Lizzy’s real name is Jan Marie. Before that, Mary Janice. And before that, Janice Mary. They each define a period of her life. Mary Janice was her name at birth and throughout childhood. When she married, she legally swapped the Mary and the Janice to become Janice Mary.
Then, ever since my dad died, she has lamented the fact that she never changed her name to the one she truly wanted, Jan Marie. We’ve spent years calling her Jan Marie because it makes her laugh. And now, after nicknaming herself after her Aunt Liz who could never remember what day it was, we sometimes call her Lizzy.
She also likes Lizzy because her aunt was an explosion of life. While she enjoys it when we call her Jan Marie or Lizzy we primarily call her Mom. The other names are reserved for times we are discussing specific periods of her life, or a pattern of behavior that we associate with one of her other names. We are sitting together in her living room, drinking tea, when she asks me, "Where are you going next week again?”
“To Clyde,” I answer.
“Who’s Clyde?”
“Not a who but a where—the town in North Carolina we went to last year.”
“What about North Carolina?” she strains to hear.
“I was just reminding you that we are leaving to go to Clyde, North Carolina, tomorrow.”
She looks up at me, indignant, and spits out, “Why are you telling me that again?” There’s a comedy routine in there somewhere.
My husband and I pack up the car in preparation for our sixteen-hour road trip. We’d like to get on the road early so we can stop at dinnertime. After we’ve made our last schlep from the car and come into the house to get ready for bed, the phone rings.
“Can you order some of those meals to be delivered for me?” she asks, as if that is the reason I exist.
“Sure, but remember, you have to order at least four meals, and you always think that’s too much.”
I go online and together we pick four—Pasta Primavera, Meatloaf and Mashed Potatoes, Chicken Florentine with Brussel Sprouts and some awful sounding mushroom dish.
“Those all sound fine,” she says, sounding pleased. I know what’s coming. Lizzy will get her meal delivery next Tuesday and call me.
“What in the world am I going to do with all this food?” Her tone will be incredulous. “I could never finish all of this!” she’ll exclaim, as if I’ve offended her.
She’ll hang up the phone and call my sister to complain about how much food there is. Sometime around mid-week she’ll call and ask me to cancel the meals.
“It’s too much,” she’ll say.
At ninety-one, Lizzy’s face has hardly changed since her early eighties. People stop her in the grocery store to tell her how beautiful she is. Lizzy is tall and slim. Her hair didn’t start turning gray until her late eighties. She has beautiful green eyes that sometimes look blue depending on what she’s wearing, and admits vanity is the reason she won’t use a cane. Or a walker. In the last few years, she has broken her hip, her wrist, and, most recently, her pelvis. In and out of hospitals, transitional care, and then back home as if nothing had happened.
Once she fell in my backyard. I ran over to her and realized she had landed in a nest of bees.
“Mom, you have to get up!”
She said lazily, “I’m going to lie here a while.”
I panicked as the bees began swarming, so I lifted her to sitting. She then heard the buzzing surrounding us, motivating her to pop up. I helped her move back to the deck. That was the time she broke her wrist. Miraculously, we didn’t have to add countless bee stings to the injuries that day.
When she came home from transitional care after breaking her pelvis, she agreed to let us hire a home health aide for a few days a week. She selected one, then another, then another and finally ap- proved a very young, personable Somali woman she liked. What she liked most was hearing about the woman’s two upcoming weddings. One in the US, one in Somalia. The custom fascinated her. But once Lizzy was up to date on wedding plans, she didn’t want that aide anymore. It wasn’t that aide exactly. It was any aide.
“I don’t want to sit around and talk all day,” she’d say, rolling her eyes. “She doesn’t even know how to make a bed.”
She agreed to use her walker and stop driving. The walker is now resting against the garage wall, and she’d still be driving except her car battery is dead. It feels like we’re right back where we started except Lizzy’s body is weaker. I told her we worry about her, about another fall.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know better than to fall again. I refuse to end up in a nursing home.” Her motivation is clear, and she clings to it.
Lizzy’s apartment is decorated like something out of a magazine with corners of personal memorabilia—books she bought in Paris, photos of her fifteen grandchildren and eleven great grandchildren. Before my father died, at the very end of her Janice Mary period, she and my dad moved into an apartment, which was supposed to be temporary until they settled on a place to buy. She carefully fixed it up and ended up being so comfortable, they stayed. Mementos of my father line the rooms—the picture of him that was in the paper when he was promoted at work, a caricature of him riding a camel on their trip to ... well, I’m not sure ... a place that has camels, letters, photos, and the monogrammed, leather-bound journal I made for him.
To this day, she continues to make small changes—a new pillow, a painting, something red for her kitchen. She no longer dusts or vacuums and finally lets me hire cleaning help.
The older Janice Mary reminded me of my grandmother, Hilde. My mother, as the only child, cared for her. She bought her clothes, which Hilde always had my mom return to the store because they weren’t her. She’d clean up my grandmother’s apartment, but she never did it right. Once I visited Hilde on my lunch break from work and brought her some McDonalds French fries—her favorite. I walked into her room and the first words that came out of her mouth were “You shouldn’t wear that color, Jane, it washes you out,” commenting on my matching pants and jacket. I plopped into her guest chair, opened the little bag of fries, intending to eat them one by one in front of her. Believe me when I say I hesitated before offering her one.
When my grandmother died, Janice Mary and I went out to buy a new blouse for her mom to wear at her wake and burial. The woman ringing us up asked if we’d like a gift receipt. With my grandmother’s history of returning clothing that was purchased for her we found this hysterical and took the receipt, which my mother tucked into my grandmother’s casket before they closed it. Still, if we dug her up and opened her casket, I am positive she’d be wearing something else.
I am going to bury my mother with the leftover meals I will have ordered special for her funeral. If there isn’t enough room in her casket, I will remove them from their microwaveable boxes.
Lizzy has a spontaneous and reliable sense of humor. Recently, she was riding the elevator to her apartment with my sister, Mary. My mom was carrying a loaf of French bread, and they were chuckling about something. Mary noticed my mom’s hand had inadvertently dropped and she was holding the French bread down in front of her hips as if it were a penis. Mary laughed so hard tears fell from her eyes. She pointed at the French bread and my mother looked down and cried,
“No! Please, don’t make me laugh.”
But my mom laughed and laughed until she wet her pants in the elevator. Which made both of them laugh even harder. Fortunately, she lives behind the first door to the right of the elevator and slipped into her apartment unnoticed where she and Mary continued to laugh like children after a fart.
Lizzy tells me she dreams about the cocktail parties she’s going to have. In her Mary Janice years, she was an expert entertainer. She organizes menus, guest lists, and dates. I offer to help her throw a party and she refuses. It’s in the imagining, and that dream is enough to sustain that part of her identity.
During the Christmas season now, my Mom plans a holiday open house for everyone who lives on her floor. It never happens though. Sometimes she knows it’s something she would like to do. Sometimes she thinks it might have happened.
I often look at the wedding photograph on my desk of her and my father. The beginning of the Janice Mary period. How beautiful they looked. The many hopes and dreams they shared. Having a bunch of kids, doing better for their kids than their parents were able to do for them. How she loves to create beauty from nothing, because once, they had nothing. She worked with newspaper, felt, dried flowers, ribbon, looking for ways to incorporate almost anything into something special for her home or a friend. She was also a good writer and painter but didn’t explore those talents because they were outside the realm of homemaker. She always insisted that a homemaker is what she wanted to be.
After sixty-four years, she lost my father. My heart broke for her first, and then me. She didn’t want to share her grief with us, but we knew that, for several years after his death, she cried every night when she went to bed. She told me that the last thing they said to each other in bed was “I love you.” The night he died, they both fell asleep right away and no words were shared. She also lamented the fact that his last meal was a McDonalds hamburger.
My mom stayed at my house for those first few nights sitting silent in front of the fire. Then one morning, she got up and announced that she was ready to go home. I hated leaving her alone to wrestle with her grief.
It took a few years to reshape life in a way she could make her own. My sister and I stayed close; we’d take turns sleeping overnight when she wanted company though Lizzy sat in her chair silently while we were there.
“Do you want to talk, mom?” I’d ask.
“No thank you,” was the response.
But in time, on the other side of that grief, Jan Marie was born.
Jan Marie was game for anything. In her mid-eighties, she went with my husband and me to Paris. Twice. She was a great travel mate. No complaints, full of curiosity. Happy to sit in an outdoor café all afternoon and watch people while we drank Sancerre and talked. Then, a year later, we took her to Salzburg. That was her last twirl around the world.
“Did I pay my Visa bill?” she asked me.
“Why, I don’t know, Mom, did you?” I answered, smiling.
I used to pay it online and, after the payment was late once, she decided she’d better handle it herself. Now they are always late, but she’s got the control she needs to feel independent. She laughs when my sister and I joke about running circles around her, our hair on fire—picking up, returning, picking up again, getting the mail, taking her to the doctor, buying groceries, changing her sheets, and picking up prescriptions, on behalf of her ‘independence’.
Lizzy has a cell phone which she uses exclusively for solitaire. She has the same six pink curlers with pink pins that she’s had since she got married. Every night they go into the front of her hair, with the exception of two that she plants on the back of her head to smooth out a persistent cowlick. She doesn’t care about food so eats tiny bits at a time, sometimes a salad, sometimes crackers and cheese. Sometimes she eats crackers and cheese with pink curlers in her hair while playing solitaire.
“When do you come home?” she calls to ask, not for the first time since I’ve been in Clyde.
“We’ll be back in the beginning of March,” I say.
“That’s a really long time.”
“Just two weeks left, mom.”
A couple of days later I call her. She doesn’t seem to want to talk. The conversation lags so I talk about myself, trying to engage her. I tell her about what I’m writing, the hikes we’re taking, the food we’re making, how late I am sleeping in. At the end, I tell her I love her, she tells me she loves me too, and we hang up.
She calls me right back to ask if she has any more meals being delivered. I say no and remind her that we canceled those deliveries for good.
“I’m glad,” she says. “Too much food.”
Shortly after our return home I took Lizzy to the doctor. The doctor checked each symptom of old age and pronounced my mother otherwise healthy—that deft emphasis on age that only a doctor can provide. She looked sad when we got back to the car. She looked at me, as if I’d asked a question, and said “I can’t imagine having a better life. It was all so much more than I ever imagined. A beautiful marriage, children who love me and now care for me. Great friendships and so many wonderful memories. But now,” she says wearily, “most of my friends are gone and all I have left are memories.”
I take her beautifully spotted hands, with her long piano fingers wearing rings of love from my father and hold them tight.
“Are you unhappy?” I ask. She turns and looks at me without saying anything.
“Are you content?” I try it another way.
“I’m content,” she smiles.
And it hits me. My mom likes to be alone now. She is slowly putting distance between herself and the friends that remain, herself and the rest of her life. I hug her frail frame gently when we part and remind her that I am always here for her, to talk, to visit, to pick up whatever she needs and to love her. She looks up and says, “I love you so much.”
After Lizzy is safely in her building I drive away with a heavy heart. Five minutes after I’m home, the phone rings.
“I knew I wanted to ask you something,” she says. “I wanted to tell Patt (her neighbor) where you went?”
“To Clyde,” I answer, smiling. I could have said “North Carolina.”
“Wait,” she says, “Who’s Clyde again?”
After we hang up, I imagine her alone in her apartment. She gets ready for bed, rolling her hair in her pink curlers with pink pins. In bed by eight, she plays solitaire on her phone. She might be wearing her soft pink nightgown and bed jacket because she gets cold at night.
This is where we are. Lizzy is beginning her long, slow goodbye in the only way she can. Gradually pushing our world away.
