DORIS

DORIS

By

Les Clark

“Are you tired?” I’d asked Doris a few times during our back and forth.

She paused, referring to her notes.

“Of course not,” she responded in an unwavering voice she used long ago to corral six kids. “All they talk about here is pills and illness. I’m enjoying this. No, I’m fine.”

Doris rested comfortably in a well-padded red brocade chair she’d had one of her kids bring from the home she shared with her husband before he passed years ago. Before her, on a TV tray table of indeterminate age, sat her latest large print novel. On the floor beside her, stacked like a Jenga game, were those read or waiting for their turn.

She looked back at me through rimless glasses...her eyes bright and clear. To her right, her reading lamp framed billows of white hair in a halo. Every time I came into her room for a chat on my route delivering meals to other residents, I made her’s the last stop. I could spend the time because my total route was complete.

I met Doris when she rounded the bases for the 99^th time.

“Well, hello there,” was the first thing she ever said to me when she answered my knock.

“Well, hello there yourself. How are you?”

“I’m old but not as old as some of the folks in this place.” This place happened to be one of the nicer, better staffed memory care and assisted-living facilities in town. Of all the residents I had on my route, Doris fell into the feisty, well versed and most conversant category. I gravitated to her immediately.

“What kind of food did you bring today?” she asked, eyeing the offering with some suspicion. It’s a hot entre, fruit, bread and snack. Today’s meal was turkey stew.

“I taste test everything. It’s pretty good.” Doris eyed me with some suspicion.

“Can you sit for a bit, or do you have to go?” She didn’t sound forlorn but there was a lonely edge to her comment. As I traversed the halls on my route, I saw staff and orderlies but few folks I could categorize as family. If residents were out and about, their youth and agility were prehistoric.

“No, I’m good. It’s Friday afternoon. I’m done for the day.”

She was pleased. I looked around her room. I got the sense it was as close to a duplicate of the home she’d left behind. It was no-nonsense, decorated in earth tones, mismatched expensive chairs. A cherrywood drop-leaf table held her thick crossword puzzle books---the easy kind. In her bookcase, even more books waited for her fictional journeys. She noticed my nosiness.

“Do you play backgammon?” Another question. I was starting to believe if this friendship went much further, I was in for a slow but steady ride. We spoke for an hour. Her vocabulary was extensive because of all her 38-Across and 52-Down efforts. It was also colorful without the need of color.

She was eager to talk. I threw out the conversational fish line.

“What is your earliest memory?”

“I was cross-eyed as a kid. In 1923, my mother took me to a hospital in Boston for an operation to fix that. We didn’t have a car. We had to take the elevated back and forth. I was still partially anaesthetized and out of it.” Doris laughed at the memory.

“If you want more of my life, I’ll have to write things down. You know, I’ve got almost a century of memories up there.”

Over the next two years, Doris revealed much, as if for a new-found friend, her history should not be forgotten. I thought of Robert Heinlein’s epic novel, Fahrenheit 451. Outlawed books were memorized and shared verbally. Doris was giving freely of her life.

“The movies were a dime back then, you know. We lived on the second floor of my mother’s house. Once a week I had to scrub the back stairs for that dime so I could go to the movies.”

Doris shuffled the notes and found another prompt. “I remember we had an ice box. We had to put an orange sign in the window, so the iceman knew we wanted ice. On one side it said, ‘10 cents’ and on the other side it said ’25 cents’ and that would tell the iceman what size piece of ice we wanted, and he would come up with that ice and huge tongs to hold it on his back.”

I’d heard the same stories from my mother when I was a kid. Doris, with her life no longer veiled over the horizon, was reliving highlights of hers. Lowlights would be coming. In the meantime, there appeared little Doris wouldn’t discuss. She told me about her education.

“I graduated high school in 1936. They had three courses: business, college and domestic arts. For girls, that was cooking and sewing. We didn’t have any money for college, so I took the business course. And you know there weren’t any college loans then. I got a job with an insurance company in Boston. I worked there for five years. You could only work there for six months after marriage unless your husband was disabled or sick. The jobs were really there for the men.”

I asked about her family.

“I had one girl and five boys. I have (without skipping a beat) seven grandchildren, ten great grandchildren and two great, great grandchildren. One of my boys is severely disabled. But I have to tell you this. My husband drank beer, so we always had beer bottles in the house. One of the kids was still in diapers. It was the winter. I had run out of baby bottles, but I found that a nipple would fit over the end of a beer bottle. A visitor was astounded seeing a baby walking barefoot over the warm floor drinking milk from a beer bottle.”

She thought that was a hoot.

There came a time when my meal delivery to her stopped. I didn’t know the reason. I knocked on her door that day to see if there was anything wrong. She had recently turned 100. Her greetings in the past had been strong; today not so much. Her voice was thinner, higher with a slight rasp.

“Well, hello there. Have you learned to play backgammon?” I noticed she’d left off the word ‘yet.’

“How are you? I noticed you’re not on my route anymore.”

There were tears forming in her eyes. She dabbed them quickly away.

“I can’t swallow their food anymore. My son (she didn’t name which one) is fixing my food in a blender. It’s easier for me.”

We would spend that day and a few others before she was gone. I stopped in the office, worried something had occurred in the few days since I’d seen Doris. The office manager, ever mindful of the HIPPA laws, would only reveal she had been moved from her residential apartment upstairs. Knowing my friendship with Doris, and using the magic word, I was given Doris’ new digs.

As aging took its toll---mobility, meals, personal needs---the family moved her across town to an assisted-living facility where she would get more attentive assistance. I hurried over the next morning only to be intercepted by their visitation policy. Once I gave them my history with Doris, I was in.

I hurried down the hall to her room. I knocked and got a more reserved, and tired greeting. “Well, hello there.”

After some mutual chitchat, catching up on what I was doing and how each of us was feeling, she hesitated before relating an upcoming hospital visit for a minor procedure to alleviate a nagging pain. “They have to take me by ambulance. I can’t get into a car anymore.” Doris looked uncomfortable. “I’ve lost some use of my left leg.”

A few weeks later, I could tell there was a difference. I sat quietly, unprepared for the her soliloquy.

I dreamed about dying two nights in a row last week. I was okay with it.

I remember when my son Jim was dying, not in the dream, but in real life. If you remember, I told you Jim was a paraplegic all his life. We were all around his bed, all his brothers and sisters. I was 100 and he was 75. I told him we were all happy to be there with him. I held his hand as he took his last breath.

In my dream, everyone was with me as I was dying. And I was okay with it.

Doris finished with, “I’m ready to go.”

I couldn’t talk.

Her story ending, Doris gave me a crooked smile.

“Can you push my lunch table over. They give me so much food. Breakfast was just at nine. Coffee and orange juice and oatmeal and eggs and toast and water.” Not unlike James Bond in License To Kill, Doris had license to complain.

Doris beckoned me close. As I bent near, she held my face and gave me an air kiss.

As the weeks passed with my regular visits, the changes were evident. Once, after I left her room, I headed into the office to speak with Rebekkah, her social worker.

“She nodded on and off while we were chatting. What do you think?”

“It’s getting close. Don’t worry, this all part of the process. Are you okay?”

It was nice of her to ask about me, but my concern was for my friend, now 101.

I received a call a week later from Rebekkah. “Can you stop by?”

I knew and was okay with it.