Native Country of the Heart

by Cherríe Moraga

  * * *

  After her surgery, my mother was moved to Brighton Gardens, a nursing facility just down the Imperial Highway from Expressions. As the surgeon predicted, we witnessed in our mother a sudden, accelerated decline. Her exterior world was very small now. She was moved from bed to wheelchair and back again. Her family came and held her hand as she muttered to us and to herself, rehearsed phrases from the distant memory of another life.

  She slipped in and out of dreams.

  Questions I had rejected throughout my mother’s illness returned to torment me.

  To what degree is consciousness determined by the capacities of our brain? Where might her consciousness reside independent of her diminishing brain? In her present state, what might her transition unto death be like?

  I knew, in truth, that these were spirit questions, even as I consulted science for confirmation. For, to look at Elvira, to really look, her interiority seemed to deepen by the day. She was speaking to the other side now. She seemed to not only remember but was able to foresee a future of otherworldly relations, unencumbered by the contraction of her brain and physical surroundings. There was no denying it. My mother’s facultad was growing, but in this final stage of her life, it grew away from us.

  Would I now only come to know her in my dreams?

  * * *

  I am at a seaport. I walk along its boardwalk, a kind of pier extending into the water.

  The slatted wooden walls of the buildings and plank boards are painted in Cape Cod gray and white. I am to go down through a hole in the floorboards, which leads into the ocean waters.

  I sense that my mother is there and that my descent is as if to meet her, join her in her slow dying, or perhaps she was already dead in the dream. I don’t recall. But I do go down through the hole and into the water without hesitation to be rejoined with my mother.

  Suddenly a gray-blue dolphin approaches and wraps itself around me. I feel its smooth rubbery texture engulfing me around my waist and at first I am afraid of being strangled, squeezed to death by the strength of its hold on me.

  But then I relax. I give in.

  And this is the most pleasure I can remember,

  to swim in the embrace of the dolphin.

  In the embrace of life in death.

  SOFT SPOTS

  We were all such a long way from home.

  When I arrived at Brighton Gardens that late July morning, I had been away from my mother for about a month. My son and I had just returned from Arizona and we landed in Southern California dusty, and I, broken with fatigue. It had been a hard road trip taken with Celia, who was fighting a relentless flu, along with teen-angst-ridden Camie and a recently “adopted” nephew.

  Nephew had come to us via Celia’s son Maceo, who had homesteaded with the boy’s mother for a few years. Maceo was now gone, and we were left to respond to the boy in some way. It had been a kind of unspoken contract, after all, the promise of fatherhood from Maceo, something we two lesbians in our fifties could never fulfill for this boy. Throughout the trip, Nephew made every effort to show us how at twelve years old he was already a man, and needed little from us besides the price of a meal.

  Throughout the too-long week away in the Sonoran Desert, the site of my ancestral origins, I kept suffering the question of “home,” and whether I was truly up to the task of this queer and makeshift familia, reconstructed from broken promises and spurned hopes.

  And then suddenly on the first day of our return to California, I find “home” slipping away in an Orange County nursing facility. My mother’s recovery from hip surgery had continued to be fitful and laborious, she falling into regular bouts of illness, rising irritation, and mounting depression. The physical therapy was each day leaving her more and more spent. And although my father was adamant about keeping my mother out of the wheelchair, my sister wondered if it was not the kinder solution.

  When my father and I arrived at Brighton Gardens for that morning visit, the head nurse stopped us at the door. Vera’s vital signs were dangerously low, she told us. She was dehydrated and needed to go to the hospital right away. It was a perfunctory recommendation, which we had previously responded to affirmatively each time our mother’s vital signs dropped. Since her first hospitalization at Della Martin, Elvira had endured several short hospitalizations for blood clots and heart issues that would, each time, throw her into a state of panicked disorientation where nursing staff would have to restrain her physically. Moving her from her everyday surroundings often felt cruel, unfair, and unnecessary.

  After the hip surgery, JoAnn and I decided that we would no longer passively accept such recommendations. Wasn’t this the exact situation we had been preparing for for some time? “As little invasiveness as possible”; we had repeated those words over and over again, to ourselves and to her caretakers. On the other side of those words, nothing prepared us to make such choices—to determine for our mother the quality (maybe even the day) of her death. But these were the choices we were required to make when natural deaths were seldom proffered to our elders.

  “Let me see her,” I say.

  When we enter my mother’s room, the shades are drawn against the intensity of the summer morning sun. In the muted light, my mother is a small hill of blanketed gray. I go to her, put my hand to her forehead. It is cool, too cool. She appears to be sleeping.

  I exit to get my sister on the cell phone. She steps out of a work meeting to answer the call. We confer with the nursing staff, and they with their administrators.

  “What would the hospital do for her?” I ask.

  “Administer antibiotics, a chest X-ray, provide oxygen and an IV for hydration.”

  “Can all this be done here?”

  “Yes,” the nurses respond.

  “Then she is not to be moved,” I say with full authority, doubting my every word.

  Within an hour after the hydration and some antibiotics, a small dose of energy has returned to my mother. She is surprisingly better. I even manage to feed her a half cup of Ensure. I step out of the room for a moment to speak with the nurse. When I return, no more than ten minutes later, my mother is alert and animated; she seems to have forgotten the trauma of her near-death an hour earlier, when the slightly built Filipina nurse struggled to insert an IV as I steadied my mother’s arm.

  Now it is as if I enter the room for the first time. She exclaims, “Cherríe!” and greets me in full recognition of who I am. I go to her, embrace her anew. She had not said my name in forever, but that day, unprompted, she greets me as me.

  By the time my sister gets to Brighton Gardens, bringing my son with her, Elvira is already exhausted and, after a short visit, falls back asleep. Minutes later, her primary physician arrives and, after taking one look at her, asks …

  “Would you like hospice care for your mother?”

  Observing Elvira, the muted physical presence she assumed in a matter of moments, it was in many ways such a benign question, a mere affirmation of what her daughters, her husband, the nursing staff, and the doctor could already witness, that Elvira was slowly yielding to death. There was no urgency to the doctor’s inquiry. Hospice simply meant that she would stay on at Brighton Gardens, but without any further invasive procedures. Certainly, she didn’t mean that our mother would go anytime soon, we told ourselves as the doctor spoke to us. It was merely a respectful gesture in the direction of the natural death we had sought for our mother. Our mutual yes emerged effortlessly—a quick glance between my sister and me, a look over to our father, who seemed confused but in agreement.

  There is a small silence in the curtained half room after the physician leaves. The meaning of our decision begins to settle. Was my mother privy to this conversation where her loved ones wordlessly measured respect against betrayal, perseverance against hopelessness, regret against denial? Have we merely grown too tired? We ask this for all of us, including our mother.

  Suddenly, without knocking, the physical therapist enters to shatter all hope.
Clipboard in hand, she tactlessly announces there will be no more therapy sessions for our mother. Disturbed by her intrusion, JoAnn absently signs a form. And then it hits our father, as the therapist exits in a blur of efficiency.

  “Does this mean Vera will never dance again?” Joseph still believed that his wife would return to him and put his two reconstructed hips to good use.

  We had just said yes to hospice, yes to readying our mother for death. Ten minutes later, my father hears, My wife will never dance again. And somehow this one fact breaks him down right there in my mom’s sickroom/deathbed. This floors him and us, too, because we thought he knew how sick she was. We thought he knew she had been dying for so long.

  * * *

  Elvira’s eyes are closed, lips slightly parted. She breathes steadily and my father and sister, after a few hours’ vigil, slip out to return to the business of their day. Rafa and I stay on to watch my mother, his Grama, move in and out of sleep. As if in a waking dream, her mouth moves with utterances I can’t decipher, her hands whipping the air in the drama of some unknown story.

  Rafael knows she is going, probably more than I. He composes a poem on the spot. She is “talking to the dead,” he announces, no doubt in his voice. Then, exhausted, his abuelita drifts off into almost-sleep; for it is not quite sleep, but another place of being.

  She is being called. I feel it, the pull on her from the other side, but I do not allow myself to recognize this, not in my body. It is too simple, too ordinary, too subtle; this shift from one world to the next. The room is animated with spirit; there is no mistaking it, but we are programmed in this culture not to believe what we feel. We deny and argue against this deeper knowing. We defer. Had not the physician said, “It could be weeks or months or even years from now?” Had my mother not just eaten from my hand?

  Had she not just called my name in the gesture of goodbye? That was the truer question. Ignoring it, my son and I kiss her forehead and walk out to leave her alone to her journeying.

  * * *

  Let me tell you a story, a story of a family in shock and mourning.

  Watch the family go to the county fair. We fly above the treetops, our legs dangling like expectant skiers over the blacktop flatlands (once orange groves), neon reds and yellows spinning beneath us; blues blasting from one corner, punk rock from another.

  We do not celebrate; we mourn. We play “pretend” that Elvira is not dying.

  The big-band orchestra plays, too, under the fairground tent, and I suavely sneak up on my father, who sits with a half-eaten leg of chicken on the paper plate in front of him. I ask him to dance. We are not ashamed to dance right there on the asphalt pathway because this is after all the last dance, the dance reserved for my mother, which my father does with a holy vengeance, spinning me around in Vera’s stead. I can’t miss a beat and don’t because dancing was the one thing they really enjoyed doing together, the one thing they shared without ambivalence.

  His grip is like nothing I ever felt from him before; so tight, it is almost violent. He swings me wide and tethered to him. His eyes are wild with three glasses of red wine in his gut and a forged public smile. The dance is a rough-and-tumble toss and turn, which I keep up with, so that it looks smooth and partnered. But Daddy’s dancing to his own tune, I think, dancing against the brutal rupture of the one thing that meant joy in his life. Dancing with his wife.

  After the dance, we leave Joseph to nurse a cup of coffee, and we walk about the fairgrounds. I love my sister enough to know that she needed to pretend tonight: she, with her grown son who escorts my son about the fair with an elder brother’s tenderness. At one stop, I watch Rafa, with spindly spider legs, scale a fabricated mountain wall; I watch him dump cash into the pockets of the money-grabber three-balls-for-five-bucks barkers. My son is a gambler, weighing the odds: the remaining crumpled bills in his pocket and the accuracy of his free throws against the coveted prize of those giant stuffed basketballs.

  Brian came of age today, too, I think. On his first day as a teacher for special ed kids, one pisses on the floor in defiance, saying, “F you, you mother-F-er,” as my nephew puts it. And I know Brian got broken just a little bit today, learning that the strength of his character alone would not ease these troubled kids. He enters the adult world of powerlessness.

  And I sigh, forgiving us all our soft spots.

  * * *

  Five hours later at three o’clock the next morning, I am pulled out of bed by the force of Elvira’s passing. I don’t know it then, that this is what draws me up and out of bed and into the backyard of my sister’s house. But as I stand barefoot beneath the fog-shrouded moon, the same moon whose light filters through the half-open slats of my mother’s room just a few miles away, my heart bears witness to the change.

  I am suddenly at once bereft of a god and full of a prayer’s urgency. I cry out to that moon, “Show me a sign.”

  It is an orphan’s prayer, I know.

  “Tell me we made the right decision.”

  And my respuesta comes at seven o’clock that morning, when, rising to go to the bathroom, I hear through the thin walls of my sister’s bedroom the twenty-month-imagined phone call.

  SOLA CON LOS DIOSES

  When the earth element is gone, you cannot move anymore. When the water element goes, your lips are dry. When the fire element goes, you start losing heat. When the air element goes, you stop breathing, and your heart stops beating.

  —GEHLEK RIMPOCHE

  She was alone with her gods when she left this world. Maybe that is what shatters the daughter’s heart, knowing that even the greatest love is eclipsed by the power of the spirits’ summons to the dying.

  I don’t know what I had hoped; perhaps that I would witness my mother’s last exhale, believing this was the closest I could get to her spirit. As faithful sentry, I would be the last to pass her on to relatives on the other side. I imagined myself that important; that her death would not be impartial.

  But death is impartial.

  Twenty minutes after that 7 a.m. call, my sister and I arrive at Brighton Gardens. We wait to inform my father; we wait to know what we feel. We avert the compassionate looks of the attending staff who step aside as we wind our way to the last room in the corridor. The room that contains our mother’s deathbed. When we enter the room, I am relieved to see that she is the same hill of gray we witnessed the day before, except that a carefully folded towel props up her chin. The transformation is so fundamental and so subtle at once; for there was no mistaking that our mother had not yet left the room, that she was everywhere outside that body, as if her spirit had simply slipped out from that vessel, that bowl of bones and guts and elegance placed upon the bed, and had drifted into the air above us.

  I tell my sister, She’s here, JoAnn.

  I had been praying to my mother’s spirit for years, since the onset of her illness, and as the energy that was she permeated the air around us, I knew that this was the same she I had prayed to. It was the same energy moving through and out of that brain and body that had contained her for nearly ninety-one years, but never completely.

  Now she was alone con sus dioses. I held her hand after death. After death, I took her sculpted face and skull into my palm. With water drawn from the sacred springs of Mount Shasta, JoAnn and I washed the skeletal grace of her legs and arms, her distended belly (always the site of discontent), her olive-graying skin that lay like oilcloth along her delicate bones.

  JoAnn had been the one, among others, to find the Mount Shasta spring as the Winnemem chief had directed. She and a search party of friends had left the base camp of our ceremony to listen for the water lying clandestine beneath the June snows. That had been two years prior, and as we gathered the few items from JoAnn’s house in preparation for sending our dead mother home, JoAnn had remembered the jar of water.

  Oh, I touched my mother after the breath had left her body, my hand moving across the carve of cheekbone, the noble arch of her forehead, her parched mouth.
She was so present that it startled me to brush past her lips and encounter that vacant site of breathlessness. Had I thought she would still be breathing somehow? This body, whose living air had fallen upon my head and face as intimately as my own breath, had emptied itself once and for all. Without our witness, her last breath of life had spilled from her being into the air around us.

  My mother died before she’d have to start another day. Perhaps she had been that exhausted. Maybe, as others have testified, the dying cannot depart in the presence of their most beloved survivors. Maybe the day before, as my mother appeared to sleep, she had listened with her heart’s ear to our words. Maybe she had heard us let her go. “It’s okay, Mamá,” we said with our decision to accept hospice.

  An hour later, I drive to my father’s place at Prestige. I do not rehearse the lines in advance, as I wend my way, quick-stepping through the puzzle of corridors to his studio apartment. I want to simply let come what comes. I enter without knocking.

  When I tell my father, the first words out of his mouth are: “It’s been so hard for me.” He, too, is relieved. There is no denying it: the purgatory of Alzheimer’s has been a great trial for him. And yet I am disturbed that his first words are about himself.

  * * *

  On that morning of my mother’s passing, my sister and I and my father, and my tío Eddie and auntie Lola, keep vigil over her body, until the funeral people come to retrieve it. We pray the Rosary. We whisper cariños to her, grasping what memory we can in the knuckled repose of her hands. Every half hour or so, my tío steps out for a cigarette. He returns shrouded in Lucky Strike smoke, his shoulders a bit more bent by the lucklessness of death.

  “She’s gone home,” he says, contemplating the blanketed figure of his almost-mother, which is the best thing anyone can think to say.