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Wise Counsel as Unexpected Moments
By Dale Russakoff, The New York Times
March 26, 2009
As I was moving my widowed mother from a retirement community in Alabama to a nursing home near me in New Jersey, there was a particularly awkward moment on our flight when, somewhere over Philadelphia, she had to use the bathroom.
My mother, then 78, had dementia and balance problems and couldn’t walk without help. Arm in arm, we inched up the aisle, lurching with the turbulence. Somehow, I steered her into the tiny stall and onto the toilet seat, then squeezed myself inside so as to close the door and give her some privacy. Suffice it to say that it’s a lot easier to change a baby’s diaper than a mother’s Depends in an airplane bathroom.
The author and her mother, Irene Russakoff, in a snapshot taken in 1998, the year she arrived at a New Jersey nursing home.
A flight attendant caught my eye as we returned to our seats and gave me a knowing, sympathetic smile. On the ground in Newark, as I settled my mother into a wheelchair for the ride down the jetway into an uncharted stage of her life (and mine), that flight attendant touched my shoulder and said one sentence that I remember to this day: “Just don’t hurry.”
Her advice caught me off guard because it was so different from the conversations I’d had with myself about this new responsibility. I had a demanding job, a husband, two young children, a dog and a house, and now I had a mother to take care of, too. In order to keep up, I had to do everything faster, right? Wrong, this woman was saying.
I heard her voice in my head many times in my mother’s last six years as she became sicker and needed me more and more. “Just don’t hurry” became a way of willing myself to be calm when I was with her, no matter how distressing the challenges. As years passed, everything took her more time — dressing, eating, talking, getting in and out of wheelchairs and, yes, going to the bathroom. “Just don’t hurry” helped me experience life at my mother’s pace and understand a little better what she was facing.
Anyone who cares for an aging parent gets no shortage of unsolicited advice. But every now and then, one comment resonates — and helps, again and again. This was the first of several that I came to value.
Another came from a nurse at the nursing home where my mother spent those final six years. My mother had deep bouts of depression, which medication wasn’t helping, and at various points I was visiting almost nightly just to keep her company. I was losing sleep, and I’m sure I looked as stressed out as I felt.
One night, a nurse named Ann, who had that nurse’s knack for being crisp and caring at the same time, looked sternly at me and said, “You know, your mother could live another 20 years. And if she does, you won’t.” She said it with such authority that she scared me. And I realized suddenly that Ann was right: no way could I do this for 20 years. (As I said, my mother lived only six.)
I didn’t stop responding to my mother, but I came less often — usually one weeknight and weekends. She ultimately accepted that, restoring my life expectancy.
Still, I was often the first target for her frustration, and one night my mother lashed out at me in front of her brother and his wife, who were visiting from New Mexico. I don’t remember what triggered this, but I do recall my Aunt Sherry saying softly from behind me, “Be a duck.”
Baffled, I turned around to see her very discreetly miming a duck letting water roll off its back. This was so comical, and so supportive, that it short-circuited the hurt and anger welling up inside me. “Be a duck” became a handy mental trick to stop myself from sweating the small stuff.
My younger son, then 7, delivered some helpful advice unintentionally one night when he asked, “Mommy, when you get old, are you going to be like Nana?” I remember saying something to try to ease his fears, but I also remember realizing all at once that my role as caregiver wasn’t just for my mother’s benefit. For better or worse, my children were watching carefully and would draw big, possibly lifelong lessons from what they witnessed. Caregiving felt less lonely when I thought of it as trying to be a good mother instead of just a good daughter.
In the last year of her life, my mother lost the ability to speak. On visits, I tried to fill the silences with whatever I thought would interest her, but the one-way conversation seemed only to accentuate her isolation, rather than relieving it. I mentioned this to a colleague, who suggested I call his wife, Suzanne Southworth, then a clinical psychologist consulting with nursing homes in the Washington area. “People communicate all the time without words,” Suzanne said.
Instantly, I thought of plenty of nonverbal ways we could communicate. My mother had been an avid gardener when I was a child, so I bought her an amaryllis, and each time I visited, we would look at it together and marvel at how it seemed to grow literally before our eyes. She also was an art enthusiast, and we paged through her many art books, admiring Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists and more. My father had been a jazz trumpet player in his spare time, and we listened to tapes of him and his combo playing “It Might as Well Be Spring,” “Summertime” and dozens of big band standards. We also looked at her many photo albums.
The last time I saw my mother alive, we happened to look at her pictures of my 7-year-old birthday party. I was holding a brand new Beatles album above my head, and all my friends and I were squealing some form of Beatlemania. “Oh my God, Mom, do you remember that?!” I exclaimed. She gave a huge nod, her eyes glistened and we both threw back our heads and laughed out loud.
One sentence of advice from Suzanne gave us back our common ground, our mother-daughter mutuality. What wise words have made a difference for you?
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