My mom died at 9:47 p.m. on July 19, 2017. I had resigned from my position as an arts and music editor at an area altweekly, worked my last day, and that celebration was soon replaced by a four-day death vigil. I drove directly from my former office to my dad’s house, to sit by her side as she lay in that hospice bed.
It had been four years of witnessing dementia slowly change her life gradient from a radiant, impassioned woman to a graying, mute semi-catatonic. By the time she died, we had the weirdly wrapped gift of a kind of expanding, anticipatory grief. Neurologists, apparently not wanting to hedge their bets, had no tidy diagnosis so it was all painfully nameless yet evident. A long preliminary trial that became nauseating through its exaggeration and unimaginable stubbornness.
If it was a test, I failed the test. I relapsed during this time, 11 months of returning to pay blood tribute to heroin, eight years clean jacked through a rig, resigning myself to return to full-blown possession of myself. Walking backwards into the undertow. Fake gods delivering gimcrack miracles. When I’d go see my mom, high or between highs, I’d usually leave with a stolen ten-pack of her insulin syringes in my pocket.
But I also got clean again while she was dying. At some point, days in to kicking cold turkey, driving to see her with wobbly hands on the steering wheel, I think I might have gone down the hall into that bedroom and sat beside her, slowly wiping a cool washcloth tenderly across her face, leaning my arm against that steel guardrail on the bed, and confessed my relapse.
I don’t know if I was burdening someone who already had enough to carry, or just carrying that pain to someone I know who would never judge it. I don’t know if it even happened or if it’s some false atonement but it seems right. It seems appropriate to she and I.
My mom spent the last year of her life with her eyes closed, barely communicative, on her back. Her body had atrophied, her limbs reduced to useless stems. She had said one thing to my dad during the second half of that year and one thing only, totally unprompted as he was adjusting her pillow, carefully feeding her in measured spoonfuls or administering her insulin:
“Sometimes life is hard.”
She was a woman of little complaint but when she complained she made it count.
The hospice nurses would come by every few days.
“She’s still in there.”
Sometimes it sounded more like a dented question than a verifiable truth.
When I was a young boy, my mom bought me the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was initially offended, thinking she was trying to turn me into, God forbid, a sissy.
I adored those books.
So, I’d sit next to her, holding my Kindle, and read Little House on the Prairie stories to her out loud.
The whole time thinking, “I hope she isn’t here to hear this.”
In the previous years and over the course of her dematerialization, I had moved from being a lifelong atheist, to a believer in some higher power, to a lapsed atheist, to furious skeptic, to a defiant enemy of God. If my mom was somehow trapped in this husk, to my confession and stories about wagon trains and impromptu homesteads on the plains, I would die at war with God, or detonate my mind trying; clamoring up from the abyss, smoldering from flames, refusing to obey.
Waiting for someone to die is exhausting. The self-created games of distraction just collapse on themselves. I sat in the living room, all out of reasons to “go to the store,” and just sat on the floor and meditated. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could hear the ceiling fan chain clinking away above me. In that short time, I essentially forgave God for God’s transgressions against my mom. She was no saint but she was pretty damn close.
This exchange of forgiveness that occurred is hard to articulate. It was a moment that was as awkward as it was powerful. It didn’t feel allowable. Spiritual things are expected to be revealed in slow grandeur, like a shared cloud everyone can gather around to witness, but this happened so quickly and was uncomfortably personal. But that night God seemed to almost bow and be quiet so I could let God off the hook. It felt like a lop-sided blessing.
My dad yelled down the hall. My brother and I ran into the bedroom, me dizzy in this kind of trance of love in forgiving God, and then she died. We held her and wept, our hands were just grabbing at her arms, taking turns to kiss her face now wet from our tears, almost rocking her body to keep her soul there, disorienting her spirit so it could not find the way out to leave us behind.
She took that powerful exit exhalation, and she left the body. We each stepped away from her and then towards each other, in a shuddering, almost-electrified embrace. Then, weirdly, we simply stopped crying. We let go of one another. We were still.
Two young guys from the funeral home had met the on-call hospice nurse at our house in a moment that was weirdly exciting because it was something new. It all seemed so methodical to them yet was surely our first time on this particular page in the book we were now all in. The two men seemed strangely overdressed, in crisp white shirts and neckties. We were a small audience, dressed in sweatpants and jeans. After they had put her in a body bag, a parcel that was colored a blunt dark-brown, they rolled her down the hall on a gurney. They accidentally bumped her head against the door frame. They gasped, mortified, and looked at my dad and apologized. Then they glanced at me. I shrugged my shoulders. I was part of the new audience portion of this moment. “She didn’t feel a thing,” said my dad, reassuringly.
Within the hour I was in my car, driving south towards anywhere. The roads were weirdly empty for that hour and were wet, the reflection of the stoplights in the puddles of rain resembled long reddish-gray-and-green brushstrokes on a soggy canvas. I listened to Otis Redding’s “Ole Man Trouble.” Still not a car in sight at 11 p.m. Everything seemed eerie and malleable and everything felt perfect and correct. I turned back. I was a lapsed atheist again.
Hours later my dad and I were in the living room. He was staring disinterestedly at the half-empty beer bottle in his hand. On the TV, W.C. Fields threatened to throttle his young daughter in The Bank Dick, the DVD being my attempt at levity.
Hours after that, he and I are at the funeral home. Parked out front is a replica of the 1960s Batmobile. “FOR SALE.”
My dad knocked on the wooden door of the building.
A woman came to the door, squinting and seemingly surprised that someone would ever knock on the front door of a funeral parlor.
“Are you here about the car?”
My dad looked at me, perplexed, and then back at her.
“We’re here about a body!”
He and I laughed.
For Mom
(6/11/1945 – 7/19/2017)
STAREHOUSE 