They Left Us Everything Read online

  They

  Left Us

  Everything

  They

  Left Us

  Everything

  a memoir

  Plum Johnson

  For my children

  Contents

  Never Mind the Dog

  PART I

  Endings

  Mum’s Will

  Hornet’s Nest

  Point O’ View

  Dancing Till the End

  Goodbye, Mum

  PART II

  Inheritance

  Other Mothers

  Unpacking the Past

  A Fate Worse Than Death

  Appraisals

  Buried Treasure

  PART III

  Dispersal

  Two Weddings and a Funeral

  Dividing What Remains

  Earthquake

  Careful What You Wish For

  Separation

  Hong Kong Farewell

  One Last Look

  Acknowledgments

  Never Mind the Dog

  The night before I turn sixty-three, I’m looking in the mirror, pulling my sagging jawline up to my ears, listening to voicemails on speakerphone. Three are from Mum:

  “Happy birthday m’darlin’!”

  “Promise you’ll drive out first thing tomorrow!”

  “Damn this machine! Call me!”

  Mum is ninety-three, and these are her messages just since dinner. Nineteen years, one month, and twenty-six days of eldercare have brought me to my knees. But first thing next morning, I crawl to my car, hack at the ice on my windshield, and slump into the front seat with the heater cranked up.

  Mum lives in Oakville, forty-five minutes from my home in Toronto, so I follow the curve of the highway west around the shores of Lake Ontario, watching the lid of brown smog recede in my rearview mirror, and exit south down a tree-lined road— to the slower, more-remembered pace of my childhood. Just ahead the lake rises up, beckoning me with its liquid shimmer. Even now in late November, the icy water sparkles.

  Our old clapboard house is rooted here in this prime location overlooking the lake, a place Mum calls “The Most Beautiful Spot on Earth.” This is where my four younger brothers and I were raised. This is where one of my brothers died. Dad died here, too.

  I pull into the driveway and step up to what we euphemistically call “the boathouse door.” None of us uses the front door anymore; we all use the boathouse. Dad used to store his sailboat here, between the garage and the house, and eventually roofed it over as a kind of carport to keep off the snow. There hasn’t been a boat here in over forty years.

  They say you can never go back, but the people who say that haven’t seen this house. Nothing’s been changed since Mum and Dad bought the house in 1952—not even the dining-room wallpaper—and the family who sold it to them had owned it since 1917. You come through the door and think you’re in a time warp.

  A movie scout for Walt Disney Pictures once walked in here and his eyeballs almost fell out of his head. “Get here quick!” he screamed into his cell phone. “You don’t understand … we won’t even need props!” Which is why there’s a framed picture of me in the living-room scene of The Ref with Kevin Spacey.

  As I step into the mudroom, the first thing I see is the cast-iron woodstove with HOME COMFORT etched on the front. Teetering on top is a tin of powdered dance wax and a potholder with Mum’s Southern message: Y’ALL SPOKEN HERE! Dangling from the window latches are long metal fly swatters. I hear a faint humming—the summer flies are long dead, so it might be the pipes, or it might be the furnace, or I might be just imagining things. Hanging from wood pegs near the ceiling, next to waterlogged canvas life jackets and stiff straw boaters, are old wooden tennis rackets, screwed by wing nuts into their square wooden presses. Stuck into one of the windowpanes is a plastic sign of a gun aiming straight at your heart: NEVER MIND THE DOG: BEWARE OF THE OWNER!

  Then I see Mum.

  She’s in the kitchen, plumped into a chair at the long harvest table, wearing black polyester pants, a red turtleneck sweater, and large white plastic earrings. Her round cheeks are pink and her lips are enlivened with Revlon Red. She has no wrinkles, even in her nineties, and no eyelashes—or at least none that we’ve ever been able to see. She has never plucked her eyebrows or had a facial, something she’s always considered vain and a waste of money: “Men never have facials, they never use face creams … just soap and water … and do they have wrinkles? No!” Her fingernails are painted red, though, because she will, from time to time, have a manicure. She also dyes her hair brown because, she says, “There’s already too much grey in the world … why would I want to add to it?” Mum loves glitz, so above her diamond engagement ring she wears a gaudy pile of sparkly beads on an elasticized band. On the table are her favourite red sunglasses, shaped like a pair of wide laughing lips.

  The cowbell on the door handle jingles as I let myself in. Mum looks up expectantly and smiles.

  “Hi, Mum,” I say as I kick off my boots. “How are you?”

  “What?”

  “I SAID HOW ARE YOU?”

  “You don’t need to shout!”

  “I wish you’d get a hearing aid,” I mutter.

  “Going deaf is the best thing that ever happened to me!” she says. “Everything’s too loud anyway.”

  The kitchen table—her command central—is piled high with newspaper clippings, Sears flyers, church leaflets, and Christmas cards. Letters from the Publishers Clearing House announce that she’s won a million dollars, and Mum’s already stamped those brown reply envelopes. At the far end of the table, loose photographs of grandchildren and great-grandchildren are propped up in a motley reunion around a vase of plastic flowers, and kitschy feathered roosters perch near the fruit bowl competing for space with her salt and pepper shakers, which are shaped like little pink pigs in waiters’ uniforms. There’s an open tin of homemade shortbread from some well-meaning neighbour and a stack of Biodiesel Smarter magazines, published by one of her grandsons—Mum is a loyal subscriber. Her long-handled magnifying glass lies atop the editorial page of today’s newspaper.

  The only obvious hint that Mum has a problem is her oxygen tubing. It winds around her ears, across her cheeks, and into her nose, emitting a constant pock-hiss … pock-hiss. Sometimes the tubing falls off her ears. Sometimes she gets so mad she scotch-tapes it to her hair.

  I walk across to give her a hug, but she throws up her arms like steel rods to keep me at a distance.

  “Don’t hug me—it’s flu season!”

  I bend down and kiss the air beside her cheek. She’s recently had cataracts removed, and I notice that her eyes are covered with a gooey film of gel.

  “How are your eyes, Mum?”

  “The same.” She shrugs.

  “What did the doctor say yesterday?”

  “The same old thing, I told you! Why do you want to know?”

  Mum says she can’t stand “old people who discuss their ailments.” Everybody’s got problems, she says; it’s just what happens when you get old, so why talk about it?

  From the top of the fruit bowl she takes a persimmon—my favourite fruit—and shoves it towards me.

  “Here!” she says. “This is for you—happy birthday!”

  She’s drawn a smiling face on it with magic marker and tied a ribbon around its middle. I’m pleasantly surprised, because usually Mum gives me cheap, gaudy jewellery, just like hers, and doesn’t even wrap it—she leaves the receipt in the bag. This is the first year she’s given me a consumable ... and I like it, which suggests I’m no longer in acquisition mode—I’m happier with gifts that won’t clutter … things I can eat. I look at the brightly painted eyes and upturned
lips of the persimmon and think, I must be getting old.

  “I’d give anything to be your age again!” says Mum.

  “Really, Mum? Thanks—that puts everything in perspective.”

  “Do you have any plans to celebrate?”

  How could I, when I have to be here? Mum couldn’t possibly know how I’m feeling—anchored by aging parents. By the time she was thirty-six, both her parents were dead. My resentment bubbles over, so I sidestep her question and try a little dig.

  “What were you doing when you were sixty-three?” I ask her.

  “Let’s see,” she says, oblivious, “I guess I was taking that wonderful cruise up the Nile!”

  She turns to her pile of newspaper clippings. “Now,” she says excitedly, “I have some things to show you!” She points to an article on Barack Obama. “I want you to read this—the best thing the Nobel Committee ever did was give that intelligent man the Peace Prize. If the world would just listen to what he has to say, we might stop trying to blow each other up!” Then she plows through her stack and hands me more, one after another. “Recognize her? Our oldest ancestor in Ethiopia— she’s a fossil named Ardi, over four million years old! And look—the Leonid meteor shower! Imagine, two hundred comets an hour!”

  “The Leonid what? Where?”

  “Over Southeast Asia—this afternoon! The Earth is going to pass through all this cosmic debris that was produced when Christopher Columbus was alive! Don’t you wish we could see it?”

  My brain is spinning. I’m still thinking about her ophthalmologist.

  “And I want you to help me with this!” she says. “Remember when I told you about the festival?”

  “What festival?”

  “Stratford! It’s pathetic—they’re losing money! They need to mount an advertising campaign!” She bangs the kitchen table with her fist and grabs a pen. “So I’ve come up with a new word … Shakesperience … Isn’t that the greatest word?”

  Her old advertising copywriting experience has come flooding back and she’s written a letter to the director, laying out a marketing plan to help him out. I’m reading her draft, scribbled on the back of an old grocery list, imagining some young assistant rolling her eyes before dumping it in the trash.

  “I sent this weeks ago!” Mum says. “Why hasn’t he written me back?”

  “People don’t know what to do with handwritten letters anymore, Mum. They only use emails.”

  She purses her lips, shakes her head, and tosses her draft back into her pile of debris. I get the feeling she’s shocked by her own lack of power to effect change.

  “He’s just rude, if you ask me! No manners whatsoever.” She adjusts her oxygen tube and gasps for breath. “Damn this thing!”

  Mum’s mind can access facts faster than Google—her memory is prodigious. She remembers more about current events than most people and can rattle off an astonishing array of historical data. But politics has always interested her most; her family in Virginia was steeped in it. Her ancestors include Edmund Randolph, who was the first Attorney General of the United States, and Bartholomew Dandridge, who was George Washington’s brother-in-law. She has ancestors buried at Thomas Jefferson’s home, which entitles her to access the cemetery, so she’s delighted she doesn’t have to pay admission when she visits Monticello.

  When Mum was growing up, Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., were populated by many of her relatives in positions of power. Two of her cousins later became U.S. ambassadors and her oldest brother was director of Germany’s industrial reconstruction after World War II for the Marshall Plan—which he helped draft. He also served on various councils advising several presidents, from Truman to Kennedy, so Mum felt privy to the backroom dealings of the world stage. She was used to getting the inside scoop.

  I don’t think Mum realized how unusual this was. She simply believed that if you wanted to change something— anything at all—you just had to make one phone call. To the person in charge. Who was probably a cousin. Which is why her unanswered letter to the director of the Stratford Festival in rural Ontario has, quite literally, taken her breath away.

  Mum has been on oxygen for years now, ever since she quit smoking (and playing tennis) at the age of eighty-five. Thin, clear plastic tubing—miles of it—snakes through this four-thousand-square-foot house, tethering Mum to a loud, belching, institutional-sized machine located in the upstairs hall outside the guest bedroom. The tubing trails after her wherever she goes like a long, loopy extension cord. Sometimes she forgets she’s tethered and walks one too many times through the front hall, into the dining room, through the pantry, back into the front hall, past the living room, and into the dining room again, encircling herself in an impossible tangle.

  “Damn this thing!”

  If she sits on the chairlift to ride up the main staircase, she hauls the tubing into a coiled lasso and slings it over the armrest, as if she’s out to strangle a bull.

  “Damn it to hell!”

  The dials on the machine are now cranked up to what the doctors say is their highest level of oxygen output, but when this becomes inadequate, Mum plans to get two machines. “Who says I can’t? That’s ridiculous!”

  You’d think her predicament would make anyone swear off smoking for life, but all I want when I’m with her is a cigarette.

  After Dad died, Mum felt lonely and began talking about moving into a retirement home. She complained that most of her good friends were dead. The rest had moved into swank retirement homes nearby, but Mum refused to join them in what she called “those hoity-toity places named after dead politicians.” She didn’t understand how anyone could arrive at old age and still be a snob. “Didn’t they learn anything in all those years?” She wanted interesting people around her, from all walks of life. Eventually she found a place more to her liking—“more down to earth.” It was miles away.

  My brothers and I tried to talk her out of moving. We couldn’t imagine how she could shrink her expansive nature into one room. But when she insisted, and a two-room suite became available, my brother Victor put down the hefty deposit.

  The week before Mum was due to go, I’d been home with her, sitting in the TV room. She was wedged into the upholstered recliner with her feet up. To ease the circulation in her swollen ankles she’d cut open the elastic tops of her nylon knee-highs, and they drooped like cuffs over her shoes. I pointed to a picture on the wall. It was a hunting scene of hounds chasing a fox to ground.

  “You’ve always loved that picture,” I said to Mum. “Why don’t you plan to take it with you?”

  Her face turned purple. “How dare you!” she shouted.

  “What?”

  “How dare you tell me what I can and cannot take!”

  “Mum!” I said. “I was only making a suggestion.”

  She pounded her fist on the armrest. “You all can hardly wait to get me out of here! You all want to send me away so you can sell this house!”

  I was astonished. “That’s not true! We’ve begged you not to go.”

  “How dare you!” she screamed again.

  A strange voice thundered up from my soles, the first time I ever remember raising my voice to my mother. “How dare YOU!” I roared. “How dare you suggest that we want you out. This was your idea! We had nothing to do with it! We’ve done nothing but bend over backwards … for years … to do what you ask … to try and make you happy … and all you do is turn on us!” Then I fled from the room in tears. I ran into the living room, sank into the sofa, and wept and wept—loud, heaving sobs. “I miss Dad! I miss Dad!”

  Dad’s slow fade had consumed most of my forties and fifties, but I had more patience then, and sweetness. Now I was convinced that Mum would make it into the Guinness World Records as the Longest Living Mother. Friends of mine who’d lost their mothers early kept telling me, “You don’t know how lucky you are … I’d give anything to have my mother back for even one minute!” But I just couldn’t relate. All I wanted was my freedom. I looke
d into the future and thought, Will I ever get my life back?

  Almost an hour went by before Mum shuffled into the room, trailing her oxygen tubing. She looked defeated, standing there unsteadily in the middle of the hall. She waited until my sobs subsided.

  “Do you think we should talk to somebody?” she asked.

  I looked at Mum, surprised. “Talk to somebody? You mean, like a therapist?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I stared out the window, wondering where we’d ever begin. I could spend a lifetime on a therapist’s couch trying to untangle my complicated relationship with Mum.

  “I think it’s too late.”

  “I think so, too,” she said, and sounded relieved.

  I knew Mum was facing a cruel choice for an extrovert— to either live in isolation here, “The Most Beautiful Spot on Earth,” or be stimulated by crowds of people in a sterile environment—but she’d made her decision: she wanted to give the retirement home a try. So a week later I called in the troops and we all drove her over there for a two-week test run.

  I was proud that we’d come together, presenting a united front. It happened more frequently now, although it hadn’t always been that way—some of us had managed years earlier to escape. When Sandy was starting his career, he’d moved as far away as possible—to Hong Kong and then Saudi Arabia—and rarely came home; Robin went to the University of Virginia as a young man and never moved back; and Chris had lived in Saskatoon for almost twenty years. That left Victor and me— the youngest and oldest—holding the fort. For years he and I had rolled our eyes as Mum praised the others for their short weekly phone calls. “It’s remarkable! Do you know they call me every Sunday?” But whenever she’d laugh and say, “All mothers love best those children who live farthest away,” Victor and I would joke about moving to Fiji.

  Each of us provided a unique kind of solace to Mum, and together we made up a whole: I provided efficiency; Robin, diplomacy; Chris, empathy; and Victor, practicality. If Sandy had been alive, he would have provided dignity. She knew we all loved her—it was just hard to show it with any patience these days. Her demanding, domineering personality seemed to gather force with every passing year—it was her way or the highway—and we were at our wits’ end.