HOW TO GRIEVE THE TERMINALLY ILL
I ONCE PLUCKED out the eyes of all the dolls I owned because I couldn’t bear to have them as witnesses. I might have been ten, twenty-five, or thirty-two—at this point, does it really matter? I couldn’t allow the dolls to see me being driven away from my home when I was ten. They can’t see the years I spent baking cakes in my home because I found it difficult to make friends. And the dolls could never bear witness to my mother’s steady, heartbreaking decline: the thirty pounds skinned from Ellie’s already slender frame because cancer booked passage into her body and proceeded to breed.
Sometimes one needs to remove things.
I watch an interview with Charles Manson where he calls Ted Bundy a mama’s boy, not fit to roll with his tribe, because Manson can only stand people who can stand to be with themselves. Manson shouts: Who do you think I am, girl? If you can pick all the words of the vocabulary that your mother told you, who do you think I am? This is only a couple of hours. Can you imagine a couple of days with me? Manson pleads for more time.
Experts think Ted Bundy hated his mother. Reports say his mother was a prim, modest department-store clerk who bore Bundy out of wedlock. He grew up in a home where he’d sometimes see women tossed down flights of stairs if they overslept. As a child he was horrified. As an adult who had been betrayed by his mother and first love, robbed of his identity and manhood, he understood hate. Women needed to be taken, possessed. Women required instruction.
While Ellie lies dying, I occupy my time observing the habits of strange men and reading grief manuals online. I learn how to bind myself to my mother’s pain and how to cope with loss.
I spend hours watching Bundy pay homage to the heads of his victims. He recounts how he posed and cleaned them, watched the skin turn gray then purple then blue. Inevitably, the skin would blister and crack, removing itself from the skull. Chrysalises aroused Ted, and in these moments of reliving the murders and the careful care of the remains, his voice is deep, melodic. I bake cakes. I pipe roses. I learn the term anticipatory grief. Ted was handsome, arresting. Sometimes I change the color of my hair. Other times I comb frosting through it.
I don’t want to talk about that. No, no I do not.
STAGE 1: CRISIS
Your family’s equilibrium will be disrupted. Anxiety is the most common initial reaction, but with estrangement, you may feel guilty, resentful, or angry.
Drinking softens the edges. The day Ellie is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, she buys a pack of cigarettes and takes up smoking again because why not? What does it matter that she quit ten years ago when she won’t be alive to see another ball drop? She pours glass after glass of Sancerre because she likes the taste of it. She shreds the prescriptions and tosses the paper in the air like confetti. She hasn’t considered death until she’s had to reckon with it. There was a time, years ago, when she wanted to die. When she was in a hotel in Bakersfield and turned the faucets on, full blast, to see if she could drown in a room. When she was on a street in Tonopah and didn’t know if she had the strength to go on, to be a dutiful wife and mother. Maybe if she took all the pills, she could rub all of it away. Why didn’t the cancer come for her then?
“So this is what I get,” Ellie says, “for the woman I’ve been.”
“We should get a second opinion,” says James.
“Why?”
“People get misdiagnosed all the time. We can’t take this lying down. We have to fight this.”
“You sound like a fucking Lifetime movie,” Ellie says. “I’m not going to another doctor. What I am going to do is finish this bottle of wine and start on a new one. And then I’ll smoke through this pack until I need to send you out to buy me a new one.”
“I think James is right,” I say, timidly.
“When this is all over, I want to be burned.”
“No one’s getting burned,” says James. “We have time.”
“You have time,” Ellie says. “Both of you.”
No one mentioned that all the anger and resentment in the room would belong to Ellie. No one feels guilt.
This will go on for hours until Ellie is passed out and James locks himself in the bedroom with Nic Cage movies. I remove the lit cigarette from my mother’s hand. I rub it out. I drape a blanket over her sleeping body and tuck in the edges. I’m careful with the hair, the feet.
“What’s one less person on the face of the earth anyway?” Ted Bundy says during an interview.
My mother is dying. She’s fucking dying. I bite down on my wrist, hard, until I can see teeth marks.
STAGE 2: UNITY
The needs of the dying become paramount. Not only does each family member have to define their role with respect to the terminally ill, but existing grudges or ill will must be resolved. But being a team player admittedly is challenging.
We don’t seek out a second opinion and live with the fact that Ellie’s on a clock. Her coughing causes her pain and the tissues surrounding her bed are covered in blood and phlegm. The cancer is spreading. I watch movies about death and I’m confused. Why does everyone appear to be encased in white light when we know there’s only black? We have to consider the possibility that nothing exists beyond our final breath except for a pine box or gray ashes flecked with bone.
In the yard I yank weeds from beds and James talks to me about putting some distance between us. The chemo was working, now it isn’t, and we don’t know what to do. The cancer has metastasized. It’s in the house.
“I know you’re angry,” he says.
“You have no idea.” I yank.
“I’m human, Kate, and this is me trying to do the right thing. But you got to take some responsibility in all of this.”
“You fuck another woman and it’s my fault? I was a witness. I saw what you did, I saw—”
“Kate, you were there.”
“Don’t.” I stand, wipe the dirt from my hands on my pants. A tiny worm winds its way around my finger. “And while you’re trying to do the right thing, I’m going to give my dying mother her medication and arrange for hospice. Is that enough distance for you, James?”
“We need to be on the same team,” says James.
“And whose team would that be?” I say, walking into the house.
Ellie tells me about a friend named Cassidy. “I was sick and she took me for a ride. We planned on driving all the way west, through California down to Mexico, but we only got as far as a small town in Nevada. And we got into a fight, over what I don’t remember, and the last time I saw her was in a car speeding away.”
“Do you know where she lives? I could find her for you,” I say.
Ellie closes her eyes. “She died. Cancer. Funny how time sorts things, delivers retribution when you least expect it. At least she went quickly. My sickness is fucking with me, baiting hope only to snatch it away. It sits in a rocking chair with its needlework and sips lemonade. But I deserve this.”
“Is there anything I can get you? What can I do?”
“You can close the door behind you and let me sleep. Let me pretend that I could go back. That I could’ve stayed in the car with Cassidy. Could’ve heard the engine run.” She speaks so softly that I suspect she doesn’t think I can hear her say, “I could’ve been the one who ran.”
“I love you.” I edge closer to her on the bed.
Ellie’s eyes are still closed when she says, “I know you think you do.”
I leave her alone because the websites tell me that I need to put the dying’s wants and needs before my own. Grief is slippery—once you think you’ve grasped it, it changes its form. You know there’s pain in the room—it rises up all around you—but you can’t identify whose it is. Ellie will die. She’ll die even if I manage to resuscitate the hyacinths in the garden. She’ll die even if James and I come to a kind of reconciliation. I don’t see the sense in studying the grief guides, but I do it anyway because this is what you do when someone you love is dying. I’m Kate, playing the daughter of a woman dying from metastatic lung cancer, a cancer that has crept into her liver. These are the feelings you’re told to feel, the calls and arrangements you have to make. You’re given a timetable and you take solace in the fact that you can follow an outline. Right now we’re all in stage two and I do everything my mother tells me. I play daughter. I play nice.
Yet I feel nothing. I think about my dolls’ eyes, my mother’s cancer—how they have the ability to see. I feel nothing if not the by-product of their harvest.
Later that night I read a collection of Ted Bundy quotes while James soft-knuckles my door, begging for forgiveness. I haven’t blocked out the past. I wouldn’t trade the person I am, or what I’ve done, or the people I’ve known, for anything. So I do think about it. And at times it’s a rather mellow trip to lay back and remember.
In this, Teddy and I agree.
STAGE 3: UPHEAVAL
Your anticipatory grief is running out because the ill family member still breathes even though their life is falling apart. Rage and resentment become constant states. Everyone needs to communicate in this stage, but who really wants to?
People must think, when will it be over? While they’ll never admit it, everyone craves closure. There’s no joy in watching pain played out on an extended tour. There’s a moment when something in you shifts. You’ve done the work. You’ve made the arrangements, interviewed the hospice nurses. You are told in the end she will require oxygen, and part of you wonders, why bother? Why bother torturing her with air when she’ll invariably lose it?
At one point, you and James sit in a room that is not in your house and you both wonder aloud, when will this be over? When will she die? When will her illness cease making demands on your time?
You need “you” in this stage because resorting to the first-person “I” is unimaginable. Sometimes you need to move through different voices, varying points of view. This makes life tolerable.
You need distance.
You need to play daughter, play nice; your part is the grief-stricken daughter and there is no dress rehearsal. This is the show. Curtain rises. Hit your mark.
You hold James in your arms while he weeps.
You don’t cry, you only sleep.
A young Jim Jones once threw his Bible to the floor and shouted to his associates, “Too many people are looking at this instead of looking at me.”
When will you die?
One day near the end, Ellie studies you. Says with a sincerity you don’t recognize, “I worry about you. What will become of you when I’m gone? How will you live your life then, now that the war is over?”
You tuck her in, crush pills, and press them onto her scabbed tongue. Lately she’s complained that it hurts to swallow. Even water has become an assault.
“I’ll manage.”
STAGE 4: RESOLUTION
The terminal family member’s health rapidly deteriorates, yet these moments are punctuated with false hope. Stabilization occurs, corners are turned, and everyone considers the word “hope.” But in the end everyone knows what’s coming, and this is the stage where grudges and old jealousies are settled and everyone boards the memory train. Everyone pantomimes: remember when? Everyone dusts off the family albums they were all once too excited to keep hidden.
Ellie drifts in and out of consciousness. But today, she’s stronger in a way that makes all of us think she’s turned a corner. Maybe we should’ve gotten a second opinion. Maybe we didn’t need the stages, a manual for grief. She’s laughing. She’s talking to Cassidy again, and she says the words photo and cock.
“Hope, sister. Hope.”
Ellie climbs out of bed, says she has an urge for toast.
“You know you can’t eat that,” I say.
“I’ll eat whatever the fuck I want,” says Ellie.
The phone rings.
“Tim?” says Ellie.
Life’s unfair, really. You’re given hope only to have cancer snatch it away.
“THERE ARE NO pictures of her before she was ten,” I say. I hold a photo album in my hands. I cup a photo of Ellie and me in my hand.
“You know why.”
“I wasn’t asking a question.”
STAGE 5: RENEWAL
The terminal terminates. The final stage of grief begins with the funeral and the celebration of the now-departed family member’s life. The marker of loss is weighted with the celebration of life. Everyone’s looking forward.
I leave her room for the yard. There are seeds to plant. I watch Ellie and James in a room. I scan photographs of urns on my phone. I think about my mother. I think it’s time for rest.