the day after

Well, you could say my mom got the last laugh. She would have let out a big guffaw had she been there this morning. Or rather had she known that she could do this one final act of defiance: dying her way.

My mom died last night. We thought she had a few more days left in her, but we were wrong. She slept the whole day and by evening she was gone. I got the call just as the debate was going into its most precious moments. She would have laughed at that as well. She did not mind interrupting me in the course of the day. Mom, I can't talk now (about the aide who disrespected you last night). The kids are here. Mom, later, okay? Fine, two more minutes and then I really have to go.

The Hospice person asked me if I would like a viewing of the body. It's one of those things -- I would personally not have requested it -- I've seen her plenty in the last few days of her life. I do not need to see her in death. But, once offered, I changed my mind. Maybe I owe it to her? I mean, she'd hate that I did this, but on the other hand, maybe I can do a private little speech? Because really, what I need most right now is quiet time with my own thoughts and maybe I could put a few good thoughts together into something like a good bye speech? So I said okay. In the morning, I'll be there. My solicitous daughters asked if I needed them at my side. I said no to the Chicago girl but yes to the Madison one. We'll go early in the day.

So is this a closure of sorts then? Or are we doing more to honor her? One thing I know for sure -- my mother did not want a funeral or a memorial service upon her death. Pity for a hard life she loved. We never gave her enough of it even as she offered us, me especially, so many opportunities to speak the magic words that she craved: you've had a miserable life, you were treated like dirt throughout, and yet, here you are! We are so so sorry for you. My failure here was that I could not say it. Lies and halftruths were spoken aplenty ("yes mom, everything is fine here, no one is sick, everyone is good!" -- even as kids were banged up from falls, grownups were sick with Covid, the world would be on the brink of something horrible and there I was -- "yes mom, it's all good. we are fine.. no problems." Why? Her sympathy was worse than whatever malady I faced. She dramatized everything and if you went in thinking that a day was difficult, sharing that with her would have you believe that we are at the cusp of a planetary disintegration. So, drama she craved. But celebrations of life's joys and marvels? Not for her. She shunned Christmas and birthdays. Celebrations are for children -- she'd repeat this every year and especially on November 15th. (She would have been 101 this year on that day.) But surely memorial services aren't for children, so why be so adamant about wanting none? 

Or maybe funerals are in fact for children. Maybe I should listen to what they need and not to what my mother stated as her dying wish.

Morning...

Breakfast...

I think about this all day. My kids knew her all too well. She was the last of the grandparents to die. She'll be cremated. Without ceremony? They want a memorial.

When my father died (in March, 2013), I was traveling with a friend through Italy. There wasn't a funeral nor a service for him and when his ashes were scattered, I wasn't invited. No one thought it was important enough for me to cross the ocean and attend. The fact is, for a long time, I had seen my father just once a year, on my then annual trips to Poland. We did not otherwise keep in touch. He wasn't the kind of guy who would track the life of another, even if that "another" was his child. And so his death cut out very little substance from my life: one annual trip to the apartment where I lived out my adolescent angst, cancelled. 

The death of my mother is a whole different story. My days were full of her, especially in recent years as she went from independent senior living, to assisted living, to hospital care, to rehab and finally to the Hospice nursing care facility. I managed her affairs, and I responded to lengthy emails detailing all the wrongs that befell her, and I listened daily to a repeat of all those woes by phone. On good days, she would enumerate all the ways in which the staff had failed her and then end with these same words -- "but I can't complain." I never once said -- but you just did!  If I occasionally pushed back, it was because I wanted her to believe that the aides and nurses were not out to kill her, or even neglect her. A useless endeavor. She hated it when I denied her the right to gripe. Oftentimes she'd hang up on me. Clearly I did not understand.

Thinking now about the good things in her life, I try to recall times when I thought her to be happiest. When she was the ambassador's wife in New York -- definitely then. It was a real paupers to privilege story and she loved every minute of their sudden leap to the top. But if I asked her now, she herself would say that her happiest days were with my daughters when they were very little and I occasionally left them in her care. Only with them did she appreciate the value of play. She relaxed her emotional guard for them alone. In my children and grandchildren she found no fault. Children had this going for them: they could not fail at life. All adults, young or old, including us, her daughters -- we were all suspect and we disappointed her constantly and she was not shy in letting us know about it.

And if we had a memorial, what would I say that would spotlight the happiest times I had with her? I would talk of images I had growing up: I remember picking flowers along the riverbank when I was very little, holding her hand, singing a song -- this would have been on the day she would come up by train to visit us in the village where we lived with my grandparents. And later, much later, I remember car trips and stops at Howard Johnson's for their 21 flavors of ice cream. Or was it 28? We sat in a booth -- she was always by my sister's side, I was by my father's. I wondered then why we were stuck in these roles -- was I more my father's child and my sister hers? 

As a very young kid I loved my parents totally and desperately. I thought they were the best! No one had a mamusia that spoke such good English or a tatus that was a respected diplomat! I was prouder than proud. 

Then we stopped being little children and everything changed. I was a teen, we were back in Poland and, well, read about in Like A Swallow. Things went sour. We were growing up, she got lost in her own affairs. And we were straying into lives she could not understand. So she lost us. There were many grumbles, but her biggest blow up came when I left my husband.  I would not see or hear from her again for a handful of years. And she dropped contact with my daughters too. Didn't attend graduations, didn't reach out (except to my ex). 

None of that sat well with me over the years. But, you must know -- my mother was not uncaring. She was not mean. She simply was not able to relate to adult children. And difficult as she was -- such a handful! -- she was also incredibly generous with and kind to my kids. She had a pension from my father and she was frugal with it -- except when it came to buying things for my girls. Once a year, we went kids clothes shopping. No store in the mall was off limits. That they each had Abercrombe & Finch sweaters -- as desirable in those days as expensive athletic shoes may be today -- was only thanks to her. That we went to Borders for a book splurge for the kids -- that, too, was thanks to her. She never cooked dinners for us (she was a terrible cook), but on a special occasion, she would take us out to Porta Bella for an Italian dinner or to Imperial Garden for Chinese food. Her treat. It pained her that in her final years she was not allowed to spend money on the great grandkids. She would have bought them a heck of a lot more plastic than they needed, and even bigger packs of KitKats if she could. Spending time with them wasn't what she longed for. She wanted to spend her resources, what little she had, on them. (Rules of her benefit program did not allow her to spend more than $50 on anyone but herself. How she despised that limitation placed on her!) 

But the fact remains -- my mom was a handful. I never gave up on her, but it is also true that I felt like I was in a rip current that would drag me out to sea and ultimately sink me unless I used all my strength to stay afloat with all that negative stuff she threw my way. There was that never ending drum roll, that ominous message -- wait until you get to be this old, this frail, this unhappy!  She'd been saying that since she was fifty. Spreading the fear of what's to come. You'll get diabetes -- she'd tell my sister and me. It's genetic! And it's horrible!

So long as you agreed with her in life, you were golden. In the last years, mostly I let her speak her mind. I let her make her wild claims. I was, therefore, mostly golden. But part of me wondered -- had I spoken up for myself, for others, had I insisted on greater gentility when referencing well meaning hard working people, might have I turned things around for her? Might we have had better conversations, might I have been less saddened by almost every back and forth we had? Imponderables, all of those thoughts and questions. 

Every mother teaches her daughter so much! I've often said my mother taught me to watch my step. To not make those mistakes she did. To allow people to be themselves and love them deeply for all that they bring to the table. She couldn't do it and it cost her. I knew I needed to do a generational shift there. My kids, grandkids should never feel shame for making decisions they feel are right for them. I'll always always love and admire them, and as I've taken to telling them -- I not only love them, I like them! I like that they are not me, that they pick roads that would have frightened me. I like that they dress, eat, play according to their own moral compass.

This and my commitment to a never ending search for joy. Finding contentment, turning my back on petty mishaps. Holding grudges, being mad -- I wont go down those paths. When they misbehave, my grandkids will often ask -- are you mad? And I always say -- you know I'm never ever mad. They press -- are you disappointed? No. At most, thinking how to help you get on a better path, though really, you're doing a pretty good job finding it yourself. If they make a mistake -- I want to be there to tell them it's okay. 

So she taught me what not to say, do, how not to punish, withhold love, she taught me to be more curious about them and worry less about sharing my worldly wisdoms from my own life. She struggled with all of this. I promised myself I would try to do better.

To her credit though, she lead a life that in small ways I admired. She was big on movement, on some modest exercise. She was the one, too, that introduced me to the concept of healthy eating. She went overboard on supplements and I think many of them wrecked her health and upped her blood pressure and destroyed her GI functioning in her senior years but given that she lived so long, arguing with her over the wisdom of popping so many extra pills was was pointless. 

But it's in the eating department that she had a transformative impact on me. As a student at the university, I ate nothing but junk. But as I moved my mom to Madison and listened to her extol the virtues of fruits and veggies, I took note. True, she was diabetic and also secretly gorged on candy (oh, the stacks of candy bars I found hidden in her drawers each time I moved her!), and she hated to cook so once she moved to Madison, she switched to institutional meals and her healthy eating necessarily was diminished. But I learned from her to pay attention to what I ate. She and my grandmother before her were suspicious of the American diet, of meats and fried anything. I got from them both a healthy respect for eating that what you can grow in your own back yard. (I of course cheat and let the local farmers do it for me.)

And like Ed, she never cared about faults in her appearance. Ed is oblivious to how he looks. My mom employed another strategy: make the most of what you have. She was proud of her looks and she walked into a room with confidence about who she was and what she brought to the table. She flashed her straight American white teeth, she showed off her height with high heels and teased hair (even though this made my short father look even shorter than he already was), she sewed her own gowns that showed off a body that she thought was just about perfect.

Her body. I drive one last time to meet my daughter at Oakwood -- her final home, where I am told I can see my mother for one last time. I worry about what I should do with these minutes -- say a few words for sure. Take a picture? Maybe not. Let's see how all this plays out.

At the Hospice nursing care facility, I encounter the staff that has been with her for the last five months. I thank them for putting up with her. The chaplain comes. She tells me -- your mother was loved. Oh those people! They tell you anything you want to hear!

And I ask -- where is she?

Well, not here! She died last night and within hours she was transported to the funeral home. You can see her there, we're sure.

But the person told me...

My mother did a disappearing act. She's gone.

I call the funeral home. Oh, but you have to reserve a time! We have other viewings before hers. They normally take 30 minutes. They cost extra you know. And we have to get her ready for you. Close her eyes, close her mouth...

People, we're talking about five minutes and I've seen her with her mouth open and eyes open and closed. I do not care if you dress her up or not. Can I just see her briefly?

Well no I cannot. They follow procedures. She's being moved to another cremation center on the other side of town. Another day maybe?

I book a slot for tomorrow. Mind you, I never wanted this nor needed it, but again, once offered, it seems disrespectful to refuse it. Tomorrow then.

 

In the meantime, I have work to do. I've cleared out all that I want from my mom's room (almost nothing), but I need to shut down her accounts, figure out how to deal with her finances -- what does she owe now and to whom, to be distributed out of $1000 that she has left in her account. Her total generosity paid off for her. She spent down all her money and had none left in the end, making her eligible for Medicaid and thus a privileged spot at a nursing facility that was otherwise way out of her financial reach. So, I have work to do and, too, daughters are murmuring about the need for a memorial scattering of ashes. I'll let them decide that one. Whatever they need is okay with me. I feel I've done my reckoning, remembering, reflecting, privately, occasionally with them, sometimes with Ed, and lately here, on Ocean. But, if scatting ceremonies is what they want, I'm good with that. I ask at the funeral home -- remind me, did I spring for an urn? You did not. So, how will you package her? In a bag which we give you in a cardboard box. Ah, sort of like an Amazon delivery.

I go to a coffee shop with my computer to write. Not going home yet. Not the familiar comfort of Ed, of the cats, of my fading garden. I just want it to be my computer and me and the rumble of cars going by because the table is outside and the street is noisy.

And then I go home. Ed and I go for a walk.. And it is beautiful.

And at 1:45, as always, I head out to the kids school. I pick up just the girl today. (Her brother is trying out sewing lessons for the first time so it's just her at the farmhouse.) Gaga, I'm glad you picked me up but aren't you mourning today?  I smile at her. I had my morning hours. I'll have the evening too.

 

(He cleaned up my mom's ancient computer, installed her favorite games and gave it to Snowdrop. She is thrilled. My mom would have been pleased.)

 

Toward evening, Snowdrop and I meet her mom who is waiting for Sparrow to finish his lesson. We pause for a drink. Snowdrop loses herself in her book. Her mom and I talk.

 

 

I go home. Ed is biking. I light the candle he hates. Maybe just this once he will forgive me. And I think about how over all these years, I've never given up on my mom, and, too, she never gave up on any of us either. We were her family. The youngest members were always the ones who delighted her the most, but the fact is, in truth -- we all mattered. A lot. Her last sensible words to me? You take care of yourself. No matter what happens, take care of yourself.

Such a handful! I miss her.

with love...