mother

October 1991

My mother is a flower closing, her belly button is the center, the point around which the collapse occurs, limbs drawing in. Her shoulders are compressed forward. There is a hump on her upper back. The matching curl of knees when she sits in her wheelchair or lies on her side in bed. The pale feet which she cannot move. At the center of her body, death is pulling on a cord, gathering her in and down.
No one knows what she is dying from. The doctors have tried many tests but she stops breathing every time and they always stop the tests. Ultimately, what does it matter? She is dying and it cannot be stopped.
Linda, Ann, Dianne and I visit her in the nursing home. She eats only enough to keep
herself alive and she is losing weight at an alarming rate. For the past month it has been a strain to visit my mother every few days, and I’ve finally decided not to see her so frequently. She was always so strong, healthy and in control; seeing her helpless, dependent and afraid breaks my heart and scares me. Yesterday, I thought about my own children, imagined them in the position I’m in now, and asked myself if I would want them to visit me if it upset them this much. I answered, honestly, No. And I was free of guilt for one day.
Sometimes I am resentful and angry about my responsibility for my mother. Other times, I simply acknowledge it as the natural duty of a daughter. My sisters visit her often and Linda has a lot of anger for her. Ann never speaks of her feelings. We all want to be with her when she dies. Dying, the final scene, will be dramatic, or at least interesting, but the process leading up to it is long and tedious. We all want to skip the last act and just show up for the finale.
I realize that I am letting people care for my mother who love her less than I do and I must forgive myself for this again and again. I fantasize about bringing her home with a private nurse and assist her in dying quickly and with grace. But I can’t imagine my mother dying in my house.
“I’d shoot myself in two days if I had to care for her,” I tell a friend. But the guilt I am trying to dislodge is ancient and deep; I am not caring for the mother who gave birth to me, whom I ought to accompany through her dying.
“It doesn’t matter whether you visit or not” the counselor says, “so long as you are at peace with your choice. Your mother won’t remember.”
“But I will,” I say.
Inside me, a war rages, on one side is my small self, the coward who wants to hide, a delicate soul who cannot bear the smell of the nursing home, the sight of the deformed and shriveled bodies, the irrational and mournful sounds. This self cries often. She will always be too sensitive for this world. Her mother told her this constantly.
Opposing her is the conqueror, the self who strides out, takes on all comers, and wins. She says, Drop by. Visit. It’s no big deal. She bullies me. She’s impulsive, pushy. What kind of daughter are you? she chides.
"A scared one," I say, taking the side of the small self. I tell her that my mother wasn’t always kind to me. I dream up excuses. I turn mystical, saying that I’ll pray for my mother, light candles for her, visualize her finding peace in another realm.
The argument runs on and on, like a Russian novel with too many characters and lots of philosophical asides, political manifestoes, and religious debates. It is endless, this subject, to visit or not to visit. It is metaphysical, psychological, diabolical. It is the arena in which my angels and devils fight it out.
When I was a child death entered my bedroom each night. I was there in my body, but really I was at the bottom of a deep, dark pit with slick, oily sides. I fell into this pit every night, my pink nightgown blown up around my head, my body cold and wet with fear; no sound. A space at once too vast and too confined for a scream. Nothing but me, falling, falling.
I never called out for my mother. I knew better. It was a Chicken Little scenario. The sky wasn’t really falling. It was only my imagination. And so I kept falling alone into nothingness, into the idea of not being. I could not fathom this, could not imagine that the world could exist without me, without the sting of me – my teeth, my breath, my eyes.
As my mother continues to die, something inside me is dying, as well. Out of a storm of feelings, a wave appears and knocks me over. When I am no longer her daughter, whom is there for me to please? To answer to? To be happy for? To live for? Oh, I know the prescribed answers – I’ve been reading a few of those self-help books, but none of them does any good. Rage gathers in my belly. I boil as my mother cools, swells as she shrivels. ’ve tried so hard all my life and this is what I get? Worse, if I no longer have to be the person she wants me to be – the person I’ve tried to become and live inside for fifty odd years – then who am I?
I stare at a postcard in my “studio.” A stone sculpture of a primitive, animal-like creature, verging on human, stares back at me, eyes wide, teeth bared, nostrils flared. She’s sitting the way many poor women in India do: back on her heels, knees up, her breasts touching the tops of her thighs. From between her legs emerges a small replica of herself, also wide-eyed and grimacing.
My mother is in the hospital and the doctors cannot find out what is wrong with her. Every time they try to do what they feel are necessary tests she stops breathing and must be revived. What would we like them to do, they ask.
Take her back to the nursing home and let her go naturally we say. Do not torture her anymore.
My mother drifts in and out and at times I believe she knows what is happening to her but she is calm and seems to be accepting; strange behavior for my controlling mother, acceptance. I am grateful for it. I beg peace for her.
She asks Dianne for a doughnut and a cup of coffee. Dianne rushes madly about the nursing home looking for what is not to be found and returns, sad, not be able to grant my mother’s wish. My mother has already forgotten and drifted off to sleep again.
My son, Chris, has a daughter. I tell my mother and she says she is pleased and she has been waiting to see if this child was a boy or girl. I don’t believe she understands what I am talking about.
I must see this child right away and I talk to Linda and Ann and they agree it will not matter where I am when my mother dies yet I struggle with my conscious as I drive to Santa Cruz. It is a long drive and I vacillate between the feelings of excitement at meeting my new granddaughter and the guilt at leaving my mother.
Baby Evan is an enchantress and I am in love but I am only there a short time when the phone rings. Immediately I know what it means. Ann says my mother is dead. I fall into an immediate dichotomy – a life gone and a new life in front of me. I look for some meaning and finally decide it is exactly what it is – a life gone and a new life in front of me. Is that not the way life works? And it takes me along with it.