Your mother died in fear.
No one was with her.
You didn’t want to be with her.
The last time you saw her, two months before,
while you were saying goodbye to her,
her turkey-claw hand shot up like a viper
from under her wheelchair lap-cover
to clasp your hand and keep you with her,
to bind you to her,
to not let you leave her ever.
I CAN’T STAY HERE
she screamed like a toddler, over and over,
insane with fear, lost in fear,
without a mind to guide her,
her brain saying horrific truths to her.
You were on the Mercy Home basement floor,
by the nurses station, where she slept in her wheelchair,
because she couldn’t be alone ever,
because the moment another human being left her
she was left with her fear, which instantly seized her,
so she couldn’t sleep in her room or ever go there
except when a nurse took her for a sitting shower
and stripped her and undid her diaper
and propped her weeping under the water
and soaped her and rinsed her and dried her and dressed her
and lifted her back into her wheelchair.
Did she know the man standing over her
was her son, saying goodbye to her?
Your hand was any hand, a human tether.
She wanted you to take her home in a car
but the Mercy Home was her home—she had no other—
she meant home with her husband and children fifty years before.
What does it matter who you were to her?
Or whether she had ever been your mother?
She was a shrunken old woman, ninety-four,
plundered by years of medical torture,
installed in a wheelchair with a backpack oxygen canister
that fed tubes up her nose so she wouldn’t drown in air.
You felt all her fear-strength clamping your fingers
as if she had slipped from a cliff and you were holding her,
only it wasn’t gravity pulling your hand from her—
it was you, pulling a trigger:
your hand snapped free, recoiling like a revolver
as if you had shot her,
and you watched her fall into terror,
into her nightmare future,
and she couldn’t stop screaming over and over
I CAN’T STAY HERE
which is where you left her.
She was right: she couldn’t stay there.
She suffered her life only two months more—
if every hour to her were not a year,
if her death in fact meant her suffering was over.
For all you know, she endured centuries there.
(For all you know about what others suffer.)
How did she fall out of her wheelchair?
That was a question no one could answer.
She gouged her leg so they stopped the blood thinner
that kept her alive despite congestive heart failure
so she died in the night three nights later
in her bed in her room on the basement floor,
alone with her fear, her tormenter, her familiar.
The Mercy Home for aged and infirm Mercy Sisters
and your mother, a devout believer,
not a Sister but a faithful Catholic school teacher
so they made an exception and accepted her.
Those who need minimal care live on the second floor.
Those who need assisted care live on the first floor.
Those who need nursing care live on the basement floor,
and one by one all of them die there.
How do they bear moving lower
when the last move left is to the basement floor?
Their “personal items” and family pictures
are gathered into cardboard boxes by the nurses helper
because they don’t own luggage anymore,
because they will never go anywhere.
Hospital rooms off the basement floor corridor
border the common rooms in the center:
TV room, game room, lunch room, beauty parlor
where a volunteer does the ladies’ hair.
When someone dies in the night like your mother,
the next morning the telling Lysol smell is everywhere
while the room is aired, door propped open, bed stripped bare,
and in the corner her former wheelchair
empty except for its backpack oxygen canister.
At breakfast there’s an extra prayer,
and a prayer too by those in wheelchairs and walkers
when they pass her room and try to remember her.
How do the old nuns remember her?
Tubes up her nose, dozing in her wheelchair?
With you, the Cheerful Son when you visited her?
This will be your attempt to remember her—
not how she failed you so you failed her,
not how confused she was by your anger,
not how she needed your kindness as you had needed her
when you couldn’t walk either and also wore a diaper
and she carried you with her and pushed you in your stroller
to parks and playgrounds to show you to neighbors.
That last moment you were together,
after you pulled your hand free and were about to leave her,
you leaned over to kiss her, for what good it did her.
At least you did that, helpless to help her.
Now you may take her out of there.
Now you’ll never fail each other.
No drunk father, no molester neighbor,
no sadist coaches, no nasty teachers,
no nuns, no priests, no Pope, no hellfire,
no need for her to be your protector,
no need for her to suffer her failure
or watch you grow absorbed by anger
and wilder and wilder teenage behavior
that scared the bejesus out of her
(you loved scaring the bejesus out of her)—
you who thought you invented despair,
you who drank despair with your father.
mother fear father despair molester neighbor
shame fouling the air
shame everywhere
Now you may take her out of there.
No need anymore to fear her fear.
Now you can be kind to her.
Wasn’t there a time when she was happier?
Before you were alive to make everything harder?
When all that hurt her had not yet touched her?
Take her back now to being engaged to your father,
twenty-three in nineteen thirty-four,
on a country picnic in an open roadster,
when she could breathe easily the purest air,
when she had just found love that filled her and fulfilled her,
when she believed everything life has to offer
was opening before her.
And leave her there.
from The Kenyon Review