“She’s the social worker,” I say. “I called her. She’s supposed to help us.” He rolls his eyes. She comes out of the bathroom and I answer some basic questions.
“Now I’d like to ask your mom some questions,” she says, with a faux-cheery voice.
“You can try,” I say. My mother has been mostly unconscious for the past twelve hours.
We go into the room and sit by the hospital bed. Ringo, lying at the foot of the bed, stiffens and growls when the woman enters, which I have never seen him do; Eamon hovers, protectively.
“Barbara?” the woman says. “Hi, I’m here to help you and your family out. I just want to ask you some questions.” My mother opens her eyes and gives the social worker the Skeleton Face. For some reason, she is alert and focused—as if sensing intrusion.
The social worker begins her questioning. “When were you first diagnosed?” she asks. She has just asked me these questions.
“May of 2006,” Mom says.
“And did you take chemotherapy?”
“Yes.”
“And when did you stop the chemotherapy?”
“September,” my mother says wearily, looking at the ceiling.
“And then you were in the hospital just now?”
“Yes.”
“And how have you been doing since you were in the hospital? Are you getting everything you need?”
My mother slowly looks around the room. I have answered all these questions. The social worker was supposed to show us how to take care of my mother, not torment her with details. But she is one of those people who is enamored of her own slight power over the distraught and diseased.
“Have you seen or would you like to see a priest or a minister?” the woman asks.
At this, my mother rouses herself, fixes her eyes on the woman, and asks, “What exactly is the point of these questions?”
“I just—we just want to figure out where you’re coming from,” the social worker stutters, taken aback.
“I know exactly where I came from,” my mother says slowly, as if she is speaking to a moron. “I’m much more interested in where I’m going.”
Eamon and I can’t help it. We start giggling.
Still, she does show us how to lift my mother. The key, it turns out, is getting her firmly from under the shoulders.
EVERY TIME my mother goes to the bathroom with her walker it makes a scratching sound against the kitchen’s stone floor. Scritch-scratch. Scritch-scratch. Her eyes have begun to go vacant. Her hair is a mess. Soon my mother can no longer stand, and then she is half asleep all the time. The hospice nurse comes one day and says, I think we need to let her just lie here. She washes her with a warm cloth. We take turns sleeping on the couch. When it is my turn, I wake up in the middle of the night and see that my father has come downstairs and is standing in his sweatshirt looking at her in the darkness, fists punched into his sweatshirt pouch, shoulders hunched. He stands for minutes, gazing down on her sleeping face.
Isabel and Diana come to sit with her and say their goodbyes. For some reason this, more than anything, makes her impending death real to me. I can’t look in their teary faces.
My father brings home a Christmas tree and puts lights on it and decorates it. It’s five feet from my mother’s bed, and the warm glow of the colored lights on her face makes her look tan. The pine smell is sharp. Lying there, reading one night, I keep thinking of a Basho haiku:Even in Kyoto—
Hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto.
Sometimes I just sit on the couch with a quilt and a book and read beside her. I want to be next to her as much as I can. I have found an old copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles in the basement rec room, the copy she gave me for Christmas when I was in fourth grade, and I read it early in the morning next to her, remembering myself as a child getting up early, reading on the sleeping bag, her sleeping in the room next door and eventually waking and saying, “Hi, Meg.”
She moans in her sleep. I press the pump to give her the bolus, the extra shot of morphine you could give every thirteen minutes.
I love and hate the bolus. Am I even referring to it properly? I don’t know; I never quite learn the name. And why can’t she just have the bolus all the time? Why must she be in pain? Click. There’s another shot. Sometimes I get impatient and click it before it’s ready. And it beeps hostilely at me. Beep.
Eamon hates the bolus. He hates the Ativan. He thinks the drugs are making her confused. “Let’s just try giving her less drugs,” he keeps saying, but I can’t stand my mother’s pain.
SLEEPING beside my mother’s body again, as I did many years ago, I have only grown hungry for more of her. For suddenly the mother is everywhere. She is in the room: expansive, calm, the same brow and mouth. I wake up in the night, hear her breathing—long suck in, two short sucks out; long suck in, two short sucks out, the space between them getting longer and longer—think, She’ll be dead in three days, easy, and suddenly can’t breathe. I reach for her Ativan and take one. Otherwise I don’t sleep at all.
Then she cries in her sleep and her face twists and there’s that weird demon again, and I look away. I wonder: If I believe she will live, if I say No, if I refuse—will she not just go on living?
I think: It’s the holidays. There are parties. I’m young. I’ve spent the past two years going to oncologists. I’m going to put on my party shoes. And I do go to one party, and I leave when people start to dance around a pole. Later I start dating the man whose party it was, and he remembers being glad I came, and casually tells me how he flirted his head off that night. I’m not in your country, I think. I haven’t lived in your country for a while.
My ex-husband comes to say goodbye. We’ve all been sick; there’s no food in the house. He goes grocery shopping and carries wood in from the porch. My mother has been mostly in what resembles a coma. But as he walks through the foyer, which opens onto the living room, she opens her eyes and says, just like usual, “Hi, Jim!” Then she closes her eyes again.
These are the last words I hear her say. Instead of words there comes a horrible pain—pain of a kind I have never witnessed, a shuddering, bone-deep pain that swallows her up whenever the hospice nurse moves her or washes her or when we roll her on her side to change her and get her blood circulating.
In these last three days, she begins to look very young. Her face has lost so much weight, the bones show through like a child’s. Her eyebrows and eyelashes are very black. Not sort of black. Very black. I hold her hand. I smooth her face. Her skin has begun to feel waxy; my fingers slide dully over it. Also there are little grains all over her face, as if she is in the midst of exfoliating.
As she dies, two hours after we open our presents, in a charade of our usual holiday, she opens her eyes, looks at us, and takes one final rattling breath. She has not opened her eyes for days. How can she not be full of intention? She has chosen to look at us, to say Goodbye, I love you, goodbye.
Later, Liam gamely jokes that she died because I said I was going for a run. As soon as I did, her breathing slowed. “She didn’t want to wait that long,” Liam says. He shoots me a look. “And she knew you’d be pissed if we were all here and you weren’t.” And his voice breaks.
Our mother was a fierce driver. A leased BMW was her one luxury—she didn’t have fancy clothes or jewelry, other than a few necklaces and earrings my dad gave her, and a ring from Isabel. She was protective of the car and proud of it. “I love driving it!” she would say, almost purring. The summer before she died, Jim came up to Connecticut with me for dinner; he’d just bought a used Audi. “Barbara,” he said, “I have to show you something.” My mother had just begun her final round of chemotherapy, but she disentangled the chemo purse from her chair and walked haltingly out to the driveway. When she saw the car, she cried out in glee, looked at Jim, and said, “We should race!”
It was always apparent that she was alive, Eamon says as we talk about her in his room. There was a calm vibran
cy to her. She was essentially impossible to knock off her balance. But she wasn’t stagnant. She was always moving. She had found the equilibrium.
While we talk, he lies on the bed, his arms stretched overhead, a woolen ski cap with ear flaps perched precariously on his head, as if he needed protection from the cold. The room is strewn with clothes.
I think she had the most beautiful smile in the world, he says. And she was very warm to lie next to, soft, like a blanket.
II.
CHAPTER SEVEN
{yearning}
In the weeks after my mother’s death, I experienced an acute nostalgia. This longing for a lost time was so intense I thought it might split me in two, like a tree hit by lightning. I was—as the expression goes—flooded by memories. It was a submersion in the past that threatened to overwhelm any “rational” experience of the present, water coming up around my branches, rising higher. I did not care much about work I had to do. I was consumed by memories of seemingly trivial things. At coffee with a friend, I distractedly thought back to a sugar jar that fascinated me as a child—a cut-glass bowl divided in two parts, with a metal lid that never lay quite flat, the light striking the glass and hovering oddly around it. I liked to lift the lid and close it, lift it and close it; the act of opening contained some piquant, totemic pleasure, and one day the confluence of the thick, chewy glass and the radiant light invoked in me a baptismal shock: time was our master, and the world lay beyond our making. I kept opening and closing that bowl, until my mother, cooking dinner, snapped, Enough with the sugar bowl. Years later I saw these same bowls in Little Italy and wondered if my parents had palmed one from a restaurant back when they were first married—so poor, my father would laugh, that they used the Williamsburgh Savings Bank clock tower to tell the time. I found myself yearning for the sound of her voice: Enough with the sugar bowl.
This yearning is what I felt most strongly in the weeks after my mother died. I kept thinking of a night many years ago, when I took a late flight to Dublin, where I was going to live for six months. I was nineteen, and it would be the longest time I had ever been away from home; boarding the plane that hazy summer night, I was lit up with the prospect of making my way in a strange city, where no one knew me and I knew no one. At one a.m., I woke up disoriented in my seat. Out the window to my right flashed the aurora borealis. I had never seen anything so spectacular. The twisting lights in the sky evoked a spectral presence. I had a sudden, acute desire to turn around and go back—not just back to my parents in Brooklyn, but deep into my childhood, into my mother’s arms holding me on those late nights when we would drive home from dinner at a neighbor’s house in the country, and she would sing a lullaby and tell me to put my head on her warm shoulder, and I would sleep.
WE HAD no rules about what to do right after my mother died; in fact we were clueless—
“What do we do now?”
“Call the nurse.”
“The nurse says to stay here.”
—and so we sat with my mother’s body, holding her hands. I kept touching the skin on her face, which was rubbery but still hers, feeling morbid as I did it, but feeling, too, that it was strange that I should think so. This was my mother. In the old days, didn’t the bereaved wash the body as they said their goodbyes? I was ransacking the moment for understanding. Finally, when the funeral home workers came to take her body away, I went to my room and called some friends, saying, “My mother has died.” I had the floating sensation that I was acting out a part in a movie, trying the words on.
Once my mother’s body was gone, my father immediately moved the furniture back into place and wheeled the hospital bed onto the porch, where it assumed the bedraggled look of an outdated piece of machinery. He came back and sat down in his normal chair, and for a panicked moment I wondered if this was how he would treat my mother’s memory. But his eyes were looking inside himself instead of out; he seemed shrunken in his chair.
“I want to cook Christmas dinner,” he said.
What else was there to do? A few hours later Jim had driven down from his parents’ house to join us for dinner, and Liam’s friend Emily had taken the train up from the city. I don’t remember much about that dinner, except that we sat together, and there was carrot cake afterward, and it seemed odd to eat anything so sweet, and my father talked at one point about an enormous pig he and my mother had seen in Spain on their honeymoon, and I decided to fast for a day in recognition of this loss, which was so huge I needed to contain it somehow, to put barriers around its chaos. But the night slides away in my memory, like a balloon; there is no center to it. Do my brothers and my father remember those hours very differently? They must.
The next afternoon, my college friend Jodie came up; I was feverish. She took one look at me and brought me to the doctor. I hadn’t slept a full night for a week or more, and I had a sinus infection. After she left, my high school boyfriend, M., came up with bagels and we went down to the basement rec room and watched TV for hours with my brothers. I was not sure if we were dead or alive. Would we, too, enter the world of the dead now? “Eating is a small, good thing at a time like this,” says the baker to two newly bereaved parents in Raymond Carver’s famous story. He feeds them rolls and dense, hearty bread and at last they talk; they cannot sleep, but the conversation and consumption bind them to this world.
My mother was cremated, and so we didn’t have a proper funeral for her. At first my father didn’t want to have any kind of funeral—just a memorial service, perhaps a month or two down the road.
“But she died,” I said.
“I’m really exhausted, Meg,” he said, looking drained. “I don’t want to have to organize something and clean the house.” I remonstrated with him and he said, “I’m tired,” and went upstairs.
This resistance seemed bizarre to me. My mother had just died. And we weren’t going to have a funeral for her because we were tired? I sat, unable to move, in the living room; though the furniture was back in place, the room seemed deflated and empty. A few minutes later my father came back downstairs.
“You’re right,” he said. “We should do this. It makes me anxious but I’ll be OK.”
I reminded him that we were the bereaved. We didn’t have to provide the food. Someone would help us with it. And three days after my mother died, we gathered in our living room around pictures of her—I could barely look at the pictures of her as a young mother—and said our goodbyes. My father talked about how my mother, wanting to get out of the house a month or so before she died, had gone with him to return some books at the university library in New Haven; over lunch, afterward, she asked him, “Wouldn’t it be nice if it could always be like this? If we weren’t always worried about the things we had to get done?” My brothers and I, and her sisters and Isabel and Diana and even Diana’s ten-year-old son all spoke briefly, too, and afterward, we all ate and drank and shared more stories of her life. My grandmother is normally a gregarious, optimistic person, but she didn’t talk much. She looked very tired. Earlier, in the fall, my mother had said to me, “It’s very hard for my mother to see me this sick. It’ll be easier for her afterward.” It didn’t seem easier. Before my grandmother left, she pulled me aside in the foyer and said, “Just remember, your mother isn’t with us anymore, but you kids carry her forward in this world. You all have her inside you.”
The night blurred with exhaustion. I remember trying to eat the warm, cheesy pasta our friend Peter, a chef, had brought, and being unable to get the slippery pieces down my throat.
When I got back to Brooklyn, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t focus on anything at first. Because of the holidays, most of my friends were away. I wasn’t teaching that semester; I was still working on the Web magazine, which would launch in May, but I had a week’s leave. The world seemed to push me away. I felt that I was pacing in the chilly dark outside a house with lit-up windows, wishing I could go inside. But I also felt that the people in those rooms were shutting out the news
of a distant, important war, a war I had just returned from. Consumed by the question of what it means to be mortal, I looked around and thought, We are all going to die. When a friend talked about a minor problem at work, I wanted to shake her: You’re healthy, your loved ones are healthy, this problem is small. I stared at the clock, willing the minutes to pass. I hated being alone. I hated time. One night I went out with M., my old boyfriend—we had been seeing each other, sort of; I had gravitated toward the solace of a shared past—and stayed out till six a.m., with no idea how late it was. I wanted the hours to rush past. I wanted to fast-forward a week, a month, a year to when I’d feel “better.” Though I had been “prepared,” I remained clueless about the rules of shelter and solace in this new world of exile. I said to myself at times that it was not worth continuing. Life ended in death, and usually in great suffering. Why wait around? My mother was gone; my husband and I had divorced; the man I’d been dating was no longer part of my life; and even M. seemed skittish and odd. There was at least one night when I lay in bed eyeing the bottle of sleeping pills. I opened it and spilled them all over the bedside table, where they shone like moons of another galaxy. I wanted someone to save me—I desperately wanted someone to save me with an all-consuming love, as in a movie.
What was most difficult was that I myself didn’t know what to expect. How long would I feel like this? Would this yearning ever pass? And—did I want it to?
THOUGH I WAS EXHAUSTED, I had a hard time sleeping. The nights were long and hallucinatory; death seemed present in the room with me, an enemy to have it out with then and there. After several fruitless, insomniac nights, I gave up trying to sleep. Instead, I read, turning to books to understand what was happening to me.
The Long Goodbye Page 9
