At My Mother's Deathbed

The leaves of the plum tree outside the window are

Liquid-like blood spatters when the sun plays

Behind them.

I can’t remember about photosynthesis, how it works

When the leaves aren’t green.

The pillowcase under her head is a stiff, bleached field of white

Sprayed with tiny pink flowers,

Not the one from yesterday, which was, as I recall,

Blue with yellow stripes.

Memory: she took me out of school—fourth grade?  fifth?—and

We rode an AC Transit bus to the city to buy clothes at

J. Magnin, and she told me

Red wasn’t my color.

Sitting on the window sill are

Two mismatched plastic water glasses—

One a quarter full of Ensure, the other of water—

Each with a maroon-handled metal spoon

Leaning against its rim.

On the dresser, a photograph of her and my one-year-old son, who wore

A blue shirt and red Oshkosh overalls,

Very much the fashion in 1986.

Her moaning is terrible until

I ask Kathleen to give her the morphine

Half an hour early.

Her watch, which she keeps checking, is

Large-faced, with a stretchy red band.

“Twenty-five dollars at CVS,” she often told me,

Even when she could no longer remember

My son’s name.

Another memory: she taught me to play mahjong

When I was nine, then waited for me to come home

So we could set up tiles on the table in front of

French doors that opened onto the fern garden. 

Winds, dragons, flowers.

Bam, crack, dot.

“Real players play it faster,” she

Liked to let me know.

She was born when Woodrow Wilson was president.

Her fingers look just like mine.

The moaning is terrible.  She is pulling at the sheet.

“We’ll call the nurse,” Kathleen says.

The painting on the wall is one she

Painted of our house in 1964.

In it, the green leaves of trees—

Whose conversion of light into chemical energy I

Understand—shimmer.

Through the window of my father’s study,

Pens and pencils bloom

In a squat, red pot.

She took a class through Adult Ed.  One class.

The red doesn’t mean anything.  It is just

What was,

The truth around us on

Those days. 

I thought writing it down would

Safeguard the details of grief,

The minutia of loss,

Would remind me how I felt, watching

The empty gaze,

The caving-in of skin over bone,

The arms vainly flailing,

The rattle-y slowing-down.

But it is already fading, all that.

And what I mainly remember is hopefully modeling the plaid dress 

In the tiny, mirrored room, 

And then my heart shriveling in my chest as she told me, authoritatively, that

I should try on something blue instead.

First Thoughts on the Death of My Mother

She died.  My mother died.

It still feels weird to say.

She died Sunday, June twenty-first, at about 1:30 in the afternoon.  I wasn’t there, although I’d been with her every day for the past three weeks, but when I got the call, I went up and sat with her at the Board and Care before she was taken away.   I was afraid, kind of: I’d never seen a dead person before.  And she looked really dead.  Not herself.  Her mouth was open.  Her hand, when I held it, was icy, just as I thought and couldn’t quite believe it would be.

I sat with her again the next day, at the mortuary, with my ex-husband, who wanted to see her.  She looked better than the day before.  Actually, she looked quite beautiful.  My ex-husband and I had a lovely conversation for about twenty minutes, and afterward we both said we almost expected her to sit up and participate.

Everything around the death of someone close to you is surreal and odd.  Some of it is horrible and some of it isn’t.  Some of it makes you want to laugh, and then you feel ghoulish and heartless.  But, you know, feelings.  We get to have them.

I made all the arrangements on Monday.  On Thursday, I was driving to my early-morning spin class when I got a phone call from Marty, the mortician.  (Seriously.) 

“I’m calling to let you know that cremation is about to begin,” he intoned.

“Oh,” I said.  “Okay.”  Inside, I was like, What the fuck?   Now I have to think about this during hill surges?

Marty laughed.  “There’s no going back now!” he said, in a surreally gleeful way.

I think morticians don’t hear themselves, sometimes.

The service was nice.  Oddly nice.  My closest friends showed up even though most of them didn’t know my mother.   I saw some cousins I haven’t seen in a while.  I spoke and the rabbi said, “You done good” afterward, which was comforting, if purposely ungrammatical.  My daughter said she was proud of me.  Robert cried.  And then we had hors d’oeuvres in an oddly, surreally elegant room at a local hotel.

I have been sick since the night of the twenty-first: nothing too serious, just the sorts of things requiring doctor visits and medications that (I found out too late) interact adversely.   I Googled it and found a scientific explanation of how grief mucks around with the immune system.  It’s why people often die after their spouses of long standing have passed away.  They succumb to infections, their bacteria-killing neutrophils incapacitated.

I don’t feel as though I’m grieving.  I feel as though I’m getting on with things.  But my neutrophils know better.

People say that sitting with the dying can be beautiful.  I never understood that before, but I do now.  My mother and I had some moments—during her last hospital visit and in the Board and Care during that last week—that I will treasure for the rest of my life.  It was almost as though she was finally able take a machete to the plaques and tangles that had been gumming up her neurons for years.   I am grateful to have been there, to have seen what I saw and heard what I heard. 

I’m going to write about this more, but I think I’ve written all I can for the moment. 

Writing helps.  Eventually, writing always helps.