In Mors, Veritas

One day more than 25 years ago my mom called me and asked me to drop by. This was nothing unusual; my parents lived nearby and I saw them regularly. When I walked into their house everything was, as usual, perfectly spic-and-span, with nothing out of place. Also as usual, I reflected on the many unfinished cups of coffee my mom plucked out of my hands to put in the dishwasher and I understood, for the thousandth time, why I never became – and will never become – a neatnik. 

But I digress. I sat down at my mom’s round white kitchen table and looked up expectantly. She sat down across from me and told me she was going to die. Just like that. This was one of those handful of moments over a lifetime when time stops and something in your brain takes a full-color snapshot that will become an unalterable part of you until the day you die yourself - right up there with JFK’s assassination (7^th grade art class with the teacher with the green contacts). Time stopped. My dad stood in shock, a dejected lump with his hands clasped tightly in front of him, the first time I had ever seen him at a loss for words. It struck me that my father, the proudly independent Marine WWII fighter pilot who had hitchhiked before the war to the University of Minnesota from Chicago’s Southside to go to college, would find it nearly impossible to live without her.

I was amazed that I had not understood this sooner. With my mom’s dozens of friends and political activities, she would have missed my father if he had died first. But her life, bound up as it was in her community, would have picked up the beat in short order and sailed right on into whatever time she had left on Earth. But my father drove every weekday to his law office well into his ‘80s; his work was his real life. He always talked to me adult-to-adult, and I adored him, adopting many things he did with my own children. Like leaving the title of a book I wanted to read on a scrap of paper I left on that round, white kitchen table. In the morning he took the paper with him to his San Francisco law office. Walking down to Stacey’s on Market Street on his lunch hour, he bought me the book. In this way I read Lolita and many other books banned by my friends’ parents. He always told me that nobody was ever corrupted by a book, and that books could transport you to every place–and every idea–in the world.

Because my father was self-reliant and considered himself the master of both his fate and his home, when Mom shared her diagnosis of advanced congestive heart failure he resolved to care for her himself. (When my daughter was born and my mom came to stay with me for a week, there were several panicky calls from my father, two inquiring how to run the dishwasher and how to operate the drip coffeemaker.) Not unheard of among his contemporaries but nonetheless an indication of his domestic skills, his notion of caring for my mom was a fool’s errand. I was working 60 hours a week in the city and my brother was a drug addict, so in due course a social worker stopped by one day, saw him struggling to hold mom up while she tried to walk, and put an end to that (being a harm to both mom and himself since, however determined, he was feeble and uncoordinated following a stroke the year before). This ushered in a depressing parade of fulltime caregivers, who were nothing like the cheerful, animated caregivers you see in TV commercials. There was a head caregiver who he called Mother Superior, who scheduled and managed the sorry group of poor young women, most with young children of their own, who tended mom around the clock. When I came by after work each evening I typically found the assigned night caregiver on the phone, outside on the deck, coordinating the care of her own children (though I came upon one who was apparently firming up a cocaine deal). 

Things had finally settled into a routine when Mom, just weeks away from her death, seemed inexplicably to have lost her mind. Having rarely challenged Dad openly throughout their long marriage, her voice emerged with a roar. She told him she was sorry she had married him (52 years before), and on one occasion threw a cup of hot coffee in his face. One time when I was in San Luis Obispo on business she called to tell me that my father had kidnapped her and that, as her daughter, I needed to immediately “bring the car around” to rescue her. In their floor-to-ceiling book cases I found folded notes, written in her tiny, spidery script, pleading for rescue from my father, who she claimed was holding her hostage at home. She railed against him, dredging up half a century of resentment and vomiting it out in front of everyone. She demanded that she be given the deed to the house so that she could change it so my brother would solely inherit it. My younger brother, an impoverished drug addict, was her favorite child. When she looked at me she saw only her own lost opportunities. (“Why didn’t anyone ever tell me I could be a doctor?”) Her rage was a storm that filled the house. When her hapless caregivers put her to bed she bit them. 

There finally came a day – and an argument – where, exasperated, my father told her to get up out of her wheelchair and walk if she felt so imprisoned. She gripped the arms of her wheelchair and clenched her jaw, directing every cell of her body to get up and walk away. Arms trembling with the effort, she collapsed, ushering in the last phase of her life: the bedridden part. Once confined to bed, my mom just wanted to die. Her caregivers tried to force her to eat, a practice my brother fortunately witnessed. There would be no more force feeding. She started sleeping most of the time, and told me upon awaking that she had been in London or Paris. She said it was harder and harder “to come back.” Finally, in retrospect just eight weeks of chaotic drama, she quietly died in her sleep after everyone had left her room. 

When two young people from the coroner’s office picked up her body, my father asked them to unzip the body bag so he could see for himself that she was really dead. He then lived two more long years, passing the days in his battered white leather chair, feeling utterly lost and alone without her. In the final week of his life, when he became delirious, he called me by my mother’s name.