by Chana Wilson
“Do you have any siblings?” the social worker asked.
Why so many questions, why now? Did she have any idea what it was like to be waiting for the ambulance to bring a mother home to die?
And then I heard it: an engine, a door, the sound of men’s voices. I leapt up and went to the windows. “They’re here!”
“Don’t worry, they’ll take care of bringing her in. Now . . . ” the social worker was asking me another question, and her voice trailed after me as I bolted out the door of Gloria’s flat and down the hall to the front doorway.
I watched two men go around to the back of the ambulance, open the doors, lift my mother out in a stretcher, and lower its stainless-steel wheels onto the street. She looked like a prone Humpty Dumpty; in spite of the ascitic drainage, her belly was terribly swollen, and the sheet arced in a curve over it. My legs felt shaky, and I steadied myself by leaning on the door frame. I glanced over toward my mother again. Even though I couldn’t hear their words, I saw that the two men standing next to her were bantering with each other, and one was laughing.
The driver came up the front stairs. “I need to see the route we’ll be taking.”
I turned and led him to the apartment. There was a hall between the living room and the bedroom, made narrow by teak bookshelves my mother had installed. They held a mix of books and stacks of my grandmother’s Limoges china, inherited a few years prior.
“Too narrow here,” the driver said, surveying the hall. “We’ll have to bring her in a sling.”
I waited in the bedroom, wanting to greet her there. After a time, I heard voices, grunts, footsteps muffled by the wall-to-wall shag carpet. Then a crash, a male voice yelling, “Damn! Watch it!” and the sound of shattering china. They brought her headfirst into the bedroom, swaying like a baby in a huge canvas cradle, and deposited her on the bed, with its pulled-back covers.
“Sorry about the breakage,” the driver told me. He handed me a card. “Call this number, and my supervisor will help you declare an insurance claim.” I said nothing and turned to Gloria in bed.
“Welcome home, sweetheart,” I greeted her.
She smiled up at me drowsily, sedated on morphine. “Hi, darling. Thank God I’m home.”
We sat together for a brief while; then I introduced her to Brenda and went out to the living room to finish the social worker’s questions.
WHEN I ARRIVED AT the apartment the next morning, my mother had a complaint about Brenda, although she couldn’t remember her name. “I asked that woman to help me out of bed, and she told me, ‘You can’t. You’ll never get out of bed again!’”
“Jeez, I’m sorry. I’ll have a talk with her.” The statement was true, but much too brutal coming from a stranger.
I hated that we were dependent on Brenda, that she could hurt my mother. My first impulse was to fire her, but she’d been the only health worker available on the list that hospice kept. Instead, I admonished her. “Don’t ever talk like that to my mother again! You have to be gentler.” As if I could change her personality, as if I could control her.
AT THE HOSPITAL, Gloria had asked if she could come live with us. “I don’t want to die here,” she’d said.
She understood she couldn’t manage on her own. How to honor her wish? I didn’t want her to die in that hospital, either. Dana and I had talked it over. We needed our home to be a refuge in the midst of all this. I didn’t want it to be the place where my mother had died.
I had told Gloria that we were going to bring her back to her apartment but I’d be there a lot—most of the time—and we were hiring a woman to help take care of her. She’d asked, “How much will this cost?” She was worried that she would use all her money and leave me nothing. I didn’t want to tell her there was no need to worry, because we wouldn’t have to pay for help for very long. Her confusion had deepened, and the next day when I arrived at the hospital, I found her asleep holding a pen. A piece of paper rested on her chest. I picked it up. A jagged line of numbers spilled down the page, erratic multiplication with dollar signs, the numbers trailing off when they reached the millions.
AS FRANK AS MY mother was, she needed an emissary to ask me one particular question, and she elected her friend Rebecca to do it. Brenda had sent me out with a shopping list, and Rebecca was there when I returned. “Can I talk with you?”
Rebecca was a close double to my mother: Like Gloria, she was a sixty-eight-year-old, short, Jewish, formerly married lesbian who was a retired Gestalt therapist. In my early twenties, long before she had been friends with my mother, she’d been my therapist for a time. Small world. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” she began. “This just has to be awful. For you and Gloria. It’s just that Gloria wanted me to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“Well, you know how much she’s suffering. And, well, she wants to know if you’ll agree to help her. Help her end it—I mean—the suffering. By taking pills.”
“Oh.” My stomach knotted in a fist. Somewhere over my head, the shadows of the three Furies hovered, flapping their great wings—those primal goddesses with mud-streaked faces and hissing snakes for hair, those avengers of matricide, baring their fangs.
“What do you think?” Rebecca prodded me from my glazed-eyed reverie.
No pondering was needed on the unthinkable horror of giving my mother pills to hasten her death. We’d come so close, so many times.
“My God, there’s no way, Rebecca. I understand her wanting that—I’d probably want it myself—but you know my history with my mother and drugs and suicide. Even if we could get away with it, having all these hospice people around, I can’t help her die of an overdose. It would haunt me the rest of my days. Killing my mother . . .” My voice trailed off. “We’ll just have to go the natural route.”
“Sure. Of course. I’ll tell her.”
THE HOSPICE NURSE CAME by at least once a day, sometimes twice. She and I were at odds. She kept turning up the morphine pump dial. Her goal was to help my mother drift off to her death. I wanted bedside talks, heart-to-hearts, last memories, conversations with as alert and coherent a mother as I could have. Balancing that with pain relief was tricky business.
Having no prior experience to guide me, I often deferred to the nurse. Yet I was horrified that my mother would end her days doped into a stupor. It was too reminiscent of the early years, with her stoned on psychiatric drugs. What complicated medical decisions further was that my role wasn’t just to voice my own needs, but to speak for my mother, for what she’d want, and she’d asked for drugs. What to do?
For a time, I lost the morphine war. A week after her return home, Gloria spent a day completely snowed, breathing shallow breaths with long pauses before the next inhalation. It scared the hell out of me, and I was numbed into inaction. That day, a new social worker came to see me. He and I sat in the kitchen. We could hear my mother’s rasping inhalation from there, followed by a gust of out breath, then the long silent pause.
He asked me questions and wrote down the answers. I told him some of my history with my mother: about her addiction to psychiatric drugs in my childhood, and how, after I’d left for college, she’d gotten off drugs and reclaimed her vitality. I was trying to get him to understand the context of why I didn’t want my mother overly sedated, but as I spoke, I felt barely present, rambling, and unfocused. Part of me was hovering, disembodied, in the direction of my mother.
Finally he said, “Let’s go see what’s happening with her.”
We leaned over her bed, listening to the long pauses between each breath. I found myself silently counting: one thousand one one thousand two one thousand three . . . please please inhale.
He shook me out of my frozen stupor with the simple statement “I think you should call the hospice nurse.”
When I got the nurse on the phone, she said that was just how it needed to be. Nothing to be done. But now that I had mobilized myself to action, I wouldn’t accept that answer. I showed the so
cial worker out and called our family doctor, Dvora. She told me how much to turn down the morphine pump.
After several hours, Gloria finally came to. She raised her head and looked around. “I couldn’t wake up,” she rasped. “I thought I had died.”
I took her hand. “No, no,” I soothed, “you just had a bit too much drugs.”
Chapter 49. Submarine
FOR A FEW DAYS, I had my mother back.
One afternoon, she said, “Something, something I have to tell you.” She was short of breath, struggling to get the words out. “Something about Happy.”
“About Happy?” I echoed.
Of course she meant my childhood dog.
My mother’s words were a bit slurred from the morphine. “’Member when we talked about giving Happy to the farmer?”
“Yes?”
“There was no farmer . . . a story I made up.” Her voice caught. “Juz couldn’t handle him anymore. I had him put to sleep. Sorry, so sorry. Can you forgive me?”
I laughed at the shock of it, all these years kept secret by my mother. In the immensity of my mother’s dying, Happy’s death seemed far away and small. Absurd, almost. I dismissed its meaning, giddy in my present sorrow. I was quick to reply, skimming the surface, too overwhelmed with grief to excavate below.
“Of course, Gloria, of course,” I soothed. I wanted no regrets between us, and so I overlooked my own.
SOMETIME AFTER HER death, I wondered at her decision to put Happy down all those years earlier and felt the stirrings of fury. Was there no other way to tame Happy’s wildness than the injection of a lethal sedative? My mother’s choice had found no way to leave me one of the few solaces in my childhood, a companion who eased my loneliness and gave me joy. She robbed me of that.
And what of my mother’s shame, like a boulder between us? I thought we had told each other everything after we both came out and were beyond the silence of her suppressed lesbian years. How terribly guilt-ridden she must have been, to never speak of what had happened.
But then I thought further. There were my own silences, the taboo learned early on—from whom, I’m not sure: Don’t be angry with your mother; it’s not her fault she’s sick. My fury had leaked out toward her in mean and scornful remarks like plutonium from a sunken Russian submarine, unacknowledged but still lethal.
I imagined another conversation. My mother tells me about putting Happy to sleep. “Can you forgive me?” she asks.
I reach toward my mother, take her face between my two hands, hold us eye to eye. It is time for naming.
I tell her, “Mom, I have hated you. This moment, I hate you. Can you forgive me?”
Chapter 50. Sinai
BY THE MIDDLE OF her second week home, my mother was becoming more agitated and incoherent. She whispered, she muttered, she yelled sentence fragments over and over.
I leaned over the side of her hospital bed, stroking her hair. “Shhh, shhh, it’s all right, Momila.” I tried to make eye contact, but her pupils were dilated and she seemed to have gone some manner of blind. She was far from me; I could not find her.
Her arms raised, her hands fluttered in the air. Although her words formed no sentences, I could hear her distress, feel her deep restlessness.
Brenda came into the bedroom and checked the catheter bag. “You won’t be able to speak with her,” she said flatly. “She’s too far gone.” When Brenda left, I closed the bedroom door.
I knew there was a place beyond words, this ancient connection between my mother and me. I began to sing, simple songs, singing the words over and over: We all come from the Goddess,
and to her we shall return
like a drop of rain flowing to the ocean.
MY MOTHER QUIETED, her arms lowered, her face relaxed. She joined me in singing, not word for word, but humming, singing one word now and then . . . goddess . . . ocean.
I reached my hand toward her and laid my palm and spread fingers on her breastbone. “My heart to your heart,” I said. “My heart to your heart.” She whispered, “My heart. Your heart.”
Then I sang to my mother the names of all the women who loved her, and the names of all the women she had loved. “Chana loves Gloria . . . Dana loves Gloria . . . Arlene loves Gloria . . . Reva loves Gloria . . . Carol loves Gloria . . . ” on and on. She sang her name, drawing out the syllables, “GLOR—I—AAA.”
I sang her Hebrew prayers and Yiddish niguns, wordless tunes whose nonsense syllables vibrated with memories, with meaning and meaninglessness.
Hida hida hi diddy di da hida hida hida . . .
There was life between us, my mother and me. We found a place to meet when spoken words were no longer possible. Beneath words, behind naming, lived something else.
THE NEXT MORNING, I arrived to find my mother muttering gibberish and sentence fragments, sometimes in a whisper, other times shouted. Most of the time her eyes were closed, but when she opened them, they were unfocused, not recognizing what was right around her. Not seeing me, sitting right there next to her. She didn’t respond to my voice or my singing. She would open her eyes and stare off into some unfathomable distance. I wondered—where was she journeying? What wilderness called her?
Amidst her muttering, two sentences, so potent with history that they were in some ways a life summary. I could make out each word clearly: “Abe is not good for Gloria. Gloria prefers women.”
Later that day, she whispered, “All the wild things, wild, beautiful things.” Repeating it over and over, “Wild things, wild, beautiful things . . . ”
Where was she traveling? I wanted to go with her, like we had on that camping trip in the Sinai Desert. I wanted to lie back in our sleeping bags laid out on warm sand, staring into a desert night ablaze with stars.
My mother, whose spirit was like an elf’s, with her twinkling eyes, her wild-hearted lust for women—that desire that would not be crushed by the modern-day Inquisition of electroshocks and psychiatric drugs. My mother, who loved the wild places of the earth—the sea, the mountains, the forests—and the wild places in our hearts; who danced with abandon in lesbian bars; who laid her body in the roadway, protesting nuclear bombs; who meditated to Ram Dass tapes and introduced me to sunflower sprouts; who looked me in the eye when she asked, “Am I dying?”
She was leaving me. Standing on the wild threshold, saying goodbye.
Chapter 51. Shiva
AFTER MY MOTHER died, I dreamed of her each night and woke with a start to a motherless morning.
Grief descended on me with its thick animal musk, a beast with ragged, muddy fur, muffling all my senses. My mouth was dry, my chest hollow. I covered every surface of the living room—mantel, coffee table, end tables—with photos of my mother. I was nearly blind to the friends who came and went, bearing casseroles and soup, barely noticed Dana’s presence or absence. I knew that visitors were supposed to be a comfort, but it strained me beyond capacity to turn my face toward them.
It was a chilly, damp fall. I kept a fire going in the stone fireplace, its flames an orange haze. I sat in an armchair. Nothing warmed my bones.
On the eighth day after Gloria’s death, close friends gathered in our house for a small private ritual. I felt like a groundhog poking my head up above its hole to check: Is it spring yet? No, snow all around. But now, just a bit, I could take in the comfort of being surrounded by those who loved my mother or me or both. We shared memories and stories of Gloria, sang together.
A few days later, I drove up into the Berkeley hills. I parked the car at an overlook, got out, and stood on the edge of the precipice. The entire Bay Area spread out beneath me: the flatlands, the gray metal of the Bay Bridge bisected by the knob of Treasure Island, the bay itself ringed by the skyscrapers of San Francisco and the silhouette of Mt. Tamalpais, and, spanning the bay’s entryway, the Golden Gate Bridge. Below me, waitresses were serving meals, executives were sitting at board meetings, prostitutes were turning tricks, women were giving birth, people were falling in love, being mugged,
painting on huge oil canvases—I knew all this, but it seemed inconceivable, bizarre. Didn’t they know the world had been rent asunder?
OVER THE NEXT FEW months, every now and then, I’d get this irresistible urge to pick up the phone and dial my mother’s number. I would hold the receiver tight against my ear, leaning in. Always, now, the same female computer voice stiffly intoned: “You have reached a number that is no longer in service . . . ” The sinking feeling. The weight of my arm, lowering the phone.
Then, one day, the inevitable. I called and a voice said, “Hello?” She sounded young. I wanted to cry out, This used to be my mother’s phone. Who are you? What matters to you?
I remained silent. She repeated, “Hello? Hello?” There was a click, and then a dial tone.
Breathe in, breathe out. Another motherless day.
Chapter 52. Thermals
IN EARLY OCTOBER, as the first anniversary approached, it was as if my body were remembering each day of the year before, each stage of those last weeks of my mother’s dying: This is the day she came home from the hospital, this is the day she could no longer speak, this is the day I sang to her.
Our living room was no longer covered with her photos. I’d condensed her tribute to an altar on a side table. Candles, photographs, seashells, and a small owl statue were arranged around the ceramic vase that still held her ashes. Although I’d gone to Hawaii the past spring, I hadn’t brought along her ashes. I wasn’t ready to feel her sifting through my fingers, couldn’t yet bear to let her go.
Now, each day for a bit, I would sit in a rocking chair facing the little altar, memories flashing through my mind.