I FLEW HOME several times during the months of my mother’s last illness, sometimes with my wife and baby, other times alone. Maybe because I didn’t fly until I was in my twenties, I tend to think of airports and planes in terms of adventure and excitement, but since that time I’ve noticed that among the hurrying business travelers and the oddly dressed vacationers there are always two or three whose eyes are red from crying, who have the vacant look one wears containing grief in public. On one occasion I went to buy some Rolaids at a candy counter, and there among the key chains, T-shirts, magazines, and Smurf dolls, I began to cry. An eruption; there was no stanching it. And a man in a trench coat was suddenly at my elbow, handing me a tissue and the small package it came from, which he had just purchased. While I blew my nose, he picked up his bag and sped away. I pulled myself together and bought the Rolaids, which I needed because I wanted to drink, both before and during the flight.
I have a page from a journal written during one of these flights:
I want to grab this guy in front of me and yell, “We’re eighteen thousand feet up bucking like a Yugo on a dirt road and most of your hair’s already fallen out no matter how you try to grease and comb it and you’re reading a Xeroxed manual on Greater Product Definition in Market Segments Previously Dormant!”
And the old priest next to me is wearing diocesan-issue glasses: black frames, clear rims, with a little metal chevron at the hinge, and he slumps against me, asleep.
There are four hundred thirty-seven rivets visible from seat 17A on the wing engine manifold of a 737. I want another vodka.
MY MOTHER WAS in the hospital two days before my father could bring himself to say the word “cancer.” “But they don’t have all the tests yet,” he said.
“How’s she doing? How’s she feeling?”
“Jesus Christ, you know what your mother says to me? I ask her does she want anything from home and she tells me a carton of cigarettes! Fuckin’ cigarettes!”
He was angry. He already knew she was leaving him.
FOR A TIME after my mother’s death, I hated old women who smoked. I wanted to scream at them: “How dare you smoke and get away with it and grow old enough to tint your hair blue and be a grandmother to someone who will grow up to remember you?”
Robert likes to look through the album of our wedding pictures. He used to ask, “Who that lady?”
“That’s your grandma who died. You don’t remember her, but she loved you very much.”
“Why she die?”
“She was very sick.”
“Why?”
Later he would point to her in the picture and call her “my-grandma-who-died.”
“That’s right.”
“I want to see her.”
“Well there she is. In the picture.”
“But why I can’t see her?”
ONE MORNING, WHEN Robert was small enough to hold in the crook of my arm, my lips against his silky head, I dozed and dreamed that he and I were at an outdoor celebration. There was a big yellow-and-white-striped tent like the one Kathi and I had at our wedding. I was holding Robert proudly. People bent to him and touched and patted me, nodding and smiling. We were seated at a very long table, across from a radiant old man. I asked him why we were celebrating, and he said there was no occasion, that he and all the others were always there; didn’t I know that? I suddenly felt that I did. I propped Robert in his little plastic seat on the table. “We’re always here; we’re family,” the old man said, touching Robert and smiling at me.
The food was delicious. The baked beans were my mother’s. She used to make them for picnics when I was a boy. I wanted more. The food was under the yellow-and-white-striped tent. I heaped the plate high and ate some right away, on my way back to the table.
They were gone, all of them. Robert’s yellow seat was on the table, empty. Oh no. Oh no no no no no. Again I felt that I knew what had happened. I saw the old man, in the distance, walking away. “Wait!” I called, and ran to catch up to him.
He turned and said, coldly, what I fully expected to hear. “You didn’t take care of him, so he’s been taken from you.” I tried to grab the old man, but I fell, helpless, and lay on the ground.
I woke, and Robert stirred in the hollow underneath my chin but remained asleep, his tiny mouth making sucking movements. He had given me the dream as a gift: without the small warmth of him to wake to, reassured, I would never have let myself have that dream. I would never have been able to feel, if only briefly, the horror and despair and shame of losing him. For the first time, I touched, for merely a dreaming moment, the kind of pain my parents must have felt, grieving for my brothers.
AT LAST THE call from the hospital came; Mom was in the Recovery Room. The surgeons had removed her right lung. Later we received another call informing us that she was no longer in Recovery, and we could see her briefly. My father grabbed his jacket, fished in his pocket for the car keys, threw them to me.
At the front door to the hospital, Dad fell behind, and I was through the automatic door before I noticed. I turned and saw him standing against a concrete post with his head down. I turned back, but the door was one-way and I had to go through the revolving door. When I touched his arm and asked if he was okay, he lifted his head, jaws clenched, face red and wet, and said, through his teeth, “I’ve spent half my life in this fuckin’ hospital.”
Joe was already upstairs. He told us we had to wait until the hour, when we could see her, one at a time, for a total of ten minutes. “Oh, what kind of bullshit is this now,” Dad said, grabbing the handle of the heavy door. It was locked.
“You have to ring the bell,” Joe said.
“Wait,” I said. “It’s twenty of.”
My father was leaning against the door, cupping his hands around the small window, looking in. Through the window of the other door, I could see nothing but the curtains around each bed, a nurse in a lab coat carrying a small tray, one machine with tiny red lights and gauges and wires plugged into it like a switchboard.
Dad went in first. When he returned to the corridor, I asked him if Mom was awake. He covered his face with his hand and nodded, and I walked past him.
I’d forgotten to ask which bed was Mom’s, and I walked down the center aisle looking to both sides. I remember seeing one patient, man or woman I couldn’t tell, mouth gaping, eyes wide open. He or she could not have weighed a hundred pounds. I almost passed my mother’s bed; the curtains were parted only the width of a doorway. For a moment I wasn’t sure it was she. Her mouth was open wide around a blue plastic hose connected to a machine at the head of her bed. Whoosh. Click. Her face was white and wet with perspiration, and her hair, fanned out around her on the pillow, was grayer than she’d ever let us see, only the last couple of inches still colored black. Her eyes were closed; when I touched her hand, they opened quickly and rolled in panic until she found me. She gripped my thumb, and I was startled and reassured by the strength in her hand. But I felt her desperation in her grip. “You made it,” I said.
A week later she came home from the hospital, minus one lung, and her voice was barely audible because the surgeons had had to scrape the spreading cancer from her larynx. Tipping up her oxygen mask to speak, she held out her hand to me. “Look at my fingers,” she rasped. “They’re not yellow anymore. I quit.”
I WAS SITTING on a kitchen chair next to her bed in the makeshift room. It was night. My father, brother, wife, and baby son were asleep upstairs. The only sounds in the house were the bubbling plastic cup on the oxygen compressor and the sibilance of my mother’s shallow breathing. Her face changed, continually, as I watched. From time to time she mumbled something and I leaned close to her.
“I know,” she said, softly. “I know. I lose. But don’t do this to me. Who are these people? No, I paid. Tell him I paid. I won’t do that. No, not unless you show it to me first. Ah. It’s beautiful.”
Another time she whispered, fiercely, “No! Let go of me. Don’t touch me!” And when I released her hand, her eyes opened wide and she grabbed for me in panic. “No no, not you, not you.”
A coughing spasm woke her. Her grip hurt my hand. She pressed the button to raise herself in the bed, plucked at pink tissues in a box beside her, and coughed. She let go of my hand a moment and with a frantic gesture let me know that I should switch the green plastic tube from the compressor to the tall tank in the corner that put out more oxygen. I started to rise, but she grasped my arm and shook her head. “Mom, I can’t switch it over without getting up.” Her nails dug into my wrist. She was choking. Shaking her head. Crying.
Once she asked for her mirror. “Wait till your brothers get a load of this,” she said to me, staring at herself.
“DON’T YOU HAVE a holy candle?” Aunt Kitty asked.
“Agh!” my father said. “A holy candle. How the hell should I know?”
“She should have a holy candle when she crosses.” She spoke as an exasperated adult speaks to a difficult child. “It isn’t right. She has to have a holy candle burning when she crosses.”
“Hold on,” I said. I went upstairs to my parents’ bedroom, where I knew I would find two blessed candles inside the hollow mahogany crucifix above their bed. When I took it down, the plaster behind it crumbled and the nail it had hung on fell down inside the wall. I touched the cracked and yellowed ivory Jesus and then pressed upward gently until the cross slid away, tongue-in-groove, to reveal a compartment containing a vial each of holy water and holy oil, both dry now, two candles, short, wicks burnt, and a slot into which the crucifix could be placed upright. I hadn’t handled it since I was a boy, when someone, maybe my mother, showed it to Bob and me; we’d been curious about it because at school we were learning about the sacraments. The one called Extreme Unction scared us. We wondered if you had to die once the priest anointed you with the holy oil. Was it too late then to get better? What if the priest was too anxious and wanted to hurry up and get someplace else? Bob and I called it the death kit. We invested it with mystery: it could keep away devils and protect you from hell, but once you invoked its power you had to die.
I couldn’t decide whether to bring the whole kit downstairs or just one candle. I took one candle from its cavity and began to slide the crucifix back into place; then I did a curious, reflexive thing: I held the candle to my nose and smelled it. It was my mother who showed this to us; I remembered her explaining to us, with her convert’s zeal and awe, that only candles made of pure beeswax could be blessed by the priest and made holy. “You can always tell a real beeswax candle,” she said, and after drawing one under her nose with her eyes closed, “Hmmmmmm,” she held it out for Bob and me to smell. I put the candle back, slid Jesus back in place, and brought the whole cross downstairs.
I WAS ABOUT to put on my coat. I needed to get outside, once around the block, fresh air. Aunt Kitty waved me to her, put her hand on my arm. “Stay.” I went back into the small room and knelt by the side of the bed. Dad placed my hand on Mom’s leg. It was cold. Both Dad and Aunt Kitty nodded when I looked at them. I felt my mother’s wrist for a pulse; for a moment I was sure I felt one, then there was none. Within moments the cold crept up her body as if death were pulling a blanket over her.
My father rested his forehead on the bed beside her, and I stroked his back and rested my hand on the back of his neck. I remember that my relief, after such a long struggle, was so great that I had a strange impulse to congratulate my mother for what she’d accomplished at last. For a moment I thought I could take her by the hand, now that her agony was over, and she would sit up and smile with triumphant fatigue—as if she’d just struggled mightily to give birth, or as if we had been waiting merely for a fever to break, or as if we’d been waiting with impatience for an hourglass to run out so we could turn it over again. I remember hearing the buzz and click of the clock radio on her nightstand, then the sound of the next minute falling into place, and for that one moment, I was as shocked by her death as I would have been had she been healthy and died in an accident or inexplicably in her sleep.
My father left the small room with his sister’s arm around him, and I remained behind, alone with my mother, with her body. I spoke into her ear, carefully. Is it merely a superstition that hearing is the last of the senses to fade? I could almost hear her voice: “Nobody can say it’s not true” and I could almost see the way she would raise her eyebrows, purse her lips, and hold up an admonitory finger. So I spoke.
“I love you, Mom. Go now. Don’t be afraid.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I added, “Go on ahead. I’ll see you later.”
Nobody can say it’s not true.
My father came in. He looked at her and turned away. It seemed reflexive, like pulling your hand back from a flame or shielding your eyes from the sun. He asked me to step out to the living room.
“The people from the Becker will be here soon,” he said. “Do me a favor. Your mother still has her oxygen hose on. And that catheter thing. I don’t want them going in there and…” He stopped, collecting himself, and took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. Gently, his hand on my upper arm, he turned me back to the small room.
After I had done what he asked, I went into the kitchen and poured myself a tumbler of whiskey.
“Dickie? Go easy with that, will you?” Aunt Kitty said.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Never mind. Just go easy, that’s all.”
By the time the funeral director and his two assistants arrived, I was working on a second tumbler. I walked unsteadily to the door and opened it. A large man in a dark coat held out his hand, and when I tried to shake it he grasped my fingers. He was wearing an ill-fitting hairpiece, and I disliked him immensely for it; it seemed a vain discomfort with mortality, unseemly, an affront. Behind him on the porch, two men flanked a stretcher, looking down. A stretcher? Truly drunk by now, I wanted to spit at them, “You’re too late!”
“Come in. Come in,” my father said from behind me, and I took a step back and let them file past me.
My father and the funeral director went into the kitchen. The other two men carried the stretcher into the makeshift room. I sat in a chair, glowering into my drink, and silently indulged myself in all the impotent rage I felt. I wanted to bellow, “I know who you are!” to the three men in the black coats. “Get out of here! Get out of this house!” They were they. They who had found my mother too Dutchified, too citified, too rude, too poor, too human. Who had patronized her and threatened her with ridicule every day of her life. Who had determined her babies didn’t need her breasts, who sold her powdered formula instead and a steam machine to sterilize bottles, while her breasts, ignored, ached with their uselessness. Who crossed her heart instead and lifted her breasts a certain way beneath a certain kind of sweater. Who called her illegitimate, a broad, a bitch. Who sold her poison smoke with coupons on each pack to save for cheap household appliances. Who determined what she did and did not deserve. Who convinced her they knew how to live but would tell her only how not to. Of course they would look like this officious black-clad trinity, their eyes averted, come to remove the offending object of her body. I knew who they were. I took another angry drink.
The funeral director came in from the kitchen, and I heard, from the small room, the metallic noise of the stretcher on its folding X’s as they adjusted it, and the locking of restraining belts. He opened the door. I smoldered deep in the chair; my father stayed in the kitchen. The two men pushed the stretcher from the small room to the front door, stopped, and lifted it. And they carried my mother’s body from my father’s house.