I jogged the mile and a half home as fast as I could. The first thing I saw upon entering the house was a coffee cup on my mother’s cherished oak dining table. An earthquake followed by a fire and a flood could have struck our town, and my mother would not have failed to put a coaster under a drink on that table. I walked in—slowing down, now, hesitating at the last moment—and there was her leg, sticking out at an odd angle on the floor. Her face was puffy. She was completely unconscious and did not respond to my calling to or shaking her. I saw the prescription bottles on the table.
I called the operator in a daze and was connected to the police; then I called my father, who was hours away in Manhattan and did not seem to fully grasp what I was saying. Then I stood outside the house and watched as the small caravan of emergency vehicles cruised down our peaceful, woodsy street. An ambulance and two police cars pulled into our driveway. One of the cops was joking about some vaguely crude matter as they entered the house. From the vantage point of decades later, I now realize that this was how he handled his job, which involved seeing much of the underbelly of humanity. I also realize now that he was a completely insensitive asshole.
The cop kept joking even after he saw the body, but it really didn’t matter; it was all part of a strange, surreal play. Meanwhile, another officer took me aside and asked about my mother’s medications. I showed him the drawer where she kept her prescriptions. Then they put my mother in the ambulance and drove away. The officer who asked about the drugs stopped and looked at me.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.” What else was I going to say? What do teenage boys always say? I sure as hell wasn’t going to talk about any real emotions.
I wish I could tell you that it all ended happily, but we all know life doesn’t end happily. The end is the end, and for the purposes of most storytelling it is quite unsatisfactory. The good news is that Marion recovered from that suicide attempt, though it was a close call, and then made great progress with a psychiatrist who treated her for depression. A year or so later, Dave came to terms with his alcoholism and never drank again. (I remained a hellion.) Dave and Marion had some good years together, but the toll of alcohol, overwork, and cigarettes eventually caught up with Dave and he died, too young.
After the funeral, Marion was walking back from Dave’s gravesite accompanied by her four children and the family minister, when she stopped to read the name on a gravestone.
“So that’s why I haven’t seen him around,” she said.
Marion always had her humor, but she couldn’t accept growing old without Dave. She went into a tailspin a few years later, locked herself in a motel room, and took a boatload of pills. This time she succeeded in taking her own life.
I have a lovely picture on my bookshelf of my parents, Dave and Marion. A smiling Marion is looking at the camera, her arm around Dave’s shoulder; he is laughing as hard as a person can laugh. It’s easy to guess what’s happened—Marion has made some outrageous, funny remark. She had that gift, and Dave appreciated it.
Yes, I remember them dying, but I remember them laughing, too.
DEATH WITH DIGNITY
— Sherry Glaser-Love —
After eight years in renal failure, combined with four-hour dialysis treatments three days a week, with a side of occasional Friday afternoon seizures that rendered her unconscious at the Cedars-Sinai bus stop, my mother has been deemed mentally competent by an ethics panel in a Los Angeles hospital to make the decision to refuse treatments, and therefore relinquish her life here on earth. She tells her frustrated little nephrologist that she wants one more dialysis treatment on Friday, so she’ll be sure to live through the weekend. She wants to say her goodbyes. He reluctantly agrees and prophesizes that she’ll panic and beg for dialysis on Monday.
We laugh at him.
She returns to her own room at the Garden of Palms assisted-living facility, and she is now under hospice care.
She has very little on her agenda. She needs to cancel her dental and chiropractic appointments. I sit on the bed next to her listening. They ask if she would like to reschedule. She says, “No, I’ll be dead.” There is a stunned silence on the other end. She thanks them for their time and hangs up. She then goes through her phone book calling long-distance relatives to tell them goodbye. Witnessing this is probably the most hilarious, terrible thing I’ve ever seen. Some fight with her, try to talk her out of it. Most cry out how much they love her and how much they are going to miss her. Before she hangs up, the last words are, “Remember, I love you, goodbye.” With total consciousness, she is saying goodbye to her life here and eagerly anticipates leaping into my father’s heavenly arms. She is ecstatic at the thought of their reunion. She shaves her legs. True love waits for her. That’s heaven all right.
I watch my mother throw her bills into the recycling bin, try on coffin wear, and decide which shoes go with her eternal crepe turquoise dress. This seems like a good time to ask her if she’d like to say anything particular in her obituary. She pauses, looks heavenward, and says, “No matter how my life has been, I’m glad I had it.”
I’m so happy for her. I’m so sad for me.
She’s still taking excellent care of herself, taking all her medications and keeping to a proper renal diet. She says, “I want to look good and feel good when I die.” But after eight years of a chocolate-free existence she has consented, with some coaxing from me, to have dessert every night. “That’s the point, isn’t it?” I tell her. “You need to live a little,” so she does. The chef at Garden of Palms starts to cry from joy when we tell him she’ll have dessert from now on.
After getting word of her imminent departure, three of our family clans gather on that very weekend to pay homage to my mother. She’s having a going-away party.
On Sunday morning, we all meet at the French Market on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. These are the kin my brother and I grew up with but haven’t seen for a long time. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and such, everyone squeezing together in the restaurant’s little centrally located indoor gazebo and ordering a lot of fried food and dips. And dessert, of course. It’s like musical chairs up there. We all exchange seats to have a chance to visit the past, then we converge back at the Garden of Palms, where other residents are offended at the joy we share in just being together. One angry grandma says, “They have some nerve.”
My generation and our kids sit in the umbrella shade of wrought-iron patio tables and listen well. We get to hear stories from the elders of the great migrations of our great-great-grandfather through Mongolia, and our great-great-grandmother’s trek through Czechoslovakia with her six children. We tap the root. Together there are thirty of us, cross sections of three generations who have come to pay respect and gratitude to my mother, who over the last seventy years has brought us divine messages, manic comedy, true forgiveness, unconditional acceptance, and love, love, love.
So, in effect, she is orchestrating a ritual of death with dignity, compassion, and celebration. I hear the symphony. It is an extraordinary expedition into the complete unknown, trust, beauty, and surrender. I am not aware of any families that have had the privilege and good fortune to participate in a positive death experience, where one has the ability to have an intimate conversation with the dying—not fraught with suffering, misery, and fear but instead infused with liberation and exaltation.
Monday morning is more intimate. It is imperative that my mother have alone time with her sister, her nieces, my brother, and me. Door closed, sacred and divine apologies, confessions, forgiveness, and looking into the face of death, confrontation of immeasurable degree. Looking into the face of someone you’ve known your whole life, knowing they are going to die shortly and saying goodbye, is powerful with a capital P. My youngest cousin says goodbye to my mom in the dining room. She walks out and collapses in tears into my arms.
The family is departing in waves. By Monday afternoon, it is just me and my brother. I ask if there’s anything she’d like to do. W
e agree that it’s a relief that she doesn’t have to be at dialysis. She says, “Let’s go to the theater.”
Two years earlier, my mother had gone around the block to the Lee Strasberg Theatre and submitted her play Love as a Dying Art. It is a black comedy about a middle-aged woman desperate for attention from her family, who pretends she is dying of cancer so they’ll treat her with more love and respect. The receptionist had promised my mother that they would at least do a staged reading, so she could hear the play out loud. She was still waiting to hear it.
I say, “Great, let’s go.”
My brother says, “I’ll drive her.”
My mother says, “I want to walk.”
I say to my brother, “I’ll walk with her. What’s the worst that could happen? She could die.”
We laugh.
We leave the Garden of Palms and wobbly-walk about fifty yards to the corner, and then enter the theater. The woman at the desk recognizes my mother and begins apologizing, adding, “We haven’t forgotten about you.”
“Oh, I’m glad,” says my mother, resting her arms on the counter. “I’m dying.”
The lady goes pale. “Oh, I’m …”
“Well, I’d just like to hear my play before I die.”
“Of course, I’m so sorry.” She pulls out the calendar. “How’s next Thursday?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Oh, ummm, how about this Thursday?”
My mother shakes her head.
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Oh, definitely,” says Mom.
“Let me get your number, and I’ll arrange it right away. I’ll call you as soon as I get the actors together, and we’ll do it in the little theater.”
What an extraordinary feeling of revenge for all playwrights who have waited weeks, months, years, and sometimes forever to hear back!
By the time we return to Garden of Palms, it’s time for dinner. Hamburger, zucchini, kugel, and chocolate cake for dessert. My mother is excited: everyone in the dining room is happy to see her. She has been a friend and kind angel to all of them. Some look confused because they know what’s going on. Others are oblivious. I join her at the table with her best friends, Ruth, Phyllis, and Gloria. They know she’s not long for this world, yet at the same time they are so excited that she is eating the same food as they are and that they can say “Isn’t this delicious?” out loud. The chocolate cake tastes like it’s been sweetened with Splenda, but they all like it very much.
It’s seven o’clock. We go upstairs to her room. She conducts her nightly ritual: sponge bath, brushing her teeth, and flossing. Running around her room naked, she looks like a badly wounded little bird, with terrible bruises from the dialysis portals, flesh hanging where it used to be stuffed to the brim. She looks so fragile. It’s hard for me to leave. I ask how she is.
She says, “I’m nervous.”
I say, “What are you nervous about?”
She says, “Dying.”
I ask, “Do you want to practice?”
“Yes.”
We sit on the side of the bed where the oxygen tanks are set up. I take the tubes and place them gently around her head and place the hoses up her nose. “So, if you feel like you’re dying, get into bed with these on, get comfortable, lie down, and relax. Breathe.” She does a good job. “Either you’ll fall asleep and wake up feeling better, or you’ll die.”
“Okay, that’s easy.”
We take off the apparatus.
She says, “I can’t wait to see your father. I know he’s waiting.”
“Yes.” I hold her hand. “I’m going to miss you so much.”
“I know, my baby, I know. It’s time for me to go.”
I hug and kiss her goodnight. I ask if she’s sure I should leave. She asks if I want to stay. I’m confused.
Earlier in the evening, the hospice nurse had taken her blood pressure, pulse, temperature. Normal. I thought: It’s been a busy weekend with the whole family, I have quite a journey ahead, it could be a week or two before she goes, so I decide to head north on the 101, as opposed to the hotel, ten minutes away, to get some acupuncture and bodywork from my cousin Linda.
I tell her that I’ll see her in the morning.
After my acupuncture treatment is over, I fall right asleep, only to wake up a little while later and wrestle with myself about getting up and going back to the hotel. But it is so warm and comfortable at my cousin’s house, I can’t even get my body to cooperate, so I surrender.
My mother wakes up at 5 AM, like she does every morning. She takes out her list of prayers from the bedside table, blessing us all and asking again for world peace. She takes her medication. She washes up and makes her bed. She falls. She gets up and gets dressed in a pretty aqua sweat suit, fixes her hair, and puts on her makeup. She goes to breakfast.
I wake up with a start and check my phone for messages. My mother has called at 9:09. I call her at 9:20, and she says, “I’m falling apart. I feel really cold. I walked down to breakfast, but I had to come back to my room in a wheelchair. I think you should come. I’m cold.”
“I’ll be right there. Is there anything I can bring you?”
“Chocolate.”
I leap from the bed and am dressed in thirty seconds. I ask my cousin if she has any chocolate. She hands me a box of Dove chocolates in the shape of hearts. Perfect.
I get in the car and drive. My mother gets on the computer and makes a $10 donation to Doctors Without Borders.
I had such marvelous plans for my mother’s final moments on earth. I had special music to die by. I intended to read the love letters written by my father to my mother when he was in the army for six months, before they were married. I had a stack of those and would use them to set the stage, the mood for their heavenly reunion. I had my yoga mat in tow and would stretch and breathe and use my physical body to release hers. Then I imagined, in the last minutes, I would crawl in her bed to be with her, take her in my arms, lay her head on my breast, and kiss her forehead until her last exhale.
But, as my great-grandfather used to say, man makes plans and God laughs.
So Tuesday morning, while I’m sitting in traffic on the 101, my mother dies. God must have gotten a real kick out of that.
I understood pretty quickly that I was where I was supposed to be. My brother was also in traffic at the time, and my sister-in-law, always at my mother’s building, being the director of operations there, happened to be on the way to the dentist. It was Diane, a kind nurse who worked at Garden of Palms, who held my mother’s hand as she took her final breaths. Just like we had practiced, Mom put on the oxygen, lay down, took three breaths, and then she died.
My mother’s body is still warm when my brother and I arrive. We kiss and hug her one last time and cry a lot. While the man from the mortuary wheels her out on the gurney, the woman from the Strasberg Theatre calls.
“We have a cast ready for tomorrow evening.”
“It’s too late. My mother died this morning.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Yes. I’m sure you are.” Ah, the revenge of the playwrights.
According to the family psychic, Gloria, with whom Aunt Florrie has been consulting for the last thirty or so years, my father, in heaven, was standing in a circle with other family, and my mother surprised him. He knew she was coming, but it usually takes a week or so to get through purgatory and all the final arbitration of one’s good and bad behavior. Yet my mother, pure of heart and soul, went VIP, express elevator, right to the pearly gates, where she was welcomed by archangels who recognized her as an old friend, and held open the gates as she waltzed right in.
According to the psychic, my father spun around, lifted her into his arms, and immediately drew the curtain. I guess they had some catching up to do.
Now, some of you might say, “Well, that’s silly,” or “How do you really know that happened?” I admit that it’s challenging to trust. It requires faith. And we are filled with so m
uch doubt, how can we trust that there is an afterlife, that it’s good, that our dreams of heaven can be real? Well, as a family, we discussed this with my mom, and she agreed to send us a sign that in fact she was in heaven. This is just one of the blinding messages we got from the other side: My uncle, the family photographer and videographer, wanted to share some old movies with us after the funeral.
One of the tapes he pulled from his archive, which contained hundreds of hours of video, was a VHS tape my mother and father had recorded twenty years ago, as a birthday gift to her sister, Florrie, for her fiftieth birthday. The title of the tape was Florrie Raises the Roof, in which my mother parodied all the songs of Fiddler on the Roof and sang them as a tribute to my aunt. My mother crafted cardboard cutouts of the family, images that perfectly suggested our characters. There was a circle cut out for the faces, so my mother could stick her face into the hole and impersonate each of us, like my Uncle Paul singing, “Now I am a rich man, di di, did ididi dum.” It was hilarious and very touching to see her portray us with such love and affection.
So what was the epiphany? It came with my mother’s introduction to her production. The very first image we saw of her—and this was Saturday morning, after we buried her on Friday afternoon—was the beginning of the tape, in which my mother was dressed, as—a drumroll, please—a guardian angel. Yes, halo and all.
My mother’s death was not traumatic; it was relaxing. She took the tragedy out of death—quite an accomplishment. She had no unfinished business, no loose ends. She went in peace. My mother put the wonder in wondrous, the marvel in marvelous, the truth in trust, the will in must. As our family tries to comprehend this happy ending, the ultimate oxymoron, we realize that each moment is precious, fragile, and more so because we witnessed her farewell to friends and family, in utter humility that serves us beyond measure.
She taught us how to die. A lesson that could, in a funny way, save our lives.
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