by Ward, Sela
Those next few days were difficult. There was a constant parade of family and friends through Mama’s hospital room, and it was unnerving to watch as she smoked (yes) and held court, pretending she wasn’t going to die. Some days she’d be laughing so uproariously you’d look at her and think, She’s going to be fine. But the truth was, she knew as clear as day what was happening, and we knew just as surely that she couldn’t handle it. It was frightening enough for us to confront the thought that this was the end. But the vision of our headstrong Mama refusing to acknowledge the fact that she was going to die, was almost too much to bear.
We called everyone who was close to Mama—her brother in Tennessee; her best friend, Betty; her niece in Jackson and her kids; my aunt in Birmingham and her daughter—and told them that this was it, that they needed to come say goodbye.
Jenna decided to call Tom Sikes, a new minister at First Christian Church, and ask his advice. We’d never met this new pastor before, but all we knew to do was reach out in Mama’s time of need. Mama was very sick, Jenna told him; she needed to talk with someone about dying, but it wasn’t going to be any of us. Maybe he could come around and see if he could help.
Later that day my sister brought Daddy home from the hospital, and when she returned to Mama’s room the handsome young pastor stood up to greet her. “Hi. I’m talking to your mother about death,” Tom said.
“Okay. Well, I’ll just go get a Coke and come right back,” Jenna said.
By the time she returned Mama and Tom were laughing and joking, just as she always did. He stayed about an hour. When Jenna showed him out, he took her into the hallway.
“Your mama said, ‘I’m going to walk the road I’m on, and I’m going to need your help,’ “ he told her. At last a concession; at last a request for support. We all breathed a sigh of relief.
Mama could never have told us kids directly what she was going through. She had spent too many years trying to protect us. But Tom Sikes was there for just that reason. He’d lost his own family, I learned later; he’d addressed death firsthand, and he knew what language to use.
One night, as Mama lay dying, Jenna and I had an intimate talk with Daddy. He told us why certain things had happened the way they had in the life of our family—things he and Mama had endured but kept from us children, for our own peace of mind. They had suffered for each other and from each other, he told us, but they had endured. At last he could no longer keep up his façade; he wept not just for Mama, but for his cousin James who died in the war, for his Aunt Margaret, and for years of unreleased tears. It was a moment of mercy, and we all wept with thanks.
At last Mama’s family started arriving; though not one of us said so, we all knew the time was coming near. Jenna kept a diary of Mama’s last days, and she recorded the aunts’ and cousins’ visits faithfully. “When I saw all her relatives coming,” she wrote, “I just further understood that everything is in order. She is saying goodbye. Dear Lord, I need not worry, I know you are doing everything and I appreciate the beauty of all of this, as I find it so hard.”
Sitting by our mother’s bedside, Jenna also wrote: “Oh little, little one. You are so tiny. You are so sweet. So courageous. So strong. I wish you didn’t have to be so strong. I wish you could just be taken care of. I wish your lungs were strong again. I wish I could have been closer . . . maybe your friend. I pray that your lungs will quietly take you away and that cancer doesn’t ravage your body to the end. I guess you’re blessed that the cancer will not eat you away. But what is it like to drown in your own lungs? Peaceful, I hope. I wish you would sleep. Thank you, Mama, for everything. I am grateful. There is so much grace. There is so much grace.”
That night, Jenna and I huddled on either side of the bed in Mama’s room, talking and laughing with her on into the deep of night. Mama stopped at one point, looked at us, and said, “Isn’t this fun, just the three of us here together?” It was as if we were all hunkered down at the farm, telling stories in the middle of a winter storm. At one point, Mama’s mood seemed light enough that Jenna felt able to take a chance. So she turned to Mama, and told her she could leave us whenever she felt ready. “You mean kick the bucket?” Mama laughed sassily, all Bette Davislike.
The next day, after breakfast, I was due to return to L.A. to resume filming. Leaving my mother’s bedside after four emotionally charged days was one of the most painful things I’ve ever had to do. I took her face in my hands, savored her sweet smell, and told her, “I’ll be back, Mama. I promise.”
“I know you will,” she whispered. “I know you will.”
That made one of us. On Monday morning I showed up back at work, determined to find it within me to remain professional despite the state of my heart. But I was haunted by my promise. What if I don’t get back before she dies? What if she dies this week, while we’re filming? Mama had to hang on until the weekend. I so needed to be with her as she breathed her last breath. I was in a horrible position.
But what could I do? The Once & Again producers had been marvelous in accommodating my needs for time off during my mother’s last days. They had generously chartered the first plane home, and spent several days shooting scenes around my character. They had done everything they could for me, but now they were hard up against the reality that nothing more could be done on the program without me. Had I stayed in Mississippi past the weekend, production would have had to shut down at the cost of $80,000 a day. I would just have to deal with the guilt, and pray to God for just a few more days of life for Mama.
I pushed myself through those days, nerves frayed, exhausted and distracted. I stayed in constant touch with Jenna, and she told me Mama was getting weaker and weaker. I would go to my trailer to cry. I prayed: “God, please help me. I don’t know what to do.” I needed to be there at the end, but nobody could say when that would be—days or weeks or longer. She had come back from the brink so many times before.
It was the worst week of my life. I was tempted to walk off the set, and leave everyone holding the bag. But I talked myself off that ledge, convinced that it would have been wrong to do that to the others. Still, what about my obligation to Mama? I was enraged that at such an important moment in my life I wasn’t free to do what I wanted to do. The helplessness I’d felt in the wake of September 11 came back a thousandfold, and was compounded by the guilt I felt—the simple guilt of surviving a loved one’s death.
I’d get a knock on my trailer door. “You’re needed on the set, Miss Ward!” a young man would shout. I’d pull myself together, run to makeup, and become Lily Sammler. For the most part—save for a tearful moment on the set’s staircase—I found myself able to lose myself as I spoke Lily’s lines, living her problems, so focused on her that there was no room for other thoughts. In times of crisis, work can be a great painkiller.
The cast and crew stood by my side, and held me up when I couldn’t do it alone. Marin Hinkle, who played my TV sister Judy, was particularly kind and loving. My director, Dan Lerner, and costar Billy Campbell couldn’t have been gentler or more patient. The most moving moment for me came when one of the grips whispered to me, “You want us to call in sick with the blue flu?” He was offering to organize the crew into a sickout, allowing me to return home. His offer brought tears to my eyes. I thanked him, but begged him not to do it. And so he didn’t. What made all their concern even more poignant was the fact that we were anxiously awaiting word from the network about whether the show would be renewed for another season. At any moment, we could all be told we were out of a job.
Normally I would have found much solace in the arms of my children, but I rarely saw them. I’d leave for the Once & Again set in Culver City before they were awake, and wouldn’t get home until they were in bed asleep. I talked to them on the phone every day, and brought them to the set a couple of times, but it wasn’t nearly enough.
Thank God for Howard. No matter how early I got up in the morning, or how late I arrived home, he was always awake for me, ready to put his
arms around me and let me cry. Howard was on the phone with Mama daily, trying to lift her spirits. He even tried bribing her, offering $100 a day in casino money if she’d only stop smoking and start eating. He told her she could use the money to play the slot machines, a late-in-life obsession that Howard felt sure was almost as strong as her addiction to tobacco. When she heard his offer, she just chuckled, “Sure.” Then lit up another cigarette.
Mama became a serious slot-machine fan when the Silver Star Casino opened a few years ago in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Vicki Savoy, who handled VIP arrangements for the casino, was fond of Mama, and always looked after her for me. Every now and then Mama would take Vicki up on her offer to send a car to pick her up, but she wouldn’t let it pull into her driveway. She was afraid the Baptist neighbors would see the Silver Star logo on the door and disapprove, so she had the driver meet her down the road, at a convenience store. But more often Desiree Jennings, her caregiver, would drive her up to the casino when she felt good enough to play the slots. We knew it was her escape from the realities of her cancer, and I was so thankful that she had something to look forward to.
So there I was, stuck in L.A., agonizing over my mother’s failing health, waiting for my show to die, working eighteen-hour days, never seeing my children, who had to face the fact that their grandmother was about to die, and their mom wasn’t there to help them through it. People tell me I’m an optimist, but I have never despaired as I did that week. I wanted to run home: home to Mama, home to Meridian, home to a time and place that seemed so simple, innocent, and loving, at least in my memory.
So I white-knuckled it through that week, waiting for a phone call that mercifully never came. I finished filming at three in the morning on a Friday, climbed aboard a charter flight the next morning, and landed in Meridian that afternoon. I went straight to the hospital, and never left until it was over.
Mama was so brave. One night early in that week, she could have died if she had just let herself go. Brock was sitting up with her, holding her up as she struggled to breathe. She said, “I wish . . . I just wish there was a pill I could take to end this.”
Brock told her he might be able to find something.
But apparently she thought twice. “No,” she said. “When it’s my time, God will take me.” And then she made it through the night. After this, Jenna told me later, she knew Mama wouldn’t allow herself to go until I got back home. She was waiting for me.
The hospital gave us a guest room for the night; we slept there in shifts, when we weren’t keeping Mama company. She had by then become so weak she couldn’t lift her legs by herself. She was still awake and alert, but a film had descended over her eyes. Her fragile ribs were starting to crack, and the fluid in her lungs was suffocating her. She was given morphine to help her relax, to help dampen the sheer panic that comes with losing the use of your lungs. She’d beg us not to leave her; her greatest fear was dying alone. “Mama,” we would reassure her, “Mama, we’re not leaving you.”
Her own strength was ebbing, and yet she could still demand it from us. At one point, one of us began weeping by her bedside. Mama lifted one stern finger. “Not in my house!”
As her life drained away, though, a childlike spirit seemed to come over her. On the night when she nearly died in Brock’s arms, he heard her say, “I love you, too, Mama.” She talked about seeing birds flying outside her window, even when there were none to be seen; we wondered if the morphine was making her hallucinate, but somehow we thought not. And she began singing eerie little rhymes, nonsense songs that none of us had ever heard:
Wrap it all up, roll it in a ball,
roll it down the hall,
See you on the other side!
Later, to no one in particular, she said the word “Gabriel,” and gave a little chuckle. Jenna told us that she had quietly been praying to the Archangel Gabriel to come help Mama, and that a spiritual friend of Jenna’s had phoned to say she had a feeling the archangel was present in Mama’s room. Jenna had never mentioned this to anyone, and you never heard Mama talk about Biblical characters, ever. I wonder whether, through the drug-induced haze, she had found some way to peer through the curtain to the other side.
Finally, during one of those endless days, I was alone in the room when a doctor came by and asked me into the hallway. He told me her lungs were filling up again.
“If this were your mama,” I asked him, “what would you do?”
Bless that man for being honest with me. She wasn’t going to get any better, he told me. “Aside from her lungs, her cancer’s inoperable. She’s really weak, and if she were my mama, I wouldn’t put her through any more aggressive procedures,” he said. “They just won’t have a positive result.” He told me that if we wanted to do the merciful thing, we could bring her suffering to an end by easing off her life-support regimen and simply allowing her body to shut down.
“We can keep her comfortable,” he said. “It’ll take no more than forty-eight hours.”
I couldn’t make this decision alone. I called Jenna over at Mama and Daddy’s house, and we got Daddy on the phone. He said that Mama wouldn’t want to be placed on a ventilator, and we all knew that was true. The decision had to be made. We made it, and I let the doctors know.
I felt as if I had just given the order to kill my mother.
I made it down to the nurses’ station and called Jenna, begging her to come be with me. I started sobbing uncontrollably. The nurses, those sweet, sweet ladies, came over and held my hand and comforted me.
And then the whole family arrived. Jenna, Berry, Brock, Daddy, and me. We gathered around Mama, and Berry began to speak to her. His tears came before his words did. He said, “Mama, I want you to know we’re all going to be okay, that we’ll take care of each other.” She had been our rock, our touchstone, our protector, and our friend; Berry’s tears were for us as well as for her.
We had spent the last nine years trying to keep Mama alive, through cancer, emphysema, and other illnesses. Whenever she took ill, all four of us would rush to her side, confident that our love would somehow carry her through. Once, when she was in the hospital for an aortic aneurysm operation, she stayed forty-five days, and we were right there with her; after she pulled through, surprising even the doctors, we Ward siblings were left with an illusion of omnipotence, a feeling that we had the power to keep her alive, if only we could be with her and love her hard enough.
In the end, the most loving thing we could do was to let her go.
We watched her breathing grow shallower and shallower over the next twenty-four hours. Pastor Sikes was summoned, as were her closest relatives. Tom suggested that we stand around Mama together and start sharing happy memories, even telling funny stories about our lives together. That Tuesday morning, the doctors told us she probably wouldn’t make it through the day. Mama was gasping for air; her head was arched back, mouth open, desperate to breathe. Her eyes were shut and her neck was rigid.
We called everybody and told them Mama had only a couple of hours left. All the aunts, uncles, and cousins rushed down. Even Desiree Jennings, who had been Mama’s caregiver and friend during her final years, came and never left until the end. We surrounded her bed, and each person touched a part of her body. Daddy held one hand, her brother had the other; Aunt Sarah caressed one of Mama’s feet, Berry had a hand on one leg, and Brock on the other. I had my cheek resting on Mama’s forehead, and Jenna was next to me on Mama’s right side. We cradled her, and caressed her, and told her again and again that it was all right to let go. With each passing moment, she slipped further and further from our grasp.
There was, in those long moments, a wonderful warmth in the air, the kind of easy feeling Mama always created around her. The streak of irreverence in our family was there, too; when Tom recited a psalm that didn’t seem to fit the moment, we told him, “No, we don’t like that one. Read the last one again.” And between readings we would take turns sharing memories from our lives with Mama. “We lov
e you, Mama, we love you,” we murmured. “We love you.”
And then she took her final labored breath with those exhausted lungs, and she died. A tear dropped down her cheek. Mama, unsentimental to the last, was finally able to cry.
“Look up and blow her kisses,” Tom said. All of us raised our tear-streaked faces, kissed the palms of our hands, and waved goodbye to Mama. Then we joined hands, standing in a circle around her, and sang “Amazing Grace.”
That is how Annie Kate Ward, my mother, left this world.
The day before she died, we kids left the hospital and went to the farm to find a suitable place to bury her. We had never discussed it with her; she was so conscious about spending money, and we knew just what she’d say: “I already have a plot paid for, out there where my parents are buried.” But it was a run-down cemetery on the outskirts of town, and we weren’t going to leave our mama there. So we made the proper arrangements with local authorities, and set out to find her a place on our own land.
The four of us went with Daddy to the lower part of the farm, below the railroad track. At first we thought of burying Mama in the pecan grove there, because she was so fond of those pecan trees. But I remembered her saying in the hospital how lonely the sound of a train is, and I decided I couldn’t have her hearing that whistle every day. So we found a spot on a hill behind the Rose Cottage, within view of all three lakes, where she could be closer to where the rest of us lived. Mama’s grave would begin the family cemetery.
The afternoon she died, after they’d taken Mama’s body away, Brock said, “I’m going to dig her grave.” He began to dig on the hill, and after darkness fell, came in and asked for an electric lantern. The next morning Berry helped him finish, and Jenna and I even got down into the hole to help out.