I think of this as the goodbye time. A time of endings, and new beginnings. But the endings are all sharply defined and known, and the beginnings yet to come are thus far only nebulous. So far I have lost, in chronological order: my marriage, my cat, my mother, and my job; and shortly I will be losing the home of my youth, when the family and I sell Mom’s house. I thank God daily that He has so far left me my health, and surrounded me with love and support from family and friends. I’ve been reading book after book this past year or so about people who lived through real problems — like the gulags, or the Holocaust. Pain is relative. I keep telling myself truthfully that I don’t yet have real problems; only inconveniences. Of course at this rate, a Real Problem seems increasingly likely to pop up at any moment...
The goodbye time had a sort of beginning last November, when Cutie the half-Siamese half-feral Fierce Jungle Tiger failed to return home one chilly night. No pathetic little rodent-corpse borne homeward to decorate the front stoop. No loud-mouthed feline demands for entry. And the next night, the same. Then I knew. She wouldn’t be back again. For once she wasn’t the fastest — whether car or dog, something had caught her off guard for the last time. I had struggled to care for her in an ordinate manner — not to lavish over-anthropomorphized “love” on an animal with a lifespan so much less than my own; but I had given her much affection, and gentleness, and she had over the five years we’d known each other gradually come to return the sentiment, in her self-absorbed, feline way.
Then two months later came Mom’s seventy-seventh birthday, January 26th. Her frequent hospitalizations over the last year or two had been a sore trial to her and to the family, but she had weathered them with a grace that drew comments even from the battle-hardened night nurses that tended her, ministering to her embarrassingly intimate needs with the tough tenderness common to such veterans.
In the wee hours of the morning of the 26th, I heard Mom vomiting in the bathroom. I lay there helpless, praying. I thought it was flu, or something she ate. But finally she called me. She had become worried enough to ask to be taken to the hospital. She didn’t think she was strong enough to walk downstairs. When I saw the bathroom I realized why. I had heard her throwing up repeatedly, but now I saw blood on the bathroom floor and around the toilet, bearing signs of her imperfect attempts to clean up the mess. I called 911 and went downstairs to look for the ambulance, leaving Mom to marshal her resources in her bedroom. When I checked on her, she had managed to dress herself, after saying she didn’t think she could. So stubborn — it was actually one of her most endearing qualities; very English, to avoid “making a fuss.” I went back downstairs to watch some more, and the next time I looked around, there she was — sitting on the bottom step, fully dressed, looking weary. “Happy birthday!” I thought but didn’t say. Gallows humor runs strong in our family, but things that hurt too much aren’t funny any more.
Then the ambulance came, and I followed it through the park to the hospital in a fairytale whirl of big, feathery snowflakes zooming out of the darkness into the glare of my headlights. As I drove away from the house, I was pleasantly unaware that Mom would not be coming back to it again. Her next homecoming, six weeks later, would be to a much better place than an old wood-frame house with blood in the crevices of the bathroom floor.
I sat with Mom in one of the little alcoves in the emergency department, she in a bed and me holding two plastic bags containing the clothing she had so painfully donned an hour earlier. Doctors and nurses came and went. The minutes crawled past. They decided to admit her, and began giving her blood. I saw that this was going to be another long-term thing, and decided that I would be worth more if I could snatch a few hours sleep. So I kissed Mom goodbye and drove home at about 4:30 a.m. Left a message on the answering machine at work, and crawled back into bed. Amazingly, I slept.
What can be written about prolonged hospital stays, that’s worth reading later? Hospital time is what I think prison time must be like, with symptoms and debilities for gates and bars. Weakness, pains and discomforts, shortness of breath; a twilight haze of half-sleepings and half-wakings, punctuated by interruptions from busy attendants; against the constant background symphony of beeps, buzzes, hisses, footsteps, snores, moans, and clatterings that are constant, day and night.
Some things stick up above the vague sea of blurred memories from that period. Of course looking back, memories of one long hospital stay tend to bleed into the memories of other stays, leaving only the particular symptoms as road signs to which siege a given memory comes from. But I remember the initial prognosis, that she had bleeding ulcers that were going to kill her fairly soon, unless the affected portion of her stomach were excised. And by the way, the surgery would probably be fatal, as well.
Mom was as ready to die as a person can be, confronting that jumping-off-place with no information but that supplied by faith. She wanted to do what the Lord wanted her to do, trusting Him to make it work out whatever way was best. I prayed with her there in intensive care, and she opened a Bible at random, trusting the Lord to speak to her. She opened to Ezekiel 36. At a time when the Jewish nation was being eradicated from the earth by the armies of the Babylonian empire, the Lord was instructing the prophet to prophesy to the mountains of Israel. As if the earth itself had ears, and understanding. She handed the book to me to read. Here are some of the things I read to her:
1 And you, son of man, prophesy to the mountains of Israel, and say “O mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord!”
8 But you, O mountains of Israel, you shall shoot forth your branches and yield your fruit to my people Israel, for they are about to come.
9 For indeed I am for you, and I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown.
10 I will multiply men upon you, all the house of Israel, all of it; and the cities shall be inhabited and the ruins rebuilt.
There’s more in the same vein, and Mom took comfort from it. So did I. We felt that whether she lived or died in the operation, the Lord was speaking to her now in a comforting way. It was as if He were telling her that her life would yield fruit that would nourish and bless others. As if her life were a mountain, upon which others would build. She told the doctors to go ahead with the surgery.
Mom survived the operation. The surgeon, speaking to me later, said “It was a miracle.” His words. I suppose he may have been speaking metaphorically, but I didn’t take it that way. Neither did Mom. She was slow this time to climb out of the post-operative lethargy and confusion, though. Her thinking was a bit off-kilter. She remembered things that hadn’t happened, and she was quite positive about them. Her nieces, my cousins, listened with appreciative amusement to her colorful meanderings. I tried to steer her gently back to what we normally think of as “reality.” It was interesting — even when she was recounting something that could never have happened, she was still herself. Her inputs had gotten a bit scrambled, but her personality was intact. She wasn’t disintegrating; she was merely operating with some bad information. We prayed, and waited, and gradually her thinking returned pretty much to normal.
It took about a month for Mom to climb back to the point where she could be discharged to a nursing home. All her life she had detested such places, and her greatest fear may have been to be relegated to such a facility. She was always youthful inside; always learning; always traveling and never arriving. She viewed with appropriate horror the idea of being blown ashore in mid-voyage at such an appalling destination. Driven onto the rocks she had hoped to steer clear of. She always preferred to spend time with people younger than herself, and they frequently sought her out. Her sister’s two daughters were frequent companions, and even a grand-niece, who loved to come visit and watch Jane Eyre and snack on naughty goodies. Mom always said she didn’t like being around “old people,” which might have been amusing, but wasn’t, because she was serious. “Old people” only wanted to talk about forty years ago, or about their latest operation. Mom wanted to talk about the work of the Holy Spirit today, or other things with deep meaning. She had a desire and habit of thinking Big Thoughts, and enjoyed exploring them with anyone who had a similar proclivity.
The nursing home was new and modern, with a cheap, faux-country décor guaranteed to make anyone with any artistic sensibility even sicker. I guess there just isn’t anything you can do to make a place warm and cheerful, when its purpose is to warehouse the not-quite-dead. I see I’ve been infected with Mom’s attitude. But if you’ve ever been to a beach the morning after a storm, and seen there the wrack of driftwood and dead fish cast up in an untidy jumble along the shore, you’ve seen what the best nursing home in the world looks like. There’s no way to make that pretty, or enjoyable. It would take miracles to make it even endurable. But as I said, this was a new nursing home, very “nice.” Mom was there for a week.
As a society, we generally entrust the care of our children and our parents to uneducated, poorly-paid young women, who on the whole would much rather be watching soap operas and talking on the phone with their boyfriends. And who could blame them. We get what we pay for, and I suppose what we deserve, corporately speaking. My long-suffering, patient mother referred to her young helpers as “little snots.” Not meanly, but with feeling. We tried to visit every day; her nieces, my two sisters, and I. We began to investigate alternative arrangements, wondering how much assistance might be available to us in a home setting. Then after about a week, Mom threw up blood again while she was visiting the hospital for a dialysis session.
Back into intensive care. More hopeful/fearful chats with doctors. More praying. More visiting the by-now-intensely-well-known hospital wards. I recognized many nurses by now, and noticed when they moved to a different ward, or changed their hairstyle. I could find a parking spot in the hospital ramp garage blindfolded. It was the beginning of March.
Things were hopeful; we were promising Mom she wouldn’t be going back to the nursing home. Spring was arriving. On Tuesday night, March 7th, I was picking up a car at the dealer’s showroom after I finished work. It was supper time, and the air was balmy. My pager buzzed, and I called the number, recognizing it as being from the hospital. My cousin, telling me that all of a sudden things were going downhill, and might finish quickly. I numbly finished signing papers for the dealer and drove my new car to the hospital ramp garage. New car smell, spotless interior, maneuvered smoothly into the parking spot. Who cares.
Know what? I hardly remember any details from that night. I try, but nothing comes. I want to avoid simply imagining something that might have happened, and plastering that onto my mind as a real memory. Let’s see. I don’t think Mom responded to us that night. I remember telling my youngest sister I was going to try and get some sleep at home. She said she’d stay awhile. The next day I found out she’d stayed pretty much all night before going home briefly and returning. I think.
Anyway, she was the one who called me the next day when I was at lunch with Kellie, a coworker. I was starting to talk with her about the work of the Lord, like I used to do with Mom. Then the page came, and I went outside to return the call. Mom had just died.
Wednesday, March 8th, 2000; a beautiful sunny day that could have been pulled bodily from the middle of June, and slipped intact into the second week of March. Seventy degrees, fresh sweet breezes. I remembered what some groups of Plains Indians were reputed to say as they prepared their souls to go into battle: “It is a good day to die.” It was. It was the kind of day that reminded me that Mom had not ceased to exist, but had in fact been set free of a cumbersome, outworn shell, so that she could begin to exist in real freedom. Bursting her chrysalis and spreading damp new wings to the unknowable upper airs of eternity. In my heart at that moment there existed, simultaneously and without contradiction, both my personal pain at having to say goodbye, and a strong sensation of envy at the new life she had just begun. Really.
It feels funny to reread what I just wrote about envying Mom. Morbid. Suicidal. But that’s not it at all. Like the man said, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” It’s as if we were brought up like a princess in a fairy tale, who is told every day of her life that someday her prince will come. She believes it, and waits, and hopes, and grows older, still waiting. But still believing. Imagining how handsome and wonderful her prince will be when he comes — strong, tender, exciting, glorious. And believing that even her most ardent fantasies of him will fall far short of the real thing, when once he has her in his arms. This is how Mom thought of the Lord Jesus, hoping that He would return for her before she died. It’s how I think of Him, too. But instead of coming for Mom, her prince called her to come to Him. She had to pass through the gate of death to reach his kingdom. But she reached it. And for the first time in her seventy-seven years, she saw His face. And it made her most ardent fantasies seem like skim milk. That’s what I envied. Because He’s my prince, too. And I’m still waiting. Still walking around down here in the shadow land, longing for the forever country.
I told my sister I would be up soon, and went back into the restaurant. I told Kellie that my mom had just died. She expected that I would leave at once, but I told her that one, I hadn’t eaten yet that day; two, everybody would still be there in a short while when I got there; and three, my mom would have wanted me to stay long enough to tell Kellie some important things before I left — the kind of things that I talked about with Mom. Had talked about with Mom. The hardest thing to get used to is using the past tense. So I ate my salad, and talked with Kellie about life and death and God and good and evil. I told her that the most important thing is simply that God is alive, and He speaks — He doesn’t just leave us to figure everything out on our own, or do the best we can; but instead He reaches all the way down to wherever we are, and shows us things we need to know. That’s been my experience, I told her, and my mom’s as well. It’s how she lived her life, and how she died. And it’s why she died in peace, and why I can live now in peace, even though it hurts. Kellie was impressed — I hasten to emphasize not by me, myself; but rather just that my reaction to such a wound showed her viscerally that God isn’t just words in a book. To a dissatisfied, “non-practicing” Catholic, that was evidently an eye-opener.
When my dad died I was sixteen, and he was forty-six. I’m forty-two now. Of course, he was old, and I’m not. Yeah. Well. Anyway, I never got to know him as a person, one adult to another. I never got to have the conversations with him that would have given us the chance to see each other as people. I’ve realized by now (even as young as I am, wink) that there’s no such thing as a simple human being. Yesterday while lunching at an Italian restaurant, I saw a young woman with mild Downes’ Syndrome; from her clothing I assumed she was a dishwasher. Gainfully employed. But not a rocket scientist. Her mind was simple, but only very slightly less so than Einstein’s. Because she’s complex, too. In her breast beat hopes, fears, loves, aspirations... Even if she couldn’t put them all into words as easily as some. I bet she’s worth knowing. Because people are. My dad was. Even if I didn’t get the chance.
What’s my point? Well, a wall doesn’t have to fall on me twice before I begin to grasp a simple idea. Moms and dads die, and you won’t always be able to begin a sentence “Hey Mom...” So when I was divorced and Mom made room for me again in her home, I took advantage of the opportunity to get to know my mother as a person. Nobody else on the face of this planet will ever love me in exactly the way that Mom did. She’d known me since before I was born, when I might have turned out to be a Christopher Patric, or a Susan Elizabeth. She was thirty-five when she had me, her first child, and she’d been waiting for a long, long time. It became my great privilege to get to know this lady as maybe no one else but my dad had been able to. Over the five years that I lived with her, I gradually metamorphosed from being only her son, to also being a good friend, an occasional adviser, and eventually something of a caretaker. Sometimes it felt kind of odd, like the first few times I realized that I’d grown taller than Dad. But I came to understand that realizing our parents’ limitations is part of growing up. They won’t always be better than us at everything. And that’s fine.
We had time for some good talks. I don’t remember the contents of the discussions as well as I remember the sense of communion. She told me that talking with me was like talking to my dad. I was deeply honored, because I’ve never known another couple with a relationship like they had. They were soul-mates, who found in each other a refuge from a world of people with whom neither one ever quite fit in.
But the thing is, more or less the point of this extended monologue, around which I am long-windedly circumlocuting — at various times, in various ways, I told Mom all of the things that I knew I would wish I had said, and would regret not having said if I left them unspoken. Those things that we think of when we remember a departed loved one, and wish we’d found some way to put our love into words. I got to do that. On her seventy-fifth birthday I wrote her a long love letter. Four months later when I turned forty, she returned the favor. I still have the letters. And from time to time, especially as she began to visibly age, I remembered to hug her and say “I love you, Mom.” It’s the simple little things like that that we really regret leaving undone. I’m not proud I did that; that would be silly — I’m profoundly grateful that I was granted the opportunity. When I was born, she loved me and took care of me. When she was dying, I loved her back and took care of her. That has a symmetry that is so rarely achieved in our disjointed, post-modern, deconstructed western culture.
I love you, Mom.
Peter Moore
July 2000