Help!

Why is the nicest thing you can do one of the hardest things to ask for?

A few days after the New Year, I finally got my shit together and hired a couple of painters to finish my living room. The time had come to stop living among drywall and become a grownup, with a proper salon to match. The job would take two weeks, half of it just for the cutwork on the ceilings, which meant Eleanor, Lucy and I would need to vacate. You cannot have cats on a job site when there is painting involved. This should need no explanation.

I started looking for a pet-friendly Air Bnb and announced to Michel and Simon that they could stop making fun of my living room; adulting was finally in gear. “Don’t rent something, just take our place,” Simon said. “We won’t be there til at least the second week of January.” Really? This would save me a thousand bucks at least in rent, which I could use because the painters weren’t cheap.

Michel and Simon’s place is a fairy tale cottage with a stepped garden filled with apple and plum trees, a koi pond with actual lily pads and an adjoining pasture. Unlike my house, it’s also heated properly. I thanked them and said I’d keep the girls sequestered in one room. A small perimeter benefits newly transplanted cats. Throwing them into a giant new space stresses them out, which would certainly mean Eleanor would regress back to free-range pooping in some faraway corner, and then their own cat would stumble upon it when she came back home. It would be an act of war.

Michel said we should take the master bedroom up in the rafters because it had a desk and an adjoining bathroom. It is a lovely room, with a little upholstered crapaud chair by a cubby window that looks out onto the pond. I told him we’d be honored.

In the four years since I last did a temporary move with cats, it feels like I have aged 300. A recent series of MRIs revealed a jambalaya of wear and tear injuries brought on by my sedentary profession: degenerative disc disease and arthritis in my spine and hip, with fluid buildup in the hip joint, swelling in the bone, and tendonitis in an adjacent muscle. Since it flared up a few months ago, I walk stooped over half the time; the other half I’m limping. It’s agonizing, has hampered my ability to concentrate, and until my doctor gets back from her very long vacation to help with a treatment plan, it means lifting anything heavy is out of the question.

I now understand some of what my mother went through when I was little. A freelance interior designer with herniated discs, she’d finish up a lot of workdays flat on her back while we’d run around screaming and throwing food, sneering when she begged us to give it a rest. She had no sick leave, so after each of her two surgeries, she leaned on one of her best friends to drive her to appointments so she could keep working while she recuperated.

So I already knew that this kind of pain means you have to ask for help. I am utterly awkward with this. What I can’t handle on my own, I try to make sure I can pay someone else to do, because asking for favors creates debts. It makes you look soft and needy, like you don’t have it all together. Nobody wants that.

The favor economy of Saint-Maxime took some getting used to for someone of my disposition, though I am making progress. Jeannette would scream at me and leave behind half the cash when I paid her Paris rates to cat sit, because “it’s not like that here!” I still don’t know quite how to insert myself into this ecosystem smoothly. I prefer to be transactional, but people so rarely need what I can provide, which is mostly just English copywriting skills and the occasional lift to the train or the mechanic.

A day before the move, on a short, slow Sunday afternoon walk with Jean-Yves and Cassandre, my limping got so bad, Jean-Yves had to give me his arm so I could make it home. I told him there was no way I’d be able to get Eleanor and Lucy, two litterboxes, a giant, very necessary scratching post, a suitcase, yoga mat and groceries, over to Michel and Simon’s the next day by myself.

He volunteered immediately but said we needed to be strategic. A fast-oncoming snowstorm was due to hit us by noon the next day, which was when I planned to relocate. I had only been back from Los Angeles for like 48 hours by then, so my cupboards were bare, as would be Michel and Simon’s. I’d need to get to the grocery store before the storm hit and we got snowed in, an inevitability since very few of the roads get treated in the remoter corners of Le Perche like Saint-Maxime. We have no commerce. We have 175 people. We don’t count.

Because my car is heavier than Cassandre’s, we decided we’d take hers and the three of us would go to the nearest supermarket the next morning once I got the painters set up. (Reminder that in the French countryside, nothing is open on Sunday.) The next morning we showed up to our designated, ten minutes away, and it was inexplicably closed, so we drove as fast as we could 25 minutes in the opposite direction to Saint-Jouin for a panic shop at the giant Super U. Because I know the layout by heart, I managed to get the urgent necessities in 15 minutes: broccoli, tangerines, duck shepherd’s pie, Little Gem lettuce, melty chocolate cakes from Bonne Maman, sweet potatoes, fancy ginger ale, too many lemons, oat milk, chicken legs, saucisse de Toulouse, tartiflette, red wine.

The snow was coming down in chunks by the time we paid up and got back out to the parking lot, so we crawled back to the village stuck behind a very cautious camper van. By the time Jean-Yves helped me unpack my car at Michel and Simon’s, the snow was so thick I didn’t dare drive him back to his place, so he walked the kilometer and a half back home alone, under a silent carpet of white. I spent the next week and a half counting my blessings as Eleanor and Lucy navigated the rafters and miraculously didn’t shred anything.

We have a proper nucleus of meaningful support in our little pocket of Saint-Maxime. We know each other’s recipes and celebrate each other’s good news and wipe each other’s eyes when somebody suffers a loss. It is a proper cocoon, and none of it was a given when I got here four years ago.

When I get too weird about not being 100% self-reliant, even in such kind circumstances as the ones I live in now, I remember the end of my father’s life. He had terminal prostate cancer and opted to use hospice care for his pain meds, but he wanted to stay in his apartment, and I couldn’t blame him. It took a year or so before it got really bad, and finally his girlfriend called me to say that he needed more help than she could give anymore. It was time for us kids to take it in hand. Of my siblings, I was the only one with a job I could do from anywhere, so why not my father’s living room, sitting on his Harvard chair surrounded by stacks of legal file boxes eventually destined for a dumpster? I volunteered.

I spent a few months there with him on and off, cooking and grocery shopping and driving him to various medical appointments. They weren’t treating the cancer, but he had a lot of secondary infections that needed looking after.

When he would nap, time stopped. I’d often stare at this big oil painting he had on the wall near his front door that depicted a sort of mystical jungle scene. It was one of the last possessions he had left from back when he was flashy and loaded and drove a convertible Mercedes and was still married to his horrible second wife. I’m pretty sure they bought the painting together from an art gallery in Paris. It was by a student of Henri Rousseau, painted in grayscale, but each animal was rendered in a different squiggly brushstroke to add another layer of dimension. I’d start at the big black lion, and move onto the owls, and then the zebra, and wonder if my dad would wake up howling from the morphine wearing off, or instead emerge from sleep peacefully, and go make himself another four liters of organic vegetable juice that absolutely would not heal his cancer.

My father and I had a very complicated relationship when I was younger. He loved me enormously, but he was often neglectful, sometimes to the point of borderline sadistic. If I made him laugh, I was OK, but if I needed something, or was emotionally dysregulated, I would either get a lecture or get blanked. If you’re wondering how I came by my fear of asking for help, I was trained into it.

I could have given my dad as good as I had gotten, it would have been only fair, but by the time he was sick we had long ago mended our most splintered fences. He needed help, and I could give it, and that was all there was to it. He thanked me for it all the time, but I could see he hated asking. It was there behind his eyes, a mild desperation he felt humbled by. I strongly suspect that’s what I’m hoping to avoid myself, and I really should get over it already.

I always told my dad it was my pleasure, and while his cancer was not a pleasure, being able to help him with it was. My father was a legitimately brilliant and quite funny man, and we spent a lot of our time together laughing our asses off. We had all the conversations that needed having. I got to be somebody’s hero. I got to bury all the bullshit, which made me a hero to myself as well. And I learned what it was like to die. Death doesn’t make you noble. When you know you are going to die, you don’t go stand by the river that runs in front of your apartment to contemplate what it all means, you watch another episode of The Daily Show and do things that make you feel normal until you can’t anymore.

Eventually, my father became skeletal and then he was delirious and then he was gone. My brother and sister showed up to do most of the cleanup, which I didn’t need to ask them to do. The three of us split his few possessions equitably, also without any drama, thank God. The painting was the only thing I wanted.