“Mom, just talk to him about it,” I suggested. “I’m sure he isn’t trying to rush you. He just moves a mile a minute, you know that. Tell him to slow down. I think it’s hard for him.”
My mother didn’t respond.
That night, I made what I believe was my mother’s last homemade meal—as Dad ordered out most nights and soon after she began a liquid diet.
Before leaving to return home, I wanted to set them up with some dinners they could reheat in the microwave, but I asked her what she wanted for dinner that evening. She said that she wanted pork roast with cabbage and apples.
“Now, brown the roast in the pan on all sides,” she began as she told me how to prepare the meal.
“I’ve got it, Mom,” I smiled at her. “You taught me how to make this meal.”
“I did?” she asked.
I nodded. But then I realized that she wanted to be part of the preparation.
“I forget when I add the apples and cabbage,” I told her.
She happily rattled off the instructions.
“Don’t add any salt,” she reminded me, “your father can’t have any.”
Later, when I brought a plate to her on a tray, she tasted it.
“This is delicious, Nancie.” She finished it all.
It would be the last meal I ever saw her eat.
CHAPTER 20
Going Dark
THAT FEBRUARY, about three months after the diagnosis, while I traveled as one of the chaperones for Jane’s Winter Color Guard Team, we were stranded in Peabody, Massachusetts, for two extra days after a weekend competition. In between supervising homework sessions, watching the kids make sleds out of cardboard boxes and duct tape while the wonderful hotel staff moved the snow they cleared in the parking lots into hills for them to slide down, and playing never-ending card games, I kept trying to call Mom and Dad to let them know where I was.
The first few times they didn’t answer, I didn’t worry. I knew my middle daughter, Sharon, would be out to visit, so I called when I knew she would be there. She had been a regular visitor during times I could not go, and Dad and Mom seemed more comfortable with her there than me. When she picked up the phone, I asked if everything was okay.
“Oh, you know,” she tried to say casually. I sensed something was up.
“Can Mom or Dad come to the phone?” I asked her. She checked with Dad who told her they couldn’t right then. I said I’d call back.
I tried calling several times after that. The first time, Sharon said that they were in the middle of something. The second time I called she said, “Grandpa says he can’t come to the phone right now.”
On my third attempt and her third reason for why they couldn’t come to the phone, I used my mother’s voice.
“Honey, tell your grandfather that I need to speak with him.”
My father came to the phone that time.
“Hi, Nancie.”
He sounded so tired. I had learned a long time ago that some people only answered questions they were asked and volunteered nothing else.
“Hi, Dad. How’s Mom and what has changed since we last spoke?”
“Your mother is moving to hospice. I’ve gone over and chosen the place and the room. I wanted to make sure it was nice. She’ll have a view of a lovely lake.”
I didn’t ask him anything else. Though I knew how I felt, I could not imagine how this was affecting him.
“I’ll be home tonight Dad, and I’ll drive out tomorrow.”
“That will be good,” he said. “Love you now.”
When I spoke to Sharon next, I asked her how it was. She was especially close to my father, and somehow it seemed right that she was with him and Mom at that time.
I learned that she had been in the car driving out to their house when she got a call from Dad. He told her they were not at home, but at the hospital. She drove straight there, parked the car, and found the floor Mom’s room was on. Dad was in the hallway standing outside my mother’s room.
He filled her in. Mom had been unable to keep anything down and had some other frightening symptoms. When they called her doctor’s office, they told Dad to take her to the hospital immediately. It wasn’t too long after she was settled in a room that the doctor came in.
“Suzanne, I am so sorry. There is nothing else we can do.”
They recommended hospice care, so Dad was just waiting for the transfer to take place when Sharon arrived at the hospital.
“She is not going to survive this,” he told her.
“Grandpa’s eyes teared up, so I told him that the allergens were really high,” she revealed to me.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“‘Yeah,’” she said. “That’s all. Just ‘yeah.’”
It occurs to me now that I don’t remember talking to my children about much more than the logistics of Mom’s care, my schedule of visits, the transportation schedules Rachel and Sharon would have to manage to make sure Jane made it to where she needed to go while I was away, and the daily reports on my mother’s status after conversations with Dad. I have no memories of asking them how they felt, if they were sad, or afraid. I don’t remember crying or telling them how I felt. I don’t remember thinking that they might want to cry.
I understand now that by carrying on as though my mother’s impending death was the most normal thing in the world, I put up a good front, thereby assuring that I did not fall into a canyon of emotions so deep I might not climb out again. I didn’t speak to my father or my brothers about how I felt.
After all, Dad was on the frontlines. I just ran back and forth between there and my own home front when asked to. I didn’t talk to my father or brothers about how I was feeling. I never asked how they were coping. I avoided exploring what my mother’s impending death meant to me. I just tried to handle things and managed most of the time. But there were solitary moments in my pod at work when great waves of sadness and fear rolled from the soles of my feet through my body and the tears came.
It took many years for me to realize that though Mom and I did not talk directly about it, we each had known all along that she was dying, though Dad appeared not to believe it. He had not allowed himself to know until he stood outside Mom’s room in the hospital, after the doctor said she recommended hospice care, that it was over. No matter how solid the strategy, no matter the planning, no matter how closely he followed the schedule for dispensing her medication, no matter how on time he was for all her appointments or how much time he spent with her trying to reassure her—Mom was going to die.
CHAPTER 21
Let it Come, As it Will
IN APRIL, two months after my mother began receiving hospice care, my father called me at home one night after work. “I’d like to take you up on your offer to come out for a week or two,” he said, “though I don’t think it will be that long. The hospice nurse said it could be any day and that there is no reason your mom should have hung on this long.”
I knew the reason. Mom had managed to live through her birthday, her granddaughter’s and grandson’s birthdays, and her fifty-fifth wedding anniversary. She was trying to hold on a little longer to get through Dad’s birthday on May 2, which was a week away.
My middle brother, Jim, flew up from Florida. His wife would fly up later. Since my youngest brother, Clint, lived there already, my mother would have all her children at home when she died.
When I arrived, my father was tired, wan, and focused on Mom. He and Janet, her nurse, worked together like a well-oiled machine.
The day after my brother arrived from Florida, I ran into Dad coming out of his den. He said, “Listen, I’ve asked your brother to write your mother’s eulogy. He’ll do a good job. I can’t do it.”
I’d like to say that I focused on the feelings revealed in my father’s statement “I can’t do it” rather than the reaction I had. We’d never discussed it, but I planned to give my mother’s eulogy. Clearly, she hadn’t told him about our conversation. I felt passed o
ver. But then I thought, I should have said something myself earlier. Now was not the time to say anything. I thought, “Okay.” I rationalized away my disappointment.
Poor Dad. He wanted to give Mom’s eulogy but is too sad.
My brother will do a great job. And he probably won’t cry.
Dad doesn’t know that Mom and I talked about this.
Who cares whether I give it or someone else. Mom just wanted to be remembered. I can help.
I found my brother at my father’s desk.
“Are you working on Mom’s eulogy?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m happy to help. Do you need anything?”
“No, I think I’m good,” he said, smiling at me before returning to the work.
I could not sort out my feelings. Everyone was sad. Not just me. Was this a girl/boy thing? Did my father think my brother was a better writer than I was? Mostly, why didn’t I say something? I could have said, “I would like to say something, too.” I didn’t. And I was somehow more upset that—for my mother—I didn’t stand up and assert myself. I’d made her a promise. But it was a promise that didn’t really matter to her. She was going to be remembered. That’s all she had wanted. And I knew my brother would do a wonderful job.
A day or so later, as I was walking through the house, I met Dad headed toward the kitchen.
“Did you want to say something at the service?” he asked.
“Yes, I would,” I said.
“Okay. Your brother will go first.”
I’d settle for that.
I thought about what I wanted to say. I was sure my brother would hit the high spots. I discussed it with the members of a close group of online writers I’d belonged to for years, since I updated them daily with the latest happenings. I let them know that I decided to read a poem. My mother loved poetry. It was not unusual for her to call and read something she’d written or read.
“Do you have time to listen to a poem?” she’d ask. I always did. “Don’t you just love that?” she’d say. I loved her reading the poems to me more than some of the poems she chose to share.
I considered “Funeral Blues,” by W. H. Auden, because my mother heard it for the first time when she saw Four Weddings and a Funeral.
“I loved that poem at the end of the movie,” she told me. “I wonder who wrote it.”
“Auden,” I told her.
“Oh?” she said. “Do you think so?”
“Auden, Mom. W. H. Auden. Yes, I’m sure.”
“That wouldn’t be my choice,” my friend, the poet Ruth Bavetta, wrote in the message board. “I’ve always liked this one.”
She suggested “Let Evening Come,” by Jane Kenyon, who wrote it while enduring the cancer that would take her own life. The images evoked of a farm as night falls were perfect. My mother came from a long line of farmers and visited the family farm in Ohio during summers after her family moved to New York when she was a child. But the last stanza comforted me and seemed perfect.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
We settled in as a family for the first time in many years. It was good to have everyone there. Like myself, my brother worked during the times we weren’t with Mom. Mom’s nurse, Janet, was with her from about 9 A.M. until 3 P.M., so that Dad could rest, which he didn’t, because he used that time to “keep the operation running.” I spelled Janet and Dad when they needed help.
I made lunch and dinner, though sometimes we picked up meals from one of Dad’s favorite local restaurants. I ran to the store when necessary. Dad ate early then went up to be with Mom for the rest of the night, taking over Janet’s nursing duties.
During my shifts, I sat with my laptop on a small, Korean bed tucked into the bay window in her bedroom. I worked remotely, checking in at the office through email and chat messages. As it was a large room that ran the depth of the house, there was enough space for Dad to have positioned Mom’s hospital bed diagonally between two windows at one end of the room, through which she had a view of the magnolia tree on her left and the large expanse of land partially screened by a crepe myrtle on her right. She’d been comfortable here for two and a half months. She moved in and out of consciousness now, sometimes clear of head, sometimes obviously somewhere else.
Sometimes, I caught a whiff of magnolia and forsythia from outside. Once I could have sworn I smelled roses, though there were none around my parents’ home. It seemed ironic that it was spring, symbolic of hope, birth, and celebration. Promise and future. But this season both time and living were rooted in nothing but sadness and impending death.
It was always calm and quiet except for the light scratching of a random branch on the side of the house and my mother’s and my breathing. Hers shallow and labored. Mine deep, my chest so tight that breathing hurt. My exhales were more sighs than breaths. I looked up frequently to see if I could still see her chest move. It became harder and harder. Sometimes I’d sit forward on the Korean bed and peer at Mom, and just as I might get up and walk across the room to her bed, I’d see her chest rise or a finger flutter imperceptibly.
The rest of the time, my fingers flexed, pointed, and reached, poised and ready, then dancing lightly across the keyboard. I tried to be quiet, but sometimes she would open one eye.
“Nancie? Is that you? Are you typing? You should rest,” she’d say.
“I’m okay, Mom. You rest. Can I get you anything?”
She’d give me a look that floated on the spectrum between love and concern, leaving it to me to decide where it would land. Our eyes locked and I chose to believe that if she could smile, she would. We stared at one another for a moment. That moment became forever. Then she closed her eyes, while I returned to double duty. Work and waiting.
She was in such pain. Dad was meticulous about dispensing her pain medicine right on time, even when she fought him. He wanted there to be no chance it would wear off, exposing her to even a second of pain she did not have to feel. Sometimes I helped support her head. Her bones were loose inside her skin, she was so thin. I could have sworn I heard them rattle.
There were times she hallucinated. One day she called out to me.
“Nancie! Why are they here?”
“Where, Mom? Who do you see?”
She motioned weakly to the foot of her bed. “There. Why are they here?”
Another time, while Dad and Janet were trying to give her medicine, she cried out in a voice I did not recognize—so different from her own, which was always clear, precise, and correct. It seemed a country accent, rough and ungrammatical. For some reason, I suspected it was her grandmother’s. And it was weak, aged, and feeble sounding.
“Don’t give me any liquor now. I can’t have no liquor.”
I sat one morning and watched her for about a half hour. I suddenly wished I had the power to breath deeply enough, even while sitting across the room as I was, to suck the air out of her lungs—slowly, easily, in one long breath—so that I could remove all her pain and she could let go.
Janet let us know that she’d gotten permission to work over the weekend because, she said, “I’m sure your Mom will not make it beyond Sunday.”
But Mom did. And because Janet had worked the weekend, she was required to take Monday and Tuesday off. A relief nurse came to fill in. She was nursing student and clearly inexperienced and uncomfortable. But we were there and knew what to do, so I didn’t worry.
On Tuesday, I was in the room while the new nurse took her lunch break. Suddenly Mom spoke clearly and in a stronger voice than I’d heard for days.
“Oh, have you come to get me?”
I went over to her bed.
“Mom? Do you need anything?”
Her hands, colder than they’d been before, look mottled. Her system was shutting down and her circulation slowing. Her breathing was labored. I knew it would be soon. The visiting hospice nurse came soon after lunch and confirm
ed what I thought.
“It will be soon,” she said. I heard her talking to Dad. It sounded as though she was giving him instructions.
About an hour or so later, I heard familiar sounds. The relief nurse and I stood up at the same time and moved toward Mom’s bed. I stood to Mom’s left side, took her hand, and leaned down close to her ear, “I’m here Mom. We’re getting Dad.”
The poor novice nurse stood away from the bed staring at my mother.
“Give me your stethoscope,” I told her, “and please get my brother, he’s across the hall.”
She nodded and ran across the hall to the guest bedroom. My brother came to the door of the bedroom, I nodded, and he ran down the stairs before I could finish saying, “It’s time. Get Dad.”
As I held her hand, I rested my head as close as I could to her pillow. I whispered, “It’s okay, Mom. Dad’s coming.”
My mother began to call out for my father, “Lowen? Lowen? Where’s Lowen.”
My parents’ house is old and solid. Sound doesn’t travel, so I do not believe my father could hear my mother calling, he just knew she was, because he knew her. From the landing I heard him, as he began running up the stairs, “I’m coming, Suzanne. I’m coming. I’m here.” He took her hand in his.
With my father on her right, me on her left, my brother at the foot of the bed, my mother died. I heard my father talking to her, but I don’t know what he said. I don’t know if he was standing or kneeling or if he looked at her face. I remember vaguely seeing my brother but don’t remember his expression. Instead I focused on my mother, telling her how much I loved her and that she could go, we would be alright. And as she struggled, I remember saying, over and over, “It’s okay, Mom. You can let go. We’ll be fine. I promise.”
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