Olga Katsovskiy
What We Are Going To Do
I was at the hairdresser, and she was talking about the inconveniences of growing older while brushing out my hair after a wash with a fine-tooth comb. I held my glasses on my lap under the black cape, wincing and hoping there won’t be any more knots. She told me about a client who was twenty years younger than her husband, a man who had come down with dementia and was completely dependent on the wife, as though dementia was something a person catches, like the cold or COVID. I kept thinking about my parents, how my mom’s purplish eye circles had deepened with time, how I can see the crown of her head as her stature shrivels a little more each time we met, how the warmth of her clung to my arms, and how my body recoiled when she touched me like I am afraid to break something.
When my phone rang, I felt rattling in my chest, like a caged bird flinging itself against the bars, suddenly trapped. I have saved pictures of my contacts in their profiles over the years. My mom’s is a portrait of her from the chest up, shifted to the left side of the circle. Her pearl earrings match her white cardigan. The thin black straps of her mini traveling backpack are digging into her shoulders. Her hair is in her signature bob, bangs parted in the middle, and she is smiling a forced but gentle smile, showing her teeth. In the murky greenish-brown background, there is a tiny blue figure of my dad wandering into the woods with his back to the camera. It was a photo I had taken as a teenager in another lifetime. I kept it as my mom’s contact photo all these years, not knowing what it would foreshadow.
When a family member is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, they say it is easier to lose a loved one to sudden illness than go through the slow unraveling of said disease. Our ability to experience, retain, and build memories shape our identities. I often wonder what goes on in my dad’s head, what pieces of him are still there. I can only imagine the extent of my mom’s daily heartbreak. I hear it in her voice when we talk on the phone and overhear him asking her what they are going to do for the hundredth time. Sometimes I feel like my mom and I are sisters. She calls me to tell on him like he is our little brother and we are conspiring to tell our parents.
***
“I nearly died,” she told me when she pulled over to the side of Route 9. My dad was asleep in the passenger seat and wouldn’t wake up on the way to a doctor’s appointment. He was sitting upright with his arms relaxed on his sides, facing ahead, his eyes closed, looking more pale than usual. She reached for his large hands and massaged his thick, calloused fingers, but he didn’t stir. She spoke his name first as a question, then a command, and then pulled over, parked, and pleaded. She touched his pale, concave cheek, his mouth slightly opened. He felt cool to her touch, and she worried, stroking his face, gripping his thigh, and shaking it lightly. She called him by his name again. The emergency flashers went on clicking, and she concentrated on his hushed breath, slow but steady, like a first-time mother watching the rise and fall of her sleeping baby’s chest. She cupped his chin in her hands, panic welling up inside her. She watched his eyelids begin to open, his watery blue eyes coming back into view, and then his eyelids wrinkled at the corners as he smiled weakly and met hers.
I have a friend who avoids making phone calls at all costs, not even to order pizza. Growing up, phone phobia wasn’t an option for me. I didn’t have anyone else I could rely on to arrange my parents’ doctor appointments, file their insurance claims, to call out sick from school, to arrange hotel reservations, to apply for financial aid, to request test results, to dispute a medical bill, to call Medicare for the tenth time about enrollment, to call the prescription insurance and hear a rooster cry in the landscape of some remote village where a young woman (likely as worried about her family as I am) gets me on her queue, to sit on hold for hours - always being the one who calls back, the one who is on call to make things right.
Phone calls in my family are reserved primarily for emergencies. As a result, when my phone rings, I am immediately shaken and ready to fend off an attack. I generally have a soft-spoken demeanor, but when I am on the phone, I transform into something resembling an enraged dog choking on a chain in a fenced-in backyard. If my parents need me to mean business, I will unleash my wrath and demand an explanation on their behalf. I have accompanied my parents to doctor appointments, watched my dad fall asleep slumped in his chair, and interrupted my mom from saying “Yes, yes!” to every question just because someone in authority is asking. Interpreters, health care proxies, durable powers of attorney - all really say one thing about aging immigrant parents: you are on your own.
***
My dad and I never really spoke except to report on our whereabouts. The only activity we bonded over was waiting for my mom to come home. When we moved to the States, her first job was as a home care aide while my dad worked a manual job moving dressers up and down the stairs in a furniture store. I accompanied my mom to her jobs in big houses with even bigger front yards, where stone statues of upright lions greeted us at the gates and, more often than not, smelled like cigarettes and cat pee on the inside. Old women tried to stuff five-dollar bills in my pockets while my mom cleaned, and once, an elderly man cupped my mom’s butt when she was hanging his window curtains. That was the last straw, but it was really because of the commute, low pay, and unpredictable hours. The next job was housekeeping in a chain hotel downtown, where she wore a light blue skirt and blouse with a name tag that read “YES, I CAN” in larger font printed in bold on top of her name.
I used to wait for him to pick me up at home after school, and then we drove to the city in our rusty red two-door hatchback. We would pull up to the front of the hotel and wait, watching the suited attendants load bags on gold bell carts, listening to our ABBA cassettes on the stereo. Sometimes the attendants waved at us in their white-gloved hands or knocked on the hood of the car to nudge us to go away. We would drive around in circles until we saw the doors swing open before my mom’s neat blonde bob would come into view. It was the most exciting part of my day, the reunion, my parents chattering in the front seat as I played with the gifts my mom brought me. I examined the foreign coins, caressed the used Beanie Babies, and leafed through the Playboys and the paperback novels with bare-chested Fabio on the covers that guests left behind in their rooms.
In the summers, he took me to the beach or the park, where he stationed himself at a picnic table or sprawled out on a towel with his portable radio. He fidgeted with the antenna, trying to tune in to the life he had left behind. Sometimes he would read old books we brought with us to the States, shiny thrillers with tough men and guns on the covers. I sat or lay next to him until I grew bored, walked around, or climbed rocks, venturing out and coming back to the jutting-out antenna. My mom started a new job as a nursing assistant in a nursing home, and soon my dad and I transitioned to sitting in the car in the parking lot, waiting for her to come out either at the break of dawn or at dusk. I passed the time eating crackers on the backseat, scribbling in my journal, or lying flat on my back and watching the clouds and the stars through the side window. She worked in that nursing home for twenty-one years, taking care of other people until she retired to take care of my dad full-time.
***
Mom was in denial for a long time. There were many red flags. She went through the annual Alzheimer’s training at work and knew to recognize them, but it is different when it happens at home. She told herself he was only getting forgetful with age, dismissing the warning signs, like the time he drove away forgetting her on the side of the road or the time he was supposed to pick her up from work and ended up in another state, or the time we coached him to hand his cell phone to a cashier at Lowe’s so we could find out where he was and take a taxi to get him, or the time he rear-ended another car in a parking lot and totaled his, or the time he knocked on the neighbor’s door to borrow a ladder to climb in the second-floor window because he forgot his house key was in his pocket, or the times he kept dragging in discarded houseware and iron rods he found on the street - pushing the garbage bins back in the garage before it was collected, turning the TV, the coffee machine, the heat, the light off as soon as my mom left the room - or the time he sat by the window waiting for her to come home when she already was.
He got up in the middle of the night and closed the door behind him in the bathroom. He didn’t turn on the light, and my mom lay in bed, resisting the urge to follow him in an effort to stay in the undisturbed warmth under the covers a little longer. She wants to give him the feeling of independence to preserve his dignity. The toilet flushed, the tap ran and stopped, then it was followed by scratching and tapping at the walls, the clank of a small object falling to the floor. She knocked on the door, called out his name, opened the door, and switched on the light. He was holding a towel bar, freshly ripped off the wall, mistaken for a door handle. He was looking for a way out and had forgotten where to go. By the time she tucked him into bed, he had forgotten he had gotten up at all.
“What are we going to do?” he murmured.
“Sleep,” she said.
Olga Katsovskiy, MHA, works in a non-profit healthcare organization in Boston. In addition, she teaches writing classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. She has a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and has held a number of editorial roles in the past. She immigrated to the U.S. from Belarus with her parents as a child. She enjoys reading and writing nonfiction and is devoted to daily journaling, obscure books, and good coffee. Find more of her writing at theweightofaletter.com.