. . . . . . . my mother died in my arms.
As it happens, yesterday Sheila O'Malley, MB (magnificent blogger),
posted about hearts, how they skip a beat when you're in love, and how sometimes they break and leave you feeling empty inside. I commented that the emptiness I felt inside me after my mother died was so much like hunger that I was stuffing my face with a vending machine sandwich 45 minutes after her death.
I was supposed to make a presentation that night to the local arts group about a proposed Bicentennial project I was spearheading - a sculpture garden for the artless little town square in our artless little suburban community. I was 17. I had secured permission from the city council to appropriate a 50' x 50' square of land next to City Hall, got some bricks donated by a local builder, commissioned a steel sculpture of an eagle in flight, and the local cemetary was prepared to carve the names of everyone who donated more than $25 into slabs of richly striated pink marble cladding the podium upon which the sculpture would perch.
At the last minute, I thought, "I'm not going to the meeting." I would have been in my car, driving to the community center, rehearsing my pitch about the damned sculpture garden. Instead I was at home when the phone rang.
"Son, you better get to the hospital." Dad made that choked-up sound he made when he was fighting back emotion. He had never called me Son before.
I jumped in my powder blue Dodge Dart and rushed to the hospital.
Mom had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about three months before, and although I would later learn that there was absolutely no point to it, her physician put her on chemotherapy, thereby making the last three months of her life as miserable as possible. Now it was almost over, and she was in and out of consciousness, according to Dad and my grandparents, who had been by her side all day.
As I rushed into the room, I could see she was not focusing, laboring for a breath every 30 seconds or so. I put my arms around her, my face close to hers, and said, "Mother!" With the very last remaining energy she had, she turned her head slightly and a glimmer of recognition came into her eyes. I sobbed, "It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, Mom - I love you - you can go, it's okay . . . . you can go . . . . I love you . . . . it's okay . . . . "
She was beyond words but she communicated to me somehow that she understood what I was saying. Tears welled in her eyes and one solemn teardrop made it about halfway down her cheek.
And then she was dead.
I had the sensation almost immediately that her spirit lifted up and out of her body and was gone; what remained was not her. It was, most definitely, not her lying in the hospital bed. It was, most definitely, an empty vessel.
Like brief glimpses into the illuminated windows of a passing train at night, I remember vague washes of color and light and brief, sharp flashes of intensity in the hours and days afterward:
- Grandma wailing her daughter's name - "Cookie - Cookie - Cookie" - never had the embarrassing nickname sounded so agonizingly like fingers on a chalkboard.
- Grandpa fainting from a blood pressure rush, then sitting with a white, wet facecloth on his cherry-red head.
- My father dutifully scrawling onto the last page of the stenographer's notepad where he meticulously kept track of the various milestones of Mom's illness, "6:55 pm Steve arrived and went to her bedside; 7:00 pm Carol responded to Steve's voice; 7:10 pm my darling Carol is no more." Then closing the notepad and clipping the mechanical pencil to the cover.
- The kind nurse who had taken loving, compassionate care of Mom for two days, coming in to shoo us out for a few moments so she could remove the medical paraphernalia and put Mom in her favorite blue velvet robe.
- The mortician and his trainee who came for the body, and the trainee, in a misguided attempt to comfort us, said, "Don't worry, we'll wire her mouth shut."
- Finding myself alone, sitting in front of a black and white TV in a visitor lounge someplace down the hall, 45 minutes after Mom's death, shoving that vending machine sandwich into my mouth as tears streamed down my face.
- Grandpa warning us about the perils awaiting Mom's body at the morgue, saying, "You know there's all sorts of c - h- i - c - k - a - n - e - r - y," spelling it out, and me trying to figure out what the hell he was spelling. I thought, "What is he talking about - chickens?" It took me a minute to get it, then this sense of disbelieving revulsion flooded over me as I realized he was warning us about gold tooth thieves and necrophiliacs.
- Hugging my father later that night for maybe the first time in our lives completely unreserved, just two people hanging on to each other, afraid of sinking, afraid of the present, afraid of the past, afraid of the future.
- Receiving a scolding call from the arts group leader, wanting to know why I didn't show for the big meeting, and experiencing a sense of deep satisfaction at the embarrassed silence on the other end of the phone when I quietly told her I was too busy watching my mother die to come to the meeting.
- A few days later, on Memorial Day, Dad and I in a three-seat biplane, taking off in a Seattle downpour to sprinkle Mom's ashes over Puget Sound, and being so buffeted by gale-force winds that we had to turn back, but not before I had opened the box of ashes as instructed by the pilot in anticipation of the scattering and discovered large, identifiable chunks of tibia and femur (pulverizing costs extra, you see).
- Wondering, briefly, if I should keep a piece of tibia as a memento, then deciding against it.
- Sitting in a reknowned waterfront restaurant afterward, Dad and I, exhausted from our near-death ash dissemination attempt, bowls of "The Captain's World-Famous Chowder" steaming before us and hundreds of those little oyster crackers spread out in a random pattern on the snowy linen tablecloth, the two of us alternately staring at each other and the sweeping view of a stormy Puget Sound.
- Writing a song to play on the piano at my mom's small memorial service.
- Not knowing how to tell my high school friends about it, so I didn't, and therefore had to "act" normal as, all around me, kids were getting excited about the plans they had for summer vacation just ahead.
- Cancelling plans to be a foreign exchange student in Spain later in the summer because I didn't think I could be away from Dad for three weeks.
- Suddenly not giving a shit about the trigonometry final.
- Ditching school for a week and living in my car, mostly parked in a Jewish delicatessen's parking lot, gorging on rye bread and corned beef and almond crescents and chopped liver and borscht out of the bottle, completely blowing the $300 I was going to use when I was in Spain.
- Finding everything my grandparents said intensely irritating, especially the way they kept repeating "Cookie this" and "Cookie that" and "When Cookie said to the . . ." and on and on, in a futile attempt to keep her close that had the unintended consequence of driving me from their side.
- Getting into huge blow-out arguments with my Dad over nothing, absolutely nothing.
- Standing on a stage in a huge hotel ballroom in D.C. six weeks later, on the Fourth of July, 1976, winning second place in an international speech contest, applause and smiles all around me, and having the sudden realization that I would never again share moments like that with my mother.
And so I sit here and type this, and yes, a tear or two coursed down my face, and my cat licked them off, and I don't feel too terribly sad, but I became a different person thirty years ago today, and I wish I could tell you something inspirational, like "It gets better" (which is true) or "I'm a better person for the experience" (which is not true), but mostly I just want to say that, once upon a time, there was this woman named Carol Henrietta Brisk Carlisle, and her parents called her Cookie, and she was my mother, and I don't remember anymore the sound of her voice.
