My mom doesn’t, though. Her favorite reply to any text intended to cheer her up is the Bitmoji with a hand coming out of a grave that says “Literally dying!”
Charlie is reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich aloud to her. She can’t read books anymore by herself—pain meds, focus—but she’s cognizant enough to absorb as he reads.
“Well, one thing I know is that definitely won’t be me,” Charlie reports that she said of Ivan Ilyich’s brutal penultimate moments raging against the perceived darkness, drowning in the disbelief of life’s finitude.
Charlie and I wonder about this. I mean, at one level, of course she’s right: She’s the opposite of Ivan Ilyich. Her life’s work has been looking straight at things—including death—and she’s worked on coming to terms with dying for nearly nine years.
Still: “Do you find it unsettling that Mom hasn’t had more violent reactions to all of this?” Charlie texts shortly after her decision to withdraw from the endless parade of failed clinical trials.
We’ve both recently seen the movie After the Wedding, where one of the main characters—faced with a brutal diagnosis—completely loses it, sobbing and thrashing dramatically about on the floor. “Not that I wish she was, obviously, just that I’m a little suspicious of her serenity about it all,” he writes.
“I know!” I write back. “Sometimes I think she’s more of a Yankee than Dad.”
That of course is not true. Her temper still flares from her deathbed—and her humor and her rebellious soul. The last words she speaks—several weeks from now—will be undeniably hers: I’m so fucking fat. But she has developed an emotional toughness to her that I find myself trying to imitate. She embodies some of that stoicism that Montaigne admired so much—a kind of fearless acceptance. Well, not fearlessness exactly—but a fearlessness of being afraid.
*
One morning I show up and sob in her lap. She rubs my back and looks at me sympathetically. “How are you not crying?” I ask, almost exasperated. She says, “I’ve done all my crying already, and I’m kind of over it. You’re just a little behind.”
Sunlight sneaks in through the drawn blinds and casts odd patterns on the wood floor. She asks me to bring her an ice cream sandwich and her jewelry boxes and we spend the afternoon in her bed sorting through an ancient-smelling world of gems and old chains and stories about her mother. We put all her rings on all of our fingers. She gives me a gorgeous jade pendant. “If you’re ever looking for a gift for someone you don’t want to spend a lot of money on, just remember this stash exists.”
I ask her if there is anything she still needs to tell me about things I could be doing better, any mothering she feels has been left undone. “You are a great person in many ways,” she says after a minute of thinking. “But sometimes you are too hard on people, which doesn’t become you, especially when it’s behind their back. And I really wish you were better about going to the dentist.”
*
She sees visions—wispy entities whirling around her, the Pope squatting perilously on the curtain in the corner, the lilies on the mantel turning inside out to reveal their beautiful innards. She has an aura of peacefulness and grace, despite her obvious discomfort. She has moments of great clarity.
She wakes up one afternoon as I’m sitting in the chair in her room reading. “I know this song,” she says to the quiet room. “It is the music of a man and a woman arguing.” Then she slips back into sleep.
But, who among us is not Ivan Ilyich—absolutely creamed at times by all the missteps we have taken, stunned by where these steps have led us? Surely there must be some wild stocktaking that is still to come for her? Or is that just the work of those who love her now—to loosen our pursuit of the fox, to pull in the reins and admire the peacefulness of the forest, to be aimless in it, to stop and look up and notice the way the light filters down through the canopy?
23. Album
The one where she and my dad are paddling toward the Seal Rocks in the double kayak. The one where she and my aunt Francie are headed off down the path, laughing and beckoning to the photographer. The one where she’s telling Charlie something important on the lawn after his wedding. The one where she’s holding snoozing Benny in her lap in the Adirondack chair. The one where she and I are smiling on the porch swing. The one where she’s standing on the very end of the breakwater by the boathouse—a silhouette, arms akimbo, wind whipping her hair. It is taken from a boat, and it is clear she is not greeting the photographer; she is seeing them off, although she is not waving or smiling. The tide is high, and silver waves splash the rocks. I’m fine where I am, her planted feet say, as if it is the end of summer and she is the only one staying behind.
STAGE THREE
1. Fifteen Signs Death Is Near
If there were an exam on the caregiver booklet that hospice gave us, titled “Fifteen Signs that Death Is Near,” I feel confident that Charlie and I would both ace it.
It’s almost midnight. We are sitting at the kitchen counter of our parents’ house, obsessively going over the checklist that attempts to break it down by weeks, days, hours, moments. Preparing for the unpreparable. Our mom is lying on a hospital bed in a nearby room.
Her breathing pattern is changing. Check.
She hardly drinks or eats. Check.
Her extremities are cold and possibly tinged with blue. Check.
She sleeps most of the time. Check.
When she is awake, she is restless. Hallucinations are common—she may reach for things you cannot see. Yes: She seems to be working and reworking an invisible cat’s cradle with her delicate bluish fingers. Or playing with Silly Putty. Or poking a hole into another dimension.
When she speaks, it is slow and difficult. She may refer to things you do not understand. “Who can trust the light?” she cries out with a start after hours of silence. Then: “Let’s get out of here!”
You administer liquid morphine under her tongue from a big red bottle. Your criminal defense attorney husband assures you that you could make a fortune off it on the black market. Check.
This passes as humor. Check.
She doesn’t seem to be aware of you anymore. You are beyond exhausted. Check, check.
Your dad is asleep for the first time in days in his clothes on his stomach the wrong way in the bed next to her hospital bed with the lights on. Check.
“So, what’s your guess?” I ask Charlie.
“I don’t know—a week, a few days?”
We both stare back into the booklet, scanning for something that is not there. Strange creatures: we who try to excel at knowing the unknowable.