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Muse 12

the healing muse, volume 12

These are just a few excerpts from the many inspiring selections in Muse 12. To order a copy and read the entire issue, please visit our Support the Muse/Order Copies page.

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Marylou DePeitro, Snow on the Brain

The very first sighting
was a fistful of specks,
                        a flurry
          of confetti
               or ash.

“We call it
              ‘Snow on the brain’”
the doctor tells me
     (shrouding the truth
     in beauty and mystery
     and mesmerizing
     solace).

He says it again,
             “Snow on the brain”

but by now I am

           drifting

                    drifting

Lynn Lifshin, When You Talk About Making Dinner for Friends

when you retire in five
years I say nothing. I'm
thinking only to the
first snow, to a white
blanketing us together.
When my mother talked
of her next spring, I
thought only of a summer,
a few weeks of lilacs,
roses. "We'll visit Virginia,
DC once a year," you
say and I'm trying to
remember mantras of
hearts and valve repairs.
You see yourself in a
kitchen with copper pots
and ladles, definitely
not a white tile floor that
shows every stain while
I try not to stare at
the floor as if I dug in
I'd uncover cracked skulls,
bones your words still
cling to, heart tissue, all
I'm afraid to lose

Tish Pearlman, The Drowned Girl

meet me there
near where the undertow
meets the body    locked in tossing
currents
where is horizon?
where is shore?    tumbling
I recall the drowned girl
she was a Mexican (they all whispered)
visiting Lake Gregory, not one of us
probably couldn’t swim (they all whispered)
lost her way
I could have been her
about my age
gelatinous substance on her mouth
long dark hair cascading
lying limp on the sand.    a crowd gathered
almost a dream, that summer memory
and afterward,
we went back to our towels
soaked in the sun, swam in the lake
never realizing that that late
morning in the mid-60’s
would follow us
hand in hand with
the drowned girl who
could have been one of
us, not forgotten, but lost
still,
lying forever on the sand—
tell me, did you
have a name?
drowned girl was a destination,
but it could not have been
your name.

Non-Fiction

Donna L. Emerson, Visiting Alzheimer's

9:30 a.m.

Jack’s wife Clementina finds him at 2 a.m. running through their apple orchards. “A stone’s throw from the freeway,” her voice breaks as she signs the papers for Jack’s placement in the Alzheimer’s care home. She fears not only for his safety, but her own. “Jack hears messages on the radio and starts rambling. Then he runs. I can’t keep up with him. Nobody’s sleeping.”

All six feet of Jack stand up. He reaches to the shelf above his television for two Life magazines “—from the War—I took these.” He points to two sepia-toned black and whites, soldiers in Paris, brilliantly captured by his field camera at close range. “Used available light,” he breathes deeply, his chest raises a little.

“He got awards for those,” Clementina softens, smiling. Her wiry hair calms down as she presses both sides of her head. She’s trying to look like herself.

“These are breathtaking,” I say. Jack and I talk photography for a minute, when Jack returns to a wandering tale about the clock behind me. I wonder if someday I’ll be sitting like this with my husband signing papers to put me in ‘a home.’ Me showing some social worker I never met, who I once was. Who I still am.

10:45 a.m.

Seventy-nine year old Molly walks around the farm kitchen, opening and closing cupboards, while her children talk to me about “putting her in a home.” After a few minutes, eyes never landing on any person in the room, but her head cocked, listening, Molly’s walk becomes a run. The cupboard doors slam more loudly with each turn. While her daughter says “We’ve been held captive for a year,” Molly approaches me and pinches me sharply on my forearm. Her short white Dutch bob nods with her head, her eyes crinkling pleasure, at my wince.

Now a new rhythm, with every lap around the big kitchen, doors slam, then she pinches me in a new place. “You don’t like me, do you, Molly?” I say, rubbing my shoulder and now cheek.

12 noon

Lucia is only sixty-two and is in the bedroom packing, as I arrive. “Where are you going, Lucia?” I stand very close. “I don’t know but the bus leaves in a few minutes. Gotta get out of here.” Lucia’s niece takes her hand, quietly and pulls her to the bed. Lucia brakes her feet, like a child.

“Everything’s OK, Aunt Lucy,” she strokes Lucia’s restless arms. After seeming to quiet, like a rabbit in a thicket, Lucia jumps up, turns to me “Help, me, now!” She grabs my hand and squeezes so hard I can’t let go. Her nails break the skin on the top of my hand.

“I want to help you,” I try to calm her, slipping my hand free so I can blot the blood and talk without gasping.

1:30 pm

James lies in fetal position on his new hospital bed, with no blankets over him.

“He stop talking Monday. Don’t eat. Don’t know me no more,” his caretaker whispers in the trailer’s hallway.

The room reeks of urine. I try not to choke, touch his shoulder, “James, are you cold?” He remains still, rigidly fixed, his eyes closed. I think of concentration camps, how we all die, bodies wither, only our bones last, after all.

3:00 pm

I read poetry with the twenty-five Alzheimer’s patients at an assisted living center. Most of the group wrote poems with me at our last meeting, last Tuesday.

Helen starts,

"I have been in every war.
Since the First War.
They still go on.
I am still here."

Jimmy goes next:

"My name is Ringo.
Ring-a-ding-dingo.
Meet me here."

Everyone laughs. Jimmy laughs back.

Florence begins,

I fear I’m losing my mind.
There’s nothing else to say.
Proclaim it."

Some read aloud, some ask me or an aide to read their poems, now neatly typed in large print by the Activities Director.

As we come to the end of our time, Lindy eyes Bob. Her face mischievous, dimples in full bloom. He stands up and offers his right hand to her. She puts both of hers in his and lets him lift her up to her feet. “Feels so good.” She smiles very close to his face. They can smell one another. Her eyes hold his. “Light as a feather,” he says as he winks at her.

Hand in hand, they ascend the stairs to a room they’ll likely share.

“Are they married?” I ask.

“No—just found each other here last week,” Laura tells me. “You know, the inhibitions go pretty quickly.”

Bob walks upstairs like my grandfather, slowly, deliberately, as if he has all the time in the world, with a determined smile, trusting blue eyes glancing at Lindy. She presses her body into his. At the same time he resembles a boy I knew in third grade. Face full of wonder.

“We had a woman here who had a husband at home, while she attached herself to another resident. Eventually the family took her back home because she became the talk of the town. Quite sexually active. Every family decides what’s best.”

As I drive away I think none of my clients are like the recent movies that try to heroically portray Alzheimer’s. They leave out the third and fourth dimensions. The delight at being in a group, writing. Reading or being read to. Some remember me, week to week. Some don’t, but remember something about our relationship in the moment. It may be my dress. They remember old poems by Bobby Burns. They recite Robert Frost with me. The films leave out the real laughter, the wrenching anger, the tender spots behind the running, pinching, packing to go, and the very real flirting. Alzheimer’s films want a story we all know. Most of us don’t want to really know.

I feel like running through Jack’s orchards with him. Getting on a bus to wherever it’s going. Pinching someone I don’t like because they aren’t listening to me. Going to bed with an attractive man just because it feels so good. Ringo-dingo, ring-a-ding-dingo.

My uncle Harry died of Alzheimer’s at ninety-one. He’d just listened to “When the Saints Come Marching In,” at the facility’s Valentine’s Day party. He wore his stethoscope around his neck to every meal, sometimes listening to peoples’ hearts.

Note: Names and details have been changed to protect client confidentiality in this group of home visit notes.

Fiction

Emily Weston, Being Lucy

He knows it has been a bad day when he gets home and she is talking to the dog.

He slams the door and sets the grocery bags down on the counter. "I'm home," he says, unnecessarily. He hears her rise and come out into the kitchen. She has already changed out of her scrubs. She kisses him quickly, and in the fading winter light, she looks older than her age, worn out.

"How was your day?"

She looks at him. "It was fine."

He takes a deep breath, takes a plunge. "Why don’t you work somewhere else?"

The fine lines furrow, the eyes narrow. "I said it was fine. Why would I want to change jobs?"

"You don’t seem fine. You were talking to the dog."

"Those damn windows. If we had neighbors, they'd know everything about us."

"We don’t have neighbors and I like the windows."

"I know." She bumps by him and gets the Advil out of the cupboard.

"You could try working out or something to let off steam," he tells her.

"Are you crazy? Do you know how hard I work already?"

"Or you could quit. I make enough," he says mildly.

"Don’t tell me what to do."

"I wasn’t. It was a suggestion."

"Don't suggest. It was a terrible idea."

He puts the groceries away, eggs and milk in the fridge, rice in the pantry. "Should I throw these steaks on?"

"How much did you pay for those?" She is glaring at him. "Never mind. I should know by now not to ask."

He doesn’t say anything. He wants to be thanked for good meat, for offering to cook, to grill in the cold, for goodness sake, and for getting everything on the list. He isn’t sure what he has done wrong, but he too knows by now not to ask.

She pulls a platter out of the cupboard and hands it to him. "How was your day?"

The question hangs, and he sees the office, crowded paper and programs. In his mind, above the mess and chaos, there are buildings not yet realized.

"Lots and lots of drafts," he says. "One of the drafters is out sick and I have to do his work, and this client is really pushy. They can afford to be, with what they're paying us." He cracks open a beer. "Stress, but I like it. It doesn't push me to come home and spill my guts to Lucy."

He sees the disdain flash across her face and immediately regrets his words.

They stand facing each other for a moment, a gulf of unsaid words between them.

Then she says, "Don't forget the lighter. The grill's been acting up again."

During dinner, she says, "Did you take Lucy out with you while you were cooking?"

"I don't pay attention to you all the time." She plays with her food. "It's undercooked."

"I forgot you don't like it that way."

She is about to say something, but bites her tongue. He waits. Then she says, "It's not about you, OK?"

For a while, she is silent. He thinks about windows on a sunny day, great sheets of glass that he’ll draw into his draft of his new building tomorrow. Windows that look clear, but when you stood back a little, you could only see reflections. Her eyes are like that. Her whole being is like that and there is something beneath that he can't touch. If he does, he’ll have to share it, and he feels like he can only offer pity. Is this love?

She mutters something about needing the bathroom and gets up. She doesn't return. They have a long standing agreement that one of them cooks and the other cleans up. He puts his plate in the sink and goes to his office.

He works on drafts. He wants to work from home all of the time, but there is a clause in the company's insurance that won't allow it. He loves his house with its huge windows, open spaces, and good sense. He designed it, created it around himself and his wife. It is on a hill, a half-hour from the city, isolating them from the world and sometimes from each other.

Outside the wind blows. The house creaks. He knows exactly what joint is creaking and where it needs to be fixed. If spring ever comes, he’ll fix it. He thinks about taking down the drywall, exposing the faulty joints, setting them right, repainting. The corners would be sharper and cleaner. Actually, that whole side of the house could be set straight. If he gets the next commission, they could have a screen porch on the south side.

His pencil draws straight, clean lines, and in his mind, a building rises.

Suddenly it is eleven p.m. He sits up sharply, and stands. She will be in bed already. He feels a sudden need for her, for her physical presence. He can't plumb her depths, can't reach her, and he is suddenly afraid that one day their little spats will create a rift that neither of them can bridge.

Or perhaps she'll wither away; her body, already small, worn down by the nature of her work, will finally crumple under the strain. He'll be left alone, strong and ropey as he was at twenty, to tend to her empty shell. She should exercise, he thinks, eat right. Stop the diet of chocolate, coffee, lettuce and Advil. She'd feel better.

The dishes are where he left them. He shakes his head.

He brushes his teeth. The bedroom is dark with moonlight and silence. He climbs in bed next to her.

She is curled up facing away from him. He touches her neck gently, reassuring himself that she is indeed still there. She stirs. "Sorry to wake you," he says.

"I haven't slept yet."

She does not move towards him, nor does she move away. Finally, he pulls her closer and kisses her neck. She shudders and he reaches a hand down her leg. Then he realizes she is crying.

He fends off his irritation. What am I, your counselor? He doesn’t know what to say. Who ever does?

"The worst thing about today was that the patient's sister just kept saying, ‘we were supposed to go to Florida together.' And that was the worst thing. I could just see it. When she first got to us, she looked good, like a cancer survivor...by the time she died she looked terrible." She sniffs. "The fucking magic of sepsis. It'll fucking transform you from a human into a fucking corpse in less time than a bullet."

It is quiet. In the long dark silence between words, the clock ticks and time moves on.

"I've been thinking that all day. And I could see them in a hotel or on some post-card beach down there. She would be bald and not care. And they would do all the stupid things tourists do sometimes, like do the YMCA when it plays in a restaurant or karaoke to horrible songs and wear funny shirts and fat sandals, but to them...it would mean more. The whole time...they’d be thinking, we survived non-Hodgkin lymphoma. They probably fucking already had their plane tickets. And here she was, with pneumonia."

She stops talking and starts crying, big dirty sobs, like a little kid, he thinks. He still says nothing just holds her. He is trying to think of the last time he's heard her say fuck. Two years? Three years ago?

"She was only on levo when we got her, but we maxed on neo pretty fast and gave her five boluses. And of course we couldn't ventilate her, and her pressure still sucked even after the vaso went up, and they would want to run bicarb. Why? By the time you start bicarb, it's too late. It never works. It's sort of like admitting that you’re desperate." She is crying, sobbing between her words. He doesn't know really, what she is talking about, but like Lucy, he listens.

She sits up, and he watches her get out of bed. "I need some tissues," she says. She goes into the bathroom in the dark. "If I turn on the light," she says, "I won't be able to tell you any more. It will be like...I don’t know." She fumbles around, and when she comes back, he can see by the dim light of the clock and the moon that she has a roll of toilet paper. Her eyes are black holes in her pale face. "I'm sorry I'm such a wreck. I shouldn't dump on you like

He says something then, something quiet and stumbling, pulling her back towards him, wiping her tears, cradling her, and she is quiet for a while.

Then she begins to speak in that language nurses have, a language of abbreviations, diseases and curses. She tells him, or maybe she is not telling him at all, she is just reliving her day.

"And the resident wouldn't call his fellow. And I think that's...that's because he realized before I did that this woman was just going to die." She shudders silently. "And she did die.

"People die there all the time, right?"

She makes a funny noise. "People die all the fucking time in the ICU, but this woman was supposed to live. She was in rehab when she got sick. She was in remission. And her dad was there, sitting in the corner, and he just looked so lost, and her sister was walking up and down in the hallway muttering fuck fuck fuck fuck. And then I realized what Wasim realized. Everything we were doing was pointless. And I said, 'Wasim, we need to talk to the family.' And he just kept looking at the monitor and at the patient and didn't answer me. I had to say it like five times. So we went and talked to the family, and at that point, he decided a chest tube might help her, and we were playing that game, you know, where there is an elephant in the room that no one will say anything about it. The elephant's name is death."

She laughs, a terrible sound. "Wasim and I both knew she would die, but we couldn’t say that to the family. Why? Why couldn’t we say, we know she is going to die no matter what we do?" She laughs again, but he can hear that she is not smiling.

"Don't answer that question. No one knows the answer. So they decided to put in a chest tube, but the surgeon that comes just dicks around for the longest time, she can't decide whether it will hurt or harm the patient. And I took the sister out of the room, explained what was happening, and if she knew what she wanted to do if the patient coded, and she finally started crying and said, 'We were supposed to go to Florida together.'"

In his mind's eye, he sees a forty-something woman sitting on the beach. The sun is bright and hollow. The chair next to her is empty. Below it is a pair of unworn flip-flops. She couldn’t leave them at home.

"I just wonder how we bear it. All this death. It has to happen. With some people, it's almost a blessing that they die and with others it is a tragedy. And we code them or let them go, but they all die in the end. And we send the family home and bag up the body and strip the room for the next patient. And usually I don't take it home. But this one was bad."

"I think...I usually don't get like this with families. I usually see a patient in the bed, disconnected from everything, and that is OK...but we were working so hard, and we knew it was pointless and when I looked at her sister...and I saw that unbelief..."

There was silence. He holds her tighter, thinking of what he could lose. Outside, the wind blows through empty branches and the moon watches the world silently, dispassionately. Outside of the room, there are dirty dishes and unpaid bills. There is a snow blower that needs to be serviced and a mother-in-law who hasn’t been visited in weeks. There are drafts unfinished, unhappy clients, and traffic jams waiting to happen. There are wars and famines and plagues and droughts, but in here, in this room, in this bed, there is her, alive and sobbing.

"I love you," he says, and realizing that he means it, kisses her hair. She cries some more, her body wracked, and he lets her, thinking about non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

After a few minutes, she quiets. "Do you feel better now?"

"Kind of snotty, but better." She sniffs. "If you let that stuff build up inside, you rot, I think. It just sits there, and you rot." She gets up again and goes into the bathroom. This time, she turns on the light. "I'm a freaking mess." The door shuts and he hears water running and then she comes out again.

"Sorry I had to put you through all that," she says, and in the light of the bathroom, she casually strips and then kills the light. He is temporarily blinded and also rendered mute by her outpouring. But to her, it must be in the past. She is crawling across the bed, to kiss him, to lay her body, beneath the blankets, on his.


Questions? Please e-mail us at The Healing Muse: hlgmuse@upstate.edu

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