WAITING (Nursing Home Life, part 7)

I have never been much good at waiting, but when it is necessary, I prefer to wait for good things—Christmas, tooth fairy, the arrival of spring. Being a person of privilege and a hope lady too, I find I’ve had little experience figuring out what you can do while you wait for bad things to happen. The experience I have comes from way back. There was this one time, the Saturday morning of the May long weekend, back in 1973. David and I set out for a drive on the highway in his mother’s white Mustang. The sunny sparkling day was perfect. I was still a teen-ager then with my boyfriend by my side. The weekend stretched before us with the promise of my mother’s cooking waiting for our arrival. Nothing could go wrong. But then something did. David saw that the car ahead of us had come to a complete stop. “Hold on,’ he cried, taking the car out of gear and slamming on the brakes. We skidded, and we skidded, and then we stopped, just short of the car in front. We had cheated disaster. It was a tremendous relief. But then it wasn’t. From behind us came the squeal of brakes and a growing vision of blue that filled the rear view mirror. From inside David’s mother’s mustang came a mind-numbing realization. Without warning we had been plunged into limbo. We were in great danger, and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it except wait for as long as it would take for a bad thing to happen. Reason tells me that we only waited a few seconds to be catapulted from behind into the back of the stationary car in front. Memory tells me otherwise. How many years did I age while we sat there filling our heads with that terrible screeching? Was it an hour, a day, a lifetime? And what did I do while I waited? Did I utter words of undying love to David? Did I write a book, compose a song, plan my career, strike a bargain with God? Memory tells me I did none of these things. I simply waited, and waited, and waited, feeling powerless. In that circumstance, there was nothing else that could have been done. These days I find myself here at Laurier House with David, healthy and able, loved and fed. It wouldn’t be bad at all were it not for the fact that together we are once again waiting indefinitely for a bad thing to happen. This time the waiting is much longer. The very length of it gets to me. With more time to spend, it becomes more difficult to sink into the comforting anesthesia of powerlessness. “Do something!” says a nagging voice from deep within. “Do whatever it is that you can do.” Some mornings when I rise, sleepy-eyed, contemplating the stretching of the endless day, I stand by David’s bed, dripping thickened water into his mouth, trying to conjure a picture of the woman I hope to be. She’s my hero and I am hoping that having the picture will help me be more like her. The woman I hope to be is serene. She has long ago accepted the inevitability of her husband’s death and the unstoppable decline towards it. She does not strain to control that which is beyond her control. The woman I hope to be is vigilant. She reads the latest research. She studies her situation and notices improvements need to be made. She keeps records and asks questions. The woman I hope to be is gracious. She is not the sort who, losing her temper, would snap at an irritating inexperienced care-giver: “Would you just be quiet so we can hear what David is trying to tell us!” The woman I hope to be is creative. She has the smarts to figure out how to get things done. Just suppose he wants to watch The Good Wife on Netflix. Suppose his hands are too rigid to operate the remote. If blindness renders her unable to read the screen, and his speech is so slurred that she can’t tell whether he is telling her to press Up, Down or Okay. She will find some way around that. The woman I hope to be has a sense of humour. Once she has figured a way of getting The Good Wife on the screen, she will linger with him, listening to the voices of those cut-throat glamorous women, wondering which of them she would need to copy in order to be a good wife. The woman I hope to be sleeps more peacefully, exercises more vigorously, plays more music, eats more healthily, laughs more heartily appreciates more gratefully, gives more generously. She reads better books, phones lonely people, delights in the antics of her grandchildren and listens patiently to the troubles of others. She writes and writes and writes until finally she gets something that can be published on her blog. Doing all of this leaves her barely enough time to contemplate the difficulties involved in waiting for a bad thing to happen. The woman I hope to be occasionally shows up to help me out. When she’s here, I do better.