Ladysitting Read online

  Ladysitting

  My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century

  Lorene Cary

  W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York | London

  With love

  to my own dear grandchildren:

  Sam, Zach, Mica,

  and Wrenna Ruby

  Preface

  Why was it that weekends at Nana Jackson’s felt like a world apart? Maybe because, dressed in old ball gowns, I traveled with the sun patch across the floor of the suburban New Jersey neocolonial and soaked in more light and luxe than my parents’ West Philadelphia apartment could ever offer. Delight and time, the wide-armed, fragrant mimosa to climb in summer, the fireplace to stoke in winter, and choices all the day long—“whatever your little heart desires.”

  Yes, yes, yes, I knew that I was being spoiled, that word that obsessed black grown-ups, and even kids. What could be worse than to be spoiled, ruined by indulgence, incapable of withstanding hardship as we had done and would do in future? We were brought up by hand as surely as Pip in Great Expectations, and much prouder of it than he. “You spoiled!” could get you a corrective beatdown. Fast. Besides, everybody needed to respect authority, learn limits, and above all, to know that older people valued you, that they loved your undeserving black behind enough to bring you back from wrong to right. I knew myself to be a wimp, a failure in the toughness category, which was why I went insane with terror at the sound of my mother coming for me, or my father reaching for the threatened, though seldom used, belt. If a kid down the street got a beating—and in our cheek-by-jowl row houses we heard each one—I’d be good for a month!

  So, believe you me, as my mother would say before administering some firm guidance by hand, I knew good and well that my whole Nana deal was off-the-charts spoiling. Which was why, with peers, I kept it to myself. What happened in West Collingswood stayed in West Collingswood. Nana’s weekend abundance did not feel unconditional, by any means. Our contract was that I would “occupy myself” while she got things done, and then she’d spoil me. But the time alone felt more like Sabbath, as if God visited me occasionally in those sun patches and let me curl up to Its presence.

  Ecstatic! I learned in junior high school the word that retrofitted my memory of this meditative, out-of-time, out-of-body joy. It made a through line, connecting to when I was allowed to sit next to the beautiful Ward AME organist Ms. Selena, who bounced from the pew to the organ to the wooden box that got her up to where the choir could see her guiding them to breathe with one breath for us to share. Ecstatic connected to reading the ancient, but living, Bible with my great-grandfather from Barbados, born in the 1800s, who hailed from the other side of the family and the Caribbean. We read Samuel, so that if God called me, in the night, I’d know to say, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” It connected to the Renaissance-era church prose we mumbled to confess to God our “transgressions against his Divine majesty.” This ecstasy at Nana’s and Pop-Pop’s house, however, transcended transgressions in a childhood buzzing with anxiety about right and wrong and punishment.

  One of my earliest memories with Nana, at her house, anchors the rest. I wanted a drink of water and went into the kitchen. Nana wasn’t there, so I reached for a glass. They were small Libby juice glasses, diner-style, wavy and thin enough to feel beautiful against my palm. I forget whether I climbed up to reach the metal cabinet that opened with a ping or found the glass on the counter. Either way, I knew it was too high for me, and as I knew it, the tiny tumbler dropped from my hand onto the linoleum, where it crashed into sharp pieces.

  Fear flooded me from scalp to gut. My mother had warned me to behave well on these weekends; she sent just-right outfits, perfectly laundered so I’d look like somebody cared; she instructed me how to make my hair twists last overnight, because Nana, with her straight hair, never could comb mine right, that is, fuzz-n-naps pulled back hard enough to straighten them. Above all, I was to do there what I had learned at home: to anticipate what was correct and do it before Nana had to ask.

  Now, instead, I’d shattered one of the thousand glass hazards in this breakable house, with its bric-a-brac ceramic white faces and Chinese antique stuff everywhere—all things I was usually careful to look at, but never touch (except for the Chinese doll, which Nana would take out of the cabinet and let me hold in her presence). I’d get in trouble with Mommy for failing to be careful, and that would be bad, but I was used to it. What was worse, though, was that I had broken the spell. I’d wrecked the charm of my magical place. Nana would be angry; and I would no longer be the trusted, free-range granddaughter, free to play records over and over and pick out tunes on the piano, and dress up, and roam freely to sing and draw and make up stories in the middle-class museum of her house and garden. I could hear her rushing down the carpeted steps. My gut wrenched with dread.

  “Oh, honey,” she asked when she stepped into the kitchen. “What happened?”

  I knew I should admit the wrong and apologize. But how could I? The metal cabinet pressed cold against my back.

  Nana looked back and forth, frowning, inspecting the scene like a diorama. She could see my original misjudgment, and, worse yet, the moment of willfulness when I knew better, but grabbed at the glass anyway. I was crying by now. That’s what you get. I think I began apology blubber.

  Nana took my right hand, turned it over, and then smiled. “I thought you had cut yourself,” she said, clearly relieved. “We can always get another glass, but we can never get a new hand, can we?”

  Sabbath returned, not a charm, but a peace we could choose. She never hit me.

  And yet this person who provided kindness and delight to my sister and me was at the same time the woman of whom my father, her only child, once said, “She never loved me.” As I moved into adulthood, Nana showed me more sides of herself, enough so that I understood, even as I grieved, why she and my father, who had seemed inseparable, had stopped speaking. What was love among them or us? Had it ever been real?

  I’m writing to find out. I want not to forget, but to recall, how the end of my grandmother’s life pulled into focus her hundred and one years on earth, the part we shared as well as the earlier life she brought with her into ours. I want to keep company with other families who have lived through and are living in the intense and demanding time of hospice. We underwent a mash-up of fear and mortality—she was dying, then living again, then dying—and memory and love.

  Nana hinged angrily between ancestors coming close and descendants she was about to leave. Her story required me to learn more about the father she’d referred to with pride, but only glancingly, and it took me into the halls of Congress and the Jim Crow South he brought his family north to escape. It brought me closer to her son, my father, and drove me farther from him. Death up close and personal meant my husband and daughters, and my sister and her family, riding with Nana in family sidecars through her alt-universe of dreams and visions, and our own, through truth and lies, business and money, and communal and racial memory.

  After she died, I felt stuck for years: I couldn’t sweep up the odd bits of her business; I couldn’t shake the sense that I had not done enough over that long, slow year and a half for her or for my other family members. I did not move easily through anger to acceptance. Nor could I do what I’ve done all my life: I couldn’t write my way out. That was until Ash Wednesday three years ago. This narrative explores my struggle, like so many others’, to find love again each time I lost it, because it is only love, as the Song of Solomon assures us, that is strong as death.

  Set me as a seal upon your heart,

  as a seal upon you
r arm;

  for love is strong as death,

  passion fierce as the grave.

  Its flashes are flashes of fire,

  a raging flame.

  Many waters cannot quench love,

  neither can floods drown it.

  If one offered for love

  all the wealth of one’s house,

  it would be utterly scorned.

  —Song of Solomon 8:6–7

  New Revised Standard Version, 1989

  Chapter 1

  A month after Nana died, she started to come to me in dreams. She was sitting in her wheelchair, banging her fists on the padded arms, demanding that I get her back into her house in New Jersey. Weak and clouded over with cataracts she’d refused to have removed, her eyes nevertheless burned into me. “Get me into my house,” she shouted. “I want to come back.”

  I knew that life force.

  In her eighties Nana contracted pneumonia. She spent Mother’s Day and then her birthday in Our Lady of Lourdes hospital under the neon halo of its namesake. When I brought a new pink nightgown to the hospital and she commanded in a whisper that I was to “save the nice box,” I knew she’d make it.

  In her mid-nineties Nana survived a car accident that plowed her head into the windshield as she drove home from work; a month later, as I drove her to her tiny South Philly real estate office, she asked whether I had any doubts about her buying a new car.

  The summer she turned 100, Nana contracted a bladder infection that started to take her down. It was midsummer 2007, and we were hosting a reunion of the descendants of the eleven Barbados Drayton siblings on my mother’s side who came to the United States in the twentieth century. We held it at my husband’s church in Philadelphia, with its protected greensward and sunny parish hall.

  One cousin from Barbados stayed with us at the rectory. I’d cooked and refrigerated three kinds of meat stew she liked to eat for breakfast on the kitchen porch where she could watch the birds. Hummingbirds came to the feeder; they were my husband’s favorite, but my cousin developed a special fondness for “those large brown birds that pull worms from the ground after rain. What are they?”

  When we told her, she shouted: “Robin? Robin redbreas’?” Were these indeed the “robin redbreasts” of her postcolonial, but still thoroughly English, grammar-school readers? Oh, dear, dear robin redbreasts that live in the Northern Hemisphere and in the English romantic imagination imported for Caribbean schoolchildren in poetry and worship. My cousin called to them lovingly across the lawn.

  I made a mental note to tell Nana the robin redbreast anecdote that evening. I took her these stories along with food treats, often with lightbulbs, when I visited her three, four, five, six times a week, at her house, just across the Walt Whitman Bridge from Philadelphia. The visits were as necessary as food and water. We kept up an ongoing conversation, disagreeing gently at predictable intersections, about human nature and meaning and hope.

  This was the summer the last Harry Potter was published, and my sister Carole, who buys the best presents, ordered our younger daughter Zoë one of those early copies. The Barbadian cousin met Zoë’s excitement with disapproval. Weren’t these books about witchcraft? Didn’t that fly in the face of the teachings of our Lord and Savior?

  No doubt I would have added that to the story I’d tell Nana. Maybe Nana would laugh outright. I’d wonder aloud, in ways that would bore her, about faith that gives hope vs. faith that guarantees.

  Toward the end of the reunion, though, I was tired, so I decided to ring Nana to tell her I wouldn’t come that night; instead I’d see her the next morning. But Nana did not answer. I rang several times, the same number she’d had since I can remember, the second phone number I ever memorized, with an exchange that began with UL for Ulysses. I did not even bother to ring her cell phone, even though she’d used it to call me a few times when she had a problem with the landline. I found my sister Carole and asked her to come with me on the half-hour drive to Nana’s house in West Collingswood, which would take us twenty minutes that night. Our older daughter Laura, who’d just graduated college, said she’d come, too. At eleven, Laura had been with us when the undertakers came after the death of Pop-Pop, Nana’s husband. We stayed with Nana as they carried Pop’s body down the stairs and out the door in a body bag that looked like corduroy. To this day the two emergency drives over the bridge meld together in her mind.

  On the way I rang Nana’s doctor. By now, he was in his nineties, with a geriatric schedule, no answering service, and a home phone he might or might not answer, with or without hearing aid. If he was asleep, there’d be a long grappling with the receiver followed only by a startled near-shout: “Hello!”: no name, no “Dr. ——, here,” nothing to distinguish him from a wrong number to the nursing home. Even back when his office had regular hours and normal doctorly protocols, my sister would sometimes ask me whether I thought he was a quack. True enough, Nana liked her medical and financial professionals controllable.

  On a recent phone call, Carole had asked me whether he was still licensed. After training at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and working as a reporter, followed by marriage, a successful corporate career, and two children, Carole turned to lengthy training as a flight instructor and finally professional pilot. She handles gargantuan volumes of factual material. Had she lived here, my sister the pilot would have checked to see whether the man responsible for Nana’s care still had a valid New Jersey license to practice medicine. I was ashamed to say that I didn’t know. Nana would not have wanted to know. Nana didn’t care.

  “She’s strong, very strong, so it probably won’t kill ’er,” the doctor said of her current infection. “But on the other hand, it might.”

  Pause. Beat. Silence.

  “So your suggestion? If she were your family member, what would you do?” I pushed.

  “Call an ambulance and get her to the hospital.”

  We stepped into the house we all knew as well as we knew our own. To me it smelled as it always did: dry, a little dusty, with kitchen and fireplace scents as low background notes. The relatively new smell of urine from her next-to-the-bed bucket hit us on the landing, just past the blue-and-white ceramic Chinese garden stool where I used to sit when no one was looking. Our phalanx of women contrasted with Nana’s isolation, which I felt as though I shared on the afternoons I went to her house.

  We’d eat a tiny dinner together, and I was to save any leftovers. Sometimes I argued that she’d never eat that crust of tarragon chicken salad sandwich or the bottom tablespoon of yogurt she’d push to the back of the fridge and forget. Sometimes I pulled out as evidence two other crusts, or a bit of fuzzed-over cream cheese, and she’d shake her head and say: “I just don’t like to waste.”

  “But these are wasted. See, I’m throwing them away.” It felt like bullying. But to keep putting in and throwing away felt like letting myself be manipulated.

  “Don’t let me see you do it,” she said.

  Then I attended to the day’s tasks. She wanted a bulb replaced in the entryway and the hot-water level checked in the ancient boiler in the basement. I wanted to put in Wi-Fi so that I could access the Internet. By converting her bills to electronic, I hoped to slow the paper avalanche that had taken over the dining room. Alone during the day, she’d begin to tackle old notices and reorganize them into the many supermarket produce and shopping bags that rolled off the table and onto the floor like tumbleweed. By the time I arrived, she fairly shook with anxiety and confusion. I wanted to consult a lawyer about a slip-and-fall lawsuit working its way, Bleak House-like, through Philadelphia’s courts; she wanted to forget about it.

  “Now that you can throw away!”

  She wanted me to take out the envelopes she’d hidden in Pop-Pop’s old sock drawer. (Now I understood the cliché—socked away!) Those on the left side were labeled for “Business”; those on the right were hers, labeled, in her handwriting, in caps: THE PROPERTY OF LORENE H. JACKSON. She wanted me to b
ring the money to the kitchen table where she could count it, and I could check her. She could barely see, and her movements were slow. She wanted all the money laid out—tens of thousands of dollars—to count and arrange in piles and replace into the envelopes. Like a wheelchair gangster, with me cast as the underling.

  “Now, here: you check me. How many is that? Am I right?

  “Am I right?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s do it again.”

  Funky, dirty-bill smell diffused through the kitchen. That’s how she wanted it. She claimed that having the money on hand made her feel safe. Except that she lived in fear of theft, so that the list of who were allowed into the house got very short. I felt my choke chain tightening.

  “What if something happens and I need cash?” She elongated the final digraph—shhhhh.

  “Cashmoney, cashmoney,” I’d answer her, trying to make light. “Sure, Nana.” Inevitably, she’d reference the Great Depression and divorce. I heard it, but without compassion. “But how much do you need, Nana? Could you do with me putting, let’s say, just this thousand into the bank this week?”

  “How much will that leave me?”

  “Twenty-five. Nana, surely you don’t need more than twenty-five thousand dollars’ cash in the house with you in Pop-Pop’s underwear drawer.”

  “Oh, stop it! When you put it like that, go ahead.”

  We did this ritual over nearly a year until she was down to two thousand cashhhhh, in case of a zombie apocalypse, when, I know, I know, money means nothing anyway . . .

  The year after Nana Jackson died, I heard social psychologists claiming on the radio that seeing and handling paper money can release endorphins that ease pain and anxiety, and I remembered how she’d sit back, relaxed, after these counting sessions, and sigh, and begin to clean up for dessert.

  But the certain way to ease anxiety was love. When my sister and daughter and I came into her bedroom that summer night from the family reunion, not sure whether she’d be alive or dead, Nana managed to find some secret cache of life force under her bed, pop it into her mouth, and swallow it down with a sip of the water that was still where I’d left it from the night before. Then she pulled a century-old Brownie smile out from her pocket and spread it across her face.