The Long Goodbye (12 page)

 

 

One day I wake in a bad mood. Melancholy: the black sorrow, bilious, angry, a slick in my chest.

I have a question today for those who run the universe:
She tried hard. She did her best. She didn't complain. She took all the fucking medicine. We helped her. We put the poisons down her throat, then cooked bland food for her
.
Don't we get something for that?

For that, we get a social worker.

“Hi there, are you” (looking at her paperwork) “Meghan?” she asks brightly, standing on our doorstep.

“Yes,” I say. I am sullen already. I have made a mistake. I have told the hospice people—the nice, bright, clear hospice people—that we want a social worker. Now I realize:
We so, so, so do not want a social worker.
I know it already. Her demeanor informs me. They told me a social worker could help us figure out how to get my mother in and out of bed. Instead, she wants to make us feel better. I don't want to feel better. She is also, I decide immediately and cruelly, dumb. Unfortunately, we
are
having trouble getting Mom in and out of bed. And we need help.

“Here,” I'd said yesterday morning to my mother. “Put your arms around me.”

She put her arms around me. “OK.”

I lifted. We got her twenty-five degrees up off the couch and then I couldn't lift anymore. I was too short. She fell back down and grunted.
Uoph
.

That didn't work.

She was making a face, the pain face.

Liam came to help. He's taller and much stronger.

“Put your arms around me,” he said.

She put her arms around his neck.

The walker was getting all tangled up in his legs.

“OK, here we go.” He lifted. He had a better angle.

She was up, sort of. “Let me go,” she said irritably to me when I took her arm. “Give me the walker.”

She got the walker. She pushed it across the floor. She went into the bathroom. Silence. We waited.

Do we go stand outside the door?

Should we be listening to our mother urinate?

Should we be letting her stand and sit on her own? Should we be letting her fall, as she does, when we let her go in alone?

The social worker introduces herself to my dad. Eamon walks into the kitchen and pulls me over. “Who's that?” he says. He's already bristling. “Why is she here? Too many people have been here,” he says. “They're bothering Mom.”

“She's the social worker,” I say. “I called her. She's supposed to help us.” He rolls his eyes. She comes out of the bathroom and I answer some basic questions.

“Now I'd like to ask your mom some questions,” she says, with a faux-cheery voice.

“You can try,” I say. My mother has been mostly unconscious for the past twelve hours.

We go into the room and sit by the hospital bed. Ringo, lying at the foot of the bed, stiffens and growls when the woman enters, which I have never seen him do; Eamon hovers, protectively.

“Barbara?” the woman says. “Hi, I'm here to help you and your family out. I just want to ask you some questions.” My mother opens her eyes and gives the social worker the Skeleton Face. For some reason, she is alert and focused—as if sensing intrusion.

The social worker begins her questioning. “When were you first diagnosed?” she asks. She has just asked me these questions.

“May of 2006,” Mom says.

“And did you take chemotherapy?”

“Yes.”

“And when did you stop the chemotherapy?”

“September,” my mother says wearily, looking at the ceiling.

“And then you were in the hospital just now?”

“Yes.”

“And how have you been doing since you were in the hospital? Are you getting everything you need?”

My mother slowly looks around the room. I have answered all these questions. The social worker was supposed to show us how to take care of my mother, not torment her with details. But she is one of those people who is enamored of her own slight power over the distraught and diseased.

“Have you seen or would you like to see a priest or a minister?” the woman asks.

At this, my mother rouses herself, fixes her eyes on the woman, and asks, “What exactly is the point of these questions?”

“I just—we just want to figure out where you're coming from,” the social worker stutters, taken aback.

“I know exactly where I came from,” my mother says slowly, as if she is speaking to a moron. “I'm much more interested in where I'm
going
.”

Eamon and I can't help it. We start giggling.

Still, she does show us how to lift my mother. The key, it turns out, is getting her firmly from under the shoulders.

 

 

E
VERY TIME my mother goes to the bathroom with her walker it makes a scratching sound against the kitchen's stone floor.
Scritch-scratch. Scritch-scratch.
Her eyes have begun to go vacant. Her hair is a mess. Soon my mother can no longer stand, and then she is half asleep all the time. The hospice nurse comes one day and says, I think we need to let her just lie here. She washes her with a warm cloth. We take turns sleeping on the couch. When it is my turn, I wake up in the middle of the night and see that my father has come downstairs and is standing in his sweatshirt looking at her in the darkness, fists punched into his sweatshirt pouch, shoulders hunched. He stands for minutes, gazing down on her sleeping face.

 

 

Isabel and Diana come to sit with her and say their goodbyes. For some reason this, more than anything, makes her impending death real to me. I can't look in their teary faces.

My father brings home a Christmas tree and puts lights on it and decorates it. It's five feet from my mother's bed, and the warm glow of the colored lights on her face makes her look tan. The pine smell is sharp. Lying there, reading one night, I keep thinking of a Basho haiku:

Sometimes I just sit on the couch with a quilt and a book and read beside her. I want to be next to her as much as I can. I have found an old copy of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
in the basement rec room, the copy she gave me for Christmas when I was in fourth grade, and I read it early in the morning next to her, remembering myself as a child getting up early, reading on the sleeping bag, her sleeping in the room next door and eventually waking and saying, “Hi, Meg.”

She moans in her sleep. I press the pump to give her the bolus, the extra shot of morphine you could give every thirteen minutes.

I love and hate the bolus. Am I even referring to it properly? I don't know; I never quite learn the name. And why can't she just have the bolus all the time? Why must she be in pain? Click. There's another shot. Sometimes I get impatient and click it before it's ready. And it beeps hostilely at me.
Beep
.

Eamon hates the bolus. He hates the Ativan. He thinks the drugs are making her confused. “Let's just try giving her less drugs,” he keeps saying, but I can't stand my mother's pain.

 

 

S
LEEPING beside my mother's body again, as I did many years ago, I have only grown hungry for more of her. For suddenly the mother is everywhere. She is in the room: expansive, calm, the same brow and mouth. I wake up in the night, hear her breathing—long suck in, two short sucks out; long suck in, two short sucks out, the space between them getting longer and longer—think,
She'll be dead in three days, easy,
and suddenly can't breathe. I reach for her Ativan and take one. Otherwise I don't sleep at all.

Then she cries in her sleep and her face twists and there's that weird demon again, and I look away. I wonder: If I believe she will live, if I say
No,
if I refuse—will she not just go on living?

 

 

I think: It's the holidays. There are parties. I'm young. I've spent the past two years going to oncologists. I'm going to put on my party shoes. And I do go to one party, and I leave when people start to dance around a pole. Later I start dating the man whose party it was, and he remembers being glad I came, and casually tells me how he flirted his head off that night. I'm not in your country, I think. I haven't lived in your country for a while.

 

 

My ex-husband comes to say goodbye. We've all been sick; there's no food in the house. He goes grocery shopping and carries wood in from the porch. My mother has been mostly in what resembles a coma. But as he walks through the foyer, which opens onto the living room, she opens her eyes and says, just like usual, “Hi, Jim!” Then she closes her eyes again.

These are the last words I hear her say. Instead of words there comes a horrible pain—pain of a kind I have never witnessed, a shuddering, bone-deep pain that swallows her up whenever the hospice nurse moves her or washes her or when we roll her on her side to change her and get her blood circulating.

In these last three days, she begins to look very young. Her face has lost so much weight, the bones show through like a child's. Her eyebrows and eyelashes are very black. Not sort of black. Very black. I hold her hand. I smooth her face. Her skin has begun to feel waxy; my fingers slide dully over it. Also there are little grains all over her face, as if she is in the midst of exfoliating.

As she dies, two hours after we open our presents, in a charade of our usual holiday, she opens her eyes, looks at us, and takes one final rattling breath. She has not opened her eyes for days. How can she not be full of intention? She has chosen to look at us, to say
Goodbye, I love you, goodbye
.

Later, Liam gamely jokes that she died because I said I was going for a run. As soon as I did, her breathing slowed. “She didn't want to wait that long,” Liam says. He shoots me a look. “And she knew you'd be pissed if we were all here and you weren't.” And his voice breaks.

 

 

Our mother was a fierce driver. A leased BMW was her one luxury—she didn't have fancy clothes or jewelry, other than a few necklaces and earrings my dad gave her, and a ring from Isabel. She was protective of the car and proud of it. “I love driving it!” she would say, almost purring. The summer before she died, Jim came up to Connecticut with me for dinner; he'd just bought a used Audi. “Barbara,” he said, “I have to show you something.” My mother had just begun her final round of chemotherapy, but she disentangled the chemo purse from her chair and walked haltingly out to the driveway. When she saw the car, she cried out in glee, looked at Jim, and said, “We should race!”

It was always apparent that she was alive, Eamon says as we talk about her in his room. There was a calm vibrancy to her. She was essentially impossible to knock off her balance. But she wasn't stagnant. She was always moving. She had found the equilibrium.

While we talk, he lies on the bed, his arms stretched overhead, a woolen ski cap with ear flaps perched precariously on his head, as if he needed protection from the cold. The room is strewn with clothes.

I think she had the most beautiful smile in the world, he says. And she was very warm to lie next to, soft, like a blanket.

II
.

In the weeks after my mother's death, I experienced an acute nostalgia. This longing for a lost time was so intense I thought it might split me in two, like a tree hit by lightning. I was—as the expression goes—flooded by memories. It was a submersion in the past that threatened to overwhelm any “rational” experience of the present, water coming up around my branches, rising higher. I did not care much about work I had to do. I was consumed by memories of seemingly trivial things. At coffee with a friend, I distractedly thought back to a sugar jar that fascinated me as a child—a cut-glass bowl divided in two parts, with a metal lid that never lay quite flat, the light striking the glass and hovering oddly around it. I liked to lift the lid and close it, lift it and close it; the act of opening contained some piquant, totemic pleasure, and one day the confluence of the thick, chewy glass and the radiant light invoked in me a baptismal shock: time was our master, and the world lay beyond our making. I kept opening and closing that bowl, until my mother, cooking dinner, snapped,
Enough with the sugar bowl
. Years later I saw these same bowls in Little Italy and wondered if my parents had palmed one from a restaurant back when they were first married—so poor, my father would laugh, that they used the Williamsburgh Savings Bank clock tower to tell the time. I found myself yearning for the sound of her voice:
Enough with the sugar bowl
.