A Pachamama Christmas
The Melba Notebooks[1] portray the ankylosis of elder- time. Entries shuffle stiffly along the pages, days, nights, meals, illnesses, recoveries, and medications, in the handwritten words of caregivers who come and go. The enervating tedium is only broken by unexpected or outrageous events, and by the sharp clear voice of writers, like Di, Melba’s principal caregiver in 1996. Her regular morning notes begin innocently with repetitive introductory remarks about her arrival, cleaning up, and the preparation of meals:
11/1/ 96 Di: Got here. Put away groc. Cleaned up, did laundry. made jello
made muffins
Beef stroganoff
Carrots, broccli, tomatos, muffins.
made cole slaw
The generic notation above for the first of November is followed by a recurring Di-ism:
“Dinner still in oven from last night”.
Since Melba fractured her hip two years prior, then fell again one year later fracturing the other hip, her husband Bob, and their four children have managed the household. They all communicate by writing notes to one another in spiral notebooks, the source for this episode. The night before caregiver Di had left a hot dish in the oven, but Bob overlooked it, serving only left-overs for supper. He does this sort of thing rather often.
11/2/96 Di: We are doing an experiment. Old hamburger. Old salad. If they both get ill, it was the hamburger. If only dad gets ill, it was the salad. (Here there is a happy face. Why? Because Bob now doesn’t eat meat. He has been told it is bad for prostate cancer!)
Di…. But they say it was really good!
11/3/96 Di: Well…no one was sick- so I guess they are tough! Their stomachs are used to it since they use the oven as a ‘fridge!
11/5/96 6PM Di: Mom went to the toilet in the stink of soiled Depends on the outside windowsill. I removed them. She was pissed. (sorry!)
Di takes a dim view of men in general, having experienced abuse in her own life. This particular man, Bob, threatens to become administrator of Melba’s kitchen, bathroom, laundry, medications, and body.
Pachamama
Di is ¼ Inca but unacquainted with Pachamama[3], female Inca deity who created the world. Earth is Pachamama’s current name, and she is very green. But Bob was green for reasons antithetical to most green dogma. He is green because imprinted by his parents’ family values, Thoreau’s abstemiousness, and by the great depression that drove him out of the country to find work. His various machinations to save soap and water place him at the most extreme of greenness: he tries to limit toilet flushes to one-a-day L; he has placed bricks in the toilet tank, and since his prostate surgery, voids in the bathroom sink (it’s convenient and saves water); he has post op incontinence and uses old pieces of cloth to catch leaking urine, rinsing them in a thread-thin stream of tap water and drying them on the towel rack or windowsill ; he objects to the use of the washer and dryer; he uses up all left-over food before resorting to fresh cooked victuals, and cooks up great quantities of bulk produce, serving the same dish, from the same dish, three meals a day for many days. Di finds these are insults to herself, to Melba, and the entire female universe.
11/12/96 Sophie: Came to get Melba to go to church. She wasn’t dressed yet. Dad went ahead so I think she didn’t want to go! I’ll take her to my house for a shower. (It has become very difficult for Melba to get in and out of the tub, and Bob still resists replacing the tub with a walk-in or wheel-in shower.)
Dora, 4PM: House is warm and restful. Cat here and very happy. I reminded mom that he has a sensitive stomach and can’t eat people food or milk. He urps it up.
11/17/96 Sophie: Here for short visit. Dad mad because Cat won’t go out the kitchen door- thought I’d better check on it. Dad did get into a hassle w/cat; hand is black & blue & scratched.
Without exception, Notebook caregivers are lovers and defenders of this stray tomcat; that twists Bob’s tail. Ongoing hostilities between Bob and the feline invader call to mind the hearth/ forest and male/female dichotomy of the Kipling story, ‘The Cat Who Walks By Himself’. There is no fond description of the tomcat, and color is never mentioned, because he is much larger, more transcendental than would be a mere pet; his formal and proper name is appropriately archetypical like Man; it is: Cat.
11/ 15/96 Dora: Sunday. Good morning. Mom not going to church this morning. Nor ready. Didn’t realize it was Sunday. Messiah tonight. Need to be at the MB Theater at 2:00 or 2:15. Will meet Nick and Will there. Both Melba and Bob seem depressed today.
Maybe it is intuition… Yet they look forward to The Messiah. Classic Opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, symphonic, choral, and Mexican rancheros are staples of their long life together. A performance of the Messiah on a cold winter day in the north latitudes, when nightfall is in afternoon, might be passed up by many people almost ninety years old; but this old couple are unwilling to miss it.
Bob still drives his old Plymouth. He does so now. (When I last visited, I had no heart to ask him not to drive me to and from the airport. Over the objections of those who love us both, I reasoned that though he may not hear well, since his cataract surgery he sees better; and he is a more cautious, probably a safer driver than long ago when he drove always at the edge of speed, time, and route, relying on his reflexes, but straining the sphincters of his passengers.)
Bob and Melba leave the Church on that dark winter evening after the long performance of The Messiah. Bob steps out to find the car, leaving Melba behind to catch up. But he is pre-occupied about something; he doesn’t recall where he parked. They walk on. And on. At last Melba becomes cold, exhausted, and falls, fracturing her pelvis. Yet fortunately it is not severe, and this time, unlike the earlier hip fractures, she is expected to soon begin the familiar painful and slow process of healing. Only later will a pacemaker correct the true cause of her recurring falls: dysrythmia.
11/16/96 Di: Sorry about Melba. Will do whatever I can to help. Bob thinks every other day will be enough (for me to work) until Melba gets back.
Indeed he does. In fact, when Di takes time off, Bob manages very well alone and the notebook voices fall completely silent; there is not a single word written there until Melba is brought home from the hospital; the notebooks are not about Bob.
Ever since her hip fractures, requiring many weeks in an Extended Care Facility, Melba has been very fearful of being buried alive in such a place. She has repeatedly insisted she will die happily before living through it again. Yet now the same future faces her.
Several days later, in the hospital, she is up in a chair with help. Sophie, Melba’s youngest daughter, is a nurse and tries very hard to convince Melba’s doctors to allow her to go home rather than to a Nursing Facility. Sophie has installed the hospital equipment needed for Melba’s care at home. She has requested regular home physiotherapy; yet despite the great reduction of net cost that would result, the bureaucracy, filled with fear of known or imagined danger, cannot agree.
Sophie has no power of attorney, but Melba is clear-headed and adamant. Based on Melba’s iterated wish, and many prior family conversations there is no need to consult with anyone. Therefore Sophie acts:
At 5 AM on December 24th, the hospital halls are as quiet and as vacant as a catacomb. Sophie simply commandeers a wheelchair, and abducts Melba from her bed, taking her back to her familiar unsafe old three story home. There is where the love of Melba’s life waits; she made a commitment to Bob in 1929, and won’t cast it aside for the sake of any pale fop like the law, a medical profession on cruise control, public convention, safety, or opinion.
12/ 25/96: 8 AM: Di: Warm and quiet. Cat asleep and happy on the hairloom couch. Merry Christmas all! See you soon!
On Christmas morning Cat is warily detached as always. But Melba, her family, Di, and other caregivers are not. Sophie’s Pachamama style intervention is her most transcendental act of faith, and her greatest gift to us all that Christmas in 1996.
[1] Adapted from entries in five spiral notebooks written over a nine year period by family and caregivers to communicate with each other, as they assisted Bob and Melba, born in 1908, to live and ultimately to die, in their own home. Aberrations of grammar and spelling are preserved. The author’s comments are in italics.
[3] Pachamama is a goddess revered by the indigenous people of the Andes. Pachamama is usually translated as ‘Mother Earth’ but a more literal translation would be “Mother world”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachamama.
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