Now I’m back at the apartment, which we’re renting while we renovate our house--mom’s room seems somehow, though still cluttered with all of her belongings, an empty shell since she was admitted to hospital over a month ago. On the bookshelf is the family bible, containing a card on which she recorded, three years ago when my father died, her funeral wishes. She has chosen certain pieces of music, scriptural readings, even a guest list. Looking through my mom’s filing cabinet for banking and other documents, I find the letters received by her mother, informing Grammy (then a young mother of two) of the grave injury and subsequent death of her husband, a chaplain serving overseas in World War II. I heard on the radio today that the number of veterans from the second world war is dwindling--along with some platitude about the relentless march of time that will finally claim all soldiers.
I cannot imagine the anguish of receiving such news, how colossally unfair it must have seemed to Grammy to lose her husband in 1944, while others lived to return to their wives and families, to go on with the business of living their daily lives. In the wake of this disaster, she picked up the pieces of her life and became an academic in the small college town where she lived with her two young children. I’m having enough trouble processing the final stages of my mom’s life, or perhaps I should say the initial stages of her death.
It’s hard to keep the guilt at bay as I think of the stages our family has gone through in the past several weeks. First, mom was admitted to hospital with pneumonia: one day when we got home from work, she was so disoriented and incoherent that we felt she must have had a stroke. Paramedics came for a quick assessment and spirited her off to Emergency, from whence she was diagnosed with a possible urinary tract infection, then pneumonia; she was just starting to recover from the latter when she fell out of her hospital bed and broke her hip, requiring a partial hip replacement; just starting to recover from that when she contracted antibiotic-resistant VRE; then came a catastrophic stroke that left her partially immobile, and unable to swallow or speak.
Now she lingers in a truly twilight existence that no one would choose, unable to communicate but seemingly aware of her surroundings and those who come and go from her hospital room, including yours truly. Emails and phone calls have been pouring in from across the country, including a message from my mom’s college classmate who can’t believe all the “unfair” things that have happened; I admit I did a double take when I read that word: after all, where and how does fairness enter into it?
“Fair doesn’t count,” my godfather always used to say--and with particular resonance when he approached his own death from cancer a few years back. “Only the good die young--you’re safe,” I countered. He laughed. This was back when I used to wish my godparents, who’d raised me through my teenage years, were my real parents. Meanwhile, my mother and my father, both of whom devoted their lives to the service of others (a prophet, they say, is revered everywhere except at home) followed their own paths, along their own, respective, journeys.
Now each of the stages in my mother’s final journey parallels a shift in my own perceptions. I now look back to the time when she was with us with a sense of unreality. Even those first couple of weeks when she was in hospital, I expended considerable time and energy trying to convince social workers and medical personnel not to send her home but to place her instead in a care facility. At one point, the social worker said, “We can’t go ahead and make arrangements for your mother’s long term care until her condition stabilizes--it wouldn’t be fair to her.” Fair, shmair, I thought: I just can’t take care of her anymore.
I know, looking back, that I had been feeling almost overwhelming bitterness and resentment, but couldn’t conjure up either emotion now to save my life--and would do just about anything to save hers. Not that she seems to want to be saved! She’s tried on several occasions, apparently, to use her limited strength to rip out her feeding tube, and who can blame her? I can’t, but it’s odd to find myself in this position. Those phrases you hear or read--DNR, power of attorney, next of kin--they are all so immediate and real to me now.
Each new moral dilemma, predicated on the notion of what’s fair to whom, seems unanswerable: should I contact her estranged, incarcerated ex-husband somehow? (No). Should I stop payment on the life insurance policy she took out on him in bygone days when they thought he was sure to predecease her? (Yes). Should I take my young children to visit her, thus inevitably upsetting her and perhaps scarring the girls for life? (Survey says No, I said Yes. And did. And it was fine...).
Sometimes I think all I’m doing is buying myself time: time to process the grief, time to say goodbye. If someone had told me I would hold my mother’s hand, give her a hug, kiss her cheek--I would have said they were crazy...but I wouldn’t have been that polite. Of course, politeness, like all the gentle trappings of social nicety, is highly overrated anyway. It wasn’t politeness, or gentleness, if you ask me, that brought my mom back from the brink. Because, really, I need to be clear. I know I’m painting a bleak picture here, but the bottom line is that she is still alive; two weeks ago, we got a call saying she had very little time left, perhaps as little as a few days. They would try to keep her comfortable, the doctor said.
There was the question of the feeding tube. Unable to swallow, with only IV fluids sustaining her, my mother was in a weakened condition. Whether she would make any further improvement was unknowable, but it seemed “only fair” to give her a chance.
I dragged myself into the hospital after work the next day, expecting the worst.
Trying (as always) to postpone the inevitable moment of entering the room, I first went in search of the woman that the reception desk told me was my mom’s new nurse: the name was unfamiliar to me, something like Soledad but nothing I was confident I could pronounce, so I simply looked, as directed, for the one in pink scrubs.
At last I found her: she was standing in the hallway talking to another staff member, and caught my eye with a merry wink. In a few seconds I had her undivided attention, and looked apprehensively into her forthright, dark eyes, which met my tentative gaze unflinchingly. “Your name?” she barked, pleasantly. I told her. “Well!” she said. “Mother is quite low. Not much change from yesterday. But you will see.”
The nurse shepherded me into the room, where, to my amazement, she cheerfully heralded my arrival to my mother, who lay prone but bright-eyed, propped up on her pillows (the doctor had told me over the phone that mom was virtually paralysed and pretty much non-responsive). The nurse’s strident tone brooked no denial. “ZEEMIN! ZEEMIN! Look! Look! Who is this? Who has come to visit you? Look!” (I whispered my mom’s first name to the nurse--though hesitant to contradict her). “Right!” she corrected herself, “RONNA! Wave to your daughter! That’s right, wave!” (My mother waved). “And a smile!” (My mother dutifully smiled). As for the nurse, I could only suppose that she didn’t get the memo about comfort measures only. She turned to me apologetically: “Not much, I know. But we make a start.”
At that moment, so distinctly that I could almost hear it, something inside me snapped. It wasn’t at all like the snap at mom’s speech therapist’s office earlier this fall--the one that (as I told myself) caused my mother to lose her will to live. That earlier snap was all about me, I think: how overwhelmed I was, trying to care for her at home and raise my young family and work full time and support my husband while we build a house. But suddenly at this moment, in this snap, all of that fell away, along with years and decades and a lifetime of, well, unfairness. All that remained was gratitude that I could have just a little more time with her.
That’s all we need, just a little more time. And I’ll use whatever power I have to prolong it.
No comments:
Post a Comment