A Way Through Ruins

When at home in Flint, Michigan, I make my daily round through the ruins of east side neighborhoods, looking into the black eyes of windows, smelling fire smoke from rubble in which a chimney stands like the pistil of a tulip after the petals have dropped off.  I climb porch steps that lead into oblivion.

Franklin Street, Flint. MI.  Franklin Street is the main road through the east side.

My original home—my mother’s home—has gradually gone to wrack and ruin since my father died in 1980.  She filled it with so much stuff that there was no room for life.  “We’re not going to touch the house,” said my brother sternly while my mother lay in a clean hospital bed.  She’d broken her hip after catching her foot in a purse strap hung over a chair in her cluttered kitchen.  My brother’s plan, which I now realize was no joke, is this: “when she dies, we’ll just bulldoze it all into the woods.”  I stayed in the house alone last winter, sat at the table in Mom’s place, grading papers (just like she did).  I was listening hard for life, and I heard the laughing voices from Christmas parties past in myself.  I felt my cold cheeks, swallowed warm cocoa, and felt the warmer presence of my father.  The mice scurried.  I anxiously checked my cell phone all night, fearful of the outside getting in.

All the evocative images of houses are paintings by Charles Burchfield who worked in Buffalo, N.Y.

It’s been a year since Mom broke her hip.  Every other week, something happens and I fear I’ll lose her for good, and I’ve made eight or nine trips home.  Weakened by urinary tract infections, pneumonia, and with “suspicious” areas in her lungs, she keeps living from cigarette to cigarette.  “No I’m not ready yet,” she says stubbornly when I ask if I can squash her butt, “I’m not going to waste two inches of a good cigarette.”

Sitting in my school office at the University of Michigan-Flint, the phone rings, and I am shocked to hear Mom’s scratchy voice.  “Mary Jo (pause).”  “MOM.  (She never calls me).  How ARE you?”  “Terrible,” she responds.  “I need to go home.”  I tell her that I understand.  I tell her we’re working on it.  I remind her that she must be patient, that getting the house ready will take time.  I remind her of Saint Anthony.  She seems calmer, and I feel almost joyful.  She needed me, and I was there.
 

“I’m not the one telling Mom lies,” snaps my lawyer sister in Seattle over email.  I didn’t think I was lying to Mom.  My other sister, who has been managing our mother's care, had asked us the night before to make calls to home health care agencies to see if it was possible to let Mom go home.  The problem has been that the siblings cannot face the ruin, have not mustered the collective will to make the place safe and livable.  At this point, the round-the-clock care Mom needs is too expensive.  I still didn’t feel I was lying to Mom.  I felt I was comforting her.  Home.  What is it?  Where is it?  When I was a young girl traveling alone in Greece, after I’d been raped and dumped back at a hotel with sheets as cold and clean, as stiff and heavy, as those on any hospital bed, I was frantic.  I remember begging the men in the lobby to let me use the phone to call home.  My mother answered.  I tried to tell her that something bad had happened, but I couldn’t say the word “rape.”  Besides, her voice, if I heard compassion in it, could bring me home.  Suffice it to say, I remained stranded.  “Go to the police, Mary Jo.”  When she told the story—and she told it a lot in the intervening years—it became a joke.  “My daughter called from Greece and said a man was following her (ha, ha).  What did she think I could do?”  When my mother called me from a far-away nursing home, I thought she needed my loving voice.  That’s what I gave.

Before driving home to Glens Falls, New York for Thanksgiving, I drop by the religious goods store in Mount Morris, Michigan.  I had the idea that when Mom is feeling particularly agitated if she could look at a statue of Saint Anthony, she would remember to pray.  Her father—my grandfather—who had lost his sanity in our house when he had to move in with us when my grandmother suffered a stroke, always took his bearings by the large framed tapestry of Charles Lindbergh that hung in our family room.  Frank was often agitated and mumbled his worries.  After making his way to the toilet, he’d return through the kitchen and step down—treacherous that one step—into the family room.  Lifting and placing the walker in front of him, he crossed the blue rug like Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic at night, his mind confused by too many years and too much moving around.  “Now where am I?” he’d ask.  But when he made the turn to sit down on his settee and saw the image of Lucky Lindy and his Spirit of Saint Louis, Frank’s question was answered.  “Ah, Lindbergh.”  Somehow the face and all Lindbergh meant would settle him.  I thought that maybe Saint Anthony, patron of lost things, would help Mom in a similar way.

We drove from Michigan across Ontario and New York state and pulled into Home2 Suites by Hilton late on the night before Thanksgiving.  The next morning we went over to Mom’s house.  There had been a snowstorm a week ago, and the driveway and front steps were all crusty with inches of snow and ice.  Dick, her neighbor, who is no spring chicken himself had said he would snowblow this winter.  Maybe the early storm surprised him.  Maybe he went to visit his children in Vermont.  Inside it was warm enough but full of shadows and sadness.  We grabbed two packs of Kools from the carton in the freezer, poked around a bit in the cellar, didn’t see any large rodents (thankfully).  Then, we headed down to meet Mom at the nursing home.

When we got there she was slumped in her wheelchair in the corridor, and I pushed her into her room.  She seemed happy to see us, happy to see Saint Anthony, and the books with Billy Graham (praying) and Pope Francis (smiling).  As for my fantasy of reading Billy Graham’s memoir, written at 93, called Nearing Home, that wasn’t going to happen.  My mother had her own plan.  “So what do you think?  What should we do?”  I told her I’d made a dinner reservation in Lake George, hoping that we could take her out.  “Do you think you are up to getting into the car, Mom?”  She hadn’t done this since September before the pneumonia and before the disorienting transfer to a new facility.  “Oh, of course.”  My sister had told me in an email that the Physical Therapy staff did not recommend taking her out but couldn’t legally stop us.  “Let’s drive to Indian Lake,” suggested Mom.  Indian Lake is where my father’s family lived and where we camped every summer of our lives.  My husband and I looked at each other and smiled.  He whispered later on the drive north, “she’s still pretty adventurous.” 

The day was bright but bitter cold.  Mom’s new wheelchair, extra heavy to accommodate the oxygen tanks they hang from the back, was difficult to take apart and fold up.  “If she is smoking,” explained a weary nurse, “the tank must be turned off.  I’ve seen peoples’ faces burned off.”  We wheeled Mom outside and she stood up with relative ease.  I helped her pivot and turn so that she could lean back onto the passenger seat.  Then I urged her to boost her butt over, knelt down to lift her feet in, and strapped the seat belt across her small body.  Then, Paul lit her cigarette.  She tried to blow the smoke out the crack in the window, and she returned to something like her old self, giving driving instructions and insisting on telling us which roads to take although I’d been driving to Indian Lake all my life.  It was an old road for all of us, and between the mountain scenery, Mom’s reminiscences, her calling “Mary Jo” every five minutes (verbal herding), the car, “hot-boxed” as my sixteen-year-old daughter said, felt like home.  We made stops along the way to get fresh air.  We’d open Mom’s door so she could feel the bright light and cold.  At The Glen, I stood against the car, listening to the Hudson River rush along somewhere behind the houses and railroad tracks.  I looked up and saw the gray tear of a hornet’s nest in a tree against blue sky.  I felt happy that we could make Mom happy.  Thanksgiving afternoon, we felt full long before we dug into a turkey dinner at the Fort William Henry in Lake George.

Night came.  We wheeled Mom out of the restaurant, past a Jamaican woman in a red sweater who kept saying, "God loves you very much."  A full moon lit the parking lot, and, though we couldn't see the surface of the lake, it was easy to imagine a widening circle of brilliant light.  Once we loaded her safely into the car, Mom said to Katya and me, “now we’re going to go home and make a nice fire and get warmed up.”  I knew she thought that we were taking her to her own house.  So when Paul drove the road toward Hudson Falls, she began to protest.  “Paul, you are taking us 20 miles out of the way.  Turn this car around.”  When we stopped at the nursing home, she thought he’d pulled up at a school, and, despite her confusion, allowed us to help her out and take her back to her room.  Sun-downing.  It’s something that happens to old people with dementia.  They get especially confused and agitated at night.  My grandmother could be counted on to say that she needed to be “getting home” every night when dark came.

Something happened overnight in Mom’s head, but the next day—Black Friday, she was more definite and determined and bossy.  I was already tired by the time I arrived at the nursing home from shopping with my daughter at the Lake George outlets, tired of looking at overpriced hoodies and body jewelry.  Mom was playing with her food at lunch, piling carrots in a tower on top of meatloaf, insisting she could get outside for a smoke through the dining room window, and wanting to pay a table-mate’s husband for lunch.  Paul had suggested he go to the Mall with Katya while I stay at the facility and visit with Mom.  But she didn’t want that.  “I’ve been up and down these hallways too many times.  I’ve got to get out of here.”  So we went to the Mall.  All of us.  Then we went for pizza slices at Amore’s restaurant.  And then, Mom said we had to take the pizza home and warm it up.  Her house, her real house, was just a mile away.  “We have heat in there.”  Maybe it was a mistake, but we decided to drive her by the house to see it and to see that the snow and ice would be impossible for her to cross.  “Pull in the driveway behind my car.  Okay.  Let’s get inside.”  We tried to explain to her that we wouldn’t be able to push the wheelchair up the driveway, that the snow was too crusty, that Paul couldn’t carry her across the snow and up the icy steps.  “Oh, that’s just a little bit of snow.  You guys are being ridiculous.  I could sweep that up in a few minutes.  You all just want to take the easy way out.”  We sat for a very long time, staring at the blue Cape Cod.  “Well, there is smoke coming out of the chimney,” I finally said to break the silence.  “Yes.  Because it’s warm in there,” she stated matter-of-factly.  We noticed the little snowman with the dough-boy face, holding the bluebird, that had been on her porch for many years.  I thought of the inside darkness.  I imagined her smoking at the table.  I remembered how I’d sit paralyzed, unable to think or speak or be … just be.  I had always followed her plan.

The ride back to the facility was painful.  Mom got abusive.  “Mary Jo will you just shut up.”  I hadn’t said a word.  “I have a plan.  No one else does, but I do.  You can just drive me back to my house, and I’ll stay in the car for just one night.  In the morning, maybe we can go inside.”  She told me I had a “very mean husband.”  She called Paul “lazy.”  She tried to open the car door while it was moving.  She refused to budge when we got back to the nursing home.  “I am not going in there for $6,000 dollars.”  “Mary Jo, please let me say in the car.”  I tried to tell her that we couldn’t do that.  It was too cold.  It was our car.  We had to pack it and head back to Michigan tomorrow.  Finally, nurses came out and helped us get her in the wheelchair.  “Give me a big bear hug,” said one, as she lifted Mom into the wheelchair.  Inside, a sweet-faced 93-year-old reached out a very warm hand and said, “Oh, you don’t want to go home.  There’s nothing at home anymore.  Here, there are people and things to do.  What can you do at home except wander from room to room?”

I sat with Mom in her new room, and I tried to tell her that I understood her desire.  Home meant normalcy.  Home meant control.  It was hers.  We’ll aim to get the driveway cleared for Christmas and take you back home.  She said, “okay.”  Then her blue eyes brightened and looked right into mine, “Mary Jo, we get along.  You could stay with me.”  It was the eye contact.  After her abusive words, it reminded me that there was a bond—that it was real—when I thought all was lost.  Tears pooled in my eyes.  “Oh, Mom.  There is nothing I’d like more than to get you home and stay with you.”  “Okay, so let’s go.  We can stay in the car.”  I started to explain that we couldn’t do that right now, but instead, I looked long into her eyes, and we both laughed. 

At that moment, I let go of the house.  Home was in her eyes.  When she called me at work, home was in her searching voice.  But she didn’t understand.  And I couldn’t tell her the truth that I didn’t want to sleep in a cold car with her smoking and fussing the way she smoked and fussed for years at the kitchen table while the house became less and less of a home.  Ruin creeps up on us.  It’s a process.  Something gets lost.  Someone goes rigid.  Routine paths through the clutter that are wide enough for just one person become life.  The fire dies.  Little fires get put out.  Meanwhile, skin falls off in patches, and a daughter’s dog licks the sores.  Our house began to sink in 1980.  It was lost to us, her children, back in time, long before Mom was pulled out by paramedics after her fall. 

In Flint, the insides of house after ruined house are char-black.  I think of our old “family room.”  My father and I imagined that room and built it—the railroad ties for beams and the wood stove that sits in its bricked alcove.  We transformed our old back porch and would later build our Indian Lake dream house out of fragile balsam wood and delicate tissue paper on the kitchen table.  An eighth-grade art project worthy of any architectural school.  He taught me that rooms and houses have to be dreamed up and lived in together.  When collaboration ends, life goes out.  I think of Mom sleeping on the couch in that ruined room so she could let the cats out at night, walls blackened by soot and cigarettes and curtains hanging stiff with grime while cobwebs stirred the air.  I begin to understand the anger that leads disappointed families in Flint, betrayed by the stuff they owned and the stuff they couldn’t afford, to torch it all for a bit of pocket change and a high.  

I wish Mom could remember the joy of leaving things behind to go outside—to garden, to golf, to carol in the streets, to slip down a German stream on a riverboat, to visit the frozen and faraway continent of Greenland.  Maybe my brother is right about bulldozing all the stuff into the words.  Ruins are blind.  For some reason I’m thinking of the doomed King Saul.  After a potentially life-altering meeting, woke from madness by the voice of his “son” David, Saul goes back to his place.  But David went on his way.  Two simple words--"place" and "way"-- that are so fraught with meaning.  A place is static; a way is dynamic.  A place is built to defend and ward off; a way is the path of and to God, who makes all things new.   Is that why I compulsively WALK through the RUINS when at home in Flint?