Neebish Island Day 2--Grandma Goes to the Hospital

Friday, July 19, 2013

Kelly and I are sitting at Cozy Corner, the only restaurant with in 20 miles of the Neebish Island ferry.  She is taking pictures of the mooseheads, deerheads, black wildebeests, bush buck, baribou, and eland stuffed heads mounted on the wall.  “Are these all real Senora Amy?”  They were once all alive and now they are dead, I explain adding a bit of an introduction about Michigan hunting culture and US gun laws to my Colombian nanny.  Three full days ago we arrived at this same spot, running late for the ferry, I had quickly got on line at the bar, checked email, posted my daily blog post, and made for the ferry launch.  At the time I didn’t know if we would have wifi or cell access on the island.  Now I know, we have neither.  Three days of seriously unplugging, when you don’t choose to and when you are not on a silent retreat would make anyone go a little stir crazy.

As we drove to the island, I asked my mother how the month has been.  Her mother is 86, lost her 92-year-old boyfriend of six years earlier this summer, has early stages of dementia and requires 24/7 care.  My mother’s sisters, an enneagram nine and six, both provide round the clock care during the school year and as my mom has summers off, she comes to the cabin and makes sure grandma remembers to take her medicine, goes  to play Euchre on Wednesday nights at the community center, and insures that she gets her daily newspaper—The Wall Street Journal.  The paper comes everyday at 2:00 PM to the mailbox at the end of her steep gravel driveway.  Coming to Neebish Island as a child with my family, I was always too scared to drive the family station wagon down the gravel hill.  I begged and pleaded for permission as a scared young seven-year-old to get out at the top and walk down to the water.  My memory is that it was a straight drop, a nearly 90 degree descent to the shoreline, which waited with an open jaw at the bottom of the hill to suck us in if my dad missed the turn.  My parents, still married at the time, always said yes and let me walk, carefully, to grandma’s house.

When I asked my mom how it has been she described it like this, “It is like watching your mother fall deeper and deeper into the tentacles of her own mind, you can see her struggling, ensnared by forces she can’t untangle.  She is slipping away, drowning in her repeating thoughts.”  I had heard before that she was having trouble remembering things, and that you often needed to repeat instructions or answers three or four times within ten minutes.  I hoped meeting Santiago Brach Lovejoy would bring her joy.

When we got to the cabin, I took a moment to breathe in the Michigan air.  The house was originally a boathouse of my great-great-great grandfather.  He received permission to raise it and put in a floor which means that there is no setback from the St. Mary’s River.  As we sit in the bay windows doing 500 piece puzzles, playing hearts, and talking in rocking chairs a Michigan breeze rolls off the water through the screens, into your pores and makes you sleepy.  Even 24-year-old Kelly will lay down on the sofa reupholstered by Grandma Lovejoy in mallard duck print and take a daily two-hour nap.  But when we arrive I simply look around at the tall white-skinned birch trees, the hummingbirds at the feeder, and listen to the sounds of Neebish Island.  The first familiar noise is the sound of the back porch screen door slamming shut as Sienna runs through it to greet me, “Aunt Amy, Aunt Amy, do you want to go swimming?” 

Sienna learned long ago that my answer is always yes.  I told her I would need a minute to change into my swimming suit and then we could play in the water.  “Can I hold Santiago while you change?” she asked in her precious five-year-old, how-can-I-be-helpful voice.  “Why doesn’t your mom hold him and you can talk to him?”  I countered.  Sienna loves babies.  Last time we were together, her mother and I went to get manicures and Martinis Sienna brought her doll Ellie, along with her diaper bag and bottle.  Sienna explained to me that sometimes she pretends to be breast-feeding Ellie even though, “No milk comes out of my booby doobies.”

The sun hadn’t even begun to set at 8PM when we all found ourselves playing on the beach with the kids.  My 86-year-old Grandmother had received her WSJ, and sat by the shore reading the day's news, my brother-in-law Ken stood at the end of the rock peer and fished for pike, and my sister Kari and Kelly played hard in the water with the kids as the sun finally began to set at 9PM.  I carefully took in each piece of it, Grandma and her newspaper, the sound of a slamming screen door, new children looking to this generation of aunts to make Neebish fun, and Kelly wading out further than any adult had ventured this summer splashing water at Mack and Sienna, despite the swathes of dead May Flies that covered the surface like oil slicks.  The freezing water kept the rest of us onshore.

The next day would be perfect.  Sienna and I would bake brownies, I would teach her to crack her first egg.  When I proposed that we lick the bowl she would howl, “Ewwww,  I don’t want to get salmonella! Aunt Amy you know you shouldn’t eat raw egg!”  Ken would row Sienna and I out to fish, teaching his daughter to hook the worm and watch the red and white bobber and teaching me to cast a MEPP 5 lure.  Which according to Mr. Koeger, Grandma’s neighbor, is the only way to catch pike this year.  Kari and I would canoe across the river after dinner. The sun would set on our second day with Sienna and me playing dominoes.  I would start the game by asking her how she would feel if I won.  She would answer sweetly, “Ok. Sometimes that is just how life goes.”  And when she played the final five-dotted tile to win the game, with the humor and humility of many of my aunts and grandmas that have come before her she would lean in and say, “Aunt Amy, how will you feel when I win?”

But on the third day, everything would change.  Grandma would ask again for her paper.  “Grandma, I just gave it to you.”  Three minutes later she would ask again, “Has anyone gone to get the paper?”  And I would explain, yes Grandma it is on the bed table in your room.  Three minutes later, “Can someone go to get the paper?”  I would say goodbye to Kari and her family, packing four small brownies in a ziplock for their nine-hour car ride home and I would wonder, while answering Grandma’s repeated questions why my mom is so on edge.  Lying on a bed feeding Santi I heard her shriek as though someone was dying in a furious high pitched voice, “Whose cross word puzzle is this, I have moved it six times?”  Kari and I had been discussing earlier in the day why we are so pathetic at cross word puzzles.  What had gone wrong with our education?  But more to the point, why was my mom so frazzled?  The night before when I suggested I give Santi a bath in grandma’s bathtub, mom had spent 30 minutes scouring it, disinfecting it, showing her OCD inclinations had not relaxed since we spent a month together this January in Bogota when Santiago was born.  She laughs it off when I call it OCD, mom says call it, “brilliance,” and smiles proudly when she isn’t overreacting to a cross word puzzle or how perplexing she finds deleting pictures from her digital camera. 

Yesterday, day three, I lay on the back porch, listening to the water lap underneath the floorboards as I fed Santi.  The breeze entered the screened-in windows and took the sting out of a Michigan 90 degree summer day.  I watched seagulls float on the air currents and 1000 foot ships pass by as my mom talked on the phone to a nurse.  My mom explained to the nurse that my grandma had been unusually lethargic, falling asleep in front of her favorite Fox TV shows throughout the day, that she had lost her appetite and didn’t even try one of the brownies I baked.  When she added the detail of grandma’s diarrhea that had lasted three weeks the nurse told her to come to the emergency room immediately. “I don’t mean to scare you, but leave right now.” The nurse said.  Mom immediately started crying, “Convince your grandmother that we are going to the hospital.  I can’t talk.  I have to go pack my bag or we are going to miss the ferry.”  I convinced my mom to not rush, to pay for a special ferry, and to try to go calmly to the hospital.  I gave Santi to Kelly, who was cooking over the stove that great Grandma Lovejoy used to make home made mashed potatoes for us on and began working on getting grandma to change out of her island shorts into pants for the ride to the hospital.  She was resistant.  “I am fine.  We aren’t going to make the ferry.  I hate when your mom drives like a bat out of hell.  I don’t need to go to the hospital.” 

As I walked grandma to the car she said angrily, in the same voice my mom had complained about the cross-word puzzle,

“You do not know your mother as well as I do.  I hate how she drives.”

Kelly and I stayed on the island alone last night with Santiago.  A storm moved in and we decided not to walk back to our cabin with Saint Santi in the rain.  We sat alone at the large kitchen table, sharing a meal of delicious lentils, brown rice and green beans with carrots and remembering just the night before when the table was filled with Santi’s cousins, his aunt and uncle, his grandma and great grandmother spinning the lazy Susan in search of more piece chicken or floret of broccoli.  It felt lonely, quiet, and calm.  Sort of like the calm before the storm. 

I laid on the porch and talked to a close friend Jenn from a land line, I got caught up the blog my friends and I keep, and described the spider to her that descended and ascended down a singular line seven times during the call.  Landlines feel so 1930s, like the orange rocking furniture in this cottage.  In the morning, when the storm had passed, I called my mom to hear what the results were of Grandma’s tests were—two words stand out from the call.  “Contagious and deadly.”  As my mom explained something about a bacteria in her colon that might be called C-dif.  I yelled, in that same cross-word puzzle voice to Kelly not to enter my grandmother’s bathroom to brush her teeth.  The entire thing would have to be bleached and all the towels burned.  My mom asked if any of us had the symptoms: excessive lethargy, loss of appetite, diarrhea.  Kelly and I had been sleeping since we got here and little Santi hadn’t had a bowel movement since we arrived.  “Contagious and deadly” rung in my ears. She was admitted into the hospital, pumped full of antibiotics and told she would be staying for three to four days.  My mother and her sisters divvied up the shifts, you can’t be in the room with her without being fully gowned, gloved, and masked.  Poor Grandma.  Poor Santi, I hope he doesn’t get this.  I told Kelly to help me pack our bags we were getting the hell out of here—like bats.  Before we left, I picked up the World Book Encyclopedia and looked up the bacteria C-dif.  My grandma had spent her whole life selling World Book encyclopedias door-to door.