After all, everything had been leading up to this—the glue of the family was becoming unglued because she was tired of the chaos. She was tired of living through my father’s never-ending lawsuits—his financial unevenness. Being married to my father would have given anyone cancer. My mom was tired of fighting, and she was enervated. Her idea of heaven was dreaming about life while she slept, so in her mind, I’m sure, she was actually looking forward to being able to watch all of us without having to participate. In the afterlife, she would have a front-row seat to all of our lives, but from a higher perch and without the need to get dressed in something other than a housedress. She was worn-out.
I didn’t feel sad that my mom was going to die; I felt sad that no one in my family seemed prepared for it. When I saw my sisters suffering at the prospect of her leaving, I felt like they hadn’t learned their lesson the last time. There was my lack of empathy again. Never understanding that other people may be receiving things differently.
That’s okay, I told myself. I didn’t need my sisters to be fighters. I have enough spinach for all of us.
Death.
This, I know how to do.
Move over, everyone.
* * *
• • •
I went straight to the hospital when I flew in from London, where I found my brother Glen and my dad sitting in a hospital room like two useless cartoon characters, with my mother lying there half-unconscious, weak, and listless—with a fucking roommate who had visitors who reeked of cigarettes. My mom hated cigarettes.
I may as well have seen a priest raping a child. The hell I raised at the nurses’ station was so disruptive and hair-raising that there were people who didn’t come back to work the next day—or maybe ever.
I remember Glen grabbing me by the shoulders in the hallway, telling me I had to calm down, and a nurse threatening to remove me from the hospital if I didn’t, and me telling her that she would be the one getting removed. The next thing I remember was wheeling my mother’s hospital bed into the hallway while I instructed my father and Glen to grab onto any machines that were attached to her body and to follow my lead.
For the record, I would like to state that never in the history of humankind has a woman been told to calm down and then calmed down. We don’t like that.
Once we got my mom situated in a private room down the hall, I got into bed next to her. She put her hand in mine and said in the thirstiest of sounds, “Please help me die.”
This was the opportunity to show my mother that she could depend on me, that for all the times I fucked up and for all the grief I caused her by never listening to anything either of my parents ever said and constantly getting into trouble in and out of school—that for her last wish, I was listening and I would show up. I was going to prove that she wasn’t wrong about me. That finally she could depend on me. Those were my marching orders, and I wasn’t going to leave until I had fulfilled her request. It didn’t occur to me that she may have said that to all my siblings, looking for anyone to bite.
She spent the next week in her private room, surrounded by her children. I slept on the bed next to her every night. Sometimes, in the morning, I’d leave her side after her first dose of morphine—when she would drift away again—to go to the cafeteria for some eggs, and then be sick at myself for having an appetite. I would remind myself that I needed to stay strong to help my mother die. I was in full-on Joan of Arc mode, and I was not going to make dying a problem for my mother. I hadn’t been so laser-focused on anything in my life, ever.
The one time I left her to go home and take a shower, I came back to find her covered in her own vomit, most of it pooled in her newly cavernous collarbones—like two gravy boats. My father was sitting with all four corners of the newspaper facing her—as if he were in his own living room—and hadn’t even noticed. He was proving to be as useless as a gorilla underwater, and took up about the same amount of space. I never left her alone with the nurses—or my father—again.
In between bouts of unconsciousness, she would spring to life and utter these fully formed sentences that would render you speechless.
“Once I’m gone, you’re going to find out what a piece of work your father is, and I will be laughing at you from heaven,” she’d say. Then she’d turn her head, close her eyes, and drift off again, and I’d be left sitting there, looking at my clueless father reading the op-ed page.
I remember looking at her, wondering how she could be so sharp and so with it, while also floating in and out of consciousness. I learned that people have moments of clarity when they’re dying, called “terminal lucidity.” Or that they’ll sometimes seem like they’re getting better only to fall further the next day, kind of like a death rally.
“You don’t know your own strength,” she said to me one afternoon, squeezing my hand. “Please use it for something good. I know you are going to have a big life, but don’t forget about your brothers and sisters. And promise me you’ll always wear your seatbelt.”
“Get a spoon,” she said to me with her eyes closed, the day I was cleaning the vomit out of her collarbones. Then she opened her eyes and said, “Promise me you’ll take care of Roy and Shana.”
I had no idea my mom thought I was capable of taking care of anyone, but she empowered me to think that I was, thus creating the certainty that I would be able to do so.
One day she brushed my cheek with the back of her hand and said, “He needs to let me go.”
I looked at my father, who was sitting five feet away—in his diurnal spot, always with the newspaper, this time with a half-eaten Egg McMuffin sitting on his knee. The fact that he hadn’t inhaled it in one fell swoop meant that he must have had another meal on the way over.
“You need to say goodbye to Mom,” I told him. “She needs you to let her go.”
He peeked over the top of the newspaper to make sure he’d heard what he thought he heard.
“Keep her alive, no matter what. She can be on life support.” I got up and ripped the paper down the middle, with my hands trembling. It was dramatic, but my mom deserved drama. She had put up with too much shit from both me and my father for way too long. If there was ever a time she would accept a fuss being made over her, it was in her death—and by one or both of the people that caused her the most grief.
“Keep her alive, no matter what?” I was standing in his face and his eyes widened. “Do you know how selfish that is?”
“I’ve got to go show a car,” he announced, bracing himself to get up from the chair he was smothering. My father never sat in a chair. He assaulted it, and the chair was seldom the same.
“A car?”
“Yeah, a guy called me about a car. He’s in West Orange.”
That was when I knew my father wasn’t equipped to deal with what was happening. Death had happened once, and he didn’t like the way that turned out, so it wasn’t going to happen again. I thought about how sad men are. How little they know about helping women with their feelings. I realize it’s not entirely their fault, because they’re wired differently and they’ve been raised for thousands of years to act like this, but it’s still hard when you see it up close and personal—especially when it’s your own father.
“Okay,” I told him. “Go do that. Mom and I will probably just go waterskiing.”
* * *
• • •
There were supposed to be four hours between drips of morphine, but when she was uncomfortable, I would summon the nurse, who would come in and reiterate to me that it had been only two hours since her last dose.
“Do you have a fucking mother?” I wailed. I hadn’t left the hospital for five days and was starting to look like Gary Busey.
The nurses had stopped communicating with me soon after I arrived, and I can’t blame them, but a four-hour pain-medication protocol when someone is clearly dying is a set of rules th
at needs to be changed. We should be allowed to help one another die. We shouldn’t have to scream and yell and throw tantrums, but obviously in the interim, I am and will always be a person willing to take on that role. There are things you can do for other people that you can never do for yourself.
Whenever I have trouble standing up for myself (it’s happened), I think about whether I would tolerate the situation if it were happening to one of my sisters, mother, daughter, or niece. If it’s not acceptable for them, it’s not acceptable for me. I was born with a torch in my hand, and I haven’t always used it so judiciously, but this was an instance where I needed to protect my mother—because she didn’t have the strength to protect herself. She never did. She was never like that. She was shy, demure, soft-spoken, sweet, mushy, and full of womb-like feelings. She was always there for a hug or a cuddle, but I couldn’t ask her for advice. She had been sidelined by my father, and the way I saw things, she had very little say in anything. If my father hadn’t really loved her, it could have been a disaster.
“Just answer the question!” I screamed at the nurse after she told me it had been only two hours since her last morphine. “Do you have a mother?”
The nurse came over and upped my mom’s morphine, and then put her hand on top of my mother’s. I saw my mom’s hand tighten around the nurse’s. “Can you imagine having a daughter like this one?” she said.
When we were told it would only be a matter of days, we decided to transfer her to a hospice, where they would give her as much morphine as she wanted and stop trying to force-feed her. I rode in the ambulance with her head in my hands, because every time we made a turn, it felt like a coconut falling from a tree.
Once she was in hospice, none of us left again until she died. Well, my father did, because he, of course, needed to eat something in order to re-clog his arteries every few hours.
The night before my mother died, the five of us were sleeping on cots in her room. Glen and I were sleeping on one side, while Shana and Roy were on the other side of the room next to each other. Simone was sitting up in a chair.
“Chelsea,” Glen whispered. “How long do you think Shana and Roy have been sleeping together?”
“Seriously, Glen,” Simone muttered from across the room.
That’s what death is like, though. You can’t only cry for two weeks straight. You cry, and then you get tired of crying, and someone says something, and then you’re all laughing, and then it feels bad to be laughing, but it also feels so good. Without the laughter, we’d all be dying too.
The day my mother died, we were all in the room with her. Her body got cold, and Shana, being a nurse, told us what was happening. My mom was starting to turn blue, but she was always a little blue. She had an alabaster complexion. We sat and held hands and cried together, until my father interrupted us.
“We’re going to need to discuss the funeral details,” he announced to the room with my mother’s still-warm body. “She’s got to be buried in the plot next to Chet, so it’s going to have to be a Jewish funeral.”
“But she’s Mormon,” Shana blurted. Shana was Mormon too. She had converted to Mormonism years earlier with the help of my mother. After Chet died, my mom threw in the towel on Judaism and got back to her Mormon roots. When Shana was a freshman in college at the University of Delaware, my parents got a call that she was very sick and they drove to go pick her up. After weeks of testing, they diagnosed her with lupus. They say that when there is a death in a family, it’s not uncommon for family members to develop diseases in the years following. Who knows if this is true, but five years later, Shana got lupus and then my mom got cancer. After Shana got sick, she turned to Mormonism. The Jews in our family were dropping like hot potatoes.
“Jewish cemeteries won’t allow non-Jews to be buried there,” Glen informed us. “We have to have a fake Jewish funeral.”
“What about all of her friends from church?” Shana asked.
“They’re just going to have to pretend she’s Jewish, for the funeral,” Glen said, matter-of-factly—as if this is what all families do when there’s a death, have a fake funeral. It seemed like Glen had already sorted this out with my father and was breaking the news to the rest of us.
“What if they find out she isn’t Jewish? What about her bishop or friends from church who want to say something about her?” Shana asked. “They all know she’s not Jewish.”
“They’re not allowed,” my dad told her. “They can go do their own thing.”
“You know, like have a service at a local supermarket,” Glen told Shana. Glen can be an asshole in these instances. He doesn’t mean to be, but he’s just another man who doesn’t know how to handle women when they are in crisis.
My dad announced that he needed us to get him something to wear for the funeral—“None of my nice suits fit anymore”—and then he walked out of the room.
Glen’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. “I wonder why.”
“Dad doesn’t know that Mom baptized Chet,” Shana said quietly.
“Are you serious?” Simone asked, appalled.
“Yes,” Shana declared.
“Mom baptized Chet?” I asked. Just another fucking thing that no one in my family ever bothered to tell me.
“So, now we have two non-Jews that will be buried in a Jewish cemetery,” Glen declared, smiling. “Sounds like there’s an odd man out.”
“Can we just baptize Dad after he dies, and then they can all be buried together?” Roy asked.
“That’s a great idea, Roy,” Glen told him. “That ought to fix everything.”
“Does being baptized negate your Judaism?” I asked.
“Not if you’re dead when they baptize you,” Glen whispered, as he gently kissed my mother on her forehead. It was a perfect Glen moment—tender, but dripping with sarcasm.
“Actually, in the Book of Mormon…” Shana started, and I had to interrupt her.
“Please don’t with the Mormon stuff right now. I just can’t.”
“She’d want to be next to Chet,” Simone said.
“Yeah, but would she want to be next to Dad?” Glen asked.
We sat in silence for a few minutes trying to make sense of what was about to take place. Then Roy—who had had a bar mitzvah thirty years earlier, and never converted—asked, “Am I Mormon too?”
These are the times when you think no family is as fucked-up as your own, and that no one on earth has been through anything close to what you’ve been through.
* * *
• • •
We all dealt with Chet in our own way, and now it was time for us to split up and deal with our mom dying, individually. But we didn’t. We stuck together this time—perhaps from knowing the mistake we made last time.
Shana and I drove to the Short Hills mall to pick out something for her to wear. Shana has extremely short legs and two bricks for feet. Buying clothes for her is and always will be confounding. The looks of the saleswomen at Saks and Nordstrom are always entertaining to behold—if you like diplomacy mixed with a healthy dose of bewilderment.
While we were shopping, I tried to convince her that an A-line skirt was just what she needed to meet someone romantically at our mother’s funeral. She reminded me that she was already married with a baby. I got her to laugh and she got me to laugh because that is what sisters do for each other in the depths of their despair—they cry, laugh, sing, fight, and then go see a movie, in that order.
My sister and I buoyed each other that day. I thought my mom would be proud of how we guided each other through this death storm. Then we got back to Shana’s house, and when I came upstairs from putting our bags away, I found her standing in the rain on her back porch, crying inconsolably. Her husband was standing in the kitchen staring at her, not knowing what to do. Who would know what to do? Sisters. Only a sister knows how to comfort a sis
ter. Period. End of story. Men can give us a hug or pat us on the back, but only a girl will get another girl off her feet to face the rain. That is the definition of sisters. There exists between us an ineffable understanding. We don’t have to ask why or how or when. We just go in.
Sometimes, I’m there. Sometimes, Shana is there. Sometimes, Simone is there. One of us is always there. We’ve all been one another’s mother at some point.
It hurt to see Shana in so much pain, and I felt guilty that my pain didn’t cut as deep. She was close to my mother in a way that I never was. She was more dependent and more loving, and they were more alike. My sister would have taken advice from my mother. Both were reserved, sweet, and Mormon together. I never appreciated or respected that.
When my sister converted to Mormonism after Chet died, it felt like one more strike against her. Religion was of no interest to me, and when I read the Book of Mormon at my mother’s behest, I came away even more embarrassed for both of them. It all bored me to no end. Religion wasn’t going to ever be my jam, and I didn’t appreciate trying to be converted in the privacy of my own home. It all felt so sanctimonious. The notion that accepting Jesus Christ as your savior absolved you of all wrongdoing of any scale felt like a crock of shit.
Shana and my mom had a special bond, and in that moment, I felt my sister’s pain way worse than any pain I had myself. I knew I’d be fine. I wondered how long it would take her to be fine. She’s got children; she’ll get better faster because of them. I reminded myself that a parent dying is more commonplace than a child dying; therefore, Shana would have to pull herself together at some point. People’s parents die all the time. This wouldn’t be like last time.
* * *
• • •
I remember every finger on my mother’s hand and her inveterately chipped nail polish. She would never have gotten a proper manicure or pedicure. My mom had a low tolerance for that kind of frilly stuff. She liked to grow her nails long and paint them herself, but it was always a crapshoot. Her fingers were chubby but somehow elegant. She was chubby and elegant too. I could pick her hands out of a lineup of a thousand.
Life Will Be the Death of Me Page 11
