Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “And no alcohol.”

  “I don’t drink. Anymore.”

  That night, with the help of the Seconal the doctor had prescribed, I did sleep. Deeply, in an underworld of dreams that seemed to issue from somewhere in the wilderness of the collective unconscious. In one, especially vivid, I saw my mother and father, in their twenties, romance efflorescing, young and smiling and given to laughter. They were flying in a single-engine aircraft, my father piloting his girlfriend, the woman he was in love with, across Lake Michigan into a cloudless blue sky for a special dinner where he would propose to her. I snapped to consciousness with the incandescent realization that somewhere, deep in our dreams, or deep in unconsciousness, or deep in the afterlife, all conflicts and acrimonies are resolved. That it was consciousness that so unrelentingly afflicted us with suffering.

  I parted the heavy gray drapery. The storm was clearing. The skies were lightening to a refulgent blue, dispersing swaths of clouds in the windy upper atmosphere. Sheboygan’s streets glistened. I was groggy, but oddly refreshed. As I shaved I couldn’t help but stare at myself in the mirror. Dark pouches underscored my eyes. I might be feeling stronger, but the trip had aged me.

  Breakfast at Alice’s was somber. I had taken to coming over in the mornings to keep her company, and then driving her over to see her sister. But I could tell the visits were wearing on her. Death is too slow in coming was what she would have said had she not been a Christian.

  “I don’t think I’m going to come today, is that okay?” she asked.

  “Sure, Alice.” It had to depress her profoundly to see her older sister and know it could just as easily be her. And who would be here for Alice when the time came?

  I rose. “Come on, Snapper,” I said. “Let’s go see Mom.”

  Snapper jumped off the couch. As his owner was growing more frail, he was improving.

  “You know I can’t take him,” Alice said.

  “I’ll find a home for him,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Say hi to Phyllis.”

  I drove, Snapper riding shotgun, to St. Nicholas Hospital.

  The hospital was sepulchral at this hour. I found my mother in her room, slumped over in her wheelchair. Her head listed onto one shoulder, the left side of her mouth sagged; overall, a grotesque visage. The early shift had bathed and dressed her. This was the first since her arrival here I had seen her in her street clothes.

  “Mom?” I said gently, to rouse her. I couldn’t tell whether she was sleeping or still in such a state of disorientation that she was less than half in the world. “Mom, it’s me Miles.”

  She turned her head slowly and tried to meet my eyes. I had to squat because the heaviness of her head, coupled with the increased diminution of motor control, precluded her looking up at me the way she had even recently been able to do. “Hi, Miles,” she said faintly, the words drawn out, her speech so aphasic, similar to that of an infant, decipherable only by the parents. Still, it was a lingua franca that we had developed over the years since her first, devastating, stroke.

  I massaged her shoulder in hello. “How’re you doing?”

  “Not so well,” she said, garbling her words.

  A muscular young PT came bustling in. Though a different guy from the one I’d seen the day before, he said in the same cheery voice, “We got her up today.”

  “That’s good,” I said, unable to share his enthusiasm about my mother’s ostensibly improved condition, but understanding that it was his job to put a positive spin on the most moribund of cases.

  I found myself speaking without having thought through what I meant. “I was thinking of taking her for a drive,” I said casually. “Maybe buoy her spirits.”

  The PT furrowed his brow. “Let me ask the doctor.”

  “Please.”

  Brimming with energy, he strode off.

  I squatted down again. “Do you want to go for a drive, Mom?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “I want to get out of here.”

  “I’ve got Snapper here with me.”

  “Oh. You’re a good son. My Snapper.”

  “Where would you like to go? It’s a gorgeous day.”

  She considered for a moment, then nodded sedately. She lost her focus for a moment, then her eyes opened wide. A flicker of exultation, pushed by a remote corner of a receding emotional core, swept across her face. “Am I going home, Miles?”

  “Yes, Mom,” I said unhesitatingly. “You’re going home.”

  She grew practically animated, a wan smile creasing her lanolin-shiny face. “Oh, that’s such good news.”

  The PT returned with the doctor who, it occurred to me for some silly reason, had her whole glorious life ahead of her. She held out her hand. I took it and smiled at her.

  “I’d like to take her on a little drive, if that’s okay. Might be good to get a little sunshine.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea, Miles. Your mother’s pretty weak.”

  “I think it would be good for her. Plus, I’ve got her dog in the car.” I told her about the amputation to gain her sympathy.

  She squatted in front of my mother. “Mrs. Raymond? It’s me, Dr. Neiser. Do you remember me?”

  Her patient stared blankly into her face and I feared for a moment that my mother wouldn’t be able to get past even the most basic cursory examination to confirm she was still possessed of her faculties. But she rose to the occasion. “Oh, yes. How are you, Dr. Neiser?”

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Raymond. Do you feel up for a drive with your son?”

  That perked the old coot up. “Oh, yes,” she exclaimed. She raised the index finger and added, “I need to get out. I want to see the sky.”

  “Okay, Mom,” I said, chopping her off, fearful she was going to spin off into the dottily transcendental and reinforce the doctor’s misgivings.

  Dr. Neiser straightened to a standing position. “Her heart’s very weak. We’ve had to double the nitro.”

  I could see she was torn, and not trending in my direction. “We won’t be gone long.” I lowered my voice. “I’m leaving tomorrow to go home. This may be the last time I see her alive.”

  Frowning, the doctor looked from my mother back to me, then, against all her professional instincts, she smiled and said, “Okay. Have a nice outing.” She turned and walked briskly out of the room.

  The PT, in the wings, said, “Do you want me to help you out with her?”

  “No, we’re fine. I’ve got a special handicap van.”

  He placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder, squeezed it with his strong fingers and said, “Have a nice afternoon, Mrs. Raymond.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  “All right, Mrs. Raymond. See you when you get back.” He went off.

  “Ready, Mom?”

  “Yes. All my life.”

  For the umpteenth time I circled around behind her chair and took hold of the steering handles. We rolled through the door, down the length of a corridor, past rooms featuring demoralizing dioramas of every imaginable human debility, past the receptionist’s desk and out through the automatic doors into the crisp air. The bright sunshine galvanized my mother to root around in her purse for her sunglasses, but she was having trouble. I slowed to a halt and helped her find them. I placed them on the bridge of her nose. I rooted out her favorite faded blue Gilligan’s Island hat and slapped that on her head as well.

  “Oh, it’s such a beautiful day,” she managed.

  “It is, Mom, isn’t it?” I replied, feeling one with her elation.

  We pushed off again and, in the handicapped parking, eased her to a stop at the side of the Rampvan, and slid open the door. When Snapper saw her he started barking his fool, impish head off.

  “Oh, Snapper, you be quiet,” my mother scolded.

  I rolled my mother into the back and set both the brakes. Snapper, with an adrenaline rush brought on by his recognition of his owner, leapt adroitly into her lap. My mother bent forward to let him lick her, talking to
him all the while. It brought a smile to my cynical face.

  I circled round the van, climbed into the driver’s seat and turned over the engine.

  St. Mary’s Cemetery, where my mother’s parents were buried and where she wanted to go, is a small-town Catholic burial ground set in a wooded area outside Sheboygan. It’s a traditional cemetery that you don’t see much of in California, populated with heavy granite steles, plinths and gravestones of all shapes and sizes.

  It was blustery when I braked to a halt on the access road fronting the cemetery. I rolled my mother with Snapper in her lap down the ramp. The going was bumpy as we traversed the dirt path and threaded our way through the grave markers to where her parents’ modest stones stood embedded in the ground.

  “Are you chilly, Mom?”

  “A little.”

  I went back to the van to retrieve the sweater that Alice had been thoughtful to give me when I told her I might take her sister out for a drive. I wrapped it around her shoulders. “Better?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” Snapper lay contentedly in her lap. She stroked his small head.

  I stood next to her as she stared wordlessly at her parents’ graves. No telling what images and emotions were ranging over the drought-stricken floodplain of her nearly destroyed brain. Was she journeying back in time? Or surrendering to the inevitable and the darkening of those bright blue skies?

  After a long silence she said simply, without looking at me. “I don’t want to go back to the hospital.”

  “I know.”

  “You promised.”

  I hooked my arm around her and gave her a hug. “You’ve been through a lot, Mom. You’re a tough old bird.”

  She rasped a chuckle.

  I hugged her tightly. Then, mustering all my courage, I said, having succumbed to her private idiom, “You’re ready to go home?”

  She stared at the grave markers for the longest time. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, she nodded.

  I squeezed her shoulders and let go my hug. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She wordlessly nodded, turned her eyes slightly my way, but said nothing.

  From a brown paper bag stowed in the Rampvan, I removed a cup of yogurt and a plastic spoon. I dumped out half the yogurt and added the powder of fifteen Seconal capsules, stirring the mix until it was smooth. Trying to go on autopilot, following the steps I had rehearsed in my head, I walked back to where my mother sat still staring at the grave markers. She was mumbling something to Snapper but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  I fed her the half-cup of yogurt, spooning baby food to the child I’d never had–and never would. I stood behind her with my hands on her shoulders, both of us gazing out at the sea of gravestones.

  As if one last thing had flared in her mind, she looked up, raised her heavy right arm and crooked the index finger, at some invisible god she invoked to help her understand this final moment. She grew momentarily agitated. “Miles?”

  I squatted down. “Yes, Mom? I’m here. What is it?”

  Her face bore the oddest, most innocent expression, as if she had come full circle back to infancy. “Where do you think we go when we die?”

  I tried to take her question at face value. “I don’t know for sure,” I started, wanting to be profound, knowing I would come up short. “But I had a dream last night that seemed to say that we go to where all our conflicts, all the resentments, all the bad things that have happened to us, are somehow resolved. I don’t know where. I don’t know what it looks like, but it has to be a place where everything is made whole, where we are no longer angry or in pain or suffering, where we are somehow one with ourselves, one with our families, one with the universe.”

  My mother nodded, seeming to understand, as if my disjointed speculation were the oracle. “Oh, I hope so.”

  A wind blew through the cemetery and pushed some leaves over the grave markers.

  “I’m sorry about everything that’s happened,” I started. “This whole trip and everything. It was probably a mistake.”

  She shook her head slowly and definitively back and forth. “Oh, no,” she said, tears muddling her words. “We lived life!”

  “That we did.” And with her words I saw what this trip had meant. Not just to her. The point wasn’t the transporting of an infirm woman to Wisconsin to die. It was the improbable journey itself. I looked back at her. Still petting Snapper, she was staring, again, at some fixed point in space and time. I looked away.

  Leaves swirled and eddied as swirling gusts of wind kicked up abruptly and then died down just as suddenly as they had come up.

  After what seemed like an eternity, I turned and looked again at my mother. Her head was slumped forward, her chin resting on her chest. Her eyes were shut. I levitated the back of my hand next to her mouth. I could feel her warm, but now weak, exhalations. I glanced around and there was no one in the cemetery except my mother, Snapper and me.

  Then, the strangest thing happened. Snapper perked up his ears, leapt out of my mother’s lap, raised his head to the sky and started yipping uncontrollably.

  “Snapper,” I admonished. “Snapper.” But he wouldn’t stop. I had never seen him in such a state. His yips were that of a coyote, yowling, echoing through the cemetery.

  The Internet medicide advice said that “when using barbiturates it is important to stop the breathing manually.” Unless I asphyxiated her she would take longer to die, and death might come horribly by her choking on her own vomit.

  Following one of three recommendations provided on the site, I pinched my mother’s nostrils shut and then clamped my other hand over her mouth. She struggled only a few seconds and went slack. I removed my fingers from her nose, but kept my other hand over her mouth until I could no longer feel breath.

  After what might have been a minute, Snapper still yipping away, her breathing seemed to have ceased. Just as in her condo a few years before when she had had the congestive heart failure, a peace had settled over her and her face seemed haloed, in a permanent state of rest. I looked at her a long moment, could have sworn I felt her spirit or whatever ascending out of her, breaking free of the dilapidated body that yoked her to the earth, this pain she had borne with so much suffering. She didn’t want to go back to the hospital, I kept rationalizing, and she didn’t want to waste away the last months of her life in a nursing home. And: I had promised.

  Suddenly, Snapper stopped his yipping just as quickly as he had started. It was followed by a plaintive whimpering, as if he, too, sensed what I had. He looked at me, and I looked at him. If we could have spoken to each other we would have said the same thing: she’s gone.

  I turned to my mother and placed my lips on her cold lifeless cheek. I put my arms around her. And took a look at my watch.

  My mother quickly grew cold in my overdue embrace. I checked and double-checked for evidence of breathing, but there was none. I examined her cursorily in the fading light. Her chapped lips had gone motionless and her face had grayed. Feeling her wrist with my thumb, I couldn’t discern a pulse. Just to be certain, I let another half-hour pass. In that half-hour I reflected on our trip. More than once I laughed through the tears.

  I finally punched in 911 on my cell.

  An EMS vehicle showed within ten minutes, its lights flashing. Two paramedics, a man and a woman, hustled over to where my mother was peacefully slumped in her wheelchair. After hearing how she had just lapsed into unconsciousness they checked her vital signs and went to work in a vain attempt to resuscitate her. Despite the fact they found no pulse they employed all-out heroic measures. Oxygen, cardio-push, adrenaline injections. After twenty futile minutes the female paramedic returned to where I was standing and said simply, “Your mother’s gone.”

  I nodded at the inevitable, tears forming anew in my eyes. Had they miraculously brought her back from the dead this time I would have been out of my mind with rage. The fact that they used everything in their medical arsenal to resuscitate her I didn’t blame on th
em per se; it was what the law required them to do.

  Per the standard procedure, the male paramedic got on a cell phone to the Sheboygan Police. Another numbing twenty minutes passed before a squad car with flashing lights parked on the periphery of the cemetery. Two uniformed officers made their way over to the scene of my mother’s death. After conferring with the paramedics, they approached me. Through tears, I told them that I had taken my mother out of the hospital so she could visit her parents’ graves.

  The cops nodded empathetically, signed some papers and handed them to the EMS crew so they could “move the body”–my mother!–into their truck and back to the hospital.

  Dr. Neiser met me in the waiting room after performing a cursory postmortem. We sat across from each other under bright fluorescent lights.

  “Do you want an autopsy?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I think we know why she died.”

  “I always advise an autopsy,” she asked. “There was evidence of petechiae.”

  “Pardon?”

  She looked at me with cold, unblinking eyes. “Facial hemorrhaging.”

  “Which means?”

  “Hypoxia.”

  I looked at her dumbly, waiting.

  “It could be indication of asphyxiation,” she elaborated. Our eyes met, but only briefly before we both looked away. “Of course, CPR was performed in the field. That could also cause hemorrhaging.” She glanced away and wrote something down on the paper on her clipboard. She looked up at me. “I believe what happened was for the best.”

  I nodded.

  Our eyes met in that same darting reluctance. She glanced down and wrote something more on the form. “I’m going to put cause of death as ‘heart failure,’” she said.

  I pressed my eyes shut to block another onrush of tears. “There was no failure of heart,” I said enigmatically, before checking myself.

  The doctor signed off on the death certificate and mortuary arrangements–more paperwork!–were made. Cremains to be shipped to a funeral outlet in San Diego where they would be held until I could pick them up and arrange for disposition at the Ft. Rosecrans Cemetery next to where my dad was interred.