Exit Laughing (28 page)

“Take a deep breath, and think of a time when you felt good in your body, vibrant and healthy.”

“I never felt good in my body,” she muttered.

I stopped, feeling deeply sad. “How about when you were a child?” I asked.

“I felt fat. Big and fat. Big Bertha, like my name. I always hated my name.”

“Well, did you ever have a fantasy about feeling good in your body?” I tried.

“Yes. I wanted to be a ballerina. Light and graceful.”

“Can you picture that? Is there an image you can associate with it? A color?”

“White.”

“Wonderful. Now, picture that white. What does it look like, feel like? What’s its quality?”

“It’s a dirty white. Like a used tutu.”

I sighed. “We’ll have to go with that.”

She struggled with cancer for three years. Her cancer was sneaky, and it took years and many trials to confirm the first diagnosis of lymphoma. By then, it had spread. In all that time, she kept finding first one doctor, then another, who
would finally be the one to truly take care of her in the way she’d always longed for. Inevitably, he would betray her—fail to answer a phone call or respond to a complaint—and she’d transfer to someone else.

Of course, what she truly wanted was for me to be the one to finally take care of her. I resisted. I had escaped L.A. in my early twenties, and I was reluctant to move back. Besides, every attempt I ever made to take care of her ended in some hailstorm of Virgoish rage at my imperfection, because I never could do things quite the way she wanted, never could offer her exactly what she needed most.

When I was nineteen, my mother had cataract surgery. In those days, it required a long stay in bed. I came home to take care of her. I cleaned the house. I washed the kitchen floor. She got out of bed, saw what I had done, and flew into a screaming tirade because I had used too much water. I walked out and refused to come back. My brother took over her care. Of course, now I understand that she wasn’t really angry about the water; she was furious because she wanted something from me that I couldn’t give her, just as I wanted something from her: the love so perfect it would bring the dead back to life.

In June 1992, she was well enough to come up to my wedding in San Francisco. Yes, I had finally found a partner, with no help from the personal ads, and while he wasn’t Jewish, I pointed out to my mother that he was male and she’d better settle for that. In fact, when she met David, her comment was, “You’ve finally met a real man—I can die now!” Deconstructing
that statement, I understood her to mean, perhaps unconsciously, that if I ever supplanted our mother-child bond with a partner bond, it would kill her. But I didn’t share that thought.

Nonetheless, she proceeded to die. When I came back from our weeklong honeymoon, I rushed down to L.A. and was shocked to see how much she had deteriorated. But her doctors assured me they just needed to adjust her medication—that at the rate her tumor was growing she’d live another year, even if they did nothing. I began, however, to prepare mentally for a time when I would go down and take care of her, possibly at the end of the summer, during which I had a full travel schedule of workshops to give.

In August, however, my brother stopped by for an impromptu visit between music workshops, which he taught, and we got a call to come down immediately. “Your mother may not last the night,” we were told, too late to get a plane that night. At the same time, my husband got a call that his father had had a serious stroke. My brother and I flew down on the first flight in the morning and found that Mom had rallied. She was awake, conscious and talking, Rolodex at the ready.

Mom faced her death with the same combination of courage and irritability with which she faced life. An intern came in to take a blood sample, and she batted him away.

“No,” she said. “I’m tired of being stuck and hurt. Go away! I’m done with that.”

“But we have to take your blood,” he said. “We need to check your potassium level. If it gets out of balance, you could have a heart attack!”

“A heart attack!” she cried with glee. “That would be the best thing that could happen. I’m dying! Now go away.”

His look of chagrin was the funniest part of the whole sad event. But after we ditched the Rolodex, the day took an upward turn. Mom’s brother and her favorite niece came to say goodbye. Old friends and devoted students came to pay her tribute. In between visitors, I found myself possessed with a sort of panic. There were things she knew, information that she had that I would no longer have access to once she was gone. There were things about her that I might forget, if I didn’t fix them in memory while I still had her there. I kept asking her questions. “What’s your favorite color?” “What year was Daddy born?” There were things I still counted on her for, and I wasn’t prepared yet to let her go. There was something I still needed from her and this was my last, my very last, chance to get it.

“Why are you asking me these things? Stop bothering me!” she snapped.

In the afternoon, her breathing became labored. As her lymph system stopped functioning, she was slowly drowning in her own fluid. I offered to do a little trance work with her, to make her more comfortable.

“You’re floating in a dark pool,” I murmured. “Deep beneath the earth, and you’re a drop of water. Letting go. Dissolving into water. At peace, at home in the water …”

I’d led the guided journey often—starting as a drop in the heart of the mountains, rising up to become a bubbling spring, following the stream down to become a river, pouring out into the ocean, evaporating up into rain, falling down to
soak into the ground and become again part of a deep pool under the earth. But as I began to suggest that she felt herself rising, she stopped me.

“No. I’m going in a different direction now.”

At last, my mother was letting go.

Finally, her discomfort became so great that the doctors gave her morphine. She slipped into unconsciousness. Mark and I watched her throughout another long day. Mostly she slept, but every now and then she would awaken with a start and a labored gasp and sit up with a look of terrible panic. When she did this, we’d hold her hands, and I would lead her again into the dark pool, the comforting embrace of water. We’d said the
Shemah
with her—the Jewish prayer that one is supposed to say when dying—while she was still conscious. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” And so, after all, we were able to offer her some small measure of spiritual comfort.

At the very end, my brother held one hand, and I held the other. We tried to help her sit up, to ease her breathing, which had become not so much a death rattle but a horrible rasping as her lungs filled with fluid. And so she died, supported by both her children, who after all the nagging, and the fury, and the yelling nonetheless loved her dearly.

We sat with her for a little while. My brother put on some music he’d recently recorded. It was an Irish tune, and as its lively notes jigged around the room, I suddenly felt a great sense of relief and peace. It was as if a portal had opened to some sunny meadow where my mother could at last feel light and free, without pain, dancing joyously like a ballerina.

“What’s that tune?” I asked Mark.

“I wrote it for a friend who lost his favorite pet,” he said. “It’s called ‘Kicking Big Dog Upstairs.’ ”

Epilogue: My mother died just before her seventy-fifth birthday. I decided to celebrate it with a gathering in her honor, something she would have liked. She loved lively discussion with intellectual women. So I threw a women’s party, a dessert potluck where we could tell our own stories of grief and loss. We gorged on cake and chocolate mousse and talked about death, life, and grief, achieving at last a perfect synthesis of the smart and the sweet.

Shortly after, I was seized with an inexplicable but intense need to clean out my office, go through my files and reorganize them, and order the books overflowing from my bookshelves. In the midst of the chaos, I got a call from my brother. “What are you up to?” I asked him.

“I don’t know why,” he said, “but suddenly I got in the mood to clear off the piles of paper from my desk. And then I had to reorganize my files.”

“Me, too,” I admitted.

A long pause, and then in unison we both cried out, “Mom!”

When I began this story, I thought there was humor in it. Now, I’m not so sure. My brother and I often laughed about Mom, but she never laughed about herself. We credited her with a very dry sense of humor, sure that she was saying some of the outrageous things she said to be funny. But now, I don’t think so. Humor calls for a bit of distance, a
perspective on who we are. My mother never stood back from her own life.

She was possessed by her emotions, and she believed in fully feeling every feeling from rage to grief to joy. I wish she could have had more of the latter and less pain. With all her anger and her irritating traits, she spent her life helping people and turning her own grief into healing for others. Surely she deserved more from life than to end it in such misery, never quite getting what she longed for, except perhaps at the very end.

But humor helped us. To laugh is to take a step out of the muck of emotion, to let the silt of resentment settle out and the streams of love run clear. Through the stifling hot days of an L.A. summer, we packed up her things, rented a U-Haul, and drove what I couldn’t let go of back to San Francisco. For hours, my brother, who can remember jokes, told long, convoluted stories that generally began, “God and Moses were playing golf.” As the miles rolled behind us, we laughed away the bitterness and the last dregs of disappointment, relinquishing all that we could never quite get and accepting the priceless gifts our mother did give us: her unflinching honesty, her courage, and her imperfect love.

The flight from Miami to Newark was creepy enough: my mother, in her coffin, was somewhere in the belly of the plane; my siblings and I, sitting in coach, told funny Mom stories, as if the last year of suffering through cancer treatments hadn’t existed. We had all flown to West Palm Beach to be with Mom when she died—my sister and brother from New Jersey and Pennsylvania and me from Paris, where I was living then.

She had died while my brother and I shopped for sneakers at the mall. I had forgotten to pack shoes. In fact, luggage became the theme of that day. And creepy hardly begins to describe what happened next.

I remember not wanting to leave Mom after she died, even though I hated sitting with her body in that cold hospital room. My siblings and I said our silent goodbyes and headed to her condo to pack our clothes. We also needed to pack her clothes—that is, one last outfit for her to wear into the grave. We argued about that one: my sister preferred a blue suit my mother sometimes wore; I wanted her to dress for a party. My mother was a party girl.

I won the battle—as youngest and brattiest child, I usually won all battles. I picked out the dress, the bra, the panties,
the jewelry, and the shoes (red heels!) and packed them in my suitcase, on top of my clothes. (Apparently I had forgotten more than sneakers and had plenty of room in my bag.) The funeral was set for the next day in Trenton, New Jersey, where we had all grown up.

I remember one other strange thing about that flight home: we laughed. We couldn’t stop laughing. We had been crying for a year, since her diagnosis with ovarian cancer. Hours after her death, we stopped crying and instead howled with laughter. Remember how Mom used to knock every baseball out of the park? Remember the story about the bad date, when she climbed out of the bathroom window of the restaurant to escape the guy? Remember when we thought we had tricked her into thinking we were asleep in our beds, and she met us at the front door when we sneaked back in later that night?

The plane landed, and we headed to baggage claim. We were groggy with exhaustion and emotional overload. We stood numbly at the carousel, along with the hundreds of other passengers, waiting for the luggage to descend.

First, before any suitcase dropped through the chute, a single shoe rolled down and onto the revolving conveyor belt. A red high-heeled shoe. We stared at it, our mouths hanging open. There were murmurs and giggles from the crowd. Mom’s shoe! I grabbed it and tucked it under my arm. And then a dress seemed to float down onto the carrousel, my mother’s diaphanous flowered sheath. It even held a ghostly form for a moment before it crumpled onto the conveyor belt. I lunged for it and held it to my chest. There was a pause, a breathless moment, when the crowd watched and the unthinkable
happened. My mother’s bra descended. It was a large DD bra, lacy, lovely, and private! I grabbed it up and hid it in my arms. Stockings floated down next and then another red shoe, as if it were chasing the taupe legs down the chute.

The crowd was laughing by then. My siblings were murmuring to each other. I was hugging my mother’s clothes for dear life.

Death is indecent! Death should be hidden!

Finally, my suitcase fell onto the conveyor belt. It was partially open, all the contents spilling out from a broken zipper.

It was a mess; I was a mess. It couldn’t contain my mother’s wardrobe; I couldn’t contain my grief. I couldn’t comprehend that she was really gone, yet here came proof that she was still around, still making herself known, one article of clothing at a time.

My thanks to the twenty-three authors in this collection who loved, lost, laughed, and shared their stories.

At North Atlantic, I’m grateful to Jessy Moll, Roslyn Bullas, Anne Connolly, Kat Engh, and copyeditor Laura Shauger. A big thank you to everyone at Random House responsible for making sure this book appears on shelves worldwide.

As always, I count Jill Marsal of Marsal Lyon Literary Agency as one of my life’s blessings. Her unflagging support—which includes not rolling her eyes when I run a really terrible anthology idea by her—gives me the confidence (and courage!) to keep going.

In the
last but not least
category, I give loving thanks to Alisa and Eugene Law, Matt and Erica Sosnick, and my beloved grandchildren: Olivia, Sophia, Lily, and Joshua.