What We Lose(15)

In the bedroom, there was a camera set up to the side of the bed. I saw the red light blinking, already turned on.

“Is this all right?” Liz asked.

I wasn’t sure if it was. She kissed me and we fell to the bed. Patrick joined in, tearing our clothes off like we were Christmas presents. We made love for two hours, and when it was done I was satisfied, but more important, my mind was empty, my lips tingling.

I fell asleep and awoke at dawn. I dressed while Liz and Patrick were still sleeping, their arms crossed over each other. I caught the 7:00 a.m. bus back over to my side of town. My father would be eating breakfast then, almost ready to leave for work. From the bus, I watched the sun rise over city hall. The bus was nearly empty. There was no one around to see me cry.



That night, I didn’t eat. I collapsed early and slept into the late morning. My father spent the night at the hospital with my mother while I rested at home. My father called from the hospital in the morning to say that my mother had had an accident.

He was in the hospital room, waiting with the nurses to decide their next move. He lowered his voice so that no one else could hear.

“Can you bring me a change of clothes?” he said.

She had peed all over the bed and her clothes, and when he tried to clean the mess before the nurses came in, it got all over him. His voice cracked, and he began to cry. He put the phone down.

I packed him a shirt and sweater from his closet and some new pants from his drawer. I headed to the hospital, fighting off the image of my mother and father covered in her piss.

By the time I arrived, they had fitted her with a catheter tube.

“No more accidents,” the male nurse said, smiling, trying to be upbeat. I imagined the painful method by which he had connected the catheter to my mother’s bladder. From the bottom of her blanket ran a tube connected to a clear plastic container tied to the foot of her bed.

I sat in a chair by her right side while my dad changed in the bathroom in the hall. When he returned, the doctors told us she wouldn’t wake up after this. I wondered if she could hear, if she knew what was going on, and I decided it was better if she didn’t. I decided not to think anymore. I stared at the urinal, the tubing, not watching, not reacting. The room smelled acrid because she had a bacterial infection, which was forcing her into a coma. I let the smell overwhelm me until I couldn’t smell it anymore. The stench was nothing more than molecules moving in and out of my nostrils, the scene nothing more than light reflected off objects alive and inanimate, some dying.



We moved her to a hospice in downtown Philadelphia, across the street from one of the cafés I used to visit when I was a teenager. She was taken there from the hospital by ambulance, by two young women around my age—one of them larger, darker-skinned, with hair gelled to her forehead in plastic-looking curlicues. They wore smiles to which I had no concept of how to respond and joked in a careful way with me and my dad. I imagined them being trained to handle families with extreme sensitivity: You can use humor, but not too much. Stick to neutral subjects, nothing controversial.

My father rode in the ambulance while I waited outside the hospital, under the neon EMERGENCY sign. After I’d spent twenty minutes in the cold, my mother’s best friend pulled up in front of me in her old Chrysler.

She cried as she turned the wheel, almost running red lights. We didn’t speak. Her car smelled stale, of smoke. The oldies station played on the radio: Al Green beneath a light layer of static.



The hospice was a new place on the top floor of a cold brick building with few windows. When we arrived, a tie-dyed social worker tried to steer me into a cheerily lit kids’ room. The staff had a phrase for what was happening to my mom—“the dying process”—and they said the words like they should be followed by a ?. Like she was in the process of walking to the store or buying groceries. Just another thing that humans do.

While my father was out grabbing us prepared sandwiches for dinner, I crept into her room. I closed the door and shoved a chair against the doorknob so no one could enter. I had many things I wanted to say. Some sleepless nights ago, I’d made a list of all the things I needed to apologize for, all the things I needed to tell her I forgave her for. But as I stood there with those mathematics in hand, the weight of the moment on me, I said nothing. And when I tried to speak, only tears came. The pain was exponential. Because as much as I cried, she could not comfort me, and this fact only multiplied my pain. I realized that this would be life; to figure out how to live without her hand on my back; her soft, accented English telling me Everything will be all right, Thandi. This was the paradox: How would I ever heal from losing the person who healed me? The question was so enormous that I could see only my entire life, everything I know, filling it.



They gave me a stapled book on “the dying process.” I read about symptoms that occur in people who are dying. It described what to expect at intervals of months, weeks, and days before a person dies from illness or old age. It said that the person will stop eating meat, and then vegetables, and then they will be able to eat only a few bites of very soft food. And then they will eat nothing. They will sleep most of the day, with their eyes half open and unseeing, glassy. As the person begins to sleep more hours of the day than they are awake, they will become disoriented, as their dreams become merged with our world, and they prepare to live in the other world—the afterlife—forever.