by Gwynn White
That night I took my Mom out to her favorite Japanese restaurant, Momiji. She hesitated, but as it was my first night back and she was in the mood for Japanese, accepted.
My mother hadn’t been doing well recently, and although I tried in my mind to place it in relation to grief at the death of my father, I couldn’t trace it back to that. It was a more recent development.
One night a couple of weeks before I left for South Africa, we were having dinner at Best Friend Chinese restaurant, when I noticed that she was slurring her speech. At any other time, in any other place, I’d have put it down to the wine—but we had nothing stronger than jasmine tea. Looking back on it now, she complained a bit about the toughness of the steamed chicken, and her difficulty swallowing, even though I found it beautifully done.
My mother was 55 then, still working for the same law office she had for the last 29 years. The lawyers at her firm worked late into the night, and she’d continue working at home, her computer lighting her face late at night at the dining room table. I’d bring her coffee, but that night I noticed an awkwardness in the way Mom’s arm would hang, a clumsiness in her typing. Her posture was a bit off, and she was having difficulty keeping her right arm in position.
When one day she tripped and fell on our carpeted floor, for no reason, I told her she should go see the doctor, and she’d gone during the time I was away.
“So how did it go?” I asked.
“Naomi wasn’t there, so I had to see another doctor,” she said.
“Who wasn’t there, Dr. Satoshi?”
She nodded. “The clinic said she’d left, she and her husband. For Mars. They sold everything about a year ago to get a berth on a private ship. They waited, got word that it was ready. They just dropped everything and left.”
I’d heard similar stories from Chloe and the others at the Zoo. People with the means and the connections finding ways off the planet. Space tourist companies converting their orbital yachts into long-distance transports. Cargo companies accepting human payload instead of consumer electronics goods.
“So who did you see?”
“A new doctor, just got there last month. Dr. Bishara. He had all my charts.”
“And?”
“He put me through some tests, then he scheduled me for some more at Sunnybrook Health Centre. We’ll get the results in a month.”
I watched her closely at Momiji. She was very deliberate with her sushi, but she was content. Except for her comment about Dr. Satoshi, we didn’t talk about the Comet or the Ashitaka at all.
Over the next few months, my mother did go through several more tests for her undiagnosed symptoms, and I gathered they included—besides blood and urine tests—electromyograms, magnetic resonance imaging, a spinal tap and a muscle biopsy.
She was still struggling, and once in a while complained about feeling weak in her knees and ankles, or about cramps in her shoulders and arms, and strangest of all, her tongue twitching.
That last one scared me to no end, and I began collating all the symptoms I knew with an online diagnosis app.
I confronted her with my fears, and she finally confessed.
Dr. Bishara, that first day she saw him, had given a provisional diagnosis amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
Known commonly as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS was a type of motor neuron disease, where the nerve cells gradually break down and die. It begins with weakness or twitching in limbs, and eventually begins to affect control of the muscles needed to speak, move, eat, and breathe.
Up to now, doctors had little idea why ALS occurs and to whom, although inherited genetics plays a role in some cases.
The paralysis makes for a slow and painful degradation, beginning to affect control of the muscles a person needs to move, to speak, to eat, to breathe.
A specialist she was referred to prescribed edaravone, which was supposed to slow down the degradation, but still contributed to her shortness of breath.
It is not a cure. In fact, there is no known cure for ALS, and eventually, within four or five years, the disease is fatal.
Get out now. Military families are a priority. Take next possible ship out.
That was Paul, leaving a message on my phone. Not one of his throwaway messages, just to keep in touch, to look like he cares, not another Hope your day’s been good.
I glanced at Mom across from the granite island in the kitchen, where we were peeling and chopping potatoes to put in a beef stew. It was clear she’d gotten a similar message on hers.
She looked at me, wiped her hands on her apron, and started a message back. She pressed SEND and laid her phone down on the granite, where I could read her response.
I’m not going.
In between bursts of messages, we finished cooking, ate our meal, washed our dishes, sat reading a book or watching television, completing the back and forth with Paul in their slow, interplanetary crawl.
I fell asleep in front of the television. When I woke up, she had turned the television off, and she was watching me in the lamplight.
“This weekend,” she said. “I want to fly with you.”
And that was how, one day, I flew with my mother on an Aerolite Merlin, a step-up from my Aerolite Dragonfly trainer.
Frail and beautiful, she took in the vistas I showed her, the troubles of Earth far beneath us, the terror of the Comet still far away. As we neared Glen Eden, I went lower so we could see all the habitats—the Arctic icecap, African the savannah, the Australian outback.
I showed her the world, in all its beauty, in miniature.
And that was when she told me she wanted to die.
Part IV
Stag
For Immediate Broadcast M5 50 85
Multi-Spectral Imager Spots Comet on Flyby
Multi-spectral images of Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS were obtained in the early morning hours via the UEF’s Antigone spacecraft on a flyby. The images reveal an oval-shaped core that appears to rotate about once every twelve hours. The multi-spectral images have resolutions as fine as 25 feet (7.5 meters) per pixel.
Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS was discovered by researchers with the Deep Ecliptic Multi-Object Survey (DEMOS) at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
The comet is expected to intersect Earth’s orbit with an estimated error of plus or minus less than approximately 1 million kilometers, or more than twice the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The encounter is expected to result in an impact, the effects of which would be mitigated upon impact with water, such as the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean.
Since the surface are of the Earth is presented as 71% water, it is expected that the effects of an impact by Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS will be minimized in terms of severity, and will allow a measured response by authorities.
The diameter of the comet’s primary mass has been estimated by DEMOS to measure approximately 40 kilometers across. Other multi-spectral observations of the comet have also been conducted, and are anticipated to provide images with even higher resolution.
Multi-spectral imaging has been used to observe thousands of comets and asteroids. When these natural remnants from the early universe pass in the vicinity of our solar system, deep space multi-spectral imaging is a powerful technique for more precise determination of their trajectories, as well as to determine their material properties, including size, shape, rotation, surface features, roughness, and any other physical characteristics that may be of interest to scientists.
14
One Bee
The first of the civilian ships left early the next year. They were re-purposed military transports, on rotation from the nearest bases, drives charged to a level just enough for a round-trip to the inner colonies.
Paul had been right about military families getting priority on these first transports. It was a lottery system, but that lottery only included immediate families of those whose sons or daughters, mothers or fathers, were serving on remote systems.
Mother had told him
she wouldn’t go, that it was pointless because she had ALS, that she should give up the berth to someone else, if she was chosen.
By the middle of the year, only five civilian ships had left. With a capacity of 50,000 per ship, that was less than a hundredth of a percent of the Earth’s population, one bee in a hive of 10,000.
In the end our names weren’t selected, so it was a moot point.
15
Grevy’s Zebra
On the Merlin, when we were flying over Glen Eden before she told me she wanted to die, she told me she loved me.
That outright expression of affection was something that was not raised to express. But she told me she was afraid that soon she would lose the ability to even do that. So, she made sure.
We talked much more in the next few weeks. She quit her job at the law firm—there wasn’t much point—and most days she had time to come with me to the Zoo.
Following Erin, a few more of our keepers left—but most of them stayed, finding some continuing meaning in their lives in caring for the animals, even though the number of visitors had dropped precipitously.
In between data runs and at lunchtime, I pushed Mom in a wheelchair through paths that were now nearly empty. I stopped for her to watch Leia in the zebra habitat, or at another of the many habitats, or in one of the picnic areas, finding in the time together and the conversation a reason to continue for a while.
Pain is almost never the reason people ask to die. More often, it’s fear—the fear of the loss of independence, or the loss of dignity, or the ability to have an acceptable quality of life. Beneath it all, there is always an illness, an ailment, and there may be excruciating physical pain—but what really hurts is the existential suffering.
That was how I summed it up, what my mother told me.
My mother knew friends who had gone through similar things, their bodies slowly failing them. Susan, a woman in her yoga class who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, who had lost the use of her arms and legs. Daisy, an administrative assistant at her firm, who could no longer speak.
She didn’t want to become like them, didn’t want the slow decline of what was essential to life. If only, she said in a moment of weakness, if only the Comet would come sooner.
We continued to talk. Mom knew she had to convince me, because she needed me to do things for her now, and because she knew that I wasn’t yet strong enough to do those things. If only I had been stronger sooner.
Only a few months after my Mom’s diagnosis, I had to bring her to the hospital. When she was released, she couldn’t take care of herself any longer; I took leave from CIRCE to look after her.
It was painful to watch. The woman who had raised me, was my rock, comforted me through my father’s death, through my brother’s departure, through everything—reduced to a willow’s shadow of herself.
She was far from old, but I would have to bring her to the bathroom every morning and every night, watch the horror of awareness on her face as I had to clean her up.
She grew even thinner and more impatient with herself. Her legs collapsed if she tried to stand up, and she no longer had much use in her arms.
She would struggle for breath as she sought to tell me something, choke on the mucus building up in her throat.
And every time she could finish a complete thought and enunciate it, it would be this: “Please let me die.”
Medically assisted dying had been legal in Canada since early in the twenty-first century, for cases that showed serious and incurable illness, disease or disability; an advanced state of irreversible decline; enduring physical or psychological suffering; and where natural death was reasonably foreseeable.
In that sense, my mother and I were lucky. In other jurisdictions, that option wouldn’t even have been possible.
Here, the laws were strict, but they allowed us to take action.
So, one day, I made the call and talked to her doctor.
That night I held my mother’s hands and told her that Dr. Bishara and someone else on staff could provide the independent medical opinions she needed, and a reference to a physician who would take her through the medical process.
I accompanied her to all the appointments, cupping my ear to her mouth and translating her slurring when necessary.
And when, finally, my mother had the assent she needed, and an agreement with the physician on that date, the most peaceful smile that I have ever seen spread on her face.
My mother was born in the Year of the Dragon, as was I. She chose to die, as well, in a Dragon year.
On the day of her death I took her back around the world, to the Zoo that she had come to love as much as I did.
Our last stop, Mom and I, was at the zebra habitat. Mom’s eyes were failing, but I pointed out Leia, grazing peacefully among a group of other Grevy’s zebras in the sunlight.
When we were done, I took her home.
By now she was using a feeding tube, so I connected her and read her poetry. In the middle of something by Pablo Neruda, she seemed to be trying to say something, and when I listened more closely, I thought I knew what she was saying.
“You want your phone?”
She nodded yes.
I took it out, turned it on, and showed it to her. On the screen, as she knew, there was a message from Paul.
I LOVE YOU MOM.
I asked her if she wanted to reply.
She shook her head, raised two fingers to gesture toward me, and with great difficulty, she said, “You answer.”
I made myself smile, and nodded.
An hour later, in my pocket, her phone vibrated, but at that moment the physician was at the door.
I laid my mother on her bed, and pulled the covers up. The physician asked her, slowly and clearly, if she still wanted to continue to do this. She nodded and I took her hand.
The physician opened his case, where he had a set of pre-filled syringes—midazolam, xylocaine, propofol, rocuronium. Bezoar stones, goat’s blood, bone of a stag’s heart, unicorn’s horn.
The first was an anesthetic drug, which puts a patient to sleep. The second numbs the veins. The third put the patient into a deep coma. The fourth paralyzes the body’s muscles, including those of the respiratory system.
The physician took the syringe with midazolam and injected my mother. Her breathing slowed and her eyes closed.
Then the physician applied another injection of xylocaine and propofol. I continued to hold her hand.
A final injection, this time the rocuronium.
I watched my mother the whole time I held her hand, mouthed a prayer at the final injection. I couldn’t tell where she had stopped breathing, and from the beginning there wasn’t even the flutter of her eyes.
In all the features of her face, there was just the simplest expression of peace. I touched my fingers to her eyelids, and bent down to whisper in her ear:
“Goodnight, Mom.”
16
Firefly
My mother’s phone was still in my pocket the next day, a morning alarm she must have set buzzing like an insect, waking me from my dream.
The words of Paul’s message last night, each letter luminous as a firefly, were still on the screen:
You too Zara.
Pablo Neruda once wrote, “If nothing saves us from death, may love at least save us from life.”
But what saves us from love?
Oblivion.
17
Deer in the Manger
We brought her to St. Dominic’s Church, in Lakeview, to the parish she grew up in before she and my dad moved to Milton.
She’d been a member of the Catholic Women’s League there and had made many fast friends. She’d contributed marshmallow brownies and banana bread loaves to various bake sales. She’d helped organize pilgrimages to the Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima across the border in Lewiston. She’d joined the CWL in calling parishioners in the drive to raise funds for the recent renovation of the church’s roof.
I’d been at
St. Dominic’s before when I was six. One of her cousins was getting married, and I’d been tapped to be one of the flower girls. I remember moving down the aisle in my white dress and shoes, hands pressed together and, as I approached the altar, mouthing an Our Father.
I went back another time when I was older. At the rear of the church, there was a small, enclosed booth with a central chamber, where—in place of God—the priest sat, with two smaller booths on either side. You sat kneeling in the dark until the priest opened up a small, latticed window to your small booth, which was a sign to start fumbling through your sins.
I believed in God back then.
You remember everything at six as being bigger. God. The backyard of my great grandfather’s stone house in San Andres, which I remember as having a lake and shoals of fish, turned out to have a small carp pond, though no less beautiful. Returning to Meadow Green Academy, my elementary school, I found the halls as welcoming, but narrower, and I wondered how I could fit everything in the cubby-holes they had to store books and bags.
St. Dominic’s was as immense as I remembered it.
From the outside, its face was glass, framed by the steep, inverted V of a peaked roof. The main structure of the church, the nave, was oriented from east to west, and the transepts at the top of the nave combined to form the arms of a crucifix as seen from the sky.
Inside, after stepping through a small vestibule, the architecture was just as breathtaking.
From the entryway, the roof was a line of A-frames, constructed of solid timber, imposing in its steepness, a sharp arrow to the heavens all the way to the sanctuary area at the back. All along the length of the church, cylindrical lamps hung over the pews where the congregation sat, converging on the altar where the priest celebrated Holy Mass, on a platform elevated from the main floor by four steps.
