by Meghan Daum
That night she drank half a vodka gimlet to celebrate and regretted it for the next several days. She vomited from the chemo through the rest of the summer until she landed back in the hospital with severe intestinal and bowel trouble. It was September. Autumn, New York’s most flattering season, was preparing to make its entrance. I had just gotten engaged to my longtime boyfriend, which had made my mother very happy.
“Our recommendation would be to transfer to another level of care,” the oncologist said.
Hearing this, I moved my chair closer and grabbed my mother’s hand under the blanket. I did this because I felt that if we were in a play this would surely be part of the stage directions. I was also afraid the doctor would judge me if I didn’t. If I just sat there with my arms crossed against my chest, as I was inclined to, the doctor would make a note in the file suggesting that I might not be capable of offering sufficient support to the patient.
I retrieved her hand from under the blanket and squeezed it in my own. She did not reciprocate. She didn’t pull away, but there was enough awkwardness and ambivalence coming from both sides that it was not unlike being on a date at the movies and trying to hold hands with someone who’d rather not. I think we were both relieved when I let go. The doctor said she would most likely make it through Christmas, so we should feel free to go ahead with any holiday plans.
For three nights in a row, my mother made me stay in her hospital room. She was dealing with incontinence (if you learn nothing else from these pages, learn that gastrointestinal cancer is not the kind of cancer to get; get any other kind, even lung, even brain, but don’t get carcinoma of the gut) and it had grown so severe that she was up every few minutes and sometimes didn’t make it to the bathroom in time. The people who came to clean her up were terse and tired and spoke mostly in heavy Caribbean accents. A few times she lay there in her own shit before they could get there. I know this because I was in the sleeping chair on the other side of the room, listening to it all while pretending to be asleep.
I tell myself now, as I told myself then, that if things had gotten really bad, if she had cried out in pain or called my name or if a serious amount of time had passed before a staff member came, I’d have gotten up and helped her. I tell myself that I closed my eyes to protect her dignity, that if she could step back from the situation she’d never want me wiping her shit, that there are some daughters in the world who would do this for their mothers but that we had never been that kind of mother and daughter and trying to pretend to be so now would only make both of us feel inexpressibly and inerasably violated. I tell myself I did it out of compassion but the truth is I also did it, as I had done so many other things where she was concerned, out of rage. I was enraged at her for her lifetime of neediness that she’d disguised as a million other things—independence, fabulousness, superiority—and demanded praise for. I was enraged at how this bottomless longing encircled her like barbed wire and that now that she genuinely and rightfully needed me I just couldn’t deliver. I was enraged that what I was doing struck me as so unspeakably cowardly that when I was finally allowed to return to her apartment and order Chinese food and drink from the wine stash she hadn’t touched in ten months I wouldn’t even be able to call my fiancé in Los Angeles and say what I’d done.
Later, when the horror of those nights had been eclipsed by other horrors—patient proxy forms, calls to an attorney, wrenching phone conversations with her friends—my mother was discharged from the hospital and my father and I took her back to her apartment in a taxi. I’d been in taxis countless times with my mother since her ordeal had begun, mostly taking her to or from a chemo session, and it seemed that invariably the driver was playing a talk radio station sponsored heavily by cancer treatment centers. This day was no exception. “I got my life back,” a voice earnestly intoned. “So say goodbye to cancer and hello to a front-row seat at your granddaughter’s wedding.” My mother would have no grandchildren. Neither my brother nor I had ever shown an interest in reproducing. I had a dog, which she sometimes called her granddog. The three of us sat in silence through this advertisement and several others—for weight loss, for acne scar removal, for adjustable mattresses. It was a cold, gusty day and tree branches scraped the car while we waited at red lights.
Back at the apartment, my father stood around awkwardly for a while, and finally left.
“Would you do all this for him?” my mother asked me. “Would you take care of him?”
* * *
One thing I did for my mother that I would not have done for my father was get married. That is to say, I got married pretty much right then and there, less than six weeks after getting engaged, so she could be in attendance. We spent three weeks discussing the wedding and five days actually arranging for it, which in retrospect I think is the perfect amount of time to plan a wedding. During the time we were discussing it my mother became fixated on hosting the event in her apartment and inviting her friends and associates. Due to limited space, this would exclude many of my and my fiancé’s friends and associates. She also made it clear she did not want children in her apartment for fear of their knocking over her pottery or damaging her art. My fiancé made it clear he didn’t want to get married in a dying woman’s apartment. He did not make this clear to the dying woman herself but to me during the countless hours I sat with my cell phone in the lobby of the famous cancer center’s hospital trying to figure out how to handle the situation of a dying woman (a woman dying brutally and prematurely) who effectively wanted to turn her only daughter’s wedding into a funeral she could orchestrate and attend herself. Meanwhile my mother, who’d heretofore thought my fiancé walked not only on water but on some magical blend of Evian, San Pellegrino, and electrolyte-enhanced Smartwater, began to say things like “Well, now I’m seeing a different side of him.” When I pointed out to her that he’d like the wedding to include his sister’s small children, she told me he had to realize he couldn’t always get what he wanted.
The discussion period ended when my mother realized she was too sick to orchestrate anything. She told me to wait and get married after she was gone—“It happens all the time,” she said, crying. This was one of our more authentic conversations because it so happened that I authentically wanted her there. My father, as far as I could tell, regarded marriage as a fatuous institution. In moments, he seemed to regard my wedding plans as yet another complication that had been thrown into the mix of our crisis. My mother was the only person on earth for whom my getting married really meant something. She was the only one for whom it wasn’t a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing. I felt like it wouldn’t count if she weren’t there. It was the first thing I’d needed her for in a long time and the last thing I’d need her for from there on out. So on a Sunday in late October we rounded up everyone we could and walked from my mother’s apartment to the park across the street, where we were married by a close friend who’d been ordained online the day before. Photos taken by another close friend later suggested my mother was in an extraordinary amount of pain. Wearing a wig, being humiliatingly pushed along in a wheelchair by my brother (with whom, a month later, at Thanksgiving, I would trade earsplitting obscenities as she lay in the next room after vomiting at the dinner table), she is wincing in every shot. In some, she’s not only wincing but also staring into space. After seeming relatively alert during the preshow (champagne at her apartment, compliments on the decor), she appeared to unravel throughout the ceremony, shifting from barely living to officially dying in the time it took me to slip from lack of official attachment into wedlock. The next day, the four members of the hospice team came to the apartment to introduce themselves. When they asked her to describe her level of pain on a scale from one to ten—one being no pain, ten being unbearable—she told them eight. When we asked if she was really sure about that she said she wasn’t sure. She said she had never in her life been able to answer that sort of question.
* * *
A few times I saw Vera kneeling by my mother
praying. I ducked away and pretended not to see but I appreciated the gesture nonetheless. Bedside praying wasn’t something I’d ever done myself, though when my mother was still cogent I’d told her a secret I’ve told maybe two other humans ever. I’d told her that I’d prayed most nights since I was nine years old (prompted by extreme guilt over a schoolyard incident in which I’d caused another child to burst into tears) and found it a useful tool for, if not speaking to a higher power per se, articulating that for which I was most grateful and that for which I most hoped (“Thank you for letting me pass the French test; please get me through math class tomorrow”). I added that I usually tried to send out a special prayer to someone who probably needed it (the girl I’d inadvertently made cry, the stray animals of the world), at least if I didn’t fall asleep first.
Given our belief system (atheist) and overall family dynamic (cynical, avoidant of confrontation yet judgmental behind people’s backs), this was an extremely vulnerable thing to share. It didn’t entirely pay off. “That sounds like a nice ritual,” my mother said before going back to staring at the television (in an echo of her own mother that would have horrified her, she never changed the channel and watched anything that came on: the news, the weather, The Price Is Right). Other times, when she seemed particularly aware of the irreversibility of her situation, I’d turn off the TV and try to get philosophical. I told her that as presumptuous as it might be to believe in an afterlife it was equally presumptuous to deny the possibility of one. Then, at the risk of mockery or at least disapproval, I said that I felt like reincarnation was at least something worth thinking about, that it felt clear to me that souls existed and that you could just tell from knowing people that some souls had been around longer than others. Plus, dogs obviously had souls, so there you had it.
“Maybe you’ll have a whole new life and it’ll be even better than this one,” I said.
“But I don’t want to be a baby again,” she said. Her voice sounded genuinely worried.
Ironically, she was in adult diapers. Women’s Depends, size small. I’d been sent to the drugstore to buy them on numerous occasions, especially when she was in the hospital and didn’t like the brand they had there. I suspected she’d been using them for several months now, actually. Back in the summer, when she was still thinking she might be cured, I’d walked into her apartment and thought odors from the young children who lived upstairs were somehow migrating downward. Months later I realized those children were all too old for diapers.
“Maybe you won’t have to be a baby again,” I told her. “Maybe you’ll be a bird. You’ll fly around and look at everything from up high.”
“I don’t want to be a bird,” she said.
It’s amazing what the living expect of the dying. We expect wisdom, insight, bursts of clarity that are then reported back to the undying in the urgent staccato of a telegram: I have the answer. Stop. They’re waiting for me. Stop. Everyone who died before. Stop. And they look great. Stop. We expect them to reminisce over photos, to accept apologies and to make them, to be sad, to be angry, to be grateful. We expect them to clear our consciences, to confirm our fantasies. We expect them to get excited about the idea of being a bird.
* * *
My mother’s official date of death was December 26 but the day she actually left was December 5. This was the day her confusion morphed into unremitting delirium, the day the present tense fell away and her world became a collage of memory and imagination, a Surrealist canvas through which reality seeped in only briefly at the corners. Suddenly she seemed no longer in pain. She was mobile, even spry, and given to popping out of bed as if she’d forgotten to take care of some piece of essential business. When I walked into her bedroom that morning, a painting had been removed from the wall and clothes she hadn’t worn in months were strewn across the floor. She’d thrown up, of course, and the green-brown vomit was dribbling down her pajamas and onto the bed. Whereas the day before she’d have been flustered and embarrassed, she now seemed unfazed, unapologetic, even ecstatic. She wanted her purse, she told me. She needed to put some things in it. I recognized this impulse from my death books. Dying people often pack suitcases and retrieve their coats from the closet because they’re overcome with the idea that they’re going somewhere. My mother had a cane she used for the rare occasions when she got up—a tasteful wooden thing; she’d refused the walker sent over from the medical supply company—and now she had it in bed with her and was waving it around so it threatened to knock over the lamp and yet more pictures. When I leaned over the bed to wipe up the vomit, she put the end of the cane on my head and began rubbing my hair. She was smiling a crazy smile, her tongue hanging from her mouth like an animal’s. The gesture struck me as something an ape might do if you were sitting across from it trying to make it play nicely with blocks, a helpless molestation, a reaching out from behind the bars of a cage. When I managed to grab the cane she resisted for a moment before letting it go.
“Meghan,” she said solemnly. Her voice over the last few weeks had grown faint, her speech slurred and monotone. It was the sound of fog rolling in over a life.
“What, Mom?” I chirped. She could hear just fine but I’d taken to talking loudly, as if she were an old person who was going deaf. It drove her crazy. She was always shushing me.
“We need to figure something out here.”
“What’s that?”
“I need to ask you something.”
“What?”
“How did we get kidnapped?”
* * *
The dying have their own version of dementia. They drift not only between the real and the not real, the past and the present, but also the living and the dead—and not just the dead they appear to be seeing but the dead the living want to believe they’re seeing. It’s like they’re living in six dimensions, at least two of which exist solely for the benefit of the people standing around watching and listening to them. (“Folks with dementia say the darnedest things!”) “Is that Grandpa you’re talking to?” we ask when they murmur at an empty chair. “Is there someone up there? Tell me!” we plead when they lift their arms in the air and curl their hands over invisible shapes. Science says the grasping gestures are related to changes in brain chemicals as the body shuts down, but my death books said it’s because dying people reach up to greet those who died before them. A cat visited my mother regularly in her final weeks, at one point jumping on her bed and lying at the foot of it like every cat we had when I was growing up. In the beginning, I’d laughed and told her there was no cat, but with the dying you soon learn the folly of raining on a parade, especially one that might produce that holy grail of darnedest things: insight into the afterlife.
“What kind of cat is it?” I asked, finally. “Is it orange?”
“Black,” she rasped.
We’d had two orange cats, both named Magnificat and called Niffy for short. Niffy One and Niffy Two, both of which were friendly and affectionate. In between we’d also had a black tomcat that was an asshole.
My mother softened in senility. She developed a childlike quality she probably hadn’t had even as an actual child. Her head seemed perennially cocked to one side, her eyes wide, and with her hair now growing back in soft white tufts she looked like a perfect white frosted truffle. For the first time in years, she was without affectation. There was no trace of the drama queen. As feathery and ephemeral as she was, she seemed like a real person rather than someone impersonating her idea of a person. Though I never would have said it, she looked almost exactly like her mother, who, despite her fleshiness and thick glasses and suspected intellectual disability, everyone, even my mother herself, had recognized as being very pretty. For the first time in years, I didn’t merely love her. I actually liked her.
“Do you know why you’re here?” the hospice nurse asked her gently one day (unlike me, she knew not to shout). This was turning out to be a day of particularly acute agitation. There was a lot of picking at the sheets and furious murmuring
. I’d long given up my philosophical lectures. My new best friend was Haldol, which was supposed to keep her calm and which I administered under her tongue through a syringe. There was a perverse and momentary pleasure in this act; it made me feel like I was a stern, efficient nurse, like someone who knew what she was doing.
Her words, barely intelligible, were like soft formations carved from her teeth and lips. Her breath could scarcely carry them an inch.
“Because,” she said, “my mother was here.”
* * *
Ten months after my mother died, twenty months after my grandmother died, I nearly died myself. Oddly enough, this was a scenario that had crossed my mind a time or two over the preceding year. Talk about a morbid trifecta: three generations of women in one family, each of them almost physically repelled by the one before, wiped out in less than two years’ time. This wasn’t a recurring thought, more like the kind of thing that crosses your mind two or three times and then convinces you that the sheer act of thinking about it at all converts it from a mere implausibility to an almost total impossibility. This is what doomsday scenarios are for. They protect us from disaster by playing out the disaster ahead of time. They’re the reason the plane doesn’t crash and the bomb doesn’t drop. They’re the reason we will almost certainly not die in childbirth. The fact that I almost died despite having entertained the thought of dying, the fact that my organs began to fail despite my having walked down the snowy sidewalks in the days after my mother’s death, thinking, Maybe you’re next, maybe there are no coincidences, maybe you were right about it being presumptuous not to believe in an afterlife and maybe the afterlife of this matriarchal line is a group-entry kind of deal, still feels at once too overwhelming and too silly to fully contemplate. And yet it became relevant to the story of my mother’s death and my grandmother’s death before that. In fact it’s part of the same story, a third act that got rewritten at the last minute, a narrowly dodged bullet from the gun that went off in the first.