Riding Fury Home (38 page)

I found Gloria with her arms gripping the bedrails, her nostrils flared, her mouth in a deep frown. I moved up close. It took calling her name several times for her to focus on me. “Sweetheart . . . Gloria . . . Gloria . . . Momushka . . . ” Her head turned toward me; then one hand reached for me, and I grasped it. I tried for a soothing tone. “The nurses tell me you're frightened that they're trying to hurt you, but it's okay, it's really okay. No one here wants to hurt you.”

She released my hand, groped for the bed control, and held the button down while the bed whirred as she rose to sitting. Her eyes were wide with alarm and bright yellow-orange. “It's this feeling—this feeling I can't get over, even if it's not real—this horrible feeling that they're trying to kill me.”

I saw the terror in her face.

“Yes, that feeling—something
is
trying to kill you,” I said, “but it's not the nurses.” I shook my head. “It's your own body that's trying to kill you. It's the cancer that's out of control.”

“Oh, yes, it's my body.” Her face eased with that simple, brutal truth.

“I'm right here, I'll stay with you,” I said.

“Yes, stay . . . ” she said, her voice dropping off. The next moment, she slept.

Later that morning, breakfast arrived, and she picked at some scrambled eggs and nibbled on toast. I ate her leftovers. It was one of those bits of time when she was both relaxed and lucid.
Maybe this would be a good moment to ask her,
I thought. It wouldn't be that odd, as now our conversations were laced with non sequiturs.

“Hey, Glor, do you remember that trip to the Big Island that Dana and I signed up for next spring?” I asked.

“Sure, I remember.” Her head lowered, and she looked unspeakably sad. Then she looked up at me, her eyes brimming with tears. “Hawaii—you and I—we never made it, did we?”

“No.” An ache gripped my chest. “God, I wish we'd gotten to.”
What was I thinking? Maybe this is too weird to ask.

“I was wondering, how would you feel if, um—only if you want, of course—would you like me to take your ashes with me and put them in the volcano?”

She laughed then, the only true belly laugh I'd heard from her in weeks. “Wonderful, yes, that would be wonderful,” she beamed, eyes alight. “Throw me into the fire, into the volcano. Throw me back to the Mother!”

THE HOSPICE SOCIAL worker and I were seated in my mother's living room. The young woman had lowered herself daintily onto the couch after I'd let her in, which left me to sit in the chair facing her, with my back to the windows that looked out onto the street. I'd rolled up the shades, hoping to keep an eye out for the ambulance that was bringing Gloria.

I was struggling to focus on the woman's queries. It seemed as if I had grown long deer ears pointed toward the street, acutely alert and quivering, nerves poised for the slamming of a door.

Brenda, the home health aide, was in my mother's bedroom, making up the hospital bed that had been delivered the day before. The deliverymen helped to drag her queen bed down to the basement storage space. Another medical supply company brought a huge green metal oxygen canister that now waited in the corner of the bedroom. Brenda rejected the roll of egg carton foam I'd gotten from the hospital dispensary to help avoid bedsores. “Too hard to turn them with that,” she declared. She was a heavy-boned woman, and her broad
face took on a bulldog expression with her pronouncement. Since she would be doing the turning, I couldn't argue with her.

“Do you have any siblings?” the social worker asked.

Why so many questions, why now? Did she have
any
idea what it was like to be waiting for the ambulance to bring a mother home to die?

And then I heard it: an engine, a door, the sound of men's voices. I leapt up and went to the windows. “They're here!”

“Don't worry, they'll take care of bringing her in. Now . . . ” the social worker was asking me another question, and her voice trailed after me as I bolted out the door of Gloria's flat and down the hall to the front doorway.

I watched two men go around to the back of the ambulance, open the doors, lift my mother out in a stretcher, and lower its stainless-steel wheels onto the street. She looked like a prone Humpty Dumpty; in spite of the ascitic drainage, her belly was terribly swollen, and the sheet arced in a curve over it. My legs felt shaky, and I steadied myself by leaning on the door frame. I glanced over toward my mother again. Even though I couldn't hear their words, I saw that the two men standing next to her were bantering with each other, and one was laughing.

The driver came up the front stairs. “I need to see the route we'll be taking.”

I turned and led him to the apartment. There was a hall between the living room and the bedroom, made narrow by teak bookshelves my mother had installed. They held a mix of books and stacks of my grandmother's Limoges china, inherited a few years prior.

“Too narrow here,” the driver said, surveying the hall. “We'll have to bring her in a sling.”

I waited in the bedroom, wanting to greet her there. After a time, I heard voices, grunts, footsteps muffled by the wall-to-wall shag carpet. Then a crash, a male voice yelling, “Damn! Watch it!”
and the sound of shattering china. They brought her headfirst into the bedroom, swaying like a baby in a huge canvas cradle, and deposited her on the bed, with its pulled-back covers.

“Sorry about the breakage,” the driver told me. He handed me a card. “Call this number, and my supervisor will help you declare an insurance claim.” I said nothing and turned to Gloria in bed.

“Welcome home, sweetheart,” I greeted her.

She smiled up at me drowsily, sedated on morphine. “Hi, darling. Thank God I'm home.”

We sat together for a brief while; then I introduced her to Brenda and went out to the living room to finish the social worker's questions.

 

 

WHEN I ARRIVED AT the apartment the next morning, my mother had a complaint about Brenda, although she couldn't remember her name. “I asked that woman to help me out of bed, and she told me, ‘You can't. You'll never get out of bed again!'”

“Jeez, I'm sorry. I'll have a talk with her.” The statement was true, but much too brutal coming from a stranger.

I hated that we were dependent on Brenda, that she could hurt my mother. My first impulse was to fire her, but she'd been the only health worker available on the list that hospice kept. Instead, I admonished her. “Don't ever talk like that to my mother again! You have to be gentler.” As if I could change her personality, as if I could control her.

 

 

AT THE HOSPITAL, Gloria had asked if she could come live with us. “I don't want to die here,” she'd said.

She understood she couldn't manage on her own. How to honor her wish? I didn't want her to die in that hospital, either.
Dana and I had talked it over. We needed our home to be a refuge in the midst of all this. I didn't want it to be the place where my mother had died.

I had told Gloria that we were going to bring her back to her apartment but I'd be there a lot—most of the time—and we were hiring a woman to help take care of her. She'd asked, “How much will this cost?” She was worried that she would use all her money and leave me nothing. I didn't want to tell her there was no need to worry, because we wouldn't have to pay for help for very long. Her confusion had deepened, and the next day when I arrived at the hospital, I found her asleep holding a pen. A piece of paper rested on her chest. I picked it up. A jagged line of numbers spilled down the page, erratic multiplication with dollar signs, the numbers trailing off when they reached the millions.

 

 

AS FRANK AS MY mother was, she needed an emissary to ask me one particular question, and she elected her friend Rebecca to do it. Brenda had sent me out with a shopping list, and Rebecca was there when I returned. “Can I talk with you?”

Rebecca was a close double to my mother: Like Gloria, she was a sixty-eight-year-old, short, Jewish, formerly married lesbian who was a retired Gestalt therapist. In my early twenties, long before she had been friends with my mother, she'd been my therapist for a time. Small world. “I'm sorry for what you're going through,” she began. “This just has to be awful. For you and Gloria. It's just that Gloria wanted me to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“Well, you know how much she's suffering. And, well, she wants to know if you'll agree to help her. Help her end it—I mean—the suffering. By taking pills.”

“Oh.” My stomach knotted in a fist. Somewhere over my head, the shadows of the three Furies hovered, flapping their great wings—those primal goddesses with mud-streaked faces and hissing snakes for hair, those avengers of matricide, baring their fangs.

“What do you think?” Rebecca prodded me from my glazed-eyed reverie.

No pondering was needed on the unthinkable horror of giving my mother pills to hasten her death. We'd come so close, so many times.

“My God, there's no way, Rebecca. I understand her wanting that—I'd probably want it myself—but you
know
my history with my mother and drugs and suicide.
Even
if we could get away with it, having all these hospice people around, I can't help her die of an overdose. It would haunt me the rest of my days. Killing my mother . . .” My voice trailed off. “We'll just have to go the natural route.”

“Sure. Of course. I'll tell her.”

 

 

THE HOSPICE NURSE CAME by at least once a day, sometimes twice. She and I were at odds. She kept turning up the morphine pump dial. Her goal was to help my mother drift off to her death. I wanted bedside talks, heart-to-hearts, last memories, conversations with as alert and coherent a mother as I could have. Balancing that with pain relief was tricky business.

Having no prior experience to guide me, I often deferred to the nurse. Yet I was horrified that my mother would end her days doped into a stupor. It was too reminiscent of the early years, with her stoned on psychiatric drugs. What complicated medical decisions further was that my role wasn't just to voice my own needs, but to speak for my mother, for what she'd want, and she'd asked for drugs. What to do?

For a time, I lost the morphine war. A week after her return home, Gloria spent a day completely snowed, breathing shallow breaths with long pauses before the next inhalation. It scared the hell out of me, and I was numbed into inaction. That day, a new social worker came to see me. He and I sat in the kitchen. We could hear my mother's rasping inhalation from there, followed by a gust of out breath, then the long silent pause.

He asked me questions and wrote down the answers. I told him some of my history with my mother: about her addiction to psychiatric drugs in my childhood, and how, after I'd left for college, she'd gotten off drugs and reclaimed her vitality. I was trying to get him to understand the context of why I didn't want my mother overly sedated, but as I spoke, I felt barely present, rambling, and unfocused. Part of me was hovering, disembodied, in the direction of my mother.

Finally he said, “Let's go see what's happening with her.”

We leaned over her bed, listening to the long pauses between each breath. I found myself silently counting:
one thousand one one thousand two one thousand three
. . .
please please inhale.

He shook me out of my frozen stupor with the simple statement “I think you should call the hospice nurse.”

When I got the nurse on the phone, she said that was just how it needed to be. Nothing to be done. But now that I had mobilized myself to action, I wouldn't accept that answer. I showed the social worker out and called our family doctor, Dvora. She told me how much to turn down the morphine pump.

After several hours, Gloria finally came to. She raised her head and looked around. “I couldn't wake up,” she rasped. “I thought I had died.”

I took her hand. “No, no,” I soothed, “you just had a bit too much drugs.”

FOR A FEW DAYS, I had my mother back.

One afternoon, she said, “Something, something I have to tell you.” She was short of breath, struggling to get the words out. “Something about Happy.”

“About Happy?” I echoed.

Of course she meant my childhood dog.

My mother's words were a bit slurred from the morphine. “'Member when we talked about giving Happy to the farmer?”

“Yes?”

“There was no farmer . . . a story I made up.” Her voice caught. “Juz couldn't handle him anymore. I had him put to sleep. Sorry, so sorry. Can you forgive me?”

I laughed at the shock of it, all these years kept secret by my mother. In the immensity of my mother's dying, Happy's death seemed far away and small. Absurd, almost. I dismissed its meaning, giddy in my present sorrow. I was quick to reply, skimming the surface, too overwhelmed with grief to excavate below.

“Of course, Gloria, of course,” I soothed. I wanted no regrets between us, and so I overlooked my own.

 

 

SOMETIME AFTER HER death, I wondered at her decision to put Happy down all those years earlier and felt the stirrings of fury. Was there no other way to tame Happy's wildness than the injection of a lethal sedative? My mother's choice had found no way to leave me one of the few solaces in my childhood, a companion who eased my loneliness and gave me joy. She robbed me of that.