Art Saves Lives???
I’m about to leave fogbound Madison, Wisconsin this morning after a week of adult daycare for my folks. Mom just went into the medium care apartments but she didn’t go quietly. Dad is still up at their house where they’d lived for 5 years and you can bet she wanted to go back up there too. The Old Man finally relented, even though the assisted living staff said no way could he handle her needs, but at the last minute he decided they were right, at 93 he was no serious caregiver. Believe me, my mother was devastated.
Still, she wasn’t going to give up. She wanted to go ‘home.’ Home, I said, was where you are, make the best of it. Three meals a day, light housekeeping, nurse a buzzer away, laundry once a week, friendly and professional staff — really the best that money can buy, a blessing for the rest of the family. Hell on earth for her.
I got here a week ago. Her apartment had furniture my brother and his wife hauled down, kitchen table, chairs, TV, couple of small end tables, lamps. They wanted to hang some paintings and prints but Ma growled No Way and so the apartment had all the warmth of a Keokuk Motel 6 in the dead of winter. She wasn’t, she told us repeatedly, staying long, she was going home.
Where there’s a will there’s a way is an old aphorism that’s plenty oversold to eager optimists, okay with me, but there comes a time to accept your losses and move on, make the best of a bad situation you maybe didn’t choose. So … my job was to cheerful up the place. I bought a few paintings and when I rolled in with them under both arms, she asked what I had. Presents, I said, early Christmas, late birthday. Little by little, day by day, we hung art, placed silk flowers, brought in vases and baskets. Takes a heap of living, though, as the poem notes, to make a place a home, nothing she was going to do, that’s for sure.
She knew, with every nail in the drywall, every framed painting hung, every vase placed, she knew she wasn’t going home. I’ll look back months or maybe years from now and wonder if all that art, rather than the cheery bumper sticker ART SAVES LIVES! art didn’t actually kill her.
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