LITMIR.BIZ

      SEVEN

      Mid-January, 2014. Flint is in the news, another financially strapped, predominantly Black city under state-imposed financial control. An unelected emergency manager advances a plan to save money by drawing the city’s water from the Flint River. My wife and I had visited Ima Nell between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the first such visit in almost a year. We were shocked by the extent of her frailty, her precipitous decline. Today, I sit stranded listening to Michigan Radio, the local NPR affiliate, recovering from surgery to repair chronic Achilles tendonitis. The same condition, untreated, had hobbled my father in his twilight years.

      By late February, foot immobilized in a walking boot, we set off, my brother and I, bound for our mother’s Tennessee hometown, the place she has lived since our father died in Florida seventeen years earlier. She keeps a small, neat condo on high ground across the river from the old county courthouse—happier than she’s been since marrying and leaving home sixty-two years before. She’d been little more than a girl—young and in love, yet stricken with a longing for home from which she never recovered.

      Lately she’s been falling, every tumble requiring costly EMS rescue. She is helpless to care for herself, no longer able to drive safely, cook, or manage her affairs. Her robust younger sister, whom she has come to rely on for care and support since returning home, was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The two of them together are a hazardous combination of unintentional heedlessness, stubborn denial, and zany comedy duo. Not long ago, she opened her door to a Eureka vacuum cleaner salesman, a slick huckster who must have smelled blood in the water. She purchased an expensive model much too heavy and cumbersome to be practical. I had no idea vacuums were still sold door to door. Not long afterward, she bought a lightweight, inexpensive Shark at Walmart. Can openers, fasteners, and jar lids—insurmountable barriers. Trips to the mailbox are freighted with hazard enough to rival the Pacific Coast Trail. An expensive senior alert system goes unused at critical moments, the very contingency for which we had purchased it. An acquaintance of hers, a woman with nursing experience, offers to provide companionship and around-the-clock care in her rural home a few miles east of town. We’ve set aside two days, my brother and I. Time enough to assess things, convince her to leave her condo, negotiate a monthly fee, and make all the necessary arrangements. As the months drag on, we will make little effort to disabuse her of the belief she is only on temporary hiatus from her home.

      Back home before dinner gets cold, our hope; naiveté laid bare. I am eager, a bit too gung-ho, perhaps, to play dutiful eldest son. Something roils inside. I have other muddled, ignoble reasons for making the trip. Chief among them grievance, shame, and a reservoir of raw, tangled emotion long suppressed. I yearn to surrender to aching need, burn to bear witness to the tragic opening scene of her inevitable decline. I fear she’ll be lost to me before we can—what—reconcile, forgive, redeem the years squandered? Everything else is for show, reprise of a role I can play in my sleep.

      Passing through Ohio and Kentucky, climbing ever higher, pressing on into Tennessee, we utter euphemisms for feelings we can’t begin to articulate; equivocate and dissemble. Banalities roll off the tongue, sweet and cloying. Dusk blankets the Appalachian foothills. Ima Nell and all her possessions, a condominium and its contents, a twenty-year-old car that embodies the heroic myth of her late husband await our arrival, poised for final disposition over the coming eighteen months.