Using a bendy straw in a plastic cup, my sister tried to give our mother a sip of water.
But my sister wasn’t wearing her glasses, so her depth perception was off. And she was exhausted. So she accidentally spilled the water on Mom.
“Oh, no,” my sister said to our mother. “You’re soaked now.”
Our mother was too high on painkillers to care, but my sober sister was mortified.
For perhaps the tenth time that day, she cried.
“Here, Mom,” my sister said. “Let me help you into your wheelchair and then I can change your sheets first. And then I can change your clothes.”
My sister and our mother had traded maternal responsibilities.
“Lift your arms,” my sister said. “And I’ll lift you.”
My sister carefully pulled our mother to her feet and wrapped her in a hug.
“Okay,” my sister said. “Now two steps forward and then we’ll sit in your chair.”
Ah, the slow-motion choreography of hospice ballet.
“Okay, Mom,” my sister said, “take one step forward.”
Our dying mother took that one step toward her wheelchair, but then she immediately took a step back. Our mother swayed.
“Mom, let me help you,” my sister said.
“It’s okay,” our mother said. “I’m dancing on purpose. I want to dance. Dance with me.”
It was three in the morning but our mother was awake, and she shuffled left and right.
“Oh,” our mother said. “We are dancing. It’s been so long since I danced. And I don’t know why nobody asked me. I was a good dancer.”
My sister laughed. She was alone in the night with our mother. There was no music. But my sister held our mother closely and shuffled with her. They moved in the smallest of circles.
“We only danced for a few seconds,” my sister later said. “But, all the next day, whenever she was awake and had visitors, Mom kept bragging that she’d danced until sunrise.”
O Mother! O Mother! Even in your last moments, you told beautiful lies.
9.
End of Life
MY MOTHER WAS a tiny woman, just under five feet tall. But her mother, Etta Adams, was over six feet tall. Her matriarchal power matched her physical size, so everybody called her Big Mom. She was born in 1904 in Nespelem, Washington, and she and her parents were close friends with the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph and his family.
Yes, my grandmother was babysat by the famous Chief Joseph, who in 1877 led his seven hundred followers on an epic eleven-hundred-mile flight from two thousand U.S. Cavalry soldiers. He was eventually captured and delivered his mournful promise that he would “fight no more forever.” He and his followers were exiled to the Colville Indian Reservation, where Joseph died not long after my grandmother was born.
For Indians, loneliness is a natural cause of death.
In 1980, as she lay dying of lung cancer in her reservation home, Big Mom was visited daily by many Indians. She was famous in the Indian world for her spiritual power—for her ancient stories and songs. We still have a dozen photo albums of Big Mom, thin and bald from chemotherapy, posing with all of her indigenous visitors.
My grandmother wanted to say good-bye to everybody.
As she died, she wanted to be celebrated for her life.
She wanted to be remembered.
In 2015, as my mother lay dying of cancer in her reservation home, she asked my sisters to tell only her most trusted friends and relatives.
“I don’t want to see people I don’t want to see,” our mother said.
So, while my grandmother was visited by hundreds of Indians, my mother said her official good-byes to maybe only thirty people. Most folks on the reservation didn’t know she was terminally ill.
My mother was a spy who treated her own death like a top-secret mission.
Or maybe she was like a mad queen who believed only a few of her most loyal subjects deserved to know about her cancer.
Or maybe she was terrified.
Or maybe, as my wife thinks, my mother just wanted to leave this complicated world in the most uncomplicated way possible.
When I visited my mother for the last time, along with my wife and teenage sons, she asked for a photograph.
“Oh,” my sister said. “Do you want to pose with Junior’s family?”
“No,” my mother said. “I just want a picture of Arnold and Junior and my grandsons. All the men. Put them right there.”
She pointed at the plasma television located only three feet from her rented hospital bed.
“Don’t you want to be in the picture with the men?” my sister asked my mother.
“No, no,” she said. “Just them.”
So, yes, there exists a photograph of my big brother, my sons, and I as we stand with our arms around one another in front of my late mother’s big television that happened to be playing the reality show Naked and Afraid.
Death is always incongruous.
In that photo, you can see the foot of my mother’s deathbed. But you don’t see my mother.
She is located outside the frame. She is the unseen witness. She exists in that negative space.
10.
Valediction
After my sisters told me they had to contort Themselves and my terminally ill mother
As they lifted her from her deathbed And led her down the hallway
Into the narrow bathroom of my childhood home, Then bruised her hip when they lost their grip
And dropped her to the floor,
I texted my big brother that he could make
A greater space for everyone to navigate If he removed the bathroom door.
He quickly did as he was asked,
But I should have done more
Than I did. I should have done
Something more. I’ve kept the score.
I keep on keeping the score.
When it comes to my mother’s
Last days, I should have done more Than ask my brother to fix that door.
I should have done more. I should Have done more. I should have bought
My mother a new door. A new house.
I should have bargained with the gods
And given my mother a few more weeks.
A few more days. A few more minutes.
I should have forgiven her for all of her sins Against me. I should have asked to be
Forgiven for my sins against her.
But I never spoke of forgiveness. I only
Talked about the door. I only asked My brother to perform the minor work
That I didn’t know how to do. I made it Easier for my mother to use the restroom.
That’s all I did. That’s all I did. Jesus, I should have done more than worry
About that goddamn door. I should have Done more. I should have done more.
But, wait, what exactly should I have done?
How could I have made anything better?
I don’t know, not exactly, but I’m inexactly Ashamed that I was, until the end, a bitter son.
11.
Some Prophecies
Are More Obvious
than Others
LILLIAN ALEXIE DIED on the night of July 1, 2015.
Like our mother, my siblings and I will eventually get cancer. And some of us—maybe all of us—will be killed by that cancer.