CHAPTER 39

“I have to—very slowly,” Mimi said haltingly, her words slurring but her smile intact. “I’ve had I’ve had a crane—brain—problem. So my is very crazy. But you have to speak well and louder.”

Half of the words that came out of Mimi’s mouth were not what she intended them to be. She went back and forth for a full minute just on the word Austria, when what she really meant was India. “Most words came out as water,” Jeff Cheney, the family friend helping out as one of her caregivers, said. But she would not stop trying to explain herself, and was always chuckling a little.

“Margaret’s here. She’s how—you know. And my mouth is there—might be having to go, too—we’ll see—but as I’m—you know—my original was eight dollar for being old, for getting too old.”

Mimi tittered softly, exasperated. “Pretty bad. But I can try. Sometimes say boy, school, but today, boy or book!”

She laughed again. “So I’m trying a little. It’s pretty bad. Not very good. And I thought I’d be, by now, I’d be over.” She laughed louder, and then out came something perfectly clear. “Well, as Mary said, ‘Mother, you’re just taking longer now!’ ”

The people around her had learned to decode much of what she was trying to say through her aphasia. They’d set up a hospital bed in the basement level of the house, easier for her caregivers to access. Each day brought something new: a bladder infection, an upset stomach, nausea, bouts of pain tempered by morphine. But Mimi could still watch TV—movies, cable news, and her favorite, Rachel Maddow. More helpless than she was accustomed to being, she would be alarmed when she was alone and go on tears about things she felt needed to get done around the house—most of them invented, like an overflowing septic system. For the first time in her life, Mimi had a few delusions of her own.

The longer Lindsay stayed, the more she understood her mother, or thought she did. When she wanted to get a complicated point across to Mimi, she would sometimes write her a note. When Mimi kept on refusing food and ordering something different, Lindsay wrote her, saying she believed these were her mother’s final few attempts to try to control what was going on in her life. Mimi agreed with Lindsay, but she kept on doing it, anyway.

What Mimi could no longer do, thanks to the aphasia, was control the conversation. “This is my son,” Mimi said, introducing Donald. Her oldest son had decided to visit, bringing flowers, which Mimi clearly appreciated. “He doesn’t see me very often,” Mimi said. “But we kalked today, and now go to each of them back more often to come each more. One crazy, you know.” She laughed.

In his usual cargo shorts and untucked Oxford, Donald was seated at the foot of his mother’s bed. Mimi’s condition did not seem to be affecting him, at least not noticeably. Donald was so still most of the time now, it often was hard to tell what he was thinking. But Lindsay had noted that since moving to his assisted living facility, he had stepped more lightly, smiled more. “I think the social isolation that he had at my mom’s house was really not good for him,” she said. Debbie, Mimi’s housekeeper, doubled as a part-time companion to Donald, picking him up every few days and driving him on errands, or out for walks in Woodland Park. More than occasionally, the plan would be to visit Mimi, but Donald would ultimately decide not to. “She’s too bossy,” he’d tell Debbie.

Today, though, he was here. And with Mimi unable to interject, Donald took over the conversation, uninhibited. He displayed a comprehensively accurate knowledge of the names of everyone in his family, including their spouses and children and the cities they lived in. It seemed he’d been paying very close attention to everything going on around him over the years. But before long, he diverged into fantasy, almost like swerving off a highway and going off-road.

“I underwrote the Academy falconry system,” he said. “The mascot. I started that. I’m an architect out that way, too. I designed the cadet chapel. Our Lady of the Lords built it, but she did it at my design, to thank me for something I did.”

He said Don and Mimi were not his real parents—that he was actually born five years earlier than it says on his birth certificate, and not in America but in Ireland, to a different family, also named Galvin. “My parents used the name Galvin, but they didn’t come from the Galvins,” he said. When his actual parents died, he said, he came to live in this family.

He referred to Mimi as his wife, and to his late father as “her husband.” Don Galvin, the man who raised him, was “a saint,” he said, “a neurosurgeon” who trained him in the field. But Donald chose a different path.

“I became a biological scientist, and a scientist in all fields of medicine. I have ninety thousand professions I could do, but I’ve done six thousand and six myself.”

His favorite, he said, was “falconry.”

In all of his stories, Donald seemed heavily invested in being the head of the family—the role designed for him before he got sick, and the role he cannot take on now except in his most Freudian daydreams. In these fantasies, Donald isn’t just in charge, he is superhumanly potent. Donald said he sired every single member of his family, except for the ones he doesn’t like: Peter, for instance, was what he calls a “swapped child.” So was Matt. His siblings were his progeny, but not in a sexual way. He inseminated and created—“bred” was the word he used—his children by something he called the “American Wince,” in which he just stared at someone in the right way and his seed would be spread to them.

“The way they do it is they think of their testicles, they lock in the head, and they move their eyes like this.” He squinted sharply, for a split second. “It’s called wince. The American Wince. And it gives the Dick Tracy seed—travels through the woman’s eye, and mathematizes, drops down to the womb. You fill the whole body with the seed by math. And it drives in. That’s how children come rightly.”

When asked, Donald talked briefly about the priest he said molested him. “He was dastardly, and he was paid to hurt me,” he said. He said he did not know if the priest abused anyone else, and that it happened to him just once. He seemed pretty sanguine about it now. “I got damaged and scarred and got over it. Nature heals itself.”

He mentioned the medicine he must take, but that discussion spun off, too. “I’m appreciative of that,” he said. “The medicine’s for staph infections, for living in groups. Haldol is for living in the hallway with people. I’m a pharmacist. As an architect, I put nine thousand new pharmacies in America. So that’s why I get to be a pharmacist, taking the pills. The Chinese government has challenged me to take a chance with me on that, so we can have some world conquest and pharmacy for all people. That’s why I like China. I’m a neurophysiology chemist. That’s what I do in my scientific field, as a scientist.”

Donald smiled. So did Mimi, haplessly.

“Yeah,” Donald said. “Life goes on, doesn’t it?”

On July 13, 2017, Lindsay was in Colorado Springs for the day to help Matt. A few weeks earlier, he’d totaled his old truck, and now he needed a ride to his appointments. She took him to get his blood drawn, then to the pharmacist to pick up his clozapine, then to Matt’s clinic for the proper clearance for the prescription, then back to the pharmacy. And then more errands—deliveries to two disabled friends who had relied on him for help, as long as he’d had the truck.

After dropping Matt back at his apartment, Lindsay stopped by Hidden Valley Road to see her mother. Mimi never left her bed now. Today, she was having a horrible headache. Jeff, her caregiver, had tried Tylenol and a sedative called Lorazepam, but it was getting worse.

Lindsay felt it in her stomach. This was exactly how it had started the last time, with a bad headache.

“She’s having a stroke,” she said.

HER MOTHER WOULDN’T let Lindsay leave her side. Every time she tried to take a break and head upstairs, Mimi would cry out as best she could through her aphasia: “Mary? Where’s Mary?”

Over the phone, the hospice service told Lindsay to give Mimi more morphine than ever: 10 milligrams every hour. It took four or five hours for Mimi’s pain to subside. At about 4 p.m., Mimi had a full-blown seizure. Holding on to Lindsay, shaking and out of control, she managed to say, “I’m going now, I’m going now.” She lost consciousness.

Lindsay, Jeff, and Michael took turns sleeping and sitting with Mimi, administering morphine and Haldol. If they ever backed off the regimen, Mimi became highly agitated and uncomfortable. With it, her breathing was still loud but rhythmic. Through a baby monitor, they could hear Mimi’s breath filling the house like a bellows. Occasionally she would stop breathing for several seconds. Each time they were sure that it was the end. Then she’d start breathing again.

Three days passed. On Sunday, Lindsay drove to Pueblo to get Peter. He brought Mimi a big bouquet of pink roses and said a Rosary for her. She got Donald from Point of the Pines and Matt from his place in Colorado Springs, and they both also had their chance to say goodbye. Mark came, and so did Richard and Renée, who cooked for everyone. John was in Idaho, planning to come out in a week’s time. Margaret, on the phone from Crested Butte, said that she had made her peace with her mother already and would not make the three-hour drive to see her one more time.

IN THE EARLY hours of Monday, July 17, Lindsay administered a dose of painkillers to Mimi and went back upstairs to go to sleep. At 2 a.m., Michael heard the rhythm of Mimi’s breathing change on the monitor, and he got up to check on her. He stood over his mother, watching as she inhaled and exhaled deeply, about ten times.

Finally, there was silence.

Michael woke Lindsay. Neither of them could go back to sleep. Lindsay cried and they both stayed up for a few hours, lighting candles and incense, sitting on the back deck, listening to the rain. There was something comforting about the sound of weather all around them.

The next day, the rain was still falling. Lindsay opened the front door to the house. The sky was gray, but the sun was there somewhere, giving the rain clouds above a bluish hue. Lindsay walked out into the front yard. She stood out there for a long time, arms stretched out, gazing upward as the rain covered her.

She motioned toward Michael, and he joined her. Together, they got soaked, laughing in the rain. Giddy, she tried to get Michael to dance with her, only to learn that her brother barely knew a box step. “I’m a musician, I’m always sitting on the stage!” Michael said.

Lindsay laughed. And when he grabbed his sister’s hand, Michael froze. It looked just like his mother’s hand, the way he remembered it from long ago.