Goodnight, Irene
January 16, 2011
When Alice arrived in the dining room, finally released from her apartment after a 12-day flu quarantine, she noticed Irene’s place mat was upside down. Without a thought, she turned it over and started looking around to see who else had been liberated. The quarantine is still in effect, but those who have already had the flu, including Alice, are now free to eat communally again.
In the weeks before the epidemic started, Irene, who is 110, had grown increasingly restless and unwilling to stay seated until food was delivered to the table. Sometimes she would call out to be served or bang her coffee cup against the tabletop, over and over, hoping the noise would bring someone to fill it.
Occasionally, she cried out to aides she could only see as shadows moving from table to table around the room,”Help me! Help me!” And when one of them came, she would ask to be taken back to her apartment. She didn’t always wait for help to come. She got up, grabbed a walker (anybody’s walker, including Alice’s), and headed toward either the bathroom down the hall or to her apartment. Sometimes she came back. Sometimes she didn’t, and one of the aides would go fetch her and return her to the table, where she grew impatient with waiting and would soon leave again.
When food was finally served, Irene had to wait for someone to feed her. If none of the aides came by in a reasonable amount of time, Alice tried to do it. She figured out how to brace herself, though awkwardly, against the side of the table so she wouldn’t fall. Irene dropped her head back and waited for the next mouthful, like a baby bird. But unlike a baby bird, she didn’t want much nourishment. “No more, no more,” she’d say early on in the feedings. On the other hand, some days she could manage an entire meal on her own, picking up chunks of meat with her fingers because she continually lost track of her fork.
Alice’s nightly phone reports to me included what Irene ate or didn’t eat and her comings and goings from their table. Some days she ate only two or three bites. Already a tiny woman, she grew smaller. “She’s disappearing,” Alice said, “right in front of me.” The ongoing clunk-clunk-clunk of Irene’s coffee cup, she said, made her want to scream.
“But she can’t help that,” she always added, considering that Irene hadn’t been able to enjoy a cup of coffee the moment she wanted it for at least the past ten, if not the past twenty years.
Winter rains closed in and it became impossible to go outside and walk, Irene’s favorite thing to do.
Yesterday in the dining room, Alice talked briefly with her friend Aurora and nodded at Susie at the next table. Just as Lyle turned his chair around to ask if she knew where Irene might be, two aides, Nell and Caroline, came to her table. Nell took her hand and Caroline put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. The Place’s administrator stepped into the dining room, called for quiet, and made an announcement, which Alice couldn’t hear.
She looked up at Nell, who leaned down to tell her that Irene had passed away. “And then I just put my hands over my face,” Alice told me.
Several people, including Howard, came by the table to hold her hand or hug her or pat her shoulder before returning to their apartments after the meal. They’d witnessed Alice trying to feed Irene, and noticed her patience during the coffee cup episodes and the accidental thefts of her walker; more importantly, they’d seen the two of them holding hands and talking about their common prairie backgrounds (Alice’s in North Dakota; Irene’s just to the north, in Manitoba), and about how each grew up with five sisters. They’d watched them kiss each other good-bye or squeeze one another’s hands after every meal. Irene, the woman Alice didn’t even want to meet when I first brought her to The Place (see Hello, Irene), became her closest friend there.
Irene’s restlessness lately may have been a signal that her life was coming to an end. She’d told a visitor on her last birthday, “When it comes to life, there is such a thing as too much.” She was tired, she told him, and ready to move on to greater things.
But for several more months she made do with life’s stubborn grip on her by drinking a daily glass of Merlot, eating lots of chocolate, and talking to people.
As Alice was about to leave the dining room, she stopped to say goodnight to Lyle. He looked sad, and so she said what people say when someone dies: She’s in a better place. What she meant by this I’m not sure. She hopes for a better place, but she can’t quite bring herself to those beliefs.
Lyle patiently explained to Alice that Irene was in purgatory where she would have to wait until her sins were cleared away before she could move on.
Alice didn’t argue, even though Irene had been raised a Methodist, for which no purgatory exists. Irene was smart, kind, witty, and gentle. She liked to have a good time, but if she ever sinned it was so long ago even God can’t remember. Besides, she was looking forward to things greater than longevity; if she got her wish, the greatest of these might be never having to wait for anything again.
Irene
That such have died enable Us
The tranquiller to die -
That such have lived,
Certificate for Immortality.
—Emily Dickinson
Last Saturday night, I got married,
me and my wife settled down;
Now me and my wife are parted,
I’m gonna take another stroll downtown.
Sometimes I live in the country,
sometimes I live in town
Sometimes I take a great notion,
to jump into the river and drown.
I love Irene, God knows I do,
I’ll love her till the seas run dry;
But if Irene should turn me down,
I’d take the morphine and die
Stop rambling, stop your gambling,
stop staying out late at night.
Go home to your wife and your family,
stay there by your fireside bright.
—Lyrics and music by Huddie William Ledbetter (Leadbelly; listen to his recording here.)
Older posts about Irene:
January 16, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Having lost all of my relatives when they (and I) were relatively young, I have no experience of aging. As I am doing so, I often have many fears of the losses it will entail. Your gentle, wise, and loving posts give me some hope that old age will not only be a failing, but also an uprising of sorts, and that what makes me “me” will continue. Thank you for these, Barbara
January 16, 2011 at 3:16 pm
Oh, I loved this line…”but if she ever sinned it was so long ago even God can’t remember”.
Then suddenly found myself crying over the death of someone I never met. And mourn with Alice the loss of a friendship.
January 16, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Ok, posted it to my facebook.
Good night Irene, and thank you Andrea for touching our humanity so deftly every time. I can’t believe how many levels you touch with your pieces. Your language is clear as a bell, as straight forward and unadorned as anything on the prairie. And then by the end I’m thinking about death and religion and friendship and coffee and how we care for the elderly and the value of chocolate and I’m all stirred up … What I’m saying I guess is that you kinda sneak up on a person that way. I like it.
January 16, 2011 at 3:55 pm
I feel almost as if I’d gotten to know Irene through your posts. I’m sad that she has passed, although I realize this passing may have been what she wanted after such a long life. (My own grandmother used to say she was waiting for God to take her; at almost 90, she’d had enough and was, as you say, ready to move on.) My condolences to Alice. Reading about their friendship made me glad, and my heart goes out to her.
January 16, 2011 at 8:40 pm
How much life is enough? We each have what we have, god bless, I hope mine does not drag on beyond what I feel I can live. I don’t want to bang my coffee cup to get what I need. Dying is necessary as is being born to have a life here on earth.I honor Irene’s life, all the little stories that no one will ever know (a few that you have captured), that made her life, which life will pool over into the ocean of life and nourish us all.
January 16, 2011 at 9:04 pm
good night Irene from all of us
January 17, 2011 at 5:24 am
I recognize some of the same characteristics in Irene that I see in my mother who is only 92. This is one reason I appreciate this blog so much.
But I wish writers would say someone died instead of “passed away” or “passed.” The truth and dignity of what we experience is diminished when we can’t call it what it is.
January 17, 2011 at 8:36 am
I agree with you, Anne. There’s no reason to pull back from the words “death,” “dying” and “died,” and I usually wouldn’t. However, in this case I was reporting what Alice told me, though I wasn’t using quotes in that particular sentence. She told me what the aide told her, so that’s how I wrote it.
Thank you for reading the post and for sharing your thoughts.
January 17, 2011 at 3:41 pm
If there is an afterlife, my wish is that Irene is somewhere enjoying a cup of coffee.
January 18, 2011 at 3:01 am
I remember thinking, when my children were all small and I had been up for the better part of a night yet again, that if I was this tired at my young age then I would be very very tired by the time I was old! I am not even sure what I thought of as ‘old’ then but I am sure that, should I live to be 110, I will be tired in so many ways that the young me had not even experienced.
How wonderful to hear about Irene in your posts which continue to move me time and again.
My favourite line from “Hello, Irene” is:
“Her words were like fragile beads threaded along a thin wire of sound, with generous spaces in between each one.” Beautiful!
I am inspired to make the most of every minute. Thank you.
January 19, 2011 at 10:33 pm
Touching post.
January 20, 2011 at 10:40 am
thank you, Andrea, for my little chance to know Irene – and especially for the song that will be in my head for a while now.
January 24, 2011 at 11:22 am
[...] day to tell me how she was doing. She’s been eating her meals in the dining room alone since Irene died. She hasn’t been longing for a new lunch and dinner partner, she’d told me earlier [...]
January 24, 2011 at 5:07 pm
I’m very touched by your generous, moving, and beautiful responses to this post. I knew I’d have to write about her death one day and was not looking forward to it. But I tell you it’s a great gift to know that you and others who are familiar with Irene through this blog would all be here with me when the time came. Thank you so much.
February 28, 2011 at 1:08 pm
[...] 28, 2011 ——Last week a plump 94-year-old woman named Libby sat down in Irene’s empty chair in the dining room. The staff had picked Libby to be Alice’s new dining [...]
November 15, 2011 at 2:17 pm
[...] “can a 94 year old be okay if they fix a broken hip? (Yes, she can if she’s both lucky and fierce. See “She Walks.“) “what can you buy a 94 year old woman for a birthday present?” (See “Alice, Now 95.”) “why do people say goodnight irene” (See “Goodnight, Irene.”) [...]