No Saints around Here: A Caregiver’s Days

Just a Minute!

113 JUST A MINUTE! September 3 Because James and I are somewhere—no one knows exactly where—in the final chapter, I’d like to think that the words he hears from me most often now are “I love you.” Actually, what he hears most often is just a minute! I say that phrase, calmly or irritably, reassuringly or dramatically, even sometimes with a screech, so many times a day that I should have a wristband recorder that would shout it out cheerfully when I press a button. I have many variations of tone for just a minute! Cheerful isn’t always one of them. James deserves a cheerful voice. Since I do not constantly hover over him, he sometimes has to call for me if he needs something . He may be feeling “discombobulated,” his word for panicky confusion. Maybe he is chilled. Perhaps, bored with a DVD, he is anxious to get up from his chair. (Because he can so easily stumble , I have to use a red-corded ribbon tied loosely around him, reminding him to ask for help before rising.) He could simply be wondering where I am. When he calls for me (and I’m never very far away), I am always doing something. I may be on telephone hold with the furnace repairman. I could be sorting through the mail. I may have just answered the doorbell. I’m feeding the cats, emptying the just a minute! 114 washing machine, holding the garbage sack in my hand as I head to the back door to deposit it in the trash can. I’m fixing supper. I’m washing the cooking pots. I’m putting away dishes. Whatever I’m doing, I need a few seconds, maybe even a few minutes, before I drop the garbage or hang up the phone. Sometimes I can’t quite understand what he wants; his voice is faint from Parkinson’s. If I’m unsure, I do hurriedly drop the garbage. It could be an urgent cry for help. If I’m focused on something, whether breading a piece of fish or unscrewing a stuck jar lid or sneaking a quick glance at Maureen Dowd’s column in that day’s paper, I am startled by his call. It breaks into my concentration like a fire alarm: “Susan! Susan!” Before I can help myself, I say, either under my breath or petulantly—depending on whether James can hear me— “[bleep!],” and then I yell, “Just a minute!” Sometimes I repeat myself, in a frustrated bleat: “Just a minute, James! Just a minute! Just . . . a . . . minute!” After all this time as a caregiver, I still can’t get used to this sense of constant pending interruption. Until James goes to bed, I exist in a state of fragmentation. When my older sister was here on a recent visit, she felt I needed to relax more. She persuaded me to order a nifty biofeedback device, small enough to fit into my palm, with a video screen that measures breathing patterns. With little triangles and soft beeps, it tells me when to exhale. Then, after I end my session, it informs me how many“points” of relaxed breathing I’ve achieved. I quite like this little device. I am proud of myself when I’ve achieved thirty-five or fifty points in ten or twenty minutes. According to the handbook of instructions about how to transform my life, relaxing here, relaxing there, I should be doing this several times a day—and definitely logging in one hundred points at bedtime. Then, in a few months, my instructions say, I will be quite a different person. The problem is that I can’t count on ten or twenty uninter- just a minute! 115 rupted minutes. When I sink into a chair—James is napping on the nearby sofa—after a few minutes of breathing in . . . 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . (beep!) . . . breathing out . . . 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . I hear a rustling noise. James’s shoes are squeaking on the leather cushion. Then he sits up. I open my eyes. He looks at me. “What?” I say, not in a very nice way. I turn my little device off. If only I could float peacefully on the debris of the day, then I wouldn’t feel so jangled by interruptions. Don’t concentrate;don’t get involved; don’t open a book or read...