Pentimento, Jean & Jaki Jean

From Glicinas by Claude Monet

Friday, November 2, 2012

Day 24 of life in the hospital with Jean.  Her nurse for the first shift is Elizabeth (Erica went home early because of a family emergency) and her PCA is Linda.  I know these things because every morning I dutifully write the information on a white board facing Jean’s bed.  I revise the personnel information when the shift changes at 7 pm. 

I have spent obsessive time & effort & used massive quantities of Greased Lightning Super Cleanser & Degreaser to remove every faded, albeit enduring, remnant of every previous date & shift change & cheerful smiley face from the white board.

No white board pentimenti for Jaki Jean.

This afternoon, as I walked down the hall toward the elevators on one of the  myriad treks I take daily in search of ice, a thin, elderly gentleman in socks & an open gown wanders from room to room in search of his assigned slot on the floor.

Elizabeth the RN scolds him, trying to redirect him to his room.  It is not easy persuading him.  The world of a hospital wing is a small town.  I am a squatter, firmly embedded in my mother’s room.  Patients & fellow squatters recognize family & friends visiting a resident.  I cannot recall with any certainty if the wandering thin gentleman in socks & an open gown has visitors.

He does, from time to time, drape himself in a blanket or sheet, and in a standing position, spread his arms to create the illusion of wings.

It occurs to me that he was not looking for his room earlier.  He was looking for a place to spread his wings & fly away.

Jean asked me this afternoon:  Is it AM or PM?

There is a clock on the wall facing her bed, but clocks do not indicate morning or afternoon or tea time or Evensong or the night.

So I retrieve the sandwich sized Ziploc bag that stores my low odor dry erase markers & take out a red marker & write PM in large letters on a mini-white board resting on the room’s board.

On one of our adjacent wings, there is a screamer.  Not a patient crying for help or for a nurse, but a human being whose communication is limited to a capella arias of distress, anger, pain, loneliness, frustration, confusion, dismay, despair.

For a short time, we had a screamer on our wing.  A small, frail & shrunken elderly woman whose only visitor was not squatter or hallway banter friendly.  A sign on the patient’s door read:  No visitors per son’s request.

Every time I passed her closed door, strains of lonely, desperate arias no one appreciated or understood seeped through the barrier.  I wondered whether she would stop screaming if her son allowed her visitors.

As the afternoon closes into Evensong, I think to myself.  Self, it has been a good day.

Jean’s appetite was excellent, her speech therapy went excellently well, she only pulled her oxygen tube out a few times.  Her doctors are pleased with her progress, everyone who encounters her remarks on how well she looks.  

Jean & I discussed using nursery rhymes to stimulate & strengthen her speech.   I say Jack Sprat had no fat, he wife had no – Jean responds lean.  And so between them both, they licked the platter clean.

Together, we agree that it is a good plan & I make a note to retrieve some volumes of nursery rhymes from home.

A good day, Self.

I almost forget that earlier she told me she needed help getting to the other room & was confused by my response that we only had one room & a bathroom here on the second floor of the long term acute care hospital. 

Or that earlier she heard Stephanie, the respiratory tech, tell her she would return with medicine when Stephanie told her that it was time to remove the mask used in Jean’s breathing treatment. 

Is it AM or PM?

The gentleman in socks stands in the threshold of his doorway, without wings, & calls out to everyone of any gender who passes by & everyone he imagines passing by:  Please.  Please, mam.  Please.

As I pass on my return route to Jean’s room, I avert my eyes & think about thresholds & their significance in literature & drama & art.  Thresholds, representing the possibility of transgression or transformation.

Or in the case of my elderly gentleman in socks, stasis.  A lack of movement.  No possibility, no opportunity.

No pentimento.  No glory.

Evensong has passed.

Blue Orchids

Today, my sister & I went to Home Depot for things for the house & to look at options for replacing the crumbling bathroom downstairs.  As we moved to the checkout counters, she stopped at a kiosk of orchids & I said I had never in all my years in the flower industry seen a blue orchid.  She said - it is your color.  Buy it.

 

Protesting, I said I could not spend that amount of money on an orchid.  Even a blue orchid.

Then she said:  Let’s find one with blooms.  (My sister is very stubborn).  

When we found one with blooms, she handed it to me & when we went through the check out line, she paid for it.

And I thought to myself, not for the first time:  Self, be very careful what you wish for in front of your baby sister.

The hue in the blue orchid  blooms is, of course, an illusion.  The new blooms will be white.  The blue has been introduced into the plant with a dye through its roots.  

Creating an artificial blue orchid, in my color.

I shudder to contemplate what this says about me. 

My sister suffers from no artificial manipulation or influence.  Everything she does for our family comes from the core of her soul.  Something entered her soul through its roots, but it was not a blue dye.

When I am alone with her, I feel as if I am in the presence of something I will never understand.  

The child who bit me, the woman who was my Lamaze partner for the birth of both of my sons, the woman who first held each of them,  the woman who let me take over family holidays & even when I turned one over to her, followed my shopping list & menu.

The woman who is still taking care of us all.

I love the blue orchid that will bring forth white blossoms.  

As I love my sister, a gift of wonder from above.  Who is always in my color.

We gave them two goats.

A few months ago, my mother’s home health care worker,  Grace, told me that her mother had died & she needed to go to Nigeria to bury her.

Grace’s mother owned land in Nigeria & a house with twelve rooms & had carefully saved the money Grace sent home.

The last time Grace visited, her mother gave her access to her bank account & entrusted her with all her important papers.  And asked Grace to bury her on her own land.

As Grace prepared to return to Nigeria to bury her mother, she arranged for a friend to take care of her obligations to my mother.  But she seemed uneasy.

We talked about it, because Grace & I talk about a lot of things.  About female circumcision, about Nigerian wedding customs that are played out here, about life in an adopted country.

As we talked about her journey to bury her mother, I learned that Grace did not fear resistance or discord from her siblings, but from her mother’s two sisters.

So I advised her to make copies of every piece of paper she had from her mother, take them with her & first thing hire a lawyer in Nigeria.

When Grace returned from Nigeria, she showed me photos of her family dressed in splendor & told me the story of burying her mother.

Grace’s fears about her aunts proved to be true.  First, they chose a casket & told Grace upon her arrival it was $700  (Grace, the alleged wealthy American, was expected to pay for it).

Grace went to the mortuary & learned it was $400.    She insisted on a less expensive casket, because as she told me, “It was going into the ground.”

The aunts insisted that Grace give them four rooms in her mother’s house.  Grace rebuffed them, explaining, “This is my mother’s house.  It belongs to her children.”

Grace’s aunts argued that because they had been her mother’s family long before Grace & her siblings arrived on the scene.  Therefore, in their version of family ties, they had first claim on Grace’s mother’s estate.

Grace insisted:  “This is my mother’s house.  It belongs to her children.  We will not give you any rooms.”

The two aunts tried another tactic, demanding that Grace buy them a cow.

A cow in Nigeria costs roughly $400 USD.  The average annual income in Nigeria is $900 USD. A very expensive gift for two women who contributed nothing to the cost of their sister's funeral or the celebration feast honoring her life.

Grace explained to her aunts that she & her siblings could not possibly buy them a cow.  They had to buy a cow for the feast to follow her mother’s funeral.  Not to mention the rest of the food & wine.   

As Grace told me story of burying her mother, on her mother’s land, I remarked that while I understood cultural differences between Nigeria & Texas, but I could not imagine demanding a part of my sister’s estate from her daughter.

With disgust & a tone revealing a deeper sadness, Grace replied:

This is not about cultural differences, Miss Jaki, it is about greed.

Over the years, I have grown used to Grace calling me Miss Jaki, just as she calls my mother Miss Jean.  It bothers me to write it, reminiscent of an era in the south I would rather not re-enact. 

 

But I want to tell Grace’s story of burying her mother as I heard & felt it.

Grace thanked me for my advice to get a lawyer to protect her mother’s estate.  The lawyer managed to get a year long stay against the estate.
               

But not before Grace’s aunts pillaged their sister’s house.  Including the last $400 Grace sent her mother, the price of a cow.  That happened almost as soon as Grace’s mother died.          

Grace will have to return to Nigeria before the stay on her mother’s estate ends & she will have to take all the papers in her possession with her.  So I asked her to get a safety deposit box at her bank & store the papers there.  
 

As our conversation ended, I asked Grace how her aunts took 
her refusal to buy them a cow.  She replied:
]

We gave them two goats.

About that infamous trailer . . .

Well, I watched the trailer of the “film” that has incited violence against Americans & American interests across the world. 

 

From everything I have read, there are severe doubts about exactly who financed the film. the church affiliation of the producers of the film, the name of the film’s director, the theatres where the film was supposedly shown, even if there is a film beyond the fourteen minute trailer.

The trailer was without a doubt done by amateurs.  The actors & actresses were all Caucasian – the costumes were ridiculous.   The dialogue was worse – filled with misconceptions, distortions, untruths & language designed to inflame.

The question is – exactly who were the makers of this atrocious excuse for a film trailer trying to inflame?  Because I cannot imagine that any thinking American would be moved by such a debacle.  It revealed absolutely nothing about Islamic extremists.  

I have a theory that this trailer was designed to inflame & incite the very extremists it did.  Why?  As justification for anti-Muslims to launch their own version of jihad.

An idea which frightens me as much as the backlash of violence this ill-conceived project produced across the Arab world.