Seventeen Years Later, She Died

After a long illness, my mom’s death still felt shockingly absurd and poignant.

They call me at 10 am to tell me my mom is dying. Finally, finally dying. After 17 years of convalescence, of broken hips and pneumonia and “Your mom has another UTI,” this is finally it. She’s stopped eating and drinking over the weekend, and hospice says I should come in the next 24 hours. 

I send one more email and review my notes for the job interview that I’ll now take on the road somewhere between Tucson and Benson, Arizona. 

Barely thinking, I shove 2 shirts, 6 pairs of pants (!), my Granny’s antique lacquered pill box, and my earbuds into a duffle bag. Just before I open the door to the garage I catch a whiff of poetic opportunity and chuck my laptop into the sack so I can trap the moment in free verse. In hindsight, this seems like the most pathetic avarice, my lust to find beauty in Mom’s deathbed vigil.

I answer the HR director’s call with my cruise control set at 85 mph, feeling removed from the ocotillos and creosote whooshing past my windshield. 

I’m sorry I had to take this call on the road, I confess. It’s just I have a family emergency so I’ve got to drive.

Oh, well, we can do this next week, he says amiably.

No, no! I’m very excited about this opportunity and I think the reception should be fine on my phone.

We’ll make it work then, he says, and tells me he’ll just be asking a series of questions to see if I’m a fit for the company culture. Then he lobs me the question I’d prepared for before I learned my mom was dying.

Sure, let me tell you about my background as a professional writer, I reply with a smile. I rattle off my slightly embellished accomplishments to my new friend Evan at the other end of the line whose ‘uh huhs’ and ‘I sees’ indicate that he’s pleased this wasn’t a wasted screening call. I congratulate myself for taking the call despite the chaos and begin imagining my new employer’s benefits package–real insurance, PTO, maybe even a 401(k) contribution–when he stops me.

Wait, can you clarify? This job is in West Hollywood and you’ll need to come into the office three times a week, he says.

But…the job was posted as Remote, I say, braking my cruise for the semi-truck that cuts me off. 

Oh, I’m very sorry if that was not more clear, he backpedals.

More clear?, I think bemused. He’s seen my resume with an Arizona mailing address and the business locations of my most recent employers. Or did he not even bother to read the thing?  

Well, huh, is all I can manage to say, feeling as if the wave of fatalism I’d been swimming against since 10 a.m. when I got the call about Mom is now finally cresting over me. Thanks for your time, I spit out, and for a brief second, I imagine Albert Camus is sitting shotgun and I reach over to poke him in the rib and then we share a chuckle together. In real life, HR Evan returns the nicety, we both hang up, and I switch cruise control on again.

***

When I get there, my mom’s dearest friend, Patti, sits by her bedside, eyes pinked and puffed from crying. I feel ashamed that mine are not the same, but it’s not surprising since I’m rarely able to muster tears at the right time. 

I glance at Mom who usually greets me with a lopsided smile and a loud, Hey Katherine–I adore you! but now lies quiet. Two tiny slivers of white eyeballs peek out from beneath her closed lids as if even they are too tired to do their job and properly shut. Her cheeks are pronounced, her mouth slack and crooked. A sour odor crouches beneath her blankets.

Because they told me she might die in the next 24 hours, I plan on staying the night at the nursing home. But when asked, the nurses, though sweet and attentive in many ways, deny that the facility is in possession of a cot or recliner or anything for me to lay on through the night. When I learn this, the same moving-through-Jello feeling washes over my brain again like it did at the end of my road trip screening call. This can’t be the first occasion that a skilled nursing facility has hosted a family member who wants to stay with a dying patient, right? But I can’t marshal a response stronger than perplexity, so Patti calls her husband who brings a lawn chair from their own patio for my bedtime vigil. 

Imagine me, then, tossing and turning on the rubberized netting of a lawn chair, mummified in nursing home sheets, occasionally shining my phone’s flashlight on Mom to make sure she’s still breathing.

All this and I’m still annoyed with myself that I can’t get any shut-eye, because, since my struggle with postpartum insomnia, sleep has become performative and mysteriously twisted up in my self-concept. After a night of insomnia, I feel significantly closer to death, and that’s on an ordinary day when I’m not lying next to a dying woman. Not Camus, tho. He’s slumped over and fast asleep in my mom’s wheelchair.

My brother’s flight finally lands at midnight and he Ubers from the airport to see Mom, assuming she’ll pass away that night, too. He kisses her forehead, takes one look at me on my “bed,” and lovingly commands that I leave and get some rest because from his vantage point, she seems strong enough to survive until morning. It’s not a hard sell. 

***

I have some holy water, a voice says to me the next morning. 

I’m sitting on the lawn chair, chugging McDonald’s coffee, eyes bloodshot like Elmer Fudd after an episode involving Bugs Bunny and a few sticks of TNT. My brother paces the small room, cradling his phone by the shoulder while speaking to the funeral home.

The voice belongs to a small, silver-haired woman who stands in the doorframe behind me, holding a white, nondescript flask. She’s demure, uncertain if she should interrupt us, but I smile and she explains that her husband is in Room 324 right across the way from us, and she’s heard about my mother through the assisted-living grapevine. 

Yes, thank you for thinking of that, I say, and she offers the flask to me with such tenderness and faith that I want to cry on her shoulder right then and there. But my brother gets off the call and that cues her to bow out and give us privacy, so I regain my composure. 

Protestant-clueless as I am, I hold the flask like it’s a foreign object, like a new dad might hold a pump full of breastmilk. I pivot stiffly, walk over to the bed and then shake it above Mom’s forehead like I’m peppering a dish to bring out its flavor. Nothing happens except that I have a compulsion to drag my fingers across her blankets in the shape of the cross, so I obey it.

***

There’s nothing for me to do, really. Just crouch here on this lawn chair and watch your ragged, erratic breaths. 

I’m enthralled and bored and impatient. 

And I’m ashamed to admit it but I loathe what I see: your body bent, flesh mottled, features asymmetrical. 

Yet hopelessly loved. 

Until now, painstakingly preserved.

I need an escape from what you’re modeling for me: that there is an End, a real and absolute end to sunrises and coffee brewing and the reward that follows toil, and cat naps and pillow fights and the weight of my sleeping child’s body on my own flesh-built rib cage.

I’m used to you not really living a normal life like mine. 17 years of walking nursing home floors has taught me to make my peace with it, or, more likely, become numb to it. 

What I can’t accept is you dying like everyone else does, including, one day, me.

Once again, you’ve disregarded my feelings and I just have to sit and take it.

And hold your hand.

***

Another night goes by and I get a call at 6:30 am from the nurse saying Mom’s just died. I begin to rush getting ready, tripping over myself as I dress when I stop mid-legging to realize there’s no hurry. She’s already beyond the pale of time. Now I feel Camus poke my ribs and suddenly I’m bent over in spasms of laughter for a good, long while.

On the way to pick my brother up, I drive through a neighborhood where irrigation and proximity to the Rio Grande have made a “valley” out of El Paso’s bone-dry soil. Pecan and Willow tree branches dip over the road, green but spiritless. I’m fussing with Spotify and musing about the funeral, how I want it to be as minimal as possible so we can just move on with our lives, when an angel appears by the side of the road.

Quite sure I’m losing my mind, I drive half a block more before I stop, make a tight U-turn, and go back to the angel sighting. 

Well I’ll be, I blurt out loud, and turn off the ignition. 

Sure enough, right beside the asphalt, carved out of a dead tree is a 9-foot tall angel woman, her figure serenely towering over the roadside. She’s been whittled mostly smooth except for a few fissures here and there, and her pale sapwood face bears a bit of a Mona Lisa smile–both grimace and invitation. I stand under her and her height reinforces our differing ontologies. She exists above me; I’m being gazed upon and, perhaps, measured, not the other way around.

In the biblical world, angels are messengers dispatched from heaven to pronounce God’s blessings and judgments, and sometimes to offer protection to God’s people. As a recovering Pentecostal, I don’t tinker much with the supernatural anymore. I let those structures of existence answer to their own drummer. But right here on the side of the road, before I have to kiss my mother’s cold body goodbye, I ask Lisa, the tree angel, to give today to those with clay feet what heaven can. 

***

The nursing home smells like Pine-Sol and finality. I feel clownish like troops that arrive at the battlefront after a cease-fire. I should have been here, sleepless every night if need be, so she didn’t die alone.

At the nurses’ station, the women see us, nod, and then avert their gaze. This is probably out of a sense of respect, but it reinforces my hunch that we’re Johnny-come-lately relatives of the deceased.

The blue ticking curtain has been drawn in her room. 

There’s a tray of coffee and cookies for the bereaved. 

And all this empathy, this cloying empathy, it only enhances my shame.

Ashamed of what? I now think, and the answer bloops up in my head: I’m ashamed of it: Capital M MORTALITY, and the bodies that wear it and rehearse it for all to see—my own, my brother’s, and certainly hers.

I pull the curtain back, steeling myself with that ancient steel I’d clad to my soft bones, vertebra by vertebra, ever since she first smelled “off” to me as a child, ever since I realized she lacked what I needed from a mother.

But what rushes up in me–it’s so strange to say this joyously but I do–is a wellspring of tears, and I don’t hesitate or keep my distance but instead bend down close to kiss her gray-green dead fish eyes and cup her clammy cheeks.

***

No, oh my God! No! No police escort! I shriek as we sit in the freezing cold conference room at the funeral home (Rubbing my goosebumps I’m thinking to myself, We’re not dead yet. Y’all can bump up the temp a notch or two!).

It turns out we’ve unknowingly purchased the Cadillac funeral package in our haste to get it done. The check’s been cut from a trust account and to go back and redo it would be just as much of a hassle as the burial hoopla, so we’re stuck with the private viewing, public viewing, funeral service, declined police escort (but yes to limos—a perk my brother finds agreeable), and graveside service.

It’s been 17 years since her stroke, enough time for me to have birthed and almost graduated a high school senior if I’d gotten started earlier. God knows I’ve tried to be patient, but I just want this to be over and I’m flagging here at the end of the race.

Yet I know she’d actually love all of this fuss and pageantry and would be hurt without it. To illustrate: when I was eleven, the year my parents divorced, my dad didn’t cue us to celebrate Mother’s Day (go figure), and she was furious at our oversight. So I regifted her a Texas-shaped chocolate sucker my dad’s girlfriend had just given me from a visit to the capitol. Mom knew it wasn’t actually meant for her and I felt treacherous as hell, but it mollified her rage and that’s what mattered.

So, even though it sticks in my craw that we’ve spent $9,000 on an elaborate festival to put her in the dirt, I roll with it. And sign up to arrange a slideshow for her viewing. And possibly officiate the funeral, if need be.

***

Did I say $9,000 to put her in the dirt? Well, I actually meant $20,000, since those who peddle burial plots are a posse of robbers poised on the very edge of earthly existence to dip into your family’s emergency savings fund and mine. In our case, the cemetery is owned by a group in Knoxville, Tennessee who have 400 such properties so they can extort money from the bereaved at scale. 

It’d be easier to stomach this if the sales representative had some solid marketing materials. But instead, my brother and I are shown a map of burial plots on photocopied paper reinforced by a jagged-edged plane of brown cardboard cut off the side of a U-Haul box. The available plots are shaded in with a green color pencil and those already occupied are filled in stoplight red (and wasn’t there yellow, too, but what could that have possibly signified?). My 10-year-old daughter could have whipped something up on Canva that looked more professional.

Yet not in the mood to shop around, we pick a plot and then I’m asked a series of headstone questions: limestone or marble, serif fonts or sans, flower vase or no. The rep gives me a post-it note and instructs me to write up to four words to memorialize my mother on the stone. If left alone with this one task, I might spend days coming up with alternatives. Instead, I lay my pen to the neon pink paper and watch it draw whorls and straight lines without me, as if I’m conjuring answers from a Ouija board: Songbird. Beauty. Beloved Mother. 

***

Everyone knows the saying, “There are no atheists in a foxhole,” but the 20th century’s foxholes (and the millions of dead bodies you could pile within them from two world wars) must have contributed to the pessimism and absurdism that yielded our most famous atheists. Like Camus. 

He’s been with me this whole week, pointing out how flimsy my attempts to control any outcomes are and how mercilessly the wheels of nature grind us into dust.

I hear him, and he’s not wrong. But seeing my mother’s blank stare, her pupils so extraordinarily open and vacated of soul, proved his assessment incomplete. The lifelessness of her body was its own apologetic for life, just like an imprint in the ground speaks of a presence that was once here and has now moved beyond. Else, why does death bother us so? It’s an aberration and as such, a witness.

I am the resurrection and the life, Jesus says, and I’m putting all my cards on that, Mom. I’ll see you again in due time and we’ll have a new conversation instead of the same one we’ve had over and over for 17 terrible years. And I hope you listened to the story I told at your service about how you led me to the knowledge of God’s grace as a child, how you’re leading me still.