Authors: Elisabeth Rohm
Or was she? I wasn't sure. I stared at her, searching her face for some sign of consciousness or awareness. Something had brought her back to us for a moment, so she must still be nearby. She must be there. “She's here! Isn't she here?” I said to Nancy.
Nancy hesitated. “I don't know.”
We had been awaiting a meeting with the team of neurosurgeons at the hospital since I had arrived. So far, only Peter had talked to the doctors. When they called us into a long sterile conference roomâNancy and Olaf, Peter, and meâthey laid out the nuts and bolts of the situation. They said her heart attack had lasted so long and been so severe that it had damaged her brain and that she had no brain activity. They had stabilized her, but the damage was irreversible. “There is nothing else we can do,” one of the doctors said. “It's simple science.”
I remember thinking there was nothing simple about it. “Do you mean to tell me that a heart attack completely erased my mother's brain activity?” I said. The doctors nodded. I felt like they were peeling my skin off. I needed time to think about this. “But she woke up! I saw it! I was right there!”
The doctors told me that it was only a bit odd. They didn't believe it would happen again. They explained that she was a vegetable and that her episode of sitting up was almost certainly a muscle spasm. “That's what you saw,” said one of the doctors, in a Dutch accent. “It happens sometimes. It can make people believe something is happening neurologically, when nothing is happening at all.”
“No,” I said. I stood up. I wanted to scream at them or convince them or somehow make it all not true. I couldn't help thinking they were lying to me. But as I looked around at the faces of everyone around that table, all I saw were people without hope.
I turned and ran out into the hallway with my guts ripped open on the floor. I've never cried so hard. It was like the crying you see in movies. Everyone came running out into the hall and surrounded me to comfort me, but I didn't want anyone to comfort me. I'd allowed myself hope up until that moment. This was the first time I'd actually heard the doctors say she was gone. That I'd really even considered it could be true.
Finally, I calmed down. I went back into the room and sat down. The doctors said that because she had had that moment of sitting up and breathing, they would allow us to wait another two days while they observed her, to give me time to process the information. They were humoring me. It made me so angry that they were making the decision for me. They would “allow us”? Who the hell were they to say what we should and shouldn't do for my mother?
But I knew I had to sign off on it. I knew it would come down to me. They were the ones to decide that her breathing wasn't anything close to being a miracle, but I had to be the one to say that, yes, technically, this could be the end. I had to be the one to let her go.
And so we waited. I prayed. I begged her to come back to us again. I was strong for her, because she couldn't be strong for herself. I directed everything. Cleaning her, playing her music, making sure the
Buddha didn't fall out of her handâI was in charge of it all. I was optimistic and hopeful again. This was her chance. This was my chance to be a better daughter than I'd ever been before. My last chance to fix what had gone so horrifically wrong.
But one day passed, and then two, and nothing happened. She didn't sit up again. She didn't speak, or open her eyes. Yet, I thought I could feel her presence, so I wasn't ready to give up. I was stubbornly attached to my miracle. It would come. I just had to wait. Two days wasn't long enough. Not nearly long enough.
But two days were what the doctors had given us, so when the time was up, all the family members were asked to join the neurosurgeons again at that horrible long conference table. Everybody was focused on me because I was the only one who didn't think she should be taken off life support. I'd promised her I wouldn't do that. I'd promised myself. But the doctors told me that things were just as they anticipated. She had had a muscle spasm, and that was all. It wasn't complicated. It was simple. It was time for her to go. She was already gone.
I looked around the table at Peter and Peter's brothers, Christian and Olaf. Christian had joined us because he was a doctor, and we all thought he could give us another option. I looked at Nancy. Then I thought,
What would my mother want me to do?
I thought,
What would my mother have done with her last weeks, if she had known this was coming?
I thought,
What if my mother is still trying to come back?
I thought,
What if she only came back so I could say good-bye?
I knew that being a vegetable would have been my mother's worst nightmare. As an intellectual and a writer and a spiritual seeker, my mother's brain was everything to her. A lifetime of health problems had led her to distrust her body. Her hands shook. She couldn't walk without tripping. She had to use a cane. She was often in pain. But her mind was always there for her.
Would she want to keep the body but lose the brain, the one part she admired about herself? Peter said no. He took my hand wearily, looking frail. “She's done, Lis,” he said. I looked at him. He had been her lover. He knew her in a way I never could. He could feel that her spirit had left him. His beloved was gone. Maybe he knew something I didn't know.
All I knew was this biting need to keep her alive, because I needed my mother, because I needed my daughter to know my mother. But he had been so intimate with her that I looked to him for guidance in my confusion. I realized that if I drew this out, for weeks and months, it would be torture for him. For all of them. Months of pain. “She's had enough,” he said. The doctors all nodded in agreement.
“But she sat up! She breathed! She came back!” I said, still trying to convince someone, anyone, to change sides and see that she might come back to us. Still hoping for a miracle. “What if she's still in there? What if we cut her off right when she was ready to come back?”
“That's not how it works, Lis,” said one of the kind-faced doctors. “She doesn't have brain activity, and that's a fact.”
It was too terrible to accept. A terrible mistake. Who would give up and die with a thirty-six-year-old daughter and a two-year-old granddaughter? Who would die just before going home for Christmas? Not Lisa Loverde-Meyer. Not the mother I knew. All I could think was,
Somebody has seriously fucked up here. And it wasn't my mother.
But there was nobody left to blame. She'd had a heart attack. They'd tried to save her, but it hadn't worked. Finally, I just nodded, feeling the hot tears in my eyes. I couldn't meet anyone's eyes, so I looked down at my hands. I nodded, saying without words that, yes, okay, it could be over. I hated myself for that.
The doctors told us that after they removed her from the life support, she would pass within twenty-four hours. But she didn't. She
held on and held on, and a day went by, and then part of another. I sat with her, with her whole Dutch family in the room, and I couldn't help feeling that she was not letting go because of me. I started to feel guilty. Was I keeping her earthbound, with my refusal to let her go? Finally, I asked everyone to leave the room.
As the last Dutch relative shut the door, I looked at her.
“Oh, Mom.”
I climbed into bed with her and I laid my head on her chest and put my arm around her waist. I stayed there for a long time, feeling her warmth and closeness, tears running down my face. Finally, I spoke to her:
“Mom. It's okay. It's going to be okay. I'm going to be okay. Maybe you don't want to die in front of me, or maybe you think I still need you, but Mom . . . you did a
really great job.”
I wondered if she could hear me. I didn't look at her face. I kept my head on her chest and I stroked her arm and I tried to coordinate my breathing with hers, so we could be in synch and she would hear me and know my thoughts. I was a little girl, trying desperately to get some last comfort from my mother's warmth.
“You did it, Mom. You did what you always said you wanted to do. You told me you didn't own me, and that you wanted me to be able to fend for myself in the world, and I've done it. You taught me how to stand on my own two feet and carry on. You taught me that I could make it in this world, and I'm going to do great things in my life because you did such a great job raising me and teaching me how to be a good person. And I'm going to do for Easton what you did for me. I'm going to teach her how not to need me anymore. You gave me wings, Mom, right from the beginning. You didn't control me and you let me be myself. You never doubted me and you always told me how good and powerful and precious I was and, Mom, I believed you, even when I pretended I didn't. I listened, even when I pretended
I didn't. You wanted me to have courage and confidence, and I do, Mom. I have all those things. Because of you. Every good thing I've ever done in my life, I've done because of you. I give you all the credit. You did it. You are the reason for my success. You did your job.”
I waited, letting it sink in. I didn't want to say the next part, but I knew I had to say it. She needed to hear it. I knew she could hear me. I could feel it, that sense of her listening, waiting for my words, hovering over our two bodies. I didn't care what they said about brain activity. I wasn't speaking to her brain. I was speaking to her soul as it hovered over the bed, tethered to my heart.
“What I'm trying to say, Mom, is that it's okay for you to go. You're free now. You're free from this body, so you can fly away. Go to that place you've been waiting to see. God is ready for you. I'm going to be okay. Really. I'm going to be okay.” Each time I said it, I believed it a little more.
I lay there for a long time after, and then suddenly, I felt like it was okay for me to go, too. I sat up stiffly and took her hand. “Good-bye, Mom. I love you. Thanks for being exactly the mom I needed.” I kissed her hand and then I kissed her forehead, and then I stood up and walked out of the room without looking back.
After I left that hospital room, I asked Aunt Nancy if she would call the producers of
Heroes
and tell them that I wouldn't be coming back after the Thanksgiving break. I was just too exhausted to make the call myself. “I want to be here and help you clean the house and I want to be here when she . . . when she goes,” I said, swallowing. “I want to be here for everything.”
Nancy shook her head. “She would want you to go back to work,” she said. “She was so incredibly proud of you. She wouldn't want to be the reason for you giving up anything good in your life. And most importantly, she would want you to go home and take care of Easton.”
I didn't like the way she was already speaking of my mom in the past tense, even though I understood that in so many ways, my mother was already gone. “But I don't want to leave,” I said. “I want to be here when she passes. It's important for both me and Mom.”
“Even if she wouldn't want that?” Nancy pressed.
I looked at the sterile floor of the hospital. I knew that maybe she was right. Maybe my mother, despite my words to her, wouldn't go until I left. I called my Aunt Laurie and after a long discussion, she encouraged me to go home, too, for Easton's sake.
And so I packed, and got into the car, and drove to the Amsterdam airport, and got on a plane, knowing my mother's heart was still beating. When I arrived at the London airport, I called Nancy. My mother had passed away forty-five minutes after I left Amsterdam.
Maybe this sounds like a neat little picture, the perfect romantically tragic ending, but I didn't feel that way at all. I could have told myself that she needed me to leave in order to be free, but I didn't really believe it. It broke my heart that she was gone, and I didn't know for sure if I should have left at all. I was filled with doubt and regret. What if she wanted me to be there, and I abandoned her right at the last minute? I couldn't let the feelings go. I had no resolution because I wasn't there to see her go. I tortured myself with the question,
Was she waiting for me to leave, or did I leave too soon?
When she took her last breath, was her spirit looking for me, and I wasn't there? If I had stayed, would I have had more closure? Would she have come back awake? Everybody kept telling me to let her go, and I had to make a decision for the whole family, right at the moment when I was the least clear and least able to do the sensible thing. That tore me apart for months.
I went back to Los Angeles newly initiated to the cold terror of being a motherless child. I was thirty-six years old but I felt like an orphan.
Do I wish she had stayed on life support for months, even years, until it was confirmed to me without a doubt that the doctors were right and I was wrong, until I had time to get used to the idea of her passing, until I had time to really feel like I had said good-bye? Yes. I do wish for all those things, whether I should or not. I feel like she was ripped away from me, unjustly and cruelly. I felt like she was cheated out of the pleasures of becoming a wise old woman, cheated out of seeing her granddaughter grow up to be a woman herself.
When I went back to
Heroes,
I was a different person than the person who left. On
Heroes,
I played a character called Lauren Gilmore, who worked with the character Noah Bennett, played by Jack Coleman. Jack and I played business partners and romantic interests, so we had become friends, and thank goodness for Jack. Jack had lost his mother, and I knew this, so he was the only one I told about where I was going, and as soon as I got back to the set, he could tell by looking at me that my mother was gone.