Thursday, June 2, 2016

 

Maggie Smith is a brilliant actress and my favorite. Recently saw her in “The Lady in the Van.” She plays a homeless woman who winds up living in playwright Alan Bennett’s driveway for 15 years. We are given the privilege of learning something about her past—much of which I will not reveal here. Go see it for yourself. I will say that she had been a concert pianist, causing me to sob through some of the film. Musicians are loathe to see other musicians suffer. For similar reasons, I cried and laughed through “Quartet.”

Her reluctant “caregiver” makes some poignant observations, including that caregiving is all about feces (only he chose the more direct word). And it is, indeed! Mary, as she was known to Bennett, was still cogent in most respects. She claims at one point to have seen a boa constrictor and is summarily dismissed. But in fact, some animals had been let loose from a local zoo, a boa being one of them.

And then I am brought back to mom. Had she seen a boa, I would have been surprised. She is more concerned about the stray fly on the porch or the “others” in her room. She and Mary share something, however: their droppings, so to speak. The daily occupation—washing clothing, toilets, bathroom floors, showers, butts—becomes a preoccupation. I am almost always called to these noisome tasks when I am cooking. I use a prodigious amount of surgical gloves, paper toweling, baby wipes, antibacterial wipes, and plastic bags (to dispose of feces-ridden wipes and diapers)—not to mention soy candles and lemon verbena-scented aromatherapy bathroom cleaner. Mr. Bennett has the great displeasure of stepping in some of Mary’s leave-behind in his drive. Sanitation in the home is out when caregiving. No amount of cleaning will ensure that you have not stepped in some small dried up specimen somewhere and traipsed it through the house on your socks.

Then there is the issue of having only one bathroom. When mom is showered, I must remove all objects from the tub/shower, lest they become contaminated. It’s no picnic. But as careful as I am, a visiting CNA will neglect to pull things from the shower, and the cleaning quadruples for me. And once you unknowingly touch a toilet flusher handle encrusted with the stuff, you wind up spending the rest of the day washing your hands over and over again.

Do I hear a “Yes, yes! Oh my god, yes!” Funny, how when someone else is going through “it,” you can see the humor. I suppose it’s a function of being once removed. I myself found Mr. Bennett’s predicament hilarious, mostly because I knew it to be true. “It really is that way!”

I wonder if someday I will look back at this time and laugh or cry. Probably both.