“It’s all true,
but none of it happened” I was puzzled
by this rather odd remark by Playwright Howe until I watched her play and saw
the characters on stage meld and become reflections of my experiences with my
own parents.
I understood
Gardner’s bewilderment at having returned from the bar with no ice, because he had
forgotten where it was. I understood
Fanny’s dark rage at her husband’s recalcitrance for the move to the cottage,
now imminently near. Finally, I understood why Mags made such infrequent visits
to her parents’ home.
Dad died a sudden
death in 1998, a week away from his 79th birthday. I went back to Pensacola, to help my mother
make the transition from 55 years of marriage to singular isolated
widowhood. It became apparent that Dad
had covered up Mom’s encroaching dementia to such an extent that seeing her
without him there to protect and care for her brought her vulnerability into
stark view. Like my siblings and
in-laws, I chose to stay the course of denial and soon returned home after the
funeral, to let Mom fend for herself.
Months later, a
call came from my sister (who lived nearby) informing me that Mom had been
discovered stuck in the bathtub after eight helpless hours, unable to extract
herself. They removed her to a nursing
home.
Another call two
months later informed me that ‘something’ had to be done. Once again I flew to Florida to find my 84
year old mother literally parked at the nurse’s station in a wheelchair ‘where
they could keep an eye on her’. She had
apparently taken to standing at the bus stop in an attempt to return home.
My sister’s MS by
that time rendered her unable to care for herself; much less our mother; and my
brother-in-law had only the means and ability to care for his invalid
wife. Mom became my responsibility.
I took her back to
the house, to give her two days of respite before the next shock to her frail
mind: returning to Texas with me--to be warehoused in some facility yet to be
named. On the day before our departure,
I left Mom with Joanna and Chuck, to allow me the time to do what needed to be
done. With a package of those luminescent
red dot stickers reserved for garage sales, I went through my parents’ house
marking those items that would be loaded on the van in the morning for the move
to San Antonio.
When Franny
fretted about moving to a space the relative size of a postage stamp from their
spacious house, I knew the feeling and my heart sank, as it did that frantic
dismal afternoon when I consigned the vast majority of Mom and Dad’s lifelong
collection of treasured holdings to an estate sale, to precede placing the
house on the market.
Mags Church was
stoic…and detached…from any sense of the enormity of what was about to happen
to her parents. While she attended to
her father’s attempts to prod the parakeet into poetic verse, I saw myself on
the morning of our departure, cutting the last enormous bouquet of prize roses
from Dad’s garden. I saw the tears of
recognition in my mother’s face when she beheld them on the kitchen table
moments before we left for the airport. The roses were left there, to wither in
the quietude of any empty house.
If you have aging
parents, living or dead, if you have found yourself in the unenviable role of
untutored caretaker, I would urge you to go see Painting Churches. Perhaps you too will find insight to the
plight of growing old and the universality of one of life’s cruelest conditions.
I will remember
this play as long as I remember my departed Mom and Dad; until my own memory
fails and I enter those dimming years…for myself.
