End of an Eva

Sunday night at 11:15, I was just getting into bed, trying to calculate how tired I'd be the next morning having gotten up at 5:00 to do zazen. I was just starting to fall asleep when the phone rang. It was the Alzheimer's care facility in suburban Fairfield where Cris put her mother two and a half years ago. Cris's mother Eva, 79, had just died in her sleep.

I got up and dressed while Cris called her sisters who live in Oakland and suburban Walnut Creek, and the four of us went out to Fairfield, about sixty miles from San Francisco. We got there a little before 2:00 a.m. Of course the streets near the "home" were utterly quiet, so when we came into the facility we startled by the sight of a dozen elderly residents cheerfully milling about the lobby. "Why aren't they in bed?" exclaimed one of Cris's sisters. Cris said that staying up all night and walking around is a typical stage Alzherimer's patients go through; indeed, her own mother had gone through this phase during most of the first half of the 1990s.

We were led to the sparely furnished but comfortable room where Eva lay in bed on her back. Her mouth was open and her eyes were half open, giving her a pitiful countenance, a sight made even more pitiful when the covers were pulled back to reveal her emaciated body. Like many late-stage Alzheimer's patients, Eva had more or less starved to death as her ability to swallow had been erased by the advancing deterioration of her brain; her way was eased by hospice care and morphine for the last two months.

There was little for us to do but wait for the undertaker's van and sign a paper, but while we waited through the night for this simple act, we held vigil by Eva's body, talking alternately about the 15 years of her illness and what it had put us all through, and also about our own busy lives. Finally the man came and the sisters said their final goodbye, and we drove back, dropping the sisters off as we'd picked them up, and arriving home a little after 5:30 -- just about the time I would be going off to zazen. I didn't go off to zazen, though -- we both went right to bed, tuckered out.

So. Man. It's the end of an era that saw Cris and I, as well as her sisters, contributing enormous time and money to Eva's care, through a succession of housekeepers, live-in caregivers, and care facilities. Eva's illness had a huge effect on our lives -- as any serious long-term illness does on the lives of the family it strikes. First among these effects is probably the imperative for both Cris and I to stay in full-time jobs throughout the fourteen years since we returned from teaching in Japan, since we needed the money for Eva's care. This, and the need to stay close to the Bay Area, limited our mobility; we couldn't move to New York or Buenos Aires even if we could afford it (which, in the last couple of years, we could. Paradoxically, the worse Eva's illness got, the less it cost us, since it cost a lot less to keep her in care facilities than to employ full-time caregivers).

It's impossible to say how our lives might change now. We'll save the several hundred dollars a month we were still contributing to her care, but we'll still have to stay close to the Bay Area, for Cris still has an elderly aunt in San Francisco. So I don't expect any big lifestyle changes. But psychologically, it's a real high-water mark in our lives.