The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  * * *

  —

  Back at home, I unpacked my suitcase and threw my yoga clothes in the laundry. Forest was still at school. I took a shower and washed my hair, getting ready for the opening night of Forest’s play, the dark satirical musical Urinetown. I had to be there. My mother had always put her children first and wanted me to do the same, I told myself. I’d been gone for a week already, and I knew that with teenagers, proximity is everything. Quality family time can’t be planned—it happens in the random late-night moments when your teen wanders out to the kitchen where you are eating yogurt because you can’t sleep, and sits down to tell you about the blind date he went on a few weeks ago, the one you never even heard about, and how afterward he was “friend-zoned.” What he will remember, years later, about his teenage years is just this: You were there. Or you were not there.

  But I lived that night with double vision, torn between being a mother and having a mother. One Anne was in the audience at the school theater, holding hands with her partner, Teja, and her stepdaughter, River, and beaming with pride as Forest sang and danced around on the stage in a business jacket and board shorts as sidekick to the evil boss of the Urine Good Company. The other Anne was in my imagination, sitting by her mother’s bedside as she struggled for one breath after another.

  When I got home, I changed my flight. The next morning, I was on the plane to Washington.

  * * *

  —

  When I arrived at my parents’ apartment, my mother had been sleeping all day, heavily dosed on morphine and Ativan, following what my sister Kathleen told me had been an anxious night. When she was still conscious, my mother had been adamant that she did not want to be forced to eat or drink. That meant she was going to die from dehydration, which my sister explained could be a peaceful way to go. Her kidneys would shut down and she would go unconscious, fall asleep, and never wake up.

  I sat down on a chair next to the bed, Kathleen sitting on the other side. My mother was breathing with her mouth open, her white hair loose and her face slack—without her familiar expression of love and worry, she didn’t look like herself. She was covered with one of the blankets she loved to crochet, in squares of yellow and green. A little plastic device at her nose was delivering oxygen, the tube running out the bedroom door and around the corner to a machine that made the living room sound like an airport runway. Over the years she’d paneled the wall by her bed with family photos: my father getting out of a jeep in Japan, just after World War II; me in my college graduation cap and gown; multiple grandchildren holding multiple great-grandchildren in their arms.

  I got out of my chair and lay down on the bed next to her and wrapped my arms around her. Her head turned toward me as I told her I loved her, but her eyes stayed closed.

  After about fifteen minutes, my sister began to sing lullabies: “Down in the Valley,” “Hush Little Baby,” “Lullaby and Goodnight.” The room was dark, and my sister’s voice touched some long-ago memory buried deep inside the oldest part of my brain. She must have sung these songs to me when I was a baby, I thought. Then I realized that, of course, it was my mother who had sung them. I was remembering my mother’s voice—so much like mine and all of my sisters’—as she rocked me in her arms and sang, “And if that pony cart turns over, mama’s gonna buy you a dog named Rover…”

  The tears ran down my face into the rough wool of the crocheted blanket. As the youngest child, unlike Kathleen, I hadn’t sung these familiar songs to a little brother and sister. But they were the same songs that I had chosen to sing to Forest, thinking that I was randomly selecting them, looking up the words online after the tunes bubbled up in my mind as I held him. For the first time, I realized that I had been singing the songs my mother had sung to me.

  “Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham…” sang Kathleen. I had sung that one too—wondering why on earth, as a Buddhist who hadn’t gone to church in a quarter century, I had chosen it.

  When I left the bedroom, my sister Mary was waiting in the living room. She told me that the day before, my mother had told her, “There must be a nursery in heaven. And my job will be to help take care of all the baby angels.”

  * * *

  —

  By the next day, all of my six brothers and sisters had arrived. We took turns going into my mother’s room to sit by her bedside with her, put Vaseline on her dry lips, hold a damp cloth to her forehead. In between shifts we sat in the living room catching up with each other over the roar of the oxygen machine, eating the oatmeal raisin cookies my sister Celia had baked from my mother’s recipe.

  My mother still hadn’t returned to full consciousness, and I began to understand that she probably would never speak again. But she still gestured to my sisters when she needed to use the commode that sat next to her bed. And she turned her head toward me when she heard my voice.

  In order to watch a high school play, I had missed my chance to speak with her in person one more time, and I tried not to second-guess my choice. For my mom, I reminded myself, staying with your child was always the right choice to make.

  I was sitting with her that afternoon when she became anxious and agitated, trying to sit up, clawing at the air, gazing with blank eyes at things I couldn’t see. I took her hands in mine and told her, “You have generated so much love in your life. You have created all of these beautiful children. And now all that love is coming back to hold you. Love is holding you in its arms. You are floating in an ocean of love and you can just relax into it. You can breathe in love and breathe out love. You can breathe in peace and breathe out peace. You are dissolving into love.”

  She relaxed back onto the bed and became quiet again.

  “Her body was very strong,” the hospice worker said when she came for her daily visit. “So it is giving up slowly.” Part of me cried out, Why are we doing this? Give her an IV! Hydrate her! Bring this little sponge of my mother back to life, like one of the tiny, dried-sponge animals we used to toss into the bathtub when we were children to watch them swell up!

  * * *

  —

  By the next day, she was worse, her breathing restless and agitated. The hospice nurse told my sister he thought she was nearing her final moments. My father and all seven of her children gathered around her bed.

  “Goodbye, Nancy,” said my father, his voice shaking. “We’ve had so many good years.” We each called out our names to her and sang “Lullaby and Goodnight” through our tears.

  But my mother kept on breathing.

  We began calling out the names of all her grandchildren. By the time we got to the great-grandchildren, we started getting the names wrong. “Child, what is your name?” joked one of my sisters—the line my mother used to use when she slipped up and called one daughter or great-granddaughter by another’s name. Then, improbably, we were laughing.

  There was another breath, and another, and another. “I hope she doesn’t feel like this is a ‘command performance,’ ” said another sister. And we all laughed again—my mother’s quick-witted children, awkward and embarrassed by excessive emotion. It appeared that she was not dying at that moment, anyway.

  The sweet male hospice nurse explained to us that the presence of all of us in the room might be keeping her from letting go. What mother wants to leave with all of her children—and their father—standing there singing to her?

  So we all went back to the living room again and had more cookies.

  * * *

  —

  I wanted to hold my mother’s death as a sacred ritual, as a sacrament, as a kind of yoga—with calm, dignity, depth, and presence.

  But as with everything else, the sacred and the mundane seem to be inseparable. Death is a holy transition from one world to another. It is also a grimy passage that demands rubber sheets, disinfectant wipes, latex gloves, and Vaseline. It insists upon plane reservations and babysitters. It is inseparable from
the human messy details that make it…well, life.

  My mother’s death room became my meditation hall now. I would sit by her bed for an hour at a stretch with her in silence, following first my breath, then hers. Her breath was openmouthed, loud, the air wheezing across her vocal cords. Slanted light came through the blinds of a window that opened onto the courtyard where she used to love watching the squirrels and the birds flitting and scampering in a massive oak tree. Connie would give her morphine, wipe her lips, put small chips of ice in her mouth. She’d turn her every few hours so she didn’t get pressure sores. One of these times, I walked into the room and there was my mother, her legs exposed, in her underwear. I realized I had never seen this much of her body. She always wore such modest bathing suits—had I ever seen her belly before? I recognized its shape, its curves, the shape of the legs and pelvis. It looked just like my body.

  Outside in the living room, it was a family reunion. We talked about the big climate change story that my brother had just broken in his job at an online news organization. We exchanged stories about our children and grandchildren.

  My father, meanwhile, was coping by planning my mother’s funeral. He disappeared into his office and came back with a printout of a beautiful program that he and mom had designed together ten years before, with a picture of her as a young bride on the cover, and her choices for scripture readings and hymns inside.

  He passed it around the room and told us that he had planned a service here at their retirement home, followed by a full Catholic funeral at West Point.

  He said, gruffly: “Of course, she’s got to die first.”

  * * *

  —

  When I was a teenager and my mom was in her fifties, she promised to write a letter every week for a year to an elderly friend, the aunt of a parish priest, whom she had adopted years ago as her own Aunt Anne. The letters were intended to brighten Aunt Anne’s life, and to be the “memoir” that Aunt Anne had always begged her to write.

  So every week she banged out a double-spaced, three-to-four-page chapter on the old Smith-Corona manual typewriter that her father had given her when she went to college in 1939. She wrote about the time she helped a teary-eyed sergeant find a place on Fort Leavenworth to bury his children’s dead collie—“under a tree adjacent to the Prisoners’ Cemetery (Kyrie Eleison!) where the unclaimed prisoners were laid to rest.” The time she refused an invitation, as the wife of the commander of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to be the judge for a local beauty contest for girls ages three and four: “In my heart, all little girls that age are winners.” The time her granddaughter wept for a lost doll: “We understand this, Aunt Anne and I. We too have had the loss of possessions—the precious music box purloined, the favorite garment ruined, the beloved claimed by death. We too have wrapped ourselves in forgetfulness.” After Aunt Anne died, my mother’s letters were returned to her—all of them lovingly tied up with yarn and saved in a shoebox.

  It’s only now—with my own son approaching college age and nearly ready to leave home—that I understand what a gift this project was to my mother as well. She had raised seven children while traveling the world as a military wife; she was living in a strange town with an empty nest, and my father, recently retired from the Army, was gone most of the time, attending law school at night while trying to build a new career as a traveling consultant to the defense industry. I, the youngest, was away at boarding school. My mother was in her late fifties—just a little older than I am now—living mainly on her own. This project gave her something meaningful to do with her time—and a way to reflect on her life.

  I can also see the stories that aren’t in this memoir for Aunt Anne. The exhaustion of traveling the world as a military wife, moving every couple of years with three children in tow, then five, then seven. The loss, loneliness, and sheer terror of being married to a soldier at war for years at a stretch. The strain of being a shy, spiritual introvert required to socialize endlessly as the wife of the commanding general—at glamorous parties where she drank cocktails to overcome her social anxiety. The anxiety and physical pain she numbed out with prescription painkillers—and by drinking too much white wine in order to get to sleep. And the way all these things kept her from being present with her children—with me—the way she most wanted to be.

  Sitting at my mother’s bedside, I thought of the things I wished I had said to her, once I was an adult: Mother, you must have been so sad and frightened and unhappy. Mother, you must have felt so alone. Mother, I was scared too. Mother, I too felt so alone. I’m sorry, Mom. I forgive you, Mom. Please forgive me too.

  But I hadn’t said them. The code in our family was that we didn’t speak such things aloud.

  Thich Nhat Hanh’s words came back to me: “You are the continuation of your parents.” He wrote, “There are people who are angry with their mother, and…they want to forget her. They don’t want to have anything to do with her. Is that possible? No. They are the continuation of their mothers. They are their mothers. They cannot escape. That is why the practice is to go back and to reconcile with the mother within.”

  * * *

  —

  On the third day of my visit, in between shifts at my mother’s bedside, I went into my father’s office with him and watched a DVD that he had edited together of movie clips from my mother’s life.

  There she is, in black and white, filmed on a hand-cranked 16-millimeter movie camera, turning cartwheels on a beach in Hawaii in 1929. There she is riding horseback and then watching my grandmother, in jodhpurs and tall riding boots, shoot a tin can with a pistol. There she is in her wedding dress, standing next to my uniformed father, two weeks back from World War II, as he cuts a wedding cake with a silver sword. There she is rushing into the surf with my father on their honeymoon in 1944, dancing with him in the front yard of their borrowed cottage, rubbing sunscreen on his back. There she is with her children on a beach at Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, on family visit after visit—first with one baby, then two, then three, then a whole litter, with the youngest—me—in a swim cap and bathing suit, looking just like my mother in 1929.

  Then I went back into her room again and sat in silence with my sister Kathleen by her bed. Light spilled through the blinds tilted toward the ceiling. Her breath rattled in, then out. In, then out. It got faster, more shallow—then slower, with spaces opening between it.

  Death is like labor, I thought, only we can’t see the baby. On the other side, were a midwife’s arms waiting to joyfully receive my mother’s spirit? I didn’t know. All I knew was that sitting with her, I was so grateful for the training I’d had on countless meditation retreats—to be still and present, hour after hour, in silence. To follow a breath coming in, and going out, and coming in again.

  But in this situation, it was clear that the breath was not an anchor for settling the mind and heart in life. What I needed to do now was drop into the vast stillness and spaciousness that holds that coming and going. To rest my heart there. To be still. To just listen.

  I had been rereading those letters my mother wrote to Aunt Anne. In one of them, she named a list of the blessings she dreamed of for her eighth grandchild, about to be born. I would read it again later, many times: “May this child, while still a nursling, hear the serenade of a mockingbird through an open window in the still of a moonlit night….May this child, still discovering, gaze into a nest of robins while the baby birds emerge from their shells in the branches below the veranda rail….May there be marching bands and a father who whistles, and some old dear man who whittles and a lady who invites flower-picking in her gardens, and a secret hideaway, and hours of jackstones with a little rubber ball, and the discovery of the endless skein of rubber inside an old golf ball….Most of all, may the child grow to maturity surrounded by family and friends, conscious of God everywhere and in everything, and welcoming the magic that gleams beyond reality in fleeting moments.”

  I w
atched the light and shadows shifting as the sun moved into the afternoon. I felt the river of my mother’s life—how much she had seen, and felt, and loved, and lost. I felt how much of her life had been invisible to me, lived behind the screen of my projections onto my ideas of Mom. I felt—still alive inside her—the little girl who had turned cartwheels on a beach; the radiant young woman who had fallen in love with my father; the mother of seven with a shattered hip and a husband in Vietnam; the mystic grandmother who had sat crocheting in her rocking chair, watching the squirrels in the oak tree out the window, seeing God in everything.

  As the light slowly changed, my sister and I sat beside her and listened to her breathe. I felt her spirit. I felt my deep kinship with her—how I came out of her body. How I shared so much with her: bowed legs and big green eyes, warm smiles and dark worries at midnight, an inability to have a conversation with a television on in the background. She had loved me, hurt me, taken care of me, let me down—all the things that I knew I had done and would do to my loved ones as well.

  And I made her a promise in silence: Mom. I promise that the very best of who you are will live on through me. I will carry it out into the world as your ripple, as best as I can. And I will let go of the rest.

  She breathed out. She breathed in, with a gasp—and then didn’t breathe out again.

  The pause went on and on. I opened my eyes and looked at my sister. The home care attendant, sitting quietly in the corner, got up and closed my mother’s mouth. She said, “Get your father.”