In Loving Memory

In Loving Memory
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday March 1, 2014

I pull into the driveway of his brick bungalow and there he is, waiting for me. He’s propped in a folding chair in the sun, shielding his eyes with a soldier’s salute.

Three months ago we’d been strangers. “I want you to write what it’s like to grow old,” he’d emailed me, “always looking at life over your shoulder. My wife of 55 years has been taken from me by illness. Maybe one day you could visit her in the nursing home. She is in room 19. Her name is Ada. Warm regards, Carl, 87.

The following Sunday, I’d sat with Carl in Ada’s room, acutely aware that a bedrail was all that divided this sick woman from my well self. Carl held his wife’s limp hand and whispered fighting words in her ear, trying to replenish her health with his. “She’s not coming back to me, is she?” he asked. Three days later, Ada died.

Carl and I have kept in touch. Now he ushers me inside the three-bedroom home he bought for Ada in 1972.  Her shower caps are still strung along a makeshift clothes line in the laundry. A tray of her earrings is lying open on the kitchen table. The treasures of half a century of marriage compete for space on every surface. “She’s keeping her eye on me, so I haven’t changed a thing,” he says.  

I notice a framed photograph of Carl and Ada leaning against a navy-blue Mercedes saloon. “Aaah, my two darlings,” he says, “except one of them never got her licence. She loved being chauffeured around. I sold that baby two years ago – ‘Hearse or limousine’ I put in the ad. The postie bought it for his wedding.”

Carl leads me into his study. It’s crammed with towers of browning newspapers, old VHS tapes and a spaghetti junction of electrical oddments and gubbins. “Ada wouldn’t come in here!” he beams. A sign on the door reads Litter Den.

I ease a dusty book from a row on a shelf: How To Help Your Husband Get Ahead, 1954. On a dog-eared page Ada has underlined the chapter heading: Make Mountains of his Virtues, Molehills of his Faults. Carl snorts gleefully. 

I see she has folded a square of toilet paper to bookmark Chapter 9: How To Get Along With His Secretary.

We take our tea in the sitting room. “Ada had 57 falls before they told me I couldn’t look after her anymore,” he tells me.

“57? You counted?”

“I’m an accountant.”

We trade smirks. He turns to pour the milk, and I realise he is hiding watery eyes.

 “She left me behind, my Ada. What happens to us – the ones left behind? I’m 87, what’s my future? To die of a broken heart? How can I start again?”

Below a window looking over the backyard, there’s a 1960s credenza with sliding glass doors. It’s filled with cut crystal. Carl has printed on one of the glass panels with a black marker: Remember the good times you had with Ada.

Her favourite armchair squats alongside. The upholstered cushion is scalloped where she once sat. Draped over the headrest, a blue checked tea-towel is embroidered with a row of dainty tulips. I can still make out the indent of her head in the fabric.  

Carl has recovered himself and is rummaging around in a filing cabinet. With a  flourish he pulls out a plastic sleeve and lays a handwritten letter on the table. “Please read it to me” he says. “I want to hear her voice again.”

The letter is dated April 2, 1974. “My darling,” I read to him. “Once again, I have to resort to pen and paper to get my point over.” I scan ahead nervously, realising Ada has written in fury. I look sideways at Carl but he knows what’s coming and begins to chuckle: “Keep going, you swine!” he says to me and puffs out his chest proudly. “This one made me sit up!”

“I have never been sorry having married you. You have been a wonderful provider and a good husband, but lately you are becoming one of the biggest bast–ds I can think of.”

He slaps his thigh and cackles.  I’m shocked but giggling too at the secret mechanics of this marriage. And then Carl’s mirth is again overtaken by sobs. He leans into me and says: “Always kiss your man before you fall asleep – even if you have to force yourself through gritted teeth.”

It’s time to pick up the kids from school. He hands me a carton of eggs and stands waving in the driveway as I reverse onto the street. I wait until he turns and walks safely inside before heading for the highway.

The story of life

The story of life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 7, 2013

It was his email that intrigued me:

‘You have no clue what really happens when you get old. My wife of 55 years has been taken from me by illness. Maybe one day you could visit her in the nursing home. She is in room 19. Her name is Ada.’

Warm regards, Carl, 87.

The following day, on a whim, I drive out to the aged care home. It’s a secure facility. A cleaner notices me waiting expectantly on the visitor’s side of the door. She punches in the security code, then pads noiselessly away on her soft soles, leaving me to guess which of the deserted corridors to search first. I inhale that haunting scent – the staleness of life at its lowest ebb. It’s the same miasma I recall from the nursing home where my Nan died – the smell of confinement, unease and antiseptic.

I knock gently on the door of Room 19 and hear a chair scrape as someone gets up to open the door. “I told her you’d come!” Carl beams at me. “Come and meet my beauty.”

He still has his veteran’s pride: khaki trousers with a sharp crease up the thigh, a pressed short-sleeved shirt, shiny chestnut brogues. Only his hearing aid and the Velcro bandage gripping his wrist hint at any outward signs of decline.

His wife, Ada, is slumped awkwardly in the bed, a slip of a woman in a voluminous cream nightie dotted with cornflowers. Her spindly arms and papery skin stand out in relief against the fat, dimpled pillows stacked behind her. She’s breathing noisily, her lids drooped over cloudy eyes. Carl smooths a wayward wisp of her fairy floss hair.

“She’s not coming back to me is she?” We both know the answer. “Two of her brothers had Parkinsons” he continues, “and now she’s started with the tremors. I give her a kiss and she gives me ten in return!” We both smile.

A nurse rattles in with lunch and briskly suggests we wait outside. “Ada’s refusing to eat,” Carl explains, and leads me to two plastic chairs in the corridor.

He is surprisingly buoyant. “This is my world now. Sitting with her hour after hour, then going home to a cold bed. I want you to write what it’s like to grow old: always looking back at life over your shoulder.”

He points to an elderly gent leaning precariously forward in his wheelchair. “That’s Ray,” Carl says. The wheelchair’s foot rests are folded up and out of the way and Ray is using his slippered feet to inch along the carpet. “The week after he moved here to be with his wife, she passed away. He doesn’t realise she’s gone. He spends his whole day shuffling from room to room looking for her.” Ray looks searchingly at me as he edges his wheelchair past us: “Do you know where they’ve taken her?” I am moved to tears.

Carl stares at the burgundy leaf-pattern in the carpet while I collect myself. “I met Ada on the bus, you know,” he says. “I came to Fremantle after the war. I was a frontline interpreter. I’m Dutch, but I speak four languages so the Yanks wanted me.”

He opens his wallet and pulls out a small plastic sleeve. He tips a pebble into my hand. “Grenade” he tells me. “They took this shrapnel out of me leg. I howled like a baby. Ada always told me I was a big sook.”

“She tricked me into marrying her, you know,” he says. “I’m Catholic. My family back home didn’t want no Church of England girl. She says to me one day: Can you take me to Hehir street?”

“I know that street” I says to her. “Little church there.”

“We arrive at the church and the priest says to me: Know what you’re here for?”

“Ada had gone and got herself converted. We got married three weeks later.” He leans into me and says: “You girls got your ways of getting your man!”

We’re allowed back into Ada’s room. “She still won’t eat” the nurse tells Carl, as she pushes the lunch trolley out the door. He lifts Ada’s limp arm and nestles it in his. The veins at her wrist are ropey and tinged with green. The lingering remains of a soft-pink manicure stain her nails.

Carl reaches over to the bedside table and picks up a hand mirror with a long gilt handle. He holds it so Ada can see her reflection: “Look at those rosy cheeks!” he coos, but Ada doesn’t register.

“I just want my wife back,” he says. I see a tear slide down his cheek.

He leans in and plants a kiss on Ada’s slackened mouth. We sit in silence by her bedside. Ada shifts in the bed, swallows uncomfortably. Her eyes focus, settling on her husband. Her voice is trembly with the effort of speech but there’s no mistaking what she whispers: “I see a beautiful face.” And then she turns her head away and stares unblinkingly at the door.

Ada Caubo – 24/3/1928 – 13/11/13