I was yanked from a deep, disquieting sleep by the ringing of my iPhone. It was a frantic Alice calling, tears hobbling her words: “Your mother’s been taken to the hospital. She fell unconscious.”
I dragged a hand across my tired face. It was pitch black in the room. A digital clock read 5:11 a.m. “What hospital?”
St. Nicholas was located less than ten minutes from the hotel. Experienced at finding my way to the ICUs, I located my mother fast in one of the curtained bays, lying flat out with a ventilator strapped over her nose and mouth. She appeared to be breathing rhythmically, but of course once they get you into the ICU there is no mercy; their goal is to keep you alive no matter what cost, no matter what suffering, no matter how tragic and doomed the scenario.
I pulled up a fiberglass chair, sat down, finding my mother’s hand on the mattress and giving it a squeeze. “Hi, Mom? It’s me Miles.”
She grew agitated, but her hand squeezed back. An anxious Alice hovered by the curtain, a fretful hand to her mouth.
I rose to speak to her. “What happened?”
“She was trying to go to the bathroom when she fell.”
I nodded. “You’ve talked to the doctors?”
“They’re pretty sure it was another stroke.”
I looked down at my mother. The poor woman had endured so much—pulmonary embolism, stroke, heart attack, congestive heart failure, and now another stroke. Not to mention raising three obstreperous kids!
A nurse on the graveyard shift slipped into the bay and told us, in a consoling voice, there was no more we could do. She suggested we let my mother rest.
I spent the next two days wandering around Sheboygan with Snapper. And yes, half the women stopped to coo over him and chat me up. It was like walking with a newborn.
Several times I checked in on my mother. She was showing guarded improvement, but she looked bad. Alice fed me dinner both nights. She admitted that she didn’t think she could take care of her sister, apologized if she had given me that impression. It was just too hard, she said. We let Dave go. I would have to find a home.
By the third day, after they had stabilized her, she was transferred out of the ICU and into a step-down unit she shared with another woman in traction, both arms and legs in multiple casts, held in place by various ropes and pulleys. My mother, hooked up to a feeding tube, was otherwise off life-support, sentient and aware of her surroundings. Her head listed more than before and the left side of her mouth sagged worse than I remembered. When she spoke it was monosyllabically, in a hoarse voice that seemed to be issuing from a bathysphere. The morphine compounded the already extreme difficulty she experienced in vocalizing her thoughts and moving her one good arm. Her expression was all but affectless.
“How are you, Mom?”
“O-kay,” she barely managed.
“You had another minor stroke.”
She nodded almost imperceptibly. “It hurts.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
There was a silence. I held her hand in mine. She stared blankly into space. Her eyes had a kind of forlorn, faraway look, half in the corporeal world, half in the realm of the already dead.
“Do they want to keep me here?” she asked, enunciating painfully.
“For a while. Yes.”
Her head lolled in my direction and she did her best to fix her watery eyes on mine. She spoke in a sepulchral voice. “You promised.”
Her words nonplused me; no, staggered me. My heart raced wildly.
Despite the effort it clearly required she kept her eyes fiercely locked on mine. “Miles,” she croaked. “You—prom—ised.”
“Where do you want to go, Mom?”
“Home.” Belafonte’s lyric sang in my head.
“Home where?”
Very weakly, she lifted her index finger and suspended it in the air. “Where everyone is,” she said, still disoriented, still with that voice that suggested she was only half in the world.
“Everyone who?”
Her face grew disorganized as if she couldn’t understand that I couldn’t understand. Or, worse, that I was resisting. Her expression suddenly turned childlike, as if through the shifting clouds of misapprehension she had spotted a patch of blue. “You know. The family.” She nodded to herself with a closemouthed, self-satisfied smile, content that we, mother and son, were in unison.
I stared into her nirvanic gaze, focused on some spectral presence only she could make out. As she stared absently into her private numinous realm, I saw she had already gone, crossed her own Rubicon. Now, she was asking me one last favor.
Her eyes floated off. At a shuffling of heels on the linoleum, I turned. The attending physician, a young woman, sidled over, a clipboard pressed to her chest. I got up from my chair and we drifted out of earshot of my mother, who appeared to have been narcotized back asleep anyway.
“What’s the extent of the damage, Doctor?”
“We won’t know until we get her out of here and into rehab.”
“But she’s probably lost some more motor control? Her speech is more aphasic. That much I can tell.”
The doctor smiled, mildly impressed that the patient’s scruffy-looking son knew some of the stroke vernacular. “Probably,” she said. “She’s getting old.” She glanced at the medical history. “I can see she’s been through a lot.”
“Yes, she has.” Tears formed in my eyes and I blinked them back. I launched into the story. My mother living at home, then put into assisted-living after a congestive heart failure, being miserable, and how I had brought her back to live with her sister, and what an insane trip it was, “And now this.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, glancing impatiently at her watch, more patients to see, more life-and-death situations to attend to, more grieving families to face with a stoic countenance. “At least she’s alive.”
“What kind of a life is this?” I said, fastening my eyes on hers. I was hoping she’d have an answer, but none was forthcoming. Certainly not the answer my mother had sought from her son.
“I’ve got to go,” the doctor said, smiling. “Talk to her. That helps.” She pivoted in place and walked off.
Between visits to the hospital, I wandered aimlessly around Sheboygan. I’d have taken Snapper, but didn’t have the patience or focus for all the passersby who’d buttonhole us on the sidewalks. The storm that had been building had finally arrived to blanket the city with gray, impenetrable skies. Rain intermittently poured from the saturnine heavens. It was growing cold, the early fall portending another punishing winter. There wasn’t much to do. Snapper was subdued, as if he sensed the gravity of the situation. Alice was in limbo. Grief and infirmity had arrived at her doorstep and she didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t leave. My mother’s words haunted my every waking moment.
I stopped in from time to time at Alice’s, but we had little to talk about except my mother, too gloomy a topic for extended conversation. Alice wondered aloud what would happen when she got out and I said that I didn’t know, that I would probably have to put her in a home this time. “The dreaded end of so many lives,” I muttered, more to myself than to Alice. It was unfair of me to bring this to her again. Why was I trying to get my mother’s sister, no youngster herself, to look at the contemptible way, in this medically aggressive society of ours, we require people to die? I think she was relieved when I said her sister wouldn’t be coming back to her place, that that was no longer a tenable option.
My handlers back in LA were understanding, and professed to be eagerly awaiting my return so they could send me on meetings and pimp me out for lush writing assignments. I felt divorced from the whole whirligig—entertainment business, wine world, clawing to get me to this pitch session or that tasting. The exaggerated Hollywood excitement to capitalize on the updraft of this evanescent fame barely registered.
I called Hank and brought him up to date. My older brother kept mostly silent, probably afraid that once our mother was discharged I was going to make a move to dump her on him. First our larcenous younger brother, now me, then him—Mom getting worse at each way station. After reassuring him I would put her in full convalescence if need be, I asked whether he had heard from Doug. In a fusillade of expletives, he said he didn’t want to see or hear from “that fucking asshole.” No one prepares us for this, I thought, as I let a bitter Hank go, reassuring him that I would take care of everything. My mother’s dream of finding a reunited family in the afterlife seemed just that: a dream.
A week after my mother’s stroke I found her in the step-down unit with a physical therapist on one of my many visits. They had taken her off the feeding tube and were, all over again, helping her to relearn how to eat. Yogurt dribbled from the left side of her mouth and the PT patiently wiped it up, encouraging her to try again. As my mother tentatively tried to spoon more yogurt into her mouth, I noticed that her coordination wasn’t what it had been and she had trouble finding her mouth. More depressing, she appeared listless, torpid to the point of not wanting to soldier on with this wheelchair-bound, nursing home way of life. I couldn’t tell whether it was the effects of the latest stroke, or just the fact she’d made clear, emphatically, that first visit: that she had given up on trying, on life.
The PT left us to spend some time together. Before he walked off, he said, “You’re doing well, Phyllis. You’re going to get back to your old self.”
I smiled, but I wanted to smack him.
My mother ignored his encouragement and stared sullenly into space. Her expression defied such optimism, no doubt an occupational necessity the PT had been trained to manufacture. What was he going to say? You’re fucked up and you should be warehoused in a ward for people on the precipice?
My mother wouldn’t look in my direction. Rain streaked the windows on the far side of the room. The bed between the window and my mother’s was empty. “Where’s your roommate, Mom?” I asked. Not that I cared greatly; it was just a way to break the silence.
The answer to my idle question came in a voice so dark and cold and angry it sent shivers up my spine. “She died.”
In an effort to brighten the saturnine mood, I said, “They got you off the feeding tube.”
My mother went on staring into space, as if any improvement, any exhortation to keep her in the fight, were an insult.
I let a silence ensue. All we could hear was the rain pecking at the window.
“Snapper’s doing well.”
She nodded, as if she no longer cared. “Good.”
“He’s his old self, eating . . .”
“I don’t care,” she chopped me off. “They won’t let him in the poor folks’ home,” she nearly shrieked.
This was a different woman. She had gone to the edge of death and been denied it too many times. We were locked in combat over one thing, and one thing only: her wishes, and my willingness to carry them out.
Still without looking at me, she said, “You promised, Miles.” Her head lolled my way, and her voice gained in intensity. “You—prom—ised.”
I stared into the dark tunnels of her eyes and swallowed hard. Death without dignity was everywhere in this hospital.
“I’m never going to get out of here,” she said bitterly, her words garbled again. She turned back to me and demanded, “Get me out of here.”
“Where do you want to go?”
She extended that crooked index finger, barely raising her hand. With an expression that might have seen through all the walls in the universe, she gargled, “Home.”
“Home where? Back to Alice’s?” I asked, whether in an effort to ground her, or ground myself, I can’t say.
She looked confused. She became agitated, vexed by my inability or unwillingness to understand. “No,” she said. “Home.”
“Away from this misery?”
She nodded imperturbably and her face grew long, sad, the first sign of emotion I had seen in her since her readmission. “Home.” Then, chillingly: “Where my father and mother are. Where Rusty is.” With supreme effort she raised her hand higher and pointed the index finger skyward. “You promised.”
I made an appointment to see a doctor. My Xanax supply was depleted and, with my mother back in the hospital, I was chronically insomniacal. It was raining hard when I pulled up to the two-story cinderblock medical complex. In a small waiting room with a kindly receptionist manning a switchboard, I filled out my medical history. I had to chuckle to myself when I came to a series of questions regarding my psychological wellbeing—anxiety (yes); depression (yes); schizophrenia (probably). I lied on the form so as not to alarm the doctor.
A nurse opened a door and led me into a tiny examination room. She weighed me, took my blood pressure, and told me to wait. I asked her what my weight was and was mildly alarmed to find I had gained some fifteen pounds since my last office visit. I was too afraid to inquire about my blood pressure.
The doctor was a genial man in his midfifties, with thinning blond hair and a quiet demeanor. He glanced at my answers to the questionnaire, then at the nurse’s various measurements and readings. “Your blood pressure’s elevated,” he said.
“What is it?”
“150 over 98,” he said matter-of-factly. “Normally I would recommend putting you on high blood pressure medication.”
I related in my most concise story-telling mode, as if I were pitching a movie idea to a bored and jaded studio executive, what I had been through with my mother, what had stranded me in Sheboygan, postulating that this could be the cause of my elevated blood pressure.
“So, what’s the reason for your visit?” he asked.
I filled him in on my history of panic and anxiety, ending with, “I need a refill on my Xanax prescription. And,” I added, “I’d like to get a sleeping aid.” I looked him in the eye. “And none of this Ambien or Lunestra housewife crap. They don’t work for me. I need something strong. Something that will knock me out. I haven’t slept in days. I’m going to go mad if I don’t get a decent night’s rest.”
He returned my stare. I hung my head, feigning—well, not really—fatigue.
And for some reason, the weight of everything unloaded: the emotional journey with my mother, the flukish success of the movie based on my book, my downward spiral into an ongoing, wanton bacchanal, going cold turkey and seeing the world in the raw light of sobriety. I broke down and cried. The doctor just stood there. I heard the scratch of pen on paper. Brushing back tears, I looked up.
The doctor handed me two small squares of paper off his prescription pad. “Don’t go mixing these. The sedative is very strong.”
“Sure, Doctor. Thank you.”
“And no alcohol.”
“I don’t drink. Anymore.”
That night, with the help of the Seconal the doctor had prescribed, I did sleep. Deeply, in an underworld of dreams that seemed to issue from somewhere in the wilderness of the collective unconscious. In one, especially vivid, I saw my mother and father, in their twenties, romance efflorescing, young and smiling and given to laughter. They were flying in a single-engine aircraft, my father piloting his girlfriend, the woman he was in love with, across Lake Michigan into a cloudless blue sky for a special dinner where he would propose to her. I snapped to consciousness with the incandescent realization that somewhere, deep in our dreams, or deep in unconsciousness, or deep in the afterlife, all conflicts and acrimonies are resolved. That it was consciousness that so unrelentingly afflicted us with suffering.
I parted the heavy gray drapery. The storm was clearing. The skies were lightening to a refulgent blue, dispersing swaths of clouds in the windy upper atmosphere. Sheboygan’s streets glistened. I was groggy, but oddly refreshed. As I shaved, I couldn’t help but stare at myself in the mirror. Dark pouches underscored my eyes. I might be feeling stronger, but the trip had aged me.
Breakfast at Alice’s was somber. I had taken to coming over in the mornings to keep her company, and then driving her over to see her sister. But I could tell the visits were wearing on her. Death is too slow in coming was what she would have said had she not been a Christian.
“I don’t think I’m going to come today, is that okay?” she asked.
“Sure, Alice.” It had to depress her profoundly to see her older sister and know it could just as easily be her. And who would be here for Alice when the time came?
I rose. “Come on, Snapper,” I said. “Let’s go see Mom.”
Snapper jumped off the couch. As his owner was growing more frail, he was improving.
“You know I can’t take him,” Alice said.
“I’ll find a home for him,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“Say hi to Phyllis.”
I drove, Snapper riding shotgun, to St. Nicholas Hospital.
The hospital was sepulchral at this hour. I found my mother in her room, slumped over in her wheelchair. Her head listed onto one shoulder, the left side of her mouth sagged; overall, a grotesque visage. The early shift had bathed and dressed her. This was the first since her arrival here I had seen her in her street clothes.
“Mom?” I said gently, to rouse her. I couldn’t tell whether she was sleeping or still in such a state of disorientation that she was less than half in the world. “Mom, it’s me Miles.”
She turned her head slowly and tried to meet my eyes. I had to squat because the heaviness of her head, coupled with the increased diminution of motor control, precluded her looking up at me the way she had even recently been able to do. “Hi, Miles,” she said faintly, the words drawn out, her speech so aphasic, similar to that of an infant, decipherable only by the parents. Still, it was a lingua franca that we had developed over the years since her first, devastating, stroke.
I massaged her shoulder in hello. “How’re you doing?”
“Not so well,” she said, garbling her words.
A muscular young PT came bustling in. Though a different guy from the one I’d seen the day before, he said in the same cheery voice, “We got her up today.”
“That’s good,” I said, unable to share his enthusiasm about my mother’s ostensibly improved condition, but understanding that it was his job to put a positive spin on the most moribund of cases.
I found myself speaking without having thought through what I meant. “I was thinking of taking her for a drive,” I said casually. “Maybe buoy her spirits.”
The PT furrowed his brow. “Let me ask the doctor.”
“Please.”
Brimming with energy, he strode off.
I squatted down again. “Do you want to go for a drive, Mom?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I want to get out of here.”
“I’ve got Snapper here with me.”
“Oh. You’re a good son. My Snapper.”
“Where would you like to go? It’s a gorgeous day.”
She considered for a moment, then nodded sedately. She lost her focus for a moment, then her eyes opened wide. A flicker of exultation, pushed by a remote corner of a receding emotional core, swept across her face. “Am I going home, Miles?”
“Yes, Mom,” I said unhesitatingly. “You’re going home.”
She grew practically animated, a wan smile creasing her lanolin-shiny face. “Oh, that’s such good news.”
The PT returned with the doctor who, it occurred to me for some silly reason, had her whole glorious life ahead of her. She held out her hand. I took it and smiled at her.
“I’d like to take her on a little drive, if that’s okay. Might be good to get a little sunshine.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea, Miles. Your mother’s pretty weak.”
“I think it would be good for her. Plus, I’ve got her dog in the car.” I told her about the amputation to gain her sympathy.
She squatted in front of my mother. “Mrs. Raymond? It’s me, Dr. Neiser. Do you remember me?”
Her patient stared blankly into her face and I feared for a moment that my mother wouldn’t be able to get past even the most basic cursory examination to confirm she was still possessed of her faculties. But she rose to the occasion. “Oh, yes. How are you, Dr. Neiser?”
“I’m fine, Mrs. Raymond. Do you feel up for a drive with your son?”
That perked the old coot up. “Oh, yes,” she exclaimed. She raised the index finger and added, “I need to get out. I want to see the sky.”
“Okay, Mom,” I said, chopping her off, fearful she was going to spin off into the dottily transcendental and reinforce the doctor’s misgivings.
Dr. Neiser straightened to a standing position. “Her heart’s very weak. We’ve had to double the nitro.”
I could see she was torn, and not trending in my direction. “We won’t be gone long.” I lowered my voice. “I’m leaving tomorrow to go home. This may be the last time I see her alive.”
Frowning, the doctor looked from my mother back to me, then, against all her professional instincts, she smiled and said, “Okay. Have a nice outing.” She turned and walked briskly out of the room.
The PT, in the wings, said, “Do you want me to help you out with her?”
“No, we’re fine. I’ve got a special handicap van.”
He placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder, squeezed it with his strong fingers and said, “Have a nice afternoon, Mrs. Raymond.”
“I will. Thank you.”
“All right, Mrs. Raymond. See you when you get back.” He went off.
“Ready, Mom?”
“Yes. All my life.”
For the umpteenth time I circled around behind her chair and took hold of the steering handles. We rolled through the door, down the length of a corridor, past rooms featuring demoralizing dioramas of every imaginable human debility, past the receptionist’s desk and out through the automatic doors into the crisp air. The bright sunshine galvanized my mother to root around in her purse for her sunglasses, but she was having trouble. I slowed to a halt and helped her find them. I placed them on the bridge of her nose. I rooted out her favorite faded blue Gilligan’s Island hat and slapped that on her head as well.
“Oh, it’s such a beautiful day,” she managed.
“It is, Mom, isn’t it?” I replied, feeling one with her elation.
We pushed off again and, in the handicapped parking, eased her to a stop at the side of the Rampvan, and slid open the door. When Snapper saw her, he started barking his fool, impish head off.
“Oh, Snapper, you be quiet,” my mother scolded.
I rolled my mother into the back and set both the brakes. Snapper, with an adrenaline rush brought on by his recognition of his owner, leapt adroitly into her lap. My mother bent forward to let him lick her, talking to him all the while. It brought a smile to my cynical face.
I circled round the van, climbed into the driver’s seat and turned over the engine.
St. Mary’s Cemetery, where my mother’s parents were buried and where she wanted to go, is a small-town Catholic burial ground set in a wooded area outside Sheboygan. It’s a traditional cemetery that you don’t see much of in California, populated with heavy granite steles, plinths, and gravestones of all shapes and sizes.
It was blustery when I braked to a halt on the access road fronting the cemetery. I rolled my mother with Snapper in her lap down the ramp. The going was bumpy as we traversed the dirt path and threaded our way through the grave markers to where her parents’ modest stones stood embedded in the ground.
“Are you chilly, Mom?”
“A little.”
I went back to the van to retrieve the sweater that Alice had been thoughtful to give me when I told her I might take her sister out for a drive. I wrapped it around her shoulders. “Better?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Snapper lay contentedly in her lap. She stroked his small head.
I stood next to her as she stared wordlessly at her parents’ graves. No telling what images and emotions were ranging over the drought-stricken floodplain of her nearly destroyed brain. Was she journeying back in time? Or surrendering to the inevitable and the darkening of those bright blue skies?
After a long silence she said simply, without looking at me. “I don’t want to go back to the hospital.”
“I know.”
“You promised.”
I hooked my arm around her and gave her a hug. “You’ve been through a lot, Mom. You’re a tough old bird.”
She rasped a chuckle.
I hugged her tightly. Then, mustering all my courage, I said, having succumbed to her private idiom, “You’re ready to go home?”
She stared at the grave markers for the longest time. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, she nodded.
I squeezed her shoulders and let go my hug. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
She wordlessly nodded, turned her eyes slightly my way, but said nothing.
From a brown paper bag stowed in the Rampvan, I removed a cup of yogurt and a plastic spoon. I dumped out half the yogurt and added the powder of fifteen Seconal capsules, stirring the mix until it was smooth. Trying to go on autopilot, following the steps I had rehearsed in my head, I walked back to where my mother sat still staring at the grave markers. She was mumbling something to Snapper, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
I fed her the half-cup of yogurt, spooning baby food to the child I’d never had—and never would. I stood behind her with my hands on her shoulders, both of us gazing out at the sea of gravestones.
As if one last thing had flared in her mind, she looked up, raised her heavy right arm and crooked the index finger, at some invisible god she invoked to help her understand this final moment. She grew momentarily agitated. “Miles?”
I squatted down. “Yes, Mom? I’m here. What is it?”
Her face bore the oddest, most innocent expression, as if she had come full circle back to infancy. “Where do you think we go when we die?”
I tried to take her question at face value. “I don’t know for sure,” I started, wanting to be profound, knowing I would come up short. “But I had a dream last night that seemed to say that we go to where all our conflicts, all the resentments, all the bad things that have happened to us, are somehow resolved. I don’t know where. I don’t know what it looks like, but it has to be a place where everything is made whole, where we are no longer angry or in pain or suffering, where we are somehow one with ourselves, one with our families, one with the universe.”
My mother nodded, seeming to understand, as if my disjointed speculation were the oracle. “Oh, I hope so.”
A wind blew through the cemetery and pushed some leaves over the grave markers.
“I’m sorry about everything that’s happened,” I started. “This whole trip and everything. It was probably a mistake.”
She shook her head, slowly and definitively, back and forth. “Oh, no,” she said, tears muddling her words. “We lived life!”
“That we did.” And with her words I saw what this trip had meant. Not just to her. The point wasn’t the transporting of an infirm woman to Wisconsin to die. It was the improbable journey itself. I looked back at her. Still petting Snapper, she was staring, again, at some fixed point in space and time. I looked away.
Leaves swirled and eddied as swirling gusts of wind kicked up abruptly and then died down just as suddenly as they had come up.
After what seemed like an eternity, I turned and looked again at my mother. Her head was slumped forward, her chin resting on her chest. Her eyes were shut. I levitated the back of my hand next to her mouth. I could feel her warm, but now weak, exhalations. I glanced around and there was no one in the cemetery except my mother, Snapper and me.
Then, the strangest thing happened. Snapper perked up his ears, leapt out of my mother’s lap, raised his head to the sky and started yipping uncontrollably.
“Snapper,” I admonished. “Snapper.” But he wouldn’t stop. I had never seen him in such a state. His yips were that of a coyote, yowling, echoing through the cemetery.
The Internet medicide advice said that “when using barbiturates, it is important to stop the breathing manually.” Unless I asphyxiated her, she would take longer to die, and death might come horribly by her choking on her own vomit.
Following one of three recommendations provided on the site, I pinched my mother’s nostrils shut and then clamped my other hand over her mouth. She struggled only a few seconds and went slack. I removed my fingers from her nose, but kept my other hand over her mouth until I could no longer feel breath.
After what might have been a minute, Snapper still yipping away, her breathing seemed to have ceased. Just as in her condo a few years before when she had had the congestive heart failure, a peace had settled over her and her face seemed haloed, in a permanent state of rest. I looked at her a long moment, could have sworn I felt her spirit or whatever ascending out of her, breaking free of the dilapidated body that yoked her to the earth, this pain she had borne with so much suffering. She didn’t want to go back to the hospital, I kept rationalizing, and she didn’t want to waste away the last months of her life in a nursing home. And: I had promised.
Suddenly, Snapper stopped his yipping just as quickly as he had started. It was followed by a plaintive whimpering, as if he, too, sensed what I had. He looked at me, and I looked at him. If we could have spoken to each other we would have said the same thing: she’s gone.
I turned to my mother and placed my lips on her cold lifeless cheek. I put my arms around her. And took a look at my watch.
My mother quickly grew cold in my overdue embrace. I checked and double-checked for evidence of breathing, but there was none. I examined her cursorily in the fading light. Her chapped lips had gone motionless and her face had grayed. Feeling her wrist with my thumb, I couldn’t discern a pulse. Just to be certain, I let another half hour pass. In that halfhour I reflected on our trip. More than once I laughed through the tears.
I finally punched in 911 on my cell.
An EMS vehicle showed within ten minutes, its lights flashing. Two paramedics, a man and a woman, hustled over to where my mother was peacefully slumped in her wheelchair. After hearing how she had just lapsed into unconsciousness they checked her vital signs and went to work in a vain attempt to resuscitate her. Despite the fact they found no pulse they employed all-out heroic measures. Oxygen, cardio-push, adrenaline injections. After twenty futile minutes the female paramedic returned to where I was standing and said simply, “Your mother’s gone.”
I nodded at the inevitable, tears forming anew in my eyes. Had they miraculously brought her back from the dead this time I would have been out of my mind with rage. The fact that they used everything in their medical arsenal to resuscitate her I didn’t blame on them per se; it was what the law required them to do.
Per the standard procedure, the male paramedic got on a cell phone to the Sheboygan Police. Another numbing twenty minutes passed before a squad car with flashing lights parked on the periphery of the cemetery. Two uniformed officers made their way over to the scene of my mother’s death. After conferring with the paramedics, they approached me. Through tears, I told them that I had taken my mother out of the hospital so she could visit her parents’ graves.
The cops nodded empathetically, signed some papers and handed them to the EMS crew so they could “move the body”—my mother!—into their truck and back to the hospital.
Dr. Neiser met me in the waiting room after performing a cursory postmortem. We sat across from each other under bright fluorescent lights.
“Do you want an autopsy?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I think we know why she died.”
“I always advise an autopsy,” she asked. “There was evidence of petechiae.”
“Pardon?”
She looked at me with cold, unblinking eyes. “Facial hemorrhaging.”
“Which means?”
“Hypoxia.”
I looked at her dumbly, waiting.
“It could be indication of asphyxiation,” she elaborated. Our eyes met, but only briefly before we both looked away. “Of course, CPR was performed in the field. That could also cause hemorrhaging.” She glanced away and wrote something down on the paper on her clipboard. She looked up at me. “I believe what happened was for the best.”
I nodded.
Our eyes met in that same darting reluctance. She glanced down and wrote something more on the form. “I’m going to put cause of death as ‘heart failure,’” she said.
I pressed my eyes shut to block another onrush of tears. “There was no failure of heart,” I said enigmatically, before checking myself.
The doctor signed off on the death certificate and mortuary arrangements—more paperwork!—were made. Cremains to be shipped to a funeral outlet in San Diego where they would be held until I could pick them up and arrange for disposition at the Ft. Rosecrans Cemetery next to where my dad was interred.