Late-Life Love Read online

  “You must put safety first,” Tyrone instructs Don, whom he positions sitting on the edge of the bed. “All your weight must be put on your right leg. We will practice the pivot.”

  He has looped a heavy safety belt around Don’s waist and placed a wheelchair at a 45-degree angle right up against the bed. We are grateful that there is no one else in the room; the second bed is unoccupied.

  “Susan, you will watch me carefully since this will be your role. You see I have my own feet planted firm, just so. I have my hands on the belt and can push this fellow back onto the bed, if I worry about his safety. You are not strong enough to hold him up. Safety first. No more falls. Another fall will land you, sir, in a wheelchair and it is very hard to ever get out of one once you get into one. We don’t want that.”

  With his cast leg just touching the floor, Don is supposed to use upper body strength to push himself vertical. Jamming his fists against the mattress, he manages to rise and balance on his good leg. Then he must reach his right hand over to the right armrest of the wheelchair, swivel his right foot around, reach with his left hand for the left armrest of the wheelchair, and lower himself, again using upper body strength, slowly down into it. Tired, he gets befuddled. The right hand reaches for the left armrest by mistake. Or he swivels in the wrong direction. Or he collapses into the chair. Maybe we should try the pivot from the bed to the walker, from the walker to the wheelchair. We must do it over and over again, day after day—first Tyrone and Don, then me and Don—until he can master both sorts of pivots, and then it is time to rest.

  If the move from the bed to the wheelchair remains dicey, walking seems impossible. Helped upright to a walker, Don hops on his good leg and must be instructed on how to position himself inside the frame of the walker, how to slide his right foot forward only an inch or two at a time, how to relax his shoulders, how to use long colorful rubber bands to increase the strength of his arms and wrists.

  Tyrone and his peers become the highlight of our days, since Don does not want colleagues visiting in such a depressing place and Fran has neither phoned nor emailed. Besides, the difficulty of simply getting him washed or into the bathroom exhausts us both. Julie cheerfully runs numerous errands, but we don’t want to subject her to the indignities with which we must cope. In some ways, I find it a guilty relief to tap the code that opens the door out of the Trace—05 (for the month), 15 (for the year), star (for get me out of here!)—and walk into a glowing sunset, to have the physical power to escape into the warm fresh air, knowing that Don will soon be given a medication to help him sleep.

  Those surreal nights take on their own desolations, however. In the empty house, I remember the three rules Don followed when he lived alone after Mary-Alice’s death: use a placemat, don’t eat in front of the TV, and make your bed every morning. Without a smidgen of his flinty discipline, I instantly break the first and last. I don’t eat in front of the TV because I have not mastered the remotes and eating has become a problem, unless I stand in front of the refrigerator and simply reach for a piece of cheese to accompany the wine needed in abundance.

  I am furious at Fran. Probably all of my fears are projected into that rage. I had accepted her growing need for time alone at home, but this feels like being ghosted. I really never did comprehend what she expected from her deepened seclusion, but now I have learned exactly how much (and it is a great deal) I love her and how angry I am at her. That blood is thicker than water upsets me. Don’s girls have been great, as have mine from a distance. I always wanted to believe Fran was part of our family, but I have been proven wrong. I fume over the many forms of support I provided her in the past—the errands run, meetings attended, advice given and received. A sense of abandonment shrouds me, despite the offers of support from others.

  Should Don remain incapacitated, would we have to move into the assisted living quarters of a place like the Trace? He wanted nothing to do with relocating to New York or Boston, the cities where three of our girls live. Now I can no longer help the daughter in need of help, though neither she nor her husband has had a full night of sleep in months. When will I again see the Buddha-baby, sweet-tempered even when sick?

  And what if the two back-to-back operations plunge Don into a state worse than incapacity? Were that to happen, how could I stay in this empty, remote house? With Fran gone, Mary and her family set to leave for Baltimore, Julie unsure how long she will stay in town, to whom could I turn? Even my oncologist was contemplating a move to another state. Joining the girls in Manhattan or Brookline would be beyond my means. Would I end up in the Trace alone? Since the cancer diagnosis, Don and I both assumed that I would die first. The alternative threatens to capsize me. Would my existence conclude like my ninety-six-year-old mother’s?

  “Do you still watch TV?” I asked during one of our twice-weekly visits to my mother’s room in a place like the Trace. Don was putting away the laundry he did to keep her monthly bills down, as I struggled against reverting back into her churlish adolescent daughter and she began inching her wheelchair toward the stuffed animal she called Munchkin. I couldn’t bear watching her stroke the chipmunk’s tail.

  “Oh, yes,” she said brightly and veered toward the television to pick up a hairbrush precariously perched beside it. She grasped it, firmly placed its plastic bristles on the side of the blank set, and began moving them up and down, making a grating sound. Then she swiveled around to look triumphantly at me and Don.

  “You see,” she said, “I play with it all the time.”

  Better my mother’s affection for Munchkin than her earlier distress that “they came and bruised me (look at my wrist!), and took me to that other place, where there was a replica of this very room.” The brushing of the television occurred two years after we found her stash of certificates—“You Are a Million Dollar Winner!”—and months before her death. Earlier, she never got a second chance at late-life love; and if she had, she would have been too traumatized to accept it.

  One of the saddest stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Old Love,” describes an awakening of desire that comes after grief has taken too much of a toll. In his eighties, the widower Harry Bendiner lives a lonely life, his social interactions confined to visiting an office of Merrill Lynch. Only in his daydreams does he fantasize about restored powers and masculine adventures: “The brain wouldn’t accept old age. It teemed with the same passions it had in his youth.” Unexpectedly, a new neighbor—Ethel Brokeles, in her fifties—knocks on his door to introduce herself, and their conversation switches into Yiddish, as he exults, “It could be nothing else but that heaven had acceded to his secret desires.”

  In his apartment and then in hers, where she serves him lunch, they share the tragedies that had befallen them. He, the death of three wives; she, the death of her beloved husband, and her breakdown and seven months in a clinic for nervous disorders. They speak of using their money to travel before they hug and kiss. Youthful urges throb through him, but she cautions him, “Wait till we’ve stood under the wedding canopy.” Then, suddenly, he sees that her face has “grown pale, shrunken, and aged.” Back in his own place, he spends the night dozing and waking, worrying about strange footsteps, doors slamming, until another neighbor rings his doorbell in the morning to deliver a letter from Ethel, who had thrown herself out the window.

  “Dear Harry, forgive me. I must go where my husband is. If it’s not too much trouble, say Kaddish for me.” The prospect of a future husband’s appearance brought home to Ethel the tragedy of her late husband’s disappearance. Harry in his loss reminds me of my mother or she reminds me of him. No space in the Inverness seems comfortable, not the upstairs bedroom, not my study.

  I sit with my legs outstretched on the blue couch in the family room, where I wrote my last two books, not writing now but listening to Fidelio, as I had decades ago in the house in town, after my first husband left me. Our petty power struggles and hurt feelings had not deflected my incessant pleas that we work it out, for I clung to the
belief that I could change him and save the marriage. Although we were profoundly incompatible—not just “potatoes po-tah-toes, tomatoes to-mah-toes”—the breakup plunged me back into the desolation I had felt at fifteen when my father committed suicide on June 10, 1960. Carbon monoxide poisoning in the car in his shop. The inevitable questions inevitably went unanswered. Why did he do it? How had we failed him? My mother’s lonely life as a widow began when she was in her forties. More than half her existence, the second half, she lived alone under the shadow of that horror.

  During the divorce, while I listened over and over again to Fidelio, the character of Leonore enthralled me. Could I tap into her strength and fidelity? An unfair conjecture continued to nag me: Would my father be alive if my mother had possessed Leonore’s determination? Beethoven’s only opera celebrates the conjugal love of the indomitable wife Leonore, who disguises herself as the manly Fidelio to rescue her unjustly imprisoned husband Floristan. “The devotion of true married love gives me strength,” Leonore-Fidelio sings. The entire opera takes place inside a prison; its chorus consists of the prisoners; and at its climax Leonore-Fidelio must screw up her courage to descend into the bowels of solitary confinement to find her enchained and starved husband.

  With the jailer, as she begins to dig Floristan’s grave in the lower depths, Leonore-Fidelio encounters the evil man who conspired against him and who is now about to murder him. After revealing her identity, Leonore exclaims, “First kill his wife!” and then produces a pistol, when an urgent trumpet call interrupts. The Governor has arrived to liberate not only Floristan but all the inmates.

  At the breakup of my marriage, I was in my forties, about the age I imagined Leonore, and more than anything I wanted to rescue my husband, our marriage and family, from the prison-house of misery that encased us. Fidelio reworks the mythic hero’s descent into the realm of the dead by imagining a wife journeying down into the dark underworld, where she offers her buried-alive spouse sacramental sustenance—bread and wine—before leading him up to a sunlit, redeemed social order and conjugal reunion. Unlike Orpheus, she never looks back, never wavers or falters in her resolution.

  In the only interpretive book I could find about Fidelio, a musicologist writes that “virtually every critic of the opera feels the need to interpret it, to ask what Fidelio is ‘really’ about, because the music tells us that it cannot simply be about a wife rescuing her husband.” But I think the celebratory music is precisely about a wife rescuing her husband. This same scholar declares that because “Beethoven was a profoundly unsexual artist, with a sensibility of unparalleled austerity,” the opera “is utterly untouched by eroticism,” for “Leonore and Floristan are well past the ardours of the first love.” The guy knows bupkes, I think, or, as my father would say, “Qvatch!”

  First, consider the opening scenes where the jailer’s daughter, in the grip of a powerful infatuation, gains the permission of her father to plan her wedding with Leonore-Fidelio. In the single most beautiful canon I have ever heard, “Mir ist so wunderbar,” four hushed voices longingly express their desires, most quite at odds: the jailer’s daughter imagines Fidelio reciprocating her love, Leonore-Fidelio worries about the infatuation, the jailer envisions the couple’s bliss, the daughter’s spurned suitor considers his miserable abandonment. The thrilling harmonies suggest that although the singers are encased in the urgency of different hopes and fears, they share our common yearning to voice, if only to ourselves, intense emotions that remain incommunicable to others.

  Then, at the beginning of act 2, we encounter the enchained husband Floristan in his dank captivity, singing an ardent tenor aria in which he broods over the all-consuming darkness that has engulfed him and concludes with an ecstatic vision of Leonore as an angel beckoning him to freedom. The word Freiheit, repeated numerous times, is sung at the highest notes Floristan reaches, resounding over and over again, quicker and quicker, after which he abruptly falls asleep. Sandra’s husband Elliot, who often lectured me on the significance of operas, had a hilarious interpretation of Floristan’s rhythmic climax. Elliot argued that the aria mimics the progress toward orgasm, after which a man does often go instantly to sleep. I could never listen to it again without smiling and thinking of Elliot.

  But now I am decades older than Leonore, older than Elliot when he died so unexpectedly, so tragically, and Sandra, after enduring that trauma, again feels traumatized, her current relationship in jeopardy. We commiserate on the phone, though it is impossible for me to express my fear that my cherished second husband cannot be liberated from incapacity, that I do not have the strength to free him from his fetid confinement. He has been catapulted into old age: a hale and hearty senior yesterday, but today an exhausted, depleted, immobilized trace of himself. I try to instruct myself: we have been lucky to have had as much time as we did to revel in a love that was sometimes as dramatic as a spring storm and sometimes as comfortable as a worn slipper. C. S. Lewis felt the same way when, in his late fifties, he married Joy Davidson. In A Grief Observed, he marvels at their gaiety even after her cancer depleted their hopes.

  Yet during her illness, Lewis realized that there is a limit to “one flesh,” because of the difficulty of sharing someone else’s fear or pain: “I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine.” Especially when I was hospitalized for cancer-related surgeries, I knew that my physical miseries were not Don’s, and I was glad they were not. Now the cold truth that lovers can be set on different roads chills me. For Lewis, “this terrible traffic regulation (‘You, Madam, to the right—you, Sir, to the left’)” inaugurates the “beginning of the separation which is death itself.”

  Is our current separation the beginning of the end of Don and me? Had we been wrong to plan that my ashes would be buried in the plot next to Mary-Alice’s grave and that his body would join me there when he died? Would I, not he, be visiting Rose Hill Cemetery to plant flowers or place a stone? Why must one predecease (a horrible word) the other? Joy Davidson once told Lewis, “Even if we both died at exactly the same moment, as we lie here side by side, it would be just as much a separation as the one you’re so afraid of.”

  In his grief at Joy’s death, the widowed C. S. Lewis imagines himself a one-legged man. After the separation, he will “probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones.” My one-legged man’s life has changed inalterably. He, too, will face pretty bad pains probably for the rest of his life. “All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too.” Will Don ever be a biped again? I worry as I gather up books and scraps of cotton to have something to do during the leaden hours of waiting at the Trace.

  Inside the dungeon, Leonore digs a hole for the man whom she has not yet ascertained to be her husband. Impelled by the principle of freedom, she determines that whoever he might turn out to be, she will unlock his chains. That sort of wide-angled, humanitarian heroism seems beyond me now. My vision has narrowed to springing Don from the Trace. At the close of the opera, the prison choir is joined by townspeople because Beethoven wanted sopranos and altos, along with tenors and basses, to hail the hour, long yearned for but unforeseen, when justice in league with mercy appears at the threshold of the grave. His exalted music leaves me exhausted.

  Props

  INSIDE THE NARROW ground-floor bathroom, I maneuver around the walker to position a small end table on which I place a mixing bowl filled with hot soapy water and a washcloth. The soapy water must be replaced by clear water, a clean washcloth, and a bath towel. Shaving cream, a razor, aftershave, a small mirror, and a hand towel come next. Then I move the bowl, washcloths, shaving cream, razor, aftershave, mirror, and towels to the counter by the sink and place deodorant, a glass of water, and a toothbrush with toothpaste on the end table. Then I find clean underpants, shorts, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and another pair of the yellow, nonskid socks from the Trace.

  Don sits naked on the raised toilet, squeezed bet
ween a bathtub on his right and a wall on his left, a cabinet just above his head, the end table positioned next to his uncast knee. To help dress him, I crouch on the floor at his feet. In the old days, he did these routines standing in the upstairs bathroom with the door closed while I snoozed. We are home, but the burden of care weighs us down.

  The walker, jammed sideways through the door, gets Don to the wheelchair I have placed just outside the bathroom; it cannot fit through the door frame. I wheel him to the wingback chair next to a window in the living room—the wall-to-wall carpet slows us down—and then go back to get the walker so he can use it to rise and pivot to the real chair. Then the bathroom must be cleaned. We are both fatigued and I am still in my pajamas, but the breakfast dishes have to be done because the dishwasher has broken down and the sink is full of last night’s mess. As I leave him with his iPad—it’s about 11 a.m., so he has already consumed his raft of pills—he says, “Shake me up, Judy,” to which I say, “This is a happy day!”

  He’s glum about his camper outfit. He’s glum about the heavy cast, his dependency on the walker, the wheelchair, the pills, the visiting physical therapists, and me. Even with the extra-wide shoes with Velcro fasteners that Julie found at Kmart, we cannot get his feet shod. That they are not merely swollen but flaking tells me we must return again to his GP for some sort of antifungal cream. Last time the GP prescribed an antibiotic for a urinary infection and “water pills.” Taking the pills requires recurrent blood tests in the hospital to be sure they are not damaging his kidneys and trips to the nurse practitioner at the kidney doctor’s office. Weary and wary, Don hunkers down in his upholstered chair. He does not want to make the same mistake we made before. He keeps Tyrone’s rule foremost in his mind; it makes him gloomier.