Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(34)

“Keep her alive, no matter what. She can be on life support.” I got up and ripped the paper down the middle, with my hands trembling. It was dramatic, but my mom deserved drama. She had put up with too much shit from both me and my father for way too long. If there was ever a time she would accept a fuss being made over her, it was in her death—and by one or both of the people that caused her the most grief.

    “Keep her alive, no matter what?” I was standing in his face and his eyes widened. “Do you know how selfish that is?”

“I’ve got to go show a car,” he announced, bracing himself to get up from the chair he was smothering. My father never sat in a chair. He assaulted it, and the chair was seldom the same.

“A car?”

“Yeah, a guy called me about a car. He’s in West Orange.”

That was when I knew my father wasn’t equipped to deal with what was happening. Death had happened once, and he didn’t like the way that turned out, so it wasn’t going to happen again. I thought about how sad men are. How little they know about helping women with their feelings. I realize it’s not entirely their fault, because they’re wired differently and they’ve been raised for thousands of years to act like this, but it’s still hard when you see it up close and personal—especially when it’s your own father.

“Okay,” I told him. “Go do that. Mom and I will probably just go waterskiing.”



* * *



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There were supposed to be four hours between drips of morphine, but when she was uncomfortable, I would summon the nurse, who would come in and reiterate to me that it had been only two hours since her last dose.

    “Do you have a fucking mother?” I wailed. I hadn’t left the hospital for five days and was starting to look like Gary Busey.

The nurses had stopped communicating with me soon after I arrived, and I can’t blame them, but a four-hour pain-medication protocol when someone is clearly dying is a set of rules that needs to be changed. We should be allowed to help one another die. We shouldn’t have to scream and yell and throw tantrums, but obviously in the interim, I am and will always be a person willing to take on that role. There are things you can do for other people that you can never do for yourself.

Whenever I have trouble standing up for myself (it’s happened), I think about whether I would tolerate the situation if it were happening to one of my sisters, mother, daughter, or niece. If it’s not acceptable for them, it’s not acceptable for me. I was born with a torch in my hand, and I haven’t always used it so judiciously, but this was an instance where I needed to protect my mother—because she didn’t have the strength to protect herself. She never did. She was never like that. She was shy, demure, soft-spoken, sweet, mushy, and full of womb-like feelings. She was always there for a hug or a cuddle, but I couldn’t ask her for advice. She had been sidelined by my father, and the way I saw things, she had very little say in anything. If my father hadn’t really loved her, it could have been a disaster.

“Just answer the question!” I screamed at the nurse after she told me it had been only two hours since her last morphine. “Do you have a mother?”

The nurse came over and upped my mom’s morphine, and then put her hand on top of my mother’s. I saw my mom’s hand tighten around the nurse’s. “Can you imagine having a daughter like this one?” she said.

    When we were told it would only be a matter of days, we decided to transfer her to a hospice, where they would give her as much morphine as she wanted and stop trying to force-feed her. I rode in the ambulance with her head in my hands, because every time we made a turn, it felt like a coconut falling from a tree.

Once she was in hospice, none of us left again until she died. Well, my father did, because he, of course, needed to eat something in order to re-clog his arteries every few hours.

The night before my mother died, the five of us were sleeping on cots in her room. Glen and I were sleeping on one side, while Shana and Roy were on the other side of the room next to each other. Simone was sitting up in a chair.

“Chelsea,” Glen whispered. “How long do you think Shana and Roy have been sleeping together?”

“Seriously, Glen,” Simone muttered from across the room.

That’s what death is like, though. You can’t only cry for two weeks straight. You cry, and then you get tired of crying, and someone says something, and then you’re all laughing, and then it feels bad to be laughing, but it also feels so good. Without the laughter, we’d all be dying too.

The day my mother died, we were all in the room with her. Her body got cold, and Shana, being a nurse, told us what was happening. My mom was starting to turn blue, but she was always a little blue. She had an alabaster complexion. We sat and held hands and cried together, until my father interrupted us.

    “We’re going to need to discuss the funeral details,” he announced to the room with my mother’s still-warm body. “She’s got to be buried in the plot next to Chet, so it’s going to have to be a Jewish funeral.”

“But she’s Mormon,” Shana blurted. Shana was Mormon too. She had converted to Mormonism years earlier with the help of my mother. After Chet died, my mom threw in the towel on Judaism and got back to her Mormon roots. When Shana was a freshman in college at the University of Delaware, my parents got a call that she was very sick and they drove to go pick her up. After weeks of testing, they diagnosed her with lupus. They say that when there is a death in a family, it’s not uncommon for family members to develop diseases in the years following. Who knows if this is true, but five years later, Shana got lupus and then my mom got cancer. After Shana got sick, she turned to Mormonism. The Jews in our family were dropping like hot potatoes.