Sunday

Even colder outside. They used to call it good sleeping weather. Well yeah, if you have a furnace. Ours has been on since Friday night.

(morning walk)

Breakfast. Ed is dozing on the couch, but rousing himself to join me for the morning meal. I say no -- just stay on the couch, we can talk across the room. 

And we do that but when I glance over at him I see he is cheating. His laptop is on his belly! Ed!

 

After breakfast, I go over to my mom's Hospice nursing care facility. 

She is totally discombobulated. Thrashing with regrets, angry words, and as the staff later described it -- remarkably, targeting herself rather than them, which had been her usual modus operendi. I can't get her to focus on the here and now, she can't see me, she refuses to listen.

I talk to the staff: she can't die like this -- I say to them. Dont you guys have some happy meds to make the transition to death easier, like a happy sail into eternity, full of flowers and rainbows or something? Isn't that what you do for people?

They assure me that she will not die like this, that they will adjust her meds and increase the ones that put a stop to these psychotic episodes. That all will be well by this afternoon.

In the meantime she dozes off, I stay.

She wakes up, I try again. She is calm now. Medicine kicked in? Maybe. But, her complete vision loss is a problem and she doesn't fully trust me to be who I say I am. So she tests me on knowledge of family history. It goes something like this:

You are Nina? (pause) Who were my brothers?

Johnny and Chester. She looks doubtful. Alright, Chester was your half brother. She still isn't convinced. She tells me I should have included Lillian. Not a brother, mom.

Huh. What's the name of the place outside Warsaw where you lived?

Gniazdowo. Yes, she nods, I got that right. And the other place in the forest next to it? 

Julin. 

You're smart. You must have done well in school. What was your favorite subject, math?

No mom. Writing. (That's only partly true. No need to explore my rebellious relationship with learning.) 

Yes, of course. Fiction or nonfiction?

Here's this woman who has almost no life left in her, who twenty minutes ago was calling herself a piece of trash, a failure, with no one but the Lord Jesus Christ (whom, in my entire 71 years of life, I have never heard her invoke) understanding her true pain, interviewing me about my life, having never done so before, and finding me just barely adequate at it. A few more questions later, she says -- well, you were good (at knowing family history), but not great. She tightens her lips, shakes her head. My mother, all in that one sentence, in that one facial expression.

 

Seeing all of her in this exchange, I now find it easier to sit and reassure, to hold her hand and prattle my way forward: Ed went sailing for two weeks. 

And who took care of the animals? 

I did. He's a nice guy, mom. 

Of course he's a nice guy. He's from New York. And who took care of the animals when you were away?  

She pauses. She resumes. What do you do with your time? 

Take care of grandkids. And you. 

Aren't you bored? No mom, not bored.  

Well, take care of yourself. Stay healthy. Workin' on it.

It doesn't really matter that she cannot fully embrace me, that I will always be that person who divorced a guy she happened to really like (she wrote a final good bye note that she has inserted into her Box of Important Papers -- I found it today, expressing love for her family and for my ex), that both daughters have wronged her terribly too many times to count -- it doesn't matter anymore. In the end, she could not ever get out of a trap of her own making -- of finding inadequacies and hardship everywhere. A trap that ultimately made her so unhappy with life and now in these last days as well.

Flawed that we were in her eyes, I do understand that she had pity. She had constant worry. She had her own way of feeling love. David Sedaris, on the death of his father wrote that it is possible to profoundly dislike a person and have love for them. There were years when my mom expressed on many written pages her profound dislike of me, of my life, my decisions. Her disappointment was so deep that she couldn't get herself to speak to me for years. But, I know that she couldn't help herself. This was who she was. And it did not take away from the fact that she surely loved the family that she refused to see or be with. Daughters whom she couldn't enjoy, grandchildren whose successes she so lauded and celebrated, at a distance. She made up her own rules and I admire her for that, even though now, in her last weeks of life, those same rules have caused her so much anger and psychic pain.

I leave her in a calm state. This person who has never felt the need to hug or kiss, has that need now, because without vision she cannot otherwise believe that this day still holds people in it who are her family.

*     *     *

In the evening the young family is here for dinner. Here comes Sparrow, with reddish hair, because his sister and her friend offered to paint it for him, and a crisp shirt that he put on especially for dinner at the farmhouse!

You can tell Ed is back -- Snowdrop immediately dives for his computer to play her favorite game on it.

Dinner on the porch. It's warm enough! Sort of.

We linger. Despite the early sunset, despite the need for an early bedtime, because it's a school night, we linger.

With love...