Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  One person I did tell was Faith. She had never tried to be a mother to me; but in many ways, she was something better. When people asked me if I felt as if she were my mother, I always said no; she was more like an aunt, but an aunt you’re friends with, too. She was the best of friend and family, and in some ways, the best of mothering. She thought I was perfect or at least she made me feel that way. I tried not to contrast it with how my mother made me feel.

  At this point, my parents knew about Faith, Jake, and Quint. I had told them several years ago, when I couldn’t stand keeping the secrets any longer. My mother actually opened the door to my confession, by offering to give me my adoption papers and original birth certificate, papers I never knew she had. The word adoption had not been spoken between us for decades.

  I sat in the living room and told them that I’d found my birth parents, keeping the story straight and simple, being careful to start by telling them that they were my parents, my only parents. My mother sat up very straight, saying nothing, her arms at her sides, her hands clenched. My father said only one word: “Korvah,” the Jewish word for “whore,” when I told them about Faith sleeping with Quint when she was married to Jake. My mother shushed him.

  When I finished, my mother said, speaking for both of them, “We understand. It’s only natural that you should be curious about this.” It sounded like something she read in a pamphlet: “How to Talk to Your Adopted Child about Her Search for Birth Parents.”

  She told me, for the first time, that she remembered visiting me when I was in foster care those first months. The foster care mother seemed very nice, she said. She lived in Queens and had a house full of beautiful plants.

  And they asked you to keep my first initial, I reminded her. That’s why you named me Jil. No, my mother said, absolutely not. I had that name picked out years before you were born. I just liked it. They never asked us anything.

  The next day I told my kids. Alex had met Faith a few times, as a friend of mine. He thought she was a nice lady, but couldn’t figure out what connection she had to him. “Is she going to be my grandma instead of Nana?” he asked. No, I told him, Nana is your grandma.

  “So is she Nana’s mommy?” I explained it again, and he got it, sort of.

  My parents never mentioned my birth parents, or adoption, again. But a year later, we were having dinner when my mother said suddenly, “How is Faith?”

  I was confused: At first, I heard “faith” with a small F. “Fine,” I said. That was all. The papers they gave me were a fascinating piece of my puzzle—legal papers of abandonment.

  “I didn’t abandon you,” Faith said when I showed them to her. The word upset her. In her story she did what was best for me. But I didn’t mind the word. It was plain and honest. In order to be chosen, you first have to be abandoned—like Moses, like Superman. In order to be found, you must first be lost.

  At the hospital, I found my mother in the intensive care unit. I’d prepared myself for the sight of her, plugged with tubes and wires, deathlike. But she looked surprisingly calm and peaceful, calmer than she’d looked since before all this started.

  “Your mother isn’t in any pain,” one of the nurses told me; I was grateful. I hadn’t even thought to ask.

  “Will she wake up?” I asked.

  When she said, “No, we’re keeping her completely sedated,” I was even more grateful, and then ashamed of being so glad my mother was unconscious.

  In the tiny unit, with its half-closed curtain, I sat down and checked out the machines, beeping comfortingly, monitoring oxygen, blood pressure, and breathing. The whoosh-shoosh of the ventilator was soothing. Morning sun shone through the window.

  When the doctor arrived, he closed the curtain, pulled up a chair, and leaned forward to explain the situation. The CAT scan they did before I arrived showed that there were pulmonary embolisms, which explained the breathing problems. In addition, there was a serious infection in her abdomen, which wasn’t uncommon after such an extensive operation. Now that they had full test results, they knew we were dealing with the worst possible form of ovarian cancer.

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  “Well, we could put her on blood thinners to deal with the clots. But we also have to try to clean out the infection with another operation. In her weakened condition, it would be very precarious. Plus we’d have to take her off the thinners for the surgery.”

  If the surgery dealt successfully with the infection, and if she survived the surgery, there’d be a long and very difficult recovery. Once she recovered, she would face very aggressive chemotherapy, for a cancer that had been allowed much more time to spread while she waited to recover from two surgeries—if she agreed to any chemo at all. And even the most aggressive chemo would maybe buy her a year of life, most of it spent in the hospital or in some sort of recuperative facility.

  I tried to make sense of all this. But too much had changed too quickly, and there were way too many ifs.

  The doctor went over it again. It sounded even more awful the second time.

  “Do you want to talk it over with your father?” he asked.

  That hadn’t even occurred to me. My father had never had a vote on a decision in his life; my mother was always the general, always in command. In her absence, I was in charge, though I didn’t want to be.

  “Does your mother have a living will?” he asked.

  “Yes.” My mother had made and signed one just a few weeks earlier. It was exceptionally direct: no life support, no extraordinary measures, no prolonging the process of dying in case of an incurable physical condition. I’d been carrying it, along with the health care proxy, in my purse for the last two weeks. I showed it to him.

  “Well, her wishes seem pretty clear.”

  “What happens if we do nothing?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to say. She may live another few hours, or days, maybe even a week. If we take her off the ventilator, it would most likely be only a few hours, a day at most.”

  “Will she be in pain?”

  “No, we’d keep her sedated.”

  My mother’s opinion on the subject of prolonging life had always been a thousand percent clear: no way, no how—no machines, no surgeries, no treatments. But that was all theoretical; how could I know what she would want when it was a harsh reality? How could I make this decision for her, and for my father?

  I asked the doctor, “What would you do?”

  I expect him to say something like, “I can’t answer that.” Instead, he paused, and then said: “Your mother didn’t want anything like this to happen to her,” as he nodded at all the beeping, buzzing machinery. “Her prognosis is bad—just about as bad as it could be.” He looked at me—really looked at me. “I would let her go.”

  I was stunned and grateful, so grateful, for his honesty and candor, and for giving me permission to do what I believed my mother would want.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He nodded, and got up. “The palliative care team will step in now,” he explained. “But I’ll be around if you need me, or you can call.” As he slid open the curtain and stepped out of our little enclosure, he told me, “I think you’re doing the right thing.”

  I was more grateful for those words than I could say.

  That afternoon I met with the palliative care team in a small room off the ICU. Every member of the team—a doctor, a social worker, nurses—was warm, supportive, and understanding, there to make a dreadful experience as bearable as it could be. They’d been briefed by the other medical personnel, and seen my mother’s files and living will. We’re in it together, they seemed to say.

  The doctor who headed the team explained that everything possible would be done to keep my mother sedated and free of pain. An intense, slender woman, warm and gentle, she had steel in her, I could see.

  “Will your father be here?” she asked.

  My father. Oh my God, my father. How was I going to tell him? The last time he saw my mother, a few days ago, sh
e was sitting up in bed, talking, complaining. Now she was unconscious, with a breathing tube down her throat, and a death sentence on her head.

  “He’s away right now,” I said. He had gone upstate to spend Easter Sunday with his business partner’s family. “He’ll be here in the morning.”

  “Does he know what’s been decided?”

  “No. I’ll have to tell him.”

  The next morning my father and his partner came to the hospital. Jimmy had worked with my father for more than forty years, since he was a seventeen-year-old boy. He called my father “Pop,” and my father loved him like a son, almost better than a son, because there had never been conflict between them, just a sharing of the most important thing in my father’s life—his work. When I thought of him, I imagined him as the son of my father’s first marriage—to his contracting business.

  The three of us sat down at a long picnic-style table in the hospital cafeteria. At age eighty-five, my father was skinnier than ever, but still in good shape. I leaned forward and took his hands in mine.

  “Dad, I have some really bad news.”

  My father flinched, as if he’d been slapped. “Is she gone?” he asked, his voice cracking.

  “No,” I said. “But it’s not good.”

  Before I could say another word, he began to cry, covering his face with his big hands. “Oh my god, oh my god,” he said. “No, no, no.”

  I’d steeled myself to stay calm, but I couldn’t. I started to cry, too.

  “It’s not good, Dad. The cancer is very bad,” I said, struggling to get the words out, to keep from becoming hysterical. Jimmy moved closer and put his arm around him. I reached across the table for one of my father’s hands. “It’s much worse than they thought at the beginning.” He moaned.

  “Dad, she’s unconscious now. She’s on machines, and you know she wouldn’t want that,” I said.

  He was bent over, his face nearly touching the table. His shoulders shook. It was the saddest sight I’d ever seen: my big strong father, bent over, weeping like a child onto a hospital cafeteria table, because his daughter was telling him that his wife of nearly fifty years would soon be gone.

  I wanted him to tell me I’d made the right choice; but I realized he couldn’t even hear what I was saying, much less absolve me of responsibility. I was in this alone.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, struggling to his feet. “Take me out of here,” he cried to Jimmy, as they stumbled toward the exit, my father leaning heavily on his oldest, closest friend, the man who is more of a son to him than I have ever been a daughter.

  That afternoon, I met again with the palliative care team, who’d been in and out of the intensive care unit where I sat vigil, talking to my mother. “We don’t know what she can hear,” the doctor had told me. “We do know that there is some consciousness, some recognition. The sound of your voice may be comforting.”

  The sound of my voice has never been comforting when she’s conscious, I almost told her. But who knew? If it was possible, I’d try. At first it was very strange, talking to my pale, still, unconscious mother while the machines beeped and whirred; but it quickly became quite comfortable. I told her how sorry I was that this was happening. I promised to take care of my father when she was gone. I told her how much her grandsons would miss her. It was the best conversation I’d ever had with my mother.

  In the meeting, the doctor asked how my father was. I didn’t even know how to answer that, and I was too exhausted to try. Terrible, horrible, heartbroken.

  “Is he going to come and say good-bye?” the doctor asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, explaining that my father “isn’t strong enough” for hospitals.

  She thought for a long minute. “I don’t want to tell you, or your father, what to do. But there are other things you should think about. Later on, he may regret not coming to say good-bye.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “He may not,” she replied. “But someone may ask him if he got the chance to say good-bye. Or he might see it in a movie or a TV show, and feel really bad that he didn’t do that.”

  I thought about it and decided she was right. Chances were good that someone would ask that.

  She leaned across the table. “If it would make it easier for you or for your father, I could help. I could explain to him beforehand what he would see, and answer his questions, and go with him if he wanted me to.”

  It would never have occurred to me to ask her to do these things. “Yes, thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I asked my father to come to the hospital in the morning, in case he wanted to say good-bye to her.

  “I don’t know,” he said. Then, to my surprise, he added, “Maybe.”

  The next morning, in a small private waiting room, the doctor pulled up a chair and told my father very simply and directly what he would see. Jimmy sat on one side of him, and I sat on the other.

  “You can talk to her,” the doctor told him softly and slowly. “I believe she will hear you. You can kiss her good-bye if you want. It won’t hurt; she isn’t in any pain. But I think she’ll know you’re there.”

  “Can she smell this?” my father asked as he pulled out a bottle of Opium perfume, which he’d wrapped in a paper towel. Opium had been my mother’s scent for three decades. “It’s her favorite. I thought it might make her feel good to smell it.”

  The doctor didn’t blink. “I think she can.”

  I started to cry: This was the sweetest, saddest thing I’d ever heard.

  We stood up and walked into the intensive care unit, down the row of curtained partitions. “You come with me,” my father said. I thought he meant me, but realized he was talking to Jimmy. The two of them went behind the curtain and pulled it closed. The doctor and I looked at each other, and then moved away so we couldn’t hear what my father was saying. I was a little embarrassed that I was on the side of the curtain with the doctor, and not the other side, with my parents.

  In a minute, they pushed the curtain aside and came out. “I’m done,” my father said, his face ashen. They walked down the hall and out of the hospital.

  That afternoon, Faith asked me what Lenny, Damien, and Alex were planning to do.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t told them.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “I didn’t know if I should interrupt their trip. There’s nothing they can do, anyway.” I thought I was being kind, a loving wife and mother, saving them from all this pain.

  “I’m not sure you’re right about that,” Faith said. “Think about how you would feel if you were away and something like this was happening. Wouldn’t you want to be given the choice about what to do? Wouldn’t you be angry if the choice were made for you?”

  I realized that she was right. I would be furious if I were kept in the dark; I wasn’t thinking clearly.

  “I don’t even know if I can reach them. I’m not sure their cell phones work over there. And my cell doesn’t work in the ICU. Even if they get my message, they can’t reach me.”

  “I think you should try,” she said.

  They were in Sarajevo, leaving for Zagreb that night. I called the hotel and got no answer. When I called again, someone answered who didn’t seem to speak English very well. I left a simple message: Check e-mail. I knew there was occasional e-mail access in the hotel because Damien had sent me a message a few days earlier. I sent them an e-mail explaining what had happened, giving them the choice of whether to come home or stay, and asking them to call me at a specific time later in the afternoon.

  Remarkably, they got the message a few minutes later and were able to check e-mail right away.

  Later Lenny told me their discussion of what to do was very brief.

  “I want to say good-bye to Nana,” my son said, which made me so proud of him. They called as planned a few hours later to tell me they were going to try to get home as quickly as possible. There were more flights leaving Zagreb than Sarajevo,
so they were going to take their scheduled flight to Zagreb that evening and try to continue on from there.

  Then I called Alex. At fifteen, I was afraid he would find it too upsetting to see his grandmother like this. But I felt the decision should be his.

  “I’m coming home,” he said. “I’ll be at the hospital in the morning.”

  That evening, I met again with the palliative care team, and told them my younger son would be at the hospital in the morning, but that it might take my older son and husband longer to get home.

  “I feel really uncomfortable asking this, but I would like my mother to be…” I didn’t even know how to ask. I didn’t want Lenny and Damien to fly around the world and not find my mother alive when they got here.

  “I understand,” the doctor said. “You want to give your family the chance to say good-bye.”

  “Yes,” I said gratefully.

  “Of course. We’ll keep the breathing tube in until they arrive, and we’ll talk to the doctors about providing some nourishment in her IV.” Then she leaned across the table. “I’m wondering if you’ve had the chance to say good-bye.”

  “I’ve been talking to her,” I said. “It’s… nice.”

  “Good. Given all the emotion, sometimes people forget to say the things they really want to say. And they regret it later.” She pulled a piece of paper toward her. “I’ve found there are five things that really mean something to people, that they don’t want to forget to say.” She took out a pencil. “You don’t have to say them all, of course—or any of them. But I’ll give them to you, just in case.”

  The words looked like a poem:

  Thank you.