The End of Eve (22 page)

We slept on my couch because I still didn't have a bed. And in the morning, I asked if she was ready to meet the family.

WE CARRIED RED
roses into my mother's room, but the room was all a glare. White sunlight too bright.

We sat at my mother's bedside as she drifted in and out.

She seemed confused. “Everything is a dream,” she whispered. “Am I dead?”

Leo tried to adjust the curtains, but that strange light wouldn't stop pouring in.

“If I ‘m dead, I want more flowers,” my mother said softly.

The chef carried the bouquets in and out of the room, repositioning the same flowers in different vases.

My mother sighed. “Thank God for all these flowers.”

These multiplying flowers.

I wasn't sure if I was self-conscious because of the chef – if I was seeing the scene with outsider eyes – or if my mother did seem suddenly closer to the other side.

I POSTED ON
Facebook:
It's getting sketchy here. If any friends who haven't come still want to see my mother, now is the time. I'm sure she'll be available to you in the afterlife, so there's no need for overdramatic travel. But we have life here now.

“Wow,” the chef said as we left. “I ‘m glad I got to meet her.”

It was almost time to pick up Maxito from his new preschool.

“Do you want to meet my boy, too?”

MAXITO RAN CIRCLES
around our little table at Yummy Café We got all the winks and nods, must have looked like some old lesbian couple out for their annual Valentine's dinner with their hyperactive kid – not like two death-soaked daughters on their fourth date.

“Do you think,” I asked the chef when the waiter brought Happy Family, “if I go to Iowa, she'll be alive when I get back?”

The chef kind of nodded and shook her head at the same time. “Maybe,” she said. But I knew she didn't believe it.

“Do you think I'm a jerk? Leaving?”

The chef shook her head. “No. Definitely not.”

The writing workshop I'd scheduled in Iowa City. I could have cancelled it. But I didn't.

NEXT MORNING AND
my mother wanted a hug before I left. We weren't huggers – not as mother and daughter – but I leaned over her bed, hugged her for a long time. When I stepped away she was crying. I said, “Are you okay?”

She said, “That's a tall order.”

I guess it was. “Is there anything you want to tell me before I go?”

My mother didn't say anything.

“Is there anything you need from me?”

Tears rolled down her face. “It seemed so easy at first,” she whispered.

“What does it seem like now?”

She stared at me. “Fix it,” she said, and she sort of snapped her fingers.

“What do you want me to fix?”

She snapped her fingers again and said, “fix the email.”

I wasn't sure if there was something wrong with her email account, or if she was talking about something metaphorical, but I said, “of course. Consider it fixed.”

She closed her eyes, started to drift off, then jerked awake. “Tiniest?”

“Yes?”

“I'm ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“I'm ready for
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
.”

And I said, “All right.”

“I don't want any more bullshit.” Her tattooed eyeliner seemed so heavy now on her skeletal face. “Tell my friends I'm dying. Put a sign on the door. Tell them I don't want any more bullshit.”

I nodded. “No more bullshit.”

“Take my makeup bag with you,” she said. “Take all the lipstick. I'll never wear it again.” But she hesitated, thought better of that, said, “no, wait, leave the makeup. Ronaldo might come and see me. Make the sign and bring me the book, but leave the makeup bag.”

I nodded. “Good thinking.” When I took a Sharpie out of my purse to make the sign, the word “Clock” caught and fluttered to the tile floor.

“
PILLOW
”
IN THE
airport bathroom stall as I was leaving.

“
HOME
”
NEXT TO
a dumpster behind a bar in that little Midwestern town I hardly knew.

30.

Poodles and All

IN IOWA, I COOKED FOR STRANGERS. ENCHILADAS WITH
Chimayó red chile. Kale and potato salad with onions and capers. I listened to the strangers' stories. Their legacies of love and abuse. I tried not to appear too distracted as I checked my text messages under the table.

At home, my mother vomited. She didn't want to wear the adult diapers, but she could never get to the bathroom in time. Leo or his relief caregiver cleaned up after her, cleaned her, fed her pills even though it hurt her to swallow, even though she vomited most of them. She pressed the morphine button, wet the bed.

“
DEATH IS UGLY,
” my Gammie told me after her last husband died. She poured herself a glass of vodka, tapped her red fingernails on the kitchen counter. “Don't ever let anyone tell you that death isn't ugly.”

EXTRAORDINARY TRANSITIONS ARE
recounted in the
Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
The deaths of Buddhist masters, lucid and mystical. But in
How We Die
, the Western doctor Sherwin B. Nuland says that our societal belief in passing with grace and dignity is a collective fantasy. Death, he writes, “is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person's humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we
die.” In fact, “The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail. Occasionally – very occasionally – unique circumstances of death will be granted to someone with a unique personality, and that lucky combination will make it happen, but such a confluence of fortune is uncommon, and, in any case, not to be expected by any but a very few people.”

I didn't expect my mother to die like some enlightened monk.

MY LAST MORNING
in Iowa, my host, Shell, fed me dark chocolate for breakfast before she drove me to the Cedar Rapids airport. “Look,” she pointed to the sky. “That cloud with the sun behind it looks like a cross.”

It did. “Like God.”

My mother was alive when I got on the plane headed home.

She was alive when I landed in Albuquerque.

I stepped into her room, gagged at the smell. Putrid, like decomposing compost.

She smiled weakly from her bed, asked “how much longer?”

Leo had the window open, but it was cold outside. The heater blasted.

“I don't know how much longer, Mom.”

She curled her finger at me.

I moved closer.

“You have to kill me, Ariel,” she whispered.

I shook my head. I wasn't going to be the one to kill her. It had been crazy-making enough being her daughter for 41 years. I certainly wasn't going to kill her. “I can't help you with that,” is all I said.

IN THE DINING
room, the hospice nurse fretted about my mother's anxiety medication.
Why were these extra pills here? Had she missed a dose?

“What can we do about the smell in there?” I asked.

The nurse frowned, scratched her eyebrow. “It's the rotting
flesh around your mother's bed sore. It's tunneling in. The spine is exposed. Do you want to see it?”

I didn't want to see it.

“That bedsore is the only imminently life threatening thing we're dealing with right now,” the nurse said. “As far as the smell goes, you can try putting half an onion in the room. And an open box of baking soda under the bed. You probably shouldn't let her see you do it. She might be embarrassed. Just put the onion in the wastebasket and the baking soda under the bed. Put a new half onion in the wastebasket every day.”

Another task to add to the front of the logbook.

LESLIE
'
S EX-BOYFRIEND ARRIVED
for his weeklong ministry, lanked around the house talking incessantly about sex and orgasm. He sautéed marijuana in butter, fed that to my mother. And now there were no further mentions of vomiting in the log.

After a month of baby food, Leslie's ex had my mother eating bread with olive oil, baked tilapia, and spinach quiche, but he seemed overwhelmed with all the medications. He scratched his head. “You can tell you've missed a dose when she gets really agitated.”

My mother had been home from the hospital for a month. I called Milagro Home Care, told them we needed caregivers 24 – 7 now. Friends would still come to help, but it was all too much for a single untrained person.

“
TINIEST,
”
MY MOTHER
smiled when I walked into her room. “I dreamed you brought me a gleaming woman. Bathed in light, she had silver hair.”

I texted the chef:
I think my mother is asking for you.

When the chef showed up maybe twenty minutes later, my mother gasped. “I thought I dreamed you.”

She smiled shy. “I've been told I'm too good to be true.” And she sat next to the hospice bed, talked with my mother about food and Mexico, asked if there was anything she'd like to eat.

“Well, yes,” my mother said. “Ceviche with red snapper. Miso soup. Oaxacan molé. Can you make those things?”

“I can make anything,” the chef said.

“Can we have an Oscar party?” my mother asked, wide-eyed.

“Sure. This Sunday?”

My mother smiled. “Can you make Chinese food?”

“Yes. I used to own an Asian restaurant.”

“Chef?” my mother whispered. “Whatever happens between you and Ariel, I'm leaving you the kitchen.”

A knock at the open front door. It seemed like someone was always knocking at the door now.

I left my mother and the chef to their hospice menu plans.

A young guy stood on the front step, a green backpack slung over his shoulder.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah,” he shrugged. “I was just passing through town and I saw the door was open.”

I stared at him.

He smiled. “I'm just kidding. They sent me? From Milagro?”

I'd forgotten. “Yes, sorry. Come in.”

“I'm Cloud,” he said, and he sat down at the dining room table to read the caregiver log to date. We had my mother's medication schedule and urgent messages in the front of the binder, then the daily notes. “Well,” he said when he was done with it. “What we need here is a diagnosis and a short biography so that any time anyone comes in here they can sit down and read this and have both the overview and the day-by-day picture and be ready to go.”

“All right,” I said, and I sat down with Cloud and set to work transforming the log into something comprehensive.

OVER THE DAYS,
the caregivers came. They were nursing students or underemployed health care workers, massage therapists or aspiring herbalists. They wrote their names on a dry-erase board in my mother's room so she'd feel less disoriented.

THEY MADE NOTES
in the log:

12:40 p.m. Eve is falling asleep now.

6:25 p.m. Vomiting and pain on right side of chest. Called lead nurse to change battery in morphine pump.

7:30 p.m. Eve wants to watch “Strangers on a Train.”

9:20 p.m. “The Maltese Falcon” (again).

2:15 a.m. Eve is awake, nauseous, in pain, disoriented, anxious, angry.

5:20 a.m. Eve said she had to go to the bathroom, sat on toilet for one hour, said she couldn't go. As I lifted her up she had an accident on the floor. Cleaned up.

11:45 a.m. Eve awake, eating spinach and garbanzo beans, alert, happy.

FOR THE OSCAR
party, the chef made scallop ceviche for my mother. She made the Chinese food, too: Summer rolls and bok choi, scallion pancakes with hoisin sauce, pork tenderloin and shrimp shu mai.

Maia flew in for the weekend.

Maxito adjusted the lights.

And we all sat on pillows around my mother's hospice bed as
The Artist
and
Hugo
won the statues. She said, “All this is heavenly,” then cried, “I can't believe I never wrote my screenplay,” she trailed off, “never won my Oscar ...”

“
YOUR MOTHER ISN
'
T
following any of the normal patterns,” the lead hospice nurse said when I arrived the next day. “We could be here for many months.”

I washed dishes, scanned the log, opened a bar of dark chile chocolate.