Lucky

Bettie, our family, our friends.

My mother holding my dog on a leash and one of her favorite books, The Geometry of Art and Life. Author photo.

When you’re dying, a lot can change in a day.

On Sunday, my brother Sam and sister-in-law Julie come, as does his closest friend, Dave. Dave has a successful business restoring old homes. Our old house is the first one on which he worked. He’s close to my mom.

Later my cousin Bob and his wife Pam join us.

My mother perks up for company. Her manners kick in. Manners are like muscle memory to her. Guests appear, and she greets them.

“I’m so glad you came,” she says.

Sam and Dave go to lunch and pick up an eggshell covering for her mattress, as ordered by Julie, who’s an RN. She gets my mother’s room in ship-shape. She shows me a very clever trick for turning her in bed, and where to place the pillows for maximum comfort.

If only every dying person had a Julie.

I take my mother for a spin in her wheelchair while they are changing the bed. I open the double doors in the hall and wheel her chair to the entrance. She is able to look at the front circle, her lawn. She breathes fresh air for the first time since she came home from the hospital.

It is an excellent day.

She starts to complain more about pain in her spine and is willing to take morphine. When my mother takes medication, I know she hurts.

At the kitchen sink, I look out the window. I count thirteen vultures waiting in the topmost limbs of the oak tree.

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I sleep that night, and wake up late for me, around 6:30 am. I’m surprised I didn’t hear anything from her room overnight. I go in.

Something is different.

She’s still sleeping. She has this heavy, giant white and green cushion behind her back. The walker is folded up against the far wall, nowhere near her.

What the hell.

She did not have that pillow behind her when we went to bed.

She wakes up. I bring her tea and ask her if she got up in the night.

“I got up once,” she says.

I don’t know how she managed, but she got up, walked to the bathroom without her walker, picked up that heavy cushion, and rearranged her bed. By herself.

She can barely stand even when I help her.

For her last act, she performs a magic trick.

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She can’t get comfortable all morning, and keeps talking about the pain in her spine, even after I give her pain meds. She is very agitated. Her hands start to move again.

I tell Bettie the hospice nurse is coming.

“Oh good,” she says. “That helps.”

It does help.

My mother’s oxygen reading has dropped to 90. There is a switch to morphine only for pain. No more pills, lots more morphine.

I know what it means. But it continues to surprise me when the nurse refers to my mother’s death, and how it will come quickly now. A matter of days at most.

The nurse leaves. I cry. In the long saga since her fall, I haven’t cried in front of her. I apologize.

She says,

“No, I want you to cry.”

This makes me laugh.

Then she says, to my great relief,

“I am going to die. And I want to die.”

“I’m glad you told me that,” I say. “It helps me.”

Then she and I talk about how lucky we are, that we’re together as she dies. We talk about how much we love each other.

It’s been a complicated relationship. In the end, we have love without sentimentality. We are aware the peace between us now was hard won.

Somehow, all three of us—Sam, Bettie, and I—can be ourselves while working together as a family. It seems a miracle, but it took years to get here. Sometimes it was downright ugly.

I’m glad I don’t have to pretend to love her. I actually feel it.

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Her words are a relief because I’ve been confused by a contradiction in her.

She is always adamant she doesn’t want to outlive her body. She even has a handwritten note with her medical directive about how she doesn’t want extraordinary measures. How she plans to stop eating to hasten her death.

But not once since she entered hospice has she said she’s ready to die.

I’ve been confused about how tightly she’s held on. How she hasn’t mentioned dying at all. It’s become an elephant in the room after a lifetime of openly speaking of it.

Sam and I have an older brother, a physician. Bettie is his stepmother. I asked him last year if he could give me a prognosis for her.

“Well,” he said, “Bettie has had about six months to live for the last ten years.”

I know from watching other people die, the human body does not want to go. The body insists on staying. I watched someone die for three days once. Every breath she took could have been her last, and she kept breathing.

I know the body’s determination.

But my mother has always been practical about death. Very matter of fact. I once asked her, years ago, if she worried about it.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t mind going through a door a lot of my friends have already gone through.”

And she loves to quote James Madison, on speaking to his niece when he was dying:

“Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear.”

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There is a lot of waiting between breaths.

She’s no longer conscious. I count the seconds between them. Sometimes it’s 12 seconds. Sometimes it’s three.

One one-thousand, two one-thousand…

Her best friend since childhood, Florence, comes in the afternoon. She stays for hours, and we talk. We play Big Band music, what they danced to as teenagers. My mother loved to jitterbug.

People start to fuss over me now. I both appreciate it and wish they’d stop. I have one job, to help her die. I don’t have time for much else. I am busy counting breaths, dispensing morphine, and wondering how the hell she got up the night before and arranged her pillows like that.

I must admit sometimes I think she’s pulling my leg with the whole business. She knows if she’s dying, she has my complete attention.

Now I have evidence. If she can get up in the middle of the night and move that giant pillow, she’s not dying. She’s pretending.

---

I wanted to write about finding my maternal great-grandmother’s pocketbook in the closet. I wanted to take a break from—whatever this is. Eldercare. Hospice. Death. Vultures-in-waiting.

I don’t have time.

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Our last visitor of the day is Tammy. She’s my oldest friend, she’s always lived next door, and she’s helped take care of Bettie. I don’t have words for how much we love her and what she means to us. Her visit makes me feel better, at ease.

Tammy leaves.

I turn off the music. I keep the TV off, although my mom’s fallen asleep to C-SPAN since the beginning of cable television, keeping her sharp eye on Congress.

Pam helped me drag the mattress from my bed into her room. I won’t leave my mother now.

I want to remember how good the silence felt.

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I wake at 1:30 am. I realize it has been over four hours since she got morphine. They want to have it in her system regularly.

I don’t know if I will remember everything, if my mother’s death will be etched in amber. But I don’t need to remember. Being here is enough. Dying isn’t our whole relationship.

She did give birth to me. And I was a young child, safe and happy, in this very room.

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My mother isn’t awake, but I worry about her. She jerks sometimes. I want to ensure her comfort.

I can give the morphine every hour now. But do I? Is she alright? I call the hospice number and ask. Her nurse calls me back and says she’ll come.

Then my mother’s breathing changes. It switches from breathing to rattling. I know what it means, but still. It remains impossible.

Her nurse Tracey comes. She explains my mother is no longer transitioning, she’s dying. She tells me she can tell from my mother’s face she’s comfortable.

Her face is absurdly beautiful. There isn’t a line on it anymore.

Tracey and I move her in the bed, and I know she’s unconscious now. She doesn’t react as we turn her. If she felt us doing it she’d cuss us to kingdom come.

Tracey explains all the things which belong to death. The mottled skin, the rattle, even the fever she’s running.

The body fights to stay alive and has a mind of its own. When it starts to die, the body says,

“Hmmm. Maybe this is an infection…”

And a fever begins, to try and fight it off.

Isn’t that nuts? The body tries to live even as it’s shutting down.

Tracey and I talk a long time, then she leaves. Not long after, my cousin Cameron, Bob’s brother, comes in. He sits across from me. It’s hard for him to see my mother go.

We sit on either side of Bettie and trade stories, and laugh, talking about our parents and grandparents. I feel Bettie’s happiness that we’re together talking about our family.

Then Dominic comes.

The hardest call I had to make was to Dominic, because I know the enormity of what Bettie’s loss will mean to him. Cameron and I leave the room for a minute to give him some time.

Dominic lived here a long time, and he’s the only person not in our family who knows this house, which runs like a dilapidated ship. He’s originally from Palau, Micronesia, and my brother and I share Bettie with him. She’s his American mother.

Dominic goes. When Cameron leaves Bettie and I are alone again.

I play Chopin’s Les Sylphides. It’s part of her ballet music collection. It transports me to the barre, the room with the big mirror, her arms.

Big Band was yesterday with Florence. We’ve had Tchaikovsky most of the day, and I played her favorite movie soundtrack earlier; the 1972 soundtrack of John Barry’s Alice in Wonderland.

I decide to text Cathy, my closest friend in New York. She’s a ballet teacher now but was a dancer with American Ballet Theatre during the Baryshnikov years. Her mother was a ballet dancer, mine a ballet teacher, and both are 94.

As you can imagine, we always have a lot to discuss.

At 4:00 pm I text,

Bettie and I are listening to Les Sylphides.

Cathy is teaching a ballet class. Later she texts back,

You won’t believe this but my pianist just played it.

Later she tells me he played it for the révérence, the end of class.

I climb into the tiny hospital bed with my mother and am by her side. I put my arms around her. I whisper all my thoughts in her ear. I tell her she is perfectly loved.

At 4:05 my mother takes a breath that’s different. I know it’s time. I hear the door open, and Pam comes in.

I have my hand on my mother’s chest now. Pam walks over to us. I say,

“Bettie is dying right now.” There’s a long silence, and a tiny breath, and she’s done with this life.

How lucky am I?

Two years ago I walked out of this house and blocked her phone number for two months.

Today I am in the room I slept in as a child, holding my mother at her last breath, looking out the window to the branches of the same mulberry tree which was there when I was little.

Pam goes to the kitchen to wash the dishes and give us some time, and for a second I’m mortified I left dirty dishes in the sink.

Ah well. Nobody’s perfect. I can’t always keep up with the dishes as I’m ushering someone out of the world.

I call both my brothers.

I was with my grandmother, Bettie’s mother, when she died. She died the same way. One big breath, one small. I was seventeen.

That was over forty years ago. Now I know if we live long enough, death is a process. My mother’s last breath was the period at the end of a sentence.

I hear Pam crying in the kitchen. My mother was deeply loved. I go over to the window and open it wide to the wind and rain. I let my mother’s soul float out of the room.

Sam is picking up Julie and they’ll be here in a couple of hours. It ends up being longer because of the Armageddon rain.

We have a plan about how things will go, and we stick to it.

When my dad died, my mother gave him a green burial (before it was popular) and buried him in a wooden coffin in our family cemetery. We will do the same for her. She’ll be buried next to him, the same way. No embalming.

Bob arrives and joins us. For the two hours until Sam gets here, I can’t leave my mother. The only thing which changed is she’s not breathing. I know she’s dead, but I’ve been taking care of her for a long time. She’s still there.

I do worry I might not want her to leave when the time comes. I hope I am not in some delusional state, or if I am, I hope it’s short. I am very tired and really not up for a nervous breakdown.

After Sam spends time with my mother, Julie and I get a basin and water and wash her body. But we do it with the greatest respect for her modesty. Julie does the difficult parts.

We put a sleeveless white cotton eyelet nightgown on her, one like she wore the last couple months of her life. Then we shroud her in ten yards of the soft linen Julie procured.

It’s only after this process is over I’m able to leave the room. I know she’s no longer there. The act of dressing her body, of putting her in a shroud, is what makes her death real and bearable.

It’s an old-fashioned death. She dies at home, and the women to whom she’s closest dress her. She will not be touched by the people at the funeral home. Her privacy is intact.

Death is a process. Dressing her for burial is a process. And doing so sets me free. I can leave her body in the room now.

I walk into the living room and tell my brother and Julie I need to eat. They’re starving too. We order food and wait for the funeral home to come.

When they arrive, they carry my mother down the front steps. Her two children stand arm and arm on the porch to see her off. Then we turn around to go eat dinner.

It’s almost 9 pm.

Lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky. I’m the luckiest person alive today

The oak tree this morning. Blue skies, and the vultures are gone. Author photo.

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