On the table by the bed in my mother’s apartment there were bottles of pills, tablets, capsules, liquid medicines, take this for that and that for this three times a day when it’s not four but not when you’re driving or operating heavy machinery, take before, during and after meals avoiding alcohol and other stimulants and be sure you don’t mix your medications, which Mam did, confusing the emphysema pills with the pills for the pain of her new hip and the pills that put her to sleep or woke her up and the cortisone that bloated her and caused hair to grow on her chin so that she was terrified to leave the house without her little blue plastic razor in case she might be away awhile and in danger of sprouting all kinds of hair and she’d be ashamed of her life, so she would, ashamed of her life.
The city provided a woman to care for her, bathe her, cook, take her for walks if she was able for it. When she wasn’t able for it she watched television and the woman watched with her though she reported later that Mam spent much of her time staring at a spot on the wall or looking out the window delighting in the times her grandson, Conor, called up to her and they chatted while he hung from the iron bars that secured her windows.
The woman from the city lined up the pill bottles and warned Mam to take them in a certain order during the night but Mam would forget and become so confused no one knew what she might have done to herself and the ambulance would have to take her to Lenox Hill Hospital where she was now well known.
The last time she was in the hospital I called her from my school to ask how she was.
Ah, I dunno.
What do you mean you dunno?
I’m fed up. They’re sticking things in me and pulling things out of me.
Then she whispered, If you’re coming to see me, would you do me a favor?
I would. What is it?
You’re not to tell anyone about this.
I won’t. What is it?
Will you bring me a blue plastic razor?
A plastic razor? For what?
Never mind. Couldn’t you just bring it and stop asking questions?
Her voice broke and there was sobbing.
All right, I’ll bring it. Are you there?
She could barely talk with the sobbing. And when you come up give the razor to the nurse and don’t come in till she tells you.
I waited while the nurse took in the razor and screened Mam from the world. On her way out, the nurse whispered, She’s shaving. It’s the cortisone. She’s embarrassed.
All right, said Mam, you can come in now and don’t be asking me any questions even if you didn’t do what I asked you.
What do you mean?
I asked you for a blue plastic razor and you brought me a white one.
What’s the difference?
There’s a big difference but you wouldn’t know. I won’t say another word about it.
You look fine.
I’m not fine. I’m fed up, I told you. I just want to die.
Oh, stop. You’ll be out by Christmas. You’ll be dancing.
I will not be dancing. Look, there’s women running around this country getting abortions right and left and I can’t even die.
What in God’s name is the connection between you and women getting abortions?
Her eyes filled. Here I am in the bed, dying or not dying, and you’re tormenting me with theology.
My brother Michael came into the room, all the way from San Francisco. He prowled the area around her bed. He kissed her and massaged her shoulders and feet. That’ll relax you, he said.
I’m relaxed, she said. If I was any more relaxed I’d be dead and wouldn’t that be a relief.
Michael looked at her and at me and around the room and his eyes were watery. Mam told him he should be back in San Francisco with his wife and children.
I’ll be going back tomorrow.
Well, it was hardly worth your while, all this traveling, was it?
I had to see you.
She drifted off and we went to a bar on Lexington Avenue for a few drinks with Alphie and Malachy’s son, young Malachy. We didn’t talk about Mam. We listened to young Malachy, who was twenty and didn’t know what to do with his life. I told him since his mother was Jewish he could go to Israel and join the army. He said he wasn’t Jewish but I insisted he was, that he had the right of return. I told him if he went to the Israeli Consulate and announced he wanted to join the Israeli army it would be a publicity coup for them. Imagine, young Malachy McCourt, a name like that, joining the Israeli army. He’d be on the front page of every paper in New York.
He said no, he didn’t want his ass shot off by those crazy Arabs. Michael said he wouldn’t be up there on the front lines, he’d be back where he could be used for propaganda purposes and all those exotic Israeli girls would be throwing themselves at him.
He said no again and I told him it was a waste of time buying him drinks when he wouldn’t do a simple thing like joining the Israeli army and carving out a career for himself. I told him if I had a Jewish mother I’d be in Jerusalem in a minute.
That night I returned to Mam’s room. A man stood at the end of her bed. He was bald, he had a gray beard and a gray three-piece suit. He jingled the change in his trouser pocket and told my mother, You know, Mrs. McCourt, you have every right to be angry when you’re ill and you do have a right to express it.
He turned to me. I’m her psychiatrist.
I’m not angry, said Mam. I just want to die and ye won’t let me.
She turned to me. Will you tell him go away?
Go away, Doctor.
Excuse me, I’m her doctor.
Go away.
He left and Mam complained they were tormenting her with priests and psychiatrists and even if she was a sinner she’d done penance a hundred times over, that she was born doing penance. I’m dying for something in my mouth, she said, something tarty like lemonade.
I brought her an artificial lemon filled with concentrated juice and poured it into a glass with a little water. She tasted it. I asked you for lemonade and all you gave me was water.
No, that’s lemonade.
She’s tearful again. One little thing I ask you, one little thing and you can’t do it for me. Would it be too much to ask you to shift my feet, would it? They’re in the one place all day.
I want to ask her why she doesn’t move her feet herself but that will only lead to tears so I move them.
How’s that?
How’s what?
Your feet.
What about my feet?
I moved them.
You did? Well, I didn’t feel it. You won’t give me lemonade. You won’t shift my feet. You won’t bring me a proper blue plastic razor. Oh, God, what use is it having four sons if you can’t get your feet shifted?
All right. Look. I’m moving your feet.
Look? How can I look? ’Tis hard for me to lift my head from the pillow to be looking at my feet. Are you done tormenting me?
Is there anything else?
It’s a furnace in here. Would you open the window?
But it’s freezing outside.
There are tears. Can’t get me lemonade, can’t . . .
All right, all right. I open the window to a blast of cold air from Seventy-seventh Street that freezes the sweat on her face. Her eyes are closed and when I kiss her there is no taste of salt.
Should I stay awhile or even all night? The nurses don’t seem to mind. I could push this chair back, rest my head against the wall and doze. No. I might as well go home. Maggie will be singing tomorrow with the choir at the Plymouth Church and I don’t want her to see me slouching and red-eyed.
All the way back to Brooklyn I feel I should return to the hospital but a friend is having an opening night party for his bar, the Clark Street Station. There is music and merry chatter. I stand outside. I can’t go in.
When Malachy calls at three in the morning he doesn’t have to say the words. All I can do is make a cup of tea the way Mam did at unusual times and sit up in the bed in a dark darker than darkness knowing by now they’ve moved her to a colder place, that gray fleshly body that carried seven of us into the world. I sip my hot tea for the comfort because there are feelings I didn’t expect. I thought I’d know the grief of the grown man, the fine high mourning, the elegiac sense to suit the occasion. I didn’t know I’d feel like a child cheated.
I’m sitting up in the bed with my knees pulled to my chest and there are tears that won’t come to my eyes but beat instead like a small sea around my heart.
For once, Mam, my bladder is not near my eye and why isn’t it?
Here I am looking at my lovely ten-year-old daughter, Maggie, in her white dress, singing Protestant hymns with the choir at the Plymouth Church of the Brethren when I should be at Mass praying for the repose of the soul of my mother, Angela McCourt, mother of seven, believer, sinner, though when I contemplate her seventy-three years on this earth I can’t believe the Lord God Almighty on His throne would even dream of consigning her to the flames. A God like that wouldn’t deserve the time of day. Her life was Purgatory enough and surely she’s in the better place with her three children, Margaret, Oliver, Eugene.
After the service I tell Maggie her grandmother has died and she wonders why I’m dry-eyed. You know, Dad, it’s all right if you cry.
My brother Michael has returned to San Francisco and I’m meeting Malachy and Alphie for breakfast on West Seventy-second Street near the Walter B. Cooke Funeral Home. When Malachy orders a hearty meal Alphie says, I don’t know how you can eat so much with your mother dead, and Malachy tells him, I have to sustain my grief, don’t I?
Afterward, at the funeral home, we meet Diana and Lynn, wives of Malachy and Alphie. We sit in a semicircle at the desk of the funeral counselor. He wears a gold ring, a gold watch, a gold tie clasp, gold spectacles. He wields a gold pen and flashes a consoling golden smile. He places a large book on the desk and tells us the first casket is a very elegant item and would be somewhat less than ten thousand dollars, very nice indeed. We don’t linger. We tell him keep turning the pages till he reaches the last item, a coffin for less than three thousand. Malachy inquires, What is the absolute rock-bottom price?
Well, sir, will this be interment or cremation?
Cremation.
Before he answers I try to lighten the moment by telling him and my family of the conversation I had with Mam a week ago.
What do you want us to do with you when you go?
Oh, I’d like to be brought back and buried with my family in Limerick.
Mam, do you know the cost of transporting someone your size?
Well, she said, reduce me.
The funeral counselor is not amused. He says we could do it for eighteen hundred dollars, embalming, viewing, cremation. Malachy asks why we have to pay for a coffin if it’s going to be burned anyway and the man says it’s the law.
Then, says Malachy, why can’t we just put her in a Hefty trash bag and leave her outside for collection?
We all laugh and the man has to leave the room for a while.
Alphie observes, There goes a life of extreme unctuousness, and when the man returns he looks puzzled at our laughter.
It is arranged. My mother’s body will be laid out in her coffin for a day so that the children can see and say good-bye to a dead grandmother. The man inquires if we’d like to hire a limousine to attend the cremation but no one except for Alphie is inclined to travel to North Bergen, New Jersey, and even he changes his mind.
In Limerick Mam had a friend, Mary Patterson, who said, Do you know what, Angela?
No, what, Mary?
I often wondered what I’d look like when I died and do you know what I did, Angela?
I don’t, Mary.
I got myself all dressed up in my brown habit from the Third Order of St. Francis and do you know what I did next, Angela?
I don’t, Mary.
I laid down on the bed with a mirror at the end, crossed my hands with the rosary beads around them, and closed my eyes and do you know what I did next, Angela?
I don’t, Mary.
I opened one eye and took a little look at myself in the mirror and do you know what, Angela?
I don’t, Mary.
I looked very peaceful.
No one can say my mother looks peaceful in her coffin. All the misery of her life is in the face bloated from hospital drugs and there are stray tufts of hair that escaped her plastic razor.
Maggie kneels by me, looking on her grandmother, the first dead body in her ten years. She has no vocabulary for this, no religion, no prayer, and that’s another sadness. She can only look at her grandmother and say, Where is she now, Dad?
If there’s a heaven, Maggie, she’s there and she’s queen of it.
Is there a heaven, Dad?
If there isn’t, Maggie, I don’t understand God’s ways.
She doesn’t understand my babbling and neither do I because the tears erupt and she tells me again, It’s all right to cry, Dad.
When your mother is dead you can’t be sitting around looking mournful, recalling her virtues, receiving the condolences of friends and neighbors. You have to stand before the coffin with your brothers Malachy and Alphie and Malachy’s sons, Malachy, Conor, Cormac, link arms and sing the songs your mother loved and the songs your mother hated because that’s the only way you can be sure she’s dead, and we sang
A mother’s love is a blessing
No matter where you roam,
Keep her while she’s living,
You’ll miss her when she’s gone.
and
Goodbye, Johnny dear, when you’re far away,
Don’t forget you dear old mother
Far across the sea.
Write a letter now and then
And send her all you can
And don’t forget where’er you roam
That you’re an Irishman.
Visitors look at each other and you know what they’re thinking. What kind of mourning is this where sons and grandsons sing and dance before the poor woman’s casket? Don’t they have any respect for their mother?
We kiss her and I place on her breast a shilling I had borrowed from her long ago and when we walk the long corridor to the elevator I look back at her in the coffin, my gray mother in a cheap gray coffin, the color of beggary.