by Janet DiNola Parmerter
Nearly ten years ago, I wrote the article below about my eccentric Auntie Rena. Unfortunately, on Nov. 30, 2022, just four months before she turned 100, she quietly fell asleep in death. In preparation for her memorial service, my husband Keith and I read this article again, and chuckled as we remembered these humorous memories and realized laughter is truly the best medicine. So, please enjoy some laughter and memories with Keith and me.
Odyssey: a long series of adventures, especially when filled with notable hardships
Yes, I believe anyone who is a caregiver may accurately define their efforts as an odyssey. Certainly, my husband Keith and I called living with our three octogenarian family members a long series of adventures. We called it “Our Octogenarian Odyssey.”
The odyssey began in 2002, when we moved my mother’s sister, Auntie Rena, from my parents’ residence in New York to our New Jersey home.
Due to my parents’ health, they also moved here and completed our happy household of three octogenarians, my mother’s feisty cat Gatto (which means cat in Italian), Keith and me, who are the two somewhat patient caregivers, and our own nervous octogenarian cat Maynard. Above the door for our elderly cat hangs a leather sign we bought in Orvieto, Italy, which reads, “In questa casa siamo TUTTI nervosa … anche il gatto!” Those words are the most “PURRRR-FECT” words to sum up our current living arrangements. It translates into, “In this house we are ALL nervous … even the cat!” This saying is written under a picture of a frightened cat with an arched back, its black fur and tail standing straight up.
Under this roof, some say the level of excitement is more than one house could stand. Nevertheless, each truss holding up this roof is secured with a good balance of humor and laughter, which is especially evident with Auntie Rena, my mother’s oldest sister. She is an 89-year-old, five-foot two-inch strong, non-eyeglass-wearing woman, with at least two pink foam rollers in her short white hair. She never married because she never wanted to burden a husband with what she called her “little problem.”
From the age of 11, Aunt Rena suffered from epileptic seizures. She turned down any prospective suitors and became an excellent Bible teacher. Even with epilepsy, she was a sweet, gentle, resilient woman, until dementia slowly altered her brain and personality. Previously, teaching the Bible filled her life with intense joy; now, Bible verses are practically her only memory. Her doctor said so many of her brain cells died because for the past 78 years, she refused to take her medication.
When the doctor told her the repeated seizures would continue to cause brain cells to die, she ignored his warning and said garlic would help. Before it was fashionable to be health-conscious, Auntie Rena was a wild health fanatic. She ate all-natural foods, believed garlic cured everything, made her own yogurt, had every Prevention magazine, and knew every vitamin and herbal remedy to heal anything. Yet, she had to be forced to take her Dilantin and flushed most down the toilet, saying, “I prefer doing things my way rather than having the side effects of that nasty medicine.”
That began Keith’s and my war of the pills. Each day we mapped out a strategy to sneak Aunt Rena her Dilantin. At first, we thought she took each pill, but later my husband found them around the sink drain and garbage can. So we planned a new line of attack. From then on, after she put the pill into her mouth, we stood in front of her until she swallowed it. At last, we won! Well, we thought we won. It wasn’t long before my daughter found dozens of pills clustered together in her sweater pocket. Auntie Rena kept the pills under her tongue, then slipped them into her pocket. Another battle lost. But we were not defeated yet. With a mortar and pestle, I crushed the pill and mixed it into a chunky peanut butter sandwich. Before I could high-five Keith, I saw her pick out something from her mouth, put it on the table, open her sandwich and begin picking out tiny bits of the pill.
Feeling defeated, I phoned the doctor. He suggested a liquid prescription which could be easily blended into her food. Immediately we added the medicine into soup, drinks, and oatmeal. Unfortunately, she told us her food tasted awful, and protested, saying, “Eat it yourself!” Score: Auntie Rena 4, the pill pushers 0.
Suddenly, I had a brilliant idea. The next day I phoned the doctor and requested the children’s medicine, a cherry flavored liquid Keppra. Each day I folded back the foil on cherry yogurt and Keith mixed in the Keppra, replaced the foil, and Auntie Rena thoroughly enjoyed each cup of yogurt. We were sure we had won the battle — until one day, when Auntie Rena caught him mixing her yogurt with a spoon, became suspicious and completely stopped eating.
Aunt Rena no longer trusted anything we gave her to eat. Even more frustrated, the doctor sighed, “Look, she’s 85 years old, why are you battling her? She hates hospitals, doctors, medicine, and especially me! She does not listen to you, and she certainly does not listen to me, or for that matter anyone else. Just let her be happy and let her do what she wants to do.” Today, she has multiple daily seizures, says she does not, and she is happy because she never remembers them.
All of her horrifying falls stay in our minds, as well as the minds of our children and grandchildren. When Auntie Rena had a seizure at the top of a flight of stairs, rolling down 18 hard oak steps in front of my granddaughter, Sydney was terrified and thought Auntie Rena died. Never realizing how others were affected by her falls, so often she has repeated the words, “I’d rather have my little problem than all those nasty side effects from medicines that kill people!”
Kill people? We are so happy she never killed anyone or herself. We were so thankful that no one was in the yard when Aunt Rena blacked out in her car and drove through a neighbor’s front gate. That day my mother took her car keys, gave them to Uncle Louie, and he drove her car back to Connecticut. For the next two months, Aunt Rena was furious.
I worried about her injuries from her terrible falls. The vivid teenage memory I have of hearing a crash, then seeing Auntie Rena lying under the kitchen table shaking with a knife clutched in her hand still haunts me.
Consequently, the more she refused her medication, the more seizures she had, and the more brain cells died. That vicious cycle caused the dementia she has today, and little by little took away my beloved aunt. Each morning, she climbed the back stairs, entered our kitchen, and quietly repeated the same questions, “Where are we?,” followed by “Do I live here?” and “What am I doing here?” After a brief moment, the last question popped up, “Oh, and deary, what day and month is this?” Every day, with the exception of the date, her repetitive questions were answered the same way. After she was told the state, she stared into space and repeated it twice as if we told her she lived on Mars. After she hesitated for a few seconds, curiously she asked, “What am I doing here? I thought I lived in Connecticut.” Shocked when hearing she had lived here for years, she became visibly embarrassed, which always sparked an unusual sequence of events.
To get away as fast as possible, she quickly turned around and wildly waved her hands over her head, lost her equilibrium, and mumbled, “Where am I? Where am I now? I’m lost … I’m confused!” For the next hour, Aunt Rena went in and out the back door several hundred times. When she decided to rest on the back deck, she gave all eight chairs a try, then got up from each chair and moved to the next one.
Eventually, conversation became outdated, and her most predictable comments were about not wanting to eat and her complaints about food costing too much. That was because when she was teaching, she had little money and continually obsessed over becoming fat. What may have contributed to Auntie Rena’s fat fear was the fact that in our family, being fat was a constant struggle, as shown by her sister Enes, who was a hefty 390 pounds at five feet tall. Once, after Keith found her antibiotics in the sink, she flippantly waved Keith off and said, “You just want me to take that pill so I can get fat like you!”
With her dislike of eating food, she acted as though eating was an unnecessary, frivolous chore. When I called her to a meal, her first words were always, “Oh, do I have to eat?” Usually, I chuckled and responded, “Well, you don’t have to eat, but death is the alternative, so I think eating is a better option.” Three times a day, when we set her plate in front of her, no matter how much food was on it, she turned her head and robotically waved her hand back and forth while saying, “Oh no, I could never eat that much!! Please just give me half!” Finally, to test her reaction, I placed one lone pea on the plate. After setting the plate on the table, I received the usual response. Quickly I responded, “Auntie Rena, I put one pea on the plate. I think you can eat the whole pea, try and force it down!” When she finally looked at the single lonesome pea on the huge plate, she laughed, and then, as if I had some all-knowing answer, she curiously asked, “Why did I say that?” Good question, but I didn’t have an answer.
However, whenever she complained about the amount of food on her plate, she always ate every bit and snuck food off our plates. After we realized she would sneak more food if we weren’t looking, we turned our heads away from the table and let her sneak whatever she wanted from the center serving tray or our plates.
Every time we went out to eat, we asked the hostess not to give her a menu or she wouldn’t eat. When Auntie Rena saw food cost more than it did in 1945, she refused to order anything but water. One day at McDonald’s, she ordered a cheeseburger, glanced up to the menu, then immediately canceled the order and complained, “Your prices are terrible!” then added, “Just bring me a milkshake.” The young man took back the burger, placed the shake on the counter, told her the price, then she yelled, “What? If you think I’m paying that for milk, you’re crazy! Young man, you can just put it back and get me a cup of water!” Trying to calm her down I said, “Now Auntie Rena, he can’t put the shake back, it’s already poured, why don’t you just take it?” With folded arms, she turned her head and stopped speaking. That was her way of saying, “Your words are going in one ear and out the other, because I won’t budge!”
While she lived downstairs, I could make sure my auntie was safe in her apartment. We had a baby cam so I could hear if she fell. One night, after bringing food to her kitchen table, as I came back upstairs, Keith watched her usual rebellious action as she pushed the plate away, stubbornly folded her arms and turned her head to the side. On the baby cam, I pushed the button and said,
“Now you just eat that food, or you will get sick!” Stunned, she jerked her head toward the food, looked all around the room, then up at the ceiling. Still looking up, as though God himself had commanded her to eat, she slowly reached forward, pulled the plate to her chest, and ate her dinner.
Years later, when my parents came to live with us, a new set of family dynamics began. Apparently, 64 years ago, Auntie Rena wanted Mom to marry someone else and Dad never forgot. It had been long gone from Rena’s memory, but not Dad’s. Since my parents moved in, the tension thickened as Rena got under Dad’s skin. Everyone’s nerves were frayed. Even our octogenarian cat Maynard tried to find peace and hid all day under our bed.
Daddy was convinced Auntie Rena pretended to be unstable, and he thought it was all an act and said it was her clever way to have us all cater to her every need. His paranoid frustration increased since he was convinced Mom was being duped by her older sister and he was the only one who could see through her deception. Conversely, before he moved in, I cautiously warned him, “Daddy, if you keep telling my friends there is nothing wrong with Auntie Rena, they are going to think something is terribly wrong with you, because everyone here knows something is wrong with her mind!”
When Uncle Dan enlarged our deck, I moved the heavy iron chairs off the deck to the far end of the yard. Mysteriously, every morning all the heavy wrought iron chairs were neatly lined up outside Aunt Rena’s door. Now I know they did not walk there by themselves, so I asked Aunt Rena, who was sitting on her patio swing, “Why did you carry all eight heavy chairs here?” Uninterested in my question, she folded her arms, turned her head away from me and kept swinging back and forth. Again, I asked, “Auntie Rena, why did you pull these heavy chairs over here? I don’t want to keep moving these iron chairs, they are too heavy!” Immediately, she stopped swinging, turned her head away from me, then tersely said, “Stop complaining!” Shocked, I bit my tongue once, then bit it again before I laughed.
In the winter, with a temperature of four degrees, Auntie Rena claimed she needed to breathe fresh air and kept the windows open to allow the good air to come inside. When Keith peeked in, he saw her sleeping with a babushka towel wrapped around her head, socks on her hands, and so many blankets her tiny body could hardly move.
In contrast, when it is 97 degrees outside, she sits reading a magazine by her open screen door. Meanwhile, the air conditioner is ready to explode as it struggles to cool the entire state. My granddaughter Sydney closed the door three times in 30 minutes, and when the astronomical electric bills were mentioned, she calmly said, “I’m sorry, dear …Well, just remind me to keep the door closed.”
Sydney suggested pasting bright orange reminder signs on both sides of the door, so she printed up, “Keep door closed, air conditioning is on and we lose lots of money when the door is open.” It did not help! In an ornery mood, she yelled, “We never had that fake air when I was young. We had real fresh air! Just shut it off and leave me alone!” Trying to appeal to her sense of justice, I said, “If we didn’t give you heat or cool air, the police could take us away and put us in jail for not taking good care of you.” Snapping her head away, she sarcastically said, “You are making that up. No one will do that, just let them try.” She is usually such a sweetheart. But over the years, we realized her angry attitudes always came right before an epileptic seizure.
Still, after knowing all that, Dad stated, “She’s just a good actress and fooled all of you, but not me! She just wants to be waited on, and she pretends not to know things just to get her own way.” Finally, I resigned myself to the fact my father would never believe she had a problem.
With all these household Freudian dynamics, life has been quite humorous. This evening while having a seizure, Auntie Rena shoved an entire napkin in her mouth. Everyone jumped up to remove it, but she tightly clenched her teeth together and we couldn’t open her mouth. The last time I dug into her mouth she bit me, so naturally I went ahead with caution as Auntie Rena mumbled in Italian.
Disinterested, Daddy sat on the recliner and sarcastically said, “Don’t worry, she won’t choke, she’s just faking it!” Mom shouted, “John, stop that, my sister is going to choke,” and Dad came back with, “Alice, she’s got you so duped, look at her, she’s just doing this for attention.” Meanwhile, Rena was oblivious to everyone trying to get her mouth open and concentrated on chewing the huge ball of paper. It was strange, but when she had a seizure, she reverted back to the language of her childhood. Even though she no longer spoke Italian, she repeatedly mumbled Italian words.
Uncle Dan told us to hold her nose, then she would open her mouth. As I held her nostrils closed, Anna Mae sat on the other side ready to grab the napkin as Rena clenched her teeth. Still, Anna Mae managed to pick out a few pieces as Rena yelled in Italian, “It’s mine! It’s not yours, it’s mine, it’s mine!” (“Questa none tua, e mia!”) Answering her in Italian, I held down her fighting hands and said, “No Auntie Rena, that’s not yours, it’s hers! It’s not yours!” (“No, zia, non e tua, e sua!”) In a split second, she came out of the seizure, looked at me and growled, “What are you talking about? I don’t understand a word you’re saying!” It was too hilarious, and instantly we roared with laughter.
A few years ago, Auntie Rena went from the hospital to a nearby nursing facility and never came home. Now, unable to walk or communicate properly, she thinks I am my mother and when I said Keith was not my father, she said, “Who are you kidding, you’re not fooling me, I know he is John.” When I told her how old I was, and I couldn’t be her sister, she asked, “Then how old am I?” When I answered 92, she loudly exclaimed, “92? 92? What am I still doing here? I should be dead!” The nurses giggled and Auntie Rena was oblivious to everything.
That was some time ago. In the nursing home she survived two bouts of COVID, pneumonia, countless falls, and infections. When she bounced back, she amazed the entire staff.
It seems fitting to end my reflections by quoting Auntie Rena’s pet phrase as she tapped the dashboard of Maggie, her 1960 car, “The old girl is still going strong!”