It’s amazing what the living expect of the dying
For much of my life, there was something about my mother I felt almost allergic to. Yet, as she approached death, for the first time I found I didn’t merely love her, I actually liked her. People who weren’t there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by loving family.
This is technically true, though it was just my brother and me and he was looking at Facebook and I was reading a profile of Hillary Clinton in the December 2009 issue of Vogue. A hospice nurse had been over a few hours earlier and said my mother was “very imminent”. She was breathing in that slow, irregular way that signals that the end is near. Strangely, I hadn’t noticed it despite listening for the past several weeks (months earlier, when her death sentence had been officially handed down but she was still very much alive, my mother had casually mentioned that she’d noticed this breathing pattern in herself and that I should be prepared to walk into the room and find her gone at any moment) but apparently it was here now and when I reached the third paragraph of the second page of the Hillary Clinton article (this remains imprinted on my brain; I can still see the wrap of the words as my eye scanned the column; I can still see the Annie Leibovitz photo on the previous page) I heard her gasp. Then nothing more.
“Mom?” I called out.
My brother got off the couch and called her name, too. Then I said, “Is that it?”
That was it. I found suddenly that I wasn’t quite sure how to identify a dead person – it didn’t occur to me in that moment that not breathing was a sure sign – so I picked up her hand. It was turning from red to purple to blue. I’d read about this in the death books – Final Gifts, Nearing Death Awareness, The Needs of the Dying – that I’d devoured over the last few months. Medically speaking, I’d found these books to be extremely accurate about how things progressed, but some put a lot of emphasis on birds landing on windowsills at the moment of death or people opening their eyes at the last minute and making amends or saying something profound. We weren’t that kind of family, though, and I harboured no such expectations. I had been slightly worried that when my mother actually died I’d be more grief-stricken than I’d anticipated, that I’d faint or lose my breath or at least finally unleash the tears that I’d been unable to shed all this time. I thought that in my impatience to get through the agonising end stages I’d surely get my comeuppance in the form of sneaky, shocking anguish. Perhaps I would rage at the gods, regret all that had gone unsaid, pull an article of clothing from her closet and hold it close, taking her in. But none of that happened. She had been suffering for months and I was as relieved – for both of us – as I’d planned to be. I picked her hand up a few more times over the next two hours while we waited for another hospice worker to come over and fill out the final paperwork and then for the men from the funeral home to take her away. I did this less for the sake of holding it than to make sure she still had no pulse. She’d chosen cremation but had said once that she feared being burned alive.
A woman worked for us during the last two months of my mother’s illness. She must have found us appalling. A week or so before my mother died, my brother and I started packing up the apartment right in front of her. I know this sounds grotesque, but we were haemorrhaging money and had to do whatever we could to stem the flow. It was late December and her lease was up on the first of the new year. If she died before then and we didn’t have the place cleared out, we’d not only have to renew the lease and pay another month of sizeable rent, but we’d also have to then go on to break the lease and lose her sizeable security deposit. She was unconscious, so “right in front of ” is a matter of interpretation, but her hospital bed was in the living room and we had to crouch behind it to remove books from shelves. My mother had a set of George Kovacs table lamps that I liked very much, and every time I look at them in my own house now, three time zones away in a living room she’s never seen, I think about how I had to reach around her withering body to unplug them, after which I packed them into their original boxes, which I’d found deep in her coat closet, walked them over to the UPS store, and mailed them off to California.
“You have to start sometime,” said Vera, the woman who worked for us. I’m almost certain she said this because she had no idea what to say but felt some obligation to validate our behaviour since we were paying her $17 per hour. Vera was a professional end-of-life home healthcare aide, referred to us by the hospice. She was originally from Trinidad and spent a lot of time listening to Christmas music on headphones. I assumed she’d known every kind of family and witnessed every iteration of grief, though later I learned she’d worked for only one other terminal patient in New York, a man who was dying of something other than cancer and whose daughter apparently cried all the time and threw herself on his empty hospital bed after he was taken away. Our family, as my mother might have said, had “a significantly different style”.
Excerpt from article originally published by The Guardian, author Meghan Daum
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/nov/18/-sp-all-about-my-mother-its-amazing-what-the-living-expect-of-dying
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