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Spring Without Her II

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

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

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

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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A Candle for My Mother, II

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

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

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

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

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

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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The Last Week of My Mother’s Life

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

I should write about the end of it all. About that last, long, searingly memorable Saturday night when I kept my mother company as evening turned to night, as distress blossomed and abated, as love shone, as loneliness lingered, as tears flowed, as frost spread across her window.

About the next five days–her last, two of them in that horrible room and three in a far better, even lovely one.

About the last two days. About the night of her death.

All of this so deeply impressed on me, and in me.

portBut for some reason I don’t understand well, I just can’t revisit any of these experiences yet, at least not in any more depth than I have already managed to do. The memories are intense; some are comforting but on the whole they are heavy with disquietude. They go to the core of my grief, with its thick gumbo of sadness and regret and longing and guilt and anger and love stretching back to childhood and into the pain of now and into the unknown and the unfathomable. Writing about these profound memories will very likely be cathartic and clarifying, but right now it feels overwhelming.

I do want to remember. I want to gather the fragments of memory before they grow faint. But it feels deeply burdensome right now to have corral them into sentences and paragraphs. It overwhelms me.

I have so much else that is pulsing toward the page. The things I am not ready to write about have begun to feel like a millstone ’round my neck, pulling me away from writing.

Moving on then, for now. In time, I will circle back to those searing final experiences, the last week of my mother’s life.

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My Mother’s Last Saturday Night

Saturday, March 21st, 2009

I rue that my mother spent most of the last month of her life in in a woefully small and dispiriting room, a room so drafty–could this truly be the room allotted to a patient with respiratory disease?–that pillows were banked against frost on the inside of the window.

The room was, in truth, a dump: chaotic, slovenly, every surface choked with clutter. There was barely space to pull up a chair up alongside her oxygen tanks and special bed. The television was nearly buried under tubes and and pads; the closet blocked by a nebulizer stand. With her nightstand jammed in a corner away from the bed—at least until I commandeered one of the aides to help me shoehorn it back next to the bed–, even my mother’s blanketed form became a repository for miscellany: Extra sheets and clothing were heaped on her legs, a brush and magazine on her belly, a heavy blue telephone wedged against her side. The vases of flowers I brought disappeared under a heap of towels. The photos I gave her vanished into a drawer, or under the bed, along with the cheerful cards I left out so that my memory-impaired mother would know I had been there and would return.

We would have 9-12 months, the doctors had told us. We knew it was not a promise. Still, they were off by a good mile. When I came to know this for certain was on a bitterly cold evening in late January five days before my mother died. On what turned out to be my mother’s last Saturday night in the world, I spent six poignant hours with my mother in her appallingly disheveled room, her bed in blue-tinged and weary-looking fluorescent brightness, my chair in shadows, blankets tacked over drafty windows, CNN on the television, our voices rising and falling softly in intermittent conversation, aides coming and going, frost gathering on the pane and dripping onto the floor.

When I arrived in her doorway at about 4:30, my mother was sitting up in her bed. Cradled in her left hand was the little stuffed bear I’d brought to her in the hospital. Her head was tilted down slightly to look at it, and she was stroking its contemplative brown face with the fingers of her right hand.

She’d been glad to see me. “Well, if it isn’t my darling daughter!” she said, beaming an expansive smile toward me. She was in her usual white hospital gown with the small blue flowers; a blue knit warmup jacket I’d brought her was crumpled around her thin shoulders. She looked clean, and –did I imagine it?–there was a hint of color in her cheeks. Her white hair, in its pert new bob, looked soft and fetching. The TV was on, loud–CNN’s anchors segueing from a suicide bombing in Somalia to the remarkable tale of the American Airlines jet that had recently landed, improbably, on New York City’s Hudson River, its passengers clambering to safety in the most literal way on a wing and a prayer.

The indelibility of that night. The desultory but companionable quality of it. The heartening perk and wit of my mother, no matter the usual repetition of her loop-de-looping memory. Her entertaining stories, though none of them new, of her happy childhood years. My efforts to improve her disastrous room, sweeping towels and tubes into drawers, unearthing cards and photos, cramming pillows against the frosty windows. Aides bringing in dinner, meds, rags to mop the puddles of melting frost near the window; eventually, taking note of my mother’s worsening cough (“It really is cold in here,” a handsome young aide named Lucas comments) they wheel in a space heater. My fury about the egregious unsuitability of the room, though I hide it from my mother.

My mother’s mildly monotonous chime of reiterated questions about what I’d been up to making a surprising turn: She wanted to talk about my work, did I still like being self-employed, what had I been working on lately, was I still making a go of it ten years in. She expressed pride that I had struck out on my own (“You’re your own boss … you’re self-sufficient; that’s wonderful,” she’d remarked, as I basked in her interest and the sudden clarity of her mind). Then, more remarkably, her trenchant interest in the nuts and bolts of self-employment: did I have a sufficiently sturdy retirement plan? “I worry about you,” she said.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” I replied.

“I worry about you,” she repeated. “I wish I could help you. I would if I could.”

The surprise of that exchange … and then the heartrending crisis, the moment when she discovered she had no vision in her right eye—her one good eye! she said in a plantive and panic-edged voice. The summoning of aides, the late-night visit of a hospice nurse, the doses of ativan and dollop of morphine. The sitting by my mother’s bed as she grew drowsy, as I flipped channels, as she suggested maybe I could stay all night, as she told me in a playful but poignantly small voice that she didn’t want to leave.

And then the end of it: The sitting in the darkened lobby with Laura, the hospice nurse with the mien of someone who lived alone and cared too much, the empathic on-call angel who’d ventured out late on a bone-chilling January night to answer my tormented call about mother’s eye. Laura had waited for me in the lobby as I said goodnight to my mother. We sat in facing wingback chairs in murmured conversation before heading to our cars.

I was bone-tired and heart-heavy and deeply unsettled. My mother’s heartrending anxiety about the loss of her “one good eye” (which the hospice nurse ascertained had happened some time ago, probably a result of the bleeding disorder; it seemed my mother kept forgetting and rediscovering it). Her touching plaintiveness, tugging me to stay. And what of her unexpectedly lucid preoccupation with the state of my 401K? It seemed to have come out of nowhere.

“Well,” Laura answered in her hesitant, gentle way, “I think that maybe what your mother was really doing was expressing her need to know about whether you’ll be alright when she’s gone.”

I choked up, tears streaming, the truth of it unfurling within me. “It’s very common toward the very end in hospice patients,” Laura was adding. My heart lurched; everything in me went heavy and soft. Yet this was something I’d already known, I realized. “We’re not talking about 6-9 months, are we?” I finally croaked out.

“Oh, heavens no,” Laura said, her voice soft. She saw that I was shivering, and covered my cold hand with her warm one. My mother was profoundly, even impossibly frail, she said; frightfully tiny, almost nothing left of her, breaths so hard and wispy, so little fuel for a famished heart. “I was shocked by the feebleness of the woman I saw when I walked into your mother’s room.” Six to nine months–“I’m so sorry, Mia, but no.”

The truth of it. But … “But she was so cheerful,” I said to Laura. “She was so amazingly lucid.” Not just that. ” She was so upset about losing her eye–her one good eye, she kept saying: ‘What am I going to do without my eye?’ That’s what she said.” Her anxious, woeful laments about her eye had cut me to the quick; the loss of her vision, and her rue about it, somehow seemed the cruelest of all the hard, sad things that had unfolded in the past few years.

Her strangled breaths, her shredded lungs, her vanishing bones, the oxygen tether, the wayward shamblings of her bladder and bowels, the shrinking of her life to a circumference barely bigger than her bed–none of the trials and indignities that had befallen my mother seemed as painful, as cruel, as significant, as the failing of my mother’s vision.

My mother the voracious reader, the inveterate camera-clicker, the eager observer of the world beyond her door; my mother the lover of extravagant blooms and vivid hues and the endless variety of the human face—“no two alike!” she would marvel. My mother with her treasured morning newspaper, her CNN, her calming bedtime tea of Everybody Loves Raymond or reruns of Frasier; her heaps of photo albums and scrapbooks: the lovely silver-toned pictures from her vibrant early years, the fuzzy Kodacolor snaps that she culled into a bright and glossy record of all that came later.

“She still wants to see things,” I said again to Laura. “She wanted me to leave the door open. She’s so much better than she was in the hospital.”

Laura was quiet, her gaze level and kind and, I noticed, glistening in the corners.

“”She was so wistful and hopeful about her eye,” I reiterated. “She kept asking if it could be fixed.” Even as I rattled on, though, I knew. And it came to me then that some part of my mother, witting or not, quite possibly also knew. “What am I going to do without my good eye?” she had asked with such plaintiveness. “Will I get it back?” “We don’t know,” Laura had answered simply, with touching tenderness. “I hope so.”

My mother had been quiet for a moment. When she spoke, she sounded small and possibly scared. But what she uttered next was not another distressed lament about her eye. “Will you pray for me?” she’d asked.

A short time later, as I kissed her goodbye, as we exchanged “I love yous,” she’d asked again if I might stay. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I reassured her. “Will you?” she’d asked, the question–edged with urgency, the hint of a plea—startling me. “I’m counting on you,” she said. The unfamiliar and disconcerting unease in her, something small, woebegone, little-girlish newly floating in this wrenlike white-haired wraith who was so heartbreakingly my mother. As I turned toward the door she called to me once more. “Can you leave the light on?” she had asked.

I knew. The heaviness of it. The deep ocean of it. The dead certainty of it. “I’m so very sorry, Mia,” Laura was saying again as we sat in a shadowed lobby on what proved to be the coldest night of the year. In the window over her shoulder I saw the glow of a large winter moon, nearly full, on the snowy parking lot. “I know this is very hard to hear,” Laura continued gently. “But I can’t imagine your mother lasting more than a month. Probably less.”

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My Mother’s Last Trip, IV

Friday, March 20th, 2009

We didn’t, of course, know how short her remaining time was to be. But it is hard to make peace with the fact that she was able to experience hospice’s happy float for a mere week before she died. Instead, she spent the first 21 of her last 29 and 1/3 days enrolled in a mildly taxing regimen of post-hospital rehab.

The very idea of rehab for my mother was preposterous. But she’d had the right sort and length of hospital stay to garner a primo Medicare bennie: If she went on to a rehab round, Medicare would cover every aspect of her care for 21 days, including the $250/night room charge she would otherwise pay out of pocket. We may as well use the all-expense-paid days, everyone counseled; such a deal! We’d also gain time to plan mom’s hospice care–the months of hospice we thought she’d have–along with a strategy for dealing with our impaired and obstructionist father.

As a result, my mother, who entered the care center on death’s door, spent the first three of her last four weeks exerting herself each day with Janet, a plus-sized physical therapist of kindly disposition whose daughter and my sister’s daughter had once appeared together in a community theatre production of The Wizard of Oz. With kindly Janet’s coaxing, my mother weakly flexed her emaciated legs each morning; she fluttered her arms up and down; she gamely buttoned up a sweater. By the end of the second week, she pulled herself–her grip tightening on Janet’s doughy arm, her legs buckling–to a standing position next to her bed.

Her wheezy exertions proved of no real therapeutic value. But in those weeks in the care center, my mother did rally to an extent that seemed startling. The improvement was not so much physical, although she did manage to pull off the ambulatory triumph her therapists needed to satisfy the suits at Medicare; my mother had walked five feet, Janet exultantly reported at the 21-day care conference. No matter that it was at a painfully shaky and shuffling gait, and was accomplished with the aid of a walker; no matter that it required her oxygen tank to be pushed to the highest possible liter flow, or necessitated several rest periods to quell her panting enough that she could continue.

What really changed, for a time, was her spirit. She perked up so much that the hospice team was called upon to reassure me that, yes, she was as gravely ill as before, the prognosis was the same, a late-inning rally wasn’t uncommon, the game plan and the dismal life expectancy had not changed. The perking up was almost jarring. She had a bit of appetite again. She took an interest in surveying her dinner tray; her interest in its contents was fleeting—“I know, ish kibbibble!” the young aides would tease her—but she could be persuaded to eat a few bites of sweet potato and yogurt, and she tucked into each evening’s ice cream treat with genuine glee.

Her customary “hello, lovey!” greetings were back, along with her gift for gab; no matter that she repeatedly uttered the same sentences and posed the same questions; an endless loop. She again took an interest in things, even if she remembered nothing. The inauguration of Obama was interesting, and always news to her constantly rebooting mind; ditto the stories her daughter shared, or the small dramas she observed in the care center hallway. “Leave the door open,” she insisted to aides with a coquettish air, “so I can see what’s going on.”

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