Cathir Borrie’s new memoir, The Long Hello, navigates the seven years she spent caring for her mother.John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail
'Is all this real or pretend?"Those who've witnessed the cruel confusions, the frenzies, paranoia and unrepentant physical demand of Alzheimer's disease know this query has no adequate reply.
Cathie Borrie, speaking with her mother, answers like this: "What do you want it to be?"
"Pretend."
Borrie's new memoir, The Long Hello, navigates the seven years she spent caring for her mother, Jo, who had Alzheimer's. Stories about Borrie as an admiring young daughter who loved spending time with her mom are told alongside the details of eventually becoming her mother's caregiver and confidante.
On a survival diet of red wine, chocolate bars and sleeping pills, Borrie, a former nurse, oversees her ailing mother's every medical and emotional need and singlehandedly builds a world in which Jo can live securely and with dignity. She tells her mother repeatedly that there's money in the bank and that her son is alive (he was killed at the age of 13). She constructs fake documents to assure her mom of financial security. She buys beginner-level crossword-puzzle books and glues advanced-level covers onto them, so that her mom can complete the puzzles without becoming upset over the slip in her skill. Real and pretend melt into one reality that, honest or not, is how the truth just has to be.
Decades before, Borrie's mother saved the family from a bitter father – her husband – who drank too much. She was competitive; she had spunk. She owned boats. When another kid's parent called Borrie a tomboy (she had just won a three-legged race), her mom replied with a sharp: "She's just jealous because she's got such a boring daughter who never wins anything."
The book is as much a radiant remembrance as it is the tough retelling of a difficult time and difficult disease. It's also an awakening as to how taxing one's illness can be on the caregiver.
I thought a lot about my own mother, who spent long portions of my childhood and adolescence caring for her sick parents. Days would go by without my sister or me seeing her. All co-parenting obligations were plunked upon my easygoing, let's-order-pizza-again dad. My mom's role as a parent temporarily came second to what she owed her parents as their daughter.
The slow months that came before both of my grandparents dying – years apart, my grandfather also of Alzheimer's – were the eras in which I learned to use the stove and began doing my own laundry. This was also when I tried smoking for the first time and skipped school for an entire week. I learned what I could get away with and knew I wouldn't get in trouble. Our family's lead authority figure was busy. I quietly resented my mom for spending time away from us. But to take care of someone who is dying, who you worry no one else will take care of properly, is an all-consuming pledge.
"I feel guilty if I don't visit her every day, all day, guilty every moment I'm not with my mother," Borrie writes.
At one point, she describes watching customers at a home-care store wander around looking for solutions in the form of items and appliances – "utensil holders, jar openers, elastic laces, extra-long shoehorn, under-knee support pillow, air cushion ring, shower chair, bath railings, body cleansers, commode, raised toilet seat, transfer devices, cane, walker, wheelchair, waterproof bedding, electric bed lift, adult diapers, cleansing cloths, hospital bed" – all things for purchase to try and ease the suffering. All things to be discarded when that suffering finally ends.
How overwhelming it is, the futility of it all. The demand.
"I'm sick of myself," Borrie says. "Sick of not being strong enough to handle sorrow. My mother's, mine."
The emotional (and physical – the sleepless nights, the chocolate for dinner) stress of care-giving is heavy; no less is the agony of being compassionate.
Deaths that we see coming force us to confront the meaningful but ultimately arbitrary things we do to negotiate inevitability. "For the rest of my life I choose Pine-Sol because it smells like the woods and reminds me of the sunny day my mother and I won blue ribbons," Borrie says. But within these stabs at rationale and purpose there can be wonderful, usable significance.
Much of The Long Hello relies on tape-recorded conversations Borrie had with her mother prior to her death. As harrowing as it was to devote a segment of her life to helping her mother die with peace, there are moments of wisdom and sentiment in those recordings indicative of the strong emotional bonds that can form through completely unfair experiences.
"What do you do if you love a man and he doesn't love you?" Borrie asks.
"Try somewhere else."
"What do you think is the ugliest thing in the world?"
"A lack of dignity."
"What's the worst thing a person could do to another person?"
"They could throw their sublime into the ridiculous."
Real or pretend, this is precisely what Borrie beautifully did not do. Toward the end of illness, the line between sublime and ridiculous is blurry and extraneous. In The Long Hello, that line is barely seen. Out of Borrie's personal mayhem emerged compassion, the realest, most onerous thing there is.
Carly Lewis is a Toronto-based writer whose work has appeared in Vice, The Walrus and The Guardian.