My Mom Dies

This was written in April 2006, a month after my Mom's death.

By Geoffrey Gevalt
YWP Editor

My Mom has been gone a month now but I still have moments where I forget, when I want to pick up the phone to call her. Tonight it happened while I was washing dishes. I hate washing dishes.

Over the years I have tried to offset that distaste by getting something else done in the process, like phoning my Mom. It was easiest to do when we still had a 1960s-era, rotary wall phone with a long cord that stretched to the sink; the receiver fit nicely between the ear and shoulder.

I would scrub away and talk with my Mom about whatever. Twenty years ago it was about my new marriage and writing and things she and Dad were doing and sports and, occasionally, politics. Ten years ago it was about the kids and how she missed my Dad and how one of her friends was sick or had died and how she wished we’d come see her more often and how much the house was costing her.

And lately it had been about how she wasn’t feeling good and doctors nowadays don’t pay attention and how she missed her house and how she’d lived too long and how we never came to visit.

But there still was something comforting about most of the calls, particularly if I had initiated it. We shared moments when she could hear what I was saying without saying, what? We could connect, or, sometimes, try to find somewhere to connect.

The end came rather unexpectedly. It was a Sunday morning and the phone rang and it was a doctor whose name I could not possibly spell who sounded extremely warm and solid and direct. He put me on with the surgeon who said my mother had to have a major operation. In an hour.

The alternative? I asked. A pause.

“There would be a bad outcome.”

“Is she right there?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I understand. OK. Let me speak to her. Good luck.”

She sounded scared and resigned and tired all at once. I asked her if she’d like me to come down. “Do what you want,” she said.

How can mothers know exactly how to say a book in one sentence? “I’m on my way, Mom.”

I didn’t say, “love you.” I didn’t say, “Good luck.” Instead I said, “Hang in there.”

Silly me. What a meaningless thing to say. But I have no regrets. She knew I was coming. She knew I loved her. I knew she loved me. Last words are definitely overrated.

But those were hers and those were mine, at least, those were the last words that I know she understood.

***
I’ll fast forward on the next few weeks.

I’ll just tell you she was in surgery for eight hours plus and recovery for two-and-a-half. That’s not good for an 85-year-old woman. That’s not good for a 35-year-old woman. When I finally got to see her around midnight she had a tube down her nose and a breathing tube down her mouth that was attached to a giant machine in the corner that methodically pushed her chest out and sucked it in. She had all sorts of tubes going into her neck and arm and side. She was, as she’d say, a sight.

A heartbreaking sight.

She woke, or seemingly woke, every minute or so and her face looked terrified. Her forehead was furrowed and her eyebrows scrunched down. She was in terrible pain and there was something more, like she was panicking, maybe at having all these things in her. I don’t think she knew who I was or where she was or what was going on, but I do know that she was freaked out that she had all these things in her mouth.

The nurses were kind, efficient, warm. They came in and went to work and got her on more sedation, and I talked to them about watching her forehead, her eyebrows because that’s where you could always tell how Mom felt, about anything -- from Democrats to the food she ate to whether or not she liked the shirt you were wearing.

The second night, I was still at the hospital alone. My oldest brother, who lived the closest, was away. My middle brother was in New York.

She got the terrors again. And after a new shift of nurses got the drill and settled her down, after I spent some time with her, I saw something I hadn’t seen and that was the face of her mother, my grandmother.

The likeness was uncanny.

My grandmother took eight years to die. She was in her 80s and was in a nursing home and my mom, in her 40s, went down each week to visit her. She came back a mess. My grandmother, until she lost it all together, had a wicked case of the meanies and would tear at my Mom like a cat on a satin sofa. My grandmother just lay in bed and didn’t really know what was going on until Mom would come and she would tell her only daughter things that hurt.

“don’t ever want to die that way,” my Mom would say. “Take me out in the east field and shoot me.”

So here I was, standing over her, seeing the face of my grandmother, and I was suddenly overcome with an urge to pull everything out of her, the breathing tube, the feeding tube, the tubes for the saline and the antibiotics and the sedatives and the food and the heart medication. And the oxygen. All of them. I just wanted to rip them all out and let her die.

I finally had to leave the room and walk down the hall. A nurse talked me down.

***

I will fast forward a bit more.

The three brothers finally convened and came, albeit from different directions at different speeds, to the same point. We were unanimous, though we took no joy in our common ground. We asked the hospital to invoke her living will and remove her from life support.

It was, of course, not as simple as that. It was a wrenching, difficult time. The doctors and the nurses, though, were right there with us. They knew what they were doing. We were blessed. So was my mother. But she hung on.

***

My brothers did not watch as Tessie, my mom’s nurse, removed all of the tubes and lines into her body.

It was not something that bothered me really. There was something relieving about it, knowing that she no longer had all those things going into her neck and arms and side.

A minister had come. He was the true blessing of the day. A man who had met Mom a couple of times but in that short period had sized her up as a straight shooter. “I knew where I stood with your Mom,” he said. “I like people like that.”
He was waiting in her room when we had left our final meeting with the doctors. They had given a rather blunt assessment, that if she was lucky, if everything went well, if she even made it out of ICU, she probably would have at least six months to a year in a nursing home and then live out the rest of her time in an assisted living situation. That is if she hadn’t suffered “neurological damage,” a euphemism and an explanation, perhaps, of why she had not come out of a coma or semi-coma in the three weeks she’d been in the hospital – even for the period when they’d removed the feeding tube and the respirator and had stopped the sedatives.

She never spoke to me again. She never seem to realize who I was.
I remember once leaning into her, my face six inches from hers and feeling that she was responding. That she seemingly was answering my questions with movements of her head and eyelids. To test this impression, I went to the other side of the bed and her head didn’t follow me and she stared exactly the same way she had before, as if I were there, and her head and eyelids made the exact same movements they had before.

So when Tessie removed the tubes I felt relief. It had been a long time of it. She’d had enough.

My brothers and I never talked about it but I’m sure we all wanted her to go right away, the minister there, we standing by her side. But she didn’t go that way. She hung on as she always did.

We stayed there for hours, nearly six hours. The minister stayed, too, a tribute to him, to his sense of his own calling, to his kindness. He finally had to leave and soon after my brothers and I decided to go home for supper.

After dinner, they decided they’d had enough, that they had said their goodbyes and didn”t need to go back. So I decided to go back by myself.

The nurse that night was named Mark. He was a warm and gracious man who had spent quite a bit of time in hospice. When I called from my brother’s house to ask how she was, he asked me how I was doing. He asked how my brothers were doing.

I told him I was thinking of coming back, and he said I should do what I felt was right, that there was no wrong way to do this. He told me to tell my brothers that, too. When I told him my brothers were staying back, he said, good. If that’s how they’re feeling, that is the right choice to make.

I told him I was coming.

Good, he said. I will see you soon.

When I got to the hospital room he did something I hadn’t expected. We stood beside my mother’s bed, the lights darkened, her breathing developing a slow rattle as she descended. Mark asked me to describe my Mom, to tell him stories about her. “I want to know who she is; I want more than just a name and a number on a sheet of paper.”

So I told him stories. I told him how my Mom lived to care for us, for her husband, my Dad, who’d had polio when he was 34 and was just beginning his practice of medicine in the country. She helped him recover, gave him daily therapy, drove him to his housecalls, helped him rid his body of the morphine they’d given him in his nine months in the hospital. When he recovered fully, she stepped away but was always there to catch him.

I told him how much she liked tennis and sailing and horseback riding, how she loved to start things, business things, and always had a way to wheedle some money out of someone if she was raising money for a good cause, any cause, really.

My Mom was from a socialite background, I said, but I always felt she was more comfortable with farmers.

Mark interrupted me, as he did from time to time, and turned to my Mom and tell her, loudly, that “your son is here, Sally. He is telling me what a great lady you are.” She was always included.

At some point, I told Mark I wanted to try something and I pulled out my son’s I-pod. We taped the ear bud next to her ear on the pillow and set it for my uncle playing Eric Satie.

“Now that’s how I’d like to go,” Mark said, “with Satie in my ear.”

I told Mark about her buddy Willie, a dairy farmer who had died a decade or so ago. My Mom loved to see him driving in on his tractor or if she heard him come down the road she’d find some excuse to go out and chat. And boy could she chat.

My Mom loved to talk and the amazing thing was how much she could find out about whomever was listening. It was always great wonderment to us.

I grew tired after a while and Mark said he’d leave us alone. I stood over her and talked with her and told her how much we were with her and that she could settle in and relax. I stroked her hair and her forehead. I switched her music for a while, first to Copeland and then to Jasha Heifitz playing Beethoven’s Concerto. I also played for her some Will Ackerman, a guitarist from Vermont who, by coincidence, was a big fan of the Satie album of my uncle’s.
I was visited during the night by two others: the resident and the surgeon on duty. They asked Mark if they could come in, and they did the same drill, asking me about my Mom, turning to say something to her, including her in the conversation.

To them, I also told of her last years, of how she had to be moved out of her house, into a retirement community. She tried hard; she made friends, but inside, deep,deep inside, she yearned to be back home, back with the people who really knew her, where her identity had been shaped by her life in one town for more than 50 years.

Time passed.

By 2 a.m. I was in a chair and Mark had brought pillows and a blanket, and I sat there and watched my Mom and thought about all those times she had sat with me. I watched her monitor, noticing the hitches in her heartbeat, wondering, at each one, whether this was going to be her last.

It is bizarre, really, watching someone die nowadays. We have become so digitally inured that the bleeps and waves on the monitor carry all sorts of images, memories, not the least of which are TV shows of emergency rooms, ICUs. Was this real?

I needed to sleep.

I stood up and kissed my mom and went down the hall to the waiting room and curled up on the couch. Mark said he’d come and get me if things changed.
I awoke often. I padded down the hall in my socks to her room in ICU, nodded to the nurses and went in to check and give her a kiss. Then I would shuffle back to the couch.

At about 6 a.m., the sky getting light outside, Mark came in. “It’s getting near,” he said. “You need to get up and go see her.”

The doctor was in the room. I went right to my Mom and did something she used to do to me as a child when I was in bed, sick: I pressed my forehead against hers. I was always convinced we could hear each other think, and it was such a warm, comfortable, intimate touch, my forehead to hers. I said aloud the name of every member of our family and then every friend of hers I could think of. And when I was done, when I could think of no more, I told her that we all loved her, that we were with her, that it was time to go, it was time to be with Dad.

She took two breaths, the last one deeper than the first, and died. Just like that.
I looked up and saw the lines were flat and looked over at the nurse and the doctor and then pressed my forehead against hers. I sent her all my thoughts, everything that could go between brain and bone and skin.

Goodbye.

I looked up to find that the nurse and the doctor had left; the door gently pulled shut. I looked out the wide bay window at the horizon and there, just as if planned, the sun was rising. I went to the window and pulled the opaque blinds and watched the sun rise, the wave of exhaustion and sadness overtaking me in great sobs. But when I turned, when I saw the beautiful light pouring into the room, turning it a glorious gold, the sadness left me, just like that. I was inexplicably joyous.

She’s free. She’s finally, finally free.

The doctor and nurse had returned. Tears streamed down their faces, and we all hugged. It’s a beautiful way to go, I said.

***

Later that day, I drove home. I don’t know how I kept from falling asleep, but I did.

I came home in part to see my wife and my children and to tend to some things that simply needed to be done. One of them was to buy a suit. And here’s a Vermont story, as in, only in Vermont.

I bought a new suit at Filene’s. The sales clerk was a Tibetan who I had met years ago. In his native country he was a man of importance, a religious man, a healer. Now he is a sales clerk with four proud years at Filene’s.

On this night, when he had all the men’s department -- shoes and suits and underwear and ties and everything, there seemed an endless stream of helpless men needing something.

My wife finally told him that we were going to look for suits, that we needed something off the rack because my Mom had died and I needed something for the funeral.

We found what we needed and the clerk, Sonam, who had been able to help us off and on, rang up the clothes. After we paid, as he handed the suit to me, he said, “I’m sorry, but I want you to know that I have been saying a prayer for your Mom from the very moment your wife told me she had died. I have a prayer and I said it over and over and over, right here, while I was doing all this, I kept saying it.

“In my faith, we believe that everyone goes on to another life, and the prayer is for their safe passage, their smooth passage to the next life.”

I told him of her passing, of dawn’s light coming as she died.

He put his hands together, as in prayer, and smiled.

“That is very good. In my faith, that is a very good omen, a very treasured moment. It means the death was without conflict, that she will have a very smooth passage. That is very good.”

Spiritual solace from Filene’s. No extra charge. God is great.