Smelling Mother
Once, in college, my friend and I skipped class and went to Denny’s for lunch. The restaurant had a funny smell to it and my friend, joking around with a funny quip from a popular movie of the time, mis-quoted it. She meant to say, “I see dead people.” What she said instead was, “I smell dead people.” It was hilarious at the time; we actually still reference it with a chuckle twenty years later. It was one of those word slips you don’t forget. The smell, too, was one you don’t forget.
The building had that smell. I’m not sure what the building used to be; an office complex, perhaps, but it had become a care facility for those too sick to care for themselves and too poor to afford something nicer. The staff did the best with what they were given, but they weren’t given much and there weren’t enough of them. The halls and rooms were spacious, at least, but it was dark with carpets that were threadbare, taped down, patched and dirty. There was a weird echo to the space despite it feeling so enclosed and dim. The lobby of the building was paneled and grungy and it made me think of those pay-by-the hour motels they love to feature in crime dramas on TV.
The elevator was a shaky box that took long minutes to move and, except when traveling in it with my mom, I preferred to take the stairs in order to escape the trapped feeling, even though the stairs usually smelled of fresh urine. I guess they couldn’t keep track of all the residents all the time with so few staff. She seemed to enjoy some of the nurses but spent a lot of time in her room. She used to like taking care of plants and birds outside her window until they stopped letting her open it because someone on a higher floor had jumped out.
She’d never been much of a TV watcher and that seemed to occupy a lot of the residents time, so she listened to music in her room when the machine wasn’t broken or hadn’t been stolen. She was happy when I came to visit, but it was a bit of a drive, so she always sent me home after a few minutes because she was afraid that I might get caught in the dark or in a rainstorm or run out of gas. It smelled musty and old there and I hated leaving her but I was also relieved to have the lobby behind me for another couple of months. I could smell musty death and urine for the rest of the day, long after I’d left.
When I got the letter informing me that the facility was closing due to financial concerns, the only thing that really surprised me was that lie. I had started doing research, unearthing the complaints from residents and the county regarding the disrepair, poor conduct, inadequate care, and so on. I knew by this time that the financial concerns were more about not being able to remain open without forking up the money to fix all the issues. Better by far to oust the residents and change the entire place into something more profitable. The social worker assigned to my mother’s case thanked me often and profusely for helping get her packed and moved to the next place; she’d been assigned ten cases to get moved in thirty days and my mother’s was the only one where a relative was willing to come help. I’m shocked, but such a novice at this. I don’t know how any of this works, and maybe this is normal. It takes three moves, three tries, three stresses on a woman for whom stress is a Very Bad Thing, before we find some place that might actually work, and only because, before going into it, mom was so stressed out she ended up hospitalized first. The new place was an extension of the hospital; the transition, therefore, was easy.
This building, too, was old, a cement block on a busy street, definitely more about function than anything else. It was a longer drive but there was comfort in knowing that the police department and a hospital were nearby. Also present here was that institutional scent, the one found in places where illness, cafeteria food, and industrial cleansers swirl together into a single aroma. It was far from pretty and much too crowded to be pleasant. The hallways were cluttered with carts and wheelchairs and people wandering from space to space with no apparent goal but to move to the next space. Televisions were loud but most of the people parked in front of them weren’t watching. It was the kind of place that most of the mentally ill without money end up.
Still, she was happy here…mostly. She liked the staff, and they loved her. She sang a lot, which caused some issues with roommates at times; she changed rooms on occasion during her stay there. But they had activities daily and she saved space in her drawer for the prizes she won at BINGO, cheap beads and bubbles and greeting cards she added stickers to in art class for the holidays. These she piled into my lap when I visited, always apologizing that it couldn’t be more but so delighted that she was able to give me something after all the years of hardship. Most of these treasures ended up going straight to the Salvation Army when I left; I had no room to store these trinkets but I didn’t have the ability to say, “No thank you” when she offered them.
I got smarter about the rules and regulations and medications that ruled her daily life. Most of it was still handled by the place where she lived, and I wondered how families that didn’t have that option dealt with the headaches that come from all the paperwork, paperwork, phone calls and paperwork. Billing was complicated and I never knew what to pay when because it seemed like when I paid on time, it bounced back because we didn’t owe anything that time, and when I didn’t, we got a late fee. The most important thing to me was that she was safe and happy…mostly. She was happy but lonely, and sometimes the lonely was hard to deal with, especially when my visits were still cut short by her anxiety about my driving to see her. I tried to supplement with phone calls and cards by mail that she used to decorate her bulletin board and shrugged off the guilt when relatives far away mentioned the utilitarian space, the traffic noise, the crowded conditions-lists that seemed to bullet point my inadequacy in being a caretaker. And I still felt relief when I was allowed to walk away from trays of canned green bean lunches and Judge Judy screaming from the corner.
When I got the letter informing me that the facility was closing due to financial concerns, I was not surprised and there was no lie here. This is a county facility in an old building, and it didn’t meet earthquake code. The cost to renovate it to bring it up to current code would bankrupt the county entirely (and then some) and at least this time we were given a lot of notice to prepare. Besides, I’m not a novice at this anymore. Still, remembering all we had gone through before, I woke up often, worrying about things in the dark of night so that, when daylight came, I could closet the worries and soothe her anxieties. She, too, remembered what had gone before and she cried sometimes, thinking we wouldn’t be able to find her somewhere to live. She had made friends here, she had made a life here as best she could among the green bean lunch trays, and she didn’t want to leave them. She wrote and gave a speech at a board meeting to try and persuade them to keep the facility open, and cried again when they voted to close it anyway. It was time to move on.
The building here looked like a house that had been stretched out, placed on a quiet residential street among ordinary family homes; but for the sign identifying it and a few other details seen only because we were stopped there, we might never have known this was a care home. The parking lot was small but easily accessible, and the building lined with neatly trimmed hedges and blooming rosebushes. She noticed those first, of course; having had a love of gardening for as long as I knew her, she had missed the nature that so many of us take for granted. I could see it in her face as we pulled into the lot, the transition as her face relaxed into a natural smile from the terrified “first day of school” mask she’d worn the hour’s drive down.
There were familiar elements inside: the extra wide hallways, the alarms on the outside doors, the squeak of nursing shoes on the pristine linoleum. The kitchen still projected that scent of mass macaroni and cheese that seems to be a hallmark for hospital and school cafeterias everywhere. There are some scents and sights that can’t be escaped in this world. But it was quiet. And clean. Instead of wheelchairs and plastic tables crowding walkways and corners, there was a real living room, with a bookcase and a piano and a CD player playing Elvis Presley at a volume designed to be energetic and fun without preventing those sitting nearby from having an actual conversation. The staff was friendly, the place relatively small, and she could open a window-a real window!-and see red roses from her bed. She wasn’t even ten minutes away now, and the once-every-six-weeks visits morphed into several times a week. She took a walk outside every morning around the neighborhood, stretching her legs in the sunshine she rarely got to see in the last few years. Most of the time when I arrived, she was already standing at her window. I think at first that she’s watching for me, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that she was actually checking on the roses again. Seeing me was just the side bonus.
I’d only been home for three hours from the last visit when my brother called. They tried to call me first but after I got home from my visit, I decided to spend some time out in my garden, so I was away from the phone. She died suddenly, unexpectedly, only three weeks after the move to the new…the last…place. They never charged me for her stay, even though she’d been there three weeks. I never got a bill, only a card of condolence from the staff and an offer to help with any arrangements if I needed it. She didn’t have much to pick up since we hadn’t transitioned all her stuff in yet. We were waiting to see how she settled in, if she’d like it, before bringing anything more.
My relief at walking away this time was different. It didn’t stem from feeling like I’d escaped something dreadful. Death is a funny thing; you can’t predict how you’ll react to it until it happens. One of the thoughts I remember most clearly having went something along the lines of knowing without a doubt that she was at peace. Together, we had been through a crazy-awful road trip and we were, both of us, finally allowed to get out of the car. Sometimes I wonder if that was the trigger; if somehow she felt like here, in this place that was quiet and pretty and clean, she had found rest and could finally let go. Or, perhaps a better thought, she could finally let me go.
There are no buildings here, at least none of note. A couple of small bathrooms hunker near entrances, mostly unnoticed except when needed, and another structure of the same size is present, probably for landscaping equipment, but the rest is all garden and park.
It’s quiet here, even when the place is full. Water nearby splishes and swooshes in ways that are calming and pleasant and don’t invoke images of mops sloshing in buckets of pine cleaner. Even the light is different, natural and bright but not harsh, playing through tree branches and flower petals in patterns that make me want to nap in them so that I, too, can be dappled as they are. I feel her here more than in any other place, which is funny since she never came here. We had meant to come, but ran out of time before I could make it happen. Or did we?
Is there such a thing as life after death? Does the soul live on after the body has quit? Does it go to Heaven and sit on a cloud and play music in Paradise with God, or does it wink into nothing like the flame of an extinguished match? Are we beings on a celestial journey, making Earth just one stop on a long road, or does our energy go back into some kind of central pool, melding with one another to evolve into something or someone else? At any given time, I believe in none and all of these things; I don’t know if that’s an indication of being indecisive or incredibly open-minded. Does having faith require picking one of these options and sticking with it? If I pick a side and it’s not the right one, does the Universe give a pass on being wrong? I don’t know the answers to those questions either.
What I do know is that, when I’m here, so is she. I’m not hurried here. I don’t worry here. I can rest here and close my eyes for a while. And when I do, when I close my eyes and inhale, all I can smell is roses.
The building had that smell. I’m not sure what the building used to be; an office complex, perhaps, but it had become a care facility for those too sick to care for themselves and too poor to afford something nicer. The staff did the best with what they were given, but they weren’t given much and there weren’t enough of them. The halls and rooms were spacious, at least, but it was dark with carpets that were threadbare, taped down, patched and dirty. There was a weird echo to the space despite it feeling so enclosed and dim. The lobby of the building was paneled and grungy and it made me think of those pay-by-the hour motels they love to feature in crime dramas on TV.
The elevator was a shaky box that took long minutes to move and, except when traveling in it with my mom, I preferred to take the stairs in order to escape the trapped feeling, even though the stairs usually smelled of fresh urine. I guess they couldn’t keep track of all the residents all the time with so few staff. She seemed to enjoy some of the nurses but spent a lot of time in her room. She used to like taking care of plants and birds outside her window until they stopped letting her open it because someone on a higher floor had jumped out.
She’d never been much of a TV watcher and that seemed to occupy a lot of the residents time, so she listened to music in her room when the machine wasn’t broken or hadn’t been stolen. She was happy when I came to visit, but it was a bit of a drive, so she always sent me home after a few minutes because she was afraid that I might get caught in the dark or in a rainstorm or run out of gas. It smelled musty and old there and I hated leaving her but I was also relieved to have the lobby behind me for another couple of months. I could smell musty death and urine for the rest of the day, long after I’d left.
When I got the letter informing me that the facility was closing due to financial concerns, the only thing that really surprised me was that lie. I had started doing research, unearthing the complaints from residents and the county regarding the disrepair, poor conduct, inadequate care, and so on. I knew by this time that the financial concerns were more about not being able to remain open without forking up the money to fix all the issues. Better by far to oust the residents and change the entire place into something more profitable. The social worker assigned to my mother’s case thanked me often and profusely for helping get her packed and moved to the next place; she’d been assigned ten cases to get moved in thirty days and my mother’s was the only one where a relative was willing to come help. I’m shocked, but such a novice at this. I don’t know how any of this works, and maybe this is normal. It takes three moves, three tries, three stresses on a woman for whom stress is a Very Bad Thing, before we find some place that might actually work, and only because, before going into it, mom was so stressed out she ended up hospitalized first. The new place was an extension of the hospital; the transition, therefore, was easy.
This building, too, was old, a cement block on a busy street, definitely more about function than anything else. It was a longer drive but there was comfort in knowing that the police department and a hospital were nearby. Also present here was that institutional scent, the one found in places where illness, cafeteria food, and industrial cleansers swirl together into a single aroma. It was far from pretty and much too crowded to be pleasant. The hallways were cluttered with carts and wheelchairs and people wandering from space to space with no apparent goal but to move to the next space. Televisions were loud but most of the people parked in front of them weren’t watching. It was the kind of place that most of the mentally ill without money end up.
Still, she was happy here…mostly. She liked the staff, and they loved her. She sang a lot, which caused some issues with roommates at times; she changed rooms on occasion during her stay there. But they had activities daily and she saved space in her drawer for the prizes she won at BINGO, cheap beads and bubbles and greeting cards she added stickers to in art class for the holidays. These she piled into my lap when I visited, always apologizing that it couldn’t be more but so delighted that she was able to give me something after all the years of hardship. Most of these treasures ended up going straight to the Salvation Army when I left; I had no room to store these trinkets but I didn’t have the ability to say, “No thank you” when she offered them.
I got smarter about the rules and regulations and medications that ruled her daily life. Most of it was still handled by the place where she lived, and I wondered how families that didn’t have that option dealt with the headaches that come from all the paperwork, paperwork, phone calls and paperwork. Billing was complicated and I never knew what to pay when because it seemed like when I paid on time, it bounced back because we didn’t owe anything that time, and when I didn’t, we got a late fee. The most important thing to me was that she was safe and happy…mostly. She was happy but lonely, and sometimes the lonely was hard to deal with, especially when my visits were still cut short by her anxiety about my driving to see her. I tried to supplement with phone calls and cards by mail that she used to decorate her bulletin board and shrugged off the guilt when relatives far away mentioned the utilitarian space, the traffic noise, the crowded conditions-lists that seemed to bullet point my inadequacy in being a caretaker. And I still felt relief when I was allowed to walk away from trays of canned green bean lunches and Judge Judy screaming from the corner.
When I got the letter informing me that the facility was closing due to financial concerns, I was not surprised and there was no lie here. This is a county facility in an old building, and it didn’t meet earthquake code. The cost to renovate it to bring it up to current code would bankrupt the county entirely (and then some) and at least this time we were given a lot of notice to prepare. Besides, I’m not a novice at this anymore. Still, remembering all we had gone through before, I woke up often, worrying about things in the dark of night so that, when daylight came, I could closet the worries and soothe her anxieties. She, too, remembered what had gone before and she cried sometimes, thinking we wouldn’t be able to find her somewhere to live. She had made friends here, she had made a life here as best she could among the green bean lunch trays, and she didn’t want to leave them. She wrote and gave a speech at a board meeting to try and persuade them to keep the facility open, and cried again when they voted to close it anyway. It was time to move on.
The building here looked like a house that had been stretched out, placed on a quiet residential street among ordinary family homes; but for the sign identifying it and a few other details seen only because we were stopped there, we might never have known this was a care home. The parking lot was small but easily accessible, and the building lined with neatly trimmed hedges and blooming rosebushes. She noticed those first, of course; having had a love of gardening for as long as I knew her, she had missed the nature that so many of us take for granted. I could see it in her face as we pulled into the lot, the transition as her face relaxed into a natural smile from the terrified “first day of school” mask she’d worn the hour’s drive down.
There were familiar elements inside: the extra wide hallways, the alarms on the outside doors, the squeak of nursing shoes on the pristine linoleum. The kitchen still projected that scent of mass macaroni and cheese that seems to be a hallmark for hospital and school cafeterias everywhere. There are some scents and sights that can’t be escaped in this world. But it was quiet. And clean. Instead of wheelchairs and plastic tables crowding walkways and corners, there was a real living room, with a bookcase and a piano and a CD player playing Elvis Presley at a volume designed to be energetic and fun without preventing those sitting nearby from having an actual conversation. The staff was friendly, the place relatively small, and she could open a window-a real window!-and see red roses from her bed. She wasn’t even ten minutes away now, and the once-every-six-weeks visits morphed into several times a week. She took a walk outside every morning around the neighborhood, stretching her legs in the sunshine she rarely got to see in the last few years. Most of the time when I arrived, she was already standing at her window. I think at first that she’s watching for me, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that she was actually checking on the roses again. Seeing me was just the side bonus.
I’d only been home for three hours from the last visit when my brother called. They tried to call me first but after I got home from my visit, I decided to spend some time out in my garden, so I was away from the phone. She died suddenly, unexpectedly, only three weeks after the move to the new…the last…place. They never charged me for her stay, even though she’d been there three weeks. I never got a bill, only a card of condolence from the staff and an offer to help with any arrangements if I needed it. She didn’t have much to pick up since we hadn’t transitioned all her stuff in yet. We were waiting to see how she settled in, if she’d like it, before bringing anything more.
My relief at walking away this time was different. It didn’t stem from feeling like I’d escaped something dreadful. Death is a funny thing; you can’t predict how you’ll react to it until it happens. One of the thoughts I remember most clearly having went something along the lines of knowing without a doubt that she was at peace. Together, we had been through a crazy-awful road trip and we were, both of us, finally allowed to get out of the car. Sometimes I wonder if that was the trigger; if somehow she felt like here, in this place that was quiet and pretty and clean, she had found rest and could finally let go. Or, perhaps a better thought, she could finally let me go.
There are no buildings here, at least none of note. A couple of small bathrooms hunker near entrances, mostly unnoticed except when needed, and another structure of the same size is present, probably for landscaping equipment, but the rest is all garden and park.
It’s quiet here, even when the place is full. Water nearby splishes and swooshes in ways that are calming and pleasant and don’t invoke images of mops sloshing in buckets of pine cleaner. Even the light is different, natural and bright but not harsh, playing through tree branches and flower petals in patterns that make me want to nap in them so that I, too, can be dappled as they are. I feel her here more than in any other place, which is funny since she never came here. We had meant to come, but ran out of time before I could make it happen. Or did we?
Is there such a thing as life after death? Does the soul live on after the body has quit? Does it go to Heaven and sit on a cloud and play music in Paradise with God, or does it wink into nothing like the flame of an extinguished match? Are we beings on a celestial journey, making Earth just one stop on a long road, or does our energy go back into some kind of central pool, melding with one another to evolve into something or someone else? At any given time, I believe in none and all of these things; I don’t know if that’s an indication of being indecisive or incredibly open-minded. Does having faith require picking one of these options and sticking with it? If I pick a side and it’s not the right one, does the Universe give a pass on being wrong? I don’t know the answers to those questions either.
What I do know is that, when I’m here, so is she. I’m not hurried here. I don’t worry here. I can rest here and close my eyes for a while. And when I do, when I close my eyes and inhale, all I can smell is roses.