Elizabeth Hay - All Things Consoled: A Daughter’s Memoir

ALSO BY ELIZABETH HAY

His Whole Life

Alone in the Classroom

Late Nights on Air

Garbo Laughs

A Student of Weather

Small Change

Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York

The Only Snow in Havana

Crossing the Snow Line

Copyright 2018 by Elizabeth Hay

Hardcover edition published 2018

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request

ISBN:9780771039737

Ebook ISBN9780771039744

Cover images: (poppies) safakcakir, (background) ESB Professional, both Shutterstock.com

Cover design by Kelly Hill

McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

v5.3.2

a

For my dear friend Sheila McCook,

who knows the score.

HER KNEE

THEIR LIVES CAME TUMBLING down during that Indian summer in 2008 when Obama won for the first time and the world seemed bright with second chances. The morning after the election, a Wednesday, I went to do errands in the sunshine, returning home in the early afternoon to a message on the answering machine. His spine-straightening voice, the basso profundo that used to make students snap to attention from Georgian Bay to Whirl Creek: Liz. Call your dad as soon as you can.

I reached him. Without preamble, he said, An ambulance has come to take your mom

His voice cracked. He broke off. I couldnt speak either, torn into by what he was saying. Their telephone sat on a low countertop beside the refrigerator. He must have been standing there, struggling to master his emotions, receiver to his ear, his face working against him. And then he found a way out. Would you like to talk to Toula?

Toula was the nurse in their neighbourhood clinic. I knew her by reputation. My mother had mentioned her more than once, enchanted by her combination of warmth, stylish good looks, utter competence. The painter in my mother dwelled especially on Toulas striking brown eyes, so intelligent and alive. There was a long wait. I heard sets of footsteps in the hallway, directions being given. Finally Toulas voice in my ear. She said she had arrived to find my mother unable to get out of bed, Very, very weak, probably dehydrated. She hasnt been eating. Shes looking extremely frail right now. There were no beds in the hospital, Toula went on, so she would be admitted through emergency and might be there for a couple of days while she was assessed. Maybe with some extra fluid shell feel much better. She paused and her voice changed as she expressed the bigger problem. Im very concerned long-term about how theyll cope at home.

So was I. So was I.

I asked her how my father was and again she paused. Hes at a loss, she said.

That evening my husband, Mark, and I set out from Ottawa on the seven-hour drive across Ontario to London, the medium-sized city in the southwestern corner of the province where my parents had lived for nearly forty years. We drove until after midnight, located a roadside inn, slept as best we could, had an early breakfast and continued on. A bit before eight oclock, we rang my fathers doorbell and stepped inside. Down the stairs he came in his thick sweater, patched pants, eternal dark-blue beanie on his bald head, all smiles and relief at the sight of us. The hospital had called two hours earlier, asking permission to operate on my mothers infected left knee.

I expressed my bewilderment. But on Saturday she sounded well!

She was, Dad said. I thought everything was going fine. But on Tuesday evening, as Obamas victory was announced over the radiomy parents had no televisionshe stood up from the chesterfield and fell three times trying to get to the bedroom. I thought I was stronger. I had a hell of a time getting her up.

Shoving his hands into his pockets, fixing his eyes on the carpet, This cant go on.

We drove to the hospital and found my mother hooked up to an IV pole and lying on a bed in the emergency ward with an intern beside her, taking her blood. She was feistier and more coherent than I had expected; the extra fluid had done its good work. The young intern, examining her parchment-like old hand with its big purple veins, muttered, Lots of veins here. And my mother quipped, Veins, but no vanity.

To us she said, Theres only one word for this: helldamnspit. A salty bit of invective she credited to her roommate at the Toronto General when they were nurses-in-training. A Maritimer, she added with fondness, as if only a Maritimer would be so colourful and apt.

I was always impressed by my mother, never more so than now. She had no fear and no self-pity, or none that I could see. Part of it was her hospital training, but most of it was her calm and measured outlook on life and death. She was an artist, creative in every bone of her body, yet the most practical of women. There was nothing she could not do with her hands, and she was knowledgeable and smart.

A doctor came by eventually. He couldnt say how the infection had come about, he didnt know. Bacteria got into her bloodstream, he said simply.

I was intent on telling him about the extensive dental work she had undergone on three consecutive Thursdays, ending exactly one week ago. He shrugged. Dentists say we blame everything on them. There are many sources of bacteriaskin, mouth. Whats important is that the infection in her knee not travel to the artificial hip, which has all sorts of nooks and crannies and is much harder to clean up.

After an hour or so, Mark took my father home and I stayed on with my mother while she waited to be wheeled to an operating room. Having foreseen that there would be many hours of waiting, I had brought along her copy of Moby-Dick, the book she had taken to with a vengeance in her early eighties, reading it from start to finish three times. Not every page, I had said to her skeptically, and she had looked me in the eye and said, Not only every page, but every word on every page. While we waited, I read her the first two chapters and together we were drawn into that gnarled and watery world of long ago when language breathed the life of sailing ships and the sea, and when nature in the form of a white whale capsized everything and everyone.

The next morning, two physiotherapists came into her room and got her up and shuffling on a walker, still attached to her IV pole, around the bed and over to a chair. One of them said she was a tough cookie, and my mother had a quick comeback: Ive been baked a long time. Later, when the same fellow returned to move her back to her bed, he got entangled with the IV pole. These accoutrements get in the way, he apologized, and my mother replied, Thats French. And I dont have a riposte.