Peggy

Posted on Mar 21, 2010 02:20:21 PM

 Ron Lloyd, 2010

I sit holding her knobby arthritic hand for a long time, knowing the end is near.  She is a husk of the dynamic woman she had always been, sleeping in a sling chair used for residents who can no longer sit up.  In the “bird room” with us are other Ridgecrest Village retirement community residents, a number alone in their twisted slumping bodies.  Others are quite alert, visiting with family, waiting for dinner or bed or pills, the next event of their daily routine in the nursing home.  Glass cages hold chirping birds, their quick flitting about the cage contrasts with the Ridgecrest residents in various stages of descent toward the end.  Tall glass windows hold a view of a pleasant, flowered court yard residents can seldom visit because of limited staff to watch over them.   My mother stirs a bit, and I wonder what her dreams are like in the late stages of a life enclosed in dementia.  She wakes for a moment, but I don’t know whether she recognizes me.  Tears well up, but I stifle them. Finally, it’s time to make the trip from Iowa back to Colorado.  She dies a few days later.  Relatives say she found a release in my visit.  She could let go.  Perhaps.

In an old photograph, ten students stand squinting, the mid-afternoon September sun brightening the white clapboard siding of Centennial School.  Four are Quists, Francis and Edwin in the doorway, Eugene just behind my mother Peggy at the end of the first row.  She perches precariously on the edge of the stone slab, her face lit by a big smile under her bobbed black hair.  Wrinkled cotton stockings rise from her high top shoes, a grayish sailor blouse drapes over her plaid skirt.  She is pretty and pert, around nine years old.  She seems delighted and carefree.

 Peggy was born about a mile from the school.  The fifth of eleven children on a western Illinois farm, she no doubt received the usual abuse from older siblings and gave unusual care to the younger ones.  She scrubbed clothes, swept floors, and helped fix dinner and supper.  Her father Francis said she was born with a broom in hand. Her escape, she said, was to climb to the top of those lofty pine trees on the “high hill,” as she called it, where the farmstead stood.  She would watch the puffy white clouds of summer afternoons, imagining the shapes as ships and wild animals, dreaming, wondering.

 After eight grades at Centennial, she went to high school in the village of Reynolds.  She would start a fire in the cook stove, and then call her mother to get up before she left for school.  She walked the muddy roads, or across the fields over the fences on crusted snow drifts during those tough Midwest winters of the Thirties.  She detested missing school.  She was determined to graduate in spite of no encouragement at home.  For whatever reasons, her mother and father didn’t care.  Regardless, Peggy persisted and graduated.  Where did her resolve come from?  She told us she hated those ugly cotton stockings, not having any nice clothes.  She didn’t like being poor.  She wanted better.  For her a high school education was a necessity.

When I was around twelve, someone asked whether I was going to college.  I didn’t even know what college was.  As I got older there was no question about it.  Mom and Dad expected me and my brother to do well and understood we would go to college.  They worked hard and saved, and expected us to do the same with summer and after-school jobs. 

After an easy time in high school, I started college but was not really prepared.  I wasn’t flunking out, but I was not doing well, and the scholarship and aid went away with poor grades.  I wanted to jump in my old Ford and head west, but I could not quit; it would have broken their hearts.  I could not let them down.  Somehow I stayed the course, and graduated on schedule.  I am sure they were very proud that warm day in June.  And more so, I’m sure, three years later when Clayton graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

*  *  *

With my family, I make the trip back east again only a few days after leaving Mom.  We join my brother and his family, and our many relatives and old friends paying their respects.  At her visitation, she looks “like herself,” as mourners often say, lying in the open casket.  The undertaker’s miracle has erased many of the ravages on her physical presence.  It is relief I feel more than anything.  She is released from her suffering, we say, but I, too, am released, released from my concern for her.  I am relieved of my guilt of being nine hundred miles away, not being able to help more, to visit her more.

I realize suddenly many of these people have known her longer and, in some ways, better than I did.  Her own family, of course, is represented by her remaining brother and sister.  Being older, she had cared for both as children.  With both, there had been times of hard feelings.  Her sister decided to get married the same day as Mom and Dad.  Mom never forgave her for that.  Her brother was on the opposite side of inheritance issues involving the family farm.  That situation cleaved the siblings for a long time and must have remained an undercurrent the rest of their lives. 

My father’s remaining siblings are here.  The older of them have known her since she and Dad became a couple, the younger ones since they were born.  And there are many of my cousins who knew her as Aunt Peggy.  Gathered to pay respects are eighty years of friends and neighbors, from high school, card club, church work, people she served at the bank where she worked with Dad.

Sue Houseman, the pastor at Ridgecrest, has not known Mom long, but long enough to appreciate what she was all about.  Pastor Sue has asked my brother Clayton and me to give her some information she could use in her talk about Mom at the funeral.

*  *  *

Mom and Dad were married on Valentine’s Day, 1941.  Dad worked in a cement block plant until the draft took him in March of 1942.  I was conceived in Texas, a place Mom detested because of the Abilene dust permeating everything.  They kept flour and sugar in coffee cans to keep out the ever present cockroaches. Mom returned to the Midwest, staying with her aunt in Davenport, awaiting the baby.  After I was born one April morning in 1944, Dad wangled a furlough for a few days with his dear Peggy and an ugly baby, head mangled by forceps, purple with gentian violet, a bactericide.  Dad returned to Texas and then shipped out overseas, not to return until the fall of 1945.  He found a job in a grocery store in Edgington, a small town near where they had grown up.  My brother Clayton was born in 1947, around the time Dad left the store for a small bank in a nearby Buffalo Prairie.  Dad eventually became the cashier at the bank, and Mom worked there part time.  They were active in church and community activities.

In 1964 I was a sophomore in college, and Clayton was a junior in high school.  I received a call; Dad was in the hospital, having tests.  In response to the siren from the fire house at the south end of town, he was hurrying across the road to Dick Ziegler’s store to find out where the fire was.  His legs weren’t working as they should and he fell.  Earlier signs had been manifested, but this was a stronger signal.  Shortly, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. 

M.S. is incurable and affects its casualties in different ways; symptoms and speed of debilitation vary with the subtype.  I was always proud of Dad in that he did everything he could as long as he was able. I was also proud of Mom in her adapting to the situation as it developed.  The disease proceeded on its debilitating course, progressively requiring the use a cane, then a walker, and eventually a motorized scooter.  As he became increasingly disabled, the burden on Mom increased proportionately.  By necessity they became even more inseparable.  I’m sure she must have occasionally felt overwhelmed by the burden, but she never faltered.  Her marriage vows were never compromised.  She was in it for better or worse.

Dad was able to continue his work and was able to drive their car with hand controls.  Mom learned to do what was necessary in helping Dad around.  They learned how to swing his increasingly deadened legs under the steering wheel, how to get him situated just right in the driver’s seat, and where best to park.  They got around like that for years.  Clayton and I, along with others in the family, debated the issue of his driving, but we never felt we could take that away from them.  For years we had tried to convince Mom to learn to drive.  She had told us she had driven trucks back on the farm, but would not learn again.  She felt she could not take that privilege away from him.  Driving was the one thing he could continue to provide.  And it allowed them continued freedom of mobility.

After Dad retired in 1982, they sold the two-story house in Buffalo Prairie, and moved to ranch-style house in nearby Davenport, Iowa.  Relatives built ramps for his scooter, and he would use a wheel chair when they were out.  Of course, Mom still had to get the chair in and out of the car and help him into it, and to get around if no one else was available to help.  In those last few years he gained weight.  She felt it her duty to feed Dad well; he felt he had to oblige her efforts.  How she got him in and out of bed was amazing. She was a petite woman, but learned how to manage him.  During one of our visits, with tears in his eyes, he told me of his frustration with his inability to do more on his own, how difficult it was for Mom, and how much he appreciated what she did for him. 

Mom never relented in the house cleaning.  Everything was as spotless as ever.  She swept the driveway almost every day, and in the fall, she would drag out the ladder to crawl up on the roof to remove those last leaves.  Hours were spent with a shop-vac sucking up water when heavy rain would cause flooding in the basement.  She was over seventy by then.

Finally, the situation resolved itself.  Out for supper one evening in March, 1994, with Mom and a neighbor lady, Dad pulled out in front of a truck.  I flew to Chicago and drove back west to Davenport, with three hours of thoughts stirring in my head.  Among many memories was the guilt of living nine hundred miles away and leaving much of the burden of their care on my brother and others in the family. Shouldn’t we have prohibited him from driving?  Would they survive?  What do we do now?

They both survived.  Dad’s head was swollen, the size of a melon, but he soon recognized me.  Mom was sedated.  Very unPeggy-like, she had been cursing and abusive to the nurses and aides.  I stayed back there as long as I could, but left knowing a lot of support remained, an advantage of large families and good friends.  Dad remained in the hospital.  Mom was released shortly, but later had to be re-admitted. 

It was obvious they could not remain in their house.  Dad was now effectively paralyzed below his neck and required full-time professional care.  We moved them to Ridgecrest Village in Davenport, a facility having appropriate help for Dad and an apartment for Mom.  She spent time with Dad every day, volunteered to work on the facility’s newsletter, escorted other residents to doctor appointments, provided support for health wing residents as well as Dad, and every Sunday helped with chapel services.  Eight months after the wreck, Dad had had enough of his condition, and died quietly. 

Mom continued to live at Ridgecrest, and continued to perform the duties she had assumed.  In 1995 and 1996, I found work at a project in central Iowa.  During those weekends I didn’t fly back to Colorado, I would drive to Davenport to stay with Mom.  Typical of her, she insisted I sleep in her bed and she on the couch in her small apartment.  I was glad I had those opportunities during those two years to have some one-on-one time with Mom.  I was able to glean a few more details of her earlier life, learn a little more about her.

Eventually Mom descended into dementia.  An earlier indication of its onset revolved around pantyhose.  Mom always dressed well and always wore pantyhose, whether in a dress with heels or in slacks with flats.  Whenever someone would take her to the mall, pantyhose was on the list.  Nobody thought too much about that because she always wore them.  But when we moved her from her first apartment at Ridgecrest to the brand new wing for Alzheimer and dementia patients, we found she probably had accumulated more pantyhose than the J. C. Penney store had on display. 

Earlier, Mom had been diagnosed with diabetes, requiring careful monitoring of food intake and balancing with shots of insulin.  Often frustrated when an imbalance would show up on a daily blood sugar test, she would check ingredients of the food stuffs in her cupboard.  Her doctor told her not to worry too much about what she was eating. 

In her new setting she had access to the kitchen on her floor and liked to have a bowl of cereal for an evening snack.  After a number of episodes of unexplained reactions, the staff found she was loading her cereal with sugar.  When they denied her ready access to the kitchen, she felt she was being abused, as did we, until we understood she simply didn’t know what she was doing.  With the combination of diabetes, more than eighty years of hard work, the trauma of the accident, and losing Dad, her understanding of the world around her and the ability to communicate were slipping away.  She was forced to leave her apartment and join the rows of patients who spend their days waiting for pills, to eat or to be fed, to be bathed, and to be put to bed.  Was this still the mother I had known?

*  *  *

In the bright chapel of the funeral home, Clayton and I sit flanked and supported by our families in the front row of those gathered for the funeral.  Pastor Sue recounts the high energy and hard work for which Mom has always been known, how she had served her family, church, and community.  She relates that Mom was proud of her two sons, Clayton and me, having found life companions, raising children of whom she and we were proud and, in our own ways, serving others as well.  Further, she recounts that Clayton and I have both stressed in our notes about Mom how she had cared for Dad all those years.  With a final prayer, the service ends.  No matter how prepared I thought I was for the loss, it still hurts like hell.  I cannot stifle the sobs.