Archives

1. My mother is actively dying, with a purpose and acceleration not previous part of the picture. I hurt for her hurt, her fear, her aloneness, her paranoid hallucinations, the demon’s attack. She calls to start my week on Monday morning asking to see me, urgently, asking for my help to find a way to let go, to release her attachment to life. She does not say this, but I know it. She does not know where she is or if she is alive or dead, she says.  She wants “to see them again,” she tells me.  I say, “Your husband will be glad to see you.” He’s been gone over twenty years.  “You think so?” she asks with irony, “I’ve been thinking about that one and I’m not so sure.”   A vast trove of data and information is dying with my mother.  
She asks again, explicitly, if I can help her let go and I promise to do so, “But you have to wait until Saturday,” I say with a laugh to my petulant child, “I’m very busy, you know.”  “I don’t think I can wait,” she says.  “Well try, it’s important to me,” I tell her.  

2. My sister calls. She tells me my mother is asking for me daily. It is so odd.  And yet I know with certainty that I am assigned the task of helping her release her grip on the things she can no longer hold on to or carry, that I can facilitate her dying. I must go to her. I know it. I don’t want to, but it is duty talking. 
“I’ll be there Saturday, Ma, hold on.”  
She hears my voice on the phone. She hears the other voices that frighten and confuse her, both at the same time.  
“Who’s saying these words?” she asks.  
“I am,” I say.  
“No you’re not,” she insists. “Who is it that is saying these words?” 
“Your eldest son, Bruce,” I say.  
“No it isn’t,” says she.  
Perhaps she is right.  

3. I talk to my mother on the phone about my good fortune, about her granddaughter’s wedding announcement, about my involvement in the peace campaign, about her grandson’s basketball fortunes, the upcoming state championship game, his college acceptances, his athletic scholarships. “Oh my god, oh my god,” she keeps repeating. It is as if she is on the edge of tears that she cannot bear, that she is being overwhelmed by good fortune and grace in death. “Oh my god,” she keeps saying, as if she were crying, as if what has been conveyed to her is too much good news at once.  
“Oh my god oh my god,” she offers in worship, in gratitude.            

4. On Friday night after work I drive four hours to arrive at the home of friends who live in the appropriately named town next to her hospital in Valhalla. I will see my mother on Saturday morning. I have her release on my mind. There is urgency, of course, but there is no urgency. I have thought about it. I have had dark and enlightened thinking as well as the magical thinking in my speculations. I know what I will say. Whether it is projection, intuition, or knowledge-based I do not know, but it is clear to me what my words will be and that my words will have the power mother wishes them to, that they will be a potent force and lead her to release from life unto death.  Besides, I have to be back in town for my son’s state championship basketball game on Sunday.
And I do want my mother dead. It is what she has said she wants and I understand well why she would choose it. I also want her death for my own convenience and expedience. It is cold and disconnected and I do not know to what extent it is first my wish, made easier by my mother’s wishes, or if it is her wish first which finds fertile soil in her first born son. I just know I will talk to her and she will die. I think that truth is ridiculous. I also think it is real. Her physician has told me she will rally and recover, that the numbers are good, yet I feel her slipping away as the surreal and the real merge in me, surround me. Before I go to see her on Saturday morningI take a long walk in an unfamiliar cemetery and pause by a grave marker that reads Hug.

5. I drive to the hospital feeling casual, relaxed, and in no hurry at all.  I arrive around 11A.M.  I ask at the nursing station what room my mother is in, and am directed to her. I enter the room and walk past the woman in the first bed, whom I do not recognize. Nor do I recognize the woman in the second bed. I walk back to the nurses’ station to explain there has been a mistake but am again directed to the woman in the first bed in the room I’ve just been in. It is, indeed, my mother, bandaged, stitched, her skin so old and thin it is everywhere black and blue.  
I sit by the side of her bed and talk with her. I am not positive she knows exactly who is present but I think she does. She responds to me with understanding grunts and nods to my inquiries. “Do you want some water?”  “Do you want to change your position?” I ask. She grasps one finger of my hand and squeezes it hard. She holds my hand and I help pull her up to a more comfortable position. The muscular strength and vitality in her arm is remarkable! No one that physically strong can be close to death barring some other cause. Her eyes are closed. I lay down in bed with her positioned to my left, pulling up the guard rail behind me so that I can relax and not fall out of the single hospital bed. I have not lain in bed with my mother in over sixty years. It is quite possible I never did, that I was never provided that comfort or warmth. I fall asleep next to her.  

6. During my nap I dream of a house without windows on the north side that its owners have decided to put windows in, both to let in the light and to be able to see outside. There are big rectangular spaces carved out of the house where the windows will go. There are no frames yet built into the north wall, nor are the windows quite ready to be put in place. In the absence of windows the outside world of air and weather is also the air and weather inside the house.
When I wake up from my nap my mother is laying on her left side and I rise up slightly to whisper into her right ear. I kiss her check and her ear as I speak. I brush her hair out of her face with my fingers. I caress her face. 
“You must let go of your beauty,” I tell her and she moans softly. I know that were she fully awake she would advise me of my foolishness, tell me she has long ago let go of her beauty, tell me my ideas are foolish, silly, that I don’t know what I am speaking about, but I think she is wrong. I speak softly to her, but definitely out loud. It is more identity than vanity she must let go of.  
“You must let go of your beauty and of your strength,” I tell her.  “You must let go of your body altogether, your wonderful body that has been such a good friend to you.”
“You must let go of your sight, of your courage and determination, of your will to survive and your wish to be at your granddaughter’s wedding in this earthly form.”
“You must let go of your father and mother,” I tell her, though this too she would see as the most foolish of thoughts, her father dead over 86 years.  “You must let go of your children, of worrying about your children, of worrying about them worrying about you.” I can feel her relax in my arms.  Quite literally the tension in her body that I had not even realized was there passes out of her. She relaxes and grows lighter in my arms. Her breathing changes to an even slower pace. I am aware my sister- in-law Ona has joined us. I can’t remember when she came into the room.  

7. “I don’t know what dying breaths look like,” I tell Ona, “but these sure look like them to me.” I have never lain next to anyone when they died. My mother looks so peaceful between her slow deep breaths. And then there are none. It cannot be 15 minutes since I talked to her about letting go, and she is gone.  
“She’s dead,” Ona says, and I nod acknowledging it is so. We do not call nurses. We sit with her. I hold her. I whisper in her ear, “This is the last gift we will give each other, thank you, mom.” I say “thank you” a lot. I laugh and cry a little. At some point a nurse comes in.  
“She’s gone,” I say and the nurse feels for any pulse and nods that it is so.  
A doctor with a stethoscope arrives and says it is so.  
My sister arrives and it is so. It will be so forever. My mother is dead.
I call my brother to tell him it is so. He arrives in an hour. He waves an eagle feather over his mother’s remains and her lifting spirit. He brushes her with sage. He reads from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We all leave the hospital before her body is enshrouded and wrapped.

8. I drive back to Brookline. I call and talk from the heart with whoever is awake on the west coast. I tell my daughter who cries more than anyone else, saying how she wishes she could have seen her grandma before she died.  My giant son welcomes me home at 3 A.M. with a big hug. Everything is the same and everything is different. I tell him that just because his grandmother has died does not mean he is not allowed to enjoy things or laugh and play basketball, that there will be time to be sad. He says, “I know, Popi.” I suspect he really does.

9. I walk with best friend Steven on Sunday morning.  I pick up my daughter up at the airport in the afternoon. My son starts at power forward for Brookline High in the state championship basketball game at the Fleet Center, home of the Celtics, that night. The town police escort the team bus to the game. I tell Sam to remember that the height of the basket and the dimensions of the court are the same as any other basketball court and he tells me that that was exactly what the coach told his players in “Hoosiers.”  He has painted, “I play for you, Grandma,” on his basketball shoes.
Brookline plays very poorly and is being shut out when Sam makes the first BHS basket, bringing the score to 7 to 2. He makes both his first free throws. At the half Brookline is down 10. With seven minutes left in the game they are down 14.  With 10 seconds left they are down by one point and have the ball out of bounds on the sideline under the opposing team’s basket, but the inbound pass is stolen and the game is ended. Sam is deeply dejected. He is also fine. We are all fine. He has played for the state championship. He has started every game. His grandmother loved him, not as I would have had her love him, but genuinely and for all the right reasons.  The game is over. The season is ended.

10. We have a lovely memorial service in NY, something my mother would be pleased with. Is it only Monday? The service is simple and eloquent. My brother talks about how he liked seeing his mother age like an olden tree. My sister reads from a Gibran poem that speaks of sadness being the source of joy and joy the source of sadness. I speak of half empty and half full cups, of cups that runneth over.
In the morning before the service I walk unconsciously into the lobby of an old castle on the top of a hill overlooking one hundred and eighty degrees of the Hudson River. As I stroll over the palisades someone comes out to tell me that the grounds are only for private use. “My mother’s stay at this castle is over,” I mumble. 
After the memorial service we all drive back to the private day school where my sister works, to a lovely, quaint, Adirondack like apartment where we watch old 8mm family movies and just hang out. That day, mom’s body is driven to a crematorium in New Jersey and we drive back to Brookline. It snows hard and takes us twice as long as usually and then it is over.
What does love have to do with death I still wonder. Maybe the terror. Maybe the ecstasy.