Exit Laughing (21 page)

She stared at me for a moment. “If there’s no damned ice,” she responded, “just hold my head underwater!”

And then we laughed. It was one of those wonderful, belly-shaking laughs that makes you feel joyful and reminds you that life is worth living. It was also the perfect entrée into a discussion about how she wanted to die, and what she wanted after death, in terms of burial or cremation, funeral or memorial service. One little laugh together became an important segue: now I knew her final wishes.

Within a few months, the aides were checking in every hour. Several times a day, I had to call them to help clean Mom and change her bedding. There was a commode next to her bed, which she hated. Looking back, I realize how quickly she went from expressing her distaste of that commode to an unawareness of its presence. I wonder if placing the commode nearby—an object she found undignified and distasteful—in some way hastened her desire to die.

I walked in one morning and found Mom chatting with one of her friends, a neighbor who had dropped by to bring her some breakfast. She had stopped eating several days earlier and we were all working together—friends, family, aides, anyone—to urge her to eat. I was delighted to see that Mom was nibbling on toast and that there was color in her cheeks. “You’re looking better today,” I declared.

“You know, I’m feeling better,” she responded, with a lilt in her voice I hadn’t heard for months.

I looked at her and smiled. “That’s too bad,” I told her, “because I need a new car.”

Her friend was shocked, perhaps even offended.

Mom and I shared a laugh. She had mentioned on many
occasions how her estate would provide a little financial cushion for me. A few times, after she offered to buy me a new car, which I didn’t need, I told her I’d wait until she died and splurge on something totally outrageous: low, fast, expensive.

As we became more comfortable with the subject of her death, I asked about her childhood in Manhattan, the acting classes with Lee Strasberg, the camp her father ran where only Yiddish was spoken and where she met my father, and memories of her marriage, motherhood, and her career as a teacher and artist. During these conversations, and often supported by anecdotes that included humor (forced or otherwise), we were able to slide quietly into discussions about our relationship, including the difficult times and wounded feelings; the pain I carried from a childhood passed with little mothering—at least, the affectionate, kisses-smothering kind—and her regrets at not having been a loving, supportive mother throughout my childhood and a good part of my adulthood.

I thought it odd at the time, but I now realize that it was because of the inherent power of humor that we were able not only to laugh together but to use that levity as a way to reveal to each other where our relationship had gone wrong. Humor softened the anger, opening a door that allowed us to step through and repair some of the damage.

While we could laugh about some things, other areas tested our patience. Mom thought I was bossy and too quick to make decisions for her. I became annoyed with her unwillingness to allow little if any wiggle room for beliefs that
diverged from her own. Art, books, philosophy—you name it. But nothing brought out the claws faster than religion.

She was not a wavering atheist whose beliefs might be jarred with one good miracle, but one of those “there is no God, no heaven and no hell” atheists. In truth, she fit very nicely into that group of “don’t give me that religion crap” atheists who denigrate anyone who dares to question the existence of a divine presence. As she moved closer to death, an interesting thing began to happen. No, my mother did not discover God. What she did discover, however, was that her belief that she would die and that would be that—forget heaven, hooking up with old friends, running into your deceased husband—unsettled her. No second chances to come back and do it right; no reincarnations to be the woman she perhaps wanted to be, which was a risk-taker and adventurer. I saw it in her face when she talked about death. Fear. Finality. Period.

It may have been my recognition of her fear of death that led me to humor, as well as my sometimes inept attempts at jollying her out of the doldrums of dying, but humor became a means to fix our damaged relationship. And then it became an energy that ran between us and allowed us to breach a wall built on more than sixty years of distrust. Humor was our shared gift. For me—and I believe for my mother as well—humor not only provided a measure of respite from the sheer pain of her illness, but eased the emotional and physical tension that comes with illness and dying.

The day I arrived and found my mother snuggled on her sofa and watching not C-SPAN but a children’s cartoon, I knew
that she was near the end of her life. “What are you watching?” I asked, and she responded, her speech labored and her voice low, “I have no idea.”

The following week, my sister arrived. Six days after that, Mom died.

Deathbed
is such a quaint word, on par with
spats, antimacassar
, or
chifforobe
. You never hear of deathbeds that are posturepedic, or sofa-bed deathbeds, or death-bunk-beds (unless, of course, you fall from the top of one). I have never seen a deathbed futon. There are no inflatable death mattresses in the LL Bean catalog, although maybe there should be, as a warning to those intrepid campers who might otherwise become s’mores for grizzlies.

There are, however, certain people who like the word
deathbed
and the attention it garners. Call her Molly. (Not so much because Ishmael was already taken, but because that was her name.)

Molly was my old friend Theresa’s aunt (all names other than Molly’s are pseudonyms), and although this is a true story, some of the details are, as the writer David Sedaris puts it, “true-ish.”

Molly was a dissatisfied, unpleasant ninety-year-old lady who lived in the Forest Overlook Care Center. (This is not only a pseudonym but also a misnomer, for the only “forest” the place “overlooked” was a single mimosa tree set into an artificial red-brick island in the middle of Queens Boulevard, and the “care” there was iffy.)

Though Molly had been at Forest Overlook for ten years, she joined in no activities, neither arts and crafts nor Ice Cream Sundaes nor Friday at the Flicks, not even when Tammy, the recreation director, managed to score some black-and-white 1940s classics, a time when (most of the residents agreed) movies told stories without all the shootings, cursing, and sex, all of that baloney garbage you get today.

According to Mrs. Feinberg, the Forest Overlook social worker (who rarely called Theresa, the oldest, most responsible niece, to complain about her aunt), Molly even ignored warmhearted Father Joe, a priest and guitarist, whom everyone at Forest Overlook adored. Father Joe, who had a standing Saturday afternoon gig in the Forest Overlook rec room, where he stood underneath the
Sound of Music
mural and played every single request. (Theresa had seen that mural once. A young art student from Queens High School had painted it, and somehow Maria Von Trapp, trapped on that wall in a weird, open-mouthed position, looked like Ozzy Osbourne.) Mrs. Feinberg said that Molly was the only resident who never came to the rec room to see Father Joe, even though week after week, before he left, Father Joe made it a point to stick his head into the doorway of Molly’s room and smile hello. “He smiles,” Mrs. Feinberg told Theresa, but Molly scowls and
gives Father Joe—the sainted Father Joe—what he himself calls “the evil stink eye.”

Theresa didn’t know what to say, other than “Aunt Molly’s always been difficult.”

“Duh,”
whispered Mrs. Feinberg, but Theresa heard her anyway and ignored it.

For entertainment, Molly watched ancient game shows (hosted by old TV personalities with terrible toupees) on the small set on her nightstand, did word puzzles, rewrote her will, and when she was bored with those things, insisted that the staff move her to another room. Each of Molly’s rooms (some of which she had lived in a half dozen times before) had a shelf life of about two months, and then Molly began complaining. The rooms were either too hot or too cold, or her roommates snored or the sitcoms they watched were idiotic, or their visitors were rude, loud, inconsiderate, and smelled of foreign food. She complained that she was too close to the elevator, or too close to the kitchen where the smell of normal American food (“such as it is in this place,” Molly said) made her sick.

It was easier for the staff to shift Molly from one floor to another, from one room to another, than listen to her complaints. The staff knew that the only time Molly’s mouth was still was when the rest of her was in motion.

Though Molly had never been married nor had any children of her own (which was just as well, since she was one of those all-too-common adults whose interest in children was mainly punitive), she did have Theresa and Theresa’s four sisters, five nieces in all, the sweet Sweeney girls. Unfortunately,
on the rare times that they were all together, Molly liked to remind the girls of their terrible past haircuts, misspent youths, their wild, old, wanton ways, then she segued into their present polyester clothes, the cheap shoes on their feet, their spoiled children, and their poor taste in husbands, all of whom she’d described, at one time or another, as “the dumbest man on God’s green earth.”

Molly’s nieces, sweet as they were, hated her, and who would blame them?

Why, even their late mother, the semibeatified, compassionate, tolerant, loving pillar of the church, Margaret Sweeney, had hated Molly too.

(On the morning after Bill Sweeney’s funeral, Margaret Sweeney, wearing a green chenille robe whose pockets bulged with sodden tissues, got out of bed, staggered into the kitchen, and picked up a Mass card someone had left on the counter. When she saw Molly’s signature scrawled across the bottom, she tore the Mass card in half and stuffed it into the garbage. “At least we’re done with that son of a bitch,” Margaret said, ignoring the shocked expressions of her five daughters who were sitting around the table amidst the unopened fruit baskets, methodically plowing their way through a pink box filled with fresh donuts, their elbows stuck to the plastic tablecloth with confectioner’s sugar.)

One winter afternoon, from her current room at the Forest Overlook, Molly called Theresa and complained (in what Theresa thought was the world’s most irritating voice) that she hadn’t seen any of her nieces for years, that their father,
her only brother, Bill, would be ashamed of all of them, that ignoring their aunt was a form of elder abuse, especially now that she was ninety years old and also on her deathbed.

Theresa, the fair, sympathetic person she is, felt guilty.

“Sometimes, the residents know more than we realize,” Mrs. Feinberg told Theresa when she called. “If your aunt says she’s dying, well, she just might be right.”

The next day, Theresa forced herself and cajoled her four sisters into leaving their twelve collective unbathed children home on Long Island in the care of those “dumb” but tired husbands, with all of their kitchen tables covered with smudged ditto sheets filled with half-assed homework. She picked everyone up, and they headed off to Queens. It was a freezing weeknight, and the sisters, except for Theresa, were drowsy and half asleep, until Exit 41N when their Dodge Caravan hit a patch of ice and for a few sickening seconds slid sideways. Then everyone sat up and suddenly came alive, an angry nest of buzzing hornets. Why were they doing this? they asked each other (while Theresa held onto the steering wheel with white knuckles). Daddy was dead, for Christ’s sake, and here they were, mothers with children, risking life and limb for the old bitch whom they hated beyond belief. She was going to hell anyway, and this was the last time they’d see her, dead or alive, since none of them was going to her wake. As far as any of them cared, they yelled (except Theresa, who had noticed a bus behind her and had started praying), “Mrs. Feinberg could stick Aunt Molly into a black Hefty bag and drag her to the curb.” If they got home alive, the younger girls said, and Theresa wanted to see
Aunt Molly ever again, she’d have to go by herself. The rest of them were O-U-T.

“Whatever,” said Theresa, praying to St. Christopher, who was now discredited, and therefore a little bit useless.

Five angry freckled faces trudged through the heavy Forest Overlook front door and into the vestibule. The sisters stepped on the Oriental rug cemented to the nonstick tile floor, past the brass flowerpot (overflowing with plastic, variegated philodendron) on the tiny cherry table, then into a lobby filled with little loveseats, all covered like matching doll furniture in the same little burgundy and navy blue itty-bitty flower print, then shrinkwrapped, somehow, in waterproof, non-glare plastic.

Into the elevator and off, down the hall the sisters went, skirting the old people double-parked in wheelchairs outside their rooms, past the empty rec room where the TV blared with ads for hair dye and frozen pizza (frantically devoured by ecstatic families gathered around banquet-sized tables in palatial kitchens).

Five sisters, even Theresa, one common thought: Freaking old freaking fuck-face Aunt Molly.

But everything changed when they got to the door of Aunt Molly’s room and found themselves face-to-face not with Aunt Molly’s cranky, scowling northern end, but her in-your-face and very naked southern end. The poor thing! they thought, seized with pity for the poor old woman with her nightgown up around her waist, her shrunken legs kicking like a Rockette, her nether parts not only shockingly bald but also very crumpled-up, looking for all the world like something that forgot to put in its teeth.

Aghast by what was before their eyes, for the Sweeney sisters were good Irish Catholic girls who had never seen such an expanse of “out-there” womanhood, not even their own (although they came of age in the feminist 1970s, not one of them had ever bought so much as a speculum), the girls rushed to the old lady’s bed so fast that they bunched up in the doorway and when they got free, Amy, the youngest, was sent flying halfway across the room.