Seven days of mourning; that’s the proscribed ritual.
Elena could hardly heave herself up the stairs to the women’s gallery to attend the convocation of the end of these seven days. Dezia pulled her and Melita pushed her, and it was with great effort that Elena’s crippled legs obeyed. It was her last public obeisance to Antonio and, Heaven knows, he deserved at least that.
One day, when he was 43, tall, handsome Antonio came home from work, washed up and sat down to dinner. He bent over the rice and asked Dezia to pass the combs.
“Oh, Papa.” Dezia laughed, a delighted little girl’s ripple of merriment.
Elena looked across the table wearily. It had been a hot day, her crippled legs gave her no peace, and she was in no mood for an eight-year-old’s jokes. At least everyone’s in a decent mood, one side of her brain said. The other side kicked it. Shut up. Elena shook her head to get rid of the internal sounds.
Antonio looked sharply at his younger daughter. “Por favor, Dezia, la sal—give me the salt.” Melita reached out, took the salt, and passed it wordlessly over to her father. Papa’s word was law. You had to understand what he wanted, without his having to say it even once. At ten years old, she already understood that, the way she understood that her brother, Mauricio could always be depended upon unquestionably, for anything–even if he was only twelve. He was a son—and the eldest, at that.
That was 11 years ago. From combs instead of salt, to a drooling, weakened six and one half foot infant given to towering rages, who was helplessly locked in a bewildering futile battle against “Pick’s Disease”—Alzheimer’s of the young, Antonio was reduced to wearing shapeless nondescript grey-blue pajamas and adult diapers.
It had taken Elena four years to get the diagnoses during which psychologists, social workers and psychiatrists visited, prescribed and forcibly administered all kinds of mind bending, mood altering, debilitating “medications”—if that’s what you want to call them. I call them “poisons”. Eventually Elena got the right diagnosis, and everyone stopped telling her that her once beautiful, now splintering Antonio was just going crazy.
Slowly and in slow motion, Antonio imploded and as the silvery shards of his past life buried themselves deep within his psyche, here and there, occasionally a light of recognition and awareness would momentarily glow in his eyes. But on the whole, bewildered and confused, he fought Elena, Mauricio, Melita and the inevitable. Dezia was terrified by her father’s inexorable degeneration and her wildly beating heart clawed at the walls of her consciousness.
Elena, Mauricio and Melita battled Antonio in desperation. Dezia could only cower and watch—eyes taking everything in, heart throwing everything out. But her Papa wasn’t there to catch anything. He was lost in a swirling murkiness, far away from the shore.
Floundering blankly, Antonio drifted further away, while his height and strength remained. The visiting nurse battled for his blood pressure and together with Mauricio, an aide fought to shower him. Elena needed someone to come in to help her with Antonio, but when she went to the social worker, he shook his head. “He can no longer be home,” he said implacably.
He pushed a paper across the desk and held out a pen.
“Sign this—we will take care of everything.”
“I will sign nothing,” she whispered.
The man shrugged. “Then you can go home.”
For another year they struggled with Antonio and then Elena gave up. But even then, it took them another three years for her to get him into some kind of institution close to home. “A home for the aged?” she asked, her voice wavering in shock and wonder. “My husband is 49. He’s not an old man…”
“That’s all we have,” said the social worker tiredly.
What she really needed was a kind of senior citizen’s home for young people, a place to care for such living tragedies, but there was no such place here. There were two regular geriatric facilities; one in the “Fourth Quarter”, where Elena lived, and the second in the “Ninth Quarter”, not too far from the seaside. The by-laws for admission were the same in both; a family member had to be present to assist the patient six days a week, for six hours. The “Fourth Quarter”, which was filled to capacity, was a ten-minute walk for Elena; torturous to watch, but manageable for her, while the second was twenty minutes away, by car. Elena had no car—and could not have driven one, even if she had.
The people at the medical clinic and the people in the old-age home did not understand why it was so important for Antonio to be in the “Parent’s Home of the Fourth Quarter”. “We have an opening in the other place,” said the director. “Why don’t you just come and see it?” But it was too far away, a taxi cost too much, and Elena could not board the bus.
“I have to be with him every day.” Elena bit her trembling lips. Her dark, red-rimmed eyes remained proudly dry. “He is my life, he is my love. He is a young man.” She was also afraid of what they would do to him if she were not present, but she did not say that.
Heads bobbed like indolent flowers. “Yes,” they importantly gurgled among themselves, “It is true; she has to be present to feed him and look after him. This is, after all, the family’s responsibility at lunch and dinner time….” They looked at each other sideways through mascaraed eyes and the odor of stale coffee. But they wouldn’t move.
“Can’t you see that she’s crippled?” a friend challenged relentlessly. “Don’t you know that there is no money? You’re taking her welfare checks for her husband’s care and leaving her with barely enough for bread on the table for the children.”
Mauricio, now nearly as tall and imposing as his father had been, sat next to Elena, her hand cradled in his. Outside, the dusk held its breath, and in the brightly lit office no one moved. Intermittently, the almost imperceptible rumble of Mauricio’s voice could be felt when he spoke softly to his mother; she responded with a brief shake or nod of her dark head. Together, they were one person. But the staff wouldn’t move.
Finally, the people at the old age home relented. Seeing that the daily visiting nurses, emergency doctors and the incessant babbling of Elena and her three children would not cease, they gave up. Antonio finally got a place in the “Parents Home of the Fourth Quarter”. Right diagnosis, right place.
For the next three years, Elena went to see and minister to Antonio every single day. In the sweltering heat, in the cold whipping winter rains, Elena would “swing-turn-bend-catch”, “swing-turn-bend catch” in her crippled way to Antonio, and back. The staff was nice to her after a fashion, but what is “nice” when your beloved stands pitifully at the locked door, peering hungrily through the tiny double glass window, lurching forward as you come, vacant eyed—sometimes startlingly sad—hair disheveled and long, and dressed in stained and rumpled pajamas?
When he first came, Antonio was still powerfully tall and imposing. The ravages of Picks Disease could not totally hide his Iberian handsome good looks, but the unchanging diet of gruel, weak tea and sedating medications soon turned him gaunt, vacant and pitifully empty. Elena would arrive every morning, and he would stumble and shuffle towards her—an infant, utterly and pathetically dependent on his mother’s bosom, his mother’s unconditional love, and his mother’s compassionately crooning voice murmuring endearments—hot tears bathing the pain in her heart, the pain of the summer of her love.
Oh, Antonio. Oh my darling, darling Antonio. I cannot bear to see you like this, and I cannot go away….
In this way, three excruciating years passed.
And then, one day, Antonio contracted pneumonia. It was in the summertime.
Pneumonia is not limited to seasons, you know, and he was admitted to the hospital. From there, he was ambulanced to a run-down convalescent home. From there, it was back to the “Parent’s Home of the Fourth Quarter”. Then it was back to the hospital—and then, with no warning, he was ambulanced to the “Parent’s Home of the Ninth Quarter”, far away from Elena.
Elena and two of the children were exhausted. Melita was married by now, with two youngsters and lived abroad. There was no fight, no words left. They automatically fastened themselves onto the cruel jerking of some outside power. Under no circumstance would they—could they, let go.
Elena would not leave Antonio’s bedside, so alternately, Dezia and Mauricio went back and forth to the house to bring or take whatever they could. Dezia cowered less; she had her father’s height and carried it beautifully, and she had her mother’s porcelain loveliness—fragile, sad….and strong. And except for the fire and clarity of youth in his eyes, Maurico was a copy of his father; vibrantly embracing life. Elena was tiny between them.
Together, they tried to shield her from their father’s death, but they could not—and one night, he was borne out, finally at rest.
That night, they wept together, a jumbled tangle of dreams and hopes, and in the morning, they faced the first day of seven.
Seven days of mourning; that’s the proscribed ritual.