My Mother's Kitchen

by Peter Gethers

  I agreed to that treatment.

  For the next few hours, my mom was in and out of consciousness. She seemed shriveled, small, and so weak, I imagined that a deep exhalation of breath blown in her direction would knock her out of bed. She was having excruciating abdominal pain—even my mom had acknowledged the severity—and she seemed resigned, as if she knew her time had come. Although I suspected she could hear me and was only feigning sleep when I tried to speak to her two or three times, she did not respond or acknowledge my presence in any way.

  At three a.m., she opened her eyes and spoke to me for the first time. She said, “You look exhausted. You should go home.”

  I laughed and said I was staying. Then she said, “I want to go home.”

  I said I knew she did. Then I carefully explained exactly what was happening. I told her they had to lower her INR count, which would take a few hours. As soon as that was done, I’d get her out of there. I promised. No matter what. She nodded and went back to sleep.

  At four in the morning, I went home, managed a fitful three hours of sleep, and went back to the hospital. Nothing had changed.

  The head of palliative care came over and said that, in her opinion, my mother did not need curing, she needed relief from pain and suffering. I told her that it wasn’t just what my mom needed, it’s what she wanted. It’s what I wanted for her as well. I was amazed that doctors, who for years had been trained to keep patients alive at any cost, were now committed to such a humane and dignified approach to the end of life.

  During the night, the hospital had done an MRI. A new doctor appeared and told me that they’d found a large mass in my mother’s stomach that was most likely cancer and that was most likely causing her intense pain.

  After huddling with various doctors and surgeons, I made my decision: my mom was going home. The consensus was that she had just a short time to live, anywhere from a day or two to another week. She would go back to her beloved apartment, have home hospice care. Along with a decent supply of morphine and a hospice nurse, we would wait for the end. It was now about one in the afternoon on October 27.

  My mother had not spoken or stirred since I’d returned to the hospital nearly five hours earlier. Now I went over to her, not sure if she could hear me or not, and said, “Mom, we’re getting you out of here. You’ll be home in about an hour.”

  My mom opened her eyes, lifted her head up, smiled brightly, and said, “Really?”

  I laughed. Even the doctor who was standing nearby laughed. “Really,” I told her.

  She was home and in bed by two thirty. The hospice nurse arrived a short while later. My mother’s wonderful aides—Janet, Jennifer, and Karlene—were still going to be there to take care of my mom, too. Karlene had been on duty when my mom was rushed to the hospital; she spent the night in the ER, staying even when I went home at four in the morning. At six a.m. she was supposed to be replaced by Janet, but when I got back there at seven thirty or so, they were both there. Karlene wouldn’t leave. I knew my mom would want these women, whom she’d come to love and who had come to love her, to be nearby.

  The hospice nurse, kindly but somewhat long-winded, explained to me what would happen: My mom didn’t have much time. Because of the huge mass in her stomach, she would not be able to eat anything but ice chips. She would slowly—or possibly not so slowly—fade away. It would be peaceful.

  I said that I understood and went into my mom’s room. I wanted to talk to her but I also wanted to escape the nurse’s ongoing lecture that wasn’t comforting me quite as much as it was driving me crazy. My mom was awake, if a bit disoriented.

  “Why am I here?” she asked.

  At first I didn’t understand her question. Eventually I realized she meant: why was she at home instead of in the hospital.

  I told her the truth. I said it was because she’d made me promise she wouldn’t die in the hospital. This was the endgame, I explained. And she would spend her remaining time, however long that would be, in her own room, in her own bed, in her own home. I said we were not going to do anything to try to revive her, if that situation came up. And I told her she was never, ever going back to the hospital, no matter what. She didn’t say anything at first, so I took her hand and said, “Is that okay? Did I make the right choice?”

  And she said: “That’s wonderful.”

  I went into my mom’s living room now to call Eric and tell him what had happened. He called Morgan to tell him the news. I also spoke to Morgan and said the same thing I’d explained to his father: I could not tell how long Mom/Grandma would last. It might be a day; it might be a week. But if they wanted to see her, they’d better come soon.

  Morgan, now in his mid-twenties and recently married, flew to New York two days later. My mom was very weak, seemingly not aware of much that was going on, or at least not very responsive. But when Morgan and his wife, Stephanie, walked into her room, she certainly knew they were there and was extremely happy about it. Morgan and Stephanie stayed the weekend. On their last night in New York, they came to my apartment for dinner. It was the nicest few hours I’d ever spent with them. Morgan completely let down his guard—something that’s very difficult for him—and talked a lot about his grandmother, although tears kept interrupting his conversation. He said that my mom had been the one person who had always loved him unconditionally. He said that she was his rock. He said that he could always call her whenever he felt bad. Or just call her whenever he felt good. He said he loved sharing things with her. Stephanie said that Morgan wasn’t prepared for my mom to die. Morgan agreed—he didn’t know if he could deal with what was about to happen. I said that he could, that it’s what happens in life. I told him he was lucky because he was now happily married and that Stephanie would now become his rock. That’s the way it works. I told him that my mother’s biggest regret was that she hadn’t been well enough to go to their wedding in Hawaii, but she had loved watching the videos they’d sent her and looking at the photos. Every time I went to my mom’s apartment, she had their wedding photo in plain view, usually on her dinner table, so she could look at it when she ate. Now they both cried. And the next morning they went up to my mother’s apartment, said good-bye to her, and left for the airport.

  Eric came the day Morgan and Stephanie flew back to L.A. and he stayed a week. Even though her responses were still weak and she was barely able to speak, my mom was clearly very happy he was there.

  My relationship with my brother had changed so much over the years. We’d gone through periods of great closeness, experienced a lot of anger on both sides, and had settled into a kind of distant wariness. He and I had dinner one night, the first time we’d done that in quite a while; my cousin Beth came, too, but it was still the most intimate we’d been in recent memory. He told a few stories about our dad and our mom, tales from the past. I thought he had rewritten history to form the picture he wanted to keep in his mind. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really care if his memories were real or not. I cared only that they gave him whatever comfort he could take from them.

  During my brother’s stay in New York, my mom was so frail, so weak. Neither of us thought she could last much longer. Then, on Eric’s last night before he was returning to France, I came up to my mom’s apartment with take-out Chinese food. It was for him and for my mom’s nurses; my mom was not eating much other than ice chips, to keep her hydrated, and an occasional spoonful of ice cream. Eric took the Chinese food into our mom’s room to eat it there. Within seconds, my mom lifted her head and said, “That smells good.”

  A bit incredulous, I asked, “You want some?”

  Without hesitation, she said yes.

  I asked the hospice nurse if it was okay. Confused, she said, “They told me she wouldn’t eat.”

  “Well, can it hurt her?” I said.

  “I don’t see how, if she wants it,” was the answer.

  So I prepared a plate of Chinese food, gave it to my mom, and watched her eat an egg roll, sesame noodles, and
moo shoo pork.

  “I thought she had this big blockage,” I said to Jennifer, one of my mother’s beloved aides, who came in to watch my mom eat.

  “What can I say?” was Jennifer’s response. “Your mother’s not like regular people.”

  Three or four days after Eric left, I called my mom’s apartment to talk to her aide—it was Janet that day—and I asked how my mom was. Janet said she’d gotten out of bed.

  “What do you mean ‘out of bed’?”

  “She spent a couple of hours in her wheelchair,” Janet told me. “She was getting restless.”

  “They told me she wouldn’t move again.”

  “It’s your mom,” Janet said. “Nobody knows what she’ll do.”

  The next day, when I went to the apartment, my mom was back sitting in her wheelchair, in her bedroom. Janet had washed my mother’s hair and brushed it and she looked … well … like she always looked. She had on lipstick and was wearing her favorite earrings and necklace. She didn’t look sick.

  I asked my mom if she’d been to the living room and she shook her head. Janet said no, she wasn’t quite ready for that yet. My mother glanced at her and frowned.

  The next day she went to the living room in her wheelchair.

  The day after that she ate breakfast at her dining table.

  The third day, I called in the afternoon and Janet told me that she and my mom had gone for a walk.

  “Where?” I said.

  “Outside,” Janet told me. “Do you want to talk to her?”

  “She can talk on the phone?”

  “Oh yes.”

  I heard Janet ask my mother if she wanted her to hold the phone while my mom spoke to me and I heard my mom say, clear as day, “No, I can do it myself.”

  The next thing I knew, my mother was saying, “Hello.” I asked her how she was feeling and she said, “Fine,” as if she was surprised I’d even ask such a thing.

  Over the next week, instead of fading, she seemed to grow stronger every day. Wolfgang came to New York and went up to see her. He brought her food and stayed for two hours. My mother was thrilled. Beyond thrilled.

  “Do you know how busy he is? He was here for two hours!”

  She said he had reminisced about Ma Maison and their trips with Maida Heatter and cooking together and, just like the old days, they had a personal, private talk. He filled her in on his life. She could not have been happier.

  At first she didn’t want anyone else to see her. But as she started feeling better, she began to welcome company. My cousin Jon went up a couple of times. So did other cousins. Beth visited every day; dutifully and happily, she was there to provide anything my mom wanted or needed. Barbara Lazaroff, Wolf’s ex-wife, came to New York every few weeks and always made a point of spending time with my mother. She would bring gourmet chocolates and other goodies and my mom would invariably be a bit giddy after Barbara left. My old buddy Paul and his wife, Laurie, went to the apartment several times and so did their kids (their children, Ben and Sara, always called my mom “Grandma” and my mom thought of them as her own grandchildren, too). Laurie went up alone one day and showed my mom pictures of the wedding dress that Ben’s bride-to-be, Carolyn, had picked out. She said that my mom glowed. When I asked my mother about it, she said, “She’s going to be so beautiful.” When I said that she’d be able to judge for herself when September rolled around, my mom just said, “We’ll see.”

  I went to see her almost every day. And I called at least once a day to either talk to my mom—whose speech actually seemed better than it had been in years—or to one of the aides. Janet, Jennifer, and Karlene were all overjoyed at the turn of events. But none of them seemed surprised.

  The hospice nurse, however, was in a state of disbelief. She said to me, “I’ve never seen anything like this. Your mother is incredible.”

  Janis’s group e-mails had been going out yet again, updating the throngs on my mom’s condition. After telling everyone that my mom was on the verge of death, the e-mails now seemed as if they had been made up.

  • “Judy went out for a walk today. And she ate two bowls of ice cream.”

  • “She has yet to take any morphine. She says she’s in no pain.”

  • “Judy is eating full meals. Today she had pancakes and bacon for breakfast.”

  Her appetite hadn’t just returned. It returned with a ferocity even I had trouble accepting. I called one day and when I asked to speak to her, Janet couldn’t stop laughing.

  “What’s going on?” I said. “What’s so funny?”

  “We just got back from lunch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your mother insisted we go to a restaurant. The three of us went.” The third person was the hospice nurse.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I have photos,” Janet said. “But that’s not the most amazing part.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No,” she said. “Ask me what your mother ate.”

  “Okay. What did she eat?”

  “A pastrami sandwich. With mustard. And pickles.”

  “How much did she eat?” I asked.

  “Exactly what she usually eats: half a sandwich. And she insisted on bringing the other half home.”

  I spoke to my mother’s doctor, Mark Lachs. He told me that the blockage had obviously disappeared.

  “Does cancer just disappear?” I asked.

  “It does not,” he said. And then he said, “You do understand that what your mother’s doing is actually impossible.”

  When I went up to see my mom the next day, I said to her, “You know, you have to be the only person in history who ever went out with her hospice nurse to get a pastrami sandwich.”

  She laughed.

  And the next day she came to our traditional Thanksgiving Dinner. It was usually held at Kathleen and Dominick’s, but this year, thanks to a gas leak and extensive renovation to their building, we had to switch the venue to my apartment.

  I had suggested the idea to my mother a few days earlier.

  “You’re doing so well,” I said. “If you’re feeling strong on Thursday, I’ll send a car to pick you up and you should come for an hour or two. And we won’t tell anybody. You just show up—people will be shocked.”

  Over the previous few weeks, many of my friends had gone over to my mom’s to say their good-byes. No one expected to see her at Thanksgiving. Hell, no one expected her to be alive for Thanksgiving. But even at her lowest ebb, my mom never lost her sense of humor. Kathleen and Dominick came over to see her one day. My mother was very weak and not particularly responsive. She was having great difficulty talking so Kathleen prattled on, taking the onus off my mom. She told my mom how much she loved my mother’s shirt: she’d always loved that type of shirt, she could never find one for herself, it looked so good on my mom. My mother just smiled weakly and none of us were sure she was really listening. But when Kathleen and Dominick got up to leave, my mom put her hand out to stop Kathleen. With her good left hand, she grabbed her own shirt and said, “Relax, it’s yours. I’ll leave it to you.”

  Knowing that everyone thought she was done for, when I said she should make a guest appearance for the turkey dinner, she said, “I’m there.”

  At three p.m. on November 26, 2015, she got wheeled into my living room, all dolled up and grinning like a madwoman. She got a standing ovation—whistles, cheers, the whole shebang.

  Laurie Eagle, who was like a daughter to my mom, was especially surprised to see her. She had called my mother that morning to say how sad she was that she wouldn’t see her at dinner.

  “I’m sad, too,” my mom had said.

  When Laurie saw her arrive for the meal a few hours later, she said to my mom, “You stinker! How could you do that to me?”

  My mother said, “It was easy.”

  I had rarely seen her quite so proud of herself.

  * * *

  OVER THE NEXT four months, my mom and I had many long talks. All
of them were sweet, interesting, inspiring, and truly funny—not a day went by that she didn’t make me laugh. We discussed my dad. And Eric and Morgan. Things that had happened in the past—she never got tired of telling me how she refused to forgive my father’s father for his slight when Eric was born. She finally told me why, when she moved back to New York after my dad died, she wouldn’t live downtown. It was because her family lived downtown and she didn’t want to be too close. Moving three thousand miles away from them was what had enabled her to find her confidence and her real identity. Even in her seventies, she still felt that, as the baby in the family, she would be overpowered by her siblings. You are what you start out as, I suppose. Or, more accurately, no matter your age, you too often run the risk of being what your family thinks you once were.

  She talked about her many friendships—she reveled in all of them—but she saw everyone with a remarkably clear eye. At this point in her life, she saw everything with a clear eye. She was impossible to con or bullshit. Her brain was working 100 percent, even as her body was failing.

  Sometimes we’d argue about something trivial. I’d say, “You told me that was happening on Tuesday” and she’d go, “I said Monday.” We’d go back and forth and then suddenly something would spark my memory and I’d go, “Umm … I think you’re right. I think you did tell me it was Monday.” And she’d go, “Of course I did. I don’t forget.”

  Many of our conversations were about death and her feelings about what was happening to her. She wanted to be cremated. She wanted certain people to get specific possessions. She wanted me to stop spending so much time taking care of her problems. As always, she was more concerned with others than she was with herself. I have never felt closer to my mother than during these conversations.