by Lara Vapnyar
“But you can’t go to the graduation like this,” I said.
I said that everybody would stare. My mother said that she didn’t care. I asked if she understood how much she would embarrass Nathalie on the day of her graduation. My mother said that Nathalie wouldn’t care. I insisted that she would. Until Nathalie herself said that she wouldn’t.
Note to a reader. I still don’t understand what compelled me to insist. And it looks like I will never be able to forgive myself for that.
The ceremony was in the huge gym of a local college. The AC wasn’t working, so they had to put huge fans all over the room. We sat in the first row. One of the fans was blowing right at us. It made my mother’s hair fly up and flutter over her head. Like a halo of death.
She has a defiant smile in all the photos.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Six weeks before my mother died, I threw out my back. It happened because of my grief and greed. I picked up a flyer advertising free trial membership at a new gym and decided to go there. I was out of shape, both physically and mentally, and I thought that this free gym would be the most accessible option to get me into shape. I had only thirty minutes to use the gym that day, so I decided that the most efficient way of getting into shape would be skipping warm-ups and going straight for the machines with weighted plates. I felt a tug while using the leg press. It felt as if somebody had pulled on my spine and tied it to a tree or something. It was only two hours later that the pain truly got me.
My back pain lasted for two weeks. During that time the only way I could walk was by bending almost ninety degrees, so that my upper half was perpendicular to my lower. The kids couldn’t deal with it.
“Sorry!” they would say while sliding off the couch to the floor in convulsions of laughter.
I wasn’t mad at them, because they clearly got the sick laughter from me. Just like I got it from my mother.
TWENTY-NINE
Five weeks before my mother died, she wrote her last note.
The card read: “6 + 3 =.” The sum was left blank. Then I figured that “6 + 3” was the date. She meant June 3. She must’ve forgotten how to write down dates.
I wondered what would be the sum of the month and the date. The life you’d lived from the beginning of the month up to this date added to the life you’d lived from the beginning of the year up to this month? Life lived up to that point?
The next day I couldn’t wake her up for her chemotherapy appointment. She would open her eyes and then close them right away and shake her head. At one point she started to cry. I let her be. She fell asleep.
I called her doctor. The receptionist said that she’d call me back right away. When she finally called, in four hours, my mother was still asleep.
I told the doctor about it. She said that we didn’t have to come to the appointment. I asked if we should reschedule. She said no. I was too scared to ask her why.
Ten minutes later her nurse faxed me a referral for a hospice service.
THIRTY
Four weeks before my mother died, the hospice people came to my house to arrange things. It took them less than an hour to furnish my mother’s room for death. A hospital bed, an oxygen tank, a little box with three vials inside.
Ativan for the fear of death.
Atropine for the death rattle.
Morphine for the death agony.
The vials were signed by a doctor I would never see in person. I was worried that all these people—moving furniture, checking the bathroom, signing papers—would frighten my mother, but she chose to ignore them. I expected her to ask me about them, and I was scared to say the word “hospice” to her, but she didn’t ask anything.
The nurse told me I was fortunate to be able to keep my mother at home. This was a rare situation. My mother had both Medicaid and Medicare. She had her own space in the house. And she had a responsible adult by her side willing to provide continuous care. I had a fleeting proud feeling that somebody took me for a responsible adult.
“But what about when my classes start?” I asked.
“When do they start?” the nurse asked.
“September,” I said.
“September? Don’t worry about that, hon.”
I didn’t understand her. Then I did. I started to sob. She patted me on the arm. I found her touch unbearable.
THIRTY-ONE
Three weeks before my mother died, I walked into a church in Brooklyn. I was passing by and some impulse made me enter it. There was something important I needed to ask God, and I felt like this time I needed to do it in an actual place of worship. This was a Russian Orthodox church. I recognized it by the paintings and the smell of lamp oil.
B. once told me how much he loved that smell. He kept sending me email after email; I kept methodically deleting them without reading. I was proud of my resolve, but if I had to be honest with myself, denying B. didn’t take much willpower. I learned that the process of watching a loved one die was somewhat similar to falling in love. I was focused on my grief with obsessive intensity; the entire outside world had become muted and blurry.
I didn’t know how to pray in church. There were a few people around. They looked like they knew what they were doing. One woman bought a candle. I went and bought a candle too. But then I didn’t know what to do with it. I was afraid to do something wrong and be exposed as an impostor. I hid behind a column, squeezing the unlit candle in my fingers, and started to pray. Or rather, not to pray, but to beg God to take mercy on my mother. I wasn’t asking God to cure my mother, or to prolong her life. I knew to be humble. I was asking God to spare her suffering. I wondered if I should be more specific about suffering. The hospice literature listed three things that horrified me: unbearable pain, intestinal blockage, and inability to breathe. I pondered if I should list all three, but then decided against it, because what if there were some unknown forms of suffering lurking in the dark? Ultimately I begged: “Please, don’t let her suffer!”
Then I went and lit the candle from the other lit candles and tried to put it in the candleholder, but it wouldn’t stay up, so I left it there. Lying sideways on the tray among all those erect candles.
THIRTY-TWO
Two weeks before my mother died, the confusion set in. She mistook her six-foot-tall Jamaican nurse for her tiny friend Rita. She thought Uncle Grisha was their father. She kept wondering why we weren’t living in our Moscow apartment. “Because of the war?” she would ask. “Because of the Nazis?”
She couldn’t remember how to use a fork. Or rather she invented her own way of using the fork. She would pick up a piece of food off her plate with her hand and push it onto the fork’s tines; then she would carry the fork toward her mouth, remove the food from the fork with her fingers, and put it into her mouth.
She remembered about her book though. She kept insisting that I prop her up and give her her yellow flash cards. Once I noticed that she was holding her pen upside down, so I took it from her and turned it back up.
“Are you my editor?” she asked.
I shook my head, thinking that she took me for her editor. But it turned out that she was being sarcastic.
“If you’re not my editor, don’t tell me how to hold my pen!” She was putting me in my place; she was being mean just as she used to be.
One time, when Dan and Nathalie walked into her room, my mother smiled and said how lucky she was to have three beautiful kids. Then she said that Katya had always been the most difficult of the three, but that she knew that deep down Katya was a good girl.
“But Grandma,” Nathalie said. Dan shook his head at her, and she fell silent.
THIRTY-THREE
Ten days before my mother died, the kids and I were sitting by her bed, trying and failing to have some sort of conversation. All of a sudden my mother reached for Dan’s hand and looked at him with a troubled expression.
“Grandma, what?” he asked.
“Mama, what is it?” I asked, rushing to her.
“I—�
�� she said. “I—” But the rest of it wouldn’t come to her. Then she raised two fingers up.
“Mama, what do you want?”
She was turning panicky, but she kept thrusting two fingers at us, as if begging us to understand.
Then Nathalie yelled: “Toilet! She needs to do number two!”
Dan and I took her to the toilet. She went. We took her back. She lay down and closed her eyes.
My mother couldn’t remember how to ask us to take her to the toilet, but she found a way to communicate what she wanted. She had always been resourceful, ingenious like that. Her math textbooks had been famous for urging kids to come up with unorthodox solutions.
What impressed me the most was her ability to keep her presence of mind in the face of losing her mind.
THIRTY-FOUR
One week before my mother died, it was her birthday.
I woke up and remembered that it was her birthday and that I had forgotten to buy her flowers. The kids and I had this routine. I would usually buy the flowers the day before—daisies, she loved daisies—and hide them upstairs, and in the morning I would gather the kids and we would bring the daisies to her along with the presents. It was important to do this first thing in the morning, so that the first thing she saw that day was the flowers.
This was going to be her last birthday and I had forgotten to buy her flowers, as if she were already gone. I went to check on her. She was still asleep. I left Dan in charge, got in the car, and drove to the florist. As I drove, I thought about the especially important birthdays in a person’s life, milestone birthdays. The first, the eighteenth, the thirtieth, the fiftieth. I wondered why the Last Birthday wasn’t considered important. Of course, you couldn’t always know which one was going to be your last. But sometimes you did know.
When people asked my mother how old she was, she never said she was fifty-five or sixty-one; she would always say, “I’m turning fifty-six this summer,” or “I’m turning sixty-two in two months.” I guess that was her ingrained pessimism talking. About two months earlier, one of her nurses asked my mother how old she was. She was about to say, “Turning sixty-seven soon,” when she stopped and appeared to be embarrassed. She didn’t know if she’d live to sixty-seven. Nobody knew. But she did live to sixty-seven. Today was her birthday and it would definitely be the last one.
The florist didn’t have common daisies. She offered me marguerite daisies in a large pot.
I was holding the pot with both hands so I had to knock on the door with my foot. Dan answered the door. He was beaming.
“Grandma’s up!” he said. “She’s better!”
I carried the pot into her room. She was sitting in bed propped against the pillows, eating a crumbled hard-boiled egg off a saucer. Her expression was almost normal, if a little agitated.
Nathalie was sitting by the bed, holding the saucer.
“She asked for a soft-boiled egg, but we messed up,” she said. She was beaming too. Both kids thought that their grandmother was on the way to recovery.
I had read about this in the hospice literature. They called it “a striking temporary improvement that usually lasts up to a few hours and comes no more than a few days before death.”
No more than a few days before death.
My hands started to shake.
Dan took the flowerpot from me and brought it closer to the bed.
“Look, Grandma, daisies!”
“Pretty,” she said, “but I’d rather have a bouquet. I’m not sure if they allow potted plants There.”
The kids exchanged puzzled looks, but I knew what “There” was.
She took another bite and closed her eyes. The kids looked alarmed.
“Grandma, are you going to finish your egg?” Dan asked.
She shook her head, without opening her eyes. She wouldn’t open them again.
THIRTY-FIVE
Four days before my mother died, I gave her morphine for the first time. I didn’t know if she needed it or not, because by that time she couldn’t communicate at all. She was moaning and moving her arms in a strange twisty way. She looked as if she was in pain, but I couldn’t be sure. I called the nurse.
She said: “Honey, don’t ever hesitate to give her morphine!”
“But what if I give her too much?”
“Think about it: What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
“She will die!” I said.
“Yes! And if you don’t give her morphine?”
“She will still die.”
“Exactly!”
I hung up and thought that I had given the wrong answer to the nurse. My mother dying from too much morphine wasn’t the worst thing. She was bound to die very soon anyway. The worst thing was that it would be me who killed her if she died from too much morphine. But this would be the worst thing for me, not for my mother.
Administering morphine was easy—a few drops into her mouth from a tiny syringe. She stopped moaning and moving her arms. Her features relaxed. Yet there was something about her expression and the position of her body that frightened me. It looked as if she was farther away now. It looked as if by giving her morphine I had pushed my mother farther into that other world.
THIRTY-SIX
Two days before my mother died, she opened her eyes, but they were barely focusing, as if she were looking at me from a great, great distance.
I leaned over and called her. I whispered, “Mama, Mamochka!” not into her ear, but over her face. My words were foggy with need. I could almost see them land on her face as a damp cloud. She stirred a little, but otherwise didn’t react to me. I wanted to call her again, but then I thought that I probably shouldn’t. This was her journey. It wasn’t my place to impose on it, or distract her with my neediness, or disturb her in any way. My duty was to follow her needs, to help her along as much as I could.
THIRTY-SEVEN
On the day my mother died, she was shaking and spewing up thick rusty-brown liquid that looked like volcanic lava. By then she was deep in a coma, or rather her body was in a coma; I wasn’t sure if my mother was there in that bed. The lavalike liquid didn’t look painful, or human. Didn’t look like something that could come out of a human being. Didn’t look like something that could come out of my mother.
The hospice nurse had warned me about feeling this way. “Remember that the dying person is still there up until the very end.” She had also told me that hearing is the last sense to go and that I should continue talking to my mother. I didn’t know what to say. I whispered: “I love you.” That wasn’t true. I loved my mother. This wasn’t my mother. This was an unresponsive shaking body spewing lava. I refused to believe that this was my mother. But whoever this being was, she didn’t have anybody but me to protect her, to take care of her, to shield her from the horror. I made an effort and leaned closer. The sparse downy hair on her head flew up, disturbed by my breath. I kissed her on the forehead and said: “Don’t be afraid. It’s not scary over there.” I didn’t know where “over there” was, but I suddenly became certain that it was somewhere, that my mother wasn’t turning into nothing as my Soviet teachers wanted me to believe; she was traveling, to another realm. I knew that her essence had already left her body, but I also knew that it hadn’t disappeared.
THIRTY-EIGHT
A student once asked me why Tolstoy would drag out the scene of Prince Andrei’s death in War and Peace. This was such a perfect scene, he said, arguably the best scene in the entire Western canon.
The student insisted that Tolstoy should’ve stopped after the words “Where has he gone? Where is he now?” But instead, he wrote three more seemingly unnecessary paragraphs before he ended the chapter. The other students were annoyed.
“What are you doing, Kevin? Are you trying to workshop Tolstoy?” one girl asked him.
I looked at the paragraphs and I too found them pointless and even bland compared to the rest of the chapter. But they were necessary. Very necessary, because without them the reader would’ve
been plunged into the raw horror of awareness of death.
“Tolstoy is trying to hold your hand there,” I said to the students. “He wants to be there for you for a little bit longer, until you get your bearings and are ready to continue reading.”
Note to a good reader. This is what I am doing right now. I’m holding your hand.
THIRTY-NINE
Some time after my mother died, I saw that the body lying in the bed in front of me was a corpse.
I will never know the exact time she died. I missed the moment she took her last breath. I will never know how much time passed with me staring at my mother’s body trying to figure out if she was still alive after she had already died. You would think that you’d know right away, but you don’t. I didn’t.
She had been perfectly still for some time, and I reached and touched her hand with my fingertips. It felt cold and stiff, but it didn’t feel all that different from the skin of a person who had walked in from the cold.
I called the hospice nurse and described what I saw and felt.
“She’s gone, honey,” the nurse said.
I asked, “Are you sure?” and she said: “Oh, yeah.” She promised to send the service for the body right away.
I took one look at what was on the bed and saw that this wasn’t my mother anymore. This was the body.
FORTY
I exited my mother’s apartment and went upstairs, where Dan sat at the TV console playing Skyrim. He saw me and dropped the control to the floor.
I said: “It happened. It’s over.”
Nathalie was at Len’s. I had asked him to take her, even though she had begged me to let her stay. She was coming home tomorrow. I would have to tell her then.