27168832
(Another in the series on Eleanor and Pete, the columnist’s parents)
It was in her 81st year when Eleanor realized she could no longer live alone. Pete had passed away more than 15 years ago. A lifetime of surgeries had finally exacted a terrible price; she had become incontinent. It is bad enough to lose your health. It is even worse to lose your dignity.
As she lay on her bed in a rehabilitation center, she came to a difficult decision. She did not want to become a burden on her family. Wearing a diaper was insulting enough, but needing your family to change you was, in her mind, the ultimate humiliation. She asked her son and daughter-in-law to find a good nursing home for her.
Eleanor was lonely living alone, but she liked being her own person. She valued her independence. Now that too was being taken from her.
The nursing home was in the heart of the city. Its lobby made Eleanor feel as if she were staying at a fancy hotel. It housed more affluent seniors on the upper floors with a nice dining room, beauty parlor and physical fitness facility. When those seniors needed some assistance, they moved onto a lower floor that housed assisted living. When the need for care became more acute, they moved into the nursing facility where Eleanor was going to live. She cracked that the only move after that was out the door in a pine box.
After her admittance examination, the doctor leaned over to her son and daughter-in-law and told them to visit often as the nurses need to see their presence to help them know Eleanor has not been forgotten. It is not intentional, the doctor said, but the residents with caring family tend to get more attention. Later they found out the doctor’s own father was a resident there.
Eleanor was bipolar. She experienced regular cycles of mania and depression. Her husband, like so many his age, had never believed in mental illnes, but that his wife fell into a depression because of external circumstances such as the serious illness of a family member. In order to help his wife, he kept bad news from her. He also threw her pills down the drain in a moment of frustration.
In the nursing home, Eleanor was kept on a strict medication regimen. She began improving. The cycles of depression flattened out as did her periods of manic activity. Amidst the gloomy surroundings of the facility’s fourth floor, his mother slowly returned to the person he thought had been lost forever.
Eleanor became quite popular with the nursing attendants. She came to know most of them well enough to discuss details of their personal lives. She became like a mother to the young nurses with families. She participated in the various activities and loved when a musical performer would visit and entertain them. Eleanor retained her interests outside the nursing facility. Her family took her in a wheelchair to a restaurant or the nearby square.
Her roommate was a colorful lady also from a South Philadelphia neighborhood. The roommate suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, but it was not yet debilitating, and she and Eleanor became great companions. Occasionally, Eleanor would get frustrated with her roomie because she asked the same questions over and over. She suffered from some irrational fears, and turned to Eleanor for guidance. Eleanor could be alternately helpful or cutting and abrupt with her remarks.
If she didn’t feel like being bothered, Eleanor would threaten to request another room if her roommate didn’t stop pestering her. It was the ultimate weapon Eleanor unkindly held over her roomie’s head — the threat to abandon her. Therefore, her roommate worried every time Eleanor became ill and occasionally had to make a short trip to the hospital. She feared Eleanor would never return.
As she entered her fourth year in the facility, Eleanor’s health began to fail noticeably. She could no longer be taken to nearby restaurants or the square. She lost her interest in food. At one point, her family registered a complaint with corporate to halt the steady diet of chicken they kept serving her. The poultry dinners were halted, only to resume again. In order to stimulate her appetite, one kind attendant took to making her root beer floats. It worked for awhile, but soon she stayed in her bed all day. No longer did she go to see her favorite visiting performer. Her excited chatter no longer echoed down the halls or greeted the attendants who came into her room.
One evening, they came for Eleanor to take her for the final time to the hospital. Her roommate grew upset. Eleanor was leaving her again. Would she return? Somehow, even in the mist that cloaked her roommate’s consciousness, she knew the answer.
The one positive of Alzheimer’s disease, as it inexorably advances, is you only miss a person so long before they are lost in your memory forever. Her son called her roommate one day about a month later. The woman didn’t remember him and never mentioned Eleanor. SPR
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
28043877
