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The Trouble with Dying

Sept 2013

I am face to face with my mother. An urgent call from my sister had me over the bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn in less than an hour. I meet them in the Flatlands section, where telephone wires stretch high over the streets and the sun sucks the color out of everything. Not tree in sight; a desert of semidetached “Futurama” homes built in the ‘50s. What is my mother doing here? Medicare, I guess, Medicare is what she’s doing here. We’re in her cardiologist's waiting room.

“Mom, why did you take all 5 pills?” I speak softly, trying not to sound accusatory or incredulous. She's downed the full contents of a prescription.

“The doctor said to take it in the morning,” her voice and inflection spookily childlike. She seems bewildered by my shock, a response that only compounds it.

Soon after this incident, we find k-cups scattered across her counters--lids punctured, grounds spilled--as though caffeine-seeking rats had thrown a fiesta. My mother can no longer operate her coffee maker.

Alzheimers: Forced March of Forgetting

During the next months, I calibrate my mother’s descent by the level of stifled hysteria in my sister's voice when she calls me, often several times a day. She and her husband have lived with my mother for decades so their fates are twined, for better or for worse. And for worse has come. The following months see a person who looks like my mother play out these scenes:

Getting into a tearful argument with her 12-year-old grandson over whose dog has pooped on the rug in Sister #2’s Hamptons house. “Li-ar!” she weeps to me, her pronunciation a sudden throwback to her grandparents’ careful, immigrant English. “I hate a li-ar!”

Showing up at my sister and brother-in-law’s bedroom door at 5 am without a stitch of clothing asking when is breakfast.

Sitting with The New York Times opened before her. “What are you reading Mom?” I ask. She looks up, her expression anxious and vacant. Then: “You know what’s happening with Trayvon Martin, don’t you?” There is nothing happening with Trayvon Martin and nothing about it in the day’s Times about it; Zimmerman had been acquitted months before.

Perhaps the sorriest scene is the time she stands in the hallway, self-soiled and in tears, for close to an hour waiting for my sister to come home to clean her. She understands what she's done and is miserable with shame, not to speak of how tired and frightened she must feel standing that long.

As the year turns, she seems to lose her grasp of basics, insisting, for instance, that she was born at age 6; that Michelle Obama had visited the night before and used her new toilet seat; that no one in their right mind would think of sleeping with their hair on: desperately trying to pull it off and weeping with a despair so pure, so absolute when she can not.

“It’s ok Mom,” I whisper as I rock and kiss her at the edge of her bed, “We’re all gonna sleep with our hair on tonight,” but she is inconsolable.

Toward the spring, she takes up a ritual chant: “I live at 1001 East 19th Street; I live at 1001..,” trying, it seems, to pin her mind to something sure and solid while it is spinning away from everything she has ever called home. The momentum shakes loose her precious and precise words, falling, first one by one, then in clusters, leaving her unable to say what is happening to her. I cannot imagine a deeper hell for my mother than lacking the words to speak her grief and terror.

Let’s Finish This

By November her body, her lifelong improvement project, seems to puddle in place, embedding her in 90 pounds of once lovely, now loose and shapeless flesh that seems to have died before she has.

By her last day, December 16, 2014 my mother, who has had an enviable love of life, whispers to Tamari, her caregiver, “Let’s finish this. Let’s finish this.” I am struck by the implied “us” in “let’s.” But it is so her to want company even in this crossing. And to be honest, it is so her to resist dying by herself.

The trouble with dying is that you have to do it alone.

And in fact, we do our best to walk her up to the border: five children (one on FaceTime), two grandchildren, Tamari and little Havanese—encircling her, whispering our blessings, gratitude, good-byes and begging her to go. At 10:05 pm, for the last time, my mother, face waxy and wet with effort to suck enough air not to suffocate, releases the last breath that has connected her for nearly a century to all creation of which she has passionately felt a part. She breathes out. And we breathe in.