My Mother Walks to a Bus Stop That Closed in 1974

Three in the Morning, Coat On

The first time I found my mother at the back door at three in the morning, she had her good wool coat on over her nightgown and her purse hooked over her arm. The thermometer outside the kitchen window read minus eleven. She looked at me with complete calm and said, "I'll miss the number 16 if you keep me talking, Danny."

The number 16 bus used to stop on the corner of Lake Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis. My mother caught it every weekday morning for nine years to get to her job at a dry goods warehouse, where she typed invoices and, according to family legend, once told a regional manager to mind his language in front of the girls. She left that job in 1974, when I was born. The stop she means does not exist in the form she remembers. The warehouse has been flats for decades.

None of that matters to her at three in the morning. She has somewhere to be.

How We Got Here

Mom moved in with me two winters ago, after the diagnosis and after the second time she left a pan on the stove in her own apartment in Richfield. I am fifty-two, divorced, and I work from home doing payroll for a few small companies, which is the only reason any of this has been possible. My sister Carol lives in Duluth and comes down every other weekend. Between us we patch it together.

The walking started in the autumn. The doctor told us it was common, that people with dementia often have a strong need to move, especially late in the day and through the night, and that sometimes the walking attaches itself to an old routine. For my mother, that routine is the bus. She is not confused about where she is going. She is very clear. She is going to work, and she is going to be on time, because she always was.

In October it was manageable. I would put on my boots and we would walk together around the block, slowly, her arm through mine, and by the time we got back to the porch she had usually forgotten the bus and was talking about the neighbor's maple tree instead. Then she would sleep.

Then came December.

The Ice

If you have never lived through a Minnesota winter, I am not sure I can describe the sidewalks properly. After the first thaw and refreeze, they become a sheet of grey glass with a light dusting of snow on top to hide it. I have lived here my whole life and I still fall at least once a season.

My mother is eighty-three. She weighs about as much as a bag of dog food, and her bones, the doctor told us, are thin. One fall would end everything. I knew that. But she would stand at the back door in her coat with that look on her face, and if I said no, she would cry, and if she cried, she would not sleep, and neither would I.

For about two weeks we did loops of the hallway. The house is a narrow 1920s bungalow, and the hallway is maybe twenty feet long. We would walk to the front door, turn, walk to the kitchen, turn. She hated it. "This isn't the way," she kept saying. "We're going in circles." She was right, of course.

Carol's Idea

It was Carol who brought it up, on one of her weekends. We were sitting at the kitchen table at one in the morning, both of us exhausted, listening to Mom ask the hallway whether the bus was late.

"What about a treadmill?" she said. "Set it up by a window. Let her walk as far as she wants."

I thought it was a bad idea. I pictured my mother on a moving belt, losing her balance, the machine dragging her backwards. I pictured a big shiny thing taking up half the living room and her refusing to set foot on it.

But Carol had already been looking. She showed me her phone. She had been reading about used treadmills for sale, partly because neither of us could justify the price of a new one for an experiment that might fail in a week, and partly because she had read that the older commercial machines were sturdier, with longer side rails, which was the thing I had not thought of at all. Something to hold on to.

Setting It Up

We bought a used one in early January. I spent more time reading about belt speeds and handrails than I have ever spent reading about anything, including my own mortgage. What I cared about was simple. It had to start slowly, really slowly. It had to have rails long enough that she could hold on with both hands the whole time. And it needed a safety clip I could fasten to her cardigan so that the belt would stop if she stepped away.

Two men delivered it on a Thursday, carried it through the snow and set it up in the living room facing the big front window, the one that looks out toward the street lamp on the corner. When they had gone I stood looking at it and felt slightly ridiculous. A fifty-two year old payroll clerk and a machine he had bought for his mother to walk to a bus that stopped running before he was born.

That night she came downstairs at about half past two with her coat on.

The First Walk

I did not argue with her. I had been rehearsing this. I said, "Mom, the sidewalk's terrible tonight. Let's take the inside route."

She looked at the treadmill with deep suspicion. I took her coat, because it was too warm for indoors, but I left her purse on her arm, because I had learned that the purse matters. I helped her step up. I clipped the cord to her cardigan. I put both of her hands on the rails and stood right behind her, close enough to catch her, and I started the belt at the slowest speed it had.

She walked. Carefully at first, then more naturally, her feet finding the rhythm. She looked out the front window at the street lamp and the snow drifting through the light.

"There's the corner," she said.

I said yes. There was the corner.

She walked for twenty-two minutes. She talked the whole time, about a girl named Bernice who sat next to her in the typing pool, about a coat she had saved three months for, about the driver of the number 16 who always waited an extra half minute for her if she was running. I had never heard any of it. Some of it may not have been true. All of it was hers.

When she was tired, I stopped the belt and helped her down. She said, "Well, I made it," and went up to bed and slept until nine.

What It Gave Back

I want to be honest that it does not work every night. Some nights she will not get on. Some nights she walks for three minutes and then wants to go outside anyway, and we end up doing the hallway, and she cries, and I make cocoa. Dementia does not care how much research you did on handrails.

But most nights, it works. She walks to her bus stop by the front window, holding the rails, purse on her arm, and I stand behind her, and she tells me stories. Some of them I have now heard twenty times. Bernice gets a little more glamorous with each telling.

I have started writing them down. I keep a notebook on the windowsill next to the treadmill. Carol reads it when she comes down. We both laugh at Bernice.

The Thing Nobody Tells You

People ask me what helped most, caring for her. I usually say patience, or my sister, or a good doctor. All true. But if I am being honest, one of the things that helped most was an old machine somebody else had worn in before us.

A friend from church asked me about it recently. Her husband has Parkinson's and is restless in the evenings, and she wanted to know whether buying a used treadmill had been worth the space in the living room. I told her I did not know whether it would work for him. I told her about the rails and the slow start and the safety clip, and about putting it somewhere with a view, because a wall is just a wall but a window is a road. I told her that in our house it had turned the worst hours of the night into something close to a walk with my mother.

She went home and looked into used treadmills herself. I do not know yet what she decided.

Spring, Eventually

It is March now. The ice on the sidewalks is breaking up into grey slush, and soon we will be able to go outside again, around the block, past the maple tree. I think she will like that more. I know I will.

But I am keeping the machine. I have a feeling there will be other winters, and other nights at half past two when she comes down the stairs in her good wool coat, purse on her arm, worried she is going to miss the number 16.

When that happens, I will take her coat, and clip the cord to her cardigan, and stand behind her while she walks toward the street lamp on the corner. And she will make it. She always does.