Spring 2022, Volume 32

Nonfiction by Henry Stimpson

Notes to Herself

After my mother’s death, I discovered her list of my father’s six nervous breakdowns on an oval piece of paperboard she cut from a Kleenex box. She recorded the hospital, episode number, dates, psychiatrist, the number of shock treatments and duration, such as: Chapin Hospital 2nd 1962 Oct 30 – Dec 8th (Dr. Franek) (Treatments) (9) 6 weeks

Mom also left behind self-pep talks, reminders, bromides, phone numbers, annotated snapshots, addresses, and rants jotted down on scraps of paper. Writing notes to herself served as her risk-management and chaos-prevention system, emotional outlet, financial recordkeeping, diary, and bulwark against the ravages of time. 

She saved every old heating-oil bill—ultimately, 52 years’ worth—in a yellowing stack held by a rubber band. Once in a while she’d pull one out and laugh:  “Look at this—we were paying 19 cents a gallon in 1960!” She never hired an honest plumber or handyman: old invoices would be scrawled with “A rip-off!”

On a scrap secreted under a glass bowl, Mom kept track of the maturity dates of their many certificates of deposit, scattered among different banks. Her list of phone numbers was a grubby penciled palimpsest. Mom saved both correspondence and envelopes, which she annotated with phone numbers, reminders, and calculations. She analyzed her phone bills to the penny, covering them with a complex scrawl of numbers and arrows indicating how much she’d paid on each date and how much remained. She was good at arithmetic. I think being thrifty was part of her Italian heritage.

 

Born in 1923, Viola Iervolino was the second eldest of ten. Her father, Adamo, or Adam, immigrated from Ottaviano, near Naples, in the early 1900s when he was 12 or 13 and became a barber in Warren, Rhode Island, a mill town on a narrow upper branch of Narragansett Bay. Her mother, Amelia, also Italian, was born in Rhode Island. Though their income was modest, the family was better off than most during the Depression, and they owned a big house that had room for Adam’s barbershop. When “poor” kids were offered free hand-me-down clothes at school, Nana indignantly told my mother to refuse them. I heard family tales about Nana’s meatballs having more bread than meat in them and ice in the toilet bowl upstairs on winter mornings. Soon after Mom finished ninth grade, she got a job at the local zipper factory (a feat she was proud of) and at 15 was helping to support her family. 

She was a pretty, black-haired, 23-year-old waitress at the Wimpy Grills hamburger restaurant in Providence when she met my father, a customer three years her junior. Dad’s family were Protestants who’d been in New England for hundreds of years. He converted so he and my mother could be married in the brick “Italian” Catholic church in Warren.  (Oddly, the “French” church was just a few blocks away.) For an immigrant’s daughter, marrying Dad seemed like marrying into wealth (not really) and class. The young couple spent summers at Dad’s parents’ summer cottage in Narragansett where the bay met the sea. Mom learned how to crack a steamed lobster and love the beach.

In 1950, when I was one, my parents bought a small house bordering the then sleepy state airport in Warwick. Dad commuted to his job as a textile engraver at Universal Engravers, (a shop half owned by his father) and Mom stayed at home with me. Away from her big family, she was lonely, not able to go anywhere on weekdays because they had just one car.  But around the time Linda was born in 1955 or little after, Mom had learned to drive and had use of a second car. 

Things were mostly okay despite my father’s sometimes erratic behavior. But Dad’s growing anxieties finally overwhelmed him in 1961. He became paranoid, muttered against imagined enemies, smashed up dishes and sharpened his hunting knives in the basement. He had to go into a mental hospital for a couple of months. 

Dad tried to go back to work after he recovered from each breakdown but always started to get too anxious after a few weeks and had to quit. After his final breakdown, when I was 15 and my sister Linda was 9, he didn’t try anymore. Mom worried about our future. Grampa paid most of our bills, and Mom was frugal, shopping for the best bargains. We passed for a normal family. Most Sundays we’d visit Nana Iervolino, a short stocky widow in a dark dress who whistled tuneless Italian songs while she cooked and her Pekinese and her big tabby cat scurried around.

At 49, Mom took a part-time job as a cashier at The Outlet department store—her first job since Wimpy Grills. I found a December 2, 1972 paystub annotated: “1st Paycheck 1.85 per hr. 1972 - earned for Dec mt. = 55.50.” The job got her away from Dad and his worries, and she was proud to master the computerized register. She saved every one of her paystubs until The Outlet went bankrupt in December 1981. She retired at 58. That was a mistake, I think. Working got her into the world, away from Dad and his problems. 

By the time she was in her mid-60s, I had a wife and a little girl. She was delighted to have a granddaughter, but during our almost weekly visits—we lived an hour away—a dark look sometimes came over her face, and I knew what was coming up again. “Why do you have to live so far away? I’m never going to get to know my granddaughter.” 

It was worse for Linda, who lived three hours away, in Maine. Mom’s friends’ daughters all lived in Warwick. One of her friends even said Linda must have been mad at her move away.  Everywhere she went—the supermarket, the bank, the mall, she’d see mothers out with their adult daughters, and that made her sad and resentful. It was a daughter’s duty to be with her mother, an Italian tradition. That she and Linda got along well only made her feel worse. This theme started in Mom’s mid-60s and intensified in her 70s. “What did I do to deserve this?” she’d wail. Linda briefly went to a psychologist specializing in the elderly to try to get some relief from the guilt Mom repeatedly inflicted on her. 

Mom often deluded herself that Linda or I would move to Rhode Island, but she couldn’t always fool herself. A tiny scrap from 1996 reads: “Today, Stinks because I have no hope of anything good for me because you Henry moved!!  And again not nearby!  I am very sad-sad-sad!  Because of your father’s trouble I need help!! Help!” 

I was jolted to be accused from the grave. I had moved just three miles farther away! On the same piece of paper, she wrote vertically, in her clear printing, “Henry, you are great! The best father and man.” She was still proud of me.

On the other side are the names and addresses of two plumbers, one noted as “Better.” On the back of a coupon she penciled in a homemade calendar for July and August 1998 and circled July 16: “I fell at Beach and hurt my knee!”  And: “June 22nd Louise [her older sister] was operated on for cancer and died Aug. 1st.”  

 

Her anxiety kept ratcheting up. With Linda and my wife driving to my cousin’s wedding shower, Mom had a shrieking panic attack because she was sure they were going the wrong way. By her late 70s, she was stuck in a rut of impotent fantasy. “I’m going to divorce your father and run away!” she’d proclaim. “Where are you going to go?” I’d ask. “You’ll see!” 

By then, she’d spend five minutes fingering a head of cauliflower at the market before putting it back as too expensive.  If she hadn’t been careful with her money all these years, they’d have “ugats,” she said. She’d often pout, “I just want to have some fun before I die, for cripes sake!”  

“But we’re having fun,” I’d say. “We had a great time at that restaurant last week!” But those good moments didn’t count for much in the bleakness of her life. 

I finally persuaded her to see a clinical social worker, who told me they had a frank discussion about Mom’s fears and loneliness. The social worker advised her to move to Maine to be near Linda since that was so important to her. Mom never went back. She’d never move. No social worker could solve her problems, she said. Nor could a priest. She didn’t attend Catholic Mass anymore. She told my wife she was mad at God for taking away her mother and her youngest sister, Pat, who died at 54. 

Mom latched onto a bizarre theory about why her kids had “moved away.” Aunt Geneva, my father’s widowed, childless aunt, left some money to Linda and me in 1972. The money gave us the means to leave Rhode Island, she concluded. 

She was more notes to herself because she was afraid of forgetting things, but she remembered all too well: out to eat, she’d bitterly dredge up detailed memories of a bad meal she had ten years ago until I told her to stop. She seemed to have kept every menu from every restaurant she particularly liked, and many from those she hated, scrawling in the margin: “Terrible! Never again!”  

One day when she was about 80, I saw bills, notes, and snapshots piled on the dining room table. In their bedroom, I saw her sweaters, socks, blouses, hats and gloves heaped on the beds and chest. What if she couldn’t find a bill to be paid or a CD coming due or remember where a favorite sweater was?  She had to see everything in plain sight, so 50-plus years of bills, photos, notes and whatnot marched out of their hiding places and merged in chaos. Something was wrong with her beyond anxiety and obsessiveness.

“Stop taking things out of the drawers,” I ordered sternly. I put some things back, but she began mutely rummaging through her papers and clothes, shuttling back and forth, and piling stuff up on the sofa and chairs. I felt like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, fighting the multiplying brooms lugging more and more buckets of water into the flooding house. 

“I can’t find my checkbook,” she wailed. “Am I losing my mind?”  

She scribbled more notes on ever-smaller bits of paper. I found notes about medical tests, doctor’s appointments, annotated plumber’s ads from the newspaper, and a torn-off corner of an envelope with my office phone on it. She wrote down the same information on multiple snippets as a safety net: if she lost one, she could find another. On one of my business cards, she crammed in Linda’s phone and address along the top, plus my home address and phone and scratched them out and penciled in my new particulars after I moved. On the back, she wrote the phone numbers and addresses of her brother Adam, her sister Jackie and her best friend Dot. 

Mom raged at my inert father almost nonstop and sometimes nudged him with a cold fireplace poker to prod him into action. That disturbed Linda greatly; me, only a little, though I sympathized with Dad. 

I thought I could fix things. I made an appointment with a psychiatrist for Mom, but she canceled it. So I made another appointment and told her it was for Dad. All three of us went. She complained to the shrink about my father. He asked her the meaning of the saying, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”  She replied, “Well, if you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones”— which was both funny and sad. Suddenly, she realized, “This is about me!” and became furious. 

The doctor said she had generalized anxiety and prescribed an anti-anxiety drug. But taking psychiatric medicine terrified her: it meant losing control, becoming a “zombie” like Dad. She panicked when Dad went into the pharmacy to fill the prescription, ran in to stop him, fell and gashed her shin badly. I felt terrible about this. Her skin was fragile because she took prednisone to control a chronic illness, temporal arteritis. I changed her dressings once and found it satisfying to take care of her and do something so useful; she liked the attention.

Sometimes Mom would wander off in the wrong direction in a restaurant or parking lot. At my daughter’s high-school graduation party, she opened the door from our kitchen to the basement stairwell to look for something to drink, thinking it was the refrigerator door. When I confronted her with that, she said she was just fooling: “It was a dull party and I wanted to liven things up.”    

The booming Rhode Island airport had offered to buy their place under a noise-control program. All their neighbors accepted the deal. If they didn’t go, they’d be living in a ghost town. For at least a year, she couldn’t decide. At my insistence (even a frantic threat I wouldn’t talk to her if she refused), Mom finally said yes. Progress!

The airport bought their house, and they had three months to get out. I wanted to get them into an apartment for seniors where they’d have meals provided and people to talk to instead of sitting alone and stewing all day. But the pleasant retirement places we visited were all “prisons,” Mom said. So Linda and I showed them regular apartments in Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Selling their house to the airport boosted their already ample funds, but Mom was convinced that paying $950 a month in rent would ruin them. 

They decided to check out a mobile home. “Where’s the steering wheel?” Mom asked the startled saleswoman. 

One day, Mom called with a brainstorm: “I’ve got an idea that will make everyone happy!” They’d move into their decrepit, unheated summer house, (inherited from Dad’s parents) which she had sold in a moment of mania the previous summer, but then tearfully changed her mind and canceled the deal. Mom loved summer, going to the beach, splashing in the bubbly surf, and eating lobster—which I love too.

At last, she let me take her to a clinic for a brain MRI. The neurologist said her brain looked fairly normal and diagnosed mild cognitive impairment. His top recommendation was to get hearing aids. She refused. 

Despite everything, Mom could still scrawl on the back of a used envelope detailed figures about various bills, checking-account balances, and the cost of a car repair. But now they lived like refugees in their own home. The coils on the electric stove were burned out, so she and my father used a toaster oven, precariously balanced on a tiny table on top of scraps of paper, which made me nervous about fire until I moved it. The washing machine was dead, so they dragged their clothes to a laundromat, where she told tut-tutting strangers that the airport was evicting them, helpless old people. The cesspool hadn’t been pumped in years, so when they flushed the toilet on rainy days, little geysers like clams at low tide spouted in the grass above it. She finally called a septic pumping service, but when the man arrived, she shooed him away, saying she just needed a plumber. Meanwhile, Dad’s doctor had him on unneeded blood-pressure medication that clashed with his psychiatric drugs and put him in a fog. 

Nearly seven months had passed since the airport had bought their house. Two social workers (one from the city of Warwick, one I hired) had failed to convince Mom to move. The airport’s rep was starting to pressure me. Mom was sometimes calling me two or three times a day. Conversations bordered on the bizarre, and her hearing problems didn’t help. Sometimes I was level-headed and sympathetic, but sometimes I lost patience and yelled at her, and then felt guilty. I knew her brain couldn’t handle this decision, but her stubborn refusal to accept reality could drive me wild. 

My bowels rumbled; my left eyelid twitched. Then I had a brainstorm. I conspired with Dad (thankfully off the blood-pressure medicine) to have him sign them up for a senior-living apartment complex in Warwick. Mom found out when the movers showed up that awful sunny April morning, along with Linda and me. “You bastard!” she yelled at Dad. To get her away from him, I took her to my house to stay overnight. Clutching $36 in her claw-like left hand, she was happy in the car thinking she was moving into our dark basement in-law apartment. I tried half-heartedly to disabuse her.

On the way back to their new place the next day, she told me a story I’d never heard. She said she had been hired for a “wonderful” part-time job at a bank in the ’60s, not long after one of Dad’s breakdowns. But she had to turn it down because she didn’t trust my father to be with Linda and me all day during the first week of full-time training—one more example of how Dad had ruined her life. She bitterly said that as a young person she was “dumb old Viola,” next to glamorous, buxom bleached-blonde sister Louise. That job would have shown everyone how smart she was. I was startled by that story and her ancient bitterness about funny old Aunt Louise, who had died a few years before. 

 

If I had stayed with my parent their first night in their new apartment, she might have lived longer. I had dinner with them—she liked the meal but called the salmon “sardines”—and went back to their room, where she started complaining. I’d had enough and drove home. While Dad slept, Mom panicked because she couldn’t find her handbag and pulled the emergency cord in the bathroom repeatedly. In the middle of the night, she then went howling out into the corridor in her pajamas, the apartment door locking shut behind her. 

The next day, the place’s consulting psychiatrist convinced her to sign papers committing herself to Butler, a private mental hospital where my father had been hospitalized 40 years ago. Wearing a borrowed striped jersey, she seemed fine there, though she said darkly she’d been “raped”—the attendant who gave her a shower stuck her hand “up there.”  (She hadn’t bathed in at least a month.) But on the phone a few days later, she was incoherent, mumbling, “White spots on black pants.” Eventually, the doctors figured out she had a urinary tract infection and sent her to a medical hospital. I wondered if the shower caused it by loosening up old dirt. 

Antibiotics soon cured the infection, but she had changed. Mom was discharged from the hospital to a nursing home’s memory-care unit. She sat in a chair with a goofy grin on her face or padded down the corridor in her tiny slipper-shod feet. Dad sometimes called her “Mom,” saying with astonishment, “She looks like my mother!” Now the diagnosis was Alzheimer’s, and she couldn’t go back to their apartment. Alzheimer’s—if that’s what she had—is the disease of forgetting, but she hadn’t forgotten anything. Her mind spun with crazy ideas; I didn’t argue. She was happy with her great discoveries.

In the nursing home, she was at peace except when she was having some small battle with the staff. She no longer had to keep track of anything, no notes to write, though once in a while she demanded, “Where’s my money?” 

One Sunday afternoon, I brought some orange peanut butter crackers in cellophane for her. Mom was deep into a flyer advertising sneakers. “That’s not bad!” she said, pointing to a shoe on sale. Her friend, plump Mrs. Quinn, asked if I was Mom’s father or husband and hungrily eyed the crackers. I cracked open the cellophane and we had an impromptu cracker party. 

“I love you,” she said with a gappy grin—they’d taken away her bridge—as I was leaving one afternoon. “I love you too,” I said as my heart leaped up with the kind of love I felt for my daughter when she was a baby. It was easier to love her now than when she was fighting me tooth and nail. 

She got more bladder infections and was shuttled between the nursing home and the hospital, ultimately going to the hospital for good. She was eating almost nothing; food didn’t interest her. But when I visited her in the hospital, she proudly told the nurse, “That’s my son!” “He’s a nice boy," the nurse replied. 

I brought a coffee Burger King Thick Shake. She opened her mouth like a hungry nestling and I shoveled in icy spoonfuls as fast as she could swallow them. I’d save her life with Thick Shakes! My boyish spirits soared. 

But I could only get down there once a week, and Thick Shakes alone don’t sustain life. The doctor soon told us we’d have to let them install a feeding tube or remove the IV lines keeping her alive. Linda and I decided that keeping someone that demented alive was ghastly and futile, and Dad didn’t object, so we let her go. 

Linda and I visited. Mom’s mouth was wrenched open; one eye was shut, the other, open and glazed. “I can’t stand it,” Linda said, cleaning up some crud around her mouth. “You’ve been a great mother,” I said, feeling awkward about saying been. She flinched when I kissed her near her shrunken ear. We left.

Thirty minutes later in the car, Linda got the call. Mom died at 82, seven months after they had moved out of their home. I was left with residual guilt; almost forcing her to sell her home and tricking her to go into the seniors complex may have hastened her death. But there wasn’t another good choice. 

 

    My inheritance includes random notes she left. On the back of a handyman’s light-blue business card, she wrote: “These people are crooks about 10 min. of work – charged us $76.00 – Too much!” On a 3-by-3 scrap of green paper, she listed her 1998 cataract surgeries and added: “I moved while Dr. was operating on eye!” Noted later: “It finally (sic) healed.”  On one side of a tiny, ragged scrap she wrote Louise’s Florida address and shoehorned in the local Walgreen’s phone and address. On the other side, she wrote: “For Info - for list of member of International Bottled Water, call # 1-800-”. But she was far too thrifty to buy bottled water, as am I.
My mother’s obsessive scribblings were her attempt to stay in control and stave off time and mortality. It was a delusion, but how can I criticize her if they helped her feel safer?  More than 15 years after her death I still hang onto some of her old notes, bills, correspondence, and annotated menus. Perhaps I too am trying to defang time and mortality.

 

 

 

BIO: Henry Stimpson’s poems, essays, humor, fiction and articles have appeared in Poet Lore, Cream City Review, Lighten Up Online, Rolling Stone, Muddy River Poetry Review, Aethlon, The MacGuffin, The Aurorean, Common Ground Review, Vol1Brooklyn, Poets & Writers, The Boston Globe, Yankee, Bostonia, Boston Phoenix, Embodied Effigies, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Ovunque Siamo. He’s been a public relations consultant and freelance writer for decades. Before that, he was a reference librarian, the librarian of a maximum-security prison, and a cabdriver. He lives in Massachusetts.