The Long Goodbye (11 page)

 

 

Things My Mother Said:

To my father: “All right, I'll go to bed, but only if I can walk backward.”

To all of us: “I'd really like to get into a nice pair of terjamas.”

To the three-year-old daughter of a friend at her school: “I have a boo-boo, too.”

 

 

O
NE OF THE IDEAS I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. If I work hard, I will be spared, and I will get what I desire, finding the cave opening over and over again, thieving life from the abyss. This sturdy belief system has a sidecar in which superstition rides. Until recently, I half believed that if a certain song came on the radio just as I thought of it, it meant that all would be well. What did I mean? I preferred not to answer that question. To look too closely was to prick the balloon of possibility. I also held the delusion that the imperfect could be fixed by attention. And so in the hospital I was always eager to show the nurses what I knew, how much I had learned, including the fact that I had to prostrate myself before their wisdom, experience, and sore feet. I was the model relative, slipping out along the linoleum hallway in my thick stay-over socks, delicately catching the attention of the receptionist and saying, “I see that my mother's morphine is about to run out. I wonder if someone could change it before it starts beeping and wakes her—I know,” leaning in confidingly, like a student bowing her head to a good teacher, “that we need to stay
ahead
of the pain.” I would pause a beat. “I know you're all so busy, I just don't want my mother”—a slight stress on the word, another pause, almost imperceptible, so that the nurse could think
my mother my mother
and remember her own mother, who perhaps had cradled her and nursed her, the only relationship like that we have, mysterious, impenetrable, luxurious— “to suffer.” And I'd exhale. And the strapped receptionist wouldn't smile, but she would say, “I'll try to signal the floor nurse for you, honey.”

Doctors and nurses are the family members' priests: we supplicate them, please let us go, just let us go home, we recite their catechism, we assure them we will not blame them, we just want her to be at home, we will not sue you. These nurses were our benefactors. They were the ones who did all the work. The doctors knew things but Had to Get On. The nurses administered the morphine. They adjusted the bed. They washed my mother and helped her take a shower. They were a sorority, eager, optimistic, burned-out. I liked the receptionist. She was tough, and she saw through my wheedling show, but she helped me anyway, because she understood that underneath the performance lay not manipulation but desperation. In these moments, sliding back to my mother's room, past the room of another woman dying of cancer whose daughter, about my age, much taller, elegant and thin, showed up regularly with her two young children, and irregularly with her husband, and who caused, in me, a flicker of envy, of what-might-have-been, a whiff of the perennial outsider, so that even here, even now, where I knew we were facing the Real Deal, where I was being changed, altered, every day by it, I would experience the exact same twinge I used to feel in eighth grade at the sight of a peer who was put together and clean-limbed in all the ways I never felt, and here she was, yet again, taunting me with her family, her two ten-fingered and ten-toed children, as she, like me, bent, adjusted pillows, brought flowers, cajoled nurses.
Your grief is not like mine,
I thought spitefully.
You're going home to your family. I am newly divorced. I have no family. All I have is this: I have devoted myself to understanding death so that afterward I can say that I was there, fully there.
And in this perverse manner I somehow believed, and still do, sitting here with my books and my words, using my mind to scavenge every last scrap of meaning from the bones of these old ways, that I could lift the window in that dim, grimy Bridgeport hospital room and take my mother's bony hand and slip out, out into the street, past the hospital awning into the royal purple evening and then out into the sea, the dark green sea.

And then the noises would return. I could hear the coughing man whose family talked about sports and sitcoms every time they visited, sitting politely around his bed as if you couldn't see the death knobs that were his knees poking through the blanket, but as they left they would hug him and say, We love you, and We'll be back soon, and in their voices and in mine and in the nurse who was so gentle with my mother, tucking cool white sheets over her with a twist of her wrist, I could hear love, love that sounded like a rope, and I began to see a flickering electric current everywhere I looked as I went up and down the halls, flagging nurses, little flecks of light dotting the air in sinewy lines, and I leaned on these lines like guy ropes when I was so tired I couldn't walk anymore and a voice in my head said:
Do you see this love? And do you still not believe?

I couldn't deny the voice.

Now I think: That was exhaustion.

But at the time the love, the love, it was like ropes around me, cables that could carry us up into the higher floors away from our predicament and out onto the roof and across the empty spaces above the hospital to the sky where we could gaze down upon all the people driving, eating, having sex, watching TV, angry people, tired people, happy people, all doing, all being—

Of course this didn't happen; I got the nurse, and she replaced the morphine bag. And then my mother shuffled over to the couch with her IV pole and we curled up, and I pulled out my laptop and scooted close to her and we watched an episode of some show on DVD. Periodically the computer would freeze and we'd shake it.

I tried to sleep on the pullout couch but its plastic mattress was noisy. I made the couch back up and sat on it. Machines beeped all around me in the antiseptic hallways. Every now and then my mother moaned. I got up to give her a jolt of morphine. Outside the window lay Bridgeport Harbor, one of the least picturesque pieces of waterfront on the northeast seaboard. The city lights were a peculiar wan orange. The room in which my mother lay was functional, scattered with coyly folding plastic tables, buttons for reclining and inclining, and wee tubes of toothpaste. (You won't be needing much.) This is where we die, I thought, stripped of any fleck of the festive. Dying is bureaucratic and fluorescent. Beyond the window, a Metro-North train pulled into the station and paused. The timing was so familiar from my trips on the train to see my parents that I imagined I could hear the ding signaling the doors were about to close, and the gravelly voice announcing this was the train to New Haven. I turned the words over in my mind. I could see the small outlines of figures within, like characters in a story, a Cheever story perhaps, going home to their unhappy, flawed homes, the only homes we have on this planet, the train swinging smoothly along the tracks, lit up and shiny, silhouettes bending over their magazines and computers, pressing onward into the night.

In the morning, when she woke, she said to me, “Can you take me home, honey? I think if I go home I'll feel better. I'll be able to straighten my throat.” She gestured to her throat. “It needs to uncrinkle. Last night I dreamed that you were all in the living room with me at home, and you all were sitting in the chairs very straight, and I couldn't do it, and I was very frustrated. And you told me if I just moved chairs I'd be able to sit straight like the rest of you, and I wanted to, but I couldn't get out of my chair.”

 

 

I
GOT THE FLU my father and Eamon had. Driving back from the hospital, I developed a heavy feeling in my stomach. I went to bed early. I woke nauseated an hour later and vomited up my dinner in the toilet.

I was so sick I couldn't sleep. I threw up again and again, unable to keep water down or get as far as the bathroom. For some reason—I can't remember why, exactly, except that we were so clearly in need of help—Jim was there, and he cleaned everything up. “You don't have to do that,” I said weakly.

“It's OK,” he said matter-of-factly, wiping my vomit from the floor with an old towel. The dog came in, wagging his tail, then Eamon behind him.

Eamon knelt by my bed, almost still a child, growing into himself. “Hey Meg,” he said softly. “Hey, I think you should smoke some of this. It'll make you feel better.” He pulled a joint out of his pocket and held it up hopefully.

“It helped me when I was so sick,” he said. “I gave some to Mom and it helped her.”

“OK,” I said.

He took out his kelly-green lighter and lit it, and took a hit, the end blazing orange as a firefly. Then he handed it to me and I did, too.

Maybe I could get so stoned the hospital would recede to a tiny box, and when I returned, I'd feel like Gulliver, or a psychedelically tall Alice, able to peer down at the minuscule efforts of the medics, and think, Far out, far, far out, before returning slowly to my real life.

 

 

Then we fought, my father and I; it was snowing, my mother was in the hospital, I came home, I was tired, I had to teach, I took my mother's car. You can't take that, said my father, and I told him I wasn't a child anymore. When people are hurting they cannot always comfort one another; it was true of us. We had the same injury and different symptoms. We were on the landing; my brothers emerged from their rooms to calm us down, but we couldn't be calmed. If I'm going to help you I have to be helped in return, I said to my father, I need to borrow the car. Don't blackmail me, he said, I can't believe you would blackmail me at a time like this. Of course I was not blackmailing him but he was the bleeding front of a war, a war that was going badly, and all its resources were here, bleeding out, being badly used. I'll worry about you, and I can't have that, he said. You don't get to decide that, I said, and thought,
You don't get to decide, not just because I'm thirty-two years old, but because to live is to worry, to wonder when the last hour comes, as it one day will
. I thought of us fishing together in the past that was now always past except when we remembered it, him showing me how to thread the line, all the hours still to be used before both of us, the sun shining more shimmeringly in memory than it ever could now. But I was bereft and that made me cold and I had no sympathy for him, I was just alight with anger.

Now I think it was cowardly of me—so cowardly—not to have paused to imagine how terrified he was. But to get through the awful days I had to be persuaded of the absolute reality of the tunnel I crawled through. Otherwise I might have merely fallen to the ground in despair.

 

 

The insurance company was dragging its feet about the hospital bed. And so she couldn't leave on Friday. On Sunday I went back to Brooklyn, exhausted, to get clothes and do some work. My father and brothers got her home on Monday.

She called me. “I'm home, Meg!” she said.

A flush of happiness spread through me. She was safe. Safe with a hospital bed. A funny kind of safe, but I was glad.

By the next day, when I got back, the confusion had begun to return. Right. Her death was still going to happen.

The hospital bed has been set up in the living room, and now she divides her days between the couch in the den and the bed in the living room, a bright, open room painted a pale blue, with a picture window looking onto the lawn and the pond and a tall stand of pines. (I want to be near things that are much older than I am, she'd told me in the hospital, things that will be here after I'm gone.) We have put up Christmas decorations and they hang slightly lopsided around us, the lights sparkling on the porch as usual. But we all know that for us there will never be an as usual again.

As she sits on the couch, I bring her yogurt and rub her feet with lavender lotion. She sighs. It is the only thing I can do that brings her pleasure.

I keep counting minutes under my breath, telling myself,
She is still here
.

Every morning the hospice nurse comes for two hours. Each visit starts the same way: On a scale of one to ten, Barbara, with one being the lowest and ten being the highest, how bad is your pain? They say it fast and singsong, like a prayer or a sales pitch. My mother takes to holding up her fingers, not bothering to speak: seven fingers. Soon we need the walker. Then we need the toilet adjuster, because we can't lift her off the seat. Then we need the diapers. I am glad that we have hospice. But as Liam puts it, “My friends keep saying how great it is that we have hospice. And I want to say, Have you done it? It's not exactly a cozy picnic. The word sounds so nice, like hospitality, but the reality is awful.” Yet it is far better than the alternative, we know.