Life Coach
Dennis Donoghue
People look younger when they sleep but beyond a certain age the opposite applies. When I check on my mother, she’s lying on her back, her head tipped, skin as bleached as the pillow case, jaw slack and mouth open. I bend to feel her breath against my ear with the same frequency I did when my children were in their cribs, expecting the worst, given what her cardiologist told me after she’d returned home from rehabbing a broken hip.
“If she stays on blood thinner and hits her head again, the results will be catastrophic. She was fortunate the bleeding stopped after the fracture. If I take her off the medication, her stroke risk skyrockets. As her proxy it’s your call.”
He spoke as if my mother wasn’t sitting six feet away. A minute before we’d been talking about surfing. He owned a house on the beach and was one of those sinewy middle-aged guys who dyed his hair, wore a wetsuit, and pretended to care what you had to say. Cold water and salt air, according to him, added years to your life.
He gave me a minute to think.
“Would you like me to decide?” he asked.
He tapped on his Ipad. He was popular with people my mother’s age. In the crowded waiting room we’d sat for an hour and hadn’t been in the examination room ten minutes. Conversations like this must take place half a dozen times a day.
“Thank you,” I said, his choice somehow better than mine.
“No more blood thinner,” he announced without elaboration before changing the subject. “You ought to try surfing. It’s catching on with guys your age too.”
I couldn’t swim and didn’t like walking on beach sand. My mother would be dead in a year. Maybe a month. Maybe tomorrow. We didn’t discuss odds.
On the ride home she fiddled with her hearing aids. The whistling drove me crazy. She’d trusted doctors since the days of housecalls. She was fine when I told her what had been decided. She nodded as if it was no big deal. More urgent was the fact that she hadn’t had a morsel since breakfast and wanted a McDonald’s fish sandwich and a strawberry milkshake.
“My treat,” she said.
“I’m not hungry.”
My neck had gone stiff for some reason. I couldn’t turn my head one way or the other.
That appointment was a month ago. This morning I set out cornflakes, low fat milk, half a banana, her fourteen pills, everything but the Coumadin. I pour her a cup of decaf coffee, hand her The Boston Globe and sit down at the table.
“You don’t eat enough,” she says as she scans the Metro section. “You’re all skin and bones. I don’t know how you manage. How about an omelet?”
When I hesitate she gets up, gripping her walker and taking a few shaky steps toward the refrigerator.
“It won’t take a minute. Drink your coffee.”
She pulls open the door and places a carton of eggs on the counter. That’s as far as it goes. She can’t reach the skillet or a mixing bowl. She shouldn’t even be walking without help but because I’m her son she’ll do for me what she can’t do for herself, or at least go through the motions. I steer her back to the table and make my own omelet. To see me eating something substantial, putting meat on my bones, makes her happy. As she watches me, I imagine clumps of her blood tumbling like debris in a swollen river heading for the floodgates.
A year ago I’d retired from social work. My brother, who lives in Oregon, doesn't visit but calls every now and then to see how she’s doing. I told him I couldn’t manage all seven days and asked for money to hire weekend help. I reminded him he was her son too.
“I have to give it some thought,” he said. “I have to deliberate.”
“What’s to deliberate?”
“It’s not just the money,” he said, “as you well know.”
Then he hung up on me.
The bottle of Coumadin sits on a tray with the rest of the medication on the dining room table. The cardiologist told me to discard it as soon as I got home. Just throw it in the trash, he said. He knew it would taunt me. In no time I could shake out a pill and slip it in with the rest of her medication. She wouldn’t know the difference.
After breakfast I unroll the canvas gait belt, secure it around her waist and challenge her to a race down the hallway.
“Erin couldn’t even keep up with you yesterday,” I remind her.
“Isn’t she the sweetest thing?” she says of the perky young physical therapist in form-fitting salmon scrubs whose visits on Tuesdays and Friday we both looked forward to. “So positive and reassuring. And that red hair of hers!”
“Well, how about it?”
“Maybe later. Can you get me a Tramadol?”
She sips her coffee. Good Morning America is on. The volume is up. She doesn’t mute the commercials. Whether she can distinguish one from the other is anybody’s guess. I watch for telltale signs: Face, arm, speech, time -- FAST. It’s up to me to save her. In the meantime, I have a business to run. I can’t spend my day waiting for the other shoe to drop. If I stare too long she gets suspicious.
“What’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Not long after I retired I became a life coach. No degree or license was required. So long as I sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about I was able to build a client base. All it took was a knack for throwing out a clarifying point or two (Are you physically capable of scaling a mountain that high?; Can you afford both cosmetic surgery and a divorce?; You describe your deep spiritual longing but perhaps a month in an ashram isn’t the right choice for someone with three young children.). Business, conducted strictly over the phone, sometimes into the early hours depending on time zones, grew faster than I expected yet I haven’t met a single client in person.
“Begin with Step One,” I remind them, “and with laser focus inch your way toward success.” In fact, the name of my website is just that: Inching Your Way to a Better You.
But I’m quickly learning my mother has little intention of inching anywhere. My encouragement and advice don’t carry much weight in her world. I’m not sure she can even hear me.
“Why are you talking so loud?” she asks. “Stop all that shouting.”
She’s far from keen about the strengthening exercises Erin assigned for homework. The instruction sheet with its stick figure drawings disappeared a week ago. As for the elastic band for stretching those weakened muscles, that’s missing too. All that sitting increases the risk factor. The challenge for me is to get her up and moving, but as I tell my clients, one person’s obstacle is another’s opportunity. That’s why I encourage them to record our conversations. A second or a third listening provides new insight. But my mother doesn’t need to tape anything as I find myself repeating the same line a hundred different ways.
“You’re beginning to sound like a broken record,” she tells me.
“And why do you think that is?”
“I’ll be damned if I know.”
My father died of a heart attack two months before she broke her hip. She asks about his whereabouts as if he’d gone outside to mow the grass. She looks confused when I break the news all over again, gently, with my hand on her arm, as if it’s the first time when the call came as we were leaving for the hospital where he’d been on a ventilator. A startled look comes into her eyes. She nods in acknowledgement and apologizes for forgetting.
“Of course I know he’s gone,” she tells me, her eyes welling up. “It’s just that it’s easier to think that he’s still here.”
They’d been married sixty-three years and were apart only when she gave birth. His death is a cruel joke she doesn’t understand. She longs to be with him, wherever that is, or at least not to exist in a place where he isn’t. Maybe I’m doing her a favor withholding the medication. In her mind, the sooner the better.
Along with being her chief cook and bottle washer, I’m up half the night with my clients. One minute I’m a doting son and life coach who counsels on professional projects and personal goals, the next a tantruming toddler when all she wants is something to eat for dinner.
“A chicken salad sandwich, lightly toasted,” she called from the den while watching Judge Judy last night, “with pickle relish and a smidge of mayo, a handful of salt and vinegar potato chips on the side. And a cup of coffee if it’s not too much bother.”
“Just so you know, I have other things to do besides wait on you day and night.”
“No one sentenced you to be my slave, Mister Put-upon. You can leave any time you please. I’m fine by myself, thank you.”
“I doubt that. Sometimes I wonder if you really want to get better.”
She’s upset and won’t answer. It would be easy to pile on with my long list of indignities, the sacrifices I tell myself I’ve made to be here with her. She’s an easy target, a helpless old woman dependent upon her son. But the real truth is that I feel a satisfaction I’ve never felt with any job I’ve had. What greater purpose is there than caring for the person who brought you into this world? Yet sometimes I wonder what the point of it is. She could learn to juggle on one leg only to be cut down by a stroke with two pins in the air and here I am scolding her as if she’s done something wrong. Why can’t I just enjoy whatever time we have left together?
While she naps in the recliner, I shut off the television and call Arthur, a West Coast client, before he heads off to work. His dream is to leave a lucrative career in corporate law and start a cheesemaking business. His wife won’t hear of it. He’s got two kids in Ivy League schools, mortgages on three homes, and six cars, including a Bentley. He works ridiculous hours, his stress level off the charts.
“What do you call a dozen lawyers in cement shoes at the bottom of San Francisco Bay?” he asks.
“What?” I say.
“A start.”
We’re on the phone for over an hour during which I barely get a word in. The one thing I’m certain about Arthur is that he will never make cheese. That’s why he has me, to convince him someday he will. He elaborates on the dimensions of a cheese cave, something I’d never heard of. Since there are many cheesemakers in the Bay Area, a cheese cave will put him over the top, though it will require a sizable loan.
I don’t want to listen to Arthur another second, fee be damned. I glance at my mother and wonder why I let a total stranger who wouldn’t give me the time of day decide her fate, why I didn’t have the courage to do it myself.
“So how does that sound?” he asks. “I’ve scheduled a trip to France for a weeklong cheesemaking course.”
“Totally doable,” I say. “You’re way past Step One.”
I toss out a few suggestions, none of which a guy in a coffee shop or barroom couldn’t offer for free. Just as I’ve done nothing for Arthur, I’ve done nothing for my mother. No matter what I say or do, I can’t protect her one way or the other. Even if I camped by her bedside all night there’s no guarantee she’ll live to see the sun rise. And maybe I’m okay with that. Maybe there’s a part of me that wants my old life back, the one where I travelled, visited my grandchildren, made time to go to the gym. Maybe, God forbid, I’m ready to move on without her.
I place another call, this time to Delia. Unlike Arthur, she’s practical and has a list of concerns. She runs a hair salon and she suspects her most loyal employee, the one all her clients demand, has a drug problem. In a way, Delia tells me, that’s why she’s so good. Being high allows her to manage her ADHD while stimulating her creative side. The employee goes so far as to provide customers tips on the proper way to clean a bong (“Salt and rubbing alcohol work the best”) and even praises the lucidity of a mushroom high. More than once Delia addressed the topic of inappropriate workplace speech to no avail. Should she fire her despite her productivity? Stage an intervention? Give her a raise? Tell me what to do, Delia pleads. Just give me the right answer.
Through both phone calls, my mother dozes. Napping means less time on her feet which means less of a chance she’ll fall. The bottle of Coumadin is unopened. I’d stopped at the pharmacy to pick up a refill on the way to the cardiologist’s. The orange football-shaped pills which have kept her alive are five milligrams in strength. Now this perfectly good medication goes to waste while her blood thickens.
A week after the appointment, while I stirred tomato soup at the stove, my mother fell as she pivoted from her walker to a kitchen chair. She lay on the threshold between the kitchen and den, silent and unmoving, like a stunned bird on the sidewalk with only its chest fluttering. I was afraid to lift her so I called 911. Twelve minutes later rescue personnel carrying radios and first aid equipment rushed past me to get to her side. They propped her in a chair and checked her vitals, quizzed her on her whereabouts and asked her who the President was. After a few minutes her color returned. She apologized for making a nuisance of herself. By luck she hadn’t hit her head and didn't need to go to the hospital. I was relieved, of course, and felt the right decision had been made. But in the weeks since the fall she’s gotten stronger. Her posture has improved and her balance is returning. She brags about putting the walker away for good. Just the other day Erin had her using a four pronged cane for the first time. As she marched down the hall and back, I cheered her on while at the same time feeling sick to my stomach.
In the life coach business I don’t deal with anyone like my mother. For starters, she’s more than capable of making up her own mind, even if she later regrets her decision. And paying someone for the service? No way. For years she cleaned apartments of the wealthy on Beacon Street, riding the subway at rush hour and hiking over from Copley Square. She raised two kids, kept my father’s drinking in line, cooked all our meals and did the housework. And a lot of that time she spent worrying about me, her first born. That’s how she referred to me when my dad was around, calling out to him whenever I gave her updates over the telephone: Your first born is calling from a pay phone in some commune where he’s decided to live for the next six months, or Guess whose first born isn’t getting married in the Church? He’s found a hayfield in the middle of nowhere and expects us to join him. So sure was she that I would die penniless she purchased an additional burial plot next to them. The fact that I’ve told her more than once I intend to be cremated didn’t sway her in the least.
“Please explain this business of yours again,” she asks. “What is it you do exactly?”
“I provide advice,” I said. “My clients look to me for answers.”
“What’s this world coming to,” she asks me, “when someone incapable of making a decision pays a stranger to sort it out? I don’t know any people like that, thank God. A fool and his money.”
When she wakes I make her a cup of decaf tea and put a couple of chocolate chip cookies on a plate. Then I call Janice who’s obsessed with body building. The gym, she tells me, is a haven, a second home, much to the dismay of her family. The truth, I learned after a bit of probing, is she doesn’t want to be around her husband and teenage sons. They’re ungrateful slobs constantly quarreling about one thing or other, to the point of exchanging blows, even breaking pieces of furniture.
“I love them but if I never see them again it will be too soon, if that makes any sense,” Janice says while muffling a sob. “Bodybuilding fills a void in my life.”
“Given what your house is like, I think you’ve picked the right diversion. They won’t mess with you.”
“Excuse me?”
I’ve broken a cardinal rule never to use humor in a sarcastic or demeaning way. My clients are thin-skinned and offend easily. They pay good money not to be toyed with.
“Perhaps you’d be better off speaking to a psychotherapist,” I say. “Family dynamics are not my specialty.”
“My husband thinks I’m a lesbian,” she says, ignoring my suggestion. “He thinks I’m doing this just to annoy him.”
I want to tell her I don’t care. I want to tell her what she’s going through amounts to nothing compared to what I’m living with. Just get a divorce and be done with it.
“Let’s talk in a week,” I tell her. “Your homework is to get in touch with some therapists who can help with dysfunctional family members.”
“Is this still Step 1 or the beginning of Step 2?”
“Step 2 already,” I say. “Congratulations.”
It’s nearly noon when the doorbell rings. An older gentleman stands on the front porch holding a paper bag. It’s Greg, a Meals-on-Wheels volunteer, widower and retired commercial airline pilot who looks the part -- tall and square shouldered, silver-haired, clear-eyed, the picture of health and vitality. Today’s lunch is beef burgundy, seasoned buttered noodles, steamed broccoli, whole wheat rolls, fudge brownie and lowfat milk. Greg hands my mother a flyer from the studio where he practices yoga. According to him, this type of exercise is just what she needs. Either he doesn’t notice the walker standing right in front of him or he’s seeing a person I don’t see. By the way she studies him it’s clear she has a thing for Greg. My mother is an attractive woman with soft white hair she brushes back and inquisitive blue eyes that shine when she engages in conversation. She takes pride in her appearance and has a closet with double sliding doors along one side of her bedroom. To keep Greg from leaving she presses for details. She nods as he answers her questions. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll go ahead and sign up.
To be honest, I find Greg intimidating. By his tone and manner, he exudes a confidence foreign to me. The way he speaks, unambiguously and without a hint of irony, suggests a military background. I seriously doubt he’s ever considered the services of a life coach. As a pilot he’s had to live by split second decisions. He reacts, guided by instinct, knowing full well what to do in any situation. Never in my life have I had the feeling my gut was trying to tell me something. Whenever I’m out to eat I change my mind as soon as the waitress takes my order. Chicken or fish? What’s the special again?
Later my brother calls to see how she’s doing. I’m surprised he still calls at all after she insisted I get the house when she dies. He imports wine and could buy this house and six more like it. At first he was fine with the arrangement. He understood I had no money after my divorce. But over time he soured. It was the principle of the matter. In theory, he reasoned, since he was her son too, his name should be on that document. When she refused, he stopped visiting. According to him I’d gone behind his back and manipulated her. Nothing I said could change his mind. Given the circumstances, he regretted he would not be able to send any money, as if he was making some big sacrifice.
I could move my mother in with me except my apartment is a walkup and the thermostat is set below seventy-five degrees. After my divorce I found I enjoyed living alone. Besides, when she put the house in my name she made me promise to let her die in it. She said she’d come back to haunt me if I didn’t. At the time, back when I thought it would never come to this, I didn’t think that was asking too much. The house is on one level, a two bedroom ranch in decent shape on a quiet street with a good school system. In this market it would sell for more than the asking price. As a joke she and I hooked little fingers in a pinkie promise to seal the deal.
Later tonight I have more calls to make. My clients pick up right away expecting answers. What would I do in their shoes? Is choice A better than choice B? Are they thinking enough outside the box? If hindsight is 20/20, what does that make foresight? In their desperation, I remind them mistakes are as much a part of Inching Your Way to a Better You as are successes. You can’t have one without the other. When you make a decision, see it through. Don’t dwell on the what-might-have-beens. My clients ask when my book is coming out, as it’s certain to make the bestseller list. I’ve never mentioned anything about writing a book.
After supper I convince my mother to go for a drive along the shore. She takes the porch steps sideways, grasping the railing with two hands and making nervous little cries as she descends. I grip the back of her waistband and tell her how great she’s doing. With me hanging on she creeps along the walk toward the car. I buckle her in and abandon the walker in the driveway. She’s barely as high as the headrest but is excited to be out of the house. The setting sun brushes a ridge of low clouds with a russet tinge. As we drive along we reminisce about the old days in the Boston neighborhood where I grew up. People were different back then, she tells me, decisive and resilient, hardy go-getters, not the whiny excuse-making types you see on TV talk shows. She cites Greg as an example of the way men used to be. Isn’t he something? She might even take him up on the offer after all. Somewhere in the hall closet there’s an exercise mat she hasn’t touched in years. Do I think she’ll make enough progress to do yoga?
“If you make up your mind anything’s possible,” I say, as if I’m speaking to one of my clients.
“It’s a joke, silly,” she says as she slaps my shoulder. “Can you picture me lying on the floor with my arms and legs flung in the air like some old fool?”
We both laugh at the image. To our right houses set on a cliff overlooking the sea have silver shingles, mullioned windows and an assortment of gables. Big and beautiful as they are, no one seems to live in them. Maybe the owners have left for the summer.
“Imagine,” my mother says, “being so successful you can own a house that size and never feel the pressure to have to live in it. That’s your brother, making a name for himself out there in Portland. Everything he touches turns to gold.”
I change the subject, vaguely recalling a bungalow her aunt once owned by the water in Humarock.
“We went there for the day once on the Fourth,” she says. “You were six or seven. You cut your foot on a piece of seaglass. You never liked the beach after that.”
“I have no memory of it,” I say.
We crest a hill. The roofs of those houses fall below us. Beyond them the ocean rolls out flat and endless and has a purple sheen to it. In the east the sky is a whitish blue. Where sea and sky merge a ship creeps along but when I point she doesn’t notice.
“Isn’t the water pretty?” she says. She mentions August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the one day of the year when saltwater has curative powers. As a girl she filled a bottle for her father. Her mother sprinkled a few drops on his forehead every day to cure his cancer. She still remembers the dread she felt when the bottle ran dry, the last few drops spilling out. Why hadn’t her mother arranged to have a truckload delivered?
“Did you actually believe it would save him?”
I regret the question as soon as the words are out of my mouth.
“What do you mean by that?”
“The water. The cure.”
“Why would I even question it?”
I shrug. There’s nothing to say really. It’s September. All that seawater below us won’t do her a bit of good.
At the bottom of the hill I find a spot big enough to nose the car in. At high tide there’s no beach to speak of, just piles of smooth boulders meeting a ribbon of sand that runs along the breaking surf. I search for the cardiologist, wondering if this is where he comes to clear his head, to summon the courage to do it all over again the next day. He’d taken a decision I couldn’t make out of my hands. If I wasn’t entirely blameless, neither was I at fault. Either way, I couldn’t shake the pit in my stomach. I glance over at my mother whose attention is drawn to the horizon. The quiet evening has a desolate feel to it, the immense space before us uninterrupted by a single human being, the crashing waves marking time.
“It just goes on forever, doesn’t it?” she says. “If you didn’t know any better you’d think the world was one big ocean.”
“It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“I could just sit here and look.”
Taken by the expanse before her, my mother leans forward and squints, maybe hunting for that ship, maybe expecting to see clear to the other side.
Dennis Donoghue
People look younger when they sleep but beyond a certain age the opposite applies. When I check on my mother, she’s lying on her back, her head tipped, skin as bleached as the pillow case, jaw slack and mouth open. I bend to feel her breath against my ear with the same frequency I did when my children were in their cribs, expecting the worst, given what her cardiologist told me after she’d returned home from rehabbing a broken hip.
“If she stays on blood thinner and hits her head again, the results will be catastrophic. She was fortunate the bleeding stopped after the fracture. If I take her off the medication, her stroke risk skyrockets. As her proxy it’s your call.”
He spoke as if my mother wasn’t sitting six feet away. A minute before we’d been talking about surfing. He owned a house on the beach and was one of those sinewy middle-aged guys who dyed his hair, wore a wetsuit, and pretended to care what you had to say. Cold water and salt air, according to him, added years to your life.
He gave me a minute to think.
“Would you like me to decide?” he asked.
He tapped on his Ipad. He was popular with people my mother’s age. In the crowded waiting room we’d sat for an hour and hadn’t been in the examination room ten minutes. Conversations like this must take place half a dozen times a day.
“Thank you,” I said, his choice somehow better than mine.
“No more blood thinner,” he announced without elaboration before changing the subject. “You ought to try surfing. It’s catching on with guys your age too.”
I couldn’t swim and didn’t like walking on beach sand. My mother would be dead in a year. Maybe a month. Maybe tomorrow. We didn’t discuss odds.
On the ride home she fiddled with her hearing aids. The whistling drove me crazy. She’d trusted doctors since the days of housecalls. She was fine when I told her what had been decided. She nodded as if it was no big deal. More urgent was the fact that she hadn’t had a morsel since breakfast and wanted a McDonald’s fish sandwich and a strawberry milkshake.
“My treat,” she said.
“I’m not hungry.”
My neck had gone stiff for some reason. I couldn’t turn my head one way or the other.
That appointment was a month ago. This morning I set out cornflakes, low fat milk, half a banana, her fourteen pills, everything but the Coumadin. I pour her a cup of decaf coffee, hand her The Boston Globe and sit down at the table.
“You don’t eat enough,” she says as she scans the Metro section. “You’re all skin and bones. I don’t know how you manage. How about an omelet?”
When I hesitate she gets up, gripping her walker and taking a few shaky steps toward the refrigerator.
“It won’t take a minute. Drink your coffee.”
She pulls open the door and places a carton of eggs on the counter. That’s as far as it goes. She can’t reach the skillet or a mixing bowl. She shouldn’t even be walking without help but because I’m her son she’ll do for me what she can’t do for herself, or at least go through the motions. I steer her back to the table and make my own omelet. To see me eating something substantial, putting meat on my bones, makes her happy. As she watches me, I imagine clumps of her blood tumbling like debris in a swollen river heading for the floodgates.
A year ago I’d retired from social work. My brother, who lives in Oregon, doesn't visit but calls every now and then to see how she’s doing. I told him I couldn’t manage all seven days and asked for money to hire weekend help. I reminded him he was her son too.
“I have to give it some thought,” he said. “I have to deliberate.”
“What’s to deliberate?”
“It’s not just the money,” he said, “as you well know.”
Then he hung up on me.
The bottle of Coumadin sits on a tray with the rest of the medication on the dining room table. The cardiologist told me to discard it as soon as I got home. Just throw it in the trash, he said. He knew it would taunt me. In no time I could shake out a pill and slip it in with the rest of her medication. She wouldn’t know the difference.
After breakfast I unroll the canvas gait belt, secure it around her waist and challenge her to a race down the hallway.
“Erin couldn’t even keep up with you yesterday,” I remind her.
“Isn’t she the sweetest thing?” she says of the perky young physical therapist in form-fitting salmon scrubs whose visits on Tuesdays and Friday we both looked forward to. “So positive and reassuring. And that red hair of hers!”
“Well, how about it?”
“Maybe later. Can you get me a Tramadol?”
She sips her coffee. Good Morning America is on. The volume is up. She doesn’t mute the commercials. Whether she can distinguish one from the other is anybody’s guess. I watch for telltale signs: Face, arm, speech, time -- FAST. It’s up to me to save her. In the meantime, I have a business to run. I can’t spend my day waiting for the other shoe to drop. If I stare too long she gets suspicious.
“What’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Not long after I retired I became a life coach. No degree or license was required. So long as I sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about I was able to build a client base. All it took was a knack for throwing out a clarifying point or two (Are you physically capable of scaling a mountain that high?; Can you afford both cosmetic surgery and a divorce?; You describe your deep spiritual longing but perhaps a month in an ashram isn’t the right choice for someone with three young children.). Business, conducted strictly over the phone, sometimes into the early hours depending on time zones, grew faster than I expected yet I haven’t met a single client in person.
“Begin with Step One,” I remind them, “and with laser focus inch your way toward success.” In fact, the name of my website is just that: Inching Your Way to a Better You.
But I’m quickly learning my mother has little intention of inching anywhere. My encouragement and advice don’t carry much weight in her world. I’m not sure she can even hear me.
“Why are you talking so loud?” she asks. “Stop all that shouting.”
She’s far from keen about the strengthening exercises Erin assigned for homework. The instruction sheet with its stick figure drawings disappeared a week ago. As for the elastic band for stretching those weakened muscles, that’s missing too. All that sitting increases the risk factor. The challenge for me is to get her up and moving, but as I tell my clients, one person’s obstacle is another’s opportunity. That’s why I encourage them to record our conversations. A second or a third listening provides new insight. But my mother doesn’t need to tape anything as I find myself repeating the same line a hundred different ways.
“You’re beginning to sound like a broken record,” she tells me.
“And why do you think that is?”
“I’ll be damned if I know.”
My father died of a heart attack two months before she broke her hip. She asks about his whereabouts as if he’d gone outside to mow the grass. She looks confused when I break the news all over again, gently, with my hand on her arm, as if it’s the first time when the call came as we were leaving for the hospital where he’d been on a ventilator. A startled look comes into her eyes. She nods in acknowledgement and apologizes for forgetting.
“Of course I know he’s gone,” she tells me, her eyes welling up. “It’s just that it’s easier to think that he’s still here.”
They’d been married sixty-three years and were apart only when she gave birth. His death is a cruel joke she doesn’t understand. She longs to be with him, wherever that is, or at least not to exist in a place where he isn’t. Maybe I’m doing her a favor withholding the medication. In her mind, the sooner the better.
Along with being her chief cook and bottle washer, I’m up half the night with my clients. One minute I’m a doting son and life coach who counsels on professional projects and personal goals, the next a tantruming toddler when all she wants is something to eat for dinner.
“A chicken salad sandwich, lightly toasted,” she called from the den while watching Judge Judy last night, “with pickle relish and a smidge of mayo, a handful of salt and vinegar potato chips on the side. And a cup of coffee if it’s not too much bother.”
“Just so you know, I have other things to do besides wait on you day and night.”
“No one sentenced you to be my slave, Mister Put-upon. You can leave any time you please. I’m fine by myself, thank you.”
“I doubt that. Sometimes I wonder if you really want to get better.”
She’s upset and won’t answer. It would be easy to pile on with my long list of indignities, the sacrifices I tell myself I’ve made to be here with her. She’s an easy target, a helpless old woman dependent upon her son. But the real truth is that I feel a satisfaction I’ve never felt with any job I’ve had. What greater purpose is there than caring for the person who brought you into this world? Yet sometimes I wonder what the point of it is. She could learn to juggle on one leg only to be cut down by a stroke with two pins in the air and here I am scolding her as if she’s done something wrong. Why can’t I just enjoy whatever time we have left together?
While she naps in the recliner, I shut off the television and call Arthur, a West Coast client, before he heads off to work. His dream is to leave a lucrative career in corporate law and start a cheesemaking business. His wife won’t hear of it. He’s got two kids in Ivy League schools, mortgages on three homes, and six cars, including a Bentley. He works ridiculous hours, his stress level off the charts.
“What do you call a dozen lawyers in cement shoes at the bottom of San Francisco Bay?” he asks.
“What?” I say.
“A start.”
We’re on the phone for over an hour during which I barely get a word in. The one thing I’m certain about Arthur is that he will never make cheese. That’s why he has me, to convince him someday he will. He elaborates on the dimensions of a cheese cave, something I’d never heard of. Since there are many cheesemakers in the Bay Area, a cheese cave will put him over the top, though it will require a sizable loan.
I don’t want to listen to Arthur another second, fee be damned. I glance at my mother and wonder why I let a total stranger who wouldn’t give me the time of day decide her fate, why I didn’t have the courage to do it myself.
“So how does that sound?” he asks. “I’ve scheduled a trip to France for a weeklong cheesemaking course.”
“Totally doable,” I say. “You’re way past Step One.”
I toss out a few suggestions, none of which a guy in a coffee shop or barroom couldn’t offer for free. Just as I’ve done nothing for Arthur, I’ve done nothing for my mother. No matter what I say or do, I can’t protect her one way or the other. Even if I camped by her bedside all night there’s no guarantee she’ll live to see the sun rise. And maybe I’m okay with that. Maybe there’s a part of me that wants my old life back, the one where I travelled, visited my grandchildren, made time to go to the gym. Maybe, God forbid, I’m ready to move on without her.
I place another call, this time to Delia. Unlike Arthur, she’s practical and has a list of concerns. She runs a hair salon and she suspects her most loyal employee, the one all her clients demand, has a drug problem. In a way, Delia tells me, that’s why she’s so good. Being high allows her to manage her ADHD while stimulating her creative side. The employee goes so far as to provide customers tips on the proper way to clean a bong (“Salt and rubbing alcohol work the best”) and even praises the lucidity of a mushroom high. More than once Delia addressed the topic of inappropriate workplace speech to no avail. Should she fire her despite her productivity? Stage an intervention? Give her a raise? Tell me what to do, Delia pleads. Just give me the right answer.
Through both phone calls, my mother dozes. Napping means less time on her feet which means less of a chance she’ll fall. The bottle of Coumadin is unopened. I’d stopped at the pharmacy to pick up a refill on the way to the cardiologist’s. The orange football-shaped pills which have kept her alive are five milligrams in strength. Now this perfectly good medication goes to waste while her blood thickens.
A week after the appointment, while I stirred tomato soup at the stove, my mother fell as she pivoted from her walker to a kitchen chair. She lay on the threshold between the kitchen and den, silent and unmoving, like a stunned bird on the sidewalk with only its chest fluttering. I was afraid to lift her so I called 911. Twelve minutes later rescue personnel carrying radios and first aid equipment rushed past me to get to her side. They propped her in a chair and checked her vitals, quizzed her on her whereabouts and asked her who the President was. After a few minutes her color returned. She apologized for making a nuisance of herself. By luck she hadn’t hit her head and didn't need to go to the hospital. I was relieved, of course, and felt the right decision had been made. But in the weeks since the fall she’s gotten stronger. Her posture has improved and her balance is returning. She brags about putting the walker away for good. Just the other day Erin had her using a four pronged cane for the first time. As she marched down the hall and back, I cheered her on while at the same time feeling sick to my stomach.
In the life coach business I don’t deal with anyone like my mother. For starters, she’s more than capable of making up her own mind, even if she later regrets her decision. And paying someone for the service? No way. For years she cleaned apartments of the wealthy on Beacon Street, riding the subway at rush hour and hiking over from Copley Square. She raised two kids, kept my father’s drinking in line, cooked all our meals and did the housework. And a lot of that time she spent worrying about me, her first born. That’s how she referred to me when my dad was around, calling out to him whenever I gave her updates over the telephone: Your first born is calling from a pay phone in some commune where he’s decided to live for the next six months, or Guess whose first born isn’t getting married in the Church? He’s found a hayfield in the middle of nowhere and expects us to join him. So sure was she that I would die penniless she purchased an additional burial plot next to them. The fact that I’ve told her more than once I intend to be cremated didn’t sway her in the least.
“Please explain this business of yours again,” she asks. “What is it you do exactly?”
“I provide advice,” I said. “My clients look to me for answers.”
“What’s this world coming to,” she asks me, “when someone incapable of making a decision pays a stranger to sort it out? I don’t know any people like that, thank God. A fool and his money.”
When she wakes I make her a cup of decaf tea and put a couple of chocolate chip cookies on a plate. Then I call Janice who’s obsessed with body building. The gym, she tells me, is a haven, a second home, much to the dismay of her family. The truth, I learned after a bit of probing, is she doesn’t want to be around her husband and teenage sons. They’re ungrateful slobs constantly quarreling about one thing or other, to the point of exchanging blows, even breaking pieces of furniture.
“I love them but if I never see them again it will be too soon, if that makes any sense,” Janice says while muffling a sob. “Bodybuilding fills a void in my life.”
“Given what your house is like, I think you’ve picked the right diversion. They won’t mess with you.”
“Excuse me?”
I’ve broken a cardinal rule never to use humor in a sarcastic or demeaning way. My clients are thin-skinned and offend easily. They pay good money not to be toyed with.
“Perhaps you’d be better off speaking to a psychotherapist,” I say. “Family dynamics are not my specialty.”
“My husband thinks I’m a lesbian,” she says, ignoring my suggestion. “He thinks I’m doing this just to annoy him.”
I want to tell her I don’t care. I want to tell her what she’s going through amounts to nothing compared to what I’m living with. Just get a divorce and be done with it.
“Let’s talk in a week,” I tell her. “Your homework is to get in touch with some therapists who can help with dysfunctional family members.”
“Is this still Step 1 or the beginning of Step 2?”
“Step 2 already,” I say. “Congratulations.”
It’s nearly noon when the doorbell rings. An older gentleman stands on the front porch holding a paper bag. It’s Greg, a Meals-on-Wheels volunteer, widower and retired commercial airline pilot who looks the part -- tall and square shouldered, silver-haired, clear-eyed, the picture of health and vitality. Today’s lunch is beef burgundy, seasoned buttered noodles, steamed broccoli, whole wheat rolls, fudge brownie and lowfat milk. Greg hands my mother a flyer from the studio where he practices yoga. According to him, this type of exercise is just what she needs. Either he doesn’t notice the walker standing right in front of him or he’s seeing a person I don’t see. By the way she studies him it’s clear she has a thing for Greg. My mother is an attractive woman with soft white hair she brushes back and inquisitive blue eyes that shine when she engages in conversation. She takes pride in her appearance and has a closet with double sliding doors along one side of her bedroom. To keep Greg from leaving she presses for details. She nods as he answers her questions. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll go ahead and sign up.
To be honest, I find Greg intimidating. By his tone and manner, he exudes a confidence foreign to me. The way he speaks, unambiguously and without a hint of irony, suggests a military background. I seriously doubt he’s ever considered the services of a life coach. As a pilot he’s had to live by split second decisions. He reacts, guided by instinct, knowing full well what to do in any situation. Never in my life have I had the feeling my gut was trying to tell me something. Whenever I’m out to eat I change my mind as soon as the waitress takes my order. Chicken or fish? What’s the special again?
Later my brother calls to see how she’s doing. I’m surprised he still calls at all after she insisted I get the house when she dies. He imports wine and could buy this house and six more like it. At first he was fine with the arrangement. He understood I had no money after my divorce. But over time he soured. It was the principle of the matter. In theory, he reasoned, since he was her son too, his name should be on that document. When she refused, he stopped visiting. According to him I’d gone behind his back and manipulated her. Nothing I said could change his mind. Given the circumstances, he regretted he would not be able to send any money, as if he was making some big sacrifice.
I could move my mother in with me except my apartment is a walkup and the thermostat is set below seventy-five degrees. After my divorce I found I enjoyed living alone. Besides, when she put the house in my name she made me promise to let her die in it. She said she’d come back to haunt me if I didn’t. At the time, back when I thought it would never come to this, I didn’t think that was asking too much. The house is on one level, a two bedroom ranch in decent shape on a quiet street with a good school system. In this market it would sell for more than the asking price. As a joke she and I hooked little fingers in a pinkie promise to seal the deal.
Later tonight I have more calls to make. My clients pick up right away expecting answers. What would I do in their shoes? Is choice A better than choice B? Are they thinking enough outside the box? If hindsight is 20/20, what does that make foresight? In their desperation, I remind them mistakes are as much a part of Inching Your Way to a Better You as are successes. You can’t have one without the other. When you make a decision, see it through. Don’t dwell on the what-might-have-beens. My clients ask when my book is coming out, as it’s certain to make the bestseller list. I’ve never mentioned anything about writing a book.
After supper I convince my mother to go for a drive along the shore. She takes the porch steps sideways, grasping the railing with two hands and making nervous little cries as she descends. I grip the back of her waistband and tell her how great she’s doing. With me hanging on she creeps along the walk toward the car. I buckle her in and abandon the walker in the driveway. She’s barely as high as the headrest but is excited to be out of the house. The setting sun brushes a ridge of low clouds with a russet tinge. As we drive along we reminisce about the old days in the Boston neighborhood where I grew up. People were different back then, she tells me, decisive and resilient, hardy go-getters, not the whiny excuse-making types you see on TV talk shows. She cites Greg as an example of the way men used to be. Isn’t he something? She might even take him up on the offer after all. Somewhere in the hall closet there’s an exercise mat she hasn’t touched in years. Do I think she’ll make enough progress to do yoga?
“If you make up your mind anything’s possible,” I say, as if I’m speaking to one of my clients.
“It’s a joke, silly,” she says as she slaps my shoulder. “Can you picture me lying on the floor with my arms and legs flung in the air like some old fool?”
We both laugh at the image. To our right houses set on a cliff overlooking the sea have silver shingles, mullioned windows and an assortment of gables. Big and beautiful as they are, no one seems to live in them. Maybe the owners have left for the summer.
“Imagine,” my mother says, “being so successful you can own a house that size and never feel the pressure to have to live in it. That’s your brother, making a name for himself out there in Portland. Everything he touches turns to gold.”
I change the subject, vaguely recalling a bungalow her aunt once owned by the water in Humarock.
“We went there for the day once on the Fourth,” she says. “You were six or seven. You cut your foot on a piece of seaglass. You never liked the beach after that.”
“I have no memory of it,” I say.
We crest a hill. The roofs of those houses fall below us. Beyond them the ocean rolls out flat and endless and has a purple sheen to it. In the east the sky is a whitish blue. Where sea and sky merge a ship creeps along but when I point she doesn’t notice.
“Isn’t the water pretty?” she says. She mentions August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the one day of the year when saltwater has curative powers. As a girl she filled a bottle for her father. Her mother sprinkled a few drops on his forehead every day to cure his cancer. She still remembers the dread she felt when the bottle ran dry, the last few drops spilling out. Why hadn’t her mother arranged to have a truckload delivered?
“Did you actually believe it would save him?”
I regret the question as soon as the words are out of my mouth.
“What do you mean by that?”
“The water. The cure.”
“Why would I even question it?”
I shrug. There’s nothing to say really. It’s September. All that seawater below us won’t do her a bit of good.
At the bottom of the hill I find a spot big enough to nose the car in. At high tide there’s no beach to speak of, just piles of smooth boulders meeting a ribbon of sand that runs along the breaking surf. I search for the cardiologist, wondering if this is where he comes to clear his head, to summon the courage to do it all over again the next day. He’d taken a decision I couldn’t make out of my hands. If I wasn’t entirely blameless, neither was I at fault. Either way, I couldn’t shake the pit in my stomach. I glance over at my mother whose attention is drawn to the horizon. The quiet evening has a desolate feel to it, the immense space before us uninterrupted by a single human being, the crashing waves marking time.
“It just goes on forever, doesn’t it?” she says. “If you didn’t know any better you’d think the world was one big ocean.”
“It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“I could just sit here and look.”
Taken by the expanse before her, my mother leans forward and squints, maybe hunting for that ship, maybe expecting to see clear to the other side.