The End of a Resolution
by
Ruth Martinussen
New Year's is a great time to expiate the guilt accumulated from the past year's lapses. There! I resolved to pay more attention to Aunt Esther. I not only resolved, but I wrote a New Year's card to her. "Aunt Esther, I'm sorry I didn't visit you very often last year. This coming year I will be in touch with you every day." My resolve had become a promise. My winter would be a quiet one with books, painting, and writing. It would be a kind of challenge to try keeping up communication with Aunt Esther
On New Year's Day, I dropped by her nursing home for a short visit en route to a friend's house. To avoid a pessimistic start to the year, I tried steering the conversation to memories of her garden. I began, "Remember how the far corner by the woodshed was always a tangle of dill, asparagus and garlic?"
"Oh, sure," she muttered., "It's because that son of mine never would help me. Edward always took the easy way out. Lazy! Sneaky! Look how he's taken all my money, and God knows what he's done with it. My furniture too — that nice buffet and all the china..."
Next day I phoned late in the morning just to say, "Hello, how are you?"
"Not good. Not good," she said. "My stomach's acting up again. It might be the scrambled egg I had for breakfast — who knows what they might have put in it!" Ten minutes later I got back to my kitchen where the kettle had boiled dry.
As the days passed, I steadily kept my resolve. I called around 11:15. That seemed convenient for her, being after "The Price is Right," her regular morning TV fare, and before she began wheeling herself down the long corridor to the dining room for lunch.
On January 15th, I remembered I had a dental appointment next morning. "I can't call you tomorrow morning, Aunt Esther," I said. "I've got to see my dentist. But I'll call you at six o'clock, when you're back from supper. OK?"
When I called next day at six, a very distraught Aunt Esther answered the phone. "What happened? Where have you been? I nearly missed lunch waiting for you to call! And I've been upset all afternoon!"
Next morning I resumed the 11 o'clock routine, but I added, "If some day I don't call at this time, I'll phone early in the evening when you've come back from supper."
I kept reminding her of the alternate calling time and, in fact, I occasionally waited deliberately until six o'clock to call her. I thought I was building some flexibility into our relationship.
As we were getting on toward spring, I was looking forward to gardening, and to being out and about more. I suggested that I might sometimes be too busy to call her in the daytime. However, if she hadn't heard from me, she could call me at night before bed.
I went to see her and got her to show me that she could press the correct buttons on her phone to call my number.
It's ringing but there's no answer," she complained.
"Don't worry," I said, "you just call me tomorrow night and I'll answer."
She really caught on to the idea of calling me every night before bedtime. Sometimes a nurse's aide helped her if she was particularly shaky. She even said once, "I like saying good night to somebody — specially someone with a grain of sense in their head." Sometimes her bedtime call came at seven if she was poorly; more often it was eight or, at the latest, nine.
But I stuck to my resolution and continued calling Aunt Esther. If I called in the morning, she would often try to hook me with a closing remark such as "When you call me after supper, I'll tell you if my stomach's still hurting." If I did wait until six to phone she'd complain about how long the day had been. And then she'd phone me at bedtime anyway.
One night in April, there was no good night call from Aunt Esther. I had talked to her in the morning and she had seemed her usual self. Feeling a bit uneasy, I got ready for bed at 10. The phone rang. It was my cousin, Edward, Aunt Esther's son, calling from Calgary.
"It sounds as if Mother has taken a bad turn of some sort. I guess I should have kept in touch more regularly, but this oil business is very stressful. You talk with her occasionally, I believe? Could I trouble you to go over and see what's going on with her?"
I got dressed and drove over to the nursing home. But when I arrived, Aunt Esther had died.
I know I had gotten in rather deep with my promise to keep in touch every day. And there was the problem of what to do about her when I went away in the summer. But now I felt strangely cut off. While struggling faithfully to pay attention to Aunt Esther, I had hardly considered that she could abandon me!
