Three days later, they scheduled the surgery. I arrived at six in the morning to be there for mama, and see that things went as they should. At seven, the head nurse came and said that there was a phone call for me. I went to the desk and discovered that my mother’s surgeon had asked for me. He was on the Jacques Cartier Bridge coming in to do the surgery, but it had been bumped. Someone who was having elective surgery was in need of an x-ray machine without which he could not operate. Given my mother’s age, and the fact that she was Jewish, I had some doubts about the matter, but I knew that the orthopedic surgeon, a gentle Haitian man, was sincere, and kind to mama. He thought she had been bumped because he was not a regular staff member of this hospital.
I don’t know what possessed me, but I told the surgeon to meet me on the floor of the operating room as soon as he parked his car. I went to the laundry room, and found a green shirt that all the staff wore, and I put it on. I took a notebook and pen from my purse, and then stuffed it under my mother’s bed. I started going up and down elevators and stairs until I found myself in a really huge auditorium-sized space with about six operating rooms in two semi-circles. Between these, were a large gray divider and a nurse.
I walked up to her and asked for her name. She gave it to me. I wrote it down. Then I asked for the names of all the doctors who would be operating on that day. My mother’s surgeon had arrived by this time and stood quietly behind me. I then asked for the names of all the procedures that would need an x-ray. Suddenly the nurse looked down at me and asked who I was. I told her that I was a journalist and that if Madame Fuerstenberg was not operated on by noon, I would find five television crews and bring them to that very spot.
My mother’s operation was over by two in the afternoon, and while she was in recovery I got a little sleep, the first I had had in about four days. One time, at about three a.m., she sat up abruptly and stared at me for a moment. Then she asked, “How is it possible that I, Regina Sowa Fuerstenberg, the granddaughter of Sarah Sowa, sister and daughter and granddaughter, niece and cousin to so many, should find myself alone in this room, with just you, for company?”
I had never, up to that time, understood the loss of those eighty or more family members. They were the names of people from a world that I had never known, a world where ordinary people turned hero to escape evil soldiers by running through the city sewers, or hiding in the forests with nothing to eat. As a child, I thought of this world as though it had something in common with the world of the Brothers Grimm, all mythical and improbable and foreign. With the dawning of understanding that these were my own flesh and blood ancestors, not some chimerical creatures from a fairy tale, for the first time in my life those aunts, and uncles, and cousins, and grandparents, were my loss too. That night as I sat vigil at my mother’s bedside, I felt abandoned for the first time since I was a child.
Villa Medica, a convalescent centre on Sherbrooke Avenue, (Montreal), housed about three hundred patients. My mother shared a room with a Belgian woman who was recovering from a broken ankle. I guessed she was in her sixties, and she had a large wooden crucifix with the Christ carved in horrible agony – hanging over her bed. She loathed my mother at first sight. Mama was still very heavily medicated, and it was sometimes impossible for her to even find the little button to press for help. It became imperative that this Belgian woman should like mama, or at least, help her should she have pain or need a staff person to come to her aid.
I brought the Belgian woman chocolates (Belgian, of course); I brought her grapes, and an electric fan to combat the terrible heat of August, and I even bought her magazines. She was intractable and she wanted nothing to do with her Jewish roommate. I had to take drastic measures.
Some years earlier, I had tutored a Polish Franciscan brother in English pronunciation, and we had remained friends. I called him up and begged him to come with me to the Villa Medica in full monk regalia. I wanted all of it, except tonsure; the robe, the crucifixes, even a handy bible would look good. I was a theatre person, and I wanted high drama.
No one at the convalescent hospital thought that it might be odd for me to walk in with my own monk in tow. They didn’t even blink. When we got to mama’s room, he went directly to the Belgian woman and started chatting, and blessing and praying over her. Her smile was huge; this was heaven for her, having a real monk stand next to her bed to pray and bless her. Then, he abruptly turned and said that he was really there to see his very best friend, Madame Fuerstenberg. They had met at my home, and had many cups of tea, and had always had great fun speaking Polish.
Mama was thrilled to see her Polish speaking acquaintance, and she conversed with him about literature and poetry. Soon they were singing together, a Polish opera called “Halka.” One of the staff came and closed the door because the other patients were complaining about the noise. My mother’s street cred went up enormously, and the Belgian woman could not do enough to make sure Mama was comfortable.
The first year that Mama was with me the government gave me two weeks off. They assigned my mother to a care facility. I went to the Eastern townships and rested. When I returned, I found out that the facility had psychiatric patients who would go into my mother’s room at night and sit on her bed and rob her purse.
The next year about the same time I called my older brother in Toronto. I said, “I will be at the McDonald’s parking lot on the East side of Kingston at eleven a.m. tomorrow. I will leave mother and her meds and instructions on how to give them to her. Be there.” Then I hung up and did not answer the phone again.
After two weeks, a very shaken older brother asked if he could meet me in Ottawa instead of Kingston. He also said that he did not know how I managed. When I picked her up and took her out for lunch at a friends home, she begged me never to send her back to my brother’s home – EVER. Thus was I able to kill two birds with one simple strategy. My older brother was not god and I got two weeks of peace.
Years later, after I had given up my work to be a full-time care-giver, and was getting deeper and deeper into debt, Mama had her second heart attack. She was on the geriatric floor at the Royal Vic this time. The nurses came into her room every morning, saw her suffering what looked like a mild heart attack: shortness of breath pain on her left side, and a fist to her chest. Every morning they were giving her digitalis, which oddly did not help. Mama had a hiatus hernia, and a few spoonfuls of yogurt would get rid of the symptoms. The medication, however, would just kill her.
I asked for the doctor to call. For five days I waited. Finally, I went to the large counter where the nurses lived, and sat on it. I told them that I would not move my considerable derriere until someone got the doctor. After a few minutes one of them handed me the phone. The doctor’s name was Dr. Kravitz. I was sleep deprived and stressed out, so I asked: “Did you invent Mordechai Richler, or did he invent you?” Dr. Kravitz was outraged. He said I had taken him away from celebrating Chanukah with his children, and how dare I call him at home?
I waited for him to calm down, and explained the problem. He told me that if Mrs. Fuerstenberg had a loving daughter, she would come to the hospital at six a.m. to give her mother yogurt. I said, as calmly as I could, that if Mrs. Fuerstenberg came out of the hospital alive, she would need the home her loving daughter had to work to maintain (contract, feature film). He then said, much louder this time: “Well, if Mrs. Fuerstenberg had a loving family, they would be there at six in the morning to feed her what she needed.” I paused, and I did what I had always sworn I would not do; I pulled the “H” card. “I’m sorry Dr. Kravitz, but Mrs. Fuerstenberg’s loving family went up in smoke at Auschwitz, and can’t seem to make it.”
I admit it was a low blow, and afterwards he never looked me in the eyes at meetings. Mama survived. She was a great survivor; she had survived two world wars, a pogrom, Siberia, exile in the foothills of the Himalayas, and my adolescence. We had many great talks and times after this; I got to know her and we became best friends. During the SARS epidemic in Toronto, my brother dropped me off at the Baycrest Centre, a true paradise for geriatric care, into which he had managed to finagle her. He warned me that she had not been very clearheaded for a while and wouldn’t recognize me.
I had to wear a gigantic mask, which was very uncomfortable in the June heat. I stood at the door to her luxurious room and called out, “Mama?” She turned her head and said clearly, “Anna?” I came into the room and asked her if she wanted anything, and did she wish to talk with me. She said, “No,” and would I just sing to her. The last time I had sung her favourite Yiddish songs, a parade of wheelchair driven and walker-supported strangers had gathered to listen. So I just climbed into bed with her, and put her head on my chest, and my arms around her. She smiled and tapped out the rhythm on my arm. When she was truly and deeply asleep I slipped out. She died in her sleep on my birthday just before she turned ninety eight.
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ABOUT ANNA FEURSTENBERG
Playwright and arts communitarian Anna Fuerstenberg has been active on the Montreal scene from a very young age, when she won a scholarship to the Montreal Theatre School. Having been born in post-war refugee camps outside Stuttgart, she took decisive advantage of the scholarship and has been writing, producing, and directing theatre ever since. Alongside a raft of cultural criticism over the years in the pages of the Montreal Gazette, Marianne Ackerman’s Rover Arts, and The Senior Times, Fuerstenberg has written and directed dozens of plays, and has had short stories, poems and plays published. In addition to writing, she has also been involved in the shaping of Montreal’s younger actors, having directed three plays at Concordia University and teaching the tenets of theatre and acting in many Montreal classrooms. A tireless supporter of the arts, Fuerstenberg has worked behind the scenes with numerous theatre companies in Montreal and Toronto, and currently serves as the theatre representative on the board of the Quebec’s English Language Arts Network.