WHAT DO 'THOSE PEOPLE' WANT?

When my mother fell ill, it was the people she had always derided who came to her bedside / by Tad Bradley*  

 

"Those people," my mother spat. "They want something for nothing."

I sat in the living room of the bungalow I grew up in. I cringed as I listened to the most familiar voice in my life. I sat beside my mother, who was lying on the couch. Her voice was now fading, rasping. The words were not so clear, not without her dentures. But there was no mistaking her meaning.

In the kitchen, but not out of earshot, a woman was cleaning the stove. Usually she arrived at nine in the morning and left at one in the afternoon. She cooked what little food my mother would eat. She washed my mother's hair, gave her sponge baths, clipped her nails. She massaged her feet and hands. She took my mother by the arm to the bathroom and cleaned up after her. She dusted and vacuumed. She gave my mother the medication she couldn't live without. She talked her through each and every thing. Or, at least, tried to. Most of the time my mother was as silent as a stone.

"Those people," my mother sneered, closing her eyes tight in anger. When they opened, she gazed skyward, unable to focus -- all around her a dark, unchanging blur. There were only voices now. Mine. My father's. My wife's. That of the woman in the next room. And hers.

"I hate them being here," she said. "Those people."

My mother hated the dependence. She hated the half-hour visits from the V.O.N. nurses in the morning. The routine: Check the vitals, check the blood sugar, change the dressing over her right breast where her skin had given way to cancer, ask questions about the pain, take a look at the medicine supply. Those visits measured her decline, not her progress. She hated them even though we tried to tell her it was better than a trip to the hospital that might last the rest of her life.

But most of all she hated those four hours with the woman in the kitchen, one of those strangers sent to my parents' house by the community-care outfit in their neighbourhood.

When my mother talked about "those people," she didn't mean just the home-care workers. That was her unsubtle code. All the women, all the caregivers, were black. If there was any doubt about it, that vanished when my father interjected: "Uneducated, really" or "This one's Ethiopian, for God's sake."

I tried to keep in mind that my mother was blinded by diabetes. Went from reading the paper one day to a sea of grey the next. I tried to keep in mind that my mother was dying of cancer that would advance from her breast to her brain.

I rationalized: That's the sickness talking. She's depressed. She's dying. I tried to keep in mind that my father had survived prostate cancer and a heart attack. He's cracking under the pressure of trying to look after the needs of his dying wife. Judge not.

I told myself my parents were of another time. They were in their seventies. Neither of them went to school past age 14. They knew no different until they came to Canada after the war from "the old country," as they called it with undiminished affection. There were parts of them, attitudes toward people, toward institutions, that were long past changing.

I tried to believe that in better times they would have appreciated the help. The workers were paid $20 an hour, although my folks, fixed-income seniors, were charged the bare minimum, $10 a day, which my wife and I picked up anyway.

But they did not look at the housekeepers as professionals in any way. To my parents, they were just the help. And the moment they made the slightest slip-up, whether it was showing up five minutes late in a snowstorm or burning the toast, my parents looked at them as glorified welfare queens, stealing a good buck from the government.

My parents didn't conceal their feelings. My mother never whispered when she could shout. My father seemed to believe that any woman dispatched to the house was incapable of understanding his none-too-subtle snubs.

---

In our house it wasn't always hate and it was never all hate.

My best friend growing up was Hammer, a black guy. Though neighbours muttered when Hammer and I pulled up in front of my parents' bungalow back then, he was never turned away at the door. My mother always gave him a kiss on the cheek and waited on him hand and foot. My father shook Hammer's hand and asked him about the football team. He went out to the driveway and had a quick look at Hammer's car. Anything that ever needed doing, my father only asked for money for parts, no labour.

My parents didn't just cut my friend a special exemption.

My mother's best friend was her business partner, a Jewish woman named Shelly. They ran a shmatte store on the Danforth, a street that cuts across the eastern half of Toronto. When Shelly died 25 years ago, my mother cried like she did when her own mother died. And when my mother was dying, she had on her night table a vase that Shelly had brought back from Israel.

My father's best friend was Robby, a Jamaican guy. Robby lived in the apartment next door to my father's auto repair shop. My father joked about Robby not having any "visible means of support." He fenced some things that fell off the back of a truck. When Robby was busted, my father went out to the sidewalk and thanked the cops for "getting that type off the streets." A couple of hours later, my father picked up Robby and drove him home.

That's how it went. My mother told Jewish jokes that were racially insensitive, dropped "spade" into a conversation, but wouldn't abide anybody saying a bad word about her friend or mine. My father talked about how "dark" things were getting down at Regent's Park, yet he hired Jamaicans almost exclusively as help in his shop because he thought they worked harder than others he'd brought in. You couldn't have convinced Hammer, Shelly, Robby or any of the guys at the shop that my parents were racists.

Only they were.

I tried not to be judgmental with my parents. They were in their seventies. I wanted to believe that everyone of a certain age from the old country used those awful epithets because they never had friendships in their youth that crossed colour lines. They grew up poor -- my mother in London, my father on an unproductive farm in Ireland. At 14, both left school to work.

I always wanted to think that my parents could see the good in anybody. I didn't want to be the son of racists. I tried to believe that their attitude about race was born of ignorance rather than malice, that it was benign rather than malignant. Maybe that was true. Even if true, though, it didn't mean they weren't racists. It only meant they were racists of a different sort.

If my parents found something they didn't like in a stranger, they drew a line from that to his race or religion. And if they came across someone who held racist views more odious than their own, they'd never protest. In the worst moments, they even laughed about it.

I had seen real racism among their friends. George was a big Irishman who worked as superintendent of an apartment building. No conversation with George could pass without race somehow getting into it. No visit could be made without a rant about niggers or kikes or others whose grave misfortune was not to be born red-haired and chalk white like George.

Most of the tenants in his building were Jewish retirees; many were Holocaust survivors. George and his family used to live in a main-floor unit off the lobby. Whenever we visited, George left the front door of his apartment wide open and had his hi-fi turned up, blasting German marching music into the lobby.

I was nine and didn't understand everything George said or did. I do, however, remember my mother and father telling other people about George years later. And laughing about it.

---

The women who came to my parents' home could hear the withering contempt in my mother's voice even as it was fading. She swore at some, refused even to acknowledge others. She issued orders, never a word of thanks.

They could read the condescension in my father's words. He told them they wouldn't understand how to run the washing machine, leave it to him. As if it could be more complicated than administering intravenous drugs. He told them what food they should put in the refrigerator. As if it could be more complicated than sorting through my parents' many prescriptions.

My mother treated them like servants; my father treated them like children.

The women continued to come to my parents' house. Except those whom my parents phoned the community-care office to complain about. Except strong-minded Merlene, a former nurse and dietician who told my father she knew better than he did what foods my mother should eat. They came to my parents' house, but knew enough to work in the rooms away from my parents until my mother fell asleep or my father went out. Only then would they come in and clean up the living room.

Most of them went about their work stoically. Jennifer, alone among them, remained sunny even when my parents demeaned her. One day, when my mother was asleep and my father was on a trip to the store, I had a conversation with her.

At first I didn't raise the topic of my parents' racism. It was just there like the biggest piece of furniture in the room. Then I told Jennifer that I was appalled by my parents' behaviour toward her and that I appreciated her work.

"I think they appreciate it in their own way, too," Jennifer said. "Mum is in a bad way and maybe it would be different if she felt better. It's her heart breaking, too, not just the disease."

"I don't know how you stay so upbeat," I told her as she sat at the kitchen table and filled out reports that only hinted at her trials at my parents' home.

"I have all kinds of clients, some of them for years, some worse off than your mother is now," she said. "At least she has Dad. She has you and your wife and her friends. Every day I see worse."

I didn't doubt that, but I told her that I couldn't imagine any job being so hard on the nerves and the soul.

"There is that. Maybe if somebody just came along to do the job, they couldn't make it through one day. But for us it's rewarding, too. It's hard to see ..."

From where I sat, not hard, impossible.

"After some of the toughest days I feel the best. There are people that feel so bad, if I can make them feel better because I'm here, even just once, then my job isn't so hard. It's easy to feel good about it."

I asked her how she felt about the racist remarks she must encounter, not only from my parents, but elsewhere.

"I came here 20 years ago and I had it at work and everywhere else. It's not so bad at work because you have to accept troubles at work. But with my children -- it makes me sad, not mad. I try to see the good in everyone every day and I think that most try to see the good in me. That's all I can do. I try to do God's work, and He sees me."

---

Over New Year's my mother took a turn for the worse. She began to have trouble balancing, trouble sitting up, even when lifted into place and perched there. She pitched forward. She fell to the side. Her eyes and expression remained constant. She was unaware it was happening.

This was troubling enough, but what made matters worse was her confusion. She had always been command central, even after her eyesight had gone, even when being wheeled in for radiation treatments. She had known which cheques had to go out on which dates, which drawers the insurance papers were in.

Overnight that was gone. She couldn't remember what day it was. She still listened to hockey games at night, but in the morning she no longer remembered who had played. A few weeks earlier, she had recounted games, goal by goal, from the previous night's radio broadcast.

The next day she was rushed to hospital. We didn't immediately know that she would never return home. Scans showed the cancer had spread to her brain. We started looking for palliative care. Meanwhile, we advised the folks at the community care about my mother's condition and worked out a schedule for continued help for my father.

The administrators at the community-care offices were sympathetic. They already knew my mother had been rushed to emergency and admitted. Jennifer had gone to the house that day and found it empty. She had, no doubt, arrived at clients' homes before and found that someone she had known for months, years even, was gone without a goodbye.

When we brought my father home from the hospital, the place was spotless. Jennifer had notified the office and busied herself as best she could. The bed was made up for my mother's return, which Jennifer hoped for but knew was unlikely.

When I arrived at the hospital a couple of days later, Jennifer was at my mother's bedside. She was visiting her, on her own time, between calls to her other clients. My mother was staring blankly up.

"She's so good to me, Jennifer is," my mother said. "I wish I could go home with her."

"Mum is more comfortable here now," Jennifer said. "I've done what I can for my friend."

Now my mother's world was filled with fantasies and phantoms. All night long she listened to the moaning of an old woman in the next room --cries of "help, help" for hours on end. My mother thought it was a little boy who had visited her. "Poor thing," she said. "Such a nice boy." She swore that my seven-year-old daughter was tickling her feet and running around her ward all night.

My mother accepted the visits of my father, my wife, my daughters and me. Yet she seemed happiest around Jennifer, who came once or twice a week. She would give my mother a massage, some juice and conversation. When my mother was too weak to talk, Jennifer would tell her stories about her work, about the other community-care workers, anything to break up that lonely silence.

One day I arrived as Jennifer was leaving. As always I was saddened, trembling, knowing I'd be momentarily at a loss for the right thing to say and do. Jennifer looked at peace, not happy but at ease. "I do what's natural," she told me at my mother's bedside. "You have to do it for her, but you have to do it for yourself, too."

Before dawn one day in March, the call came. My mother had died. She hadn't opened her eyes in four days, hadn't been able to utter more than a word for a few more. She was alone when she died.

I went back to the palliative-care unit later that morning, after my mother's body had been moved to the funeral home. I dropped off a card to thank the staff for all their help. Just as I was leaving, Jennifer arrived. She saw the empty bed and my mother's name still on the door of her room.

"Mum ..." she said to me.

I told her that my mother had died that morning.

"I'm sorry for you and your family," she said. A tear rolled down her cheek and she brushed it off with a finger. Then she started off for her next call, another client, another unspeakable sadness.

"Those people," my mother had said in a voice loud enough for Jennifer to overhear. "They want something for nothing."

Maybe in those last days, my mother saw how blind she had been. Or maybe there was another vision among the apparitions and phantoms dancing, with my daughter tickling her feet and the little boy crying down the hall. A woman. Giving anything and everything for nothing.

 

- The author's name and those of some of the people in the story have been changed.