A Place to Return

My 93 year old mother sits in her wheelchair, hunched at the round kitchen table. My father’s seat, empty for a year and a half, remains quietly insistent beside her. His presence exists only in small smiling photos magnetized to the fridge, clipped to a shelf. There used to be a round clock on the wall nearby, part of my mother’s antique collection, but it fell, crashed to the floor a while ago. 

She is tiny, inconsequential, almost unnoticeable at this table crowded with old lady things: a bright reading light, tissues, a box with pens, small scissors, eye drops, library audio books, a CD player. The TV shouts the endless news cycle from its stand. My mother’s hands, worked hard in her younger life, are curled and craggy, useless on her lap, covered in thin, purpled skin. A digital clock holds a bold reminder of day, date, and time. A white board lists a schedule she can’t see. The kitchen looms to the side, this space to which she dedicated so much of her life. The counter is cluttered with cleaning materials and cookie packages. The refrigerator preserves old food. A trap sits behind the dented, dripped-on garbage can, awaiting its mouse. The large house stretches out around my small mother, but she only traverses its length a few times a day to use the commode or walk some laps with her walker or be taken to bed. On her journey she tries not to see all the things that aren’t right: the scuffs on the wall, the rings on the wooden tables, the crooked picture frames. Most of all, she tries not to notice the strangers, the round-the-clock aides sitting in her living room. 

Thirty years ago, when my parents moved to Syracuse, they planned to stay only a few years, until my father retired. His highway construction career had kept them on the move. So much so that my mother, accustomed to her husband coming home from work and announcing a relocation, was quick to start filling boxes. She never minded before, but Syracuse was different. She’d seen the sad, sagging post-industrial city burdened by an often eight month winter, a perpetual greyness, an unrelenting haze of snow. Spring, summer, and fall were lovely in Syracuse, but short. Nevertheless they chose a large ranch house because of its nice neighborhood and proximity to town, the grocery store, the highway. 

Prior to their purchase, it had been inhabited by its only other owners, the couple who’d built it, lived their middle-aged life there, grown old there, and died. The house was not my parents’ style and in deplorable condition, but they took on the project with their usual gusto and soon my mother’s passion for decorating and gardening uncovered its hidden potential. At the time all seven of us children were young adults, some married, sprinkled around the country, and my parents’ first grandchildren were being born. Even though they’d never intended on it, and for reasons that I won’t get into here, they never left. Over the decades, the house in Syracuse became a place we all loved to visit, returning again and again. 

Being the long-time singleton that I was, and also a poverty stricken teacher-type, I traveled by train from Philadelphia to Syracuse for all of the vacations and holidays of my young life and I loved every minute of  it. Summers I slept in a bedroom with three crank out windows welcoming the surprisingly chilly upstate New York air, turning the room so cold I huddled for warmth under one of my mother’s freshly washed comforters. When some of my other siblings were there, I’d get up in the morning to a crowd around the kitchen table, my father holding court in his robe, the talking and laughing and coffee drinking a favorite ritual. My mother zipped around cooking, prodding my father, planning the day’s schedules, cleaning, orchestrating. Christmas was a treat in Syracuse because the weather ensured a white one, and my mother’s decorations and preparations were elaborate and comforting. After big holiday meals we played 500 rummy with our father, then crashed in the den, snacking on leftovers, sipping beer or wine or whatever, drifting to sleep until each one of us headed to our beds. The celebrations we had in that house are too many to count, homecoming after homecoming, birthday upon birthday, holiday after holiday,. Twenty years in, I moved to Syracuse, and my future husband attended my mother’s 80^th birthday party at that house, and two years after that I pulled on my wedding gown in the one upstairs bedroom. A year later, my baby son wriggled and giggled from his pack-and- play tucked in a kitchen corner as his doting grandparents watched in awe. It was abundant, all the joy in that house. I suppose it was natural to take it for granted. 

There’s nothing unusual about the decline, but still, it snuck up on us, surprised. The summer my father turned 90, my mother, 87, was out gardening and fell, splitting her head open on the side of the house. It wasn’t the worst thing that was to happen, but that was the kickoff. The rest of that year was a parade of ER visits and hospital stays, this time for my father, culminating in a heart procedure for which he had side effects that limited his mobility, put him in a rehab facility, and required much effort from which to recover. Things got better for a time, but whether we knew it or not, things were also slowly getting worse, as they do, and my husband and I found ourselves coming over more and more to pick one or the other of them up from a fall. We began to fear leaving them alone, to stress when we left town for a trip. On top of their physical problems, my father’s memory was failing. My mother did not want help, but my sisters and I convinced her to hire a cleaning lady and to send out the laundry. The house lost its luster anyway, the gardens wilted and faded. My father, the son of a golf course owner and a painstaking greenskeeper, gave up his beloved mowing. Every loss was fought against until exhausted surrender, bitter acquiescence. Then the thing happened that we all feared was inevitable, my mother fell and broke her hip and went to rehab. Because of his memory loss, my father couldn’t be left alone. Our backs were against a wall. We had to hire 24/7 aides. My father died six months later, thankfully at home. 

At 54, I am still returning to my parents’ house. I  pull in the garage, into the empty spot once held by their red suburu wagon. Entering the kitchen through the garage door, I find my mother hunched at her kitchen table spot. Sometimes she’s quiet, sometimes she’s angry at me for taking so long to get there, sometimes she’s weeping about something the aide did or didn’t do. 

Often, she asks me, “When are we going home?”  

She has her wits about her but the house has become foreign, unrecognizable. 

“You are home,” I tell her, not really meaning it. 

We are in the house but not home. 

And I am no longer a carefree young adult returning to her parents. I am no longer a reveler, a vacationer. I am a caretaker, rolling the garbage cans out to the curb, stocking the fridge, paying the aides, making sure the laundry is done, supplies bought, the house in some semblance of order. When my siblings return it’s to visit with our mother but also to give me a break. We decorate the house for holidays and other events, throw together meals, set the dining room table, but  it’s never as nice as when our mother did it, never as fun as before. We go through the motions and try to appreciate our remaining time in this house. We know it is short. 

My parents’ house is on a major road, prominent on an incline, visible. Running errands, living my life, I drive back and forth, constantly passing. I try to picture my mother gone, the house sold, maybe knocked down, maybe rebuilt. I imagine her beautiful gardens turned over, disappeared. I know she will one day soon be buried with my father a bit further down the road. No matter what happens to the house, I will think of them every time I go by, of the hard times but mostly of the wonderful times we had, the abundance of blessings and good fortune. I will pass, driving the few miles to my own home, a butter yellow house I love, the place and people to whom I now belong.

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Silence is not an option