Dear Friends of Charlotte Cheever Cushwa Clark,
I wrote the essay below, entitled "One More Year," in 2009, after I had visited my mother for a week in March or thereabouts at her home in Harwich Port, Massachusetts. She died in late May of that year, a few months shy of her 92nd birthday.
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| Charlotte and Charlotte |
Here she is, at right, with her granddaughter and namesake Charlotte Spring Clark.
Today, on what would have been Charlotte Clark's 100th birthday, I hope you enjoy this snapshot of her at 91.
Brooks Clark
One More Year
“Well,” says Charlotte, elbows on the church folding table, one hand
holding a piece of coffee cake, “everybody says I should think about going into
assisted living.”
She annunciates the last two words with
the emphasis she might use to punctuate sentences like, “He got mixed up with that female,” or, “That dress was perfectly dreadful.”
Around the tables, arranged in a U, the members
of the Wednesday morning post-service breakfast discussion, many of them octogenarians
themselves, turn their heads to hear Charlotte’s nearly nonagenarian voice.
“I guess I need to think about it,” she
says, “even though I don’t want to.”
“Thank you, Charlotte,” says Father P____,
just a hair too patronizing, as usual, not like the interim rector, Bill, who
had preceded him. Bill had always
understood that, even as Charlotte’s hearing and sight grew weaker and she got
slower moving her walker down the aisle to Communion, she most definitely had
all her marbles.
Bill gave great sermons. He never
used any notes and stood near the front pews, so he was easy to hear, and he
was popular with everyone. Charlotte says that, at his previous posting on
Martha’s Vineyard, he had “done something bad”
– which sounds for all the world like something good in the conspiratorial way she whispers it – to earn his interim
posting at such a small church with such an old congregation. “He went astray,”
she adds, in case you hadn’t figured it out.
In her years as a clergyman’s wife,
Charlotte always hated it when parishioners said they liked the old rector
better than the current one. “It’s so
unfair to the new guy,” she explains. “So
I always stood up for John P____.” But
she did like Bill better.
“It was with the wife of a
Congregational minister,” she finally adds, having held out the juicy detail
long enough.
“Change can be hard in our lives,” Father
P____ continues. “Just as change can be hard in the Church. Many of us love the Episcopal Church because
it has so many traditions and so much history, and because the words we say
haven’t changed, going back to the early centuries of Christianity. But we now have female clergy. We have gay clergy, and gay bishops, and we
know there are differing opinions about all of that. And we have many different
ways that we approach what the Church is all about. The Youth Ministry is a great example. We’re still trying to figure out what works.” Nods all around.
“I’ve thought a lot about it,” says Charlie,
a vestryman in his 70s, “and I’ve decided that these changes are good. They
keep our Church up with the times and able to reach young people. If the only people coming to church are all
of us, we’re sunk.”
That was several years ago.
Just this fall the church got a
new rector, Judith Davis. “She went to Yale Divinity School,” says Charlotte,
“and she gives great sermons. It’s so
great to have a person of thinking.” Judith
had been rector at a church on Capitol Hill for 12 years and a hematologist in
a previous career. She and her partner, Ann,
who’s also a priest, have an adopted son, Jamie, 6½, whom they are home
schooling.
A few people left the parish when they
heard about the new hire. “Some have
come back,” says Charlotte, “because they heard she was good. There were a couple of weeks between the
announcement and her arrival. That gave people time to talk and get upset. It would have been better if they’d made the
announcement and she started right then.”
Change comes in many disguises.
A couple of years ago Charlotte started
remaining seated during Communion. That
was after Jack Doran, the head usher, made her feel uncomfortable about moving
her walker down the center aisle. “He said, ‘You can go this way,’” Charlotte
recalls. So now, after everyone else is
finished, Judith and the chalice bearer come down and administer the wafer and
wine to Charlotte in her pew. “It’s OK,” she says.
On
weekdays, Charlotte watches The Today
Show, doing her flexibility movements sitting on the side of her bed. Then she pilots her walker into the kitchen a
little before 10 a.m. Her Special K is
in a bowl with a light blue Ziploc cover on top. She pours her coffee and milk
and sits in her white wooden chair that has been recently reupholstered and reconditioned.
Barbara, her beloved caregiver
for five years now, arrives “at the stroke of ten.”
“Hello-oo!” chirps Barbara, putting her
bag down on the round kitchen table. The table has looked the same since 1969,
when Charlotte made a collage out of newspaper clips from the moon landing and sealed
it under poly-urethane. “Some still say
. . . earth is flat,” reads one headline, placed over a close-up of the lunar
surface.
On the kitchen wall, alongside a door
jamb, are pencil markings marking the heights of the children and grandchildren
over the years. From a black-and-white photo
on the wall, Charlotte’s husband, Bayard, gone some 15 years now, beams with
pride as he holds up a fish that stretches from his shoulders to his white Top-Sider
sneakers. A blue-tinged certificate signed
by Governor Endicott Peabody declares Bayard’s catch to be the biggest striped
bass taken from Massachusetts waters in 1968.
On the wall there’s also the
family photo from 1970 – the boys with the moustaches and long hair, everyone
dressed in brightly colored attire from India, brought back by two sons from
the Peace Corps. That year Charlotte’s
mother, beginning her descent into senility, had taken a pair of scissors to
her copy of the family shot and snipped the tops of the boys’ heads – and their
hair – right out of the picture.
Beneath glass in seven motley-sized frames
are dozens of business cards. The
tradition started as a retort to the question, asked once too often, “What is your job, anyway?” As if anyone in a large family ever listens
when you say your title and the name of the company you work for. And anyway, in this kitchen you worry about
other things: How is so-and-so doing in
school? Are Tommy and Jeanne going to
get married? Does the roof need to be
replaced? Can we afford it?
Nonetheless, there they are, those
cards – decades of jobs and titles and companies gone by, preserved for
posterity, testament to the changing paths of our lives, even if things don’t
change much in Charlotte’s kitchen.
Barbara takes Charlotte’s blood
pressure, reads Charlotte her mail, as well as the headlines from the Cape Cod Times, and a column or two, especially
Maureen Dowd. Charlotte closes her eyes to listen and punctuates each of Dowd’s
witty barbs with a hearty laugh.
“That’s been the hardest thing,” says
Charlotte, “not being able to read.” Last March she learned to use a small
portable CD player. So now she listens
to books on CD on Saturdays and Sundays, when Barbara isn’t there. Last spring she “read” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
A Team of Rivals, about Lincoln’s
cabinet. So many people were reading and
talking about that book that uninitiated listeners, hearing discussions about
the precocious “Belle of Washington” Kate Chase and her elegant parties,
thought Charlotte was talking about someone she knew.
Barbara makes up a meal plan for the evening and a shopping list, and
then heads out to the Star Market.
Charlotte talks on the phone with children, their spouses and
ex-spouses, grandchildren, neighbors and friends. One granddaughter is graduating from college
in May. Another is getting married in June – to “a good guy.” Another is
engaged. Another will be soon. It’s a lot to keep up with, but Charlotte is
on top of each development.
Weddings and graduations have always been
Charlotte’s favorite occasions. Three years ago she made it to a
granddaughter’s wedding in Boston, with a son piloting her wheelchair through game-day
crowds for the reception at Fenway Park.
Two Aprils ago she did the same for a grandson’s wedding in
Philadelphia. But she’ll miss the college graduation and the wedding. “It’s
very upsetting,” she says, “but it’s just too
much for me to make long trips, and for someone to look after me. Ideally, Barbara could take me.”
It’s challenge enough for Charlotte to
make it to the 10 a.m. service on Sundays, if it’s not too cold or icy. Bo Coursen, the senior warden of the church,
and his wife, Sidney, are so nice to come by and drive her. Nowadays the Wednesday 7:30 a.m. service is “just
too early.”
Charlotte has had occasional mini-strokes
– TIAs (transient ischemic attacks),
they call them – as well as a fainting episode and other health moments, but
now she’s doing pretty well. A few days after her 90th birthday
party she had a TIA, and they found she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. “I was incarcerated for three weeks,” she says of her stay in rehab at Liberty Commons,
when she learned to breathe better. They
also gave her an oxygen machine to use at night
Each week Barbara puts Charlotte’s pills
for the week, morning and evening, in two one of those M-T-W handy containers,
and, says Barbara, “she’s good about taking them.” Barbara is also good at changing the
batteries on Charlotte’s hearing aids, thank heaven.
At least once a day Charlotte talks with Lucy,
her best friend since they were 6. They can tell you anything you want to know
about anyone who attended or taught at Phillips Exeter Academy, where their
fathers were professors, in the first half of the 20th century. Charlotte remembers seeing James Agee moving
through the garden behind the dorm they lived in. “He was a very odd walker,” she
recalls.
People come by, some for tea, some for
lunch, and chat.
Before she leaves at around 4 p.m., Barbara
reads again to Charlotte. Right now
they’re in the early chapters of Dreams from
My Father. “An extraordinary story,”
says Charlotte. “Really extraordinary.”
It’s important for Charlotte to get her nap in the afternoon, but it can
be hard to get her to nap when the children or grandchildren or great
grandchildren are visiting.
In the evenings Charlotte
watches The Situation Room and The News Hour with Jim Lehrer in her
bedroom. She then moves to the kitchen,
heats up the dinner Barbara has made for her, and eats while watching Hardball.
“When everything is the same, she’s the happiest,” says Barbara, who comes
five days a week now. So don’t move that
stack of New Yorkers on the living
room coffee table. She likes them there,
right next to the Smith Alumnae Quarterly
and a Boston College hockey media guide that her grandson Tim worked on.
And don’t touch anything on that foldout
desk and its cubbies overflowing with envelopes. Many of the bills are paid automatically
these days, but there are a few that Charlotte has to deal with. A friend comes by every now and then and
helps her mailing birthday cards and other notes.
Charlotte’s ring binder with everyone’s
phone numbers printed in 24-point type stays right on the kitchen table. “Judy [a daughter-in-law] was so nice to put
that together for me,” says Charlotte. With her macular degeneration, Charlotte
is having trouble reading even with the big numbers, but she can get Barbara to
dial them for her.
The house is full of Charlotte’s paintings and lithographs. A few years ago her eyesight and unsure hands
ended her life as an artist, but she took it in stride. Right now, she just wants to keep being able
to live in her house, with Barbara coming in and cooking for her and driving
her to her doctor’s appointments, and friends and family coming by and calling
to say hello.
“I think I have one more year,” says
Charlotte. Of course, she said the same
thing a year ago, and the year before that.
“Our rule,” explains Barbara, “is that,
as long as she can get up and out of her chair, and get the bathroom, and into
the kitchen, I can take care of her. But
if she can’t get up, I can’t look after her any more.”
The specter of not being able to get up
and having to leave her house for assisted
living inspires Charlotte to do her eight minutes of movements on the side
of her bed while listening to Matt Lauer every morning.
“[Sons] Rocky and Stocky wanted to buy me
one of those chairs that you push a button and go flying in the air,” she
says. “I didn’t want that. It was brown, so it didn’t match. They said it was only $150, and you could
never get a chair like that for $150. Ordinarily they cost $600. But I said no. To keep living here, I have to
be able to get up, and if I had that chair I’d stop being able to. And anyway, I like this chair,” she says, hitting the white wood arm rest with the heel
of her hand.
“People my age don’t like change,” she
explains. “We like things to remain the
same.”
Rocky comes for dinner on Wednesdays,
usually with his daughter Anna and her boyfriend Chris, both of them just out
of college. “Both of them have jobs,”
says Charlotte. “You know, all 14 of my
grandchildren have made it through college,” she has said more than once. “I’m
proud about that, and I don’t mind saying so.”
The summer months will bring waves of
children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, filling up the house and
sparking those storied, more-the-merrier family dinners, at which those of all
ages are expected contribute to the conversation.
One granddaughter described the family
dinners in her application essay to Williams. Last summer another
granddaughter, counseling at a Fresh Air Fund camp north of New York City,
brought co-counselors from Germany, Scotland and England during one of their
breaks between encampments.
For the past six decades or so, these
dinners always begin with joined hands and the singing of “For health and
strength and daily food, we praise thy name, oh Lord. Ah-h-h-h . . . men.”
If she’s not careful, Charlotte, at 91½,
can get worn down during these months of activity, but she hates to miss a
minute and of course wants to be up to date on the constant changes in everyone’s
lives.
“Really,” says Charlotte, “I’m just so happy
to still be here.” On earth and in the kitchen, for one more
year.
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