The Long Goodbye
Ros Thomas
Published: January 26, 2018

In her dotage, my mother always planned to throw herself under a bus. She was adamant a snappy exit was far preferable to the long goodbye.

“If I start losing my marbles,” she told me on the night of her 60th birthday, “then I’ll take myself out.”

I was 30 and horrified, then amused at her ingenuity.

The number 28 bus was Mum’s contingency plan in case her golden years were to be robbed by senility. Her family had dibs on dementia. Nobody died of anything else.

Hers was a meticulous fantasy we fleshed out with new storylines to keep ourselves entertained. It would begin on the day Mum’s doctor began talking, sotto voce, about irreversible mental infirmity.

My mother, a vision of composure, would thank him for his expert diagnosis and explain that she was completely prepared for this eventuality. We imagined we’d drive home together in silence, the air between us thick and dolorous.

The next morning, my mother would begin her last day like any other. She’d eat a

small bowl of muesli and drink milky tea from her Noritake cup. She’d sweep the floor listening to her cheer-up cassette of Harry Secombe and his rich bel canto.

The breakfast dishes would be dried and put away. She’d give the passionfruit a deep watering, top up the fishpond and hang her gardening clogs on the hook by the sliding door. Twisting a lemon off the tree overhanging the side fence, my mother would take aim at one more crow.

She’d ease into her favourite pair of suede loafers with the shoehorn her dad whittled from deer bone when she was a child. (After the war, her family had run a thriving shoe shop in Oxford Street, Leederville.)

Unfurling the garage roller-door, Mum would conduct a last lap of her front garden – inspecting the leaves of her roses for thrip – then stroll down the hill and turn left onto Montgomery Drive.

At the mid-point of a sweeping bend, she’d park herself on the verge and wait calmly, the sun warming her back. When the bus loomed into view, she’d count to five, step off the curb and let the number 28 take her for one final ride – under the front axle.

The bus driver (thoughtfully edited out of our fantasy), would feel nothing, see nothing. He’d be fixated on the traffic lights up ahead flicking to green. With a gentle nudge on his accelerator, he’d flatten the last rise (and my mother), swinging his machine around the corner into Alfred Road just as the lights switched to amber. My mother’s death would be blameless. And painless.

There were few problems we couldn’t solve, she and I. Her dementia was one of them. Naturally it found her, just as we feared it would. But she refuses to become an accommodating host.

“I have a neurological condition,” she says matter-of-factly if someone asks after her health.

Dementia is a dirty word. She will not acknowledge its presence.

“Don’t worry honey,” she says to me with unnerving repetition.

“You know my end game. I want the short cut, not the scenic route.”

We snort, the two of us. She still remembers our little bus joke.

…

Mum turned 80 last year. She refused my offers of a birthday party, a family dinner, even an afternoon tea.

“No surprises,” she said, frowning at me.

“You know I hate fuss. It makes me anxious.”

In almost fifty years of daughterhood, I’ve rarely seen my mother anxious. But now she frets constantly about trifles: the whereabouts of the TV remote, the insistent flashing light on the answering machine, her grandchildrens’ names. Lately, Gabriella and Daniel have become interchangeable with Daniella and Gabriel.

I now watch her decline with a gnawing disquiet. Will this be my fate too? I turn 50 this year. An only child. Can my father’s dementia-free genes outwit my mother’s increasingly addled ones?

Every time I misplace my glasses, I wonder if this is how it starts. Tiny forgettings.

This morning, I pause, mid-stride, en route to the laundry – my mind suddenly blank and purposeless.

With a jolt, I remember I’m looking for fresh batteries and sigh with relief. My sense of foreboding loosens its grip. I vow to pack more living into each day, just in case. I know Mum is valiantly trying to do the same.

On the outside, she remains a perfect likeness of my mother. The shock of snow-white hair – two cowlicks competing with a centre-part. The winning smile, the playful demeanor, the erect carriage, her body petite now but still muscular from a lifetime of exercise.

“Tighten those cheeks,” is still her favourite dig at me as she pokes my rear with her thumb.

“No man likes a flabby bottom.”

On the inside, however, my mother is becoming a jumble of fear and confusion. A crank caller sends her into a panic.

“He said he was from the Tax Office and I’m going to be investigated.”

I hear her voice quaver.

“No, Ma,” I say. “It’s a scam. I stuck a note to the phone to remind you. It’s not really the Tax Office. It’s someone trying to scare you into giving them money. They rang us too.”

She calms down but remains shaken for hours. The next morning, she recycles the trauma with the newness of yesterday. The following day brings yet another fresh volley of alarm. I continually remind her the Tax Office threat is not real.

But the plaques and tangles of her dementia are good at short-circuiting her memory. For a week, she’s in a rat-run of despair.

Month by month, I watch from the sidelines as small pieces of her drift away. Some she lets go without a struggle.

Her mobile phone sits idly on the kitchen table. She cannot remember how to dial out or accept a call. Its keypad is now a Sudoku of confusion. I accept she is no longer contactable once she leaves the house. Secretly I think she derives a sneaky pleasure being free of me on her suburban roams.

…

It’s October. Unseasonably warm. We are lunching together at a café. She is wearing a jumper. And a pair of her late husband’s gardening shorts, ballooning around her small frame. She has them belted at the waist like a paper bag but the outfit screams of madness. I debate whether to make a joke of it. In the end, I say nothing. But as she pushes back her chair to stand, I note the critical gaze of other patrons as they absorb her fashion farce.

In conversation, I watch her grabbing blindly for a recalcitrant word, trying to direct it from woolly brain to tongue. I see the moment – the slackening of expression – as she surrenders and allows the word to spin away, out of reach. Her daisy-chains of neurons no longer transmit at will.

…

On a plane home to Perth, row 27, I’m seated next to a middle-aged Swiss tourist who’s nuzzling his girlfriend in her window seat.

He flaps his hands and lets loose a babbling stream of sound. I strain to collect a crumb of language I recognize.

He grabs her face and squeezes her cheeks and makes a smacking sound with pursed lips. Perhaps he is mimicking kissing. Or eating. I can’t tell but it’s disconcerting to feel excluded. I feel strangely alone. Is this how my mother feels when conversations she can’t understand swirl around her? I vow to spend more slow, quiet time with her.

…

It’s March. Still hot. Sitting on the grass at the local pool, I map my mother’s physique against the panorama of bodies on display. To my left, an old woman in a swimming cap negotiates the stairs to the shallow end, her back bent painfully into a question mark. A portly man, motionless on the edge of the diving board, springs with a shudder of white belly into a clumsy dive.

As far back as I can remember, my Mum was trim and fit. Her legs were beautiful: shapely calves, a muscular groove along the side of her thigh, quads taut and smooth. On Saturdays at the tennis club, blokes in their white shorts and Slazenger shirts would follow my mother with their eyes. I wanted her legs. I wanted the attention they created.

At 80, my mother’s body is still a resilient and efficient machine. She’s had no broken bones, no stents or sutures, no surgical repairs. There have been malfunctions of course: thyroid, pancreas, stomach. But nothing life-threatening.

And yet it’s the 2-percent of her body mass residing in her skull that will ultimately undo her. The neuron forest of her brain is shrinking – becoming scarred and stunted. Soon she will be imprisoned by her own incapacity to think. The vast freedoms of an independent life will be curtailed. Dementia will wither her personality and turn my mum into someone else. But not yet.

…

I decide to visit my aunt at her nursing home, an attempt to shock myself into accepting the inevitable. My Aunty Marg is the same age as my mother, her Dementia a year advanced.

It’s a Sunday afternoon in May and I see no-one as I navigate the carpeted hallways looking for room 9. I’m loath to breathe deeply – to be reminded of the staleness of life at its lowest ebb. But the corridors smell benign. Instead, I’m struck by the soupy air. It’s uncomfortably warm – a hopeful precaution against chills.

I find my aunt in the dining hall, a tiny slip of her former robust self. Gone is her trademark copper rinse, her hair now wispy and white. She can walk and feed herself but remembers nothing from hour to hour. She searches my face while I make small talk and butter her bread. Her crocheted cardigan has a silverfish hole she frets at with her thumb.

Opposite us a bird-like woman is cradling a life-like doll in the crook of her arm. She raises her fork from her plate, offering the trembling contents to her doll-baby first. I have to look away.

I sit with my aunt for an hour, repeating the names and ages of my children, my suburb and street name. I kiss her papery cheek goodbye, then sob helplessly in the carpark.

….

It’s June. Nearly a year has passed since I started this piece.

The number 28 is now just a bus to Claremont. It is no longer the Elysian Express. Mum’s master plan for a snap exit lingers in my imagination but has been erased from her own memory. She will not have the finale she wanted.

Most days, Mum’s dementia does not inhibit her.

“Isn’t it a gorgeous day,” she greets me whenever the weather is fine. If the sky darkens she’ll say: “Won’t it be lovely if it rains.”

First thing each morning, I ring to check on her. There is something to be said for daily-ness. My mother is aware decline and disaster are coming but her thoughts don’t linger there.

“Have you been for your ride today?” she asks me.

“Yes, Ma. At 6. Round the river.”

“Good girl,” she replies. “Keep doing the things you love.”

Some mornings she’ll ask me over and over: “Are you happy?” until exasperated, I snap: “Yes, Ma. I’m happy. Now – about your pills.”

For all my guilty frustrations, I’m delighted she is carefree. My job is to soothe the worries, remove the obstacles; knit together the loose threads, the pulls and runs of an unraveling life. I hope some essence of my mother survives until the end.

“What’s in the diary for today?” I ask her on this morning’s call.

“Let me see,” she replies. I hear the rustling of pages. “What day is it?” she mutters. “Friday?”

“No Ma. It’s Tuesday.”

“Aah. Table Tennis,” she says.

“I love Fridays.”