by Diane Keaton
I went home, packed a bag, and headed to Cove, where I found everything once again transformed. The word stuff came to mind. Stuff and junk—not the kind you collect but the kind you throw away. Old medicine bottles. Broken plates. Too many Kleenex boxes on the bed stand. Caregivers’ logs. Too many ugly balloons and awful floral arrangements. This wasn’t a celebration. Mom’s beloved home was stuffed with the effects of illness. If she were cognizant, she wouldn’t have allowed Suzy D to throw a sheet over the picture window, nor would the ancient videos of my films be collecting dust in the cabinets Dorothy so carefully designed. But it was the sight of Mom’s mottled hands holding a cute little stuffed bunny next to her chest that just about did me in. “Isn’t it pretty, Diane! If you pull the cord it plays ‘Mockingbird.’ ”
Robin had flown in from Atlanta with Riley. Randy walked around with a Rolling Rock beer as he smiled at Claudia, his friend. Anne Mayer, Suzy D, and Irma were also in attendance. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlotte, the hospice nurse, try to drip morphine under Mom’s tongue. Morphine and Ativan every two hours. Suzy tried to help widen Dorothy’s clenched jaw. “Open your mouth, Mamacita. We love our Mamacita, don’t we, Dorrie?” Dorrie nodded.
Stephanie called. The unanswered to-do list was waiting. Mom didn’t have Internet access. Just as well. In her workroom, surrounded by stacks of carousels filled with slides from the sixties of Randy, Robin, Dorrie, and me catching waves at San Onofre, I told Stephanie I was going to take a break.
Dad would have loved Google and Twitter and Facebook and the BlackBerry. He would have been taken by the immediate everything, the instant history, the access to anywhere across all continents. Still, the dilemma is the same as it always was: What to do? How do we focus on some aspect of information that will help forge a path to an emotionally fulfilling life? Dorothy knew it was a matter of picking and choosing. She never quite figured out a way to find an audience for the missing part, the part that made her feel she was enough. She lost something on the way. Mom’s strength as a writer came out of assemblage. She understood the transitory nature and impact of information. In one ear, out the other. At heart, she was a modernist without the craft to gather her insights into a cohesive message. From Mom’s brain to the world. From the outer reaches of her mind’s impulses to her silent audience. The incoming messages. The outgoing summing up of a life.
She knew one thing: It all boils down to family. One day you end up having spent your life with a handful of people. I did. I have a family—two, really. Well, three if you think about it. There are my siblings, and there are my children, but I also have an extended family. The people who stayed. The people who became more than friends; the people who open the door when I knock. That’s what it all boils down to. The people who have to open the door, not because they always want to but because they do.
A Balloon
Four days have passed since our band of caretakers decided to hang in for the duration. Sometimes we sleep on the couch downstairs or in the storage room with Mom’s old file cabinets. Sometimes we share our parents’ king-size bed. Sometimes Suzy D spends the night, other times Anne and Irma too. The hospice nurses come and go, carrying little vials of morphine in their handbags. Yesterday the kids came for a visit. Robin and I were watching them play at the shoreline when we heard Anne screaming. Robin grabbed my hand. We rushed past Don Callender, heir to Marie Callender pies, propped in a wheelchair. He made a gesture not quite capable of being called a wave. Running past, I thought of all those frozen pies sold to all those millions of American consumers. Money couldn’t help him now. He tried to speak. What was he saying? Robin gripped me. “Diane, come on. Hurry.”
Inside, Dorrie, Suzy, Irma, Anne, and Riley were gathered around the hospital bed. Mom’s breathing was irregular. Charlotte, the nurse, checked her stopwatch at every inhalation. Mom would take a breath, hold it for thirty-five seconds before exhaling to take another, hold it for thirty seconds, then take another for fifty. Having had asthma, I knew how hard it was to work for so little air. Inhale, hold for thirty. Exhale. Inhale, hold for forty. Exhale. Inhale, hold for thirty-eight. We looked for a pattern. We waited. When she took a breath and held it for sixty-five seconds, Dorrie started to cry. Robin pressed her face against Mother’s cheek. Duke, with a towel around his shoulders, came running in. “Mommy, don’t cry. Don’t cry, Mommy.” I hugged him tight and kissed his seven-and-a-half-year-old body. Was this the end? Duke untied a helium balloon at the end of the bed and pushed its words, GET WELL, close to Mom’s face. “Get well, Grammy. See, it says ‘Get well.’ ” Mom, as if hearing his plea, didn’t die. But it made me think of the others who already had.
Some Deaths
First Mike
Mike Carr, my cousin, died in 1962. He was fourteen. Mom, Dad, Randy, Robin, Dorrie, and I piled out of our Buick station wagon and entered the mid-century A-frame church still standing on the outskirts of Garden Grove, California. We sat in a pew close to Auntie Martha. She wasn’t crying, but her face looked unfamiliar. It was as if she’d been dealt a blow too hard to assimilate. Martha Carr was never the same, not ever, ever, ever. Something was broken that could never be repaired. The minister’s message was filled with Bible quotes chosen for funerals. There was no mention of the allegations that Mike accidentally shot himself with a rifle during an acid trip in Seattle.
Then Eddie
Aunt Sadie’s husband, Eddie, went next. Grammy Hall hated Eddie. After thirty years, she finally convinced Sadie to kick him out of the duplex. According to Mary, “men don’t count for much.” Eddie and George were weak; why else would they cling to women with means like her? When Eddie died in his cabin up in June Lake, there were no hard feelings between him and Sadie; he left all of his paint-by-number landscapes to her and their son, Cousin Charlie.
Then George
One thing about George, Grammy’s boarder: He never failed to give us kids the best birthday cards. They always pictured different kinds of trees filled with a dollar’s worth of dimes in the branches. We called them the money-tree cards.
George was a painter, a housepainter. He was also a member of the painters’ union. Every Christmas, the union threw a big bash with a giant Christmas tree and tons of presents for all the children. An announcer hosted my favorite part, the talent show. He carried a big silver microphone with a long cord and asked if anyone wanted to get up and sing. I never had the nerve, but I wanted to. I really wanted to. I used to wish Daddy had joined the union. I wanted him to dance and do funny voices like George. George did card tricks too.
Grammy didn’t say much when George got skinny. The morning he keeled over and died, Grammy didn’t cry. “He never gave me a dime. Not one dime.” That’s all she said. I thought of the money-tree cards. I wished I hadn’t spent all those dimes. I would have given them to Grammy so she wouldn’t be so angry about George. After all, he died. I was sure George meant for her to have as many dimes as she wanted. And even if he didn’t, he always tried to pay his rent on time. Grammy’s response was hard for me to decipher. Why wasn’t she sad? It wasn’t nice. What it was was cold and unattended, like her duplex on Range View Avenue.
Then Sadie
“Ninety-three years is no small eggs, but what does it matter now that Sadie’s gone?” Grammy Hall paused. “There ain’t much left in a way. I’ll tell you one thing. There’s no sense in worrying about dying. A lot of people ain’t got very good minds on the subject. I say don’t be overactive in thinking, Diane, because you can think so much your mind goes haywire. I can’t get Sadie’s pacemaker out of my mind. It wasn’t pulling its weight. She had a little button for the damn thing. She was always fiddling with that button, you know. Rolling it around and around. Then she started acting stupid for about a week. I never thought much about it. I went to the store, and when I came back she was dead. She had on a pink dress. I think she put on that dress ’cause she knew her time was up. I hate to say it, but the truth is, Sadie got taken up in the whodunit of
an all too predictable death.”
Even Dr. Landau Too
Dr. Landau was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She told me she was retiring but she would still like to see me in her apartment at 96th Street and Madison. On our last visit, she was telling me the story of how she and her husband, Marvin, had escaped Poland on the eve of Hitler’s invasion, when out of the blue she began speaking in a language I couldn’t identify. I pretended to understand what she was saying by nodding my head and smiling in what I thought was a soothing manner. Even with Alzheimer’s, Dr. Landau didn’t suffer fools. She glared at me as if I was deliberately putting her on. She wasn’t wrong, but what the heck was she saying? No matter how much I tried to placate her, she got more unnerved, so much so that she started to point her finger at me and scream as if I’d betrayed her. A nurse appeared and took her away. Dr. Landau, like Mary Hall, did not look back. We didn’t say goodbye, and I never saw her again.
In better days, Dr. Landau explained there was no such thing as fair. I didn’t agree. Life had to have its reasons. It couldn’t be a lawless jumble of contradictions. As I watched her shuffle out of her living room, holding on to her caregiver’s arm amid the orange and black furniture she’d spent years collecting, I couldn’t believe the woman who’d spent her entire adult life helping people battle the insistent demons playing havoc with their minds had been struck down by Alzheimer’s. It would take twenty years before Mother would be joining her in the fluster and distress of a shrinking brain. Felicia Lydia Landau was right; life is not fair.
One Phone Call, Two Messages, September 8, 2008
On the seventh day of our encampment on Cove Street, I went to pick up some lunch from Baja Fresh while Suzy sprayed Mother’s hair with dry shampoo and freshened her braid. The signs couldn’t be clearer. Low blood pressure. Low pulse rate. A waxy surface spreading across her face. Poor circulation. Dehydration. Every hour, on the hour, as if there was some reasonable order to the process, Dorothy’s gurgling sound got louder.
When I got back, there was a message from the kids. “Hi, Mom, it’s Dexter. Today was such a great day at the beach. I caught a six-foot wave with a four-and-a-half-foot drop. Oh, my God. Everyone was like, ‘Dude, that was sick.’ It was, like, sooo awesome. The boogie-boarding waves were soooo good. Whoo-hoo. I’m a beast in the water. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being a water bug. Tomorrow should be the same. Please, oh, please, let there be big waves. Here’s Duke.” “Mom, come home. Where are you? I want to sleep with you tonight. Can we all sleep together? I get to sleep in the middle. Mama, I wanted to say something. I’m having the Irish oatmeal. And, Mama, I wanted to say that when you get home I want to play with you for a little. And, Mom, there’s something else I wanted to say—Dexter is evil. Bye.”
We ate tacos around the dining room table. Everyone looked worse for the wear. Robin went to drop Riley off at the airport. Dorrie left to get more supplies. The caregivers took a break. It was Mom and me alone together for the last time. I looked at her face, not her ice-cold ankles, or her yellow feet. Nature had been so damn inconsistent. How ironic that Mom’s handsome face made it all but impossible for people to trace the fragile soul hiding behind such stature. I leaned in close. Safe within the perimeter of Mother’s pale aspect, I wondered what she’d seen before her eyes shut. Had the landscape of bobbing, once-loved faces been an intrusion, all those perplexed nodding heads? Mom, what do you hear in the land of no words? The dishes being washed? The ocean pounding against the seawall? Does the chorus of voices whispering “Mamacita” and “Morning, Mom” and “Dear, dear Dorothy” and “Mrs. Hall” mean anything at all?
Alone together, I hope you can identify our voices. Or are we another refrain you can’t make out? If sound is the last thing to go, I hope our chorus soothes you. It’s our lullaby of heartache. Can you hear us cooing? Does it reverberate? It’s our song of loving you from the other side of your white sheet.
I guess it’s safe to assume your eyes won’t be opening anytime soon, will they, Mom? I see you’re still clenching your jaw. No one’s messed with that mouth of yours since the day you bit Suzy D’s finger. “Dorothy’s Last Stand,” that’s what Dorrie called it. I wish you didn’t have to grip so hard. I know you’re trying to hold on to what little is left. I would too. I’m sorry there’s only one door left for you to open.
Everything seems arbitrary and haphazard and distorted and out of whack. Remember Grammy Hall harping about “health is wealth”? Only now do I know what she meant. Duke and Dexter are covered by a host of physicians. There’s Dr. Sherwood, Dexter’s orthodontist, and Christie Kidd for her skin care. There’s Dr. Peter Waldstein, Duke’s pediatrician, and Dr. Randy Schnitman for his many ear infections. As for me, the doctor list gets longer and longer. There’s my dentist, Dr. James Robbins, who recently made me a bite plate; yes, I grind my teeth. There’s his wife, Rose, the dental hygienist; and Dr. Keith Agre, my internist. Dr. Silverman gives me the yearly eye examination. There’s ninety-six-year-old Dr. Leo Rangell, my irreplaceable psychoanalyst. And I can’t leave out Dr. Bilchick, for my sprouting garden of skin cancers.
Remember my first squamous cell at twenty-one, followed by a series of basal cell carcinomas in my thirties? Warren used to bug me all the time about sitting in the sun. Why didn’t I listen? This year, more than forty years later, that mean-spirited invasive squamous cell revisited the left side of my face. I drove to Cedars-Sinai, put on a shower cap, and lay down on the gurney. As the anesthesiologist injected me, I began to drift through a kind of flip book of images. I saw you, just like me, lying on a gurney, only you weren’t alive. I saw Dad on a gurney too. I saw the extra-long needle putting Red-dog to sleep. Should I have given him more treats? I saw my friend Robert Shapizon sitting under his Andy Warhol with the giant dollar sign, discussing the emotional effects of inoperable lung cancer. Why hadn’t I spent more time with him? I saw Larry Sultan holding the cover of his book Evidence as everything started to go black. That’s when I swear I heard Larry’s voice say he wanted to live three more weeks, just three more weeks. It wasn’t like he was asking for much.… When I woke up, I had a four-inch scar running down my face. Life is starting to chip away at me too, Mom. This living stuff is a lot. Too much, and not enough. Half empty, and half full.
The Day Before
Suzy called from downstairs. She was looking for a pair of tweezers. I went into Mom’s workroom. It’s funny how you overlook the obvious. Along with THINK, Scotch-taped to the wall was a quote I’d never seen. “Memories are simply moments that refuse to be ordinary.” I hope Mom has kept a few tucked away in some retrievable part of her mind. Hunting around, I came across a few random pages Mom wrote after Dad died.
Cyrus, the cat, was mercifully and painlessly put to sleep this morning. This is a statement of sorrow at losing my beautiful Abyssinian cat, a real cat who understood his position in life and until his death did his job magnificently. I already miss him.
I don’t know why the verse from Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, came to me as I sat in a hot bath trying to get over the fact that Cyrus is no longer alive, but it did. I got out of the tub, picked up my mother’s old Bible, and found it. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, a time to dance. A time to get and a time to lose.”
I find peace in these words, probably because death is a mystery and at times a torturous burden to live with. It’s so hard to understand the complexities of our human existence. Why were we created with emotions of love only to be left with such emptiness when those we have felt love for are taken out of our lives? I will never know the answer until I die and join those who have gone before me: Jack, Mother, Mary, Sadie, Cyrus the cat, and quite probably I, next.
The Long Haul
After eleven days, Suzy D’s incessant “Praise the Lord, I pray for our Mamacita morning, noon, and night, God bless Dorothy” rant was driving me
nuts, so nuts that I put my finger in Mother’s mouth, hoping she’d bite me, just to shake things up, but Mom’s fight-back spirit was gone. I was free to feel the jagged edges of her teeth. She was flunking her last test, or maybe she passed it and was ready to let go in order to join Jack.
Dorrie and I pushed her hospital bed in front of the picture window, where we tore off the hanging sheet. Enough with the darkness. What exactly had we been protecting Mother from? Certainly not the sun. With Mom only three feet away from Dad’s picture window, Dorrie and I stood looking at our still life. That’s what she’d become—a still life, a painting, an object. What did any of our gestures matter? Picture window or not, prolonging Mother’s life felt like cruelty, even a form of subdued torture.
We washed and bathed her. We held her hand as she was turned from one side to another every hour on the hour. We swabbed her mouth with a wet sponge. The hospice nurses administered morphine. Dr. Berman consoled us much in the same manner Dad’s doctor at UCLA had done. It was the quality of life. The quality of life? As far as I could see, there was no quality left for Mom. She couldn’t swallow. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t see. The only part of her body that moved was her left hand, and its only function had been reduced to clutching the railing of the hospital bed. Now, with our mother’s face directed toward the warmth of the sun, she no longer clutched the railing either.
September 18, 2008
Sitting at the edge of the bed, I monitored Dorothy’s condition while Suzy D went upstairs. She was holding steady at sixteen breaths per minute. I didn’t see it coming. There was no sign. Only when the purple in her hands began to fade did I understand Mother had passed away without so much as a single involuntary sound.