The doctor was slender and very black, his accent suggested he is African. He seemed hidden behind thick glasses and his doctor’s smock. “I know you want to have her in the hospital for three days so medicare will pay for rehabilitation,” he said. “If I can find something that qualifies under the Medicare guidelines I will admit her.” But he didn’t find anything. The old woman had been unable to get out of bed or stand so she was brought to the hospital. Now she had to be carried back home and put in diapers. It was a week after that when we realized she’d had a heart attack. Somehow he missed that. And the blood infection. He missed that as well.
“I would like to admit her, but there’s nothing I can do under the Medicare guidelines.”
He seemed a nervous little doctor, and spoke as if he was reciting, like a telephone solicitor who is told to stay to the script and not leave any air in the conversation for questions. On his chest there was a tight grouping of .38s from my father’s eyes. This was the same doctor who had tried to send her home because there was nothing wrong with her awhile back. Another doctor came in, fortunately, and swabbed her nose. She had a particularly virulent case of flu. Now the nervous little man with the shifting eyes was once again sending her away, but there was nobody else on duty to countermand it this time.
The old woman being shuffled around was my mother, not an unwilling participant in the death process, her health having failed steadily since a stroke left her unable to walk without a walker about five years ago. She took physical therapy and was almost walking again when she got the flu. As she was recovering from the flu she was left in an examining room and told she could sit on the table. She climbed up, on to the covering of slick paper, then she slid off, badly slashing her leg on a protruding metal part. After that she was mostly confined to a wheelchair, watching reruns of Bonanza and Gunsmoke, or doing crossword puzzles. “I’m just waiting to die, now,” she said, “but you can’t just make it happen.”
She died last night when no family was there. The report was that she died peacefully, in her sleep. My sister wondered aloud if they might have put something in the drip, like a muscle relaxant. I had wondered the same thing. A little valium maybe. Just enough to ease the heart into stopping for the last time. Maybe or maybe not, but we hope it is true that she passed peacefully, in her sleep, because that is how she wanted to go.
After my little sister arrived, we had a coffee at Starbucks, and shared our feelings of confusion and even guilt that we are not more upset by mother’s dying. We both feel it was her time and she was ready and even eager to leave. We are aware that others around us might find us unfeeling. Her death is no tragedy for us, but what should be at this time.
Maybe we will feel differently later, at the funeral, when mother’s body is there, and we have to say goodbye. But now we both feel curiously proud of her for living her life until it became untenable to sustain it, and then exiting in peace. I saw what her body had become, the one that died. It was in pain. The lumbar spine was compressed and her legs were in pain. The heart was weak. The skin was blotched and bruised from blood thinners. Her upper back had humped outward. The digestive system wasn’t working well. And finally she was unable to stand, and had to wear diapers.
That was what died.
What remains is relieved of that leaky old vessel, and the spirit fills me at times with energetic memory of when she was young, and hopeful, and though she could not use many of her gifts, was limited by her status and gender, she gave some of them to me for safekeeping. She gave me a sense of joy and fun and irreverence. I passed them along to my daughter. What is denied in women is passed along to new generations of women.
I do not miss mother, because I do not find her missing. If anything the escape from that broken body brought her more fully and delightfully into my awareness. I am thinking of what my friend and client, Letticia, said on Thursday, after the doctor had called me and told me my mother was dying. Lettie said, “I think of my dad every day, Dan. And you know, I didn’t think of him every day when he was alive. But now, I do.” I started back on Friday morning.
While I was driving, I talked to my dad and he said mom was doing better and had been talking and eating. The crisis had passed he said, and she would be moving to a nursing home soon. That was just four or five hours before he called me again and told me she passed away. His voice was often overwhelmed by emotion.
Sometimes emotion comes which freezes me in time, waiting for enough composure to continue a thought. I am in no hurry. I will stay in that space so long as it holds me. Interestingly, it was in that moment of knowing death had come, that life, also, asserted itself. Linda and I spoke of the children and of the grandchildren. We agreed that our son is amazing to us. We both see him as having an extraordinary blend of qualities.
We spoke of each child, each grandchild, in turn, and we shared our joys and our fears as regards them. It is a time of blessing, and one of those rare moment in which one can bless, and be blessed. And above the blessing there is a spirit, now free. We will ritually deal with the remains, and celebrate what is contained in a life, in its time.