Yom Kippur as Manifest in an Approaching Dorsal Fin (11 page)

to see what it was like. I look at the social

worker and said, “Let’s get her ready to go,

we’ll get the papers signed, we’ll go to Hos-

pice by the Sea first and be there when she

arrives.” I ask my father if that works for him, and it does.

In moments here and there, my daughter

keeps asking me, “What did he think was

going to happen? What did he think his other

choices were?” In the meantime, she had

called in to take off work for the evening. She

told them she thought she might have to take

off the next day or two . She could not afford

to do this, but she did it anyway.

So I went back into the room to see her, got

the papers signed, and got ourselves over to

Hospice by the Sea. And my father is starting

to fret: “I can’t do this, I can’t let her starve, what am I going to do?”

We get there and the place is absolutely gor-

geous. It’s quiet, she has a large room, could

have had a party in her room. This is the idea

behind the design—everyone can come to be

with the person who’s dying. We open up the

doors in front of the room, and everything is

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built around this garden with beautiful tropi-

cal foliage.

I know at some point we ate, don’t remem-

ber when, don’t remember what. My mother

gets there around 11:00 at night, and they

bring her in to the room. My father asks for

a cot, and they bring him a rollaway bed so

he can sleep right next to her, and he goes to

find the nurse in charge. And he is beginning

to panic. I don’t want to say he’s not rational, but he’s walking around nearly hand-wring-ing: “I can’t let her starve, I can’t do this to her, I can’t watch her starve, I can’t starve her to death!” There wasn’t much that we could

do to calm him down. The nurse explained

that she couldn’t eat anything, and she also

wouldn’t be able to drink anything. You can

go twenty-one days or longer without food,

but you can’t go that long without water, and

they expected her go to within seven to ten

days. I asked about IV fluids. She explained

that she couldn’t do that, because as you die,

your body doesn’t process fluids properly, and

that means no fluids.

My father is crying, as you might expect;

I’m not handling this well either, but I’m the

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one who has to. When my maternal grand-

mother died, despite the fact that my father

and she hated one another, he fell apart, and

I had to handle everything. Despite the fact

that my second child had just been born, and

I was out of work, evicted, and had moved

back to south Florida to look for work,

instead I had to handle funeral arrange-

ments. My family doesn’t handle this death

business very well.

We talk to the nurse, and we decided they

would settle down for the night, go to sleep,

and we would be back in the morning. Just

before we leave my mother starts making

noises like she’s hungry. This just makes my

father more upset. And none of us knows

what to do; there is absolutely nothing we can

do about it. My father is asking if there’s some way we can feed her. The nurse tells him that

they can try feeding her—if she wants. But

the likelihood is that she will choke. And their recommendation is that would not be the

best thing. Let her go to sleep, let her rest.

So I go back to my daughter’s apartment

with her and settle myself down on the couch,

and it’s too short for me, which is really say-

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ing something. It’s about 1:00 in the morning,

I think.

I’m not going to be able to sleep anyway, so

I decide to talk to my mother, me on the

couch in my daughter’s apartment, my

mother in her room in the hospice. About

two weeks prior I had gotten a copy of
The

Tibetan Book of the Dead
, and had started memorizing it. I had no reason to do this; I

don’t like memorizing things. And so I

decided to recite the first paragraph to my

mother, first as it was written, and then

departing from it, paraphrasing:

O nobly-born, that which is called

death hath now come. Thou art

departing from this world, but thou

art not the only one; death cometh to

all. Do not cling, in fondness and

weakness, to this life. Even though

thou clingest out of weakness, thou

hast not the power to remain here….

Be not attached to this world.

O nobly-born, what which is death

has come to you. You are leaving this

world. Do not hold on. Let go. Rest.

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O nobly-born, death is coming to you.

You are leaving this world. Rest.

I kept saying it again and again and again

to my mother. And then I said to her, “Please

don’t do this to Daddy. You know he can’t

handle this. He can’t watch you starve to

death. Please just rest, and don’t do this to

him.”

At some point I fell asleep saying this. And

then I hear a phone ring. It’s my daughter’s

cell phone. And know what the call is. Sef

comes out of the bedroom, walks over to me

and says, “Dad, Grandma died.”

And I said, “I know.”

I was curious why my father called my

daughter instead of me. He insists he called

me, but Adam and Sef are nowhere close on

his cellphone address list. It was five minutes

before six. We got up, got dressed, not slowly

but not quickly—we were both exhausted

and feeling a little spacey.

Sef drove to Hospice by the Sea, we stopped

on the way for coffee at a Dunkin Donuts, we

needed something—protein, milk, some-

thing, because Lord knows when we’d be eat-

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ing again. Five minutes later we were at the

hospice. My brother was already there. My

father was by my mother. He was standing

over her saying, “I only left her for a half hour.”

He was beside himself—he had gone home

for some clothes and some food.

And I saw my mother. And the first thing

that occurred to me is that she looked like a

dried fish. There was nothing there. Empty.

Gone. My father kept stroking her forehead,

kissing her forehead, telling her, “It’s going to be all right, it’s going to be all right, this is not how it was supposed to go, we were supposed

to go together,” on and on and on, telling her

she was beautiful, telling her she would going

to be all right. I imagine he was telling him-

self that, but I really don’t think he believed

it. We—my brother, daughter and I—went

to speak to the nurse. She told us that she

really didn’t understand it. A few minutes

after my father left, my mother started aspi-

rating liquid, that her body had stopped pro-

cessing fluids completely. The nurse said she

couldn’t suction out her mouth fast enough,

and that her heart congested and she simply

died. She kept suctioning out her mouth to

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make her as comfortable as she could, and it

took about fifteen minutes. She died about

five minutes before my father got back. The

nurse said she had never seen someone in this

state go so quickly; it should have taken at

least three days, minimum, probably five to

seven. She really did not understand.

I told her I did.

And that was Saturday morning.

I know we had to get my father to eat; I’m

not sure where we went or what we did. I

think my brother took my father out while

we waited with the body. My daughter and I

waited because someone had to be there with

the body until someone came to claim her,

and that way we could give each other peri-

odic breaks. Good thing we stopped to get her

coffee; that had been my daughter’s idea, and

she’s always right.

The funeral home arrived for the body

around 9:30 in the morning, a very large man

in a suit. I was supposed to make sure she was

going to the right funeral home—my father

was worried—so he could get the right dress

to her; I was supposed to give the man a ring

that he could put on her finger. So he’s wrap-

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ping her up, in the shroud first, and up to this point I have not cried. As soon as he put the

cloth over her face, that was it: I started cry-

ing. He puts her in the body bag, and wheels

her out.

I went and thanked everyone at the hos-

pice. They told me they were worried about

my father, and wanted to make sure he was

getting care. I said I rather doubted that he

would. He had spent fifteen years taking care

of her. There were times when we were not

sure whether he was doing a good job or not,

but how were we to know, and what could we

do? We tried making him get respite care, but

he said he couldn’t afford it, yet he never

checked with Medicare. We tried getting him

support care for himself, but he wouldn’t’ do

it. At the hospital we were told that my

mother was in wonderful shape. They rarely

see people at her stage so well taken care of,

and the job he did taking care of her was, in

the nurse’s words, “heroic.” But I seriously

doubt that he’d get any care for himself at this point.

My daughter insists we go back to the

apartment, shower, eat breakfast. She takes

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me to Flakowitz of Boyton, a rather famous

deli and restaurant. It’s crowded, a Saturday

morning, she says the place is good. I fret

about not being able to find food that’s good

for me. She tells me, “Eat what you want, your

mother just died!”

I said, “You mean, I can have comfort food?”

She tells me to shut up and get what I want.

I don’t remember what I got, but I remember

it was really good.

As I eat, it dawns on me. I am a motherless

child. I say this out loud. Sef nods. I say, “This will take some getting used to. I wonder how

long.”

“It’s only been a few hours,” she says. She

wishes she knew her grandmother when she

was able. She became sick when she was ten.

She didn’t know her when she hiked, rode

bikes, prospected for precious stones, played

croquette, gardened, pained, did woodwork.

When Sef knew her, she was barely still able

to crochet.

My son does not know her without a wheel-

chair, barely able to speak.

I think we were meeting with the rabbi

around 1 at the Funeral Home of Lantana,

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about 20 minutes north of there. It was Shab-

bos, which means my mother could not be

buried that day. It’s Jewish tradition to bury

the dead within 24 hours unless it’s Shabbos,

in which case it’s two days. At some point that

morning I called my wife, Lee, and let her

know. She had known my mother for about

thirty years, so it was more than just her

mother-in-law having died. She said she

would throw some clothing in a bag for me,

something appropriate for a funeral, and she

would rent a car and come down, and she’d

be there sometime that afternoon. We had

only one car at that point.

We all met with the rabbi, and I instantly

liked this fellow. He wanted us to write down

things about my mother, things he should

mention, things her friends would know,

things he should know; he wanted us to treat

him as though he would have been her friend.

He made sure he pronounced her name prop-

erly, what she would want to be called, what

she would want people to know. Then there

was the matter of planning the funeral day.

It was Saturday; the funeral would have to be

Monday.

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“Why not Sunday?” I asked.

“We can’t get the grave dug by then.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t have gravediggers on Saturday.

We’d have to pay them time-and-a-half.”

In Jewish tradition, someone has to sit with

the body continually until it is buried and say

prayers over it, and that’s a paid position, a

shomer
. We’d have to pay a shomer to sit for two days. I ask the rabbi how much that

would be. He gave us the figure. I ask him how

much time-and-a-half for gravediggers would

be. There was a ten-dollar difference in cost,

about $250 more one way or the other. So I

suggested we simply ask the gravediggers to

come in and work some overtime, and spare

some old Jew who didn’t know my mother

from sitting with her and saying prayers over

her. So that was settled.

We met my wife and my son Alek at the Ft.

Lauderdale airport where the car had to be

turned in, and we went to get a hotel room.

I wanted an inexpensive hotel room; my wife

wanted a nice one. We ended up at Embassy

Suites. Why? “Because,” my wife said. “Because

your mother just died!”