No, I haven’t been to see Robert. It has been over a week. He is as stable as he can be under the circumstances.

I didn’t want to go alone, it is too much to bear. I needed someone to go with me but it wasn’t possible. When someone comes and waits in the car I feel like a child who has a left school at 3:00 PM with the day of learning behind me along with its anxieties. I will be swept off into security. The mixed emotions of a school day, and all the unknowns it brings is banished and left in the hands of an adult. In short, I don’t want to be an adult, I don’t want to handle any more overwhelming finances, I don’t want to shop, plan meals, pay bills. I want to go back to Playground 5 in Stuyvesant Town and ride the blue elevator up to the 5th floor where my mother would be waiting with lunch or dinner. She would shop at The Pioneer Market on East 13th Street and Avenue B after bringing back the deposit soda bottles. Myer’s 1890 Ginger Ale.

The heavy bottles would clink at the bottom of the shopping cart and be returned to be refilled. They would have some remnants of worn glass, the battle scars of use. True resurrection in the life of bottles and bubbles. Validation that we all come back.

I am off on one of my tangents, yes, I know, I know and I am avoiding the topic.

I had a couple of vivid dreams. They upset me for a whole day. They are indicative of my mind’s struggle to make sense of my reality. My adult reality that keeps pulling me forward and I don’t want to go. I want to hide in that after-school car. And the truth is, that scenario was not in my childhood-reality: It was a dream harvested from 1950s television.

But, there was no pickup in a car. I walked home across the cobble stones of East 14th Street, alone or with friends who, like myself were anxious and excited about the prospects of pre-teenage life.

Here I am now. At the door of a nursing home. I sign in, my temperature is taken during these Covid Days. I walk to the left down the hall as far as I can go, turn right, there are the elevators. I ride up to the second floor, greet a few people at the nursing station. Take a deep breath, put on my imaginary armor and make my way into a room where my husband of forty-five years lies, unrecognizable to me: he is physically gone, he is linguistically bereft, he is spiritually floating, he looks over my shoulder to watch a television that is black and silent.

I could not do this last week. I had appointments and the like, veritable excuses for escape. I could not do this. Not alone.

So back to the dream. The other day I was awake at 4:30 am, not unusual. I got up for a while and puttered while the skies were still veiled in darkness and then took a CBD gummy. When I fell asleep again at 7:30 AM, I dreamed I saw Robert, clearly, he was dressed in his navy slacks, he could walk, there was no cane, he was slightly off balance and yet managing. I suppose my mind was rewinding to about eight years ago when things were subtly changing, the soft signs of an oncoming metamorphosis  becoming visible. He was OK. He could do, he could go. He was alive.

I awoke to the sadness of reality. I fell asleep again and my dream somehow charged fast-forward like a galloping steed, causing me to hold the reins for dear life. There was Robert again. First, crouching down as if to look for something, then, falling, falling backward like that day last year on November 29th. He never came home again. He, like a Myer’s bottle was now fragile, made of glass.

In the dream he said, “it’s almost over.” or maybe it was, “it will end soon.”

I’ve lost the words but I’ve kept the feeling. It follows me, it is housed in my gut. He said he was going home. It won’t be long.

Falling, falling backward.

As the months progressed last year, I couldn’t catch him as he fell in the bathtub, I couldn’t catch him as he fell with his walker. I couldn’t manage his bathroom accidents, on the floor and in bed. I would face myself in the bathroom mirror each morning and pray for strength. Pray to sweep my daily anxiety aside in order to cope with whatever was thrown at me. And then came that day, November 29th, the day before his birthday, when he did fall backwards like someone picked him up and threw him as he tried to get to the bathroom, flung in the wrong direction. Seven EMS firemen entered the bedroom and got him onto the bed, disoriented, and I asked them to turn around. I said, “This is what forty-five years of marriage looks like,” and I changed his DEPEND. The regular EMS came and took him away and that’s when life officially changed.

But you knew all of this, your’ve read it over and over as I’ve written it over and over trying to make sense of it all, and though he was triaged twice and ended up here, in this nursing home, the one where he got Covid, I’ve always had that blind hope that somehow I’d visit and he’d greet me in his Robert way, with humor and engagement. But it never happened. Instead I escape and direct my energy to sorting through at least two years worth of piles of his things that never end, the collections reflecting unbridled interests and work.

I suppose that he thought he could take all of this with him, the mirrors of his life, now fragile, now glass, like soda bottles; empty and waiting to be recycled,  now illusion left for others to deal with, with both surprise and resentment. He would need a very large moving truck with wings.

If the end is near, I hope it is easy. He has left so much behind: He has left his own version of gifts to many people. He did the best he could for his family and he thrived on his job: his students.

Will his parents be waiting in a car for him? Some 1950s vehicle that would drive through The Bronx past his childhood apartment and then upward?

And then I think, who will be waiting for me? I think, my mother. In a white car.

And she never learned to drive.

[In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was a brilliant short story by Delmore Schwartz written in 1935. It is a nod to the Yeats poem, Responsibilities of 1914, based on “an old play.”]

📌The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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