Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  When I emerged from the ICU, half a dozen curious faces searched mine for information. “We have to wait while they get their shit together,” I said, and plopped down in a chair in front of the TV. The news was on but nothing penetrated. We weren’t alone in the waiting room, and around ten o’clock a family poured out of the ICU, collapsing into chairs. From their sobs I gathered that the matriarch of the family was the one who had crashed; a man and his adult daughter and son leaned into each other and cried hysterically over their concern for “her.”

  “I feel so bad for them,” I said to Ji Young on my right and Sarah on my left. “To lose their mother like that.” They must have thought I was nuts, since I was about to lose my mother like that. But my heart really went out to them because they wouldn’t be there when it happened. I glanced up at the clock. “I think I should go in there again,” I said, and returned the ICU, where I was told not to come back unless someone came for me. “Pulling someone’s plug is awfully hard,” I remarked quietly to the group when I emerged once again. The wait dragged on and Jack had to leave. As midnight rolled around, Emma decided she’d go, too.

  “I’m gonna go back there and say g’bye ta her,” she said, and returned ten minutes later with wet cheeks. “I made my peace,” she said. “I don’t need ta see her die.” I kissed Emma and walked her to the elevator.

  “Thank you, Aunt Em,” I said to my father’s favorite aunt. “She would have loved that you came.”

  “Oh, Jenny,” she said, “ya motha loved you so much. You do know that, don’tcha?”

  I did. “Yes,” I said, “and she knew how much I loved her.” And I know she did.

  AT 1:00 A.M. THE double doors opened and a woman on a limited-mobility scooter buzzed into the nearly empty waiting room. She was flanked by two security guards. “I need to speak to the daughter,” she announced.

  “Yes,” I said, and rose to meet her. “We’ve been waiting since eight o’clock. What is the delay?”

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t do this tonight,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I said, flabbergasted. “Why?”

  “Because of certain legalities, every specialist who signed off on all of the equipment that is keeping your mother alive must also sign off on its removal,” she explained, as if she were reciting from a hospital policy handbook. “A representative from respiratory, nephrology, pulmonology, cardiology, and also your mother’s general practioner all need to sign off on the order, and they’re not here.”

  “Are you joking?” I asked her, getting angry. “Is there a reason you couldn’t have told us this five hours ago?”

  “I’m really very sorry, ma’am, but you’re going to have to leave and come back tomorrow morning, okay?” As if on cue, the two burly security guards stepped forward.

  “The elevators are right around to your right,” one of them said.

  “Yeah, I know where the elevators are,” I mumbled. I was about to pitch a fit but realized that I had a goal, and if I caused a scene they’d bar me from the place and never let me back in. “I didn’t realize this was a nightclub,” I managed as the five of us piled into the elevator.

  That night Ji Young, Sarah, and I shared my mother’s bed and Arline slept on the couch. But after I lay restlessly on top of the covers for an hour I took my phone into my mother’s bathroom. I kept the light off and called one of my mother’s friends in California to tell her the news; she instantly pledged money to subsidize some of my tuition. My mother would have been relieved knowing that her death wasn’t going to bankrupt me. I returned some calls from my restaurant friends and confirmed that, yes, this was for real, my mother was going to die. I also learned that my colleagues were starting a collection for me at work.

  “I don’t think I’m going to be a waitress anymore,” I announced to one of them, a charismatic actor-writer named Turhan. He’d called me earlier with news that his grandfather had died.

  “Jen?” he asked me during a candid moment. “What’s it like?” He wanted to know how it felt to lose my last parent. He was thirty-one and hadn’t yet lost his first. I considered my answer while staring at the strip of light under the door.

  “What’s it like?” I repeated, fingering my mother’s wedding ring, which now hung from one of her beefy gold chains around my neck. I recalled how I’d lived the past year—hell, my entire life—in fear of losing my mother. I’d spent hours crying at the prospect of losing her—of losing both of them—and yet here I was, experiencing the Big One. Sitting there in the dark with Turhan’s question hanging in the air, I realized I’d never have to lose her again. For this, I was thankful.

  “The fear is worse than the reality,” I told him.

  And it’s true.

  Thursday, January 12, 11:30 A.M.

  Arline decided that she didn’t want to see my mother die, especially after preparing herself for the event only to be sent home. I totally understood and bade her goodbye on the way back to the hospital with a promise that Rita and I would drive up to see her in Connecticut later that week. It had dawned on me during all those drives back and forth to and from the hospital that I would inherit a car, one I’d be driving without a license for the foreseeable future. “Get your ass to the DMV and take that damn test!” my mother had commanded me for the last five years. Maybe this was the reason.

  I was nervous as I drove Ji Young, Sarah, and Tina to the ICU. I felt like I was on the spot, maybe because I knew I would only have this one chance to be there for her as she breathed her last. It sounds awfully strange to me now, but I wanted to get it right. I know—what does “right” even mean? To me it meant hitting all the right notes, but even from my perch in the present I can’t tell you exactly what that entailed, only that it went the way I wanted and I have no regrets. Especially this part:

  “I want you to get every tube out of her,” I told Dr. M.

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “You were here last night? I could have told you—”

  “Last night was last night,” I said. “I want to get on with this. The breathing tube, the dialyzer, the femoral line, the IV, the catheter—everything, gone.” We were allowed to sit with my mother as he gathered the necessary signatures, and Ji Young, Sarah, and Tina had a moment with my mother. Ji Young, who lived upstairs and saw my mother throughout her yearlong ordeal at Sinai, was particularly struck by seeing her like that. Before her father suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few years before, he’d lived a couple of days on a breathing tube, brain-dead, so doctors could harvest his organs. I only realized months later how traumatic it must have been for her to see my mother with the same tubes down her throat. And for Sarah, who had just seen her grandfather as he lay dying, and for Tina, who knew my mother the longest, even longer than I did, and who had just lost her mother-in-law, with whom she had been very close. Tina was a nurse, so I knew she could handle it, but I realized just how few people in the world can say that they’ve seen someone die. Nurses, doctors, cops, conflict reporters, killers. It’s an exclusive group.

  Dr. M. asked for my signature last. I stared at the paper and found the empty line. My pen hovered over the form as I read. If my mother saw my signature there, would she feel I’d sold her out? I was signing off on her death. I was the one sending her to the grave.

  Then I remembered the alternative: a lifetime of breathing tubes and dialyzers. I wasn’t killing her, I was releasing her. I signed my full name on the line, big and clear like John Hancock: Jennifer Nicole Mascia.

  “What will happen once we withdraw care?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, “she’s in cardiogenic shock, she has severe arrhythmia—”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not asking about her chances of survival. I mean, what will happen exactly? How long will it take?” I wanted to know what to expect, step by step, just as Dr. Meier had done as my father lay dying in the living room. Dr. M. said she could expire anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour after they removed the breathing tube.

 
I went back into my mother’s room and waited. Around 11:30 A.M. a group of doctors came in to remove the tube. We waited outside for about ten minutes. Tina and Sarah broke the silence by reinforcing my belief that she wasn’t there anymore and that her spirit had been gone for days.

  “You do know that, don’t you, Jenny?” Tina said.

  “Your mom isn’t there anymore, it’s just her body,” Sarah echoed. I was later told I said nothing in reply, just stared back at them blankly. Even though I’d expressed this earlier, I guess they just wanted to make sure I really believed it.

  “She wants to be with your dad,” Ji Young said, petting my hair. “She can be with him now.” She was right. My mother had spent four and a half years missing him, and for her his death would always feel like it happened yesterday. Perhaps that’s why she resented my ability to move past it. Maybe her place was with him now, if such a thing is possible. Maybe her aching for him ultimately outweighed my need for her.

  The curtain parted and the doctors filed out. We came in to find the IVs gone and the breathing tube replaced by an oxygen mask. We closed the sliding glass door and there we were, the four of us. Not a combination I would have imagined, but every single one of them deserved to be there.

  I approached her from the left and half-crawled into bed with her. It was my mother’s one regret with my father’s death, that she was so consumed by fear that she’d run out of the room instead of crawling into bed with him, so I imagined myself fulfilling her wish. But she was firmly situated in the middle of the bed and swollen, and I didn’t want to disturb her, so I wiggled my torso onto the bed and kept my bottom in the chair. I gently stroked her hair, which had grown in gray before she had a chance to dye it brown.

  “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” I said. I didn’t cry. My stoicism surprised me. I was hovering above my emotions, separated from them by a jet stream of cold air. Tina, Ji Young, and Sarah stood closer to the foot of the bed. Tina started crying; Ji Young followed suit. Every ten seconds or so the heart monitor emitted its dissonant bleeps. I’d had enough.

  “Can we shut this thing off?” I asked no one. Tina found the right button and turned it off. “And she hated that oxygen mask, she couldn’t wait to rip it off,” I said, on a roll now. “Why did they put it on her?”

  “I know,” Tina said, “it’s like they just don’t get it.” She removed the oxygen mask. My mother’s mouth looked black from my vantage point, and I wondered when she had last brushed her teeth, drunk a cup of coffee, eaten a meal. Had she known it would be her last time? Her breath was still ragged, and her cheeks puffed in and out with each new exhalation, completely devoid of control, and her lips got sucked into her mouth each time she inhaled. Her body was merely functioning now, nothing more.

  We sat with her for five minutes, ten minutes. Once in a while someone would say something to her, stroke her hand, or cry, and I continued playing with her hair, just as she loved me and my father to do. “I’m like a kitten,” she’d say. Softly, I sang a single verse of what I considered to be “our song,” the song she rasped on car rides, and aboard Amtrak, and all the times we weren’t sure where we were going or where we had been:

  And even though we ain’t got money,

  I’m so in love with ya honey,

  And everything will bring a chain of love.

  And in the morning when I rise,

  You bring a tear of joy to my eyes,

  And tell me everything is gonna be all right.

  I couldn’t stand the waiting. I didn’t want her to exist in this ephemeral state between living and dying for another minute. She was half a person this way, and anyone who knew her could attest that she had been so much more. Maybe she was waiting for me to say something? Could Yaw have been right—was she waiting for me to leave so she could depart the earth in peace? Or maybe, even without brain activity, she couldn’t rest until she heard her only child speak to her one last time. I watched her body inhale and exhale a few times. As she took in another breath I said the first thing that came to my mind:

  “Don’t worry about me, Mom. I’m going to be the first woman executive editor of The New York Times.”

  Her chest froze mid-breath. She never exhaled.

  My head snapped up and I looked from Tina to Ji Young to Sarah, stunned. We waited a moment, then all at once the four of us burst out laughing.

  “She heard you!” Ji Young said. “Jen, I know your mom, she heard you!”

  “Oh, Jenny,” Tina said through her tears, “you just made her so happy.”

  “Well, I guess that’s the last thing a Jewish mother needs to hear before she can rest in peace,” I said, still laughing. “No pressure or anything.” I walked over to the counter, picked up a pair of scissors, cut off a lock of her hair, just as I’d done with my father, and put it in a pill bottle I’d emptied for the occasion. I was about to walk away when a thought occurred to me.

  “Sarah, can you do me a favor?” I asked. Four years ealier, when my grandmother Vivian died, my mother had asked Sarah to look up the Jewish mourner’s prayer, the Kaddish, in Hebrew, so she could say it for her mother. With this request in mind I calmly turned to Sarah and said, “Could you say Kaddish for my mother, Sarah?”

  The significance of my request flickered across her face; she remembered. She closed her eyes and began, squinting to remember the Hebrew perfectly:

  Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di-v’ra

  chirutei, v’yamlich malchutei b’chayeichon

  uvyomeichon uvchayei d’chol beit yisrael, ba’agala

  uvizman kariv, v’im’ru: amen.

  A few lines in, her face turned beet-red and her hand instinctively went up to her eyes to conceal her weeping. She continued to recite the prayer through sobs that threatened to cut off her voice, a rare loss of control for a girl who always seemed to have it.

  “Thank you,” I said to Sarah when she was done. I gathered the clothes I’d brought for my mother—the clothes she was supposed to wear when she checked out of the hospital—and I left, closing the sliding glass door behind me.

  HAVING HAD MY FILL of cardiac intensive care, I ducked into the bathroom just outside the unit. I closed the door and flipped on the light, and when I caught myself in the mirror I stopped: I was totally alone for the first time since she’d died. I studied my reflection: I looked pretty much the same as I had before Friday, save for the gray circles under my eyes. I caught sight of my mother’s wedding ring, which I’d placed on a chain around my neck, destined never again to grace her finger. She’d worn my father’s ring around her neck for four years, and now I was wearing hers; the circle was complete. I studied my face again. No one would be able to tell my mother had died by just looking at me. How was I breathing? How was I standing upright? I wasn’t even crying. There was no sound in the bathroom, only quiet. She was gone. It was palpable.

  And that’s when I felt it. Not a crack, it wasn’t that dramatic, but a slow tearing of the fiber that had connected the three of us. I stood there in the unforgiving fluorescent glow, and for the first time I saw that I was standing alone. They weren’t waiting outside for me; they weren’t waiting at home for me. They wouldn’t be calling me. They were gone; they belonged to my memory now. My father’s death had muted a part of my life; my mother’s death silenced it completely. The space she had occupied was empty, like a street cut off from traffic. I was the only one left. Would I be enough?

  When I emerged, Tina, Ji Young, and Sarah were all in agreement: They were going to take me out of Staten Island for a few hours. We piled into Ji Young’s green Volvo and hit the expressway. I called Arline and told her that her sister had breathed her last at 12:14 Eastern Standard Time; I called work and relayed the news and said I didn’t know when I’d be back. I also called one of my professors, because I felt that someone at school should know what happened. I had at least a dozen voice mails, and as I listened to them I made a mental note of calls I needed to return. And then, after my
sixth new voice message:

  “You have one message whose retention time is about to expire. First voice message.”

  “Hi gaw-geous. I tried to call you before but you must have been in the tunnel or the subway, probably the subway because it’s nine-thirty. So I just want to wish you to have a happy day. And … uh, that’s all. I love you! And … thanks for everything. It means a lot to me. And … it really does. Okay? ’Cause it’s, it’s like, it’s like emotional support, and … I’m gonna start crying, so … I really love you, okay? And I appreciate everything that you do, and I don’t want you to sacrifice any part of your life. It’s enough! I love you. Byebye.”

  She’d left the message just after she was diagnosed with cancer, and I’d saved it all this time. I must have been on my way back to Manhattan after staying at her apartment when she told me not to sacrifice any part of my life for her care and treatment. I think she meant that she didn’t want me to put off going to journalism school on account of her cancer. I can’t remember what kind of emotional support I lent her that day—perhaps that was the day I pledged to accompany her to every treatment, à la Céline. Maybe I pointed out the difference between my father’s terminal diagnosis and her treatable and not-yet-advanced cancer. Her doctors also had to remind her that her cancer was more treatable than my father’s, because she could not shake the vision of his once-strapping physique reduced to shriveled skin that hung off a crippled skeleton. My mother did not want to go out like that, and maybe that was the day I assured her she wouldn’t.

  I didn’t want anyone to see me crying, so I focused my tears on the brilliant blue behind the Manhattan skyline, which was just coming into view as we sailed along the BQE. “Thanks for everything,” she’d said in a deeper, more serious tone than the “I love you!” just before it. It was an emotional octave below her normal pitch, her way of leveling with me. She’d left the message eleven months ago but I pretended for a moment that it was from today, and that the “thanks for everything” was her voice from beyond the grave telling me that she knew how I’d tried to keep her alive, and how I’d agonized over how best to do it, and even though she couldn’t stay, thank you for trying. All I wanted was to tell her that I hadn’t given up on her, especially in the face of doctors who seemingly had, and maybe—somewhere, somehow—she’d actually heard me.