Nellie
I want to remember, writing it down now so we won't forget;
Never enough paper, never enough letters so we won't forget
Call me what you want, call me what you need, words don't have to say, keep it to myself
Ooh, say you remember for I think I’ve lost it.
You don't have to be silent, say to remind me so we won't forget.
She was born on March 13, 1922, the fifth and youngest child of Clem and Hittie, in a house on an eighty-acre farm adjacent to Russell's Creek, not far from the community of Bramlett in Green County, a place which even a century later census data found to be the most economically remote in a state that was one of the poorest in America. The house had no electricity, no running water, and no indoor plumbing. In winter, heat was from a fireplace in the main room and a wood-fired iron cook stove in the kitchen. Water for consumption was drawn from a well, that for bathing and washing clothes was rain collected in a large cistern. She knew nothing but poverty, made worse by the Great Depression.
Her husband faced almost identical circumstances. Born on July 20, 1918, the eldest child of Bascom and Emma, in a house on a seventy-acre farm not far from Caney Creek in Green County. The house had no electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. Water was taken from a spring. When he was very young, one winter the house in which he was born caught fire and burned to the ground. Having no where to go, they lived in the back of a church and slept on its benches until his father could rebuild something of their own. He knew nothing but poverty, made worse by the Great Depression. War was soon to envelop the world, and in 1940, poverty led to enlistment. He was to spend nearly five years in the Army, fighting across France, Belgium, and Germany with General Patton's Third Army.
They said that they were fortunate and had a good life. He survived the war without being maimed. The G.I. Bill allowed him to attend university, and he didn't stop until he had achieved a Ph.D in plant genetics. Another federal program provided financing assistance that allowed the purchase of a small house. He retired as a full professor and chief agronomist at the United States Department of Agriculture. She was a housewife until their son moved away, after which she took a job in a department store, more for it giving her something to do as for the small pay she received. As with many children of the Great Depression, frugality and saving were watchwords and all expenditures were looked at with dismay, but one consequence was that money was not a concern when they became old. They were firmly middle class and were content and thankful for what they had. They worked on weekdays, watched television on Saturday evenings, went to church on Sundays, and took small bus trips sponsored by their church’s senior citizens’ group to visit state parks. They never smoked, drank, or cursed. She was a Democrat because Roosevelt saved America, he was a Republican for reasons never clearly explained .
circa September 1957
After 63 years of marriage, her husband died on March 19, 2007. He was 88 years old, she was 85. While his death was a shock to her, it was not a surprise. It's never surprising when someone old dies. He had congestive heart failure and had been diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease. It was fortunate that he passed quickly and presumably without suffering.
But death also tore apart the 63 years of established patterns, rhythms, familiarities, habits, and traditions that structured everyday life. She didn't talk much about it, but instead quietly adjusted and adapted. Grace let him die just a month before spring, and the warming temperatures and increasing sunlight pushed away some of the emptiness. It helped immeasurably that her son and his wife and daughter lived but a mile away, and she had many old friends with whom she could talk and get together.
That brief respite lasted just a few months, for that summer she suffered a transient ischemic stroke, often described as a “minor” stroke in that many of its effects are temporary and it is recoverable if proper medical care and good fortune are on a patient's side. Yet one in three will have another “major” stroke within a year, which is what happened to Nellie.
Some progress was gained through physical and speech therapy. There was even a small hope that if she could not return to her house to live, then at least she could move to an assisted-living apartment. That didn't happen. Hopes and dreams rarely come true for the elderly. While she regained the ability to speak and was not paralyzed, still she was unable to stand and walk even a step without significant assistance, she was unable to dress herself and take care of her bodily needs, and knowing that she would never go home again, the simple desire to live was lost and replaced by an intense desire to die.
She was placed in a long-term care facility, a nursing home, an institution designed to provide minimal care and to hide away the old and infirmed while sucking away as much money as possible. From 2007 until her death in 2012, her life was spent in a shared room in a space smaller than what is required by federal law for inmates in a maximum security prison. The institution housed some 120 elderly persons, most confined to wheelchairs, many incontinent and with varying degrees of dementia. Many could not chew and swallow regular food, so what was served was the very cheapest canned and frozen foods, cooked and boiled to a gelatinous mass. As with most hospitals and nursing homes, the windows were hermetically sealed, so the recirculated air reeked of shit, piss, and vomit. Visitors were few and and came out of guilt or duty, not desire. Many residents received visitors only on holidays, some received none at all. For the first years, her son came daily, if only but to stay a moment, sometimes to stay a half hour. But as months became years, the half-hour visits became fewer. They had nothing to say because there was nothing to say.
When it became clear that the institution and her allotted 72 square feet was to be her forever home, it was time to sell her house and dispose of its lifetime of accumulated contents. Without speaking about its purpose, her son arranged for her to see her house again. A van was hired, and together they rode to the house where she had lived for forty-five years. Her son had not changed or moved anything in the house, only going inside from time to time to clean away the dust. She had not been back since she was carried away by ambulance years before.
I need to ask the reader to pause. I need you to think and use your memory and imagination as best as you can. I ask that you close your eyes and recall your childhood home, what you would see when coming in the door, what pictures were on the walls, what things were on the kitchen counter. Think about your bedroom and what was on the dresser, what clothes were in the closet, what would be in your desk drawer. What things were in the hall closet?, what did your parents' room look like? the curtains? In the attic? Take as much time as you need. Maybe stop and come back to this essay in a few days or weeks.
Now here is the catch -- even if it was a place you lived in for years, decades, or a lifetime, you will have discovered that there are huge gaps in your memory to the extent that you really don't know what it is that you've forgotten. In point of fact, neurologists tell us that we remember only a small fraction of even familiar events, things, places, and landscapes regardless of how intimate they may seem. We tend to remember things as if seen through a narrow tube; worse yet, our subconscious tends to create and fill in gaps so that what a person thinks is a clear visual memory is in actuality an imaginary, partially assembled collage — “You can be 100% confident in your vivid memory and still be 100% wrong,” Dr. Lisa Genova, Harvard Medical School. Yet what if you could somehow magically see photographs or videos of what actually was there so many, many years ago, or better yet somehow go back in time to revisit those places as they were, then what wonders you would see, what renewed memories you would have -- indeed, you might smile and think to yourself, “Oh yeah, I'd forgotten that! Now I remember!.”
That was what Nellie experienced when her now distant and ever fading memories, her mind further erased and scrambled in part because of a stroke, confronted the reality of her house. The bric-a-brac on the counter -- just odds and ends, a fountain pen that she had used for fifty years sitting on a table next to a letter she was writing, a small ceramic cardinal sitting on a windowsill, the coffee pot with its suddenly familiar stains -- such things and hundreds of others meshed with her memories and became remembered and alive once again.. The smell of the house, the dining room table where she served forty-five Christmas dinners, the stove where she had cooked thousands of meals, the clothes in the closets and sudden memories of wearing a particular dress to church. Her things. Her house. Her memories.
Her son slowly rolled the wheelchair into the kitchen, and she opened a drawer and stared silently into it for many minutes. Lifting her head, her son saw tears running down her cheeks crevassed with age and fatigue and loneliness and despair and defeat and depression. Nothing was said. Her wheelchair was pushed past her bedroom, and after looking into it from the hall, seeing furniture that they had purchased in the first years of marriage, she shook her head to indicate that she did not want to go in. Further down the hall was a small room with two chairs for her and her husband and a television that they would watch together. And at the end of the hall, another room with a bed and dresser -- a guest bedroom should anyone have come without a place to stay -- which was her son's room as a child. The wheelchair was rolled into the room, and she pulled open a dresser drawer to see where she had kept her sweaters and clothes for special occasions. Who would wear them now? They were nice things. Where would they go? There was a small framed picture on the dresser of her and her husband, another of her granddaughter. What will happen to my things, my house?
They went back to the kitchen. Her son had brought sandwiches and Cokes for their lunch. Nothing was said because there were no words to be said. She took a small bite of the sandwich and then a sip of Coke, and perhaps memories of the two of them eating lunch together forty years, ten years, thirty years, twenty years ago were recalled. Perhaps memories of her husband sitting at the table. When Kennedy was murdered, when his brother was murdered, when birthday cards were exchanged, when there was deep snow on the ground, when bills were paid and checkbooks balanced. Perhaps memories of their little dog at their feet begging for scraps -- what was his name? The rotary phone was still on the wall unchanged since they moved into the house in 1963. The phone that brought news of her mother's death, news of who wore what and said what to whom at church, gossipy news, tragic news, happy news.
And it was time to go back to the institution. She knew that she would never again come home. And she said, “ How do I know that my memories are of things that happened and not memories of dreams and daydreams? How do I know that the good times were as good as I remembered and the bad times were as bad? How do I know what is real?”