Spring Without Her II

The room my mother died in seemed to be waiting for spring. It was a large, westerly-facing room with a windowed balcony onto a rolling wetland. We’d seen elegant Great Blue Herons wading in the pond during my mother’s previous care center visit, at summer’s peak. The pond was frozen now, drifted over with snow, ringed by skeletal maples and willows and the brown husks of dormant wildflowers.

From my mother’s bed, you could gaze directly out over the wetland. The vista had the spare, weary, beauty of winter; grey and white; architectural. Spring would be glorious. But even now, in winter’s diffused light, the room was still something to behold: spacious and sun-dappled, its freshly carpeted tidiness thrilling after the slovenliness of my mother’s first room. The large closet! The sparkling bathroom! The slender table holding a large vase of silken poppies I’d brought it, so real-looking their leaves were fraying from the inquisitive pinches of aides. A cd player on the nightstand, left by hospice’s music therapy team, cued to a new age piano cd called “Healing.” The pleasing hush of the choice end-of-hallway location; the soft whoosh of my mother’s oxygen concentrator, the gentle bubbling of the humidifier.

Procuring this serene and lovely room for my mother was a triumph. After hounding the staff for three weeks, it took a burst of full-throttle fury for me to at last spring her from the appalling shambles of a room on the ground floor. The snapping point had been that long Saturday evening when the world seemed to pitch sideways: That companionable and fervid night in the cramped room where clutter reigned and blankets were banked against the frost on the window; the night my mother grieved her vanishing vision and fretted about my 401K; the night I wept in a wing chair in a dimly lit lobby as the hospice nurse told me my mother was not going to take anywhere near 9 months to die.

By Monday—having used the word disgraceful, having emphasized tomorrow, having been ready to snap photos for a complaint to the state—I got confirmation from the social worker: “Your mother is being moved this afternoon.” A primo room, the care center’s jewel, I learned. Later, another social worker told me there’d been an internecine dispute about it from the moment the previous resident had died: “I’d promised the room to someone else, someone ahead of your mother on the waiting list,” she said. “Your mother’s needs were more urgent, but … Well, your mother had come off Medicare first, so that did give her an edge.” She paused. “And of course there were clearly some issues with your mother’s previous room.”

Blissfully unaware of these negotiations, or of how I had all but rioted on her behalf, on Monday evening my frail and bewildered mother was finally rolled to her new room in a wheelchair. She took the brief journey—a short hallway, an elevator, a long hallway—with her customary interest, smiling at aides, perking up at sight of the piano in the second-floor commons. The exertions of moving and resettling exhausted her, though, draining what minute dribs of stamina she had.

But there she was, at last, my mother, tucked like a pea-sized queen into fresh linens in a room so agreeable it bordered on the fabulous. She lay propped on her mountain of pillows just two feet from the large window with its wetland vista that all but promised a magnificent spring. How beautiful it will be! I began to say to my mother, but stopped; mentioning spring wasn’t smart; it would only have triggered one of my mother’s frequent bouts of anxiety about where she was, and why, and when she might go home.

And of course, I knew that my mother was not going to make it to spring. I also knew, as I looked at my tiny broken wren of a mother, her shoulders heaving, her breaths growing both more jagged and shallow, that I couldn’t possibly wish that for her, and didn’t.

She went faster than I had imagined or was ready for. She had just three days in that halcyon room, not even enough time to sample all the soothing hospice ministrations queued up to ease her dying: the massages, the music therapy, the pastoral visits, the little juice glasses of wine that would be catnip for her and might even, the doctors said, be good for her laboring lungs.

She didn’t see spring stir in the wetland, didn’t make it to February, didn’t even last a week. But I do know that she found in those serene surroundings whatever it was she needed for letting go, for the release of her spirit. Initially, she found the large, quiet room perplexing—not a hospital room, not an apartment; what then?

But the day she died, as I knelt by her bedside massaging her forehead, one of the few sentences she uttered from her dozy drifting consciousness was about the pleasure of being in that room. “How do you like all this?” she said with a half wave of her hand. Her eyes were closed and there was a calm smile on her face. She nodded slightly. Then she patted my hand. “So quiet,” she murmured. “Peaceful.”

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Spring Without Her III

Now spring unfurls, and my awareness of my mother’s absence from the living blooming world is acute. The tulips pushing valiantly through the mulch, the budding out of ash trees and lilacs and weigela, the boy robins strutting their orange blaze, the young cardinals flashing crimson in the arborvitae. That the world is coming alive without my mother anywhere in it feels deeply disorienting and impossibly sad.

I think of the rambunctious, kidney-shaped patch of garden my mother tended; her pride and joy over decades of springs and summers. The few brown petals and yellowed bits of stem that now remain of her zigzagged rows of zinnias and black-eyed susans; the weeds and rabbits that have taken over where her feathery cosmos and festive nasturtiums grew.

My petite mother in her ancient floral pedal pushers and a sleeveless rose-colored blouse, kneeling in the dirt of her garden on a sunny spring afternoon, cursing the rabbits that had nibbled her sweet william to nubs. Her hands pressing marigolds into the soil, clasped around the tiny green seedlings as though in prayer.

My mother perched on the backstep before dinner with her juice glass of chablis and a book on her lap, her cigarette smoke drifting toward the three o’clocks and bleeding hearts.

Here in the city where I live, the lilacs along my fence are budding. Another pang, a toll of the bell, a thought of my mother, a picture. The purple lilac bushes she loved; she’d reach on tiptoes to snip off giant bunches of blooms to place in a gilded floral porcelain vase that had been her grandmother’s. The large red rosebushes she loved, the spreading crabapple trees she loved, the trumpets of nicotinia flowers she loved. Her affection for fluffy bachelor buttons and oddball snapdragons. The petunia and geranium plants her fingers pushed every year into large clay planters, plunking in cheerful windspinners and even a gnome on a stick for good measure. The delight she took from garden-fresh tomatoes. The vases of daisies always on her table.

My mother is dead. I realize it over and over again. When will I become inured to the shock of it? When will I just know it? When will it feel normal that I am here but that my mother is nowhere in the world, that the trees have come from dormancy to bud again but that my mother has simply ceased to exist?

Yet I know that’s not the end of it. Faith, broadly speaking; transcendent knowledge. The life of the spirit, chi, the new physics, old poetry, Melody’s universal sea of energy. My mother has departed her body, her hands won’t press cosmos into the earth. But perhaps in some manner or form she is still beholding robins and taking pleasure in lilacs. Is that possible? I don’t know where she is. The indestructible energy of her, the electromagnetic essence of her, the enduring spirit of her. Yes. But all of a piece? Free floating? Reincarnated?

Since her death, she has come to me clearly just once, the night after she died. It was near midnight; I was returning from a dinner out with friends, where I’d recounted the stories of my mother’s dying within the warm cocoon of attentive friendship and mellow wine and ravioli tossed with butternut squash. I hadn’t slept in 24 hours, although my midnight trip to claim my mother’s dead body seemed to have happened a very long time ago.

In the yellow streetlight glow along our alley, A. was nosing the car toward the door of our small garage. That’s when it happened. It was sudden and startling. I felt and sensed my mother’s presence just behind my left shoulder, almost as though she were leaning forward from the middle of the backseat. It was an intense physical presence that vibrated with warmth; it felt so substantial and real and profound that every nerve in me quivered.

How to really capture what I felt without sliding into hackneyed phrases or pure pablum, without evoking the slushy bathos of a movie on the Hallmark channel? I’m not sure it’s possible. The uncanny feeling of a radiating warmth, the sense of space highly charged and fully occupied, though nothing material could be seen there. The overpowering sense of my mother, of her essence; of a wavelength and an embrace. The love I felt. The absolutely certain understanding that she had arrived in some new form or place, been transmuted, was healed and in an essential way whole. The sense that she saw things whole as well, knew the truth of things. A sense of peace, but the vibe was not static; it felt somehow generative, creative.

It wasn’t Jesus I saw that night, of that I’m certain. I wasn’t filled with the holy spirit, wasn’t born again, won’t be speaking in tongues or working my grandmother’s rosary beads. Maybe, as my endlessly astonishing Lutheran seminarian grief counselor later suggested, my emotional and physical exhaustion had left my conscious mind uncharacteristically unguarded, open to the blurry, the extrasensory, even the mystical. The place at sleep’s edge can be like that, she said; can be a gateway to realms that lie beyond the ken of the everyday rational mind.

What I know for sure is that I did have the extraordinary feeling of being in the presence of my mother, or her essence, some 12 hours after she was released from her suffering body. Figment of my imagination? I can’t be entirely certain, of course—the freshness of my mother’s death, after all; my extreme fatigue, the warmth of the dinner with friends, the buzz of the wine. But the warmth and weight of my mother’s presence seemed palpable. “My mother’s here,” I said to A. in a strangled whisper. “Oh, do you feel her with you?” A. said. “No,” I whispered, “I mean she’s really here. Right here.”

She departed more gradually than she had come, staying with me into the house, finally ebbing away as I hung up my coat and walked toward the kitchen. But the warmth of her visit is with me still. It imparted a sense of peace that, again, is difficult to describe short of hackneyed sputterings. I will only say that my sense of connection with my mother was deepened by the experience, adding only that it led to me believe that my mother will continue to be present in my life, perhaps in powerful—and empowering—ways. I hope this is true. I don’t pretend to understand all of it yet. If this sounds hackneyed, so be it. It’s what happened. Maybe in time I can find a richer way of writing about it.

There’s a coda to this story of spring and my mother. Yesterday, as A. and I headed out for a walk, a bit of white caught my eye amid the Rosy Glow barberries and Wilton junipers and Stella D’Oro lillies I’d planted on a slope alongside the front steps. Litter, I thought; I reached to pluck it from beneath the greening plants. But it wasn’t litter. It was, in slightly weathered form, the small folded program from my mother’s funeral, with its poems of hope and renewal. I staggered, flabbergasted. Neither A. nor I could imagine how it had come to be there. Presumably a copy had flown out of a pocket or purse as we returned from my mother’s burial on February 2, and had since lain there under the snow. That’s the only plausible theory.

But of course plausibility is far from the point. This sign. My mother had come to me again, left a sign for me amid the budding and greening of spring in this frontyard garden of my own making. She’d chosen an apt calling card, the program with the poem I’d chosen for its lyrical promise that my mother would be more easily found after death in blooming flowers than in a grave.

Again I fear descending into Hallmark schmaltz; so decidedly not my style. This is not a story of grief wrapped up with a bow or an Oprah-ready parable of grief and redemption. It is not a tale of how I saw the Virgin Mary on the head of a tulip or my mother winking Kumbaya in morse code from the eyes of a chickadee.

But the inexplicability of it. Not just any errant scrap of paper, but the card from my mother’s funeral. Landing where it did. What are the odds? The thrilling mystery of it, the heartening joy of it. I do savor it. I carry the knowledge of it—the day my mother blew in to the yard—like an amulet, something to wield against the acuteness of my grief as the world bursts into spring for the first time in my lifetime without my mother in the world . . . or not as the person she was, the bright slangy brimming mother I loved and felt loved by, the avid gardener with a juice glass of wine and a good book and dirt under her fingernails.

My mother died barely 8 weeks ago. Tonight found me at a gathering where no one thought once to mention my mother or even to ask me how I was doing. How is that possible, I thought? The sadness I felt. My mother so alive to me still but so quickly vanished from the everyday world.

My first spring without her. She left me signs. I look for more. I move on as best I can.

———-
The lovely poem, by Mary Elizabeth Frye (1932), that I printed on my mother’s funeral card.

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I do not die.

Hear it: A beautiful musical version of this poem is available
as a free download from Irish folksinger Shaz Oye.

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Coming to Grips

It is difficult to come to grips with everything that has happened in the past three years. How it all started: On Christmas Eve 2005, A. and I watched as my mother nearly fell down the stairs of our 1916 four-square house. I still remember it vividly. My mother looked ghostly, stricken. She’d been upstairs in the bathroom for a time, she said, struggling to get her breath. Now she clutched my arm: “I can’t breathe.”

A flurry of activity: Shepherding her to an antique Windsor chair in the kitchen, away from the hubbub of the living room where Paul Desmond’s jazzy sax played on the stereo and birch logs snapped in the fireplace and family and friends chattered over the detritus of recently opened presents.

I rushed upstairs to ferret out an inhaler a doctor had given me for the odd wintertime wheeze. On the way back I detoured to the living-room chair where my red-vested father sat, joylessly, detached from the conviviality around him; I whispered that mom couldn’t get her breath. He followed me, in his lanky lumbering way, to the kitchen.

My petite mother sat bent over, head down, her shoulders heaving. She wore a blue double-breasted jacket with a white turtleneck, a jaunty scarf at the neck and a festive Christmas tree broach on her lapel. She’d been so lively earlier. Now she was distressed. She couldn’t get the hang of the inhaler. “Breathe out, Mom,” I said. Then, as I lifted the inhaler to her mouth: “Now breathe in as deeply as you can.” She took a shallow sniff and then exhaled, coughing. It was hopeless. “Maybe I’ll be OK if I just sit here,” she said between pants. “You go and be with your guests.” I held her wrist, trying in vain to take her pulse. Her skin felt clammy. I asked her if she felt dizzy and she nodded weakly.

Just an hour before, my mother had repaired to our unheated porch to smoke a cigarette. I’d followed her out into the cold to wrap a quilted jacket around her shoulders and to switch on a small space heater. As she’d opened the oaken front door, wielding her pack of cigarettes and a glass of wine, she’d smiled in an impish but also sheepish way at the friendly tsking from A’s sister; I’d said, “I agree completely, I wish she’d quit, but what the hell, she’s 81 and still kicking, so at this point …”

Still, even then I recalled my shock the previous summer when my mother had to stumble to a bench, nearly breathless, as I walked with her from a restaurant to the car in a brisk wind. She’d walked at a snail’s pace from the start; my father and A. had soldiered ahead and were already opening the car doors as I huddled next to my panting mother on a wooden bench 40 yards away.

My mother saw the worry register on my face as I took in her ragged huffing. “I know you’re alarmed because you haven’t seen me like this,” my mother managed to pant out. Just minutes before, she’d been dragging on a cigarette, having lit up, as always, the moment she stepped free of the restaurant’s smoking ban. “Do you have pneumonia again?” I asked her.

The truth was that I didn’t see much of my mother. We’d long settled into a groove of casual intermittence: Brief phone conversations every couple of weeks, a handful of visits (Thanksgiving and Christmas, a few group birthdays, plus a dinner when my parents returned from their winter elderhostel soujourns … and the occasional night out, like this one at a restaurant in the city). I knew, though, that my mother had become easy prey for respiratory woes: bronchitis twice a year on average, sometimes morphing into pneumonia. The past winter, she’d landed in a hospital in Arizona; the previous year, it had happened in Florida—episodes my sister and I had learned of only after the fact.

Her doctor, my mother told me that night, had diagnosed in her “a touch of emphysema.” My mother now had some white powdery medicine she took; she pawed through her her purse to show me the Advair tablets. “Emphysema!” I exclaimed, peering at the little foil packets of powder. But she waved her hand dismissively: “It’s not anything dire,” she said, still breathing heavily. “I just have to take this stuff every day.”

“But what exactly did the doctor say?” I asked. My mother was dabbing at her nose with a kleenex. Her breathing had begun to steady. “She said the same thing she always does: Get. Rid. Of the cigarettes!” she said, with exaggerated dramatic emphasis and a flourish of her left arm.

“I’ve tried,” she added in a vaguely bemused tone. I knew that was true. It just never took; within days she was cheating, half a cigarette in the morning, half at noon, a whole one after dinner, then back to a pack-and-a-half a day. She was hooked but good, she said. She should have quit when she was 19 and her father offered her $100 to ditch her Lucky Strikes.

I’d always thought smoking took the edge off her life, the everyday letdown and slog of it; but sheer drug addiction also had to be ferocious in someone who’d been smoking for 60-odd years. Nicotine, rolled into tobacco with a hundred other carcinogens; all that we know now. My mother had started in college, during the World War II years when when cigarettes were sexy, when everyone lit up in supper clubs and movie houses, when Camel was advertised as “the choice of more doctors.” I thanked my stars I’d been able to stop two decades before; I still worried about the damage my 12 years of Vantage 100s might have wrought.

“You’re lucky you were able to quit,” my mother said then, as though reading my mind. “I wish I’d never started the stupid things.” She was getting to her feet. “I’m OK, really, Mia. Your old mother isn’t going completely to pot yet.” She gestured toward the parking lot. We could see a plume of exhaust; my father had started the car.

“We’d better catch up,” my mother said. “He’s antsy. I’m sure he’s getting annoyed.”

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Coming to Grips II

Her head still bent, her skinny and hunched blue-jacketed shoulders heaving, my mother on the Windsor chair that Christmas Eve did not seem to be getting any better. “I think you should go to the emergency room,” I said. “It’s just 10 minutes from here, a zip down the freeway.” 

My mother looked up at me. “Maybe I should go,” she said. My sense of alarm quickened; stricken though she was, I had expected my mother to shrug off the need for medical care with her customary “oh, pfft, I’ll be OK.” But now she looked up at my father, who was standing silently a few feet away, his hands in his pockets. He looked bored; his head was turned slightly toward the counter, and I realized with incredudlity that he was scanning an environmental magazine A.’s nephew had left out on the counter.

“What do you think?” my mother asked him. “Dad?” I said. He swiveled his head toward where I stood, my hand on my mother’s heaving shoulders. “Should I go to the emergency room?” my mother asked him again. Her breaths were coming in tortured half-pants; she was deathly pale and had begun to perspire heavily. She seemed scared. I thought of a heart attack, glanced toward the phone: 911?

“What do you think?” my mother asked my father again. “I think you need to go,” I interjected. “I’ll drive if you want.”

“Maybe I should,” my mother agreed—gratefully, I thought. Then, again addressing my father: “I don’t know, should I?” He shrugged. “If that’s what you want,” he said finally; his tone was mostly indifferent, but a current of impatience ran through it. Then to me, while gesturing toward the magazine: “Say, could I get a copy of this?”

Nonplussed doesn’t begin to describe what I felt. I looked at A., whose jaw had dropped, and then at my mother, whose eyes evoked those of a frightened deer. “You’re going, Mom,” I said. “Let’s call an ambulance,” A. suggested, with a meaningful eye roll toward my father. “No,” my mother said. She struggled to her feet. “I think I can make it to the car.”

That was the start. Everything that came afterward was augured in the kitchen that night: Not only my mother’s incommutable turn toward terminal illness, but also just how arduous and bizarre and heartbreaking her final three years would be. The twisted dynamics between my mother and father and how they would increasingly imperil my mother’s well-being. Her dependence and fear and need; his clueless inadequacy and his resentment; my alarmed and stumbling attempts to intervene.

My mother panting in a corner while my father scanned a magazine; he was, and would remain, the relentlessly stolid axis around which everything revolved, the stumbling stone on which everything foundered; his disconcerting “if that’s what you want,” with its edgy indifference, would prove to be as good as it got with him.

All the makings were there in that moment for what would play out, as her needs steadily grew and his limitations and resentments bloomed apace, as something akin to a hostage drama.

That night, my mother and father did proceed to the hospital, where—as I later learned—my father deposited my mother at the first hospital door he saw, miles from the ER, while he drove off to a parking ramp. In the unattended lobby, my dizzy, gasping mother was so confused and panicked that tears blurred her eyes and she lost control of her bladder. Thankfully, a passing doctor soon found the distressed heap crumpled in a puddle—my mother—and in short order she was flying to the ER on a gurney.

I waited by the phone; I had asked my father to call as soon as he knew anything. “Am I going to lose my mother?” I asked A, noticing the quake in my voice. “I’m not ready,” I said. When the phone hadn’t rung by a little after midnight, I tried my father at home. He answered after seven rings. “Hello?” he said sleepily. “I’ve been waiting for you to call,” I said. “You have? About what?” he answered.

My mother had been admitted to the hospital; my father said he hadn’t a clue why. “I think they just want to watch her,” he offered. The next morning, A. and I sped to the hospital early, hoping to catch a doctor on morning rounds. We were in luck: We stepped off the elevator on my mother’s floor to bump almost literally into Dr. J., an attending physician who’d just come from my mother’s bedside. “How is she?” I asked him, urgently.

“Well, as you know, her COPD is very advanced,” he told me with a look of grave concern. He was tall, long-faced, soft-spoken; he spoke with what I thought was a West Indian accent.

“Her COPD,” I repeated dumbly.

“Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,” he said. He looked at me in puzzlement. “Your mother’s emphysema. It’s very bad.”

I felt shocked. My mother’s emphysema—! In the same heartbeat, everything focused sharply and then fell apart. My God, I thought. My mother’s breathlessless last summer. Her dismissive shrug, minutes after stubbing out a cigarette, in mentioning “a touch of emphysema”; not a big deal, she’d said, pointing out the magic powder in her purse. Her repeats of bronchitis and pneumonia, the hospitalizations.

I knew little of respiratory disease. But how naive I’d been, I thought; stupid, even. But then, I didn’t see my mother that much, I reminded myself. A fact that of course offered no consolation, only a slamming sense of guilt.

Another pang: The Christmas Eve at our house the night before–! It’s no wonder her failing lungs had gone to pieces. That crackling fire in our fireplace, the candles burning in the kitchen, all those curls of wafting smoke. The cold porch, her shivering out there with her cigarette and glass of pinot grigio. The steep stairway schlep to and from the bathroom.

But I hadn’t known. She’d seemed tired, true; everytime I saw her she looked smaller and more stooped. Her voice was hoarse; yet another “little bronchitis,” she said; her doctor had given her Zithromax. But she was bright and sociable, as always, hauling in a sack of presents and a foil-packed rectangle of store-bought brownies, interested in everyone, mingling, intrepidly sampling unfamiliar tapenades and exotic cheeses; such a vibrant contrast to the glum husband frowning uncomprehendingly at bruschetta and sittingly in lumpen silence in an armchair near the fire.

And there, too, was my mother heading to the porch, her cigarettes and her Bic lighter, her glass of wine, and her tiny traveling ashtray with the silver lid that snapped closed over her lipsticked butts …

What, then of her own apparent innocence? Was it denial, her old friend? Or genuine ignorance? Her mind already had begun to slip; she forgot things, seemed to lose her way easily, had become so addled and agitated while playing Spit in the Ocean the previous spring, during a rare evening at our house, that A. and I proposed we throw in the cards and bring on dessert. Maybe she hadn’t actually been able to retain her doctor’s diagnosis, or to make sense of it.

Another possibility presented itself: That it simply hadn’t been possible for my mother to go there. Her husband, axis and stumbling block. Rationalist to an irrational extreme. He had no use for illness; it’s in your head; just don’t think about it. What’s in your head is real. Illness is not. He’d embarrassed and infuriated my mother by suggesting to her terminally ill brother, struck down at 60 by a brain tumor, that he might get right to the business of snapping out of it. Just read Norman Cousins, he said, in his earnest and superior way, though presumably he thought himself helpful.

I flashed on the previous summer, my mother gasping beside me on a bench: “We’d better catch up; he’s getting annoyed,” my mother had said with a nod toward the car where my father sat with the motor running. Yikes, I thought suddenly: My father was probably at home at this very moment loading up the RV. He and my mother were supposed to head off to the Southwest tomorrow—though my mother made it abundantly clear she’d had enough of snowbirding in a Winnebago. And of course was going nowhere now, no matter how much he willed it.

But the wreck of my mother’s lungs. Whatever my mother had made or failed to make of her pulmonary prognosis, how had her primary care doctor failed to intervene in this catastrophe? Here was Dr. J., this hospital staff doctor who’d just met my mother, declaring a full orange alert: I listened as he explained that my mother’s severely impaired lungs had all but caused her heart to fail last night, that he’d immediately hooked her to supplemental oxygen, ordered drugs, affixed a nicotine patch; that another cigarette could be the death of her; that she would have to change her life whole cloth, be on oxygen 24 hours a day, follow a regimen of medications and nebulizer treatments.

They’d soon know more from a CT scan, Dr. J. said. I was scribbling notes furiously in the margins of my checkbook, my fumbling fingers having failed to find a notebook in my purse. My mother certainly didn’t have bronchitis, he added; he couldn’t fathom why her regular doctor had given her Zithromax. My mother was profoundly weak, he emphasized; this episode—a COPD exacerbation, he called it—was extremely serious. She needed to remain in the hospital for several days. And in any event, Dr. J. absolutely would not discharge my mother without oxygen tanks and a rock-solid care plan. He had summoned social services to arrange a family consult. “This is an intervention,” he said. “It’s her only chance.”

He wrapped up by stressing that “there is so very, very little left to your mother’s lungs. It’s amazing she is still walking around.” How is it, I thought again, that her regular doctor, Dr. L.—an internist my mother always referred to as “breezy Carol”—would not have acted with a similar sense of emergency? Breezy or not, she was a doctor, for chrissake, and here was her very own patient with “very, very little left of her lungs.” How had she let my mother go home without an oxygen tank—with only those packets of powdery Advair to tuck away next to her cigarettes?

Were we in malpractice territory? Dr. J.’s wonderment that breezy Carol had diagnosed bronchitis, “when what she needs is oxygen, her lungs are starved for it.”

But now. Focus. What now? I called my younger sister, who had been waiting for news; she promised to get to the hospital as soon as she and her 9-year-old daughter had finished rolling out gingerbread. I looked at A., who shook her head. We went in then to my mother, the bright candle of her now a spent wick in a hospital gown. Her nostrils sported slender oxygen tubes. Her face lit up the moment she saw me, but she was weak and confused. “How did I end up here?” she asked me. My heart swelled with love, fearsome and fearful.

In the hallway, I phoned my father—better put him in the picture right away, I thought. Dr. J.’s sobering prognosis would, after all, be nearly as life-altering for him as it was for my mother.

“I see,” he replied noncommitally after I’d filled him in. “That’s very interesting. Thank you for letting me know.” His exact words; I remember them with searing clarity. I was speechless for a few moments. Across the hallway, I could see Dr. J. standing outside my mother’s room with a woman whose kindly countenance and manila folder suggested a social worker. Dr. J.’s slender fingers motioned to me. “Are you coming to see her?” I said finally into the phone.

“I hadn’t planned to,” my father said. “I’ve got a lot of packing to do.”

This is a true story. It was Christmas Day, 2005. That was the start. Even considering the many mountains that lay ahead, it was all downhill from there.

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A Candle for My Mother, II

In the shadows of the showy Beaux Arts Cathedral, I rose from a worn kneeler and turned back to contemplate the almost mystical glow of the votive stand. The small flames of the two candles I’d lit for my mother, the flickering pluck of them, the tiny shadows on the amber glass. I felt a pang noticing that they had grown discernibly shorter. I had set one wick burning for my mother, and then a second, lit from the first, for the daughter she had birthed and had now left grieving—for the essential truth that I was hers; for all of her that lived in me. On impulse, I tipped a match to the second candle and lit a third flame on an adjacent votive stand (another dollar in the box). A light that was made possible by the first two, I thought. One that would burn on. I knew the symbolism was simple and soft, even a little mawkish. But I indulged myself. My mother to me. My mother and me to this third symbolic flame.

Leaving the alcove–and that strangely moving statue of the Virgin Mary in young-mom mode–I set out into the baroque colossus of the cathedral, walking like a cat to mute the slapping reverb of my heels on the marble floor. The ornate and slighly culty grandeur of the place! The ornamented pilasters and balustrades; the bric a brac gone wild; the soaring stained-glass windows depicting martyrs in the throes of assorted agonies; the seas of burnished pews, vacant, weary, in shafts of late-afternoon sunlight; the metallic echoes of a few people—tourists and pilgrims—murmuring or praying softly. Granite columns, each as big as my bathroom; shrines tricked out in gold leaf; angels, saints, and the Holy Spirit gazing out of enormous dark canvasses. Front and center, a mammoth altar of black and gold marble, festooned with bronze latticework.

The overall effect seemed intended to leave no room for the human or the intimate. Perhaps it was meant to quash the faithful into awed submission by sheer granite and gold-leaf overwhelm. Still, I crept on. Here was another set of votive candles, an alcove devoted to St. Joseph. Here was an enormous padded chair, or throne, designated for the archbishop. Here was what had to be one of the world’s most towering organs, here a giant fresco featuring an eminence of some sort—an early-century Cardinal? Here, jarringly, was a rack with pamphlets —how to give money to restore a fresco or an arch, how to book a wedding or a funeral, how to support crusades against same-sex marriage and women’s right to choose. I paused, my blood stirring: had the brush with rightist Vatican morality campaigns pulled me out of my grief? But then I came to a series of alcoves announced, via wall plaque, as an international gallery of time’s most celebrated saints: Italy’s St. Anthony of Padua, Ireland’s St. Patrick, Russia’s St. Cyril, Germany’s St. Boniface, and a parade of others.

I stopped at France’s St. Therese of the Little Flower. My mother had a soft spot for St. Therese, I remembered. Her own mother had the same birthday as this French saint, and as my grandmother’s Catholic devotion deepened late in her life, she took to including in her daily Novenas special rosary-aided entreaties to St. Therese. She spent the last 12 years of her life—years 90 to 102, the sorry Alzheimer years—in a well-appointed nursing home that, as it happened, was named for the Little Flower.

Long before that, though, the fables of this early 20th-century French nun’s childlike simplicity, and the roses that rained when she died, had captured my mother’s imagination. She had kept from her own childhood a dog-eared storybook—from which she read to me—telling of the the marvelous things that might happen, flowers raining down, in a life modeled on Therese’s: honest and loving and faithful.

No roses had rained for my mother, though. And none rained that day for me; even poised wet-eyed before the statue of St. Therese, I didn’t find my mother. “That isn’t surprising,” Melody observed when I told her about it. “You said your mother wasn’t especially religious.” That was true; the observant Catholic mother of my early childhood had drifted; I’d always suspected that the mettle of my mother’s faith had gone when neither her prayers nor her beloved brother’s abundant goodness had spared him from a deadly brain tumor at 60. Her attendance at mass had become erratic; she was all but unchurched except for occasional pilgrimmages to the renegade, social justice-y, flutes-and-guitars church in the center of the city. She’d had little interest in my offers to take her to mass, have a priest come to call. But she’d taken the trouble to write “Roman Catholic” on her living-will form.

There was also, Melody gently reminded me, the age-old truism of the elusiveness of what is actively searched for: Things come to you when you least expect it.

This was true of my visitation (for lack of a better word) from my mother, who came to me suddenly and quietly late one night as I was about to get out of the car outside my garage. I think constantly about this remarkable event; I need to write about it, and will.

But where is my mother now? I keep searching. I am unable not to.

And yet. Melody’s comforting metaphysics—all those intriguing quarks and vibrations, that pleasingly chi-like universal sea of energy—notwithstanding, I am also continually caught up short by the overwhelming feeling of utter loss, of a breathtaking finality. My mother was here in her life just weeks ago. She was here for nearly 85 years and now she isn’t. I poured a glass of wine tonight and was pierced to the core thinking of her … seeing her pouring her evening juice glass of Inglenook and spreading cheese on a few Pepperidge Farm butter crackers. The pleasure she took from it. The deep and inalterable truth of her no longer eating a cracker or coming to the phone.

And all of what I knew of my mother—what of it now? My mind brims, still, with all that I knew of the complex mosaic of my mother—that she loved Barbara Pym the novelist and orange Pim cookies, for instance. That she reserved the best spots in her garden for cosmos and nasturtium, possessed a peculiar fondness for “old man of the sea” knickknacks common in surfside souvenir shops, had been a favorite of all the barn cats on her Uncle Henry’s farm, had a finger that ached when it rained from a long-ago flattening in a doorlatch, preferred Tony Bennett to Frank Sinatra, had harbored a secret hankering to write, had saved in a box to the end of her life her baby shoes and her report cards and a Marx tin windup orchestra she’d adored as a child. All that I knew and took for granted … the thousands or millions of small shards of mom strewn casually or deeply in every corner of my memory—all of this was suddenly, wrenchingly, abstract, past tense, ephemera—trivia—from a house that no longer stood.

The candles are out. Perhaps it is true that, to paraphrase a 13th-century mystic, I was using a candle to look for the sun. But what I felt at that moment was that all that my mother was—the chapters and verses of her, the music of her, the singularity of her, the history of her, the petite plaid bent smiling person of her, the woman once a girl of her—is no longer on the earth. Not as my mother and not as a person. Not as she was.

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A Candle for My Mother

My mother’s death has unmoored me. How can this be? It’s not precise to say we weren’t close. But the terrain between us was marked by lapses and lies as much as by love, its prosperity thwarted by bad history, by temperamental differences, by my mother’s stunted life, by the looming and distorting presence of my father–and by my need to keep all of this at bay.

My mother was my first, my oldest, love; I knew her breath, her smells, her sighs, and the swish and thrub of her heart, before I knew anything else. For all the damage of my childhood, for all the distance of my adulthood, for all my ignorance of what really formed her marrow, there was still after my 49 years as her daughter such a vast lot that I did know of my mother, of her quirks and habits, of her thwarted ambitions and brimming heart.

My grief for my mother started many years ago. Her death, though, has brought the whole arc of my mother’s life achingly front and center in my own. But that’s only part of it. The feeling of being unmoored … The searing years of childhood coming back into view, and the arc of my own personal history thrown into bas relief. That … and the loss of the original thread, the core connection, the groundnote.

Can I find my mother? Melody asks. The promising new theories of physics, the old ones of Eastern philosophy and lyric poetry. Her body committed to earth in a gleaming oaken casket in a plot disconcertingly close to a freeway; her soul or energy released to the ether but somehow, somewhere still of the world.

And so I keep searing for a sense of connection with my mother–or perhaps for some semblance of what Melody calls grace.

Last week, leaving a cafe where I had quietly wept for my mother twice while listlessly eating a sandwich and reading the New York Times, I was moved to drive a few blocks south to the cathedral, a copper-domed Beaux Arts pile on a hill, and to light a candle for my mother.

Only after the wick had stuttered to a steady flame did I look around to notice that I was in a side chapel devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. My mother’s candle glowed just a few feet from an oddly affecting stone statue of one of time’s most celebrated mothers, Mary, holding—and gazing with loving concern upon—her legendary infant.

For a moment, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. This Mary cradling her child to her ivory gown—the sweetness of it!—nudged loose stray motes of memory: A three-year-old me in a red sweater, sitting on my mother’s lap in a graceful wide-runnered rocking chair made by my mother’s grandfather. My plaid-pantsed mother gently kissing awake my three- or four-year-old pajamed self to come sit beside her on the living room sofa to watch a crooner—Shari Lewis? Ella Fitzgerald? Doris Day?—sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in fuzzy black-and-white on the boxy Zenith television.

I wanted more of these memories, but none came. Trying to summon them only brought less idyllic pictures: The cupboard-slamming ones, my mother’s desperate rages against the consuming needs of her children, the superciliousness of her husband, the mounting pains and unrelenting losses of her life.

I had feared that the candles I recalled from childhood might have been replaced by some sort of digital device. But there they were, skinny metal stands crowded with votives, with charred bits littering the amber glass bases and a narrow tin of long matches at the side. Amid a few dozen glowing candles, I had set my sights on an unlit one toward the middle, setting it ablaze after depositing in a slot the “suggested donation,” which was a dollar. (Were they once a nickel?)

Symbolism, if not religiosity, stirred in me. After being momentarily transfixed by the granite Mary with her infant, I turned back to the votives. I lit a second candle from the first—from mother to daughter, I thought. I knelt on a padded kneeler before a statue of Mary. I thought of my mother, of her afflicted life and the slog of her dying; I welled up again, softly. I summoned up some prayers from my early years in the pews: “Hail Mary, Full of Grace.” I mustered a small, hopeful approximation of fervency: Did Mary, in a heavenly place or in the universal ether, see my anguish? Was there a presence—a current of energy? an angel? my mother?—I might have pulled toward me for even a moment, with my candles and attempted prayers and tears?

I think I hoped a spritz of grace would waft my way, like the fragrant curls of incense the bizarre, possibly drunken, but pastorally effective priest had dispensed at my mother’s funeral mass. My feckless tries at prayer tacked effortlessly toward poetry, lines and stanzas running together willy-nilly in my mind. Mary Oliver: “What is there beyond knowing that keeps calling to me?” Emily Dickinson: “But most like chaos, stopless, cool,/Without a chance, or spar,/Or even a report of land/To justify despair” (Emily Dickinson).

I felt adrift. All of this felt somber; it had meaning. But I didn’t feel reborn, and I felt only marginally closer to my mother than I had earlier at the cafe with my tears falling onto the New York Times, or in the car at an intersection, where my heart ached as a white-haired woman with a walker navigated around a small bank of dirty snow outside a shop.

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The Physics of Grief

I’ve had one visit from my mother, the night after she died. It was extraordinary (and I do need to write about it).

But where is she now?

My grief counselor–a friendly hospital chaplain named Melody who came packaged with the hospice program that my mother was part of, if only for a slender few days–talked to me a few days ago of quantum physics, of breakthrough theories of time and space, of how energy might change form but will never dissipate, can never be destroyed.

This broadminded take on metaphysics clicked so perfectly with my own expansive spirituality –and was so unexpected from a Lutheran seminarian–that I looked at Melody in wonder. I had long ago left the clutch of catechism and the drone of mass for a more open and holistic spirituality. The vibrating strings and universal energy flows embraced on the frontiers of physics, much like the vital chi of Taoists, felt profoundly and intuitively true to me–and as lyrical an entree to the transcendent as a poem or a moonrise.

I felt immensely grateful to curly-headed Melody, who had entirely dispelled my early apprehension that she might prove to be too chatty, too chummy, too Lutheran, or otherwise unable to grasp the warp of my quirky temperament, the complex woof of my blighted heart. She seemed as oddly, likeably wise as the Dalai Lama. As she offered her surprising ruminations–on “the universal sea of energy” and on “the many ways of finding or understanding grace through grief”–I had a sense of something nourishing, something necessary, radiating warmly and deeply to my core.

Grace, Melody said again; what it means is different for everyone; how you find it is by continuing on grief’s journey. Grace–I found it lovely to contemplate, both the word, which seemed to carry a balletic elegance, and the concept, shrouded for me in appealing propositions having to do with healing and affirming, soul-deepening and coming to wisdom. Grace is another term I didn’t often use, although its essence thematically suffused much of the poetry I loved best: Mary Oliver, among others.

Could I find my mother’s energy in the world, Melody asked? Could I connect with it, maybe find ways to gather and magnify it, or take parts of it into (unto?) myself? That is the way, she said, toward grace.

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Big Mess With Mom: The Story

The day my mother was packed off from hospital to care center found me repeating The Story again and again. This had come to be the drill, whenever new health care providers or social workers appeared in the picture.

My mother’s health care history was not only a groaning database of doctor consults and hospitalizations, lung function tests and labwork, EKGs and CT scans, dexas and mini-mentals, pulmonary therapies tried and medications taking up two square feet on a countertop. It was also a train wreck, an obstacle course, a Rubik’s cube. It was a ruinous game of chutes and ladders tied to deep furrows of personality and habit and most of all to the tangled skein of her marriage. It was no exaggeration to say that her well-being had become hostage to her husband’s ineptitude, selfishness, and slipping mental gears–and his fury at both his burdensome wife and her meddlesome daughter.

Over and over, I tried to make sure people entrusted with any part of my mother’s care grasped the intricate and messy complexities of her life: her limitations, his hinderings; her profound vulnerability, his minefields and roadblocks. It exhausted me to keep doing it. But without either a power of attorney or guardianship for my mother, I was consistently at a disadvantage. My attempts to intervene on my mother’s behalf often came a cropper because I couldn’t whip out a duly executed power of attorney document. The ace in the hole I did have–my mother’s health care directive, naming me and my sister as prevailing decision makers in the event of my mother’s impairment–seemed to be given short shrift.

That my mother’s memory and judgment were impaired there was little doubt; every doctor who had met my mother said they would testify to that effect if I went for guardianship. Yet my mother, unaware of her misfiring synapses, continued to be treated as though she was capable of making her own decisions, with my impaired father—who worked hard, and often successfully, to fool people into seeing him as wholly functional—riding shotgun.

I wanted–needed–the doctors to get it; if I was to gain any traction in my efforts to ensure my mother’s well-being, it meant bucking not only my mother’s confusion but my father’s overt resistance. And so I kept telling The Story, the action-packed tale I referred to privately as Big Mess With Mom (the title I’d scrawled on a file cabinet bulging with mom-related folders). The Story: Of her losing battle with emphysema (with a dementia subplot) and my flailing (and often failing) attempts to slay all the dragons of hardship and misery (mostly my father’s doing) that were in the path of this increasingly frail and vulnerable woman.

With the hospital social workers, I took a deep breath. Here goes, I thought. Another attempt to shorten into a pithy and useful tale the excruciatingly steep and rocky journey of the past three years.

The Cliff Notes version would look something like this:

My father’s bad behavior, my mother’s dodgy mind, pointless pulmonary rehab, the downward spiral through missed medications and rotted food and stairway falls, the pitched battles with my father over the air conditioning he wouldn’t turn on and the accessible shower gizmo he kept taking off.

 

The Husband Run Amok: The Leaving His Wife in a Hot Car debacles, the Mismanaging The Oxygen catastrophes, the Harassing of the Home Health Aides saga, the Trying to Keep the Daughters Away chapters, the Writing Bizarre Notes to the Daughter kerfuffles, the Cancelling His Wife’s Doctor’s Appointment episodes.

 
The doctors who didn’t get it or didn’t want to get involved, the lawyers who pressed us to get guardianship but warned of balky judges, the county social workers that needed things to get worse, the urine-soaked clothing, the eventual horrifying crisis, finally the intervention from the county, the transition into rehab, the triumph of getting my mother into assisted living … and the despair that my father went with her there.

 
And up to the present: Her decline, his hostility, her cheerful quasi-lucidity, his brooding mental tangles, the reality that health care decisions would now have to happen without them, the good news that mom has a living will … and that I am prepared to do everything I possibly can to help my mother in this hardest hour of her life.

That day, circumstances required me to tell The Story (or chunks of it) to a social worker, chaplain, and hospice planning team at the hospital; and to an admissions director, social worker, nurse manager, and night nurse at the care center. My parents’ impairments had become more profound, and more obvious; still, many of those on the scene in the last few months of my mother’s life continued to put them in the driver’s seat. As evidence, I need only note that when my critically ill mother was first admitted to the hospital on the day after Christmas, the staff had initially heeded my father’s instructions that I not be notified at all.

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