February 10, 1999: The phone’s ringing. I’m asleep. The loud sound
fits into a dream I’m having so I keep on sleeping, dreaming. The ringing continues. Eventually I wake up and pick up the receiver.
Michelle, my mom’s closest friend, is on the other end. Her voice is shaky;
her tone is serious.
“Your mother’s kidneys have failed. The doctors
say she doesn’t have long. You better hurry.”
Michelle is at the hospital; I’m twenty minutes away at my mom’s condo with my little brother
Tony; he’s seventeen. This week my mom, who has been battling an aggressive form of cancer for the past four years, has had a heart attack and a
stroke.
Today is Thursday. I flew home from California
yesterday after receiving the news on Tuesday. It’s hard to believe it was just last
month that my mom and I went to Florida. We lay on the beach, went out to eat, and enjoyed great conversation. Watching her laugh as we
sipped drinks, reclining on lounge chairs, I thought she had a few more years. At least.
With socks on we slide across the slick black-and-white tiled kitchen
floor. My mom’s teaching me how to do the Charleston. We face each other, partners. We raise our bent arms to chest height and then flap
them, first close to and then away from our bodies, like chickens. Twisting our feet, in and out, to the front, to the back . Twisting and
flapping, we crack up laughing and lean on the counter to catch our breath.
I quickly get out of bed and slip on the closest thing I can find: the outfit I wore yesterday, lying in a heap on the floor. I jog down the
hall to wake my brother. Gently shaking him I say, “Tony, we’ve got to
go now. Michelle called and said mom’s kidneys have failed. Hurry up,
let’s go.”
“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”
I try to convince
him otherwise, “Please Tony, you’re gonna want to be there.” But he’s
firm.
Looking down at him with his eyes closed, bundled in blankets, I think of how he’s watched our mom suffer intensely and has been in the
same house with her, just the two of them, while I’ve been away at college. I let him stay home.
Driving down Route Seven tears are streaming down my cheeks. I wail, cry, and pray. What I call “prayers” are
screams and pleas, noises and
groans. Torturous questions bombard my mind: Will I get there in time? Where will she go when she dies? Is this really happening? Why my mom? Why now? I abandon myself to the shock and grief. I’m glad to be alone.
My mom takes off her riding helmet and wipes the sweat from her brow.
Her thick, brown hair is damp and matted against her head. She bends down and helps me undo the chin-strap of my helmet. My hair, too, is
damp with sweat. We had a good, long ride and it’s a hot July day. We’ve been taking lessons together at Blue Fox Farm this summer. Sometimes
we go on trail rides and jump over logs and streams or canter through open fields. My mom rides an Arabian of sixteen hands; I ride a tall
palomino pony. We have matching britches and helmets; her boots are tall
and mine are short.
It is now afternoon. I have been at the hospital all day. Many people have come and gone, people I never
expected. I have asked God to wake
my mother up. She is unconscious and I can’t bear the thought of this
being it, of never seeing her awake again. I have to see her brown eyes and hear her voice, even if it’s weak, one more time. I speak in an
attempt to wake her; it doesn’t work. I am too upset to raise my voice
to a level that might rouse her. When I say “Mom, it’s me,” my voice
is frail and childlike, though I am nineteen and not a soft-spoken person.
A friend of mine, a woman a little younger than my mom, comes into the room. She does not feel what I feel. She loudly says my mom’s
name, “Georgia.” My mom opens her eyes. I am grateful; I smile. I still
find it difficult to speak loud enough for her to hear. Others speak. She listens and
acknowledges what they say with a nod. She is on a ventilator; she mumbles unintelligible sounds. It seems to me that this
is cumbersome for her. I don’t want her to try to speak when it’s so
hard. I look at her with sympathetic eyes; I understand.
Do I understand? My mother, a woman with impressive verbal communication abilities,
is reduced to this. In my mind she is laughing, telling us a funny adventure she went on with friends, she is singing a song. But as I look
at her I hear only noises no one understands.
Jessie, Jessie, bo-bessie, banana-fanna, fo-fessie, fee-fie, mo-messy,
Jes-sie!” “Tony, Tony, bo-boney, banana-fanna, fo-foney, fee-fie,
mo-moaney, To-ny!” We burst into giggles. The way she sings this little
rhyme, going faster and faster, gets us every time. But the best part is that I really am messy, and Tony really does like bananas, so this
song fits us just right. We’re eating grapes, special grapes. My mom
taught us a way to make them taste really good, like candy. First we get out two bowls. In one I pour the sugar, in the other my mom cracks
an egg, and gets rid of the yellow slimy yolk, so only the egg white is left. Then Tony plucks a bunch of green grapes from their stems. We
dip each grape in the egg white, roll it in sugar, and then let it dry on wax paper. Once dry they become hard and the sugar coating sparkles;
then they’re ready to eat.
Several people are in the room; two are ministers. Somebody asks, “Georgia, is it all right if I pray for you now?” I now know she is
preparing to die. She consents with a nod and as the woman prays my mother
mumbles; I think she is praying, too. I watch. I am standing several feet away from her hospital bed and all I can do is watch.
When the others leave the room and it is only the two of us, I come close. She has
fallen back asleep. Someone told me that hearing is the last sense to go so I bend over and bring my mouth close to her ear. I don’t know
what to say, so I sing. I try to think of a song and then remember that
when we were in Florida and went to mass there was a hymn my mom knew by heart. Leaning over, I softly sing that song: “Holy, holy, holy,
Lord God Almighty, early in the morning my song shall rise to Thee . . .” I sing the stanzas that I know, which aren’t many, over and over.
I don’t know what else to do. This is unbearable.
Rolling up deli bologna into little round tubes, we stick them into our mouths, with eyes fixed on the current soap opera on TV. My mom let
us stay home from school today. As we were eating breakfast she said, “Let’s play hookie!” Later we’ll take our dog Ben, the Irish wolfhound
dad gave mom for her birthday, to the big park near our house. It has lots of grass, bike-paths, and hills. I’ll bring my roller skates,
Tony will bring his skateboard, and Mom will walk Ben; she loves that dog.
It is now Thursday night, though the time of day has become irrelevant, and the doctors have told us three, four, maybe six times that “this is
it.” Each time I am overwhelmed with grief and cry hysterically. But every time the doctors say that, she lives; this is not “it” after all.
All the visitors are gone, except for me and a friend named Cathy. She is on a small cot, I am on a stiff pull-out chair, and my mom is in
that awful bed, the location of countless deaths.
My sleep is broken and disturbed. I wake to the changing sound of my mom’s breathing. As the night progresses, her breathing becomes more
labored. Sitting in the dark, all I hear is unfamiliar deep wheezing. During this long night, while I am the only one awake in the room, I
realize that she is actually going to die. A mystery, death, a mystery. My mom will stop breathing, her heart will no longer beat, and that will
be it. The memories I’ve had with her will abruptly stop accumulating.
There is nothing I can do but wait.
My mom and I are standing in the doorway of my bedroom. Over the radio Celine Dion is singing “Because You Loved Me.” My mom hugs me and we
stay that way for a while, embracing and softly swaying to the sound of Celine’s voice. Tears well up in my eyes as I listen to the
words. They remind me of all my mom’s done, and still does, for our family. I
think of how she took us and all her savings and left our alcoholic father. I remember her struggle to get a job, a good job, and to provide a
comfortable place for us to live. I think of her long days, leaving to commute to work at 7:30 AM and not returning home until twelve hours
later. I cry out of gratefulness for what she does and out of shame for
the grief we’ve caused her.
February 11, 1999: I awake in the morning to commotion around my mom’s
bed. There are several people in this small room and one caring man, who I know to be a good man, is weeping for my mom. He’s trying to hold
back tears, sniffling and wiping his eyes, but it’s difficult. I know.
Many people, again, come and go. It is Friday. Yesterday was Thursday and the day before that was Wednesday. It was on Wednesday that I flew
home. I saw my mom Wednesday night. Forty-eight hours have not yet passed. I thought my mom had months to live. Not days. Not hours.
Walking down the hallway of the cancer patient ward in Reston Hospital, I feel
nauseated. It’s not the smell; it’s the patients. They are
everywhere, they are suffering, and their lives are so different from mine. I feel pity; I feel guilt. I just had an enjoyable time laughing
and eating lunch with two of my healthy friends. And now I’m here. A
woman who is pale, bald, and hunched over passes me, walking slowly in the opposite direction. I’ve been told that patients who are able to
walk make rounds on this floor for exercise. She has to drag a wheeled oxygen cart alongside her. An old man walks by with his cart, making
the same rounds. Glancing into rooms, I see many sick people. They all
look similar: pale skin, bald, weak, thin. Partly alive. I grow ill thinking of my mom
-- my vivacious, hard working, forty-four-year-old
mom -- in the same place as these people. She doesn’t belong here. I reach
her room at the end of the hall and walk through the doorway. She smiles
to see me. She has just had a bone marrow transplant. The mastectomy, radiation, chemotherapy, and steroid treatments didn’t work. She, like
the others, looks frail, but yet she smiles. How does she do it? I muster up my own smile and give her a hug. I have to be extra gentle to
not hurt her. She’s wearing an American flag bandana that her boyfriend
has given her. She’s not particularly patriotic; she just likes a variety
of bandanas to cover her bald head. I brought my camera. Why? What was I thinking? Something in me wanted to capture this awful time, to
not forget. Is it right to take a picture of my mom like this? My beautiful, photogenic mom looking sickly and awful in a hospital bed? Not
knowing if it’s right or wrong, I take a few pictures: two of her alone, two of us together. She gingerly laughs. She is optimistic, never
giving up hope. How does she not despair?
Today I ask God for two things. The first is that this will be it, my mom’s last agonizing day. The second request is that I will be with
her when she dies. I want to be next to her, close to her unconscious, diseased, dying side when she leaves this world. When she leaves our
lives. I know now that she will not get better; she will soon die. The
doctors’ continual erroneous predictions bring more sorrow and false preparation than I can bear. She is never going to wake up and doctors
are pumping powerful drugs into her veins to make her end as comfortable
as possible.
There will be no more chemo, no more radiation, no more bone marrow transplants or steroids or hair falling out or throwing up or pain or
life.
Browsing a gift shop in our beachfront Florida hotel, I spy a long, lavender linen dress. I have a brief mental battle over whether to try
it on. I know it will be too expensive. Fingering the lovely material I give in, find my size, and take it to the dressing room. It’s
flattering, the v-neckline isn’t too low, it has a feminine a-line shape, and
the price tag says $70. I leave it in the shop and head up to our hotel room. “It’s so pretty. It’s just kind of expensive. Do
you think that if I pay half you could pay the other half?” I’m in
college and can’t afford a seventy-dollar dress. Smiling, my mom responds, “Here Jessie,” handing me enough money to pay for all of it, “I’ll
buy the dress for you, under one condition: You have to wear it tonight.” I’m elated. It’s several hours later and I’m sitting to the left of
my mom at a crowded restaurant table full of her friends and colleagues. A man to my left has had a few martinis and is cracking jokes.
Smirking at his humor, I pick up my fork to take a bite of pasta, and in
doing so look down at the dress. It’s perfect.
Today I don’t leave the room until 4:00 PM. My stomach has begun hurting so I go downstairs to get yogurt. I will bring it back upstairs and
eat it in my mom’s room.
I will be right back.
On the way to the cafeteria I stop to use a bathroom. A woman rushes in and tells me my mom has stopped breathing. Oh no. I sprint to the
elevator, and then, once the elevator stops on her floor, I run to her room. One of her
friends (Vivienne? Michelle?) tells me my mom has
started breathing again. I sigh. That was too close. Sitting down in the
chair next to the bed, I lay my hand on my mother’s arm. Her arm that
will soon never be used again. No more hugs or high-fives or sugaring grapes or dancing or calling me on the phone. I put my throbbing head
on her shoulder.
It is time. It is never time, but it is time.
She stops breathing. This is it. Done. Forever. My weeping is reckless. A friend is rubbing my back. The sliding of his hand over my
t-shirt, back and forth, back and forth, eventually calms me down. I look
up and see nurses with downcast eyes and silent, frowning mouths.
