The Bath

 

 

 

The Bath

I had spotted the beautiful bath in a momentary superficial glance through an open door one day and as all the rooms are en suite, I pondered its function.

At that time Siobhan was walking by my side, then linked, later it was on a walking aid, and then later still, a wheelchair.

We would yet have to graduate to the Stephen Hawking recliner she lies sideways in now.

The bath reminded me of its presence even when the door was closed.

It called me from behind the wooden portal, promising benefits, and healing and therapy.

I never forgot that it was there.

Last week I passed it again and sought out a Nurse.

“Whose leg do you have to hump to get a go in that bath?”

She agreed to put my request in the report that the Matron oversees each morning.

I was sitting with Little Thomasina when I got the call, and was both pleased and shocked, pleased at her speed in getting back to me, and shocked that I had to take the call with my Father sitting opposite.  

The Matron is direct and straight. She is not overly familiar, she is not a larger than life character that gushes and exclaims and calls people love, or darling, describing everything including humans  as delicious, in short she is not Me.

“Well, the only misgivings” she begins.........

“Let me stop you there, there are no misgivings to have, it’s hydrotherapy and it will be amazing and she will love it”

My father is watching me. I mouth the name of the Nursing home and watch his face change, the sudden pallor under the beginnings of the tan he has attained by sitting with her in the baking afternoon sun, both of them wearing the sunhats that have graced a hundred other nameless bent white heads.

I motion with my hand that everything is ok and this is just a routine call.

I walk outside and listen as the Matron talks about spatial awareness being absent and reassure her that this will be beneficial, and much appreciated and that I will help.

She cannot know what I know –

That Siobhan has always loved water,   mucking about on the River Barrow as a child, and when she moved to a coastal town, the endless beaches, the indigo seas that crashed to shore.

That my sister and I removed her from a sweltering hospital ward, wearing an ankle tag and a nappy, and supported her to the edge of the ocean, dragging her up the slippery dunes with an audience staring at the woman in the blue dressing gown, the trinity of us reflected in the late evening sun, the white foam drenching her slippers.

That only last week I had placed a basin on her lap filled with warm soapy water and entwined her twisted hands into the soft flannel and watched for the tiniest movement of her fingers, possing.

That  I had watched Stephen Hawking in an anti gravity chamber smile a smile of unutterable joy as he floated freely, unencumbered by the chair, and his broken body, and bobbed and weaved in  freedom, at liberty, unrestrained.

It would bring tears to a glass eye and so I was lost.

How wonderful is the anticipation of  a bath filled with warm water, standing into it - feeling the temperature on the shins -  lowering  oneself down into the foamy suds, sitting first, clasping ones legs and then easing back, little by little,  splashing the water over the body, reminding the self that we are water and that we come from it, the soft feeling of it lapping, the release of tension in muscles and joints, the slackening of taut tendons, the involuntary sigh when the back of one’s head finally touches the ceramic and the neck relaxes.  

This womb of water.

This womb that birthed me.

My Father has to drive me out and so I bring the world’s tiniest dog to engage him.

The curtains in the room are closed despite the noon day sun, and I imagine them undressing her and open the door.

Her chair is empty.

It takes me a moment to locate her in the shaded room.

She is in the bed facing the wall.

I touch her gently on the shoulder and smooth her hair back from her face and tell her that I am her firstborn and favourite child, and that she is having a bath.

It reminds me of nothing so much as waking a baby, and I lift the patchwork quilt I had knit for her and look at the bent white legs.

Suddenly, we are 4 in the room and the harness I have christened the parachute is placed under and around her with much gentle rolling and placing of limbs and straps and buckles, tightening and adjusting.  

And then she is hoisted into the air and the tears start as my heart breaks.

Although we see her on a daily basis, it hits me like a frying pan in the face, that there is not an ounce of mobility  of any description left, and that a team of carers carry out the most basic of human functions for her, as Siobhan is always in the chair when we arrive.

The enormity of the scene shocks me and I wonder how I will cope as I am already crying.

“That one’s tearbag is too near her eyeball” she would have said.

If she could say ......................

Positioned in her chair, her blue dressing gown on, she is wheeled away from her sentinel, past the banging and clattering of pots in the kitchen, the smells of lunch cooking, the glasses of milk poured, the comings and goings in the halls,  and into the quiet room where I forgot to bring the scented candles.

I pour the vanilla bath foam into the gushing water while my Mother is undressed by 2 women, leaning her forward, balancing and supporting, bracing  a limp shoulder against a firm stomach,  and I want to avert my eyes, to afford some privacy to  this most private of women, this woman I write about on a public forum, and read her most intimate moments aloud to an audience ,  because  I am her  witness.

The landscape and geography of a lovers body become as familiar to us as our own, but it is my Mother’s body that I am now more acquainted with, it’s dips and folds, it’s creases, it’s secret spaces, the little  toes that resemble my own, the fingernails, the set of it, the familiarity.

The Surita hoist is an indispensable tool for lifting but at moments it resembles a crucifixion.

Siobhan is winched across to the bath and gently, gently swung over the water I have poured, the bright yellow rubber duck the only colour in the clinical room, not a nod to nostalgia but a temperature gauge,  and she is inched down, lower and lower, until I can reach her legs, and guide her swinging form down, and then I see an arm moving, waving, and I don’t know if it is agitation, trepidation, or tremors from the Parkinsons, or an awareness of what is happening as her eyes are open.

Not waving but drowning.

With infinite care we sink my Mother into the welcoming water which suckles and pops around her still form, and then there are 8 hands in the liquid, 6 busy ones moving and tenderly washing, rubbing  cloths and flannels over the quiet limbs, 2 idle hands floating on the foam. Her head is cradled like an infant in a sink basin and our three points of focus and combined energy  are  directed totally to the helpless body of my Mother in the bath.

I wash her hair.

For many years as a child, I had my own hair washed at the kitchen sink, the old stainless steel  measuring jug that was used to heat the baby bottles, poured over my bent head to rinse, while I clamped a soaking towel to my face, inhaling the laundered smell and  feeling the rough nap of it while exclaiming,  - my eyes, mind my eyes.  In a mirroring image, a towel is bunched and held to her eyes as the cascade of water streams through her hair, flattening it to her head so that she resembles a sleek otter, a water baby, and the child I once was, ...... that she has now become.

The matron hands me the small curved scissors with the very sharp blades and indicates that I should cut her fingernails, as she has already pushed the cuticles back with the sides. I demur. My sister and I are the Mary & Martha of sisters, she does the essential maintenance and I do the flitting  around with the lemongrass burner.   She does the removal of foreign bodies from orifices, I do the lighting of candles and the singing.   She however, is in the south of France and I am here in the room.

The Matron is pleased how well the event is progressing and is imagining possible future scenarios where the hoist has some minor adjustments  made to it’s wheels and mechanism  to facilitate easier transfers for late stage patients who are normally not bathed.

Did you ever use the foot spa on your Mam she enquires.

All too soon, the parachute is making a second appearance and I realise with a start that our time is ending.  In my mind, it would have been only she and I, in a hushed candle-lit room, maybe a little incidental music on, my arm around her as the water reached her shoulders, gently lapping at her knees, running more hot water and relaxing while I spoke of old times and they had come whispering in and ranged themselves like pictures around the tiles, a communion of Mother and Daughter in a room filled with memories.

This is a busy space though, and these women have other patients to attend to.

Siobhan is wheeled back down the corridor to her room wrapped in towels, and again we reverse the practice of the winching, swinging her through the air to lay her back down on her unmade bed, to pat every inch of her dry, to rub the lovely scented cream into her skin, and then she is winched up again and swung across  to her place of residence, her chair.

Thank you so much says I, touching each of the women on the arm, trying to impress on them the importance of the time we had shared, the honour of the allowing, and how that honour had my own restored.

It was a pure pleasure, says the Matron.

 

I took advantage of being in this space, at this time, and removed the hairdryer from it’s perch in the locker  to blowdry her hair. I moisturised her skin, and put dabs of eyeshadow and lipstick on, draped a silk scarf and perfume around her neck, and wheeled her out into the sun of the courtyard by the fountain where a small white headed man sat patiently waiting, and  presented  my Father with his wife. It was the best possible gift I could have given this man that I love as much as her, on Father’s Day.

 

 

MDM 18^th June 2014