Frances

My husband just walked out of the room and slammed the door. I don’t know why. I awakened from what felt like a very deep sleep. I had been lying in bed for over an hour, wrestling with the exhaustion of my body and the ramblings of my mind. My whole body had felt like it was sinking but my brain was doing things like singing “Limbo Rock”. Really! And then, I was talking to my grandmother; my "bubby".

She had come to visit and looked like she did perhaps at 60- tiny, robust, and very sweet. Her hair was a dark grey, not the white it would become in later years, and it was styled to perfection, teased a little, flipping at the ends. She looked so beautiful. And I said, “We can go to see Frances tomorrow if you like.” She had just gotten here but this was a priority. She was aching to go to her handicapped sister who I recently located in a nursing home. Frances has been living in one facility or another since my great-grandfather, my “Little Zaida” died maybe 40 years ago. Frances was “retarded” at a time when no one would dream of calling it anything else. She didn’t speak and made noises that sounded to me like those of a chimp. All “ooh, ooh, ee, ee, ah, ah”. But her brothers and sister could always understand her!

One by one over the years the brothers died, and then my grandmother, until the only people who went to visit her anymore were my great Uncle and his wife. They never told her about the cancer that had claimed one of her siblings, or the old age that had claimed the other two. “They went to Florida; that’s why they couldn’t visit.” I always wondered what she thought “Florida” was. Did she, who had never been farther than the Lower East Side until she moved into her “home” in upstate New York, have any concept of “Florida”? Of distance?

The last few years have been very hard on my great Uncle. He lost his stepson and then his wife in rapid succession. The grief was overwhelming and his stepdaughter one day spirited him to an assisted living facility… in Florida. Suddenly, without explanation, Frances was without visitors. She stopped eating. They have been feeding her through a tube.

I have either been sick or busy since I found out where Frances is and I have promised to take my mother there when she comes to visit next month. I feel a strong calling to go to her now but I’m so afraid. I still feel sick; weak and shaky. The glands in my neck hurt again and the pressure in my chest is palpable. I have to gather old pictures to bring her because she will not have a clue as to who I am. To do that, I have to find an old carton in the moldy basement that is probably the cause of at least some of my ailment. And if I do find it, and do drive the hour to her bedside, and do show her the pictures, how will I explain to this woman in her late 90s that I am the little girl in the picture taken in her father’s living room? And that I will come again next month with my mother, her niece “Fagey”, when she visits… from Florida?