60 years turns out to be a bit more complicated than I anticipated ...

The Giant & The Toilet

2006-12-07T05:36:00.000-08:00

Bea left notes in the most unexpected places. While sorting through her papers, I discover what appears to be an idea for a children’s story, scribbled on the bottom of a stationary box:

“Wouldn’t it be funny if a giant came along with this big a blade (yd.) and this long a screw, if he lowered the handle and unscrewed our toilet and carried it away – water and all. Mother came along in the car and found the giant and the toilet. Then, they’d take the giant and throw him in the swamp and bring the toilet home again.”

Now, Bea's grandfather was a plumber. In his display window sat a magnificent toilet. As a little girl, she tried to sit on this toilet and was whisked away by one of the relatives...

Bea's Journal: The Bird’s Nest

2006-12-06T04:33:00.000-08:00

"Casual happenings are sometimes like jewels in our lives. Here is an example: My daughter takes me to see a bird’s nest. There are now no birds in it. 'Their mother,' she says, 'has taught them to fly.'” 6/11/00

The Mystery Letter

2006-12-05T05:57:00.000-08:00

Lisa has just changed Bea when I enter the bedroom. My mother sits alert, enjoying the attention.

“Guess what!” I say. “I found an incredible letter you wrote someone. Do you mind if I read it out loud?”

Bea folds her hands to indicate I should proceed, so I do:

"I was happy to feel your presence at Ted’s Thursday night though the party didn’t interest me very much."

I look down, to see if Bea remembers. She has closed her eyes.

"Life is so beautiful and deep; we must not cloud it with confused points of view and confused bits of conversation. We may speak to our friends of each other, yet our only clear understanding is between ourselves.

I tried to tell Polly something of what we had said to each other Wednesday night but, to my joy, I could not convey it to her, nor to any other person. Only to you I could say something of the effect of that conversation on me by telling you that when I left that evening I had a warmer feeling in my heart for people.

I am very proud of you that you have the will power you have. Do not think of me as one you should or should not propose marriage to. You do not understand me if you think of that. If I marry someone else, it will be because I love him more, because with him I sense life more deeply. And, if you prefer someone else to me, it will be for the same reason. Marriage won’t make such difference. Real love is a thing of the spirit. And I cannot marry anyone with whom my spirit is not in harmony.

The important thing is that our lives must be finer, for having known each other’s spirits.

If I am to be anything to you, I am to be in a way a part of your music.

Neither of us, apart or in relation to each other, should be thinking of marriage as an immediate possibility. We are not ready. My spirit is not ready. Only in my emotions am I ready, but in them I would betray the most essential part of me, the spirit. And that spirit is not ready. It has to be more in harmony with the universe, healthier than it has been. It must subdue my emotions. They have not been in their proper relation as an expression of my spirit.

We must have faith in our religious convictions and live nearer to God. In that way only shall we have vision.

Then, as Time goes on, if we find we are more kin to each other than to any one else, then, we shall know we want to spend life together.

Life is simple and deep. Life is a hymn of praise, “Inasmuch as without Thee we are not able to please Thee” mercifully give us to know Thy spirit more and more each day."

“Wow!” exclaims Lisa.

“Who did you write that for?” I ask. “Bill Whitney?”

“I don’t remember,” Bea murmurs. “Perhaps myself?”

Bea's Novel (2)

2006-12-04T05:46:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, by mid-afternoon, Sara braced herself for Kameladevi’s broadcast. Oh, why did she arrange to have a friend on the air? She knew it was bad form, frowned upon. Was it self-destructive? She was proud of Kameladevi, proud to know the Congress Party leader, proud of her contacts with the Indian community in New York. She was all for the Indian struggle for independence from Britain, as much as she knew about it. But now, with Kameladevi about to go on the air, Sara knew she had no idea at all how Kameladevi would behave.

In going over the script, Sara had asked her to change one line. It wasn’t really censorship, just a shift of emphasis so Sara would not feel called upon, morally required, to submit the script to legal staff for clearance. While straightening out the matter, Kameladevi had left for Washington and matters had to be handled over the phone. Anyone who had taken part in the Salt March to the sea with Gandhi, spent five years in a British prison, a former actress at that, couldn’t be easily restrained, Sara had discovered.

She listened, at 3:40 p.m., a copy of the revised script in hand. The throaty voice of the Hindu freedom-fighter came over smoothly from Washington, but when Kameladevi reached the revision, she stopped speaking! What was the matter? Seconds ticked by. No sound. Was there something wrong with the controls? No, because the sound wouldn’t go dead exactly at the point where the deletion had been made. Lost her place? Dropped the script? No, it was silent protest. Then, after the consuming silence registered to that important handful of fellow Indians who had tuned in, the deliberate voice took up where it had left and read calmly to the end.

The whole incident reminded Sara of the last time, several months earlier, when she had, as it were, run afoul of the British Government. Claire Boothe Luce was taking part in a forum series that had been cooked up by Wendell Willkie’s widow and a former opera singer, both rich and limelight-starved. Nobody else wanted this horrible series of three Saturday afternoon discussions. So, it landed in Sara’s lap and she could not refuse. Scripts were due days in advance, but Mrs. Luce sent hers in 14 minutes before airtime. A glance showed it was a very strong plea for the United States to join the Allies, stressing the fact that we were already morally committed. Sara had been instructed not to let anything controversial air without recourse to lawyers. She couldn’t reach one on the phone until she was already in the Control Booth. She read the troublesome lines to the lawyer at his home in Scarsdale. “Let it go,” he said. With a sigh, she did.

As soon as Mrs. Luce had done her stint, the drenchingly beautiful, topaz-bedecked charmer grabbed Sara by the wrist in a tense, cold grip and explained she had to catch a plane.

When Sara returned to her desk, the phone was ringing.

“What happened this afternoon?” her boss asked. “Bill Paley just called. He said Claire Luce just made a stage entrance at his Long Island house party with the words: Bill Paley, your network tried to censor me this afternoon. “Forty minutes after she had left the studio!”…

Bea's Novel (1)

2006-12-03T06:46:00.000-08:00

Deep in a closet, I discover a draft of a novel, which was never published: Circle, Circle, April 16, 1975. It begins,

“To express emotions freely, deep emotions. That’s what we all want. April 16, 1941.” She scribbled the words on a small piece of paper, then slipped it into her desk drawer. There, in that weird place, 485 Madison Avenue, CBS headquarters, it was wildly incongruous even to have such a thought. To write it down helped.

Her desk was in an open area where the Education Department swung into the News Department. She looked up. The two men who sang the Pepsi-Cola commercial were walking by. They carried their ukuleles like mallets and, for some reason, wore leis around their necks as well as Hawaiian shirts, as if in anticipation of television. Soon she would hear, “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot … Twice as much for a nickel too. Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.”

H. v. Kaltenvorn, has already hurried past. Even when he hurried, he kept his solemn, Germanic dignity. He always seemed about to report a crisis – with dignity. Now he was checking with the boys in the newsroom on last-minute happenings. In a minute he would enter the Sound Room to broadcast the latest harrowing information from the warfronts of Europe.

Sometimes she stayed to listen. Tonight, no. Let’s see. She started to close her desk. Her friend, Kameladevi, would be on the Thursday afternoon talk program, this time from Washington. That was all set up, with pick-up cue from New York. No loose ends to attend to. Just in time to get a bite to eat at the Automat before taking the subway to the psychoanalyst. That letter from Virgil Thompson, where was it? She stuck it in her purse and scooted for the elevator.

On the subway, she read the letter again. He thanked her for her note of condolence and appreciation for his Tribune obituary tribute to Elsie Houston. Elsie was his friend, too.

Why had she done it? “Committed suicide” – strange words – killed herself? This was the first time she had known anyone who did. She thought of Elsie’s program, just two months ago. “Life in Latin America.” Elsie had sung songs by Villa Lobos: “The Donkey-Driver,” “AAAAOOOOWAY.” Sara could hear the sad sound, then again recalled the lilting quality of the voice, like a rare bird born to sing, the haunting music so expressive of Brazil. Maybe Elsie should never have left? Ah, but with a Black father from Texas, it was inevitable that she would want to see his country …

It had been such a coup to get her to sing on the program! Such CBS Education programs had little or no budget. That hadn’t mattered to Elsie. And now this fiery woman was dead. Why? Was it enough reason to be jilted by her French lover? How she must have suffered. It was hard to be partly Negro.

To Riverside Drive at last. “The forsythia are out,” she said to Dr. Witt as she proceeded to lie down, always self-consciously, on the couch. It wasn’t long before she was talking about suicide. Whose? Such a nice man, even if he didn’t understand English very well. He was a lay analyst but before that he was a poet, Rheinhold Neiburhr’s brother-in-law, gentle and comforting.

People wondered why she stayed on in the Education Department at $35 a week and managed to support herself on that amount. Vassar friends did not question her intent. They, too, had been fired up by Professor Helen Lockwood, the spinster-Kodak heiress, the English Department’s social service dynamo. Not so, Mr. Rouke, head of CBS publicity. He couldn’t figure her out. Here was a pretty face, a pretty figure. Why did she waste her time in Education? No money, no future there. When she wore her light brown hair down with the curls tied in back by a velvet ribbon, Mr. Rouke called her “George Washington.” That’s as close as he came to flirting …

Bea on Racial Relations

2006-12-02T04:39:00.000-08:00

I would like to express my thanks to faithful blog readers who have contacted me with condolences regarding Bea's death. It is true: one does feel totally disoriented.

To answer a general question, By Bea's Bedside, as a blog, will stop soon, since my purpose was to document the final months of my mother's life. But, we will do this gradually to help everyone who has complained of withdrawal symptoms!

As the weeks went by, I sometimes found notes which did not necessarily fit into the daily flow. I will now share some of them with you. Let's start with Bea on Racial Relations:

"Current US society, with its obsessive emphasis on the bottom line, has brought welcome improvement in race relations. Black millionaires like Oprah and Bill Cosby have effectively demonstrated impressive abilities to make money. Modern media has provided the means, but the effect is what counts. It seems to me that the new avenues by which these creative people have advanced themselves financially can also educate Whites and other Americans, such as Hispanics, to their intelligence and charm.

The important result, I think, is that the role of Blacks is in acute process of change. I think it is important that this evolution be celebrated.

Now that I am in my 90th year, I think back to racial relations early on. Mabel, the Black Bermudan who worked for my family was someone I loved and hugged. At that time, the movement of Southern Blacks to the North had not yet begun. When it did, we were fortunate to have a distinguished Black leader in Martin Luther King.

Our country needs a few reminders of the progress we have made: During World War II, I was working for the Office of War Information as head of the Radio Section. For this assignment, I had a large staff. At that time, African-Americans made up 12% of the population. So I decided to hire 12% Black in my staff. When my section head’s Southern secretary heard this, she said that the day a Black joined our department, she would walk out. I responded, “That fine with me.” But I discovered that when the staff went to lunch together, we actually had to form a phalanx around our Black staff member in order to be received at local restaurants, right in the shadow of the Capital.

And, earlier on, working in New York, I had a call from a photographer-friend whose assignment was to photograph the Black lady featured as Aunt Jemina on a package of pancake flour. He was trying to find hotels in which this lady could be received.

While at CBS Radio, I was asked to do a report on the extent to which the war message was reaching rural blacks. I arranged for a sociology professor from Fisk University to work on the project. Then came a snag! A vice-president informed me such a project would not get their consultant’s approval. When the consultant did hear about it, he got in touch with top people in personnel and – bingo! – I was fired with absolutely no explanation …

What changes have occurred in the last 50 years! Now members of my family have close contacts with Blacks – all of them rewarding …"

Condolences from Julian

2006-12-01T10:51:00.000-08:00

I am saddened to hear of your mother - Mrs Grabbe as i always liked to call her
i knew her for a long time, since 1970
she really liked the big deck of the little house
reminding everyone that it was my idea
i remember making grilled fish for your mother and father on the deck during
one of the Autumns we were invited to Wellfleet
i have fond memories of those times
i will miss her
she had a big heart
with sympathy
julian (Olivas)

P.S. the photo was taken in Spring of 2003 on a walk with the dogs in Central Park
the sky was windswept so the heart held its shape for only about a minute
it was traced by a single airplane at approximately 5000 feet
it only made this one shape
making two passes - one for each half of the heart
how fleeting these moments are

Epilogue

2006-12-01T06:24:00.000-08:00

How empty the house is!

Nick and I accomplish funeral home formalities and arrange for a memorial service, to take place at the Wellfleet Library, a favorite haunt of Bea's, Dec. 16, 5 pm. Then we sit together quietly before her boxes of mementos, a life well lived.

I realize I did not fully cover her appreciation of art. Bea has a box of postcards, many acquired during early trips abroad: images of Grecian statues, sculpture by Michelangelo, sculpture from Vézelay, Renaissance paintings and modern art by Mary Cassatt or Vincent Van Gogh. On the back of one postcard, marked Yaksi, Indian, Sanci, 50-25 B.C., Bea has scrawled recently, “Just because it is so beautiful.” There is a booklet from the Musée Guimet, showing a bust of Tara, seemingly in meditation. I also find peaceful Nara Buddhas, which remind me of the last time Sven and I took my mother to the Museum of Fine Arts. We pushed her wheelchair to the Buddha room. That was where she wanted to go.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the HPCCC team, who made such a difference in the last months of Bea’s life, and especially Lisa Olson. Her devotion shines as a model to others. I am glad I have recorded her loving care in this blog. This is how the extreme elderly deserve to be treated.

Among Bea’s papers we find a poem, composed in 1963. I offer it as conclusion, Bea’s wish for the world to find its way, particularly relevant at a time when war kills more civilians in Iraq every day, genocide in Darfur goes unchallenged, and the absence of outrage at murder by polonium-21 makes the needle on our moral compass swing blindly, like our hearts, now that Bea has left …

Come, virgins, in your beauteous prime.
Come, Aztec youth primeval.
Earth moves toward the glorious Sun:
Inexorable the sacrifice of blood.

Ruddy gore,
glutinous and red with corpuscles,
microscopic discs
like gaudy sacramental wafers,
invisibly, but oh so chemically
in league with Earth’s encircling air.

How comforting
to let the mind reflect,
however briefly,
on relatively simple
biochemistry!

But enough,
for warmer rays foretell
our growing closeness
to the Sun.
And so to sacrificial season when
blood must encrust
or soak within receptive soil.

We can force the blood to spill
but – here’s the tawdry joke! –
cannot make it soak
discreetly in
like liquid fertilizer.
Who knows? It may lie crusty
for days
waiting for rain.

Christ, with wooden stakes for Calvary,
joins now the celibate crew
on Friday, when the Sun and Moon
position for Earth’s
yearly resurrection.

If Christ had never lived,
we might, forsooth, have imagined Him
out of our own compelling need
for blood.

But Christ did live and die,
Attic maiden, too,
and others in the long procession.
with this difference: Christ chose
to die for others.
Can his death atone?
Can such a sacrifice fulfill
our curious need for blood?

You, there, in Murmansk,
closer to Point Barrow
as the crow would fly
than L.A., Omaha or Ottawa,
be pleased to listen.

If we concentrate
on rockets killing rockets,
we shall kill more than rockets.

More meet, it seems.
the sacrifice of One.
Weary Earth, of bloody sacrifice
Be done.

Bea Passes Away

2006-11-30T06:56:00.000-08:00

Bea took us by surprise and left early. I was not expecting her to go so fast, with my brother coming the next day. But she knew he has a hard time with death, so she left by herself, once I had closed the door. She had been breathing deeply all afternoon. It was so peaceful there in her room, with the last rays of autumn sunshine falling on her face. I wish she had let me hold her hand, but independent Bea did it her own way, to the end.

A friend sent this quote when my father passed: “A life well-lived cannot be diminished by death. The beauty, guidance, and inspiration it gave us will shine on as brightly as ever.”

Bea’s beautiful life was an inspiration to everyone she encountered.

I have the feeling my dad was there to greet her. His spirit had lingered seven years ago, November 16, when he had to leave her behind. Bea’s spirit did not linger. It just soared.

I am glad we had this time together and recommend the experience of home care to anyone who is considering it.

We can imagine Bea now with friends and family, partying away, no more pain.

As I say a final goodbye, I borrow words from her first love, Ted:

“Good night, agapiti. You have placed me under a glorious debt, because you have given me the green pines, and sunsets, and new leaves, and crazy moons, and star-dust which go into the weaving of dreams …”

No Pain

2006-11-29T14:53:00.000-08:00

Morphine (mor´ fen) n. A bitter crystalline alkaloid, extracted from opium, the soluble salts of which are used in medicine as an analgesic, a light anesthetic, or a sedative.

Bea lies in bed, sedated, feeling no pain.

Due to the general euphoria after World War II, we baby boomers were raised under extraordinary circumstances. Well-meaning parents misled us into thinking life was like a fairy tale. They did their best to shelter the pastel-colored nurseries of America and downplayed the possibility of nuclear war. Consecutive scientific breakthroughs created the illusion that civilization had won out in the battle with germs. Baby boomers grew up bubble-children, in glorious ignorance of pain.

But pain is a part of life.

Bea had her share. Sibling rivalry, sexual abuse, blame at the death of a little brother, estrangement from brother Hunter due to schizophrenia. My mother gave up her first love because of parental disapproval. Breakup with beau Bill Whitney must have been painful. She had an abortion, then lost her job at CBS. Finally, she married a man who had lived through Revolution, as damaging to the psyche as the Holocaust, although the annihilation of the Russian aristocracy received no media coverage. Despite all this, Bea bought into the dream that life was a garden party without ants. She bit off big bites and chewed hard. Anything was possible if you just tried. I marvel at her consistent optimism. It certainly brightened my world.

I am glad the morphine keeps her protected, but I miss her already …

The Beginning of the End

2006-11-29T08:27:00.000-08:00

BEA: “Are you my mother?”

ME: “Well, sort of. I take care of you.”

BEA: “That’s a no.”

The morphine from last night has worn off, and Bea’s marvelous mind kicks in. How I will miss it!

Yesterday Nurse Jane showed me how to administer the medication. Bea still talked all night, off and on, a rumble breaking into my consciousness like radio static. I gave mini-sips of water and a second dose around 2 a.m.

Her voice is hoarse but jubilant when I tiptoe in at daybreak.

BEA: “We’re going for a ride.”

ME: “What fun! Can I sit in the rumble seat?”

BEA: “Sure!”

Imagine windows in a house, at night. The lights go out, one at a time. This description also fits the human body. Jane tells me Bea’s organs will begin shutting down, one after the other. We will do our best to keep her pain-free and comfortable, during this process.

Now that I think about it, I don’t think I will enjoy the ride so much after all …

Bea Loses the Ability to Swallow

2006-11-28T01:46:00.000-08:00

Dysphasia (dis fe' je) n. Difficulty in swallowing.

Dysphasia is what Bea now has. It is common in elderly bedridden folk at the end of life. When she tries to swallow water, her throat makes a gurgle that leaves her brow furrowed with surprise, a new development, recognized by professionals as one of the last circles my mother will make prior to landing.

I spend a lot of time by her bedside.

BEA: “Why are you so nice to me?”

ME: “Because I love you?”

BEA: “Are you my mama?”

ME: “I take care of you, so I guess that’s like being your mama.”

Nurse Jane comes to visit and provides counsel on how to keep Bea as comfortable as possible in the days she has left. We will try to continue fluids, despite the dysphasia.

“It may just be your time, Bea,” Jane says, pragmatic as ever.

For once my mother seems ready, at last, to accept this permission to die.

“I’m very old,” she croaks. “Now leave me alone.”

We follow orders, leaving her propped up in bed, swaddled in down.

When the Elderly Bedridden Cough Up Phlegm

2006-11-27T06:20:00.000-08:00

Phlegm (flem) n. Thick, sticky mucus secreted by the mucous membrane of the respiratory tract, as during a cold or other respiratory infection.

Bea has been coughing, off and on, for two days now. Saturday I call Hospice and a nurse comes. She takes Bea’s temperature and uses a swab to remove as much phlegm as possible. The nurse suggests Bea should drink more fluids, but my mother now chokes on them, as if her body has forgotten how to swallow. There is a risk of aspiration, and pneumonia.

Yesterday Bea feels “awful” although she is in a happy place by the time Lisa helps me change bedclothes. We notice ankle swelling and position the front of the bed higher than usual.

The cough doesn’t seem to bother Bea, although it makes an eerie, guttural sound. I wipe the phlegm away with tissues. The wastebasket beside her bed is full of them.

The HPCCC nurse on duty calls to see how things are going. She does not seem to think Bea’s condition will improve, but my mother has surprised us all before, so who knows?

A Strenuous Day

2006-11-26T05:17:00.000-08:00

“Where is Ethiopia?”

This unexpected question pops out of Bea’s mouth in the middle of a coughing fit that hits with the force of yesterday’s gale winds. I hold a tissue below her mouth and wait. She is positioned as straight as possible, the way Nurse Jane once suggested.

“I want you to spit it out,” I order. Touchy-feely, I am not. “No more talk. You need to concentrate. Now spit!”

Bea coughs hard again and succeeds in releasing a thick glob of bubbly phlegm. I do my best to collect it in the tissue, a chore that makes me gag.

“How about Ruth?” Bea asks, much less concerned by her condition than me.

“Ruth?”

“How about inviting her over for a drink?” Before I can answer, she has moved on to another idea: “So many thin things.”

“What thin things?”

“I don’t know, dear.” She is peering up at the rafters but now turns her head to bestow a soft angelic smile that makes me feel all fuzzy inside. “So good to have you here.”

I give a quick kiss and rush off to the kitchen for warm beef broth.

“Can you do it with me?” she asks as soon as I return.

“Do what?”

“Greet my husband.”

“He was here?”

Bea is coughing again. She nods, then leans forward slightly and spits into another tissue.

At times like these, I feel out of my depth. I think of all the caregivers who have such duties daily. How grateful I am that Bea has been healthy! It must be so much harder to care for an elderly bedridden person who is not.

Singing Old Songs With the Elderly

2006-11-25T06:21:00.000-08:00

Bea has been singing quietly to herself all morning. Music that enters young heads stays there. My mother surprises me with the number of songs she remembers from childhood.

Caregivers can easily encourage songfests that bring pleasure to elderly charges. All one needs to do is provide the tune and a line or two …

When Lisa comes, we have a real jamboree.

“I love you. A bushel and a peck,” Lisa sings. “ A bushel and a peck and … a hug around the neck. Don’t you know that one?”

“Sure she does,” I say. “Used to sing it to me all the time.”

Bea is being shy. Her eyes swing around to take in her audience.

Not one to give up, Lisa tries another: “How ‘bout, Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah. Someone’s in the kitchen I…”

She stops. Then comes the faint voice: “Know-wo-wo-wo.”

Lisa: “Someone’s in the kitchen with Di-nah…”

“Peeing on the old banjo.”

Bea has not forgotten the words. She is just in a good mood and making a joke.

The change in lyrics gives us all a good laugh…

No Visitors

2006-11-24T09:06:00.000-08:00

I ask Bea if she has had any visitors of late.

“They’ve been calling,” she responds, narrowing her eyes so she looks like a toothless Crusader Rabbit, head turned away from the rafters, where visitors appear. “But I don’t want to talk to them.”

Thanksgiving

2006-11-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

One of the main stories in the December Reader's Digest is nursing home negligence: Deadly Neglect: The Shocking Truth about What's Going On in America's Nursing Homes. How much better to have my mother close by and not have to worry about malnutrition or dehydration or infected bedsores!

“Today is Thanksgiving,” I tell Bea this morning. “What are you thankful for?”

Her mouth curves down in a proud smile: “You!”

As for me, I am thankful for our hospice health aide. Lisa’s compassion brightens Bea’s final days.

Bea's Retreat

2006-11-22T06:48:00.000-08:00

Yesterday’s Frontline Living Old explained the coming crisis for the elderly in our society. Hopefully this PBS documentary will motivate new thinking and solutions. The Web site has a great selection of resource material. Individuals do have many questions on elderly care. Here are the latest Internet searches that led strangers to Bea’s Bedside:

• Disorientation in elderly (UK)
• Handling dementia and hallucinations of elderly
• How to position bedridden person to prevent bedsores
• When elderly parent withdraws and won’t communicate.

This search seems particularly relevant today.

Lisa and I talk in whispers. Bea is in a quiet place. She may lie still on the bed between us, but her spirit is wandering as Lisa again massages her toes, cold. At the end of life, such a retreat is normal and must be respected.

“Are you ready for her to leave?” Sven asks later.

A child is never ready, no matter how much sense the departing makes. An orphan I will be, but one who was loved intensely.

Lesson #1

2006-11-21T06:21:00.000-08:00

“Imagine a perfect world. What would it be like?” I asked Bea yesterday, since her mind was totally there.

“I don’t know who would have a perfect world,” she replied with the sad resignation of someone who lived through most of the twentieth century. “Nobody, darling. Nobody.”

“If it could exist?” I insist. “What would there be?”

“Love. You cannot have a perfect world without love.”

I guess the world needs to learn to love better …

Rough Ride

2006-11-20T07:11:00.000-08:00

Bea chats away, 50 miles an hour, for most of the night.

When I say hello in the morning, she asks without preamble,“Have you seen either of them?”

In my mind, I recall the nursing-home tray with its little paper cups used for distribution of meds, a method of behavior control that must make many elderly people start considering death as an option. The nurse's aide smiles as she administers the daily dose ...

“Who?”

“Your father and my father.”

“They were hanging out together?”

“Yup. They’re both dead, aren’t they?”

“They are.”

If I had drugged Bea, she would not be sharing thoughts this way. I wonder what she is going to say next?

“I’m so cold! I spent the whole night on a big stone mausoleum ... Do you mind if I call you Ruth? It’s one of my favorite names ... There’s a slice of banana, up on the rafter. What would be nice is some chocolate pudding …”

I can tell from the way the talk stops and starts, like an old jalopy, sputtering without gas, that she has slowed down now. Still we jerk along until a disconcerting remark shatters the illusion of a return to our past, when my mother always made sense.

“Do you have any more little playmates for me?

“Playmates?”

“Somebody to talk to.”

“Oh, you mean the ladies who have been coming in, like Lisa and Virginia?”

“Yes, playmates. Because I’m a little girl now ...”

The Road to Dignity

2006-11-19T08:36:00.000-08:00

Bea doesn’t want our weekend health-aide to touch her. Alison perseveres and, with a smile. I go in, under the impression that a more familiar face might help. Despite her squawking, Bea gets a bed bath and fresh nightgown. The skin on her tummy has become crackled like a sun-baked salt flat. Her skull is more angular than ever. While Alison applies Shea Butter, I fight the mental image of a scrawny chicken being buttered up for Sunday dinner, a perverse way to consider one’s mother, I agree.

This afternoon, Bea sings hymns to herself. She wakes me during the night, worried about a lost purse: “I have a problem. I wish there were some way I could find my handbag. It’s hard for me to accept because I have to have the responsibility of it since I don’t know how much money my father gave me. I need to pay for this room …”

Ah! Relinquishment of responsibility! No one wants to be beholden to others. Since the bedridden are, caregivers need to be illusionists. The Road to Dignity passes through Comfort, Reassurance, and Deception. We make stops along the way …

Bea’s Novel (4)

2006-11-18T05:44:00.000-08:00

On the edge of a mountain lake was a stretch of woods, which, in some deep way, had become her own. When, as a child, she had escaped to these woods, it had been as though with awe she walked on her own heart. In late spring, there were Indian pipes and trailing arbutus and white birch, but what she looked for were wild orchids. She would peer intently through the bushes and around the tree trunks for the flowers that seemed to hide with care from the human eye.

Pushing aside branches that caught in her hair, Sara thought about the Indians, who once had walked there, and remembered fingering the smooth flint of an arrowhead found nearby. Every once in a while she broke off a sassafras twig and chewed it to get the tangy taste of the tree itself. Sometimes she would lie on her back and look up at the sky. Only small patterns of light reached the ground.

It never occurred to her to be afraid. No one ever came into this part of the woods. She wouldn’t get lost. Moss grew on the north side of the tree trunks and that would guide her home. There was method in nature, far more consistent than in people.

As the ground became softer beneath her feet, she would bend and look slantwise for there she knew the orchids would be growing. Sometimes she found one, and one was enough. For a long while she would watch it emerge shyly from the two dark leaves, which spread themselves out close to the ground as a base for the incredible slender stem. The delicate pink flower, paper-like in texture, seemed to float on air, like a boat.

After a while, she would pluck the orchid from the lowest possible point and go directly home. Her mother would admire it, always and ever again, admire each new one, and put it in a vase on the living-room table. But everything about the orchid had changed. She would feel uneasy as she looked at its long, beautiful stem, hidden from view, and its proud head peering somewhat ludicrously over the edge.

Often, since she had come to Washington, she thought of orchid-hunting in the woods near Green Pond. There was a place where she had knelt down and felt the earth. That spot had become a part of herself, and she returned to it as if it might help her find what now more than ever, she was searching for …

Resistance

2006-11-17T06:26:00.000-08:00

Death is very much on our minds today. It approaches on little cat feet, like Sandburg’s fog, hovering at the window, ready to pounce once Bea shows willingness. Her retreat into herself concerns Lisa, who applies warm hands to Bea’s cheeks, colder than usual. Afterwards, Sven joins us for a brief conversation. We agree that most people cannot cope with the idea of imminent death, be it of a loved one, or oneself. The modern world has made the whole subject taboo.

Indeed, who wants to talk about death? Bea certainly doesn’t when the Chaplain from Hospice & Palliative Care of Cape Cod stops by for a visit. My mother reiterates the wish to “go home”. We discuss her delight at having climbed a Belleville cherry tree as a child. And, she expresses the desire to see her mother again …

I summarize a recent conversation: “Bea expressed fear of death, and I told her it wouldn’t be so bad, that she would be surprised.”

“Pleasantly so perhaps,” adds the Chaplain, who then describes how deceased family members sometimes appear in dreams to show the sick and elderly the way.

Bea listens without comment. “I want to sleep,” she says. “Go away.”

Bea's Knees

2006-11-16T05:20:00.000-08:00

Bea complains of knee pain. I help Lisa swing my mother up on one hip in order to reposition the sheepskin. How flat her body has become! From this angle, she resembles the coyote in the cartoon, after Roadrunner has just run him over. The boney kneecaps seem totally out of proportion to the stick-figure legs.

Lisa notices the right knee is warmer than usual. “How much does it hurt?” she asks.

“Comme ci, comme ca,” Bea replies.

“Translation, please!” Lisa says.

I do the honors: “Sounds like a 7 or 8.”

“Oh, you know what, Beatrice?” Lisa exclaims. “I just saw a friend from Vermont, who asked about you, because she follows Sandy’s blog.”

“Wow!” Bea declares, breaking into a gleeful smile. “I should go on Oprah!”

Bea on Oil

2006-11-15T06:08:00.000-08:00

The bedsores on Bea’s toes seem better, although her left foot still feels like ice, so Lisa begins another massage. Suddenly Bea says, “Hopscotch.” She pronounces the word with such delectation that I surmise a memory of childhood has just surfaced. I am about to request details when she asks, “Isn’t that the name of a town in the Middle East?”

Lisa and I smother giggles.

There was a time when my mother's mind wasn’t such a quagmire. On a slip of paper, she has left us these thoughts on oil, drafted in the early eighties:

“Ever since the passage of the oil depletion allowance, the oil industry, its lobbyists and Congressmen, whose campaigns have been supported by the industry, the US has been strongly influenced by all aspects of oil production and processing. Investment in research on other forms of energy has been sparse, if not willfully blinded (sp.?).

Since the discovery of oil in the Middle East, US presence and influence there have been motivated by oil economics.

Other countries have comparable influences in their governments. Where a country gets its oil now shapes that country’s foreign policy.

Third World countries with oil resources become subtle pawns.

Why? Economic necessity: all industrialized countries depend on oil…”

Bea Remembers the Freedom March

2006-11-14T06:18:00.000-08:00

This morning I ask Bea if she ever met Art Buchwald. She doesn’t think so. While talking about life in Washington, DC, I remember that my mother participated in the 1963 Freedom March. I suggest she tell Lisa about the experience since officials participated in groundbreaking for a memorial to Dr. King yesterday ...

BEA: “It was impressive. I’m sorry you missed it.”

LISA: “What was the march about?”

BEA: “Freedom.”

LISA: “Were there a lot of people?”

BEA: “Quite a few. Millions. Millions of strangers.”

LISA: “How long did you march?”

BEA: “Too long! All around Washington.”

LISA: “Did you hear Martin Luther King speak?”

BEA: “I did. That really did impress me. He spoke with such feeling, and he knew what he was talking about. I wanted him to talk so people understood that day.”

LISA: “Did people understand?”

BEA: “Yup.”

LISA: “What was his message?”

BEA: “Be good kids.”

The Lonely Life of the Extreme Elderly

2006-11-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

Bea is really, really old.

The New York Times Book Review brings news that Art Buchwald has written a “deathbed” memoir, Too Soon to Say Goodbye. The 80-year-old comments on the number of visitors who trooped to his bedside once they thought he was about to die. Well, Art Buchwald is Art Buchwald. I doubt most elderly folks are so lucky. My experience is that people shy away from death. They don’t want to discuss it, and in fact, act as if it doesn’t exist. Perhaps this is why visitors to Bea’s bedside are rare. Society does not teach us how to interact with someone who is about to pass over. There is another problem: when you get to be 97, most of the people you have known during your lifetime have already died ….

Bea Quotes from Shakespeare

2006-11-12T06:15:00.000-08:00

I find among Bea’s papers a schedule for Ethel Levy’s Shakespeare seminar at the Wellfleet Library. Bea has scrawled across the top, “2/8/01. Out of desperation, in view of the inexorability of death.”

A few days ago, my mother recited these verses from Macbeth:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
To the last syllable of recorded time; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death ...

“Dusty death,” she repeated.

I had the feeling the words have taken on new meaning.

Letter from the War Correspondent

2006-11-11T05:29:00.000-08:00

Since Bea is sleeping soundly, I again dip into her well of correspondence. What foresight to keep all these letters! This time the pump brings up the aftermath of World War II, described by a friend at Time-Life, William Walton, also born in 1909:

Bad Wildungen, Germany, May 18, 1945

Dear Beatrice,

Only a bad conscience would make me hark, at this late date, back to that March day in Washington when I failed to show for cocktails. As you probably divined, I finished my business quicker than expected and took off for New York, without the slightest idea where to reach you. So do forgive.

Since then things have moved so swiftly my head is giddy – statesmen dying, nations collapsing, wars whimpering to a lose and chaos on every hand. The transition from magnolia blossoming Washington to the stinking, death-filled concentration camps was incredible in the span of three days. And to walk into such places as Leipzig city hall and find the mayor, treasurer and SA chief, each with his wife and children, all suicides sitting cozily around like figures at Mme. Tussaud’s. It will be years, I suppose, before I can digest what I’ve seen and experiences. The stench is one that lingers weeks after the last bodies have been removed, forever maybe.

Then there was the Red Army linkup, for us more exciting than the end of the wear itself. The Russians turned out to be all we had hoped, a wild, hard-drinking, laughing crew who seem to have no discipline but manage to get things done. And how they wine and dine their friends – bowls of caviar, heaps of sausages, smoked sturgeon and salmon, eggs floating in sour cream, weird wonderful salads, vodka, wines, chicken, ham, veal and god knows what else all for one lunch.

Now comes the harder part, trying to poke among these terrible ruins and find some foundation on which to build a new nation or nations. There are few encouraging signs, but perhaps it is too early yet. Germany, more than anyone else, is in profound shock, unrealizing yet just what defeat means. When she comes out of the shock, maybe there’ll be underground resistance, maybe just gloom, or maybe some help for us. Anyway, that’s what I’m looking for now and heading into Bavaria to see what’s there. By fall, I expect to be home again and to see you. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you’re up to and what goes on in the land of Truman, V-E Day, fried eggs, and Eunice Jessup.

Love to you both,

Bill

The After-Sunday-School Party

2006-11-10T06:02:00.000-08:00

“Mary loved the lamb, and the lamb loved Mary. That’s all you need—love!”

Bea notices I have come up to her bedside and asks, “Is there any ice cream left?”

“You want ice cream? At 2:30 a.m.?”

“There are quite a few people who would.” Bea looks around a bit apologetically. “Maybe you need some helpers to distribute the two gallons?”

Welcome to Bea’s After-Sunday-School party! For starters, let’s get situated: we are in Washington DC, at "St. Ruth’s Episcopal Church, just south of the Cathedral.” The children, it seems, have been quite rambunctious.

“The girls behaved so badly. One young man hid under the bed. He just learned that you have to study to get ahead. For some people, it takes a while. I knew all these things when I was about the same age. I was trying to discipline him.” Bea pauses, then adds, “If I wanted to pull someone out from under the bed, how would I go about it?”

“I’m not sure,” I stammer.

“I know everyone here was thought to be very friendly. Sometimes people do things like bring teddy bears. People like to get attention. Some are ideally suited for playing. They feel that it is right to study and then play games, but if you could see the crowd! I would like to know how people are getting home. Some don’t want to go to church. After a while the same people will be interested in David.”

“Who?”

“He is a friend and associate and playmate of the children who attend (these) classes. I was like the little girls today, with ribbons in the hair, and ribbons around the waist, and lots of abilities. The more we see, the more we learn. The more we learn, the more other people like to hear us perform. David was naughty. You cannot very well study mathematics and have someone say ‘I love you.’ Church is a good place to make friendships.”

I repeat this last sentence, just to make sure.

“Yes, write it down, just as you said it. To hold an audience is one of the greatest things in the world. There is going to be music. Did we get a new Victrola? It looks new to me. I wish she had just asked to come up the (church) steps. If they don’t behave, they won’t be invited again. In this school, for the girls, the main thing is sports.”

“Sports? At Sunday school?”

“It’s a special program I’m initiating. Are there any parents we have not telephoned to come and get their kids? …”

It is 3 a.m. Bea had a sleeping pill at 7 p.m., upon her request. She seems to be slowing down a bit, so I administer half an Ativan to help her bring the party to a close ….

A Happy Day ...

2006-11-09T01:08:00.000-08:00

I am puttering around Bea's bed when she says, “I call you, The Efficient One. To have you around is wonderful.”

Praise is nice. I glow.

There has just been an election, but I have not mentioned it yet, so I share the good news: “Guess what! The Democrats won back Congress!”

Much to my surprise, Bea must have been listening to the commentators' voices from our living room because she already seems aware of this information: “I must confess, it is the first time in my life that I did not vote.”

My mother spends a happy day, telling herself stories and remembering rhymes, like this one:

“School days, dear old Golden Rule days.
Reading and writing and ‘rithmatic,
taught to the tune of the hickory stick.
You were my queen in calico.
I was your barefoot, bashful beau
and wrote on my slate, ‘I love you, Joe’
when we were a couple of kids …

Twinkle Toes

2006-11-08T06:25:00.000-08:00

“Let me wiggle my own feet!” my mother squawks, still a bit testy this morning.

Lisa ignores the request and begins to massage Bea’s tootsies.

“Can you twinkle your toes?” Lisa asks. “Move them around?”

Bea knows how. She's one real good toe-twinkler. Sometimes I come into the room and find her toes in motion. But her efforts have not been enough. While cold extremities are a normal progression for a bedridden person of extreme old age, her feet have gotten colder than one would hope these past few days. The wool socks and heating pad, applied yesterday, seem to help though.

Methodically, Lisa does one side, then the other.

I watch each foot perform a little dance movement, to the left, to the right, then up and down, slow exercises called Range of Motion.

“Can you point your toes?” Lisa asks. She supports the back of the ankle as Bea follows directions. “Good!”

“I’m Beatrice,” Bea tells the air.

“Middle name?” Lisa calls out.

“White.”

“Push down on my hand. Oh, good!”

“I rather like you,” Bea proclaims.

Lisa points at one of the bedsores. The exercise has made it bleed. She is massaging away old skin now, large flakes of it. I have never seen so much dead skin in one place. Bea starts humming a little tune. Twinkle Toes seems to be enjoying her foot massage. We assume she is no longer listening.

“Do you have a vacuum?” Lisa asks.

“That’s a funny idea!” Bea exclaims. “I’m an old lady. After you get to be too old, it isn’t funny anymore …”

Tough Love

2006-11-07T06:56:00.000-08:00

BEA: “Ouch! What are you doing?!”

ME: “Time to change your pants, sorry!”

BEA: “I don’t want you to change my pants. I don’t want to be alive anymore.”

ME: “Most people your age aren’t. They die.”

BEA: “What!? I don’t want to die.”

Streams of serpents spewed from Bea’s mouth this morning, and I must admit I answered in kind.

Yesterday Nurse Jane diagnosed two bedsores on Bea’s toes. Lisa showed me how cold Bea’s feet have become due to a lack of circulation. One baby toe had turned blue. We put on warmer socks and a heating pad.

Her frailty is extreme.

People say hospice patients often pass while their caregivers are away, the assumption being that they prefer not to subject loved ones to the event, considered by some an ordeal. Getting Bea up on one hip for a diaper change is the ordeal, if you ask me …

Biederman Writes Bea from Paris

2006-11-06T07:03:00.000-08:00

This morning, while Bea sleeps, I read correspondence from Charles Biederman.

In October 1936, Biederman moved to Paris where he rented an art studio for six months, “saw Gertrude Stein dragging her poodle down the street,” hobnobbed with Miro and Leger, met Mondrian, showed work to Pierre Matisse, and observed Picasso, on more than one occasion, drinking in a café. What a thrill to receive weekly letters full of wisecrack observations on the development of abstract art! The whole correspondence is worth publication, but that would be off-topic. Instead, here's a relevant snippet:

“In your last letter you said that – you know if I don’t want you I will say so – well, Beatrice, that supposes things, doesn’t it? In the first place, I’ve left New York and you, and we made no promises, as we both understood that such could not be the case. So, if and when I do return – I may live somewhere else in the States, that is, I’m thinking about it – I cannot possibly know how and where we will pick up where we left off. But this much I do know, that we are friends, and I hope always shall be, which is worth more than anything. Should I, on my return, wish it otherwise, I would, if I were you, prevent it for your own good. You are a person, a woman, whose only happiness it seems to me, can be in being married, etc., something I could not give you. Our association, physically, would soon terminate and, as has been my experience, the friendship between you and I might go with it. So that is what I think about it. By the way, why couldn’t you write me with your views about all this? You never were explicit …”

Unfortunately, Bea did not save copies of her own letters, so her response will remain a mystery.

The Rumble-Seat Ride

2006-11-05T05:57:00.000-08:00

Bea remains awake until 6 p.m, a record of sorts, two nights and three days without sleep.

Our weekend health aide Alison Wonderland tended Bea today. Alison wears crocheted shawls and long flowing skirts with little bells that jingle when she moves. Her aura still warms the barren landscape Bea’s bedroom has become. Were my mother not at the end of her life, I know how much she would appreciate Alison’s persona. Bea has always loved artists. She had affairs with more than one and exchanged letters with abstract artist Charles Biederman until the end of the century. It was with Biederman that she first rode in a rumble seat. I can just see them motoring along, off for a weekend with Dwight and Nancy Macdonald:

“June 6, 1980

When we got off the elevator at the Borgenicht Galley on the afternoon of March first and I saw you, silhouetted there with your pipe in your mouth, in conversation with someone, what a joy it was, and I knew that the part of me that has always cared for you, ever since the ride to Brookfield in Dwight’s rumble-seat, was again called into being …”

How Bea Tries to Get Everybody to the Theatre on Time and Fails Miserably

2006-11-04T16:35:00.000-08:00

Moonbeams illuminate my mother in an otherworldly light. Bea is still very much of this world, however, lone contestant on an empty stage, conscientious contender for the Guinness World Record of Non-Stop Talk who, despite a sleeping pill, has not even paused for a nap. At least the relentless chatter is more serene now than yesterday when I sat down by her bedside to record her latest adventure.

Bea looks up at me with desperation in her eyes …

BEA: “You’ve got to help me get them in the car! It’s a play they’re putting on. There’s a party afterwards. We have to get the people into the car.”

ME: “What kind of car?”

BEA: “I think it’s a Buick. Maybe you want to get in the box.”

ME: “You mean the rumble-seat? I’ve never ridden in one before. What’s the name of the play?”

BEA: “The Bluebells… something. It doesn’t matter what the name of it is.”

ME: “Is Helen here?”

BEA: “No, she broke down.”

ME: “How about Dorothy?”

BEA: “She’s in charge. Now, I think we will have to leave the flowers here. There’s nothing else we can do except get this load of people down the hill and that worries me. We have to get the horse –“

ME: “There’s a horse?! Who brought a horse?”

BEA: “The other family. This is too much for me. Will you take over?”

ME: “Sure.”

BEA: “Thank you, darling. Okay. Everybody in the car. I have to get some clothes on. Just push the people into the car. Push them into the bottom of the canoe. Push them into the front of the canoe, anywhere you can push them. What happened to the baby?

ME: Canoe? What baby?

BEA: The host’s baby. We have to get these people to their homes. However, there’s this wise child, listening very carefully.”

Bea extends a wobbly finger towards the ceiling.

BEA: “Pile them in." (TO ME) "You can be my sister. Okay. Come on, girls. Leave the flowers. All right, Helen. Where’s Dorothy?

ME: “What are you going to wear?”

BEA: “A yellow dress from my collection.”

ME: “Yellow?”

BEA: “Yes, yellow. It’s very nice. I wore it many times. It’s my best dress. Schiaparelli. I got it in Paris. The main thing is we’re going to be very careful driving the car and especially going down the hill. How old is the child? Two or three. Are you three, dear? Yes. I can give you this blanket as that will keep you warm. Take the blanket. You’re a joy, Helen. Take this and put it around as many people as you can.”

ME: “Where are we going?”

BEA: “As far as the airport, at the town next to us.”

ME: “The theatre is at the airport?

BEA: “As soon as we get to it we’ll know. You’ll see the signs, ‘Buy Cheap Underwear.’ Now turn around and get going. I’m sure you’ll understand why this has been difficult. She has the lead in the play. Use the blue and white blanket. It’s ours. I want to bring it home. You are remarkable.”

ME: “How’s that?”

BEA: “To be so calm. Now, please drive slowly. I have some candies in the car in case anyone wants some. You know where the airport is?”

ME: “Yes.”

BEA: “Well, start now.”

ME: “What about the party?”

BEA: “We’re going to have to cancel the party. Now, be a good girl. Just be quiet unless you have something to say. Take them to the airport. Go ahead. I’ll stay here. I’ll be grateful to you for the rest of my life ...”

Conversation with Lisa (2)

2006-11-03T05:20:00.000-08:00

Before Lisa’s visit, Bea eats half a peach/mango applesauce. Strangely enough, she accepts this new variety better than regular flavor. After changing Bea’s brief, Lisa feeds her the second half.

BEA: “This is what I had yesterday …. Pretty soon I won’t be eating.”

LISA: “What do you mean?”

BEA: “Pretty soon I’ll be in Heaven.”

LISA: “Oh! And what does Your Heaven look like?”

Bea does not answer, busy considering the question.

LISA: “Who will be in Your Heaven?”

BEA: “Jesus ...”

LISA: “Will he be there with open arms?

BEA: “….but what do you mean by My Heaven?”

LISA: “What does Heaven mean to you?”

BEA: “What does Heaven mean to you?”

LISA: “In My Heaven, there would be her two huge dogs.”

BEA: “Why two? Most people have one.”

LISA: “Because I want to be surrounded by unconditional love. Who else will be in Your Heaven?”

BEA: “Heaven? I don’t believe in Heaven.”

LISA: “Where will you go after you are done being here?”

BEA: “I’m going to sleep now.”

Neither Nick nor I can remember Bea ever mentioning Heaven or Jesus. This episode demonstrates a need to believe in something after death, perhaps a throwback to childhood, when Bea was brought up Episcopalian.

Lisa suggests a visit from the chaplain might be appropriate. I decide to invite the chaplain on a day when Bea is talkative.

Conversation with Lisa (1)

2006-11-02T10:49:00.000-08:00

LISA: “Rumor has it that you ate a worm.”

BEA: “As a child? Yes.”

LISA: “How old were you?”

BEA: “Three, four.”

LISA: “With whom?”

BEA: “Family.”

LISA: “What happened?”

BEA: “I ate the worm. I swallowed it 20 years ago, in the backyard.”

LISA: “But why?”

BEA: “Somebody dared me.”

LISA: “Who? Your sister?’

BEA: “Yes. Helen.”

LISA: “How did it taste?”

BEA: “Not bad …”

Vassar Reunion

2006-11-01T06:57:00.000-08:00

Today Bea received a reminder that her 75th Vassar reunion will take place in June. Five years ago, she attended her 70th …

"Poughkeepsie, yeah!" Bea exclaims as we reach the familiar Taconic exit. I maneuver our Volvo through the maze of new highways, past The Dutch, and up the hill to Alumnae House. Ten members of the Class of 1932 have returned, with canes, walkers or in wheelchairs. Bea admires a most unusual plastic cane, filled with alternating layers of rose petals and magenta flowers. She listens to a speech by President Fergusson with rapt attention. "You have lived well through years of depression and Prohibition and know how things should be done …"

Indeed, these are unusual women, and my mother is one of them.

Saturday, I take Bea to the new art gallery which instantly becomes her favorite place on campus. We borrow a wheelchair to get over to the golf carts, lined up outside the chapel for the parade, the reunion highlight. Above our heads floats the yellow banner: "Class of 1932. We're still here."

1932 leads the parade to the field house while a brass band plays. Yellow balloons bob. People cheer. Waving to the crowd is quite a kick for the ten little old ladies, all dressed in yellow, their class color.

Emotion fills the field house as reunion classes march in, one after the other, singing "Salve." There is something powerful about being connected to all these strong women and now men. Vassar meant so much to Bea that I am glad I made the effort to get her here.

Later there’s a memorial service. Bea’s roommates are only present in spirit. Kitty is ill with Alzheimer’s. Nancy has passed away. Miggits has not been able to leave her assisted living facility.

We take a bus tour of the campus, but Bea is tired. I know that she will never return. "Goodbye to pleasant memories," my mother says softly as she leaves Vassar Sunday morning … forever.

Bea’s Journal (4)

2006-10-31T06:29:00.000-08:00

• September 6, 2000. I have, of late, suffered loneliness and a sense of loss. My husband, Paul, died November 16, 1999. A few days before he died, he made love to me more rapturously than ever before in our 55 years of marriage. At the time of his death, I had come to realize that maybe people appreciate an acknowledgement of their right to die. I forever remember the look in his eyes, which expressed such love and somehow conveyed departure. He was a fine man, and I am glad I was able to have two children with him. I miss him.

• This is the last week in the year 2000. I am now 91.The important fact in my life is that my husband, Count Paul Alexandrovich Grabbe, died at the age of 97 ½. I tell myself that people do not live forever. I think of St. Francis saying, “Grazie, Signore, per la morte, nostra sorella corporale.” I do not want to identify my remaining days with the inevitability of death but rather to have the pleasure of recalling special moments of joy in my life …

• Experiencing the death of a loved one I find to be the most traumatic experience of a lifetime. It well may be the source of religious belief. In my experience, only giving birth, in its extremity of feeling, comes close to it …

What Comes Next ...

2006-10-30T04:53:00.000-08:00

Bea has asked me to keep her company.

“What comes next?” she says suddenly.

I peer out the window. Yesterday’s storm blew down all the yellow leaves from Bea's maple, the one she planted thirty-five years ago. They still thrash around the side yard, ducking back and forth, harbingers of the cold winter to come. Being an optimistic type of girl, Bea’s favorite season has always been spring. Spring 2007 seems a long way off. I cannot imagine her living that long, but who knows? My mother has defied all predictions.

“What comes next?” she repeats.

“What do you mean?” I ask, not convinced we are about to engage in a philosophical discussion.

I know Bea’s vision of death is not of much comfort to one who knows her final days are near: end of life, obliteration, nothingness.

“We will remember you so fondly when you are not here anymore,” I tell her.

This comment produces a thin smile.

“You had a good life, didn’t you?”

Bea nods. We sit there in silence for a while.

“What comes next?” she asks again.

I take the plunge: “You mean, like a meal?”

Bea nods. I fetch half a banana.

Improvisation

2006-10-29T05:45:00.000-08:00

Cigarettes stained Bea's fingers nicotine-yellow before she gave up smoking, motivated by the desire to know her grandchildren. Tonight the hands seem red. I gently turn them and examine the splotches. Her palms are not my only concern. There is a small red spot on Bea’s left knee, the knee that sent us to the hospital in February. I slop on the bag balm, one half inch thick. It has the consistency of axel grease and smells like petroleum. I have applied the ointment every time I changed her today. For the night, I make a little tent above the knee to prevent absorption of the bag balm by the sheet. If the skin enveloping the knee were a wool cap, it would be several sizes too small. Nurse Jane has provided liquid Tylenol in case of pain, but so far Bea has not mentioned any. She is grateful for the care I give and tells me so with her eyes. How sweet her soul! It makes me sad to see my mother in this condition, body wasting away … Bea has accepted only minimal nourishment and water for over a month. The doctor stopped her meds a week ago. Why do some people just die while others linger? What is the purpose of this special time we have together? How can I help her let go?

Bea's Journal (3)

2006-10-28T05:30:00.001-07:00

“I love you,” I say, tucking Bea in after dinner.

The lights are all on, per her request. Suddenly, she is afraid of the dark.

“We’re related, aren’t we?” Bea asks as I caress her brow.

“We are. You’re my mother.”

“I was thinking that I am going to die in a few days. I need to look at the calendar. After all, I am 103.”

“103? No, just 96. 97. That’s old enough!”

Her comment makes me think about the day we met, the day I was born. Bea has left us her recollections, put down on paper May 9, 1999:

“This is Mother’s Day and I am all alone! My daughter gave me a beautiful gray cashmere sweater before she left to be with her daughters in Cambridge.

I am now 89 ½ and can hardly believe it. But there are aging encounters to remind me: I have lost the vision in my right eye as the result of a TIA. Also, I have arthritis in my knees – mainly the left knee. But a heating pad helps, as does distraction. I have a need to write, to express my frustration that I am very alone with my 97-year-old husband having returned to his bed.

Shall I call to my own mind what it was like to create my own first child and, nearly 10 months later, deliver her?

The labor, for one of 37, was excessive. I remember that wonderful woman obstetrician, Dr. Jean Corwin, who helped me.

It really felt like an impossibility when the delivery time came. Dr. Corwin had said, “The baby knows when it’s cooked.” Well, those pelvic bones did not want to cooperate.

“Put your feet on my shoulders,” said Dr. Corwin. Somehow it helped and on September 7, 1949, I delivered a daughter who is now thrice a mother.”

I regret not having celebrated Mother’s Day more sequentially throughout Bea’s life.

What a gift to give someone life! Unfortunately, most people take the bond created at birth for granted ...

Bea Joins a Girls' Club

2006-10-27T06:20:00.000-07:00

"Dear Caroline and girls:

Here comes a new member to your exclusive society. And please, Caroline, isn’t your scrap basket being filled fast enough without adding this scrap of paper to it? If you publish this letter, I will … well, dance a jig.

Say, girls, have any of you tried homemade beauty clays to improve your complexion? I have one on now. I look as if I came from a convalescent ward. Maybe some of you would care to try? This is how to make it. Take

3 Tablespoonfuls of Fuller’s Earth
3 drops of Benzoin

Add Witch Hazel and mix to a paste. Put this on the face with cheesecloth over it. Keep this on for forty minutes. Don’t giggle, or wiggle. Let your friends see you and they will have a good laugh. The clay works wonders.

I am, Checkers

P.S. If this name is taken, I’ll choose another."

Belleville, Montclair, New York, Washington DC, New York, Hanover NH, Kent CT, New York, Washington DC, Wellfleet: Although Bea moved ten times during her life, she kept this scrap of paper among her belongings, admission to the Club of Life she enjoyed so thoroughly ...

“Everyone Makes His Own Happiness”

2006-10-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

Reply to Questionnaire on P. 45 of Vassar Alumnae Magazine, April 1969

1.) I like children who are spontaneous, not too “manicured,” but with evidence of some discipline.

2.) The most important thing for children to learn is that everyone makes his own happiness.

When I was a child …
3.) …I had the most fun when I could catch a sense of my own identity. Of course, I did not then think of my reaction in those terms. The way in which I got a sense of my own identity is surely a clue to my early psychic life: I liked to climb a tree higher than any other children; I liked to make a house for myself in a tree; I liked to go off by myself to pick blueberries to sell; I liked to swim, particularly underwater, when I could open my eyes, or battle ocean waves.
4.) …I felt most secure when I could catch my parents’ fleeting attention.
5.) …I used to daydream about college.
6.) …I used to be afraid of the dark, punishment (spanking), my parents’ rejection.
7.) …I liked grownups who were friendly or found me intelligent.

8.) I wish my parents could have understood that, at the age of three, a pretty little girl should not be put to sleep in the same double bed with an unmarried uncle in his twenties; that when a neighbor reports seeing little girls take down their pants at the order of little boys, a father should not beat a six-year-old and tell a four-year-old (me) that “Little girls who do that cannot live in our house,” with the child’s clothes being removed (at night) from the closet and the child feeling that it would be too far to walk to Grandma’s house; that sex is not evil.

9.) My life will be reasonably satisfying if analysis can bring a feeling of release from my anxieties, greater sexual freedom, and an acceptance of my children’s major decisions.

10.) I seem to have been a child who was very insecure, unhappy without realizing it, sexually repressed, and who turned to distinction in studies as compensation.

On Being Bea's Daughter

2006-10-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

Being Bea’s daughter hasn’t always been marvelous.

In high school, Bea would insist on reading my weekly essays, then give suggestions, which I didn’t often take. My mother also would present, on occasion, what she considered appropriate suitors. When I announced my intention to marry a Frenchman after college graduation, Bea took it upon herself to inform my former boyfriend, who showed up, out of the blue, to propose marriage. Her opposition to this union had been dwarfed by the idea of my leaving the country. While her motives were comprehensible, such intervention felt totally wrong. After my move to France, Bea continued this behavior with Nick, who rejected the Russian-American girl our mother had chosen as future daughter-in-law.

Such over-involvement provided the impetus for a policy of non-intervention in the lives of my own children. And so the pendulum swings from excess to restraint. I sometimes wonder if Bea's attempts to control my life didn't spring from her own childhood ...

Disorientation

2006-10-24T06:59:00.000-07:00

My mother is trying to form words, an almost impossible task this morning. “I… I… I…”

I wait, by Bea's bedside.

“Please tell me,” she finally utters in such a faint voice that I must lean in close.

“Tell you what?”

“If I’m normal or not.”

“Can you explain what you mean a bit better?”

Bea stares up at me with distress. She hesitates until confident enough to ask what must surely be a difficult question: “Who am I?”

“Beatrice. Beatrice Chinnock Grabbe. Does that ring a bell?”

With a frown, she gives her head a quick shake.

“You live in Wellfleet.”

“Wellfleet.” Bea repeats, closing her eyes, as if the eyelids were too heavy, reason enough for this retreat to a fact without dispute: “I was born in Belleville, New Jersey.”

“That’s right!”

There’s a pause, again to collect thoughts.

My mother furrows her brow. “And, who are you?”

“I’m your daughter.”

A contented sound escapes her closed lips. “Hmmmmm. How marvelous to have a daughter!”

How To Deal With An Agitated Elderly Parent in a Fantasy World

2006-10-23T04:59:00.000-07:00

“Helen! Will you come down from there?”

Bea’s tone is sharp. If I did not know better, I would think my aunt was in the bedroom, swinging from the rafters.

Sven and I are about to start dinner. We exchange glances.

“Martin! Do hurry. We are all going to be late.”

Bea's loud voice is easy to understand. Suddenly she starts laughing, a girlish trill of pure delight. I smile, but Sven feels uncomfortable with the situation, so I get up and close the door.

After dinner, I go to Bea, by now frantic. The ship is ready to sail and no one is on time. “I have to get up and tell those men to wait!” she exclaims and leans forward, grasping for my hand.

“Where’s Helen?” I ask.

“She’ll be right back. We are all going to miss the boat!! I must get out of this bed. Oh, please help me.”

I have already given Bea a sleeping pill. I take one look at her red-rimmed eyes and administer half an Ativan, as Nurse Jane suggested.

When an elderly person is upset about an event in a fantasy world, if one plays along, sometimes it relieves the anxiety.

“Now, don’t you worry,” I say. “I will go right away and give the men your message.”

“Will you really? Oh, thank you!” Bea relaxes back into the pillows.

Five minutes later she is sound asleep.

Of New Friends and Fruit

2006-10-22T05:42:00.000-07:00

To my surprise, Bea remembers her new friend in the morning. My mother’s voice sounds so normal that I have to remind myself of her handicapped condition: “We have to go over what we are going to do tonight.”

Her lady friend has now provided a name – Elizabeth – and the two have organized some activities that involve getting out of bed.

“How about a last name?” I ask.

“Too hard to pronounce.”

After applesauce and in the middle of a bowl of vanilla ice cream, Bea suddenly croaks, “Can I have a vegetable?”

“A vegetable?”

“And a Protestant?”

“Protestant?”

“Did I say Protestant? No, not Protestant. I mean those men who came with vegetables yesterday. They were here with Elizabeth and Marie’s mother’s baby. What was that baby called? I forget.”

“Shall I name some vegetables?

“No. I shall think of it myself. That was twenty years ago. I would like a little fruit.”

“Fruit?”

“Yes, apples and pomegranate.”

Keeping up with Bea is like racing backwards and forwards through time, a stressful enterprise, even for the most sure-footed chronicler!

Empire State Quiz

2006-10-21T05:05:00.000-07:00

Question: the Empire State Building was built (a) 1919 (b) 1929 (c) 1932?

In Bea’s mind, the idea of death simply does not compute. She communicated this philosophy to me more than once today.

Around dinnertime, my mother has at last fallen silent and stares into space.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask, convinced her sadness must surely relate to end-of-life issues.

“Somebody ought to bring chocolate pudding. Chocolate pudding is what someone said they would bring.”

I fetch the dessert.

“When I get home, I’m going to make some,” Bea announces between mouthfuls and appreciative “mmm”s.

“How would you do that?”

“Look up the recipe in a cookbook.”

On my next trip back from the kitchen, Bea has become animated. What’s more, there’s company, a mysterious lady who hovers near the ceiling and will only speak if my mother is alone. Bea simply ignores her rigidity on this matter, addressing us both at once:

To me: “I have a terrific need for you.” To her: “This is my niece.” To me: “This lady and I can share talking to me.” To her: “Hello! You’re going to be able to help us.” To me: “I don’t know the name of this lady.” To her: “You tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine …. Beatrice.” To me: “She’s been very helpful, just talking, so I didn’t feel lonely. I feel better when somebody’s near me. I don’t like to be completely alone. Nobody does. When I get to the parish, I am going to ask the minister how I can get home.” (With exasperation) “Where are the people for this lady? I’m eager to get home. I’ll have to walk home. I’d rather walk than stay here for Heaven’s sake. I’m going to miss you. I want to get home.”

“But you are home,” I intervene finally. “We live here in Wellfleet.”

“Thank you for straightening me out. What a relief! … I was born in Belleville. I remember the time my father took my sister and me to see New York. That was quite an experience. He took us up the Empire State building. I was 10. One of my legs bothers me a whole lot, and I wonder if you would be kind enough to rub it? I think it’s because I haven’t been exercising. Will I ever be glad to get out of here! …”

After the leg massage, I obtain a 1931 construction date from the Internet and let Bea know: “You couldn’t have visited the Empire State in 1919 because it wasn’t built yet.”

“How clever of you!”

How Long?

2006-10-20T05:25:00.000-07:00

The air is laden with the heavy smell of fallen leaves after a rainstorm. Autumn is a good time to die, but Bea shows no sign of passing on.

When hospice care began, I asked how long a patient usually lasts. The answer was a month and a half. Bea has been bedridden for six months now.

A stranger calls to reserve a room at the bed & breakfast. Susan spent two hours savoring this blog, a familiar story since she cared for her own parents: “It is so good to have the information out there on the Internet!” our future guest exclaims. “Ten years is a long time to care for one’s parents!”

Indeed ...

Bea's Journal (2)

2006-10-19T06:55:00.000-07:00

"April 16, 1999, 11:02

I am to write for 20 minutes and today I choose to comment on public reaction to deviant sex. I would like to explore why, in the present era, there is so much criticism of people who prefer to make love to their own sex.

I cannot help but notice how many accomplished men and women prefer their own sex or are bi-sexual.

First to my mind are the great Italian Renaissance artists: Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo was gifted both as a sculptor and a painter. His greatest work, I think, was his sculpture La Pieta, in Rome. The Sistine Chapel shows, too, merits mention. Imagine getting up to that ceiling and painting! And how beautiful is the statue of David in Florence.

Among the great bisexuals we include Shakespeare, for over 100 sonnets are very definitely addressed to a young man whose beauty is praised.

Why does Sappho’s lesbianism bother people? Or Virginia Wolff’s startling weekend with the lady of aristocratic background, the one who wrote, ‘All Passions Spent’?

I think one reason for disapproval is that those who are disturbed fear their own erotic attraction to their own sex.

Sappho expressed her desire eloquently when she wrote the following, now in translation:

‘Death shall be death forever
unto thee, maiden
for valuing gold
above the muses.’

Sappho probably lived on an island called Lesbos.

I cherish my trip to Greece in 1932. I remember one day when I wanted to swim from Ithaca to a nearby island. How sparkling clear was the water and pristine, the atmosphere! 11:20.”

Bea on Frank Sinatra

2006-10-18T06:17:00.000-07:00

“Frank Sinatra is like chocolate pudding. Rich and velvety.”

Checking Out?

2006-10-17T05:14:00.000-07:00

BEA: “I’ve stayed too long.”

ME: “What do you mean?”

BEA: “Here. Avec toi.”

Bea doesn’t speak French but throws French expressions into her conversation from time to time for effect.

Is she referring to death? My heart skips a beat. Gravitas does fill her voice.

I have just concluded my mother is indeed saying goodbye when she adds, “How do I initiate it? The paperwork, I mean? I would think it would be through you.”

“Where do you want to go?” I ask.

“To my mother’s house. Home …”

Her tone is heartbreaking.

Who would have thought childhood would leave such an indelible souvenir!

Upon Missing the Boat in Italy

2006-10-16T05:17:00.000-07:00

“Help, oh please help! I have to get up! I have to open that door so they can get on the boat …”

Before bed, I gave Bea half a sleeping pill. Half was not enough. My mother is frantic.

“There’s a crowd of men, on a pier,” she explains breathlessly. “I have to help them. And Helen has disappeared. She was here a minute ago.”

“Helen’s dead,” I say gently. “You’re imagining things.”

“No. I recognized her coat,” Bea protests, quite sure. She extends a boney finger towards the ceiling. “They're right over there. See them?”

The scenario that is playing in her mind would be amusing if it were not 1:30 in the morning. Luckily we do not have any bed & breakfast guests tonight.

“I don’t. Time to sleep. Tell them to come back tomorrow.”

I return to my room, but it is impossible to tune out the low drone, which rises and falls in pitch, to finally crescendo into puffs of breath, calling my name …

On what must be my third visit, I shout: “These people are in your mind. They are hallucinations. There is no one here but you and me. I cannot have you waking me up this way …”

Bea’s red-rimmed eyes have become beacons that shine through the night. "But they will miss the boat ..."

Shaken-baby syndrome comes to mind. I want to shake this frail body and make it shut up but don’t, of course. Instead I place my hands on her cheeks.

“Quiet,” I order in a firm voice. “You have to stop this.”

Still the words fly out her mouth like butterflies: “The bride - the bride – she needs – her dress. It was – right here. I have to – get out of – bed and – help her – find it. I know you want me to be quiet but I cannot. I’ll whisper. How’s that? I’ll whisper. Those men – in black – need my help …”

Desperate for sleep, I administer the second half of the sleeping pill.

Once a Hostess, Always a Hostess!

2006-10-15T07:17:00.000-07:00

The daffodils arrive, 400 of them.

Sven helps prepare the soil. It will take quite a while to get all these bulbs in the ground. I check in on Bea from time to time. She ate cream of wheat this morning, then went back to sleep.

In the house, I find my mother chatting softly to herself and assume she has just awakened from the nap. I flop down in the chair beside her bed, lean over, and confide, “I’m tired.”

“I’m tired, too,” she says although sleep has been her predominate state recently. No, scratch that: over the past three days hibernation is a better description.

“Did you have pleasant dreams?” I ask.

“Oh, I wasn’t dreaming,” Bea says in her busy-body voice, the one she used to use all the time. “I was busy.”

“What have you been up to?”

“Seeing that everybody got something to eat. And what have you been up to?”

“Planting daffodils. You like daffodils?”

Bea’s face fills with delight. “Oh, yes! They’re the first spring flower.”

“Want to hear some music – Frank Sinatra, or the Italian singer?”

“Sinatra. And they’re both Italian,” Bea points out.

I leave my smart-aleck mother to her guests and return to my garden…

Geronimo

2006-10-14T06:02:00.000-07:00

Bea wrote this comment on an envelope in 1995:

“I want to tell you about Geronimo. He was a tomcat. We had taken over our female Siamese to be mated. In charge was a gracious girl of fifteen.

‘Geronimo is a fine cat,’ she advises in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘He’s good to his females. First he licks them all over.’

So much for cats. Hmmm. Hurray for Geronimo!

The French want to know what women want. I suspect they want a screaming-me-me orgasm, though they may not realize.

What would be the ideal approach in making love to a woman?

Most of all, the right mood, the right state of mind, the wellbeing that comes after a delicious meal in a soothing setting with wine, perhaps after a good movie.

Tenderness can be ever so erotic.

A man’s desire is centralized; a woman’s pervasive over her entire body. Apparently it is so with cats ...”

Bea’s Books (10)

2006-10-13T07:11:00.000-07:00

In a notebook, I find the following list:

“Read in 1972:

The Day of the Jackal, Forsythe: Cheap and sensation-seeking, but compels attention.

The Assistant, Malamud: Fine job. Life and death of a little Jewish storekeeper in a less prosperous section of the Bronx.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Gustav Jung. A seminal book. Includes bibliography of Jung’s other writings. Jung refers, among others, to the writings of Jacob Boehme and Nicholas of Cusa.

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol 1, 1931-1934. Most unusual and absorbing. Wish to read more volumes. Understand fourth is about to be published. READ IT. Home was at Louveciennes, near Paris.”

Kaleidoscope

2006-10-12T07:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Sven and I escaped to Boston for a day of respite. My brother and his wife assumed Bea’s care. Still talkative, she worried about my dad’s absence. When told he had died, Bea explained that was impossible because, “We have only been married a year …”

A deadline for a script was another preoccupation.

Bea seems to be recalling her life, so full. The different periods replay in her mind much like a kaleidoscope, images which need to be experienced again before letting go …

Lisa’s Report

2006-10-11T05:01:00.000-07:00

“I want to go to my home, to the one I prefer,” Bea says in a small voice.

“Which one is that?” I ask, just in case.

“102 South Fullerton Avenue.”

I explain why that is no longer possible. She listens intently. If I am able to sit by her bedside and caress her brow this afternoon, it is because I was able to get away earlier in the day, thanks to Lisa and our hospice volunteer, Virginia.

Lisa files this report:

“Beatrice was very awake. I asked her if she was hungry and she was. I went to the kitchen to find something that she'd enjoy and brought back two puddings, to which she replied that she needed something different for her first 'course' and that the puddings would do for dessert. I went back and forth quite a few times with suggestions and finally made a salmon sandwich. She was pleased as punch and had one Beatrice-sized bite and proclaimed that she was ready for her pudding. She ate both with gusto and drank three glasses of water!!

After lunch, Beatrice said she was 'eager to be human again.' Of course I asked what she meant. She meant walking around and going here and there. She wanted to get up to be 'human'. I redirected her instead of upsetting her about not being able to support herself. It was an insight as to how Beatrice thinks of her abilities to ambulate. Virginia showed up and lit up the room. Beatrice was SO very glad to have someone else to talk with. She's such a social person when in her 'awake' space…”

Bea will chat all through the night, off and on. In the morning, I find her quite agitated. To my surprise, the comforter is again on the floor. Bea looks up at me like a little girl, who knows she has been naughty, and declares, “Scold me if you must. Oh! I’m so upset. I can’t get up. I’ve tried and tried. Could you please go downstairs and open the door for my father?” …

Bleak House

2006-10-10T05:36:00.000-07:00

Bea remains comfortable, but her quality of life is close to zero. She sleeps all day now and doesn't seem to want food.

Lisa suggests I offer Ensure again. Bea drinks it.

Lisa reads out loud from the “Patient & Family Resources Guide”: “When a body is preparing for death, it is perfectly natural that eating stops. The body is … slowly shutting down normal body functions …”

“You’re the nicest person I know,” my mother murmurs as I change her brief for the night.

I suppose this is her way of saying thank you.

I don’t feel like such a nice person. I was unable to respond to my daughter’s latest emergency. My husband is depressed. I am barely able to contain my rage that society does not provide a better solution for its citizens of extreme old age, obliging loved ones to sacrifice themselves and enter into a relationship of servitude … In the “Patient & Family Resources Guild,” I read anger is a normal reaction.

Bea is going to die soon. That fact in itself produces such conflicting emotions.

Last month Sven and I began our 10th year of elderly care.

To those whom might say, “You should have put your mother in a nursing home,” I respond, “Visit a few. Then tell me if you would like to finish your days in such a place?”

The answer will probably be no.

I am so grateful that, at least, we have hospice …

Postscript: Thank you to everyone who holds us in their thoughts, like Karyn, a stranger who posted a comment immediately this morning. Bea woke up and said, "Am I ever glad to see you! I'm hungry." She has already eaten half a banana and wants more, so we are off and running again.

“Mea Culpa”

2006-10-09T07:41:00.000-07:00

“The first serious problems in my life began when I was 3 or 4, and they greatly changed the way I grew up.

Before these traumatic events, however, there was a two-way squeeze to cope with: my older sister, Helen, 20 months older, felt unwanted, was unwanted, and nearly finished off the competition by trying to knock my basket from its perch on the sewing machine. I guess this was the last aggressive act of her life. My mother identified with pretty little me, while my sister resembled Father’s family whom Mother disliked. Still, I had not been a boy, a disappointment to my parents. Then, after 19 months, I, in turn, was displaced by a bright and handsome brother named for Father but called ‘Fumpty.’

I tried to please and soon learned to parade my charms for what they seemed to be worth. For instance, when anyone said, ‘Where did you get those china blue eyes?’ I would answer on cue, looking up beatifically, ‘God gave them to me!’ I didn’t then, of course, see the similar derivation of ‘beatific’ and ‘Beatrice.’

Early on, I disliked my name. One reason was the nickname it engendered. I was aware of the meaning of the word “beat” and resented my young uncle, then working his way through college by delivering ice blocks during the summer at the resort where mother’s family and ours had small cottages, side by side. He liked to tease and called me ‘Beat-an-egg’ as he walked by. I guess that is the way he handled his sexual response to me, or maybe he was jealous that my father was doing well in business and he had to haul ice. Maybe both.

An early memory is of a kindness – a pretty lady very gently removed a splinter from my hand. She might have become a useful mother surrogate but was only an acquaintance.

Another memory is of barging onto the side porch where Mother and Father’s brother’s wife were nursing babies. They continued chatting merrily but somewhat self-consciously together, then started giggling nervously as if caught in some kind of conspiracy. I can still see my mother’s pink nipple and the shape of her enlarged breast as the baby removed it from his mouth and turned to look at me with annoyance at the intrusion.

I stood there observing the scene.

Mother asked in a flip tone, “Want a suck?”

I don’t know now whether I did or not, though the invitation must have brought back painful recollections of being weaned. Still, not one to turn down a challenge, I leaned over and took a swig. The warm, watery liquid tasted sweeter than cow’s milk. I think I was rather disappointed. The experience stacks up as an unpleasant one. I blame my mother for being so unfeeling as to challenge me. Perhaps she was jealous of my girlish freedom.

But, that wasn’t the only stupid action that left its mark. The worst and most traumatic bêtise I must blame on both my parents because, if Mother was lacking in good sense, my father should have stepped in. Here is what happened:

In the days before we had a car, we went by train five miles to visit Mother’s family in Patterson, New Jersey. The family lived over my grandfather’s plumbing shop. There were six bedrooms, but a large family. At three years old, I was put to death – just a minute: that phrase slipped out of my unconscious, and I meant put to sleep in the same bed with Uncle Jim, my unmarried uncle who was then in his early 20s …”

Bumps on the Road of Life

2006-10-08T05:37:00.000-07:00

Both my parents had psychoanalysis during the first years of their marriage.

I find a letter Bea wrote in 1979 about its benefits: “When Nick was two and we moved back to Washington, I was forced in the move to give up an interesting, lucrative job and felt so depressed that I decided to get a job to pay for more analysis. It seemed because of my sexual difficulties that it was more important for me to try through analysis to get over them …”

My parents were married 56 years. Bea’s return to a more distant past that doesn’t include Paul is puzzling to me, so I feel pleased when she tells me he has been one of her guests.

“Daddy’s here,” Bea says simply.

“Harry? You mean your father?”

“No, Daddy.”

“Paul?”

“Yes.”

I realize I am living an unusual experience. Not every daughter gets to accompany her mother on this final journey. We are weaving our way down the road of life, towards a light shining in the distance …

On Aging

2006-10-07T05:08:00.000-07:00

Bea gazes up at the basket of colorful flowers, delivered on behalf of her nieces and nephews, and smiles. The light that reflects her spirit makes the ninety-seven-year-old face look beautiful this morning. I want to remember my mother this way, satisfied with life, happy, ready to let go.

Last night Bea almost choked. I pulled her up into a sitting position and desperately tried to pat her on the back. The food had gone down her windpipe, not a pleasant experience. She spit up a lot of thick saliva afterwards.

Swallowing food remains a challenge. I bring pears and porridge. Bea accepts two spoonfuls, then turns her head away. She is not hungry today. Something more urgent needs attention:

“Where’s my baby?” she demands.

“I’m here,” I say. “I’m your baby.”

Bea doesn’t look convinced. No, she is searching the room for a child, not a grown-up person. Distress fills her eyes. If she could only get up, she would do so in an instant and locate the recalcitrant infant she has lost.

We resume breakfast. Bea almost chokes on a piece of pear. I quickly switch to ice cream.

“Whose child are you?” she demands with suspicion.

“Yours.”

“What?!”

“Preposterous!” my mother’s voice says. “Much too old!”

Then Bea starts talking nonsense.

I cannot bear the degradation and stay away, except to change her brief. How hard it is to care for an aged loved one!

I age, I aged, I am aging.

Before Bea reached extreme old age, she wrote this lovely poem:

On Aging

Bring me
daffodils
in the spring.

Bring me new words
like “esoteric”
and “irony.”
I need to know
what they mean
while there is time
to use them.

Bring me a black checker
marked with a coronet.
Tell me why it uses
such a symbol.

Maybe it isn’t a checker
after all
and comes from Halablu,
a land where people
line up like chickens
in a barnyard
pecking order.

Before bed, I order daffodil bulbs from an online nursery, hundreds of them …

Excerpts from Bea’s Novel (2)

2006-10-06T04:24:00.000-07:00

“Some people knew how disturbed her home environment in Montclair had been, but not many. She had a way of making it sound more like everyone else’s than it was. But those who had spent a weekend with her family in New Jersey were quick to enlighten her for her own good about the family’s shortcomings. One friend had said, 'Bill changed his mind about marrying you after he met your family.'

She didn’t need their comments to be aware of social inadequacy. That same Bill had said, ‘You never should have gone to Vassar.’ Where, she thought contemptuously, would she have fitted in? New Jersey College for Women? And, hadn’t she endured the snobbery of some classmates freshman year? …

But all the more painful was the weekend her mother arrived in a cheap knitted dress that was too tight, as if she had done it on purpose.

Ellen survived Vassar and even learned. When her mother sent an awkward homemade dress for Ellen to wear to a party, Ellen borrowed her roommate’s instead. She studied hard, always aware that she was less well prepared than her friends from Brearley and other private schools. Ellen knew she was at one of the best colleges in the country and was proud to have gotten in. She would make the most of it. Yet, when all the families came up for graduation at the end of her fourth year, it was hard to be one of the only two girls in ‘the Group’ who were not invited to the dinner party given by the parents of Ellen Bacon Endicott of Beacon Hill …

It never occurred to her that she was on the make. She only wanted to realize her abilities, express herself, and fulfill the social obligations inculcated in those years at Vassar …”

Up until now, Bea has called her heroine “Ellen.” In the final paragraph of these three pages, Bea switches to her own name:

“In those years, she couldn’t decide whether to call herself Bea or Bee. She didn’t expect anyone to call her by her full name – Beatrice. She had learned that early on after the family dubbed her ‘Beata’ and her mean uncle changed the nickname to “Beat-an-egg.” So, when the family moved from Belleville to the more viable suburb of Montclair, she decided, at 15, to take no chances and told fellow students at Montclair High School that her name was B. But B…what she wasn’t sure.”

People = What Bea Likes Best

2006-10-05T06:04:00.000-07:00

Bea begins her 98th year by sleeping most of the day. When she wakes up, I read birthday cards from Carl and Mary Krogh, Sally Branch, and the good folks at the Wellfleet Council on Aging. Lisa brings chocolate ice cream as a special treat. Other highlights include a phone call from my brother, as well as a chat with Nick and Elspeth Macdonald. The conversations do not last long since Bea is quite feeble and the phone keeps slipping from her hand. She seems to have forgotten how to talk on the phone and repeats everything the other party says, which certainly does not make for a very satisfactory exchange. After the phone calls, my friend Carolyn, visiting from France, joins me by Bea’s bedside.

“Congratulations!” she says. “You’re 97 today.”

“I can’t catch a man if I’m 97,” Bea says in a sour but very matter-of-fact voice.

“You’re right,” Carolyn responds. “That’s hard, but not impossible.”

“What are you going to give me?” Bea wants to know.

It is not clear whether she is talking food or gifts, so we provide chocolate pudding and company. Sven, Carolyn, and I gather round the bed, which seems to make my mother happy. I can tell from her glow. People is what Bea likes best.

We discuss 90-year-olds who are able to travel distances by car, certainly few and far between. I reminisce about Bea’s trip to Vassar for her 70th reunion: “You wore a yellow suit, since the class color was yellow, and held a yellow balloon. How cute you looked! You got to ride in a golf cart at the head of the parade. Everyone was cheering. Remember?”

Bea doesn’t. I don’t know if Carolyn and Sven can decipher the forgetfulness on my mother’s already blank face, but I can. There is a silence. Her eyes are half closed. She is tired today.

“What would you like to talk about?” I ask, not sure if we should impose after all. Perhaps she would prefer to sleep?

“The price of eggs in China,” my mother says suddenly, then explains, “It’s a silly.”

“Actually China is more and more important to the world’s economy and to the future of the world,” Carolyn begins with some authority. She is using heftier concepts than Bea’s bedroom usually experiences these days. I wonder whether my mother will take them in.

To my surprise, Bea demands, “Give me a good example.”

“They make all we wear. Clothing.”

“I don’t agree,” Bea declares, for some reason quite sure.

Sven tells her, “Oh! China is changing fast.”

“They do things cheaply and offer lower prices than everyone else.” (This information from Carolyn.)

“The price of eggs in China must be rising because of the avian flu,” Sven says, cracking a joke of sorts.

His comment gives me an idea for our conversation: “Why don’t you tell us about the Spanish flu when you were a little girl?”

But Bea is back in zombie-land. Sven and Carolyn wait respectfully for her to emerge. I add a few more details to prod memory: “Remember how the neighbor’s family, across the street, all died and had to be quarantined?’

No reaction. The birthday girl doesn’t bat an eyelash.

“You must have lived in Belleville in 1919, when you were 10.”

“Did you have servants?” Carolyn asks.

“Mabel,” I respond, since Bea doesn’t. “The domestic.”

Just as I am deciding Bea must have fallen asleep, she offers this comment in a soft but clear voice: “I liked Mabel, and she liked me. We were friends.”

“Was there a bell under the rug to call the servants?” Carolyn asks, curious now. “I bet there was. My mom told me she had one like it at her house.”

“Something like a bell, under the table,” Bea murmurs.

“Can you tell us about your birthday party when you were 10?”

Silence.

“Did Helen come?”

“Yup.”

“And Dorothy?”

“Yup.”

“Did you have a cake and ice cream?”

“You bet.”

“Where did you get the ice cream?”

There’s a long pause. I don’t know why I asked the question, perhaps to check if she pays attention. We all hold our breath, not really expecting Bea to answer, but she does: “At Galuba’s. I knew Mr. Galuba and I liked him, but not enough to marry him. He would probably smell.” Bea is focusing in on Carolyn, now. “Did you know I had nice babies?” I take her hand. Bea turns to me and says softly, “You were lovely...”

Excerpts from Bea’s Novel (1)

2006-10-04T05:25:00.000-07:00

In 1937, Bea was 28.

I find three handwritten pages, part of a draft for a novel. Here is an excerpt:

“Life was full of zest. Ellen, at 28, was discovering herself. Intellectual circles, artistic circles, social circles – she swung from one to the other, dressed accordingly. Maybe it was the Rainbow Room or the little Greek restaurant on E. 28th Street. For many months, flat-shoed and seemingly in love with the abstract artist. Then an old beau who taught Latin at Groton would come to town, and she would fight off his frustrated kisses after brook trout and French wine at Voisin’s.

But always there, pushed out of her consciousness was the younger schizophrenic brother, Hunter. Even his haunting name hurt. In those days Hunter was already at the Hartford Retreat, and there was nothing she ever did that was harder than going to see him. How he looked one day at her metal necklace, as if he would wrench it off and her neck with it! He had to get well, and she tried in her feeble way to counsel her grieving parents, to help them. But so much did she believe in the influence of environment that she blamed them for his breakdown and never forgave herself after that for adding to their pain …”

Bea Contacts Dr. Alfred Adler

2006-10-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

Among Bea’s papers, I find a letter her brother Hunter sent from Paris on August 11, 1937:

“Dearest Bea,

You asked me to write you and here it is. Tell Dorothy I got both her letters and thank her very much. I am tickled pink with the idea of becoming an uncle. I’ll bet Tony or Dottie will blink his eyes for the first time on the 14th or 15 of August … I have done so much and had so many interesting experiences that to go into detail about each one would take the rest of this book …. I have taken four trips besides Giverny, Versailles, Reims, and Chartres. People who come to Paris for just a week see nothing and those for a summer barely scratch the surface … About a week ago I met a Bulgarian fellow who speaks six languages. Yesterday he, and a girlfriend of his, Marietta, and I took a trip up the Marne to go swimming and have a picnic. We drank 2 big bottles of wine, and, as a consequence were rather gay. I jumped off a bridge. It was 45 feet high! When we returned to Paris, we bought cheese, ham, and bread. Marietta, I think, is in love with me. Things are beginning to get complicated. Let me add that American necking is horseplay compared with the French! Please don’t think that I am getting myself in for something or turning out to be a Casanova. Kissing was as far as I went or will go in the future, but the damned trouble is that the girl really likes me… I find going out with French people and talking with them ‘c’est le meilleur methode pour apprendre la langue’ … "

Here Hunter is probably quoting his elder sister. He concludes the 10-page letter with information about sailing from Southhampton and suggests Bea look up landing times in the newspaper.

I also find a note from a Dr. Alfred Adler, dated earlier that year, February 11, 1937:

“Dear Miss Chinnock,

I should like to see the boy. If this is not possible I could speak with the mother. She shall phone me in the morning and tell me when she wants to see me.”

Truly yours,

Professor Alfred Adler, MD

At first this note seems out of the blue. Then, I realize Bea must have managed to contact Dr. Adler about Hunter. The envelope also holds the famous psychologist’s obituary. How tragic that Dr. Adler died of a heart attack May 28, 1937!

Anxiety Attack!

2006-10-02T07:11:00.000-07:00

Of late, I have noticed Bea is more confused during her waking hours. Also, as each period of non-sleep progresses, it becomes more of a challenge to make out her words. When she – does talk – all her – sentences are – delivered in – this choppy – speech pattern.

Our day starts off well enough with relatively clear thoughts and words:

BEA: “Am I glad to see you! Do you think I can go all the way to New York?”

ME: “I doubt it. Why do you want to go to New York?”

BEA: “To see an old beau …”

But I return later to find my mother desperate:

BEA: “I’ve been having an awful time. I have to ask you to help me. I’m in a troubled condition, and I’m not out of it yet. I have to get the baby here.”

ME: “Which baby?”

BEA: “I want both of them in the same place. I have to have both of them in the same place because people are complaining. It is extremely painful to me. I have to have people understand. The point is they want me to come and take the baby -”

ME: “Which baby?”

BEA: “I’m beside myself.”

ME: “How can I help you?”

BEA: “As you know I will die shortly. I’m going to be 100 years old.”

ME: “97.”

BEA: “197?”

ME: “97.”

BEA: “I want to get these two people to cooperate and take the baby with them because they are very strongly not wanting the baby. They can only care for their own baby.”

ME: “Do I know them?”

BEA: “Of course you do!”

ME: “Can you tell me their names?”

I propose several baby names. My mother indicates her concern is for the baby born to her niece Dotty in 1953.

I explain how grateful teenage Dotty was that her aunt took her into our home in Washington, DC. It now occurs to me that my mother’s early abortion made her uniquely placed to shepherd Dotty through the experience of an untimely pregnancy. I am about to say the baby is grown up now when Bea interrupts:

BEA: “I want someone else to go talk to them. They are not taking no for an answer. I see their point of view. They have to get the baby to somebody else. I think you must understand that I cannot cope with this anymore. They’re breaking my heart. Can you call and find out for me?”

ME: “Who should I call?”

BEA: “You must have her number. Tell them you cannot have anybody else’s baby but your own. They want you to come and take the baby. I’m dying over this.”

I reassure Bea that the baby has become a fine young woman, that her adoptive mother went out of her way to bring Beth up according to the instructions Dotty provided, that she had art lessons, piano lessons. I find the email Dotty’s youngest daughter Ellen sent after reading the blog August 24 and read out loud:

“I think the time with you all in DC was the best of the worst for her. She always credited Aunty Bea with things going as well as they could with the adoption etc. so I don't know perhaps if there were things we weren't ever told? She basically always made it sound like she had Aunty Bea to thank for Beth’s life … From what my mom told us there were papers she was allowed to fill out describing what kind of parents she thought would be best suited for her baby and adding information about the mother and father’s background. Perhaps that's what Bea is thinking of ...”

Dotty’s youngest sister Margot also responded to the August 24th blog and adds another piece to the puzzle: “I found the part about Dotty going to the National Gallery very poignant. Dotty always loved beautiful things. I am glad she was able to experience some beauty in what must have been a ghastly time for her. Did you know I didn't find out about Beth until I was 23???”

Dotty named her baby Damaris because she knew the name would make it easier to find her later on. Beth emails, “Damaris was not just an unusual name, but was the name of a girl in the book Dot was reading who was pregnant with an illegitimate child....”

I cannot help but wonder if Bea was not responsible for Dotty’s reading material. American society condemned untimely pregnancies in the early fifties. Bea's anxiety attack indicates what a traumatic episode Dotty's pregnancy and Beth's adoption must have been for the entire family …

Hunger Pangs

2006-10-01T05:46:00.000-07:00

“I just made some nice vegetable soup,” I tell Bea to entice her to eat. “It has got leaks from the garden. And potatoes from the garden. And – ”

“Ice cream from the garden? …”

Yes, ice cream has become Bea’s favorite food. Day merges into night for those who sleep round the clock, and regular meals can become problematic. Elderly stomachs still growl when a person gets hungry. They just don’t growl according to schedule.

Over the past six months, Bea has come up with many different ways to communicate she needs nourishment. Here are some of my favorites:

1.) “I don’t feel well enough to do anything, so somebody else will have to make dinner.”

Translation: “I’m hungry.”

2.) “We have to go to a restaurant for somebody”

Translation: “I’m hungry.”

3.) “Couldn’t we have Sven make some of that nice cereal for your bed & breakfast guests?”

Bea wants porridge, not cream of wheat, for breakfast.

4.) “Can you help Martin to get lunch?”

Translation: Bea wants food.

5.) “Are you hungry?”

Translation: “I’m hungry.”

6.) “I’ll open my mouth and you put something in it.”

Reciprocation?

2006-09-30T09:06:00.000-07:00

“It’s nice to be alive on a day like this.”

The statement is so Bea, the optimistic little girl, hungry for life, a seeming paradox now that she is bedridden and close to the end. I peer out the window at the rain and wonder at her words, the only ones she will utter today, besides, “I’m hungry.”

I turn her several times and provide dinner. The salmon salad is not a big hit. Bea freezes, mouth half open, with the salmon mixture on her tongue. She drinks water and eats half a chocolate pudding. It occurs to me that my mother would probably not be alive today if we had put her in a nursing home six months ago.

Our bed & breakfast guest, from Germany, tells me her country provides its citizens with nursing homes, but they resemble hospitals, not pleasant places where one would choose to live. She also speaks of a friend from Chile who returned to her hometown to care for an elderly aunt, because it seemed like the right thing to do: “They cared for us, so we should do the same.”

Sven reminds me that in the old days, children always took care of elderly parents. One daughter didn’t marry in order to assume this role. But life expectancies were shorter back then.

Home care? Nursing home? Assisted living facility?

Even people who can afford assisted living may eventually end up in the nursing home building of the assisted living complex.

Elderly care solution guides suggest visiting nursing homes unannounced in order to form an impression of what life will be like for a loved one interned there. People who take this advice will probably react the way I did and reject the nursing home option. For Bea, home care with hospice is definitely the best solution.

Still, home care is not ideal for the caregiver who may find his own active years shortened by the burden he/she has assumed now that modern medicine prolongs life.

Sometimes Sven and I do miss our freedom …

How Much Can Bea Say in One Minute and 30 Seconds?

2006-09-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

Imagine you are sitting by Bea’s bedside towards the end of her latest talking marathon. Bea speaks in a soft voice so as not to disturb anyone, but it is possible to make out most of her words. She has talked through Lisa’s visit. Then, for the next hour, Virginia, our volunteer, heard all about plans for a wedding reception. You are about to experience Bea’s monologue for less than two minutes, although she will talk non-stop late into the night, bursting into laughter from time to time.

Ready, set, listen:

“I’m going to wear your dress, the one you took out of the closet. Shades of brown and gray. It’s a wedding party. I’d like myself to enjoy it. I’d like your husband to have a great big smile. I’d like you to have a great big smile. I want you to come. Esther doesn’t want to be pursued. How about that lady from Syracuse and the fat man? He’s getting thinner. Do I hear somebody else besides you and me and me and you? What do you think I should wear? How about your hat? I think you should wear your hat. I’ll do whatever you say. I’ve got to stand up so you can see that I can stand up. How can I sit in a chair if I can’t stand up? I’ll wear Esther’s pearls. I can tell you where they are. I’m not going to get up any more than I have to. I’d like to go to Scotland. But these people talk with some very studious-sounding words. And on my birthday, I’m gong to have something interesting to do. I want you to know we did have some silver and we gave it to you. This evening I intend to be just whatever you want me to be. I know she doesn’t want me to wear American Indian. She’s American Indian. Esther is your cousin. I don’t know enough people in New York to organize the dance. My favorite person in the whole wide world right now is you…”

Kitty, Selden & More

2006-09-28T05:59:00.000-07:00

The daughter of Bea’s friend Kitty has sent an email after reading By Bea’s Bedside: “Mother was not only devoted to Bea, but fascinated by your dad's Russian background. And I enjoyed reading about Nancy who was also so important to Mother and whose brother Selden she often wished she'd married and talked about endlessly to me from the time I was a child. I wonder what Bea remembers about that relationship? Mother must have shared her deepest heart with her over the years.”

I explain this email request to Bea. I have brought with me a yellow pad, a sign that I will be recording her words. My mother immediately notices. She is alert and happy to cooperate.

“Why didn’t Kitty marry Selden?” I ask.

“That’s the part of the sad story. Somebody else got there first.”

Dwight Macdonald roomed with Selden Rodman at Yale. I admire the photo, which the Macdonald children gave Bea after his death. Women of my generation would have called him a “hunk.”

“He’s very handsome,” I comment.

“He was. I fell for him.”

I request more details.

“Kitty was good-looking, one of the best-dressed girls in the class. She was very much in love. Selden was a poet of some note. He had been published, I mean. She loved him and he loved her.”

“So then, what happened?”

“It was senior year. That was when Selden shifted his interest to another woman, Eunice Stedman, one of those steadfast girls who always does everything right.”

“Kitty must have been devastated!”

“No. She was very modest and sober about it. She suffered the exigencies of life in a shifting society.” Bea adds as an aside, “We can use big words in the book you’re writing.”

“He should have married Kitty!”

“Especially since they had sex together! Life is difficult to understand.”

I am thinking about Kitty’s regret at not having married Selden. We make choices in life and must live by them. I remember Robert Frost’s Road Not Taken, which Bea used to read me as a child.

“Do you have any regrets?” I ask.

“No, I cannot think of any.”

I throw out a possibility, an experience my mother has only described to her granddaughters: “Did you regret your abortion?”

Bea is quiet and doesn’t respond at first. Her mind is moving forward from the happy-go-lucky days at Vassar. “Yes, I do remember that I had it and felt very embarrassed. That was a long time ago.”

“There wasn’t much choice then,” I point out.

“Certainly not.”

“Who performed the abortion?”

“A doctor. I found him through a senior doctor in NY. The experience was very subduing.”

“Do you remember how old you were?”

“25.” Bea says this without hesitation. She certainly remembers. Her voice is void of emotion.

“Did anybody go with you?”

“No. It was a secret. I think I even went back to the office. I was afraid I was bleeding. It’s an unpleasant feeling.”

I want to ask about contraception and the prevalence of abortion in the thirties, but Bea has already retreated to more pleasant memories …

All We Need Is Love

2006-09-27T06:46:00.000-07:00

After talking sprees, Bea seems to go into hibernation. Nothing will wake her. I could march a brass band past her window and Mother Bear would not even flinch. I can remember Nurse Jane’s snapping her fingers and calling, “Oh, Be-ee!” several times to no avail on multiple occasions. When my elderly mother sleeps, she sleeps. Her breathing is rhythmic and low. She can sleep two or three days in a row like this.

I have just entered the bedroom as Bea finally awakens and looks around at the surroundings with enormous little-girl eyes that sparkle with the discovery of the world around her. How delighted she is to see me! Now that I have come, the day can officially begin.

“I want to get out of bed,” Bea declares and starts pushing off her covers.

“Not right now,” I say and gently replace them. “Maybe later, when Lisa gets here.”

From past experience, I know Bea will probably have forgotten by then. Her short-term memory has called in sick. Sometimes my mother will remember details from the beginning of the century yet be unable to recognize the names of recent acquaintances.

We run through our standard orientation drill. Bea always needs to know where she is after long periods of rest. I am reminded of my children who would do an inventory of their toy animals before I could turn off the light. Bea does the same when she wakes up. Only there is a problem. The routine today has produced disappointing results. Her hospital bed does not feel familiar. The room was renovated with rafters which she does not recognize. And her parents are not here. Where have they gone?

Bea declares in a small voice, “I need people to love me.”

My mother seems a little more lost than usual, a shadow of her former self. I empathize at her quandary.

ME: “I do love you. I hope I show it.”

BEA: “You do show it.”

ME: “Why do you say you need people to love you then?”

BEA: “Because I need love. You are related to me, aren’t you? Would you please tell me how?”

ME: “I’m your daughter.”

BEA: “I’m so happy to have a daughter!”

And so begins another day…

Letter from Dorothy

2006-09-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

"Sunday, 12/4/94

Dear Bea,

I’m sorry you were so upset by difficult thoughts that you couldn’t sleep when you wrote me. You had other stresses in addition to anything I had said. If you had previously told me all that you wrote, I would have been better able to understand. It’s too bad that Mother, and mostly Dad, had such awful Victorian mores. Sex was okay for them but no one else!! I just did my little-girl masturbation in secret. I was going to enjoy anyway! I got self-slapped by nasty Uncle Ray, too, and it took all my will power not to give him a dose of his own medicine when he was old.

It’s too bad when a lover doesn’t understand the value of foreplay to arouse a woman, and she must also work hard herself to achieve the orgasm. It’s a joint effort and even then, not always attained in my opinion.

It’s hard for me to grasp why Jack and Jimmie are to be shunned when quite innocent and removed from their father’s acts. Guilt by association? So awful in the McCarthy era! You must remember.

I enclose $40, $20 for your Christmas gift and $20 for Paul. Please buy a bottle of champagne as my gift to him. I know how much he enjoys it, and it is festive when celebrating.

I think, however, Bea, that you are entitled to make a family call even if he cannot with no sibling. Do you get paid for all the work you’ve done on his books and other duties concerning them? You might calmly remind him of this. Don’t let any man browbeat you ever! That’s my motto (smiley face).

I’m sure, now in Florida, you can relax in the nice warmth.

Have an enjoyable Christmas and get some of the rest you deserve.

With my love always,

Dot”

October on the Patuxent

2006-09-25T05:58:00.000-07:00

"On this fine sunny October day, a Patuxent oysterman shows me how to lock the claws of crabs my daughter caught before her return to the city.

'I hear you’re writing a book,' he says.

This information comes as a surprise. I gulp and say something that sounds like yes.

Here in the country with my dog for a few weeks rest, I’m probably not deemed quite respectable just reading books. So, last week, when one of the oystermen allowed as how he didn’t see how I could be by myself day after day just reading, I said something about writing, too. They can’t feel friendly toward me if they are plugging away with their oysters and I, an able-bodied woman, leave my perfectly good husband and children at home and lounge around all day doing nothing. No use trying to explain. So, I will dedicate my book to the Patuxent oystermen because they considered it possible.

The tattered page is dated Oct. 8, 1962 and also contains a poem to my father:

Osprey fly high;
herons fly low.
Please tell me how
my love can grow.

Maples are red.
The river is blue.
Before the leaves fall
I would love you.

Zinnia, cock’s comb,
petunia, aster.
I must somehow
learn to love faster.

Seagull, blue eel,
bobwhite, quail.
Where is the love
that does not pale?

Butterfly, cricket,
red apple tree.
How can my love
ever love me?

Green crab, sunfish,
butternut tree.
When will I learn
the way it must be?

Soybean, mushroom,
oyster and shell.
What must I know?
How can I tell?

Trumpet vine, cedar,
Full moon above,
show me the way
to give my love."

Only vaguely do I remember Bea’s retreat to Sotterley near Hollywood, Maryland. As far as I know, she never finished the book she describes on this frequently folded piece of paper.

The “Beautiful Bouquet”

2006-09-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

Bea is sound asleep today, exhausted after two days of conversation. I take the down time to sift through some of her papers and discover what appears to be the beginning of a memoir:

“This is the last week in the year 2000. I am now 91.

The important fact in my life is that my husband, Count Paul Alexandrovich Grabbe, died at the age of 97 ½.

I tell myself that people do not live forever. I think of St. Francis saying, ‘Grazie Signore, per la morte, nostra sorella corporale.’

But I do not want to identify my remaining days with the inevitability of death but rather to have the pleasure of recalling special moments of joy in my life. I like to think of the circumstances under which I met the man I married.

It was wartime. Paul had been offered a job at the Office of War Information because someone liked the book he had written with visual aids called, We Call It Human Nature. The way I met him was – and is – important in the story of my life ...

NOTE: The narrative continues on the next page of the spiral notebook, but Bea's mind seems to have jumped back in time.

... Because I had worked for CBS Radio before the days of TV and because I had been fired by the grotesque head of the Department of Education, Sterling Fisher. (Oh, he was a sterling fisher all right but did his fishing in the Bronx where he took up with little girls, eager to sleep their way up.)

NOTE: IN THE MARGIN BEA HAS WRITTEN that a refusal to sleep one's way up led to being fired.

After college I wanted to do something in the field of education, and so I had taken a summer course at the NYU Radio Workshop. That had led me to qualify for the window-dressing department at an otherwise strictly bottom-line section of Bill Paley’s CBS.

My salary was ridiculously low, $30 a week. I was proud to get a raise to $35. With this sum I was able to support myself in NYC. I lived in a rather crumby section in a walk-up apartment, costing only $50 a month. I took it over from Selden Rodman.

So many years later I like to think of this early self-sufficiency. Sometimes I was a little embarrassed to be delivered there by such people as Deems Taylor …”

The narrative stops here. So often Bea did this, start a memoir, then leave the reader wondering what happened next. I find clues elsewhere. This statement my dad wrote on a pad, for instance: “Man’s greatest problem is coping with women in his life – his mother, psychologically, and later his mates. The problem is to find a woman who will make a man whole, free him from his mother and release his pent-up creative energies. The sexual act is part of the problem as a stimulus to creation.”

Hmmm. Not very romantic.

Digging for more information, I come across Chapter V (marked “or VI”) of a novel Bea never finished:

“They had meant to spend the afternoon at Dumbarton Oaks, but the park was closed. They proceeded quietly along the wooded path. Here in the seclusion of the trees, some of the tension left her. After a while, they came to a large clean oak log and sat down.

He was telling her about his early life – some of the things she wanted to know. She wasn’t eager; she knew they would come eventually. And she had half guessed some of them. But it was good they came so soon in the relationship.

It was a story she had heard before, the one about the rebellious child who befriends the servants and finds a bulwark in them against parents who do not have the time nor the flexibility to understand …

Sara had decided that his absorbing interest in clarification was an unconscious expression of his own inner psychic need. She was pleased and surprised though, to hear him say that he had even considered seeing an analyst to find out what sort of a blockage might be causing it.

She felt a lift in her spirit at this evidence of insight and quietly remarked that it always seemed to her wise for people interested in psychology to get themselves analyzed. He said it was not psychology he was primarily interested in.

She knew she was on dangerous ground now and spoke slowly: “No, not psychology exactly. But your interest was reflected in the book you wrote. Besides, anyone concerned with anything bordering on psychology does well to avail himself of all the new values that analysis turns up.” Then she spoke about some of the ways it had helped her.

He said perhaps it would be wise for him to be analyzed so that he could be more able to love her. She felt as if he had handed her such a beautiful bouquet that she could hardly reach out her hands and take it …”

The Reunion

2006-09-23T05:14:00.000-07:00

I can hear Bea chattering away. The low hum has continued off and on through the night. I go in to tell her to be quiet around 1 a.m., and she asks which gown I plan to wear to her party.

This morning the subject is still apparel:

BEA: “How do you feel about wearing a uniform?”

ME: “No way.”

BEA: “Okay, so you’ll have to wear a dress then. An appropriate dress.”

Talk-talk-talk-talk-talk. How can anyone have so much to say? The monologue seems to spew out faster as the day wears on. Now, at almost 5 p.m., I wish she would stop. Jabbering this way is not normal. Bea has become that wind-up doll whose mechanism has broken, the one from Mad Magazine, Alfred E. Newman.

I feel like shaking her and screaming, “Shut up!”

On a scale of 1 to 10, the sound level must be about a 2, a gentle rumble only I notice as a permanent fixture of the day’s soundtrack. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her lips parched. When I offer ice cream, Bea asks me to serve Martin and Ruth, standing behind me, first. I ask if Helen is here, too.

“Not right now,” Bea says. “I think she’ll be back later though.”

“How about Dorothy?”

“Some family person said she was dead.”

Right! Many words ago, I spoke of Dorothy’s death in Austria. For some unfathomable reason, Bea has retained this information.

I was thinking about her sisters today. How nice it would be to have a family reunion, just us women, four generations, by Bea’s bedside. Helen would come with her cigarettes, picking bits of tobacco off her tongue; Dorothy with her gregarious toothy smile; Bertha, their mother, whom I have never met. I’m sure “little” Dotty, would be here in a split second if I invited her three daughters. The trip for sisters Nan, Sally, and Margot would take longer as they must travel by car and plane. They could bring their daughters, too, and I’d invite mine. Seventeen women in all. We could share insight on life and men, have a few laughs, express what each of us feels is really important. The older souls could pour their accumulated knowledge into a horn and pass it around so everyone could drink her fill. How joyous such an occasion would be!

I share these thoughts with my manic mother.

“Why, I think it’s a wonderful idea!” Bea exclaims.

As I close the door, I hear her voice again. She has already started planning the festivities….

Another Talking Marathon Begins ...

2006-09-22T04:40:00.000-07:00

“Has anybody seen Helen?” Bea asks, as if my deceased aunt has just stepped outside for a cigarette, biting the edge of her thin upper lip with its garish red lipstick, also a shade favored by my mother, who applied the lipstick more meticulously so it did not smear.

“No,” I say. “Are you worried about Helen?”

“Helen takes care of herself. What about Dorothy? Is she dead?”

From the look on Bea’s face, I know that, quick as greased lightning, we have left the dream world behind. I acknowledge that sister Dorothy has indeed died, more than a dozen years after Helen.

“How did that happen?”

I have told the story before, but she needs to hear it again: “Dorothy had a stroke, walking across a bridge, in Austria, on a guided tour. Remember when you went on a guided tour of St Petersburg? Aunty Dotty did the same in Austria. Seems like a good way to end a life, don’t you think? Having a good time? Dorothy was a good-time-kind-of-girl.”

Bea nods. She is all there this morning.

“Has anything changed in the neighborhood?”

My mother sounds ready to organize her annual cocktail party, a source of the latest gossip on our neighbors and always a fun occasion. They all used to meet for cocktails at least once a year, a tradition Bea initiated.

“No,” I lie. Why bring up friends who have died or been moved to assisted living facilities?

Upon my return from the kitchen with breakfast, I notice her mind has raced elsewhere.

“They don’t have fights now, do they?”

“Who are you talking about?” I ask.

“The people on television.”

“You were watching a movie on television?”

Bea nods. There is no television set in her room.

My elderly mother experiences dreams in a new way: mind-movies have become a real source of pleasure in her stripped-down bedridden world. Often when I peek in, there’s a beatific expression on her face. Not now. She is peering around expectantly. I glance behind me. There is nothing there.

“Where did that Pauly go?” Bea asks, as if her grandson had just ducked behind the armchair, a game of hide and seek from the past recreated by her overactive brain.

It is so bizarre to careen from reality to irrationality this way. The dizzying ride doesn’t bother Bea, but it makes me queasy, especially when I think we have only lived through the first ten minutes of our day!

“Paul’s in California,” I say in a firm voice and push the balls of my feet against the floor in search of grounding for us both. Bea has started another one of her talking marathons.

“What’s the name of the guy here then?”

“You mean someone was here?” I ask innocently and switch on the stereo. “Italian, with an amazing voice?”

I leave her with Andrea Bocelli and go about my own life for the next hour…

Rocking and Rolling with Bea and Lisa

2006-09-21T06:40:00.000-07:00

There are places I would rather be. Paris. Rome. Boston, holding the hand of my daughter whose beloved cat just died. But I will not abandon my mother.

Bea sleeps now. In fact, she snores loudly.

This afternoon I helped Lisa with the bed bath. Protruding bones always affect me more when I serve as helper. I reach down and poke at a bump, unsure what lies beneath the taut skin. The bump turns out to be part of Bea’s ribcage. None of us are prepared to see bodies this gaunt, legs broomstick thin.

Lisa indicates a purple splotch on Bea’s heel. I take note. It will need to be checked every day. I smear on some Bag Balm.

We “rock and roll” Bea, change her nightie and sheets. It takes two to tango, ditto for bed baths. Lisa uses humor to distract our victim. We turn her this way and that, slip in a sheet, slip out a brief, adjust the sheepskin so it is in an optimum position.

“I’m cold!” Bea protests.

Lisa covers her patient with a towel, then applies Bea’s new Lavender & Acacia Body Milk to dry-prune skin.

I untangle and wash her hair, then braid it.

Bea doesn’t want to play Name the Snarls today. She can’t wait for the ordeal to be over.

Why does my mother still live? What is she living for?

“What a great day!” I say to Lisa. “The sky is so blue!”

“I want to go outside,” Bea pipes up suddenly, the first words she has uttered that were not a complaint.

“Do you have a wheelchair?” Lisa asks. “We could …” She stops, realizing we couldn’t.

Bea is so fragile, like an antique vase with a hairline fissure that might, at any time, break into millions of pieces.

She doesn’t eat. She barely drinks.

“Let me sleep!” Bea cries, angry now at the four hands still manipulating her poor body.

Emotionally this elderly care takes a toll. I snap at Sven, eat too much, argue with my son. Sven reminisces about his plan to visit an archeological dig in Turkey. He also wants to see Rome.

Bea used to tell me that my father’s mother was quite a lady. “She knew when it was time to leave,” Bea always said. My grandma died at 82, several days after a trip to the hospital. I had just turned four. She did what was appropriate, the implication being so Bea and my father could live their lives.

Now modern medicine makes it possible to live longer than ever before. The drug companies and the doctors who pioneer the life-prolonging operations must never consider that living longer doesn’t always imply living better…

And longer lives have consequences. Family members must make choices on elderly care, a burden earlier generations did not face.

Bea is awake when I tuck her in for the night. “Thank you for being my daughter,” she says with a gentle smile.

That’s all it takes. Tears fill my eyes.

“You’re welcome,” I respond softly. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I leave her there with the hum of the electric air mattress....

Bea’s Russian Connections

2006-09-20T03:40:00.000-07:00

While abroad, Bea journeyed to Russia. Paul didn’t go. My dad knew that if he returned to his homeland, everything would feel so familiar that leaving again would be problematic. He had a new life in the United States, and Beatrice needed him by her side.

Bea thoroughly enjoyed her guided tour of St. Petersburg. At the Hermitage, my mother managed to get separated from the group, so taken was she by the art on display. I imagine her wandering through the marble corridors, lost and a bit panicked, but pleased to have an experience all her own. If Bea was able to throw herself so totally into writing and editing Private World of the Last Tsar with my father, it is surely in part due to her personal discovery of my grandfather’s world, previously limited to his diaries and photos.

While Paul was working at Dartmouth in 1944, my parents had made friends with Professor Dimitri von Mohrenschildt. They would stay in touch with this fellow Russian émigré who spent the last years of his life at Sri Auribindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India. Bea and Paul followed the situation in Russia closely and contributed every year through International Orthodox Christian Charities. When Dimitri mentioned the desire to help the children of Russia, Bea suggested IOCC and acted as liaison. Dimitri acknowledged her assistance on a postcard, September 12, 1996:

“Just a word to tell you, dear Beatrice, that I finally got in touch with Alexis Troubetskoi. I sent him a check on Wells Fargo Bank, California, for $10,000 and received a reply dated Sept. 2 from Moscow. He will come to the States on Sept. 26 and will return to Russia in October when he will attend to the disbursement of these funds as I suggested. Thank you so very much for your help.”

Notes on Spain

2006-09-19T04:54:00.000-07:00

Bea always believed in the power of literature. When I moved to France, she suggested French classics and sent a book on French civilization. “What are you reading now?” my mother would always ask. Not reading was simply unacceptable.

In the late seventies, Bea and Paul spent a few months of winter in a rented house on the Spanish Riviera. They had stayed the previous year in St. Jean Cap Ferrat. Proximity to grandchildren was the primary motivation, and each trip included a stop in Paris. Then work on my dad’s book began. Research was easier in the university town of Gainesville, so they started going to Florida for the winter. Bea quickly made a coterie of new friends, all retired folks who shared her love of culture.

While in Spain, Bea wrote this note:

“Better to understand Spain, I am reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. I had not realized before how shamefully the USSR destroyed the Socialist movement in the civil war.

I wish we had the opportunity to meet more Spanish people. In Madrid we shall see remarkable Carmen Aldecoa, who went with us to Granada. We also have met the Spanish wife of a Russian. She is a friend of Salvatore Dali and has some exceptional examples of his work – sketches for paintings – on the wall. Contemporary to Dali and to us, she now seems more a monument to her own past beauty than a currently responsive product of Spain.

I like the men who deliver the firewood and work on the grounds. They are open and friendly and have a quality of endurance. I like them better than the brittle shop girls in Marbella, some of whom have a feckless quality. Not that I blame them, for one must preserve one’s own inner space in this shifting period we are now going through.

We feel here in Spain the years of repression by a totalitarian regime. In this respect Spain must bear some similarities to the USSR. I think there has been the attitude in the government of ‘The people be damned’ and the people must know it.

Still, there has been some progress, fortunately, within the Church – an element lacking in the USSR. A leading protestor in Barcelona is a priest.

And yet the reactionary element in the Church is still strong and organized.

When the trouble comes, it will come in Catalonia.

We have yet to see Madrid and Barcelona – next month.”

The Challenge

2006-09-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

It’s the middle of the night. I am sleeping peacefully. Then Bea shouts “Food!” I pop up in bed like one of those roly-poly dolls, with weighted bottom. How I hate to be awakened! I remain cordial but every bone in my body cries out for sleep as I feed my mother.

Bea must have noticed the difference in attitude, because upon my return at 8 a.m., she is already talking up a storm and for a reason …

ME: “My! You are chatty this morning.”

BEA: “I’m trying to do it all today so I won’t do it tonight.”

We share a good laugh, the first of many during the day. It helps to laugh about it.

My midnight surliness has made Bea rethink our living arrangements. All morning she has been making plans to move in with Virginia, a friend who is unfortunately dead: “Darling, I feel I’m in the way. I need to be a guest for a limited time only.”

I watch her fold her hands, a gesture that, in the past, accompanied an important decision of some sort, incongruous now that she is bedridden and dependent on others. My mother is using a voice that used to make sense: “I know Virginia would want me. Ruth, I think, is still alive. I could live there. I just need to know what room I’m supposed to stay in until then…”

“Right here. This room. This is your room,” I tell her. And, to myself, “Patience!”

A caregiver daughter of an elderly parent must let go of the person the parent used to be and open arms to an invalid child, quite a challenge.

Yesterday Bea could barely put one word in front of the other. Today she can't stop talking: “I have to be in contact with other people. It came over me when I realized everybody was doing something except me, and I want to do something. I need advice as to what to do. If I had some goal …”

When she gets manic, I shoot from the hip. I don’t mean to be cruel, but sheer honesty seems the way to go. Once the flow of words ceases, I say, “You can just stay right here in this bed until you feel it’s time to die.”

To my surprise, she declares simply, “Thank you.”

I assume Bea has grasped the concept, but the next time I stop in, she is again working on departure plans: “I have to be somewhere with my parents. I didn’t intend to stay here longer. I was planning to go home. My mother always said, ‘Why don’t you come home?’”

“Meaning you could always come home?”

Bea nods, very serious indeed. I take her boney hand in mine and gently explain the family home in Montclair was torn down and replaced by a parking lot many years ago; I am her family now; she is in her own bedroom.

This information is not what she wants to hear. Her voice takes on a more strident quality: “I want to talk to my mother. How do I go about doing that? I call her up. Can you get the number for me?”

“She died a long time ago. I’m sorry but you cannot call your mother.”

Bea heaves a sigh of exasperation. “All these people dying!”

Denial? Not really. Life is so worthwhile. Why would anyone go and die? The idea is so far from Bea's frame of reference that she cannot comprehend.

I realize I am living an unusual experience. Not every daughter gets to accompany her mother on this final journey. We are weaving our way down the road of life, and there’s no map. That’s what makes the trip so exhilarating …

Of Sisters, Imaginary and Otherwise

2006-09-17T06:08:00.000-07:00

“Describe Dorothy,” I request, curious to see what Bea will say.

“Blond hair, blue eyes. Normal in size.”

Bea stops. Talking isn’t what it used to be. The way she advances words reminds me of a child learning to walk – a few cautious steps, a pause, a few more steps, but then once the legs start moving, it is hard to get them to stop. “I went to visit Dorothy in the Virgin Islands. She offended me the very minute I got there. She said, ‘You smell. Go take a hot shower.’”

Bea lurches to a stop. She has been remembering one of the last times the two sisters met. I imagine the scene. With Dot’s husband Charlie in between, they confront each other by the slate blue wall on a hill in St. Thomas. Snakes are spilling out of Dorothy’s mouth. Bea stands there, crushed and speechless. It occurs to me that, in reality, she probably answered right back.

Women who don’t have sisters often wish they did. I stare down at my mother. Her solicitous letters from Europe indicate Bea was instrumental in getting Dorothy to attend college. Bea loved her sisters in a profound way. She even loved complicated Helen whose name my mother was calling last night. “Can you tell me what you think is important in life?” I ask.

Bea is so still I wonder if she has registered my question. It is something I have been meaning to ask for a while. Her eyes are closed. I wait. Has she gone to sleep?

“Friendship. To care about people. I care about people.”

A word, a pause, a phrase, another phrase, all uttered in a raspy voice that is hard to understand.

My mother tires easily these days and indicates a nap would be nice: “It isn’t necessary for you to wake me up as long as my little sister is here. She likes people.”

Instinctively I realize Bea isn’t referring to Dorothy, but rather that imaginary sister present recently. “How do you know?” I ask.

“I’ve heard her say so, and I feel it inside of me.”

“What is she like?”

“I have a hard time defining her. She’s me! Sometimes she feels oppression like die, d-i-e.”

Her words do not make sense, so I steer the conversation to a dream that does, this email from Dorothy’s daughter, Nan:

“Last night I dreamed of my mother, in old age. She demanded to ride a motorcycle, because she said Bea had ridden a motorcycle and she'd be damned if she'd be outdone. So I got a motorcycle, and in great trepidation got her up on it and off she went, slowly in a very large circle. As she came back she slipped off the back. I ran to get her, really scared that she'd broken a hip, but she stood up and said triumphantly, 'Tell Beatrice she's not the only one who can ride a motorcycle!'”

“Is that something Dorothy would have done?” I ask.

“Yes. Is Dorothy dead?

“She is.”

“How did that happen? She was so young!”

I pick up a photo of Bea and teenage Dorothy, at the New Jersey shore. In Bea's mind her little sister has become that young and carefree girl again.

“Now let me sleep.”

I have been dismissed.

The edges of reality have become a blur, like LeCount Hollow Beach this afternoon, partially veiled in mist due to the change of season. After spring, comes summer. After summer, fall. My mother has already entered the winter of her life and I feel the chill.

"Everyone Has a Name"

2006-09-16T06:06:00.000-07:00

Bea often brings up her name.

“My name is Beatrice,” she will say quietly to herself, lying there in bed and wiggling her toes, “What a pretty name!” Or, “Beatrice is my name. It means ‘bringer of happiness.’”

I look on the Internet and discover she is right: "From the Latin name Beatrix, derived from beatus 'blessed soul' and meaning 'that gives happiness, joy.'"

Today I found this neat little acrostic poem Bea wrote in her later years, no doubt, while bored and already no longer able to read for long periods at a time:

B Be careful when you fly alone!
E Everybody wants to fly
A around this world from
T time to time,
R returning now and then,
I in record time, to
C come again to
E every happy place remembered,

G going over many years.
R returning, turning to my youth
A a long, long time ago
B because it helps to remember:
B Beatrice is my name.
E Everyone has a name.

"Unusually Old"

2006-09-15T04:07:00.000-07:00

“Do you make a noise when you die?” Bea asks when I come in with breakfast.

I surmise from the urgency in her voice that she has been thinking about this question for a while.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Why?”

“She was asking me.”

“Who was asking you?

“My imaginary sister.”

We have explained sisters Helen and Dorothy have both passed. Curious about death but unwilling to admit interest, Bea attributes the question to an “imaginary” sister. How hard to be the last leaf on the family tree!

Five years ago, Bea expressed her feelings on old age in a poem:

I am a special person.
I am unusually old!
I am surprised to live so long.
I am alone because my friends are gone.
I am the proud grandparent of two granddaughters and three grandsons.

I am happy to be a mother.
I am glad that I could give birth.
I am very tired sometimes and want to cry.

I am the author of a book.
I am proud of that.
I am glad that when I die my work will live on.

I am sometimes ashamed of myself.
I am glad to live in Wellfleet, near the big ocean.
I am going to enjoy the sunlit days.

I am enjoying the flowers my daughter plants.
I am afraid when I hear a strange noise at night.
I am bothered by birds chirping early in the morning.
I am a special person.
I am unusually old.

Sven's Role = Moral Support

2006-09-14T04:32:00.000-07:00

As husbands go, Sven is rather patient. Nine years ago, when I suggested our move to what was for him a foreign country and the care of my elderly parents, he embraced the idea not with enthusiasm, but rather like Robinson Crusoe, determined to make the best of the situation.

Bea took an immediate liking to my new husband. Once he had devoured the in-depth articles in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, she started sharing opinions, delighted to have an in-house intellectual with whom to converse, not to mention a handsome escort for seminars at the Wellfleet Public Library. Sven enjoyed my mother although she dominated the dinner conversations to such an extent that I had to remind him not to neglect little old me.

Bea is mostly silent these days. In fact, this week, she shut up Nurse Jane by asking, “Do you always talk so much?”

I could have pointed out former volubility, but didn’t.

The hospice folks tend to be our only contact with the outside world. Neighbors know Bea is in the homestretch and imagine she needs a quiet environment.

Yesterday I discussed the phenomenon with Jane who told me it is the norm for most caregivers. We tend to become homebodies in order to keep a close watch on loved ones. Social life is curtailed. We hesitate to go out. The result is isolation.

These days Bea’s slumber is profound. Sven goes into her bedroom to say hello every once and a while, but he, too, shies away. There is something about Bea’s circumstance that discourages contact. Perhaps people are reminded of their own mortality, as if death, like a tornado, might suck up everything in its passage …

The Emergence of Sexual Desire in Women's Novels – Introduction

2006-09-13T05:40:00.000-07:00

In the late 1980s, Bea began assiduously doing research as she prepared what could have been a marvelous book. Unfortunately, she never was able to finish it. Nonetheless, we have a glimpse of what it might have been thanks to her introduction:

“In their rebellion against the strictures of patriarchy, women writers have increasingly become aware of – and articulate about – their own sexual feelings. The gradual emergence of physical desire as a subject is reflected in the novels of British women between the mid-19th and mid 20th centuries. Those writers, who consciously or unconsciously project passion in their work, at the same time protest male dominance and the institutions of western culture shaped by male dominance.

Included here are love scenes and related expressions of women’s amorous feelings form the works of seven novelists of literary distinction, chosen to show a progression. Starting with the three Brontë sisters, chapters proceed chronologically to Olive Schreiner, Dorothy Richardson, Rosamond Lehmann and Doris Lessing. All but Richardson are of mixed ancestry, and all by Anne Brontë have spent some time outside England. These circumstances may have made possible greater freedom of expression in their time. With the possible exception of Lehmann, all protest patriarchal institutions. The female reader may at times identify with the heroine subliminally and, as in a fairy tale, find a greater understanding of her own nature. Art transmutes the unacceptable to a form that can be taken in by the psyche.

Up until 1847, with one notable exception, women’s novels concerned with courtship and marriage conformed to the strict sexual taboo of the period. The exception was Mary Wollstonecraft, best known for her polemical The Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. For this treatise she has the honor of being the first rebel against patriarchy in Britain. She later fell in love with an American, had a child, and, rejoicing in the discovery of love, wrote The Wrongs of Women, or Maria. She died in childbirth before the novel was finished and her husband, William Godwin, published the long fragment in 1797. As Ellen Moers remarks, it ‘contains Wollstonecraft’s most radical feminism and most powerful writing on a woman’s passion,’ putting emphasis on a woman’s right to passion. Like her poignant love letters, the unfinished novel is finding renewed attention of late, but at the end of the 18th century, it did not reach the wide reading public responsive to Jane Austen’s gently satiric novels, nor, a generation later, her own daughter, Mary Godwin Shelley’s romantic horror story, Frankenstein (1818).

Then, fifty years after Wollstonecraft’s Maria came the publication in 1847 of three novels by three remarkable sisters, Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848), and Anne Brontë (1820-1849), writing under the androgynous pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. All three sisters, in very different ways, wrote about a woman’s attraction to a man, and all three presented heroines who rebelled against a male-dominated society.

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, Charlotte’s masterpiece, left staid literary critics gasping with indignation. Discerning reviewers like George Henry Lewis, immediately recognized its distinction. The book had wide sales, brought lasting success to its young publisher, but was disparaged all the more when it became known that Jane Eyre was the work of a young, unmarried woman. Some critics even said it was coarse. A century later the post-Freudian Richard Chase stated his belief that the novel’s power arose from its mythologizing of Jane’s confrontation with masculine sexuality.

Anne’s novel of note was her second, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published the following year. While lacking the passion of her sisters’ novels, it was criticized for its too vivid depiction of debauchery. However, Anne wrote with a high moral purpose: she dared to make a strong plea for divorce at a time when all rights in marriage were for men only. In 1930, George Moore referred to the book as ‘the literary Cinderella’ of the Brontë books. With the advent of Women’s Studies, the book is finding renewed attention.

Emily’s great work, Wuthering Heights, has received its widest acclaim for the story of the undying love between the willful Catherine and the foundling Heathcliff.

An early and lasting influence on Emily and Charlotte was the store of Irish legends and Yorkshire folk tales, which the Brontë children learned from their father. The Reverend Patrick Brontë’s life and antecedents had a marked effect on his children’s lives and work. Perfervid and devout Evangelical parson that he was, Reverend Brontë may well have been surprised at his own influence.

In Part I, we shall consider the novels, as well as the unique background, of the Brontë sisters.

Part II will relate to the evolution in the literary expression of sexual desire by British women novelists during the century between the triple publication date of 1847 of the Brontës’ first published novels and the 1960s works of Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated city.

These seven writers, all of recognized literary merit, have been chosen as most clearly exemplifying the gradual articulation of feminine desire at various levels of consciousness in the novels of women writers during this crucial time-span.”