Loving Julia

Once a month I visit my mother’s lifelong friend, Julia, where she lives in a nursing home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. People assume I’m her daughter, but I tell them, “No, I’m just a friend.” They usually say something like, “Oh, that’s nice.”  And it is. 

But that’s not all.   

Whenever I’d visit my parents in North Carolina, I never got a “warm, fuzzy” feeling.  My parents were lifelong depressives – happy to see me, not good at showing it.   So it mattered to me that Julia, who lived near my mother, would always call the day I arrived, saying she would love to see me.

Year after year, Julia would call, and I’d visit her in her home. This went on until Julia got dementia that became so bad, her daughters moved her to New York City, where the older daughter lives.

Now I see Julia about once a month. Julia probably doesn’t remember the last time I visited. She doesn’t know the date, or what’s happening in the news, or who’s passed away that we know. She asks me the same questions over and over. For some reason, she focuses on one of my brothers. “How’s Richard?” she asks repeatedly. If I had to guess why, I’d say it’s because - as my mother’s friend from the time they both had small children - Julia probably got an earful about how bad Richard was.    

Somehow Richard grew up.  Married. Had children. Life hasn’t been easy. He’s been unemployed a long time. At 55, he’s on disability for life. He’s bipolar. A former alcoholic.

So I answer differently each time she asks, each time truthfully.

“How’s Richard?” she asks.

 “He walks the dog.”

Two minutes later:  “How’s Richard?”

“He does the laundry… He watches TV… He argues with his wife and children … He does, you know, the stuff Richard does.” 

Then she returns her attention to me. “You’re so beautiful!” she says. “Too bad there’s no one for you here,” she says (about the nursing home). “Too old!” she says, unintentionally funny. “Too sick!”

Julia’s thick white hair gets done at the beauty parlor in the building. She’s lost her roundness, gotten too skinny. Her voice, which used to be pleasant, has taken on the high pitch of a little girl. I first heard her use this voice when she’d go to the bathroom. In this strange, child-like voice, she’d talk to herself, saying things like, “And now we’ll go pee-pee.”

Julia doesn’t read The New York Times anymore, or cook delicious meals, or graciously entertain people in her former home, asking endless questions because she was a people person. (Of course, she still does ask about Richard.).

The staff like her. Despite having to lift her from her bed. Put her into a wheelchair.   Take her to the bathroom. Discard her diaper. Then back into the wheelchair and into bed. Or perhaps to the dinner table around the corner from her room, where residents sit in front of their meals not speaking to each other, while a TV plays.

Most of the aides speak nicely to residents. Some care more than others. Julia likes her aides, but since the dementia, she’s not very good at building relationships. So she complains a little, where before she never complained about anybody. 

“They won’t come when I call them!” she says, tears in her eyes. They do come.  It’s just that Julia sometimes wants to go to the bathroom when she doesn’t need to or when she’s just gone.   

Neither has she made any friends, although she’s lived there for years. Julia was 93 last March. Two years ago, her younger daughter, who lives in Holland, came into the city, and both daughters and I took Julia to a restaurant around the corner. It was cold out, and Julia didn’t want to go. We wanted to have a good time with her, so we forced her. She complained all the way. (All right, it IS bumpy sitting in a wheelchair, being pushed down a NYC street.).

When I visit Julia, I never call ahead, just show up. (Julia never answers her phone). When I didn’t find her in her bed on a recent visit, my heart froze. But the attendant at the nurses’ desk said she was with her older daughter in the auditorium.

Walking toward the auditorium, I heard Julia call out, “There’s Valerie!” from where she was sitting with her daughter and an aide in a café where I sometimes take her for hot chocolate. They had just been talking about me. It was the aide’s first day. Her daughters hired her because Julia was not getting enough attention from staff. After her daughter went back to work, Julia, the aide, and I sat looking at Australian finches that occupy a glass cage in a sitting area for residents.

It was the aide’s first day, and I guess she wanted to bond quickly with Julia, because she was overly solicitous, constantly asking Julia what she might need. Then we returned to Julia’s room, where the conversation between the aide and Julia was forced. From an end table, I took a box that I gave Julia to keep the rings and bracelets I sometimes bring her. They are costume – and brightly colored – and they delight her. Whenever I bring her jewelry, she says, over and over, “You always bring me such wonderful presents!”

Julia, the aide, and I pored over the contents of the box. Julia delighted in putting rings on every finger and bracelets on both wrists. The aide brightened. “Now I know what to do!” she said. “I have trinkets like these to give her at home.  We’ll have a wonderful time!”

But when the aide was out of earshot, Julia looked at me and said, “She’s strange.”

You have to love her.

Valerie Kaufman is a freelance writer. “Point of view” is a column open to all.