American Daughter

by Stephanie Thornton Plymale

  She looked at me, then back at her shoes. A puzzled expression crossed her face.

  “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “That’s all right, Miss Florence,” a nurse said from the doorway. “You just got confused for a second. Pay it no mind.”

  The nurse breezed in, took the shoe from my mother’s hands, and shook the contents back into her purse. Then she took my mother’s chart from where it hung at the foot of her bed and made a few brisk notes.

  “Stephanie, honey,” the nurse said, “stop in at the office and see me on your way out, if you would.”

  “I’m sorry to have to say this,” she told me a few minutes later, after my mother had gone to bed, “but the cancer has reached your mother’s brain. From here on out, she’s going to keep having spells where she’s not making a whole lot of sense. You need to be prepared for that, honey—she’s not going to be the same.”

  * * *

  SHE’S NOT GOING to be the same.

  And she wasn’t. She was different, so different. While these words had been meant to warn me—so I could brace for unfortunate changes—the truth is that for a brief and luminous interlude, she became the mother of my dreams.

  Her eyes widened with delight whenever I walked into her room. She reached out to take my face between both of her hands. She said my name as if she savored the very sound of it. She thanked me, over and over, for everything I did for her.

  Her gratitude was like an opiate. It took so much of my pain away. It eased the chokehold of sorrow that set in whenever I crossed the hospice threshold. She said over and over that I’d made her room beautiful. She told me I made her proud. She said she loved me.

  She said she loved me. How can I express what it was like to hear those words from her? I’d been waiting for them all my life, and now I hovered around her like a thirsty cat lingering by a drainpipe, wanting above all else to hear them again.

  The moment I was showered and dressed in the morning, I would run down to my car and drive to Gracelen without stopping for breakfast. The staff began bringing me meals each day, and I’d eat them beside my mother’s bed. I’d stay by her side well into the evening, working during her naps, leaving only after she seemed to be asleep for the night, a moment which came earlier each visit.

  And finally the day arrived when she didn’t wake at all. She was asleep when I arrived and, hour upon hour, she stayed asleep. Her breathing was steady but her eyes never opened.

  After that, she was asleep each time I came. The nurses said she was essentially comatose and would likely remain so until she passed.

  IT HAD BEEN two years since I’d learned of my mother’s lung cancer. I’d known she was going to die for all that time. In some ways, I’d waited for it—for the blessed end of her mood swings, her middle-of-the-night calls, her intermittent abuse and incessant demands.

  But to have her slip into oblivion so soon after her turn toward tenderness was a special kind of agony. I felt as bereft as I had ever been. When I woke in the morning, my face was damp with tears. I went around all day leaking at the eyes, hardly noticing enough to wipe the tears away, and Jim told me I whimpered all night in my sleep.

  True to our family form, my mother outlived the hospice doctor’s prediction by many weeks. More than a month after she checked in, a nurse named Jane cornered me as I was leaving for the evening.

  “Stephanie, do you have a moment?” she said. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

  “Of course,” I said, thinking she wanted to discuss some aspect of my mother’s medical care. When I sat down facing her at one of the tables in the common area, I was startled to see accusation in her pale blue eyes.

  “Stephanie,” she said in a tone of prim reproof, “you aren’t keeping your mother here, are you?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, looking at her in bewilderment. Hospice was, by definition, a patient’s final destination. Where else was I supposed to bring my mother? “People come to hospice to die, right?”

  “Exactly,” Jane said. “So why hasn’t she died?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She was supposed to die three or four weeks ago,” Jane said. “So why is she still alive?”

  I remained so dumbfounded by this line of inquiry that it took me a moment to find words. “I don’t know what you’re asking me,” I said. “Her doctors said she was actively dying and that it was time for hospice. If you think there’s been some mistake and she was brought here too soon, that’s something you should take up with her medical team, not me.”

  “I don’t think her doctors made a mistake,” she said. “I think you are standing in her way. You won’t let her go.”

  I sat there with my mouth open, unable to believe what I was hearing. Who was this woman? Was she out of her mind?

  “You’re seriously blaming me because my mother isn’t dying fast enough for you?” I finally managed.

  Jane folded her arms across her chest. “I had a feeling you’d get mad at me,” she said. “But I have to speak my conscience. That poor woman is suffering, and there’s no sense in keeping her here any longer. You need to release her.”

  “How can you—” I was so flustered I couldn’t speak without sputtering. “This is so unprofessional! I can’t believe—”

  I watched her lips turn white as she pressed them into a thin line. “I’ve been doing this a long time, honey. I’m just calling it like I see it. I’m sorry if you’re offended by my honesty.”

  I rose without another word and fled the building. How dare she? What business did she have calling herself a nurse? Did she talk to all family members this way when patients didn’t die according to her timeline?

  I thought about reporting her to her supervisor. I considered filing a complaint with the hospice and another with the state medical board. I still wonder if I should have done any of these things. As it was, I went out and cried in my car, drove home with shaking hands, and raged about it to Jim. But underneath it all, I wondered whether she was right.

  The next day, though I refused to look at Jane or return her greeting, I pulled my chair up close to my mother’s bed, took her bluish hand as she lay comatose, and began speaking the words I’d rehearsed throughout the sleepless night before.

  “Mom,” I said in my gentlest voice, low and resolute, “you know I love you so much, and I always have. I’ve felt so close to you during these last few weeks, and it’s made me so happy. But I know you’re in a lot of pain and it’s not going to get better, and I want you to know that it’s okay to go.”

  My heart felt as if it were skittering around like a dying thing itself—something crushed and stunned and flailing. But my mother’s breath didn’t falter, nor did she show any other sign of hearing what I’d said. If on some level I expected her to be snuffed out somehow, like a candle, in response to my words—well, that wasn’t happening.

  “You had a hard life, Mom, and I know you’re having a really hard death too,” I went on, “but very soon, all your hardship will be over.”

  My mother didn’t stir. Her eyes didn’t flutter. Her labored breath did not falter.

  “One of your nurses, the one named Jane, she thinks I’m keeping you here,” I told her sleeping form. “She thinks it’s past time for you to go, and that I won’t let you.”

  It was as if I wanted my mother to wake up and take my side, share my anger at Jane. She didn’t, of course. I all but recoiled, hearing the words I’d just said out loud: She thinks it’s past time for you to go. They sounded cold and peremptory and ugly, and I was furious with myself for relaying them, even to an unconscious woman.

  I strode out of her room and down the hall, looking for Jane. The facility was small, and it wasn’t long before I saw her stocking a supply cart on the far side of the corridor.

  “My mother will die on her own time, whenever that might be,” I flung at her, as if there had been no
break in our conversation since the night before. “She doesn’t need my permission or anyone else’s. She certainly doesn’t need your intervention.”

  I stalked away before she could answer or see that I was shaking.

  Jane avoided me after that.

  DECEMBER DRAGGED ON, and I continued to come every day, living in what began to seem like infinite limbo. My mother did not die, and she did not wake up. Spending nearly all my waking hours within the hospice walls began to feel unsustainable. My body hurt from sitting all day. My heart ached from the sorrow around me, pressing in on me from all sides.

  The looming fact of Christmas added another layer of dread. I hated the tinsel-heavy plastic trees scattered around the place, inside the entrance, the visiting room and dining hall. I hated their artificial and garish colors. They reminded me of every institutional Christmas of my life: in the dependent unit, hospitals, psych wards, and jails. It depressed me to see the nurses in their red plush Santa hats with sagging white pom-poms, and to hear tinny Christmas music on the sound system in the visiting room.

  Yet there was nowhere else I could imagine being. Hour after hour, I sat by my mother’s bed. Leaning toward her from a hospital chair had begun to hurt my back, so the staff lowered her bed as far as it would go and I sat beside it on the floor, on the imitation sheepskin rug I’d brought from home. I had a certain sense of completion, sitting on the floor at her side: I had been her servant in life and now I was her servant in death. But I was no longer a child in servitude. I was a woman yearning, with all my heart, to be of service.

  “LISTEN, HONEY,” Jim told me a few days before the twenty-fifth, “I have the highest respect for your choice to visit your mother every day. But I hope you’ll make an exception on Christmas Eve and Day, and just be fully present in our family celebration.”

  “Of course I’ll spend most of it here with you,” I said. “But it’s all right if I visit her for just a little while, isn’t it?”

  “Well, that’s what I’m asking,” he said. “I’d like you to take a break, just for the holiday. When you come home after your time with her, you’re always tired and sad. Can we just have Christmas away from all that? For the kids’ sake?”

  “They’re not actually kids anymore,” I said, irritated. “I mean, really, Jim. I promised my mother I’d be with her up to the end, and any of these days could be her last.”

  “Steph,” my husband said gently. “She won’t even know you’re there.”

  “We have no idea what she knows,” I snapped. “Maybe she doesn’t consciously know what’s going on, but what if she can hear me, or even just sense my presence?”

  “You’ve been there every day for more than five weeks, hon. She wasn’t supposed to last more than one.”

  “Wow, Jim,” I said. “You sound like Jane.”

  “Whoa,” my husband said. “I mean, just— whoa. That’s not fair.”

  “Isn’t it?” I retorted. “She wasn’t supposed to last?”

  “Stephanie, I saw how your brother held on well past what anyone would have thought possible. To my way of thinking, this could go on a very long time. I know you made her this promise, but you have a very full life—running a school, getting another one off the ground, and parenting. Spending all your time there for weeks or even months on end just isn’t realistic, especially when she’s not even conscious.”

  The fury I felt was beyond anything reasonable, but there it was.

  “I’m the one doing it all,” I countered, my voice rising to a shriek. “I get to decide whether it’s realistic, all right? I only get one shot at this, Jim. She’ll be dead soon enough, I promise. And then she’ll be dead forever.”

  My husband paled at this. He held up a hand in concession. “Okay, honey. I’m sorry. You do what you need to do.”

  SO I’D WON. On Christmas Eve, I arrived at Gracelen with a beautifully wrapped box and Andrea in tow. In the box was a white faux fur wrap. In my very irrational fantasy, the matriarch and her daughter and granddaughter would sit down together for a holiday dinner, after which she would open the present we’d brought.

  How can I explain expecting to find her in the dining room with all the other families, awaiting the Christmas banquet and gift exchange? I actually scanned the room and felt confused when I didn’t see her.

  “Merry Christmas, Stephanie! Oh my goodness, is this your daughter? What a beautiful young woman,” said Mara, one of my favorite nurses.

  “Merry Christmas, Mara,” I said. “Do you know where my mom is?”

  She looked at me with a startled expression. “She’s still asleep. Still unresponsive,” she told me. “Which is of course to be expected.”

  “Of course,” I managed after a moment, feeling deeply foolish.

  “But I don’t blame you for hoping you’d get a Christmas miracle,” she hastened to add, squeezing my hand. “I would feel the same way. I’m sorry I don’t have better news.”

  Andrea and I made our way down the hall and into my mother’s room. As Mara had said, everything was unchanged. She was asleep in her bed, her face ashen and gaunt against the pillow. One skeletal arm was flung out as if to welcome me, but there was a finality about her closed eyes, as if they had been sealed shut.

  I sank down onto my place on the floor, by her side. Andrea took the chair.

  “Merry Christmas Eve, Mom,” I said. “I brought you something. I hope you don’t mind if I open it, because I want you to have it now.”

  Carefully, I pulled the paper from the box, lifted the lid, and took the wrap from where it was nestled between layers of tissue. As gently as I could, I slipped one end of it beneath her neck and angled it around her shoulders.

  “Isn’t it soft, Mom? I wanted it to keep you warm and cozy.”

  I felt wildly inhibited with Andrea there, unable to talk to my mother freely as I usually did. My daughter looked uncomfortable as well. She looked down at the floor, or around at the walls—anywhere but at my mother or me.

  “Mom,” she asked after a few minutes, “can we go now?”

  “Not yet, honey!” I said. “We just got here.”

  “Do you think she’s going to wake up soon?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t think she’s going to wake up at all.”

  “Then I don’t get it,” my daughter said. “Dad was right. What’s the point of sticking around if she doesn’t even know we’re here?”

  I felt a howl gathering inside me, one I could not unleash. You wanted to come, I railed silently at my child. I didn’t ask you to be here. You asked me to bring you along!

  “Tell you what,” I said instead. “We won’t stay long at all today. We’ll leave in just one hour. Okay?” Even as I said this, I was wincing inwardly at the idea of so brief a stay. What kind of woman abandoned a dying mother so soon on Christmas Eve?

  “A whole hour?”

  * * *

  I DIDN’T VISIT her on Christmas day. I wanted to, but my family prevailed. The nurse on duty that day said she never woke up, that she surely wasn’t aware of having no visitors. But I spent the day in a state of miserable impatience, waiting for it to pass so I would be free to take my place at her side once again.

  I went to her the day after Christmas, and the next, and the next.

  Very early on the fourth day—at five thirty that dark December morning—my bedroom door creaked and our dog barked. The call came just a moment later. I like to imagine that my mother paid me one final visit as she departed from this world.

  The nurses said her passing was easy and peaceful.

  “EVERYTHING ABOUT HER death, about her entire hospice stay, was easy and peaceful,” Jim told me that day. “You healed her heart.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said.

  “She was so different than she’d ever been,” he insisted. “So happy to see you every day. So thankful for all you were doing. She was finally capable of showing love, and it was because of what you did for her, Stephanie—the
work you did to uncover her story, your willingness to understand her and forgive her.”

  I closed my eyes against the longing that broke over me then, the longing for his words to be true.

  “You healed her heart,” he repeated.

  It was the most seductive thing he could have said. It was what I wanted to believe more than anything. Sometimes I do believe the difference in her was due to a shift within her psyche, rather than a symptom of the cancer that had reached her brain. Just the same way I sometimes believe in otherworldly signs, like messages in the form of a monarch. Other times I believe a butterfly is just a butterfly.

  I’ll never know for certain if I really healed my mother’s heart. But there are a few things I can be certain about:

  My mother did not die alone.

  Whatever might have brought it about, during the last few weeks of her life, the two of us were together in that fabled place of love and gratitude that had been my dream forever.

  I’d found a way to be the love I didn’t get.

  I loved her out. I loved her on her way.

  In all of this, I had healed my own heart.

  Epilogue

  WHEN MY DAUGHTER was five years old, I read her a children’s book about a very long dachshund called Pretzel, who rescued another dog, Greta, from a deep hole. When the story was over, Andrea started to cry.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” I asked.

  “A picture in that book made me feel sad,” she told me.

  Instantly I knew the picture she meant. When Greta, depicted as a much smaller dachshund, was trapped in the hole, she wept so hard that her tears gathered into a huge blue puddle at her feet.

  I reminded her that Greta ended up safe and sound—and married to Pretzel, no less, with a litter of puppies.

  “But she was in there crying for a long time,” Andrea said.

  “So it made you sad to know she felt so scared and alone?”

  My daughter nodded.

  “I understand. But remember: In the end, Pretzel saved her, and they lived happily ever after.”