(Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and condolences. Next week I will post the last journal entry on my mom’s transition. I feel like I want to move on to some other writing, but had to write about the experience for my own spirit, and also with the hopes that it can be a comfort to others…Tim.)
Thursday, March 6, 2008
8:23pm
Yesterday was a whirlwind around here - a phantasmagoria. Mixed in with every swirling episode of drama, tragedy, and comedy were moments I can only call miraculous. I don’t know if what occurred will be believed, but I know that they are reminders for us of our own mortality and immortality. One might think what happened was some kind of collective delusion or wishful thinking. Perhaps one might say that the almost divinely-inspired episodes were created by me and that my family was only induced to believe them, to see them because they believed that I saw it, and me being a moniker of “reason” in their eyes I could hardly be doubted. But they saw and felt what happened, too.
Before I write about that, I wanted to note that today was a non-stop assembly line of nieces, nephews, cousins and aunts, old friends visiting Mommy one last time; crying; many tears; Mommy occasionally waking to see them, but unable to speak – smiling at a few, recognizing them. Some tried to rouse her, but unsuccessfully: “Joan? It’s me. Can you hear me?” I think they wanted her to see them, for her to know that they were there in the end, to get one more morsel of recognition from a woman they love.
I was happy they all came in one day: better to get it over with now so that sisters, dad and I can have the last few days alone with her, privately holding her hands, caressing her cheeks, swabbing her dry mouth with little sponges on sticks because she can barely drink anymore. This is awful. It’s almost unimaginable what a body contends with as the cancer makes it’s final, ravenous battle. This is my mom’s body’s Waterloo.
The hospice nurse put a catheter on my mom today. She showed Sandy how to empty it. Only Sandy knows this and none of us have asked how to do it. We’ll leave that up to our little trooper of a sister. Thank Jesus, Buddha, and the Wizard of Oz I don’t have to lift Mommy onto the toilet anymore. I don’t think I could take it; my back is aching. I’ll need a good adjustment from my chiropractor after all of this is finito Mussolini.
I’ve almost lost track of the days. This journal is the only thing that keeps me sane. I haven’t had any sleep except for little catnaps here and there since Tuesday morning. Neither has anyone else. Cindy has been here in the evenings, torn between her family next door and the goings on in this theater of the holy absurd. Sandy’s family is in Virginia, Kathy’s in New Jersey, so they only have to deal with the occasional phone call. Cindy isn’t here much and we try to understand, but it’s difficult. She says she’s lived next to Mommy and Daddy for three and a half years, so she doesn’t feel like she has to be sitting vigil all the time.
Again, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. We can’t judge Cindy. She’s dealing with this in her own way, but it’s hurting Daddy that she’s not here more. Plus, she’s missing all the wonderful moments when Mommy comes out of unconsciousness, opens her foggy blue eyes and smiles, offering us little mutterings like “I love you.” I can’t hear that enough and want to bask in every sunshine moment that’s left in my mom’s daytime here on earth. Every time she wakes I want her to see Timmie’s face and hear that he loves her, too.
At 4am this morning Daddy woke Sandy and me and said Mommy needed water. The three of us helped her up. Sandy held the cup and straw to Mommy’s mouth, but she didn’t have enough strength to pull water up through it, so Sandy put her finger over the top of the straw, held a little water in it and then released it into Mommy’s parched mouth. She was very thirsty. When she was done we laid her back down. She asked if Kenny was there and he said, “Kenny’s here.”
Mommy, eyes closed, then started going on about pies, the pie mix and pie racks – did he have the pie racks? She was adamant about it and then she was scared, worried about the pies. She mumbled something and Daddy looked at me questioningly. I said, “Say yes.” Daddy looked down at her and said, “Say yes.” He looked at me as if he couldn’t believe he had just repeated exactly what I said, like Burns and Allen doing their classic, “Say goodnight, Gracie.” (Goodnight, Gracie.)
We laughed harder than we’ve laughed since I arrived on Monday. It wasn’t over because I sat back on the carpet and farted. I’d been holding it in. That sent Sandy through the roof. She laughed so hard that she wet her pants. She really did: my sister peed her pants. Daddy was doubled over and we tried not to laugh too loud while Sandy held herself and waddled out of the room to change her soaked pants. Mommy looked up with those lovely eyes, a bit glazed, but still precious, and smiled, then to sleep once again. Laughter around the bedside is healthy.
Friday, March 7, 2008
12:39am
Mommy woke today while I was swabbing her mouth with a wet sponge. Her poor little mouth is dry as a piece of day-old toast. We have to swab it with cool water every fifteen minutes and keep a thin coat of Vaseline on her lips. Even though she’s hardly conscious, hospice told us that we should keep her as comfortable as possible. We’re vigilant.
While swabbing, her eyes opened wide. I use the expression “opened wide” a lot, but there’s no other way for me to say it right now. They’re closed so often that when they do open there’s a rush of excitement inside me as I lean forward, smile, touch her head and look into her eyes.
I said, “Hi, Mommy,” and she said softly, in that little girl’s voice that could only be Mommy’s: “Hi, Timmie.”
I talked to her a lot today while she was in the coma knowing that she could hear every word. I don’t want to mention a name, but someone said, “She’s in a coma, so how can she hear anything?” This person’s an inconsiderate Neanderthal, an ADD mongoloid who doesn’t know how to self-monitor his insipid remarks. People like him should be locked up together in the Houston Astrodome where they can eat each other down to the bone with third-dimension idiocy.
I told her how much she is loved, how much love she gave to the world, how big her heart is, and that she doesn’t have to be scared of anything. I told her there were angels all around her and there are.
I know this because of what happened earlier tonight as we all sat around the bed. This is one of the miraculous events: I saw a pinpoint of light moving low, across the floor, along the bed towards Mommy. She suddenly opened her eyes and whispered: “That’s nice.” I then felt a presence in the room: a warm, radiant presence that washed over me from head to toe; it was almost overwhelming – the peace, the understanding that came without words, the feeling that everything was going to be okay, that there were others looking after her. I cried, overcome with waves of emotion that pulsed through me three times. The room looked brighter and I felt the burden of my mom’s dying lift from the room. Kathy, Sandy, Daddy felt it, too. An angel, perhaps my mom’s guardian angel as my friend Vakasha believes, was there with us, holding my mom. Balderdash, you might say, that’s a bunch of hooey – it was all in your mind. No, it was in my body, my soul, I felt it, and I feel more at peace than I ever have about Mommy dying. As much as I can feel the keys of this computer as I type, I felt something in that room.
The next event was no less remarkable. A few hours after we felt the angelic presence my mom woke up again, eyes wide, smiling at all of us. We moved in closer and told her we loved her and she told us the same, and then it happened. At first the white glow around her face was almost imperceptible, but then it grew, surrounding her head, illuminating her face. Kathy turned to me: “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” I looked at Daddy and Sandy and their expressions looked as flabbergasted as mine. Mommy was literally glowing white; she was smiling, radiant, telling us she loved us. I don’t know how long it lasted – a few seconds, a few minutes – but it doesn’t matter. It happened and then she fell back asleep. My body was buzzing.
Looking back now a few hours after the experience, I think the moment she was glowing was when most of her spirit left her body and was in between worlds more than ever. A bit was left behind that wanted to hold on for whatever reason – to give us smiles, wide eyes, to get the body to the finish line, perhaps?
In the book Closer to the Light, Dr. Melvin Morse writes of children’s near death experiences (NDEs). In all of them, these children who have no knowledge of NDEs have similar experiences of being outside their body while in comas, seeing a bright light, a tunnel, beings of light and deceased loved ones who guide them during their unconscious moments between life and death. This is comforting to me because I believe that my mom’s soul is hovering around us with her angels, waiting for the final moment when her body succumbs to the inevitable last breath.
I only cry now and then because I think about her being gone and missing her, but she’s going to be okay. The biggest flock of geese flew over the house today and I wanted Mommy to be carried by their wings. Soon.
Right now I’m so tired that I can’t fall asleep. Cindy’s sleeping on the floor next to Mommy tonight. Daddy’s done it two nights in a row and his back is killing him. He’s on the loveseat in the sunroom now, snoring. It’s the first he’s slept in forty-eight hours.
I told Cindy that if she thinks Mommy is dying she should wake me up. She asked, “What if Mommy dies and I don’t hear her?” I told her that I don’t believe that “to be absent with the body is to be present with the Lord.” I do believe that people have had near-death experiences and floated above their beds and saw their bodies and their loved ones around them before heading towards the light. If Mommy dies tonight, we’ll be with her, no matter where we are in the house.
5:42am
I have to take a moment. If I don’t write about the following, I won’t be able to work through it mentally, emotionally. The images are burned in my brain, as if someone took a detailed branding iron and seared them into my gray matter. I hope that time will heal these wounds. I need to write about the horror, the physical dreadfulness of this insidious disease.
When my mom was in the hospital in December the doctor gave her two days to two weeks to live. Of course, he was wrong, but at that time Mommy asked him bluntly: “Do you know how I’m going to die? What’s going to happen?” He said she would get weaker and weaker, fall into a coma, and die in her sleep. “Will I have any pain?” No. No pain. “Good.”
As all the horror was happening during this week, watching my mother become an emaciated bag of bones, I hated that doctor for lying, then I thought, No, he did well by us, especially by my mom. I know Mommy well and if she knew what was coming, she would have dwelled on the horrible details for the three months. That doctor was being kind not to tell her too much and I thank him right now for this. He also knew that every person’s death is different and that there was no telling how exactly she would die. To give possibilities of what she would go through would be worse than the disease itself.
As mentioned before, the first thing that happened with my mom was that she couldn’t hold herself up, couldn’t hold a spoon, her speech became slow and slurred. The second thing that happened was her mind became foggier. She became more and more confused, discombobulated. She hallucinated sometimes and she’s now at the point where she mostly mumbles indistinguishably. An occasional “yes”, “no”, “uh-huh”, and “love you” are heard, but no more than that. She sleeps almost all of the time, having moments of consciousness that are less and less.
The most horrible thing we all experienced was this: Sandy woke me up early this morning around 4am. I had three hours sleep, maybe. Mommy had thrown up on herself, but it wasn’t food or your regular run of the mill vomit. She had thrown up while Cindy slept beside her on the floor. It wasn’t Cindy’s fault; she didn’t hear Mommy the first time. The second time she did. Mommy was holding the sheet up to her mouth as if trying to stop it or wipe it away. We’re not sure how long she was lying in the foul-smelling vomit, but this is what it was: bile and shit. Yes, putrid stomach bile and shit were coming out of her mouth. (Note: we found out on Saturday from the hospice nurse that there was a blockage of some kind in Mommy’s intestine. She was only guessing, but that’s what she thought it was.)
My mom threw up a third time when I ran into the room. We held a bowl in front of her mouth and this brownish yellow liquid came out of her. I almost threw up myself at the smell of it. I almost cried at the tense, horror-stricken face of my poor, dear mama bear. We wiped her mouth. I dumped the crap down the toilet, flushed, and ran back in to find my mom mumbling, “This is horrible…horrible…horrible….”
Cancer, as I’ve said before, is insidious. Malevolent.
8:30am
Still no sleep for Timmie or Sandy. We told Kathy to take a break. She was sleeping in her chair, her upper body resting on a pillow on the bed near my mom’s feet.
Mommy seems very peaceful right now.
I’m sitting here next to her on a little stool by the bed with laptop in my lap. She woke one time with Sandy and me there. Our faces were close to hers. We touched her cheeks and comforted her hot forehead with a cool washcloth and swabbed her mouth with the little green sponge on a stick. Suddenly her eyes opened and we jumped back and screamed. We laughed at this, but I think we were really laughing at the vile aspects of the deterioration of our mother’s body. We needed to laugh at something…anything.
I’m thankful I have this time here with my family, with Mommy, to tell her more things I wanted to tell her. I know she can hear me. I wish she could talk. I wish it was all over.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
Home Again, Home Again: Part 4
(We had the memorial services for my mom this past weekend. Being at the grave site, it all seems real now, like what happened wasn't a dream, although it felt like it while it was happening. Reading back through my journal on my mom's death and dying, it helps me process everything, and remember it all so that when I die, I can remember the terror and joy of life and death...Tim.)
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
3:05am
I’m sitting up, leaning against Mommy’s bed again. She woke up fifteen minutes ago, mumbling. I turned on the light and asked the first of four questions that we ask her upon waking: Are you in pain? A long awaited response until finally, a whispered: No. Her hand shifted slightly and moved up towards her chest, resting on her sternum. Are you thirsty? No. Her hand moved closer to her chin, made a feeble gesture towards her lips and then fell back down. She moaned. Are you hungry? No. Do you need to go to the bathroom? No, I’ll go…later. Then her hand reached up and her listless fingers brushed her nose. She had to scratch her nose, that was all. It’s heartbreaking to see my mom’s lassitude, her lack of energy to do something as simple as scratch her nose, to not even be able to articulate what it was she needed. I lifted up her arm and moved her finger across her nose so that she felt like she was doing it herself.
My mom is more than body and mind – these ephemeral parts are not what make her who she really is. The countless disguises we wear that the mind creates are a form of fear. Mommy is heading towards freedom from that fear and a return to her source of Being. The illusion of the self is disintegrating as her body and mind do the same. I welcome it for her, however, if I’m honest right now I hate it because I won’t be able to call her on the phone anymore, watch old movies with her, eat her turkey meatloaf, and the myriad memories singular to our mother and son relationship. I know I’ll eventually be relieved when she is gone and has made her transmutation, but right now I’m hanging on to every moment left with her.
I keep waiting here on the floor for the final death rattle. There is a long pause between each breath and it seems to be getting longer. Just when I think she’s not breathing, there’s a deep inhalation – a sucking in of air against the back of the throat – and a pendulous exhalation. I’m not sure I can take much more. I could rip out all my hair, but am consigned to pull out one to break this severe monotony of labored breathing. I pluck another hair, drop it, watch it fall onto the carpet, and now I’m typing again. Since my mom became unable to clean, my dad has been compulsive about cleaning. He’ll probably notice the hair tomorrow morning.
The lamp on the bedside table is on and casts a tender, light ochre glow against the walls, on Mommy’s face. Her skin is flawless. There’s barely a wrinkle around her eyes or mouth. Where wrinkles do reside is from her chin down, the loose wattle of skin hanging in folds. There is a luminous sheen to her cheeks, redolent, freshly touched by my hands with a lavender lotion. She likes lavender. When her eyes do open, her pupils seem a bit foggy to me, not the Nordic blue I remember. They may have lost their luster, but I can still see the real Joan in them, the woman who has been constricted to this bed against her wishes. Even with the deterioration of her body, she maintains that sparkle in her eyes. She’s not going to give up easily.
5:13am
Mommy woke up again at 4:30am. Daddy, Sandy and I helped her onto the toilet, gave her some water, dished out the swill of morphine. While Mommy swooned back into an opiate sleep, we sat in chairs around the bed and Daddy told us that earlier, while lying on the sofa, he started thinking about his life with Mommy, his memories, things I’d never heard. He remembered their first kiss outside their high school in 1949; when Mommy picked him up from the Navy in their 39 Model A Ford, coming across on the ferry, bouncing in the car and waving to him; in her bathing suit when they were dating – coming out into the living room dancing and prancing around, not knowing that the half-blind neighbor Sid Frasier was sitting in there. He also remembered their wedding day when she whispered in his ear that she’d love him forever.
I almost slept a few minutes ago listening to Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine when Mommy suddenly called out, asking if it was Levi or Luke – two of her grandsons. She said she couldn’t see. I turned on the light and told her I was here. She opened her eyes wide and looked straight into mine. “I wish the Lord would take me,” she murmured. “Take me to Jesus…please.” I told her I would if I could. I would, right then, right there. I didn’t have that power. “Kathy’s not here yet, Mommy,” I said. “You can’t go yet. You’ll go when everything is perfect.”
11:30pm
The day is almost over and I’m in the living room now, about to lie down on the couch to perhaps sleep, perchance to dream? Daddy’s in with Mommy, sleeping on the floor. You don’t really sleep in that room, though. You count the interminable seconds between breaths, and when it seems to go too long, you wonder, “Is she dead?”, and you pop up from the floor and then she scares you with a sudden mouthful of air. I sometimes feel as if my mom’s playing a little joke on us by doing this. Sandy and I have had hysterical laughs after jumping back in surprise from one of Mommy’s sudden gulps of air.
This day, this Tuesday, passed by with Mommy sleeping for most of it, waking occasionally for the toilet, some water, and a bit of applesauce or ice cream. She wants to sit up perfectly straight when she eats or drinks. I have to lift her back with my arm and then jump on the bed behind her on my knees, pressing my chest against her back, wrapping my arms around her arms, holding her elbows up with the help of my dad. I’ve found this the easiest way to hold her while she eats or drinks. I don’t mind. It gives me the opportunity to hold and support my mother like she did when I was baby.
My sister Kathy and her husband Nick came up tonight. Kathy’s staying until Mommy dies. She sang songs and played the guitar. Together we all sang You Are My Sunshine and a song we sang to her as children: You Are So Beautiful. Mommy opened her eyes a few times and smiled. I hoped that she would make the great transition while we sang, but she’s still here. She wishes she would go. She told me. I wish that she would go. We all do, however, the silver life thread is still connected between Being and her soul, her body.
I had a chance to be alone with Mommy while she slept this afternoon. I changed the focus of my eyes, looked through my third eye and saw the energy leaving her body, especially around her head where it whooshed out in great, pulsing waves. She’s leaving as I write this. She’s making the transition. I think that people who die suddenly don’t go through this. They’re here and then they’re not. With deaths like my mother’s there is a slow transformation from body and mind and soul to total spirit, to the dimension that is her destination. She’s between worlds right now. She comes back and opens her eyes to reassure us, to tell us she loves us, to make us feel better about what is happening. The entire process is beautiful and awful at the same time, but I’m awestruck just the same by this thing that is an indelible apart of life: death.
Mommy just woke up and was thirsty. It takes three of us to give her a glass of water to drink: me to hold her up straight and also to help Daddy hold her elbows up because she is bound and determined to hold the glass herself, even though her fingers are limp as dead minnows. Sandy holds the glass and straw. As a family we’ve become a well-oiled Mama-caring machine, with each person taking on different unspoken responsibilities. Sandy feeds her. I administer the morphine every four hours and we all take turns swabbing her dry mouth with a sponge twice an hour. Daddy does everything else and Kathy picks up after all of us. Cindy is dealing with this in her own way. She’s not around much. She lives next door and figures she’s seen Mommy every day for the past three and a half years since the folks moved here. She’s torn between her home, husband, children and wanting to be with all of us. We tried waking Kathy, but she slept right through everything. We shrug our shoulders, not judging either sister. We love them. We’re all going through this horror together, and each of us is an individual – we can be nothing else.
I must make an effort to sleep. It’s an effort because I want to be with Mommy constantly just in case she wakes up and wants to tell me something. One last I love you? Daddy’s on the floor beside her, so I resign myself to the couch for as much sleep as I can get before she’s thirsty again.
Wednesday, March 4, 2008
2:30am
I went to sleep on the couch listening to Fauré’s Requiem. Brahms, Mozart, and now Fauré. Their requiems, their great masses of death, aren’t the depressing masterworks one might think, but music that lifts my spirit. I listened to the Fauré because F. sang it tonight at Carnegie Hall with the New York Oratorio Society. It’s the second concert of his that I’ve missed because I’ve been called home to Mommy. The timing, the irony, the synchronicity is extraordinary. F. and I laugh about it, saying that unconsciously my mom is trying to keep us apart. She loves F., but doesn’t like that we’re together. This is her religion. If she didn’t have this disparaging point of view towards homosexuality she would rejoice in the happiness that we have found together. When the Bible speaks at all of the sin of same-gender sex, it’s always in terms of lust and not love. Lust with heterosexuals is a sin as much as it is with homosexuals. The New Testament also tells slaves to obey their masters, but Christians don’t consider this viable in today’s culture. I hope that when Mommy dies and is pure spirit she will see this and know that what F. and I have together is a wonderful love like she had with Daddy for fifty-five years.
I slept soundly, a bit high from a half bottle of wine shared with Cindy earlier this evening. Sandy rustled me around 1:30am and said Mommy had to go to the bathroom. I only got two hours of sleep, plus the three hours last night on the floor. That’s not much in two days.
In three days I’ve hoisted Mommy’s limp body seven times from bed to portable potty. The hospice nurse is putting a catheter on her tomorrow. In her pre-cancer prime Mommy weighed in at about 190, but now she’s probably about 140. (Mommy loves (or loved – I don’t what tense to write in anymore) her desserts.) She consistently tries to hold herself up, but inevitably slumps down unexpectedly. I told her that it would be better for her and me to completely let herself go in my arms rather than trying to hold herself up and then fall down in my arms, but she’s Swedish: she’s going to do what she wants. She was determined to help me by pushing herself up on her feeble gams, legs that used to strut up and down the football field when she was head majorette in high school. “She couldn’t twirl worth a darn,” Aunt Nancy once told me, “but boy, could she strut…her…stuff.”
Tonight I wasn’t sure I could lift her again, but I didn’t have a choice. The humiliation my mother would face wetting the bed was worse than acquiescing to her son, daughter, and husband helping her onto a toilet and waiting while she relieved herself. This is one part of my mother’s dying that is difficult. For my mom to let her children help her onto a toilet to pee in front of them, to have her daughter wipe her, her son lift her so her underwear can be pulled back up – this is something that wouldn’t happen except during the act of dying. And when before I thought that I could never do what I’m doing, I am doing it because she’s my mother. She bathed me, changed my wet, poopy diapers, wiped my butt, powdered it, and kept me safe and dry in the comfort of her arms. Now my arms are the ones that lift her from bed to potty back to bed again and there’s no shame. She came in as a baby and now she is going out like one, dependent on the loved ones around her to help her make this grand, noble transition.
“P-U,” she said as she sat on the toilet. “It stinks.”
We laughed, and then Sandy sneezed. Immediately, instinctively, without missing a beat, with the quickest response she’s had in three days Mommy said, “God bless you.”
We couldn’t help but laugh again. It usually takes her half a minute to say a simple yes or no to any question. I think we were laughing at the full breadth of morbid absurdity that surrounds us. It was all too real, and reality is often funnier than any contrived comedy. We had to laugh. I think we’ve laughed around that bed more than we’ve cried so far. I don’t believe we’d survive if we didn’t. Laughter isn’t just the best medicine, it’s a salve against insanity.
After she made water she wanted water. We held up her elbows while Sandy held the glass. Mommy, as always, was determined to hold the glass. We’ve learned to hold her elbows up so she feels like she’s in control of the glass. The straw rested between her lips, but she didn’t have the energy to pull the fluid up and into her mouth. We tried holding the glass up without the straw, but it went down too quickly and she gagged. There seemed to be nothing we could do right. Mommy let out a long sigh and said, “This is awful. That’s enough.”
When Daddy tried to give her morphine in a tiny bit of orange juice, Mommy said (again remembering that it takes a long time to speak), “No! The glass is so big. It’s too much.” We told her it was small, just like it always was. “It’s huge,” she said, eyes wide. When Daddy asked if he looked big, she said, “No, you’re small!” The mind’s going the way of the dodo faster and faster.
After I lifted her up off the toilet and back into bed, bringing her legs up parallel to each other while Daddy adjusted her head on the pillow and Sandy stroked her limp arm, Mommy said she was uncomfortable. We helped her onto her side, propping a pillow up against her back to keep her in place. This didn’t work. It wasn’t the comfort she sought. We got her onto her back again and then rolled her on the opposite side, repositioning a pillow once again to support her. She liked that, but her turban was bothering her. “Take it off,” I said. Sandy looked at Daddy and he nodded. My mom’s only vanity comes from losing her hair from the several chemo treatments she had over the years. After the last round, her hair fell out quicker than Liz Taylor can eat a box of bonbons. It’s grown back to a moderate white peach fuzz. “We’re going to take off your turban,” Sandy said. Mommy didn’t refuse. Sandy took it off and we cried, not because of ugliness, pity, or shame at our mother. No, this wasn’t the case at all. She truly, without a doubt, looked like a beautiful angel. She glowed. Her little head is perfect. She shimmered. I was crying because soon I wouldn’t see her beauty anymore, soon she’d be gone.
A gale wind made whistling sounds, trying desperately to get through the windows of the bedroom. Mommy and Daddy’s house is on a hill in Bird-in-Hand, PA. The wind can often be fierce. This is one of those nights. It almost seemed too cinematic for me because here I was with my dad, sister, and my dying mother in a house on a hill, a home being shaken and thrashed with wind and rain. One couldn’t write this without sounding cliché, but it happened.
“It’s hard,” she mumbled, “it’s so hard to…to….”
We didn’t need her to finish to understand how difficult it was for her to be like this. After a life of loving, mothering, giving her complete and total all, she is now left here, bereft of even the smallest amount of energy necessary to scratch her nose.
Sandy and I crouched down on the floor and looked at her through the silver guardrails of the bed.
“Mommy,” I said, “you look beautiful. You’re an angel.”
The wind ripped across the side of the house, shaking the windows. Shingles flapped up and down against the roof, sounding like a staccato drum roll.
“You are,” Sandy affirmed.
Mommy looked at us, trying desperately to keep her eyes open. The corners of her mouth turned up sweetly. “You two are cute.”
Sandy and I looked at each other, dumbstruck and delighted.
Daddy laughed, “Am I cute, too?”
“Uh-huh.”
That peculiar sound of the wind, a“whoo-ooo-ooo”, whooshed around the house.
“Am I handsome?” he asked.
“Really…handsome,” her raspy voice whispered.
We laughed and cried at the same time. Kathy then walked in rubbing her eyes.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
We told her what Mommy said.
“I always miss the good stuff,” she pouted.
Mommy was comfortable again. We were relieved. We were tired.
“Do you want to sleep for a bit?” I asked her.
“Uh-huh.”
We each kissed her in turn and on our way out Mommy said again, “You two are cute.”
“What about me?” Kathy asked.
I pushed her out the door.
So now I sit here in the living room trying to slow down my mind so I can sleep, and I wonder, are "You two are cute" my mom’s last words to me?
Amidst the crying, the sadness, the terrible experience of the lingering process of death at its gravest, the comedy of it all has surfaced again and again. Laughs are in greater quantity than tears right now. I know that circumstances are going to change. The balance will soon be weighed more heavily towards sorrow as the tears come crashing down like waves – unstoppable, necessary.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
3:05am
I’m sitting up, leaning against Mommy’s bed again. She woke up fifteen minutes ago, mumbling. I turned on the light and asked the first of four questions that we ask her upon waking: Are you in pain? A long awaited response until finally, a whispered: No. Her hand shifted slightly and moved up towards her chest, resting on her sternum. Are you thirsty? No. Her hand moved closer to her chin, made a feeble gesture towards her lips and then fell back down. She moaned. Are you hungry? No. Do you need to go to the bathroom? No, I’ll go…later. Then her hand reached up and her listless fingers brushed her nose. She had to scratch her nose, that was all. It’s heartbreaking to see my mom’s lassitude, her lack of energy to do something as simple as scratch her nose, to not even be able to articulate what it was she needed. I lifted up her arm and moved her finger across her nose so that she felt like she was doing it herself.
My mom is more than body and mind – these ephemeral parts are not what make her who she really is. The countless disguises we wear that the mind creates are a form of fear. Mommy is heading towards freedom from that fear and a return to her source of Being. The illusion of the self is disintegrating as her body and mind do the same. I welcome it for her, however, if I’m honest right now I hate it because I won’t be able to call her on the phone anymore, watch old movies with her, eat her turkey meatloaf, and the myriad memories singular to our mother and son relationship. I know I’ll eventually be relieved when she is gone and has made her transmutation, but right now I’m hanging on to every moment left with her.
I keep waiting here on the floor for the final death rattle. There is a long pause between each breath and it seems to be getting longer. Just when I think she’s not breathing, there’s a deep inhalation – a sucking in of air against the back of the throat – and a pendulous exhalation. I’m not sure I can take much more. I could rip out all my hair, but am consigned to pull out one to break this severe monotony of labored breathing. I pluck another hair, drop it, watch it fall onto the carpet, and now I’m typing again. Since my mom became unable to clean, my dad has been compulsive about cleaning. He’ll probably notice the hair tomorrow morning.
The lamp on the bedside table is on and casts a tender, light ochre glow against the walls, on Mommy’s face. Her skin is flawless. There’s barely a wrinkle around her eyes or mouth. Where wrinkles do reside is from her chin down, the loose wattle of skin hanging in folds. There is a luminous sheen to her cheeks, redolent, freshly touched by my hands with a lavender lotion. She likes lavender. When her eyes do open, her pupils seem a bit foggy to me, not the Nordic blue I remember. They may have lost their luster, but I can still see the real Joan in them, the woman who has been constricted to this bed against her wishes. Even with the deterioration of her body, she maintains that sparkle in her eyes. She’s not going to give up easily.
5:13am
Mommy woke up again at 4:30am. Daddy, Sandy and I helped her onto the toilet, gave her some water, dished out the swill of morphine. While Mommy swooned back into an opiate sleep, we sat in chairs around the bed and Daddy told us that earlier, while lying on the sofa, he started thinking about his life with Mommy, his memories, things I’d never heard. He remembered their first kiss outside their high school in 1949; when Mommy picked him up from the Navy in their 39 Model A Ford, coming across on the ferry, bouncing in the car and waving to him; in her bathing suit when they were dating – coming out into the living room dancing and prancing around, not knowing that the half-blind neighbor Sid Frasier was sitting in there. He also remembered their wedding day when she whispered in his ear that she’d love him forever.
I almost slept a few minutes ago listening to Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine when Mommy suddenly called out, asking if it was Levi or Luke – two of her grandsons. She said she couldn’t see. I turned on the light and told her I was here. She opened her eyes wide and looked straight into mine. “I wish the Lord would take me,” she murmured. “Take me to Jesus…please.” I told her I would if I could. I would, right then, right there. I didn’t have that power. “Kathy’s not here yet, Mommy,” I said. “You can’t go yet. You’ll go when everything is perfect.”
11:30pm
The day is almost over and I’m in the living room now, about to lie down on the couch to perhaps sleep, perchance to dream? Daddy’s in with Mommy, sleeping on the floor. You don’t really sleep in that room, though. You count the interminable seconds between breaths, and when it seems to go too long, you wonder, “Is she dead?”, and you pop up from the floor and then she scares you with a sudden mouthful of air. I sometimes feel as if my mom’s playing a little joke on us by doing this. Sandy and I have had hysterical laughs after jumping back in surprise from one of Mommy’s sudden gulps of air.
This day, this Tuesday, passed by with Mommy sleeping for most of it, waking occasionally for the toilet, some water, and a bit of applesauce or ice cream. She wants to sit up perfectly straight when she eats or drinks. I have to lift her back with my arm and then jump on the bed behind her on my knees, pressing my chest against her back, wrapping my arms around her arms, holding her elbows up with the help of my dad. I’ve found this the easiest way to hold her while she eats or drinks. I don’t mind. It gives me the opportunity to hold and support my mother like she did when I was baby.
My sister Kathy and her husband Nick came up tonight. Kathy’s staying until Mommy dies. She sang songs and played the guitar. Together we all sang You Are My Sunshine and a song we sang to her as children: You Are So Beautiful. Mommy opened her eyes a few times and smiled. I hoped that she would make the great transition while we sang, but she’s still here. She wishes she would go. She told me. I wish that she would go. We all do, however, the silver life thread is still connected between Being and her soul, her body.
I had a chance to be alone with Mommy while she slept this afternoon. I changed the focus of my eyes, looked through my third eye and saw the energy leaving her body, especially around her head where it whooshed out in great, pulsing waves. She’s leaving as I write this. She’s making the transition. I think that people who die suddenly don’t go through this. They’re here and then they’re not. With deaths like my mother’s there is a slow transformation from body and mind and soul to total spirit, to the dimension that is her destination. She’s between worlds right now. She comes back and opens her eyes to reassure us, to tell us she loves us, to make us feel better about what is happening. The entire process is beautiful and awful at the same time, but I’m awestruck just the same by this thing that is an indelible apart of life: death.
Mommy just woke up and was thirsty. It takes three of us to give her a glass of water to drink: me to hold her up straight and also to help Daddy hold her elbows up because she is bound and determined to hold the glass herself, even though her fingers are limp as dead minnows. Sandy holds the glass and straw. As a family we’ve become a well-oiled Mama-caring machine, with each person taking on different unspoken responsibilities. Sandy feeds her. I administer the morphine every four hours and we all take turns swabbing her dry mouth with a sponge twice an hour. Daddy does everything else and Kathy picks up after all of us. Cindy is dealing with this in her own way. She’s not around much. She lives next door and figures she’s seen Mommy every day for the past three and a half years since the folks moved here. She’s torn between her home, husband, children and wanting to be with all of us. We tried waking Kathy, but she slept right through everything. We shrug our shoulders, not judging either sister. We love them. We’re all going through this horror together, and each of us is an individual – we can be nothing else.
I must make an effort to sleep. It’s an effort because I want to be with Mommy constantly just in case she wakes up and wants to tell me something. One last I love you? Daddy’s on the floor beside her, so I resign myself to the couch for as much sleep as I can get before she’s thirsty again.
Wednesday, March 4, 2008
2:30am
I went to sleep on the couch listening to Fauré’s Requiem. Brahms, Mozart, and now Fauré. Their requiems, their great masses of death, aren’t the depressing masterworks one might think, but music that lifts my spirit. I listened to the Fauré because F. sang it tonight at Carnegie Hall with the New York Oratorio Society. It’s the second concert of his that I’ve missed because I’ve been called home to Mommy. The timing, the irony, the synchronicity is extraordinary. F. and I laugh about it, saying that unconsciously my mom is trying to keep us apart. She loves F., but doesn’t like that we’re together. This is her religion. If she didn’t have this disparaging point of view towards homosexuality she would rejoice in the happiness that we have found together. When the Bible speaks at all of the sin of same-gender sex, it’s always in terms of lust and not love. Lust with heterosexuals is a sin as much as it is with homosexuals. The New Testament also tells slaves to obey their masters, but Christians don’t consider this viable in today’s culture. I hope that when Mommy dies and is pure spirit she will see this and know that what F. and I have together is a wonderful love like she had with Daddy for fifty-five years.
I slept soundly, a bit high from a half bottle of wine shared with Cindy earlier this evening. Sandy rustled me around 1:30am and said Mommy had to go to the bathroom. I only got two hours of sleep, plus the three hours last night on the floor. That’s not much in two days.
In three days I’ve hoisted Mommy’s limp body seven times from bed to portable potty. The hospice nurse is putting a catheter on her tomorrow. In her pre-cancer prime Mommy weighed in at about 190, but now she’s probably about 140. (Mommy loves (or loved – I don’t what tense to write in anymore) her desserts.) She consistently tries to hold herself up, but inevitably slumps down unexpectedly. I told her that it would be better for her and me to completely let herself go in my arms rather than trying to hold herself up and then fall down in my arms, but she’s Swedish: she’s going to do what she wants. She was determined to help me by pushing herself up on her feeble gams, legs that used to strut up and down the football field when she was head majorette in high school. “She couldn’t twirl worth a darn,” Aunt Nancy once told me, “but boy, could she strut…her…stuff.”
Tonight I wasn’t sure I could lift her again, but I didn’t have a choice. The humiliation my mother would face wetting the bed was worse than acquiescing to her son, daughter, and husband helping her onto a toilet and waiting while she relieved herself. This is one part of my mother’s dying that is difficult. For my mom to let her children help her onto a toilet to pee in front of them, to have her daughter wipe her, her son lift her so her underwear can be pulled back up – this is something that wouldn’t happen except during the act of dying. And when before I thought that I could never do what I’m doing, I am doing it because she’s my mother. She bathed me, changed my wet, poopy diapers, wiped my butt, powdered it, and kept me safe and dry in the comfort of her arms. Now my arms are the ones that lift her from bed to potty back to bed again and there’s no shame. She came in as a baby and now she is going out like one, dependent on the loved ones around her to help her make this grand, noble transition.
“P-U,” she said as she sat on the toilet. “It stinks.”
We laughed, and then Sandy sneezed. Immediately, instinctively, without missing a beat, with the quickest response she’s had in three days Mommy said, “God bless you.”
We couldn’t help but laugh again. It usually takes her half a minute to say a simple yes or no to any question. I think we were laughing at the full breadth of morbid absurdity that surrounds us. It was all too real, and reality is often funnier than any contrived comedy. We had to laugh. I think we’ve laughed around that bed more than we’ve cried so far. I don’t believe we’d survive if we didn’t. Laughter isn’t just the best medicine, it’s a salve against insanity.
After she made water she wanted water. We held up her elbows while Sandy held the glass. Mommy, as always, was determined to hold the glass. We’ve learned to hold her elbows up so she feels like she’s in control of the glass. The straw rested between her lips, but she didn’t have the energy to pull the fluid up and into her mouth. We tried holding the glass up without the straw, but it went down too quickly and she gagged. There seemed to be nothing we could do right. Mommy let out a long sigh and said, “This is awful. That’s enough.”
When Daddy tried to give her morphine in a tiny bit of orange juice, Mommy said (again remembering that it takes a long time to speak), “No! The glass is so big. It’s too much.” We told her it was small, just like it always was. “It’s huge,” she said, eyes wide. When Daddy asked if he looked big, she said, “No, you’re small!” The mind’s going the way of the dodo faster and faster.
After I lifted her up off the toilet and back into bed, bringing her legs up parallel to each other while Daddy adjusted her head on the pillow and Sandy stroked her limp arm, Mommy said she was uncomfortable. We helped her onto her side, propping a pillow up against her back to keep her in place. This didn’t work. It wasn’t the comfort she sought. We got her onto her back again and then rolled her on the opposite side, repositioning a pillow once again to support her. She liked that, but her turban was bothering her. “Take it off,” I said. Sandy looked at Daddy and he nodded. My mom’s only vanity comes from losing her hair from the several chemo treatments she had over the years. After the last round, her hair fell out quicker than Liz Taylor can eat a box of bonbons. It’s grown back to a moderate white peach fuzz. “We’re going to take off your turban,” Sandy said. Mommy didn’t refuse. Sandy took it off and we cried, not because of ugliness, pity, or shame at our mother. No, this wasn’t the case at all. She truly, without a doubt, looked like a beautiful angel. She glowed. Her little head is perfect. She shimmered. I was crying because soon I wouldn’t see her beauty anymore, soon she’d be gone.
A gale wind made whistling sounds, trying desperately to get through the windows of the bedroom. Mommy and Daddy’s house is on a hill in Bird-in-Hand, PA. The wind can often be fierce. This is one of those nights. It almost seemed too cinematic for me because here I was with my dad, sister, and my dying mother in a house on a hill, a home being shaken and thrashed with wind and rain. One couldn’t write this without sounding cliché, but it happened.
“It’s hard,” she mumbled, “it’s so hard to…to….”
We didn’t need her to finish to understand how difficult it was for her to be like this. After a life of loving, mothering, giving her complete and total all, she is now left here, bereft of even the smallest amount of energy necessary to scratch her nose.
Sandy and I crouched down on the floor and looked at her through the silver guardrails of the bed.
“Mommy,” I said, “you look beautiful. You’re an angel.”
The wind ripped across the side of the house, shaking the windows. Shingles flapped up and down against the roof, sounding like a staccato drum roll.
“You are,” Sandy affirmed.
Mommy looked at us, trying desperately to keep her eyes open. The corners of her mouth turned up sweetly. “You two are cute.”
Sandy and I looked at each other, dumbstruck and delighted.
Daddy laughed, “Am I cute, too?”
“Uh-huh.”
That peculiar sound of the wind, a“whoo-ooo-ooo”, whooshed around the house.
“Am I handsome?” he asked.
“Really…handsome,” her raspy voice whispered.
We laughed and cried at the same time. Kathy then walked in rubbing her eyes.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
We told her what Mommy said.
“I always miss the good stuff,” she pouted.
Mommy was comfortable again. We were relieved. We were tired.
“Do you want to sleep for a bit?” I asked her.
“Uh-huh.”
We each kissed her in turn and on our way out Mommy said again, “You two are cute.”
“What about me?” Kathy asked.
I pushed her out the door.
So now I sit here in the living room trying to slow down my mind so I can sleep, and I wonder, are "You two are cute" my mom’s last words to me?
Amidst the crying, the sadness, the terrible experience of the lingering process of death at its gravest, the comedy of it all has surfaced again and again. Laughs are in greater quantity than tears right now. I know that circumstances are going to change. The balance will soon be weighed more heavily towards sorrow as the tears come crashing down like waves – unstoppable, necessary.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Home Again, Home Again: Part 3
(My mom’s body is dead. Writing about anything other than my experience is irrelevant right now. I’m sharing this with you because I don’t have a choice. My hope is that it isn’t redundant or boring, but can offer a brief glimpse into one woman’s transition from sickness to light. This is pretty raw. It’s basically a journal I kept. I wanted to show the wonder and horror of the experience of my mom’s death because I need to exorcise the images and emotions that this time evoked. It is a work in progress and will be in several parts over the next few weeks…Tim.)
Monday, March 3, 2008
11:02am
I bought a business class train ticket from New York to Lancaster. I’ve never ridden in the business class car, but am going to from now on. I’m right next to the café car that supplies me with miniature bottles of cheap California Merlot. I’ve reclined in the cushy leather chair and intend to work on the blog, listen to Brahms’s Requiem, and enjoy not being in the usual cattle car of train transport with screaming children and cretins answering their tintinnabulating cell phones, talking ad nauseum in grating voices that recall early grammar school days of white chalk screeching on blackboards. There are only two other people in the car and they are subdued, enjoying the almost reverent air of business class, each of us meditating on our separate stories and journeys. I needed this traveling environment to soothe my mind. My mom is dying. She’s dying. I can’t believe that I’m going home to be with my mom as she dies. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
Since last Thursday Mommy had gotten dramatically worse, her legs weakening, her hands unable to hold a glass of water or toothbrush without dropping them, her mind starting to feel the lethargic and confusing effects of the toxins and calcium that are rapidly building up in her body. It is unexpected. She was doing so well for so long and this dramatic turn has taken us all by surprise. We weren’t ready for this. We weren’t prepared.
No matter how much I’ve tried to prepare myself for Mommy’s death, nothing can really prepare one for this. I’ve been told this by F. and friend Kenneth, both who’ve lost loved ones. Yet, I still try to prepare myself, but without getting too emotional about it. I’ve constructed a wall inside me since my last visit home. The wall is one of feeling numb towards the daily volatile state of my mother. I’ve learned from others that I can’t be so reactionary every time my mom drops a fork or feels a twinge of pain in her legs, however, I now know that I’m going home to be there for her death. The time for denial is over – this is the real thing.
I didn’t know how to pack. I knew I had to bring my black suit for the memorial services. We’re having two: one in Pennsylvania, one in New Jersey. My mom has too many friends in both states to have one. Do I bring two or three t-shirts, how many pairs of underwear, will it be warm or cold in PA, I’ll check the weather, looks like between the 40s and 50s for most of the week, socks, how many socks, I can do wash, don’t worry, don’t worry, it’s going to be okay, she’s going to die quickly, painlessly, it’s going to be an easy transition. That’s what the doctors said, they did, they said it, so it must be true.
9:41pm
I’m sitting in the living room, taking a little break from being with my mom. She’s sleeping. Sandy and Daddy are with her.
My train pulled up in Lancaster at 1:52pm. Sister Cindy picked me up and drove me home. My stomach churned the two glasses of wine and chicken pesto wrap I had on the train. Sandy was at home, too. She drove up from Virginia yesterday. She’s younger than Cindy, but older than Kathy, who’s coming on Tuesday – tomorrow. I’m the youngest. We’re 49, 47, 41, 35 years old respectively. Cindy gripped the wheel hard, squeezing and releasing it nervously, and warned me about what I was going to see. Nothing she could say could prepare me for what I think is going to be one hell of an awful week.
When I arrived home, my mom was still in her big bed, propped up on two pillows, eyes closed, sleeping. I lay down next to her and told her softly that I was there. Her eyelids fluttered and then opened. She did her best to smile, but it seemed hard to do, like opening her eyes.
“Are you scared?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “It’s hard….” Mommy’s speech was slurred, excruciatingly slow, like waiting for thick, gooey ketchup to come out of the bottle. I had to be patient and give her time to answer the questions.
“It’s hard to what?”
“It’s hard…to hold on…. I wish…I wish I would go.”
I told her that it was okay to go, that she didn’t have to hang on for us. Peace. Serenity. That’s all she wanted, and all we wanted for her.
Mommy fell back into a deep sleep. Our Amish neighbors sent us a dinner. We ate, but weren’t that hungry. Eating just to eat. Sandy, Daddy, and I woke Mommy up and told her that we needed to move her into the other bedroom where the hospital bed was waiting. It had been delivered this morning by hospice and we needed to get her there before she became completely immobile. We leaned her up in bed. I wrapped my arms around her. As I lifted her into the wheelchair I felt her spinal chord against my hands, as if there was no skin there. She’s wasting away. The cancer’s eating her. She moaned and cried out in pain. I didn’t mean to hurt her. “Oh, Timmie, oh…stop hurting me,” she mumbled. I know she was only being honest, but it still wounded me. Writing this now, I’ve forgiven myself.
We wheeled her across the hallway into the bedroom, and this time I put my arms under her armpits, but didn’t grab hold, simply leaving them extended past her back like a forklift. I lifted and brought her onto the bed where she lay back on the pillow and sighed. I’m going to lift her this way from now on because I didn’t hurt her. I looked out the window. It was dark, but outside I knew there were freshly tilled fields. Life proceeds quietly outside this insular house.
We fed her, gave her water, then pressed the button on the bed control and lowered her head and back so she could sleep. Cindy came in and we each took a turn saying a prayer over Mommy, asking God to take her soon so that she wouldn’t suffer. We kissed her on the cheek and told her we loved her. She told us that she loved us, too. We left Daddy alone with her. I peeked back in and watched him sob over her while she lay there, motionless, and then her lips moved – she wanted to say something. I anticipated her saying, “I love you, Kenny,” but did she say that? No. What she said was (you should know my dad has a salt-and-pepper beard): “Your whiskers are hurting me.” That made my dad laugh. Mommy smiled, and then he left the room.
11:08pm
I’m now lying on the floor next to my mom’s bed. Daddy wants to sleep here for the rest of the week, but wanted me to have a night with Mommy. We don’t want her to be alone at any time. We have a thin camping mattress on the floor. It’s not very comfortable, but I don’t plan on sleeping much, not with Mommy breathing the way she is. I’m in the dark, listening to the forced wheezing, the almost interminable pauses between her breaths until she forcefully inhales and then exhales, each breath sounding like the one that might be her last. Could it be? Will it be tonight?
I think of the woman today at the train station and how she had a hard time living with things happening for a reason when good people die of cancer, like her mother, and like mine. I don’t have the answer except to believe that my mom is definitely going through this for a reason I can’t understand. Or perhaps I can understand it by simply surrendering to it, accepting it, and not trying to question it anymore. I think perhaps that’s the key because I can’t possibly know why my mom is withering away. That road of questioning “why her?” will lead to bitterness against everything I believe. I can’t travel down there.
Earlier this evening, Mommy woke and said she had to go to the bathroom. I lifted her up, swung her legs down, and got her on the portable toilet with Sandy and Daddy guiding me. I saw her spinal cord and tailbone sticking out, or rather pushing out on the bare, taught skin of her back. Emaciated would be an appropriate description. That word will probably come up a lot over the days that remain. We three made sure to cry softly so Mommy couldn’t see or hear us. I couldn’t help it. I hate seeing her like this. Cancer is abhorrent.
She peed and then said, “I have to shoot a bunny”. It’s an idiom for farting I’ve known all my life. I actually had to, too, so we farted together. We all laughed and then it hit me square on the jaw that my mom was dying and we were farting together. Absurd transcendence.
I’ve had two glasses of wine and taken a morphine pill. I don’t know why I took the pill. To dull the pain? I’m regretting it now. It’s making me loopy. I don’t want to numb myself to the pain. I have to experience this. It’s time for beddy-bye. I need to sleep. I hope my mom passes during the night.
Monday, March 3, 2008
11:02am
I bought a business class train ticket from New York to Lancaster. I’ve never ridden in the business class car, but am going to from now on. I’m right next to the café car that supplies me with miniature bottles of cheap California Merlot. I’ve reclined in the cushy leather chair and intend to work on the blog, listen to Brahms’s Requiem, and enjoy not being in the usual cattle car of train transport with screaming children and cretins answering their tintinnabulating cell phones, talking ad nauseum in grating voices that recall early grammar school days of white chalk screeching on blackboards. There are only two other people in the car and they are subdued, enjoying the almost reverent air of business class, each of us meditating on our separate stories and journeys. I needed this traveling environment to soothe my mind. My mom is dying. She’s dying. I can’t believe that I’m going home to be with my mom as she dies. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
Since last Thursday Mommy had gotten dramatically worse, her legs weakening, her hands unable to hold a glass of water or toothbrush without dropping them, her mind starting to feel the lethargic and confusing effects of the toxins and calcium that are rapidly building up in her body. It is unexpected. She was doing so well for so long and this dramatic turn has taken us all by surprise. We weren’t ready for this. We weren’t prepared.
No matter how much I’ve tried to prepare myself for Mommy’s death, nothing can really prepare one for this. I’ve been told this by F. and friend Kenneth, both who’ve lost loved ones. Yet, I still try to prepare myself, but without getting too emotional about it. I’ve constructed a wall inside me since my last visit home. The wall is one of feeling numb towards the daily volatile state of my mother. I’ve learned from others that I can’t be so reactionary every time my mom drops a fork or feels a twinge of pain in her legs, however, I now know that I’m going home to be there for her death. The time for denial is over – this is the real thing.
I didn’t know how to pack. I knew I had to bring my black suit for the memorial services. We’re having two: one in Pennsylvania, one in New Jersey. My mom has too many friends in both states to have one. Do I bring two or three t-shirts, how many pairs of underwear, will it be warm or cold in PA, I’ll check the weather, looks like between the 40s and 50s for most of the week, socks, how many socks, I can do wash, don’t worry, don’t worry, it’s going to be okay, she’s going to die quickly, painlessly, it’s going to be an easy transition. That’s what the doctors said, they did, they said it, so it must be true.
9:41pm
I’m sitting in the living room, taking a little break from being with my mom. She’s sleeping. Sandy and Daddy are with her.
My train pulled up in Lancaster at 1:52pm. Sister Cindy picked me up and drove me home. My stomach churned the two glasses of wine and chicken pesto wrap I had on the train. Sandy was at home, too. She drove up from Virginia yesterday. She’s younger than Cindy, but older than Kathy, who’s coming on Tuesday – tomorrow. I’m the youngest. We’re 49, 47, 41, 35 years old respectively. Cindy gripped the wheel hard, squeezing and releasing it nervously, and warned me about what I was going to see. Nothing she could say could prepare me for what I think is going to be one hell of an awful week.
When I arrived home, my mom was still in her big bed, propped up on two pillows, eyes closed, sleeping. I lay down next to her and told her softly that I was there. Her eyelids fluttered and then opened. She did her best to smile, but it seemed hard to do, like opening her eyes.
“Are you scared?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “It’s hard….” Mommy’s speech was slurred, excruciatingly slow, like waiting for thick, gooey ketchup to come out of the bottle. I had to be patient and give her time to answer the questions.
“It’s hard to what?”
“It’s hard…to hold on…. I wish…I wish I would go.”
I told her that it was okay to go, that she didn’t have to hang on for us. Peace. Serenity. That’s all she wanted, and all we wanted for her.
Mommy fell back into a deep sleep. Our Amish neighbors sent us a dinner. We ate, but weren’t that hungry. Eating just to eat. Sandy, Daddy, and I woke Mommy up and told her that we needed to move her into the other bedroom where the hospital bed was waiting. It had been delivered this morning by hospice and we needed to get her there before she became completely immobile. We leaned her up in bed. I wrapped my arms around her. As I lifted her into the wheelchair I felt her spinal chord against my hands, as if there was no skin there. She’s wasting away. The cancer’s eating her. She moaned and cried out in pain. I didn’t mean to hurt her. “Oh, Timmie, oh…stop hurting me,” she mumbled. I know she was only being honest, but it still wounded me. Writing this now, I’ve forgiven myself.
We wheeled her across the hallway into the bedroom, and this time I put my arms under her armpits, but didn’t grab hold, simply leaving them extended past her back like a forklift. I lifted and brought her onto the bed where she lay back on the pillow and sighed. I’m going to lift her this way from now on because I didn’t hurt her. I looked out the window. It was dark, but outside I knew there were freshly tilled fields. Life proceeds quietly outside this insular house.
We fed her, gave her water, then pressed the button on the bed control and lowered her head and back so she could sleep. Cindy came in and we each took a turn saying a prayer over Mommy, asking God to take her soon so that she wouldn’t suffer. We kissed her on the cheek and told her we loved her. She told us that she loved us, too. We left Daddy alone with her. I peeked back in and watched him sob over her while she lay there, motionless, and then her lips moved – she wanted to say something. I anticipated her saying, “I love you, Kenny,” but did she say that? No. What she said was (you should know my dad has a salt-and-pepper beard): “Your whiskers are hurting me.” That made my dad laugh. Mommy smiled, and then he left the room.
11:08pm
I’m now lying on the floor next to my mom’s bed. Daddy wants to sleep here for the rest of the week, but wanted me to have a night with Mommy. We don’t want her to be alone at any time. We have a thin camping mattress on the floor. It’s not very comfortable, but I don’t plan on sleeping much, not with Mommy breathing the way she is. I’m in the dark, listening to the forced wheezing, the almost interminable pauses between her breaths until she forcefully inhales and then exhales, each breath sounding like the one that might be her last. Could it be? Will it be tonight?
I think of the woman today at the train station and how she had a hard time living with things happening for a reason when good people die of cancer, like her mother, and like mine. I don’t have the answer except to believe that my mom is definitely going through this for a reason I can’t understand. Or perhaps I can understand it by simply surrendering to it, accepting it, and not trying to question it anymore. I think perhaps that’s the key because I can’t possibly know why my mom is withering away. That road of questioning “why her?” will lead to bitterness against everything I believe. I can’t travel down there.
Earlier this evening, Mommy woke and said she had to go to the bathroom. I lifted her up, swung her legs down, and got her on the portable toilet with Sandy and Daddy guiding me. I saw her spinal cord and tailbone sticking out, or rather pushing out on the bare, taught skin of her back. Emaciated would be an appropriate description. That word will probably come up a lot over the days that remain. We three made sure to cry softly so Mommy couldn’t see or hear us. I couldn’t help it. I hate seeing her like this. Cancer is abhorrent.
She peed and then said, “I have to shoot a bunny”. It’s an idiom for farting I’ve known all my life. I actually had to, too, so we farted together. We all laughed and then it hit me square on the jaw that my mom was dying and we were farting together. Absurd transcendence.
I’ve had two glasses of wine and taken a morphine pill. I don’t know why I took the pill. To dull the pain? I’m regretting it now. It’s making me loopy. I don’t want to numb myself to the pain. I have to experience this. It’s time for beddy-bye. I need to sleep. I hope my mom passes during the night.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Home Again, Home Again: Parts 1 & 2
(I’m at my parents house in Bird-in-Hand, PA right now. My mom is dying. We’ve been told she has anywhere between hours and a few days. Nobody can know for sure. I couldn’t complete everything I wanted to write because the time I need to commit to other things right now precludes anything else. Here are parts one and two. Please feel free to comment on the website underneath it or send it on to someone else…Tim.)
I’m sitting here in the apartment on Marble Hill after helping F. shear Jesus’s little lamby (the house Shih Tzu, Gio), cooking a turkey meatloaf, baking a dish of baked ziti, and making some chicken salad. I had to cook today. I wanted F. to have food for the week because I was going to be gone indefinitely. There was nothing else I wanted to do except drink champagne and cook, especially after I got the phone call from my sister, Cindy, suggesting that I come home soon. Mommy is failing very quickly. When I woke up I wasn’t expecting to leave tomorrow for Pennsylvania.
Gio was on the bed waiting when I awoke. We have a ritual: upon waking he crawls up me and gets as close to my face as he can. I grab his nose and shake his face gently. He snorts and burrows his nose in the pillow, rubbing the sides of his face with his paws. He then commences to lick my face. F. is not someone who relishes a dog’s tongue on cheek or chin – it drives him mad. Cries of “Stop licking me!” often echo in the apartment. Gio knows this and never attempts such canine kisses with his Daddy un. However, with Daddy deux, there is no shame.
PART 2
I’m on the train now, going home to face the inevitable. My fingers show the gnashing of my teeth. I don’t bite all my fingers, just the skin around my thumbs when I’m nervous, and they are now evidence of dissolute thoughts. The biting is just one small part of the bigger story of my life.
Everyone has a story. This thought overwhelmed me one morning when I hopped off the subway and looked at the passing faces of the throngs of people smashed against each other. I thought, Each person has her story, his story, and each one is different, but if we brought everyone together and shared these stories, we’d find links and connections in our lives that would ease some of the suffering and highlight many of the joys. That thought overwhelmed me. My face was hot as it is when I’m getting ready to cry.
I told her, “I’m sure it’s hard to believe right now, but things do happen for a reason.”
I nodded again. “I hope I didn’t sound trite. I didn’t mean to disparage your situation.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Can I ask what’s wrong?”
Yes you can ask, but do I have to answer? I would answer her. She had cancer and maybe she needed to talk. “She has cancer.”
She nodded. “I know about that.”
“My mom died of cancer two years ago, so I can’t always believe things happen for a reason.”
“That’s the biggest argument I could have against the happening for a reason point of view, but what comforts me sometimes is that my mom is on her own path.”
I didn’t say the following aloud, but I’ve thought about why my mom has cancer: Maybe it was because she was such a wonderful role model for people living with cancer, an angel on earth that shined in the midst of radiation and chemotherapy and never complained. If you visited my mom during one of many times in the hospital over the last eight years, after a chemo treatment that made her tongue feel like it had been sliced open with razor blades, or after she’d lost her beautiful hair, you’d be going to try to lift her spirits. I guarantee that instead of doing that, you’d walk out feeling lighter, both physically and spiritually – she would lift you up.
“I don’t know why she’s dying from this disease,” I continued, “but it’s out of my control. It’s not my life, but my life is being affected by it, so I can only take it one day at a time.”
“But it was out of your control, that’s one reason I think we’re all scared of dying. The train being late is out of your control.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Good luck to you, too,” she said.
I picked up my luggage turned, but then turned back around. “Actually, I don’t believe in luck, so I’ll say best wishes.”
She agreed. “Best wishes to you, too.”
Two people who came together to talk. One with cancer, the other with a mother dying from it. Each with a story. I left to continue writing mine and she would go on to live hers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
