Late-Life Love Read online

  “There was a Dick Tracy villain named 88 Keyes,” Don said. “I’m switching to the organ.”

  That is why the character Alice in the movie Still Alice would have rather heard a cancer diagnosis than the Alzheimer’s diagnosis she receives. She wanted to retain her sense of herself. It is hard enough to imagine one’s own degeneration and death, harder still to imagine dying witless.

  When I settled back down to the literature I had collected on caregiving, I realized that the experience changes radically for couples dealing with senility, Pick’s disease, Lewy body dementia, Alzheimer’s, or brain damage. The best-known autobiographical and imaginative works on this subject—John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris as well as the movie Iris, Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came over the Mountain” as well as its film version, Away from Her—depict the sorrow and frustration of loving a person whose body has been increasingly evacuated of subjectivity.

  John Bayley always understood that he did not understand the beautiful mind of his wife, the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, whose youthful confidence contrasts with the “omnipresent anxiety typical of Alzheimer’s patients.” To Bayley, the “lion face” of the Alzheimer’s patient “indicates only an absence: It is a mask in the most literal sense.” His memoir about Iris Murdoch juxtaposes a joyous Iris, enjoying daring swims, with the terror that engulfs him when he worries that she might forget and let water “pour into her mouth as she opened it in a soundless appeal.” In the movie, then-versus-now is emphasized by cutting back and forth between the young Iris, played by Kate Winslet, and the older Iris, played by Judi Dench.

  A sexually and intellectually adventurous Iris Murdoch underscores the deterioration of an agitated, frightened Iris, as the squalor of the pigsty she shares with John Bayley begins to seem downright unhealthy. According to Bayley, the “omnipresent anxiety” typical of Alzheimer’s patients “spreads to the one who looks after the sufferer.” Exhausted by her urgent questions and physical needs, Bayley asks, “Does the care-giver involuntarily mimic the Alzheimer’s condition? I’m sure I do.” Only to this extent does he suggest the grueling grind that can wear down and indeed totally deplete caregivers.

  While caring for her brain-impaired husband, Alix Kates Shulman believes they are “becoming mirror images of each other,” as if “his illness has infected me.” The doubling of the caregiver and the ailing partner occurs with other diseases as well. Again and again, Donald Hall misspoke the sentence “My wife has leukemia”; it came out “My life has leukemia.”

  Still, dementia poses its own specific problems. My Donald remembers sitting down to dinner with Mary-Alice, when she turned to him and asked in her most polite Oak Park voice, “Do you have any children?”

  “What did you say to her, Bear?” At my diagnosis, I was horrified that my cancer would propel him back into the caregiving role he had undertaken for years with Mary-Alice.

  “ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We have two wonderful daughters.’ ”

  Taking care of a partner who does not recognize you . . . that must be the hardest. Would you recognize yourself? How can longtime companions prove their love if they cannot remember their shared past?

  Alice Munro contemplates the demise of memory and of love in “The Bear Came over the Mountain.” When Grant is allowed to visit his wife in the nursing home (one much nicer than the Trace), Fiona barely remembers him and has found a new friend, Aubrey, on whom she dotes. Serves Grant right, one might think, for his philandering. But Alice Munro’s ironies reach beyond such a judgment as it becomes clear that Aubrey’s subsequent removal from the nursing home, his return to his wife, threatens Alice’s well-being. Because she is pining, Grant tries to facilitate his wife’s infidelity by means of his own: by starting a relationship with Aubrey’s wife (so he can persuade her to return Aubrey to the nursing home). Yet when Grant manages to reunite Aubrey with Alice, she has forgotten him.

  At the end of the narrative, does Alice’s affection for her husband awaken, or it is just another ephemeral caprice of her unpredictable mind? The bear goes over the mountain to see what he could see; and what he could see was, in my childhood version, another mountain and, in Don’s, the other side of the mountain. Don thinks the title means “you just keep going, mountain after mountain, one foot in front of the other.” That’s what he did for Mary-Alice. But the title makes me think of great lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.” (Clearly, between the two of us Don has the better disposition.)

  John Bayley, more than Alice Munro, suggests that love can be proven with partners who cannot remember their shared past. Alzheimer’s brings John Bayley and Iris Murdoch closer together. Decades earlier, Murdoch had defined love as “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” During her illness, this realization, on both their parts, could not be more evident. Their previous “closeness of apartness has necessarily become the closeness of closeness,” for the “terror of being alone . . . is a feature of Alzheimer’s.”

  The “closeness of apartness”—the pleasure of solitude in tandem—strikes me as an often ignored but exquisite benefit reaped by healthy companions. For satisfying hours on end, each solo and yet connected: no need to cleave together, being so closely conjoined. No need for ordinary communication either. Don and I often sit in separate rooms at home or together at a table in restaurants, not talking but companionably silent. We overhear elderly partners who bicker and babble in the call and response of Winnie and Willie, in slang, chitchat, prattle, phatic chirping. Or as Bayley and Murdoch did, in nonsensical phrases, baby talk, encoded colloquies. Before the onset of illness, Bayley and Murdoch shared “a whole infantile language of our own,” a “private” one. After Murdoch became ill, they communicated in “snatches of doggerel, song, teasing nonsense rituals” that functioned “like underwater sonar, each bouncing pulsations off the other, then listening for an echo.”

  By means of quirky dialects, many people revive unextinguished sensations and emotions. Without overt meaning or substance, sometimes addled and recycled allusions, punch lines, and jingles elicit a shared past with a multiplicity of eccentric associations that have accrued over time. Such linguistic shortcuts enliven a relationship that can be imperiled by disease, especially if it threatens the mind.

  When Marion Coutts realized that a brain tumor had taken away most of her husband’s words, she worried, “What of our private language? How can a language endure if it has only one to speak it and another to give it context?” Before cancer, “we were proximate even when apart”; after its ravages, their language “diversifies again and becomes a repertoire of homemade sighs and groans. We are in the versatile region of tone and touch and pitch mapped by light pressure to the skin or a hand circling the face.”

  As the reference to touch and pressure suggests, “the closeness of closeness” relates more specifically to the intimacy created by disease: “If Iris could climb inside my skin now, or enter me as if I had a pouch like a kangaroo,” Bayley states, “she would do so.” Alix Kates Shulman’s husband and Donald Hall’s wife confused their caregiving partners with their mothers. Caregiving can re-create the nursing couple: mother and child. For a woman, therefore, caregiving may require more of the same, but maybe not for a man.

  A memoir by Brian Aldiss explains why many published testimonies come from male caregivers, when statistically most caretakers are female. Tending to his wife of thirty years, Aldiss finds himself baffled by the shopping, cooking, and cleaning that he must learn to do. He writes his account in order to understand his perplexity. Taking on his wife’s tasks sensitizes him to her past existence. In the process, it instructs and changes him: “Our two lives had become one life.”

  According to Bayley, illness has made him and Murdoch “inseparable—in a way, like Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon, whom the gods gave the gift of growing old together as trees.” After Jane Kenyon’s death, Donald Hall
looked at the trees near her grave, wishing she were a birch, he the gray oak alongside it.

  Earlier in Without, when Hall fully expected his wife to dress herself and drive herself in a matter of months, he found himself discomforted by the thought of her renewed independence: “He felt shame / to understand he would miss / the months of sickness and taking care.” Hall had first learned how caregiving intensifies intimacy when Jane Kenyon had nursed him after he “lost two thirds of a liver and nine-tenths of my complacency”: “I have come so close to Jane that I feel as if I had crawled into her body through her pores—and, although the occasion of this penetration has been melancholy, the comfort is luminous and redemptive.” Daily, as she would massage him, he felt “an interdependent fusing together of our bodies and spirits.”

  My Donald also suffered the loss of arduous caregiving’s redemption. He was in a rage at himself when Mary-Alice died. He phoned me with the news. “I’ve failed, I’ve failed,” he kept on repeating, despite my assurances that he had nursed her devotedly throughout her long illnesses. Was our friend George—now grieving the death of his wife in New Jersey—tormenting himself with gratuitous self-recriminations? The husband of Carrol—she would no longer be attending our cancer support meetings—was contented, I was convinced, while he drove her around the neighborhood through which she was now too weak to walk. On their last drive, she confided, they had counted fifty-six rabbits, a personal best.

  That conversation caused me to reach down to the stack of books accumulating on the floor next to the blue couch and find the last collection of Jane Kenyon’s work that she managed to organize. It strikes me that the title poem is a precursor and a companion piece to the six-line catechism by Donald Hall, the one I titled “Contented.” Also a memento mori, “Otherwise” was written when she was his caregiver and begins with two declarative sentences:

  I got out of bed

  on two strong legs.

  It might have been

  otherwise.

  Through a morning of eating cereal and taking the dog for a walk, through the noontime ritual of lying down with her mate, and then later eating dinner together, and then getting into bed and planning another identical day, the refrain resounds: “It

  might / have been otherwise.” The shift to the future in the poem’s concluding, unbroken line—declaring that one day “it will be otherwise”—admonishes us to continue being contented with the work of love before the rhythm of successive days is stayed.

  Tequila Mockingbird

  VIVID GOLDS, BLAZING oranges, burnished reds first came into view through the airplane window and then danced before our eyes all the way home. We had not missed the peak of the glory. The flamboyant leaves flamed before they would cascade and drop down. “East, west,” I said, as I always do, and then I tipped our driver for “heroic driving.” What a whirl the past week, what fun. Images swirled in my head: Don toasted at a music stand, the fox crawling and the monkey strutting around Susannah’s apartment, the pavement under my feet during brisk walks alone as the city sky blued into that blacker blue that always takes my breath away.

  The maples at the Inverness were gold, the bushes orange, the dogwoods red, though the pear trees remained as green as ever, while the walnut was bare. “I miss you most of all, when autumn leaves begin to fall”: Nat King Cole’s voice issued from a fax Don once sent me when I was away in England, lecturing.

  Of course our trip to see my daughter and her family was the high point for me. During the weeks leading up to it, I was sure we would not make it. We had come down with such terrible colds that the night we were supposed to take Judith out for her birthday, she brought us garlic soup and some Emergen-C packets. Too many signs were alerting me of my advancing imbecility. One day, I noticed that I was wearing mismatched socks. On another, I forgot to pay at the salon for a trim of the few hairs growing at the back of my head and had to return with apologies. The ingredients I took out of the refrigerator for our supper that night turned out to be rancid. When I informed Don that our colleague Ross had been named a finalist for the National Book Award, he said, “Susan, we learned that a while ago, last week in fact.” (It’s never a good sign when he uses my name.)

  Yet we managed, with much trepidation, to get ourselves to Susannah’s apartment. Don did not have the energy to negotiate the bustling Manhattan streets, but I could walk the seven blocks to my daughter Simone’s place, where the chaos of life with a two-year-old and a one-year-old astonished and exhausted and delighted me. The baby was well enough for us to pack them both into strollers and take them to the park, where Sam could prance before the street musicians, while Jonah inspected and tasted the toys, teething rings, and binkies we put in his hands. The joy of seeing my younger girl so very competent and confident as a mother gladdened me, made me giddy with pleasure.

  Like most mothers, I feel a unique tie to each of my kids. Shy and sensitive as a child, my younger, in the second grade, had convinced herself that people died in their birth order and would, if they had their wallets on them, find their way back to their families. Simone represented a challenge, since my extravagant highs and lows frightened her. She was the only child to live with me and Don during her school years. We listened weekly to a musical quiz show on the radio, “Ether Game,” and guessed the titles of songs or the names of composers; she phoned in our answers to the local station. On mystic summer nights, we would sit at the table on the back porch and she would bring out her cello and play a gorgeous movement of the Bach suites to the accompaniment of the crickets and frogs.

  While I walked the seven blocks back to Susannah’s apartment with the sort of brisk stride that Indiana streets, lanes, and roads never inspire in me, I wondered if it was the pace of the young people passing me by that quickened my steps, or some trace remembrance of hustling from the Norton office to a restaurant, deep in book talk with Sandra; or maybe it was the chill in the air as nightfall brought out lights here and there in the towering buildings; or perhaps simply the exhilaration of returning to a place of origins. That I could be walking alone in the city, exulting in the toddler’s chirpings of “Hickory Dickory Dock” and the baby’s wet smooches, elated me, as did the sky darkening into the midnight blue I had chosen for many of my quilts. Amid throngs of people of every conceivable color and from an inconceivable number of foreign countries and with inconceivably various customs and costumes and cuisines, my relish at the pied beauty was qualified only by Don’s inability to venture out.

  The bracing vitality and variety of New Yorkers and some satisfaction at the trip’s having been accomplished sent me to one of the happiest late-life love stories I had found, a contemporary novel that explores the special link between an aging parent and an artistic younger daughter in the multicultural capital of the world, London. Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman foregrounds the obstacles to late-life love for people lumped together in the category “diversity”: its central character is an aging man of color, an immigrant, and a homosexual. Don and I were going out after months of imposed hibernation; Evaristo’s protagonist struggles throughout Mr. Loverman to come out after a lifetime of enforced subterfuge. His progress, like my own, proves that children may facilitate rather than obstruct their parents’ second chances.

  Seventy-four-year-old Barrington Jedidiah Walker tries to extricate himself from his fifty-year-long marriage because he has always loved and been loved by Morris, ever since they were boys in Antigua. But Barrington fears the homophobia all too evident in Caribbean society and also in the cosmopolitan British world where his girls were born and raised. I love the photograph of an aging dandy on my paperback copy of Mr. Loverman and its elegant French gatefolds: flaps extending the front and back of the cover that can serve as page holders. Though Barrington wants to live with Morris, he has witnessed verbal and physical violence against anyone labeled a “Batty man! Bum bandit! Poofter! Antiman!” The prospect of coming out makes him feel “like climbing Kilimanjaro with no clothes, crampons, rop
e, pick, or SOS flare.” Besides, he explains to Morris, “I am an individual, specific, not generic. . . . I ain’t no homosexual, I am a . . . Barrysexual.”

  In addition, like me he dreads leaving his home of many decades: “to leave here will be like dismantling and remantling myself in some strange, cold place. Houses don’t turn into homes straightaway.” In the family room, I gaze at the fireplace around which so many heartfelt conversations bound us to our four girls, at the two paintings by Jan of the red shed, at the wall covered by a huge acrylic of leeks and radishes. I cannot conceive of this house emptied of what has made it a home.

  Shades of Don and me inhabit it inside and out: caressing in the bed with the wooden frame, conducting a blindfolded knish-tasting test with a grandchild in the dining room, racing the wind-up little-old-ladies-in-walkers on Don’s study floor, chopping and baking in the kitchen, doing what we keep to ourselves in one of the living-room armchairs, watering “Splat,” the chartreuse hosta that recovered only to be eaten by deer.

  It would have been fun to teach Mr. Loverman, since it resists and spoofs the politically correct discourse that students bring into classroom conversations these days. An outright misogynist and too old to want to mend his ways, Barrington invokes Aristotle’s declaration “that the female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,” remonstrates that women “menstruate twelve times a year, or, as I like to say, mentalate, which incapacitates them physically and psychically,” and argues that childbearing “likewise incapacitates them for nine months and thereafter for eighteen years of motherhood.” No wonder he is banished from a course on feminism.