18

Our Family Shrivels

My favorite picture of my parents, which I took on their sixtieth anniversary at their home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

I long felt bad I hadn’t given my parents grandchildren. But a few years after Ronnie died, I did the next best thing: I married Dan Crawford, a man they loved like a son.

Simple happiness was not ours for long. In 2003, after a difficult, protracted battle with emphysema, my father passed away. Mom’s anxieties skittered higher after that, and her faith in the world plunged beneath her aching knees. She was frightened of spoiled food, any criticisms, poverty, car accidents, falling, my death, curvy roads, strong winds, snakes, making mistakes, looking shabby, snow, ice, strangers, fire, losing control of herself, embarrassment, cheese (causes constipation), green vegetables (interfere with blood thinner), salt (raises blood pressure), and surprises (even pleasant ones).

One of my rewards for washing her back and scrubbing her toilet was clarification of family history. When I was little, she’d storm red-faced around the house, angry about Daddy’s friendships with the Keswick postmistress and with the church pianist. Now I could ask, Had he fooled around with those women? “No, he was just being friendly. He was nice to everybody. I thought they misunderstood. He could be a flirt.”

Even in our saddest months, Mom made me laugh. At the annual service that honored deceased patients of Daddy’s hospice, an aged clarinetist played a series of doleful classical pieces in a random, modern pattern. When he was done, Mom blurted out for all to hear, “I’m glad they cut that noise off.” Don’t know what she thought it was, but it wasn’t music.

In a talk about heaven, Mom declared the idea of life after death to be “bullshit.” As a young girl, she’d taken the invitational walk of salvation down the aisle at Bethlehem Church. A woman pressured her to, promising she’d see her mother again. Even then, Mom said, still bitter, “I knew that was baloney.”

* * *

WITH MY HAND at her waist as she rose the two painful steps to her back door, I felt the grinding of Mom’s knee bones telegraphing up her frame. Getting in and out of her Buick Century was agony and sometimes impossible. New drugs interfered with her blood thinner, and she injured a leg vein. Blood pooled inside and all around her ankle. She could barely stand. My longtime doctor had gently ushered Daddy through death and would do the same for Mom. As he knelt by her red, swollen ankle in his examining room, Mom assured him, “You can take my shoe off. I washed my feet.” She still believed she stunk.

* * *

HER FORMERLY COIFFED hair now Einstein wild, Mom was as adamantly anti-science as Ronnie. We couldn’t convince her that her thermal pane windows would keep out the cold. On a Christmas card–like day, with blue-white snow draping the trees, kids on sleds, and cardinals darting to feeders Dan had erected for her, we opened her curtains to reveal the cheery scene. She insisted on closing them.

Two nights after a hospital stay when doctors studied her pains and loss of appetite, Dan and I went to dinner across town. When we checked on Mom at nine o’clock, her bedroom door was closed. She always kept it open for her cat. “Mary Carter,” she said faintly as I approached, “I’m on the floor. I can’t get up.” She’d fallen while setting her glasses on the dresser and landed against the inside of the door. A thin female medic squeezed in. Through the crack, I spied Mom’s splayed left foot. She’d broken her left hip. She’d fractured her right one six years earlier.

* * *

OVER THE NEXT thirteen months, Mom and I rode the troughs and swells of old age. She brought to it all her many fears, a deep loathing of her body, her residual shame from her youthful pregnancy, and a cognitive disconnect that made her a dangerous patient. While in the hospital recovering from hip surgery, she insisted she could stand and walk without assistance. I had to keep an eye on her or she’d take off down the hall and dislodge the new metal ball in her hip socket. I begged her to relax, to which she aptly replied, “I’m not made that way.”

She went into a nursing home, where imagery of her country upbringing emerged poetically as she recovered from the anesthesia. She hallucinated scenes of lambs playing in fields. The bellowing of a female patient was a calf hollering for its mama. The trilling of the phone at the nurses’ station was the whirring of a screech owl. When she had diarrhea, she asked for a slop jar, which is what old-timers called a bedpan.

* * *

DAY AFTER DAY, as she steadily declined, she lay in bed grieving for herself.

“I feel so, so . . .”

“So what, Mom?”

“I feel so guilty.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know.”

* * *

WE MOVED HER to a private corner room with two windows. One of her earlier roommates, a wise little woman with a lyrical tongue, had told us she knew just what to do for an old person: “They need a pillow for every bone.” I brought in colorful cushions and decorated the room with Mom’s cherished pictures, plants, and tchotchkes. A few years before he died, following a squabble with Daddy, she’d burned his love letters from their courting days. But now, to each of the four framed photos of him, she’d proclaim daily, “I love you.” When I set out her photo portrait taken shortly before their wedding, she stared at it awhile and remarked, “I think I look sad.”

* * *

AT THE END of her life, Mom still bemoaned the fact that she had sinned in having Ronnie. When she announced to me these three words, just three syllables—“I’m no good”—she seemed to be expressing the judgment of herself she’d borne throughout her adult life.

Though she’d earlier rejected the idea of heaven, now, like the proverbial believer in the foxhole, she was hoping for it. “Do you think I’ll be with Daddy?” That’s how she referred to him when speaking to me. She was sure he’d been whisked straight through the pearly gates, no need for examination. Though I wasn’t much of a believer, I assured her that yes, she would be with Daddy. I told her she’d been a good woman.

“No, I haven’t.”

* * *

ON A FRIDAY morning, she was going. Phlegm crackled in her chest. Soft wheezes with her every breath were seabird cries in the distance. I knelt by her bed and kissed her, held her hand, stroked her arms. As she was slipping away that afternoon, Dan and her church friends came to kiss her goodbye.

Her minister, who’d watched so many people die, advised me to take note as her breathing slowed. This was once-in-a-lifetime business. All the troubles of her life will melt away, he told me, all her conflicts and worries. It will all boil down to her being barely there and then not there at all.

As she fed Mom morphine, a nurse skated the chestpiece of her stethoscope over Mom’s heart. An aide kept an eye on the faint pulsing of a blood vessel on the left side of her neck. The three of us hovered head-to-head as Mom’s tongue lolled around near her bottom teeth. In her right ear I whispered, “I love you, Mom.” Then she was gone.

Aides came to wash her body and wrap it in a white sheet. The staff closed patients’ doors along the hallway as two black-suited undertakers wheeled her away on a maroon-draped gurney.

Thirty minutes after she died, I gathered up her pillows. The one that had been under her left hip to relieve pressure on a bedsore was still warm. I shuddered slightly at this ghostly, unexpected touch, then wished I could keep it forever. The lingering heat of my mother’s body was another farewell, though not her last.