Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(33)

    I didn’t feel sad that my mom was going to die; I felt sad that no one in my family seemed prepared for it. When I saw my sisters suffering at the prospect of her leaving, I felt like they hadn’t learned their lesson the last time. There was my lack of empathy again. Never understanding that other people may be receiving things differently.

That’s okay, I told myself. I didn’t need my sisters to be fighters. I have enough spinach for all of us.

Death.

This, I know how to do.

Move over, everyone.



* * *



? ? ?

I went straight to the hospital when I flew in from London, where I found my brother Glen and my dad sitting in a hospital room like two useless cartoon characters, with my mother lying there half-unconscious, weak, and listless—with a fucking roommate who had visitors who reeked of cigarettes. My mom hated cigarettes.

I may as well have seen a priest raping a child. The hell I raised at the nurses’ station was so disruptive and hair-raising that there were people who didn’t come back to work the next day—or maybe ever.

    I remember Glen grabbing me by the shoulders in the hallway, telling me I had to calm down, and a nurse threatening to remove me from the hospital if I didn’t, and me telling her that she would be the one getting removed. The next thing I remember was wheeling my mother’s hospital bed into the hallway while I instructed my father and Glen to grab onto any machines that were attached to her body and to follow my lead.

For the record, I would like to state that never in the history of humankind has a woman been told to calm down and then calmed down. We don’t like that.

Once we got my mom situated in a private room down the hall, I got into bed next to her. She put her hand in mine and said in the thirstiest of sounds, “Please help me die.”

This was the opportunity to show my mother that she could depend on me, that for all the times I fucked up and for all the grief I caused her by never listening to anything either of my parents ever said and constantly getting into trouble in and out of school—that for her last wish, I was listening and I would show up. I was going to prove that she wasn’t wrong about me. That finally she could depend on me. Those were my marching orders, and I wasn’t going to leave until I had fulfilled her request. It didn’t occur to me that she may have said that to all my siblings, looking for anyone to bite.

She spent the next week in her private room, surrounded by her children. I slept on the bed next to her every night. Sometimes, in the morning, I’d leave her side after her first dose of morphine—when she would drift away again—to go to the cafeteria for some eggs, and then be sick at myself for having an appetite. I would remind myself that I needed to stay strong to help my mother die. I was in full-on Joan of Arc mode, and I was not going to make dying a problem for my mother. I hadn’t been so laser-focused on anything in my life, ever.

    The one time I left her to go home and take a shower, I came back to find her covered in her own vomit, most of it pooled in her newly cavernous collarbones—like two gravy boats. My father was sitting with all four corners of the newspaper facing her—as if he were in his own living room—and hadn’t even noticed. He was proving to be as useless as a gorilla underwater, and took up about the same amount of space. I never left her alone with the nurses—or my father—again.

In between bouts of unconsciousness, she would spring to life and utter these fully formed sentences that would render you speechless.

“Once I’m gone, you’re going to find out what a piece of work your father is, and I will be laughing at you from heaven,” she’d say. Then she’d turn her head, close her eyes, and drift off again, and I’d be left sitting there, looking at my clueless father reading the op-ed page.

I remember looking at her, wondering how she could be so sharp and so with it, while also floating in and out of consciousness. I learned that people have moments of clarity when they’re dying, called “terminal lucidity.” Or that they’ll sometimes seem like they’re getting better only to fall further the next day, kind of like a death rally.

    “You don’t know your own strength,” she said to me one afternoon, squeezing my hand. “Please use it for something good. I know you are going to have a big life, but don’t forget about your brothers and sisters. And promise me you’ll always wear your seatbelt.”

“Get a spoon,” she said to me with her eyes closed, the day I was cleaning the vomit out of her collarbones. Then she opened her eyes and said, “Promise me you’ll take care of Roy and Shana.”

I had no idea my mom thought I was capable of taking care of anyone, but she empowered me to think that I was, thus creating the certainty that I would be able to do so.

One day she brushed my cheek with the back of her hand and said, “He needs to let me go.”

I looked at my father, who was sitting five feet away—in his diurnal spot, always with the newspaper, this time with a half-eaten Egg McMuffin sitting on his knee. The fact that he hadn’t inhaled it in one fell swoop meant that he must have had another meal on the way over.

“You need to say goodbye to Mom,” I told him. “She needs you to let her go.”

He peeked over the top of the newspaper to make sure he’d heard what he thought he heard.