Once, a man tried to kill me. A vast storm of heartbroken rage, he backed me into a corner, unescapable. Wild on crack, he brought that knife-ended arm up over my head, then down. With his 6 ½ feet and 300 pounds blocking the small cubicle in the bookstore, there was nowhere for me to go but into his furious embrace. Did I think that, plan that? I doubt it. Just the soft, animal body—intelligence in every cell—protecting me, itself.
He stabs and stabs, but I am hugging him, my face merged into his chest and he’s so big the knife goes over and past my shoulder, again and again. The employees on the stairs above see this, frozen into place.
Then we struggle. Then he slams my face on the metal counter and my upper jaw breaks, teeth caving in. Then I’m on the floor on my back and he’s on his knees at my head, leaning over me. The knife above my belly is so long.
Then somehow we fall out of time, into a space where there are only shades of perception--a seemingly infinite space. And I become a mystery to myself for suddenly it’s as if there are three of me, each with its own timeline. One, the animal self, apparently is screaming her head off. I can only think of her in the third person, she is that remote. The screams issuing from her mouth seem muffled and distant, many rooms away and I wonder who it is.. At first I don’t even realize it’s actually me screaming, that body feels so foreign and only realize this when I’m told later I was the screamer I heard.
Then there is the me who is watching and commenting. No body here, just perception, thought, analysis. And Thought is saying “It looks like I’m getting ready to die.” But there is no anxiety about this, no fear, just remote curiosity and commentary. That part of me feels a little more familiar and physically close, maybe in the same room. Then there is number three. This is the real me, the core I identify with, that I name my Self. This me is all that has any real presence or import as I abide in this timeless space.
And this me is looking up into my attacker’s eyes, and his are scared, tormented. This me seems to have no agenda, no intentions, no physical voice. Like I am pure consciousness. Then I’m aware of a subtle momentum rising within me and suddenly, with the calm authority of divinity itself I send a message to him, loud, clear yet voiceless that silently says “You don’t really want to do this.”
I have never spoken so clearly in my life.
At which point his scared eyes flash open in startled and amazed recognition, hearing my unspoken voice. His look sears into me. I feel I’ve known him forever. And forever, we are bonded. Then eternity slips and falls away. We re-enter Time. The knife, which had turned into a dazzle of slow liquid flowing up and down and almost dripping in space just above my belly now solidifies into its lethal edges and comes to a sudden halt. He jumps up and runs. I lie on the floor. Alive.
Now, twelve years later, in this hospital emergency room, my mother’s body is so restless; moving, grimacing, groaning, spouting wires, cables, tentacles. And I think of that time I was attacked and how my self split. I wonder how does it seem to her? Is she somewhere out of Time, calm, perceiving, commenting? Or simply Being with no fear, no need to push this way or that….
I don’t know. But I like to think she, too, is consciousness unafraid, as her body enacts its final drama.
Interim- a dream in early morning sleep April 16th:
In my dream, I find myself standing off stage, looking out onto a dimly lit platform. On the platform is Osa Grace Feather Lemon, my adoptive maternal grandmother in one of her dull, baggy shirtwaist dresses and heavy orthopedic shoes. She is standing so still, and yet her body feels keen to tremble and so ready to receive something vast. She is looking off stage and somewhat in my direction, but past me and as if I’m invisible; her arms wide open and so ready to embrace. I realize in my dream with complete assurance that she is there to receive and welcome my mother, her daughter Martha Ruth Lemon Abernathy. When I wake up, it is shortly after 2 AM and I feel my universe begin to shift but don’t know how.
Death Notes
April 17th….
Mom had a massive stroke yesterday morning. Dad called me a little before 6 am. Even before I heard the message, the phone was so loud and abrupt, ringing with its insistent, unwelcome news. He said “her arm was flailing” at 4am and he had called the ambulance. The medics estimated her stroke at around 2am. I sensed ny father’s great haze of disorientation and, with fear and baby-fisted panic, left home within 10 minutes, not knowing in which direction to go, Dad’s or the hospital. Or what I would find. The moment I heard the news I felt my own barely acknowledged life slip out of me in one breath, and some other life pour in, an intruder—shadowy and foreign. It seems like ages ago. I can hardly remember any other life now but the life where my mother is lying with mouth open, encased in plastic breathing apparatus, raspy gasping breath, tight green elastic straps buckling her ears. Oh she would just hate it if she knew.
Yesterday she constantly used her right hand randomly, the one not affected—yet—by the stroke. And with fingers crookedly bent, waved it, roaming up to her gown neck, pulling it down, pulling off her oxygen mask, reaching down and pulling up her gown, squeezing the sheet or the blanket. Again and again. Restless. It feels like such frantic restlessness.
I’m already so tired and my right hand is numb and hurts. But my mind resists this weariness, commanded by an unyielding desire to capture these moments and keep at least them alive. I just can’t believe I will never actually see my mother again—not in this life as this person. I feel as I have always felt--like a child--but an old, old knowing fae child with parents who are young stolid, clueless children.
April 18th.
ohhhhhhhhhhh………huge sobs try to crest and release, but uncharacteristically I’m damping down. I can’t go there yet. Too much to stay on top of.
April 19th…..
I’m in Mom’s room now. They just gave her some morphine. Her right hand is still going up in the air as if searching. And she fought me (and with what strength!) when I tried to keep her from pulling on the heart monitor wires until I realized what in the world did it matter? Let her rip all she wants. She didn’t get much control over anything in her life, so why begrudge instinct that small measure. It was disorienting to feel myself react before thinking or feeling. She’s going to die so why try to keep saving her? Habitual responses can flash into pain even in ordinary situations. Here, they threaten crashing with the vengeance of unending echoes. But as I look back on her helpless body I sense again how life is so much bigger than my fears. Right now they don’t really matter at all. And I like that. Like living here on this edge, moment-to-moment, able to recognize how unnecessary and confining all my fears truly are. It’s a great relief. I just want to be in the right place at the right time for my mother.
My dearest, darling mother……. .unbelievably, after almost a lifetime of unexpressed hostilities I find you are so perfect. You are now perfect to me and precious to the earth. I love you dearly. Now at last you are teaching me---or is it that I’m finally willing to receive from you on these stark and ultimate terms---so much about what is real; about control and surrender, judgment and forgiveness, power and grace. About how to be with what is. How can this be?
April 20th……
My cousin Marlou and her husband Bill traveled here to visit yesterday. They’re staying at a hotel for a few days. They know I’m alone with this and want to help. Marlou, you hold the deepest sense of family I’ve ever had which still leaves a cosmos of longing. And after all these decades you love who you imagine me to be with great charity. And oh….how they love you, Mom. You were their bright angel when Marlou and her brothers were young, coming to visit with presents, with trips and vacations, laughter and hope and interesting things to do and see beyond the very narrow lives they normally lived. With those high, glorious cheekbones framing your sparkling, wide smile. With what must have been to them in their heat-sodden, dusty N.C. tobacco fields and holy roller services your New York City glamour, striking stars in their eyes and minds with your city panache, your dyed-to-match spike silk high heels…..all 25 pairs of them. All those years of your miscarriages and silences, intrusive operations and disappointed hopes, while wanting and waiting…so taking up your sister’s children and loving them, guiding, pleasing, treating, indulging. Then later, sacrificing, to help them go to college when their parents couldn’t afford it all.
I look at this sharp angular face lying in the bed a few feet away, the body groaning sullenly, softly and with what feels like impatience for what’s down the road. And I remember how Mom hid so much from her sister Georgia when I was growing up. It surprises me to think about it, all the times she said…. “now, don’t tell your Aunt Georgia you’re getting ballet lessons….don’t tell Marlou…...don’t tell you have a French tutor coming to see you…..don’t tell you’re taking art/music/singing lessons in Greenwich Village.…..don’t tell you’re singing and dancing in that musical or about the plays you write and act in….don’t tell we go to those cafes/museums/performances……. don’t tell them the books you read…. don’t tell …..don’t tell……” and look! Look at all the hiding I‘ve done; the silences clung to. The gag still hanging from my mouth.
I try to imagine what it was like for her, coming from a family who didn’t support these activities. Even thought some of them immoral. After she knew my biological mother Dorothy had found me, she told me once and with great contained emotion that she had tried so hard to honor the letter Dorothy left with the adoption agency about what the Chrystal family was like. It was such a departure from her own Salvation Army background. But it seemed so natural to me, and I always wondered why I never felt any real energy for it at home…no active delight, interaction, mentoring or sharing. And with a small gift of clarity for a few of my past confusions rises an unbidden memory, as I recall when cousin Nathan said to me “we just always looked at you from afar, like some kind of strange creature. None of us knew what to do with you, you were so different from the rest of us.”…oh…..my poor darling Mom...how strange it must have been to raise a child you considered yours, knowing about that other influence coursing in her veins you could never forget, and, from indications you’ve given me all these years, you felt you could never live up to. But don’t worry. I know it’s already a late night, and I’ve certainly stumbled at length down a solitary, storm-wrecked path. But when I look, I can see the stars are finally, finally coming out and the light is clear and keen. It sings to me. Guided by the wonder of this luminous song, I’m discovering I can love you now with no judgment, no barriers, no wounded past to cloud my soul’s longing. The seed of your unlived life is here in the cocoon of my own, just ripe for renewal, rebirth. And I will always carry you here, with fierce tenderness, next to my heart.
April 21st……
A female Unitarian minister was just in here with her acoustic guitar, singing a very folksy song about Jesus and his love. She did ask if she could, first. I wasn’t sure I wanted that at all, but Marlou immediately jumped in and said “oh please, go ahead.” And her voice was piercingly clear and really lovely and I found myself crying despite my resistance to all these intrusions and assumptions. And now later am mad about it. I would think being a female minister and Unitarian to boot was probably too radical for Marlou. She and Bill are deeply religious. Really fundamentally religious, as in even-good-people-who-aren’t-saved-by-Jesus-will-go-to-hell religious. Religious as in daughter Beky lives in Africa bringing Christ to the unsaved. And to do this, what she mostly does is teach them how to read and to vote; gets them medicine and food; nurses them through malaria and AIDS. Carries the sick and tends the dead bodies. Grieves over them. Helps the men find jobs and self-confidence. Helps the women develop income and independence. In the pictures she sends home she is surrounded by so many colorful, bright, lively, glad smiles of the people who so obviously love her.
And…but….yet… I feel somewhat constricted by their presence. When Marlou writes me, almost every other sentence has three or four (or more!!!!!) exclamation marks after it. But they don’t preach to me, so I’m grateful. They pick Dad up and bring him to the hospital. They take him to lunch and then back home. They’re going to stay a couple of days and hang out with Dad so I can pay attention to this dying. I feel grateful, really grateful. And very possessive of my mother and jealous of this room and our space together. We don’t have a close family, never have had, so I don’t want company now, at this late hour. I want to pay attention, to bear witness, to mark the ending of this long broken relationship.
I want to see my mother look at me, but she can’t. I want to feel her eyes look out and convey something, but they can’t. Still, I touch one eyelid, lift it open, see the muted orb glancing around the room, almost as if she can see. I try to connect through that look. But it’s shattering. Tears roll down her face each time I open an eyelid. I know (I guess I know) that it’s just a physical thing having to do with some sort of something or other. But it’s eerie and hard, seeing those tears fall from those unseeing eyes. I do it off and on, but I’ll stop soon. It’s too hard.
April 22nd…...
I’ve filled Mom’s room with all her favorite flowers. Although it was hard to leave what has now become my eternal nest, I drove to Whole Foods first thing this morning determined to spend a lot of money in ways it was never spent for mom. So I bought one large hand-blown glass vase of deep jeweled raspberry and many ceramic containers. I loaded these with seemingly endless tote bags of burnished copper roses, frosted blue delphiniums, creamy button mums, lacy sea lavender and the not to be left out eucalyptus. Starved for something fresh and vital I also bought some kiwis, strawberries and melon chunks to eat. I caught myself setting these out between us in what felt like supplication. My clumsy, plastic-forked ritual an offering I wait for her to receive. I feel so young, superstitious and as conflicted about miracles as when I put out cookies for Santa, left teeth for my dream fairies, prayed for my possibly dead soul to be taken by some benevolent force. My nose conveys with electric, spine sharpening power the rich, clear juices of these ripe fruits and limbic Mnemnosyne grants the memory of an image of my mother’s nodding head bowed low over a dish of these fruits that she so loved. Then with just as much sharpness my mood spikes into furied resentment as I remember how seldom Mom got these fruits, and the reason why. Plummeting from the sacred to the profane comes old anger rising towards Dad.
Dad…..…last week before her stroke, turning on Mom with his hard, caustic accusatory words, each one a whip on her back, you could see her flinch, then deflate, caving in with each attack. All because he refused to hear what was actually said and understand what was actually meant. Never listening at all. Just pummeling and punishing, fueled by his own fear, shame and guilt. And she, sitting in her helpless innocence. Well….helpless, anyway, frail and past time for her own accountability.
I sat there, anxious and furious, words ready to fly out of my mouth in her defense, my body tensed to leap across the room. But saw her look at me pointedly from under her bowed head, and knew what that look meant. ‘Don’t say anything,’ she means. She wants to protect him from his own choking ignorance at this late date, actually for his whole life that they were together as far as I can tell. Yoked as her life-long accomplice, to please her I again cut my tongue out, politely chop off my hands, but poisons still leak everywhere around me. I can’t stand watching or participating in this.
Then the very last time I was with Mom two days before her stroke, the experience repeats itself, only directed at me this time. The misperception on Dad’s part, then the projection, the blame, the relentless momentum of attack. I hear this happens with early dementia. I know this can happen just with facing mortality, infirmity, loss of control. He’s old, he’s scared. He’s losing everything he cares about. So even in that painful moment I feel all my soft edges inside trying to grow, to cover all the shards and the bleeding. I want to forgive it, let it go. But it’s also the way he’s always responded to his fear and assumptions, long before aging set in, making everyone else responsible for what he can’t stand to see or feel or acknowledge within himself.
For some reason I flash back to the night I called him from the hospital to let him know I had been attacked but was basically ok. If you were a parent, how would you respond to your daughter calling with that news? “Oh my god, honey, are you alright? What can I do? I’m coming right down…” But the first words—only words—heard rushing out of the sticky lobby phone are “What did you do to make that happen?” An entire life summed up in one karate-chop sentence. Suddenly I can’t breathe, my weak effort of compassion for him drowning as my chest fills with the sludge of years. I can’t take this right now. So I told Mom “Mom, I’m so sorry. I’d like to stay with you but I’ve got to get out of here.” And did she say, “Can’t you just stop thinking about how you feel and be with me awhile? Do you have to be so self-absorbed? Do you not notice I’m going to die soon?” No. She said “Go, go, it’s ok. You deserve so much better than you’re getting.”
Well…….no pulsing anger really pushes the edges of my body here today. Just feeling dullness and the old stinking shame and yearning. Hospital food is making my body feel listless, as is no sleep night after night. Friends I still have here in Winston visit and call. They bring me healthy meals, magazines, kind words, long hugs. I am glad and grateful. And also still left with mostly a sense of distraction while in their presence.
I’m having a hard time processing impressions and sensations into words now. Feeling so much, too tired to try to catch it. Don’t want to write anymore about this right now. Words are failing. Overwhelm is claiming me. Being here is enough.
April 23rd…..
The skin on a small, exposed part of my back just pulled and slipped down off the hot, damp vinyl back of this chair. I must have dozed off. Heavy lidded, mouth tasting so foul, slightly nauseous from so little sleep. A little after 3am and the night nurse and assistant have flipped the lights on high so they can bathe Mom. They are so efficient. Once they saw I was awake they talked and laughed with each other. They cooed words of care to my mom’s vanishing body. They have a startling way of feeling terribly personal while seeming completely impersonal at the same time. Not like me all those years I washed Mom’s body. For me it was a meta-personal Sisyphean ordeal. A mirror for all my resistance to intimacy and self-awareness.
I would help Mom transfer her body into the wheelchair, her arms quivering and often flying out at the sides. Her feet rocking and stepping in strange little unrhythmic patterns as she tried to direct their movements. Then the plop down which came no matter how much I was trying to hold her aloft. It always hurt her hips and tailbone. The lungs wheezing a faint gust of complaint. Then the journey from living room to bathroom, made shorter and easier once moving into the assisted living home. But still scary for her. Frightened owl eyes as the wheelchair came near a corner to be rounded, shoulders drawing in, ready for the expected impact which never came. Involuntary jerks as her eyes misinterpreted a shadow on the floor for an obstacle that might send her wheelchair flying. Each moment, each movement, always so replete with possible dangers and all the possible reactions being lived out in visceral response. I was always already exhausted by the time we had simply reached the bathroom.
The bathroom…..what sadistic idiot designed the bathrooms in the assisted-living home? No room to roll the wheelchair next to the toilet for a transfer, doorways too narrow to maneuver in and out without advanced degrees in engineering and geometry. Instead, place mom’s walker directly in front of the toilet. Roll wheelchair up to it. Lean over the back of the wheelchair and place hands around Mom’s waist and help lift her as she drags herself up to stand with the walker. Breathe deeply and pray that she’s still standing as you back the wheelchair out of the bathroom. Then help her make a 180 to sit down on the toilet while reminding myself every second to stop holding my breath. Ok. She’s down. She would always need to rest for awhile here. So I get out the washcloths, towels, soap, no-rinse shampoo, creams, powders, bandages, clean underwear, housedress, socks. Grateful for a short reprieve from my own anxieties over her pain, fear and distress. It does her no good for me to be upset by this. So I fill my own lungs, soak in the air. I look at my swollen, tired eyes in the mirror. Remind myself to relax, that there is nothing that needs to be judged or fixed here. This is no place for opinions, agendas or preferences. This is something irreducible; an old, failing, long-handicapped body needing the simplest of care. Needing acceptance and love.
I actually can do that–I think…accept and love. It’s just that some part of me also wants to cry and split open. Wants to plead for us to return to the beginning of things, where everything started to go wrong. Wants to scream STOP! Open your eyes! Disaster ahead-- heart’s broken, minds bent, lives twisted! Wants to treat her like she’s my only child, protect her from herself, warn her that choices will be made that will warp all of us, almost destroy some of us. I want to warn her that she will get physically sick from living a lie and spend 33 years sitting in the same spot in a small, dark, fake-wood paneled den while fading away beneath a brittle mask. I want to wash clean not just her body but our terribly wounded connection. I want to let her know I forgive the high costs of her unconscious pain, and his… ..theirs (and of course, her parent’s and….) And I need to know if she forgives me, for certainly for long years my own heart was hidden, scared, and secretive. And so I hope she forgives how desperately I tried to protect my shattered, keening self with those decades of wary remoteness, passive anger, superficial responses and so many, many lies. What a master of disguise I became. To even think of it now—all that loss—almost does me in, it can just hurt so much. But I am stopping the buck here and I want her to know it. I am not handing her the responsibility for my life. I want her to know I wish I could have been there for her in her own frantic suffering and disastrous reactions. I want to make it all better, forever and ever. Want her to know me, truly know and still be able to love me, and for me to know her. But……the grief of it.,.,… this is not the time for it. That time is gone. This is the time for giving to necessity what I can give, and to think of her needs. To see past the mask and through the veil of history to that shimmering place where she is precious and perfect—where all of us are. I regret nothing, accept everything. To tell her so I will wash, over and over asking for this inside my heart.
Finally she’s ready. Mom lifts her arms over her head like a meek child. I remove her housedress, then bend down and pull off her underwear. Her old sick lady smell gags me. I remind myself that we all rot first before we turn into clean dirt----if the embalmers don’t have their way. I place a towel over her legs to help warm her. Then the hot wet washcloth does underarms and breasts, stomach and back. Many rinses later we’re doing the face, neck and arms. I dry her off often to keep her from feeling too cold in the bathroom that I’m already pouring sweat in. Her moments of happy submission come when I massage sweet smelling lotions into her skin, all over her back, throat and arms. I’m forced to lean at an angle that feels like it’s pinching a nerve. It hurts and the pain makes me want to move fast, rush through. But she is sighing with pleasure. I feel so grateful to give her something that feels good, so I make myself slow down. As slow as I can go, no matter how fast my mind says to move, move. I look at all the large, black raggedy moles covering her back, some oozing, others crusty and hard. I don’t want to touch them. They repel, scare me. But instead I focus lots of attention on them, caressing and softening.
Now she’s all creamed up on top and I wash her hair while she continues to sit on the toilet. She loves feeling my fingers massage her skull. We are such simple creatures in so many ways. Once her torso is clean, I put a soft shirt on her to help warm her up. Then I ask, “Do you want to get up now?” This is our standing joke. The first time I asked it in seriousness she sharply retorted “No I don’t want to get up, but what choice do I have?” So now I make my eyes go kind of googily and smile at her like she’s a small baby learning human facial responses and say it. With her head down she laughs weakly, no longer needing to see my expression to know it.
Upright, she holds onto the walker, her thin bluish hands all squeezed tight and she groans and wobbles. Her thin shoulders are sunken forward and her head hangs like that of an abandoned marionette. She is making herself ready for what is beyond unbearable to her; me washing the disowned shadows between her legs. I do it with care. Not lingering too long, but not trying to hurry through it with avoidance either. I think of her as my child, and wash what is so private to her with a mother’s determined, loving thoughts. Once she’s dried off and powdered, I help lower her back onto the closed toilet. She really grunts now, she’s so worn out from this ritual. I move the walker and put her feet in a tub of warm water to soak while I pull the clean dress over her head. Then I’m on the floor washing her feet, thinking of stories about this. I try to make this a sacred act of body love. The washing of feet. I take a long, long time with this part, trying to send messages of life and care to all those complicated, compacted nerve endings. Then more lotion, then socks and underwear. Then there’s the perilous trip back to the living room……….
…….and now I’m back from my reverie and in this hospital room and I hear her moaning quietly as the nurses finish the bath. They’ve washed and dried her hair and it looks so soft and like the hair of someone who doesn’t want to be dead. The first night that the head nurse came in to wash Mom I didn’t like her. Thought her too taciturn and grim to be touching my mother and that the grimness for some reason was possibly tilted at me. But the next night when she came in by herself, I warily asked her how she was. It was after 2am. She dropped down on the upholstered chair across the bed from me with a poof! and allowed a rueful smile. Sad……she was just so sad. This and that family member sick or lonely or poor. Then all her patients. She gets attached and wants to make them feel better. Makes them her own babies with each loving act and then always loses them. Because that’s the ward we’re on. She talks for almost an hour, tears slowly rolling down her face. I am, for at least the zillionth time, amazed at how my own insecure, touchy sense of expected recrimination can warp my perceptions. So I wonder on back channels how I managed to misperceive this person, as I watch and listen to her story. My body gratefully sighs and relaxes into how real she is, how honest. She works so hard and with such care. (And how, another part of me asks myself, is it that these late night confessors always find me out? The way that earlier in my life—even as a child—street people, the addicted and suffering, and all the crazed, lost and broken could always see me coming, picking me out of the crowd with their missile-locking eyebeams. My endless nights here feel like they’ve become some strange ordination.)
April 26th……
I’ve been too exhausted to keep up this death diary and finally went home to the mountains last night after nine 24-hour days in the hospital. I didn’t want to go, didn’t want to abandon her, didn’t want to miss what was coming, but the nurses “made” me. They said “Go…she may need you to not be here for awhile to be able to let go.” So I went, late in the day, a 2 ½ hour drive. Exhausted, nervous, guilty about leaving my father alone in Winston even though I haven’t seen him much throughout this dying time. And making up stories about what I’d do at home and what it would feel like. But once there I just sat overlooking the pond as the light left the meadow. Dogs and cats keeping vigil all around. Mickey too, and quiet. No thoughts, no words, no tears……..went to bed, thinking I would go back mid morning after creating some peace inside myself. But when is it ever like that? The hospital called at 5:30am, said to hurry, come now. So I did. By 8am I had picked Dad up on my way into town. He hasn’t wanted to be at the hospital much at all, it’s too hard on him. He calls all during the day, speaking about nothing that matters. I tell him what’s going on with Mom. He sighs, says, “well, I can’t do anything about that now,” and hangs up. He sleeps at night. I don’t. I watch…..wait…..but today I am taking him to the hospital. He should be there today.
They moved her right before I left yesterday.
Moved her from one side of the floor to the other.
From the brain care unit to the hospice unit.
From the side of the floor where the families and friends have red weary eyes, tight lips and rumpled clothes, to this side of the floor where there are great bursts of collective sobs, communal keenings echoing down the stark, polished hall and assaulting those on the other side who have clamped down on their grief as they try to maintain hope.
I hate this new room, it’s so tiny and dark. Her other room was large. Had one long wall of continuous windows looking out on the western horizon where, if I squinted and blurred my eyes, I could imagine I was seeing a peaceful sunset rather than a battalion of cell phone towers striking out across the distance. I could pace there, think there, stretch out some there. But this room is nothing but a tight box for death. Appropriate I guess but I would have liked better. I would have liked Mom lying on a soft blanket in a wildflower field with the green energies rising up to claim her with their whispered assurances. Where distinctions would blur. Or lying in a briny tidal flat, the water slowly rising and absorbing her, dissolving her body and my grief wave by softly lapping wave. But in this room we get 2 small windows looking out at the Sears end of Hanes Mall and grayness. Well. What does it matter…….
Dad is across the room from me, only 6 feet or so, just watching me write, anxiously hoping I will look up so he can catch my eye. As always, I feel a jolt of anger at his intrusion. I won’t do it. But now I feel conflicted and mean. So I try to soften inside. Mom is lying here between us. She’s always been between us, the buffer, the sponge. Mediating. Softening. As well as distorting. I have damned her for it in the past. Thought her weak, spineless, complicit, wishy-washy and subservient. Now I feel different. For now I’m seeing with 360 vision. Everything is perfect.
Lying on the bed, her head tilted to the right. A nasal canula hissing. Large fleshy ear cascades down the side of her face looking like the silly putty I would leave on the windowsills in the summer as a child. 14th floor apartment, Stuyvesant Town, New York City, no air-conditioning, no laundry room, no privacy, no grass, trees, birds (well, pigeons, but they seemed like just another city product like car-exhaust.) A faded, noisy haze for sky. God, how did she do it? ….Her blanched ear lobe turns under, wrinkles like a cheap oriental fan.
(….seashells from Chinatown in water, opening with their delicate pastel, paper blossoms rising up in the fishbowl. Cheaply painted, delicate glass wind chimes, tinkling…)
Her cheeks are wide smooth planes. Cliff faces. Substantial and almost daunting.
(Butterflies on my bedskirt. Hundreds of them she has painstakingly painted and then sewn on. Mobiles spinning candy colors. Rocking horse, rocking at Christmas with a high fever, red bandana-print flouncy dress with cowboy hat and gun holster on, flushed cheeks, rocking like a lunatic.)
I just looked up, trying to follow that bouncing child on her horse, lost my focus and got trapped. Dad seizes my eyeballs, jumping at the chance to talk about Social Security and notifying the government about Mom and all those official sorts of things, followed by him saying “but I’m not worried about all that right now…”
(Ice-skating in Central Park, 9 years old, black velvet dress she made, white satin lining, feather trimmed edges undulating as I twirl. Matching hat. I must be the star in Dr. Zhivago. I feel beautiful. I know I’m going to marry my handsome instructor when I grow up.)
Between watching, between writing and moving and touching and loving, I speak blessings for her journey, send her light, send prayers of gratitude, of healing, of good fortune, of joyful fulfillments in all her incarnations, forward and backward in time. I collapse, weep, struggle, doubt, feel the need to do it all over again—the right way this time—but what do prayers matter? Either love is a prayer or it isn’t. Either life is it’s own prayer or it isn’t.
(staring through crib bars in the hospital room…3 years old…..4 weeks in an isolation ward…only whispers for company …... …looking out through my eyes is some being who is not this violated, damaged child—this one knows too much…...I become only eyes staring into a void…….. .the quiet emptiness and aloneness is a crushing moment in eternity, a moment some part of me will never truly leave….. Dad is forbidden to come see me; mom won’t come see me, it upsets her too much….)
Mom’s face is so smooth, wide, flat…receding up into her still shining white hair that I have been touching constantly; petting, smoothing, combing, loving it, complimenting her on it. Glistening it lays, a nimbus connecting me to what I already think of as the past.
(Texas summer nights, grandparents, mom and me on a blanket outside, having escaped the brutality of New York apartment summers, hand cranked ice cream, meteor showers, Crazy Eights, cricket song, I’m happy and yet also feel strangely adrift and isolated….so young and already I feel so out of place and alone. Dad back in NY working in the unrelenting sticky heat.)
Her eyebrows are faint but still so delicately arched and holding the space above her deep set eyes with such steadfastness. It’s when you get down to her mouth that it all starts to get….wobbly.
Mouth open. Breathing hard. Pale lips are stretched tightly inward, wrapping her teeth as if she were toothless. A hard rictus. Today when Dad was out of the room I tried moving her lips, tried peeling them back off her teeth but they clung…no, not clung…that implies effort……they were simply fossilized and would not budge. It seemed if I tried any harder I would tear her mouth off her face and recoiled suddenly from that vision in shudders. Her breasts have completely disappeared, leaked at last into the catheter bag. Brown and orange juices. Her ribcage is working so hard. Up and down, up and down, trying to suck in air, trying to be so good. The brain still trying to send signals of imminent danger and need for survival. That old reptile brain--- it just never knows when to quit. I guess that’s what we pay it for…..
Her fingers and hands are so shiny and gleaming. Tall ridges of knucklebone, deep crevices of spaces between. I keep thinking I’ll see her hand, the right hand which now is partially closed, forefinger making a circle which rests on the edge of her thumbnail, I feel like I’ll see it move. Beckon me here, or there, or just scry something in the air, her last words, a cryptic message. I can still see how that hand would wrap around the toothbrush, struggling against the haphazard movements of MS, so diligent! So valiant! Working so hard to take care of necessities. But that hand is now still. I will never see it move again. Not in this life.
Her shins have become blades. I am so surprised to feel how sharp they are. Straight and smooth and they, too, are gleaming.
Down to her beloved feet. I have completely fallen in love with her feet these past 9 days. Actually hopelessly in love with every surface, pocket, twist, pouch, angle of her body. I cherish it. I crave it, want it to last forever. (please….. don’t leave me…) Her feet look so delicate and refined. The toes are so straight and regular. The spaces between her toes run down into the valleys on the top of her feet. All of her little broken surface veins, red mostly and some blue, have been there for ages. But today they are the scrimshaw on an increasingly mottled bruised blue background, as the circulation in her feet shuts down. The toenails that were formerly a crusty yellow are now a blank, opaque gray with shades of blue leaking through. Her feet are so very, very cold. The bottoms of her feet are stunningly splotchy and purple. Blossoming even now, this very minute as I watch. Explosions, dark fireworks….. Turning ever darker as I sit here and watch and write. She is taking about 16 hard but shallow breaths a minute right now.
…………………Now less, about 10…….her jaw muscles flex open as if in surprise with each breath. Her diaphragm pushes these breaths in ripples down across her abdomen where they die after each effort. I felt while I was home in my own bed last night how terribly unprepared I am for the feelings of loss and emptiness. Of separation. It is a tidal wave coming and all I have are faded pink plastic nose-plugs. The ocean…..it’s always in all my big dreams……murmuring to me, never leaving me. It’s always high tide.
I stand over her. Standing and leaning over her. My own mouth open, my own breath rhythm trying to entrain hers, without even thinking about it. I lean farther and farther. Absorbed deeper and deeper. But see, she is entraining me. I can hardly breathe. Dad is asleep and I don’t wake him for what is coming.
Died…….1:30pm…….slow………breath………………..breath……………………………breath………………………………………………………………………………..breath…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..