30.
IN IOWA, I COOKED FOR STRANGERS. ENCHILADAS WITH Chimayó red chile. Kale and potato salad with onions and capers. I listened to the strangers’ stories. Their legacies of love and abuse. I tried not to appear too distracted as I checked my text messages under the table.
At home, my mother vomited. She didn’t want to wear the adult diapers, but she could never get to the bathroom in time. Leo or his relief caregiver cleaned up after her, cleaned her, fed her pills even though it hurt her to swallow, even though she vomited most of them. She pressed the morphine button, wet the bed.
“DEATH IS UGLY,” my Gammie told me after her last husband died. She poured herself a glass of vodka, tapped her red fingernails on the kitchen counter. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that death isn’t ugly.”
EXTRAORDINARY TRANSITIONS ARE recounted in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. The deaths of Buddhist masters, lucid and mystical. But in How We Die, the Western doctor Sherwin B. Nuland says that our societal belief in passing with grace and dignity is a collective fantasy. Death, he writes, “is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.” In fact, “The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail. Occasionally – very occasionally – unique circumstances of death will be granted to someone with a unique personality, and that lucky combination will make it happen, but such a confluence of fortune is uncommon, and, in any case, not to be expected by any but a very few people.”
I didn’t expect my mother to die like some enlightened monk.
MY LAST MORNING in Iowa, my host, Shell, fed me dark chocolate for breakfast before she drove me to the Cedar Rapids airport. “Look,” she pointed to the sky. “That cloud with the sun behind it looks like a cross.”
It did. “Like God.”
My mother was alive when I got on the plane headed home.
She was alive when I landed in Albuquerque.
I stepped into her room, gagged at the smell. Putrid, like decomposing compost.
She smiled weakly from her bed, asked “how much longer?”
Leo had the window open, but it was cold outside. The heater blasted.
“I don’t know how much longer, Mom.”
She curled her finger at me.
I moved closer.
“You have to kill me, Ariel,” she whispered.
I shook my head. I wasn’t going to be the one to kill her. It had been crazy-making enough being her daughter for 41 years. I certainly wasn’t going to kill her. “I can’t help you with that,” is all I said.
IN THE DINING room, the hospice nurse fretted about my mother’s anxiety medication. Why were these extra pills here? Had she missed a dose?
“What can we do about the smell in there?” I asked.
The nurse frowned, scratched her eyebrow. “It’s the rotting flesh around your mother’s bed sore. It’s tunneling in. The spine is exposed. Do you want to see it?”
I didn’t want to see it.
“That bedsore is the only imminently life threatening thing we’re dealing with right now,” the nurse said. “As far as the smell goes, you can try putting half an onion in the room. And an open box of baking soda under the bed. You probably shouldn’t let her see you do it. She might be embarrassed. Just put the onion in the wastebasket and the baking soda under the bed. Put a new half onion in the wastebasket every day.”
Another task to add to the front of the logbook.
LESLIE’S EX-BOYFRIEND ARRIVED for his weeklong ministry, lanked around the house talking incessantly about sex and orgasm. He sautéed marijuana in butter, fed that to my mother. And now there were no further mentions of vomiting in the log.
After a month of baby food, Leslie’s ex had my mother eating bread with olive oil, baked tilapia, and spinach quiche, but he seemed overwhelmed with all the medications. He scratched his head. “You can tell you’ve missed a dose when she gets really agitated.”
My mother had been home from the hospital for a month. I called Milagro Home Care, told them we needed caregivers 24 – 7 now. Friends would still come to help, but it was all too much for a single untrained person.
“TINIEST,” MY MOTHER smiled when I walked into her room. “I dreamed you brought me a gleaming woman. Bathed in light, she had silver hair.”
I texted the chef: I think my mother is asking for you.
When the chef showed up maybe twenty minutes later, my mother gasped. “I thought I dreamed you.”
She smiled shy. “I’ve been told I’m too good to be true.” And she sat next to the hospice bed, talked with my mother about food and Mexico, asked if there was anything she’d like to eat.
“Well, yes,” my mother said. “Ceviche with red snapper. Miso soup. Oaxacan molé. Can you make those things?”
“I can make anything,” the chef said.
“Can we have an Oscar party?” my mother asked, wide-eyed.
“Sure. This Sunday?”
My mother smiled. “Can you make Chinese food?”
“Yes. I used to own an Asian restaurant.”
“Chef?” my mother whispered. “Whatever happens between you and Ariel, I’m leaving you the kitchen.”
A knock at the open front door. It seemed like someone was always knocking at the door now.
I left my mother and the chef to their hospice menu plans.
A young guy stood on the front step, a green backpack slung over his shoulder.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah,” he shrugged. “I was just passing through town and I saw the door was open.”
I stared at him.
He smiled. “I’m just kidding. They sent me? From Milagro?”
I’d forgotten. “Yes, sorry. Come in.”
“I’m Cloud,” he said, and he sat down at the dining room table to read the caregiver log to date. We had my mother’s medication schedule and urgent messages in the front of the binder, then the daily notes. “Well,” he said when he was done with it. “What we need here is a diagnosis and a short biography so that any time anyone comes in here they can sit down and read this and have both the overview and the day-by-day picture and be ready to go.”
“All right,” I said, and I sat down with Cloud and set to work transforming the log into something comprehensive.
OVER THE DAYS, the caregivers came. They were nursing students or underemployed health care workers, massage therapists or aspiring herbalists. They wrote their names on a dry-erase board in my mother’s room so she’d feel less disoriented.
THEY MADE NOTES in the log:
12:40 p.m. Eve is falling asleep now.
6:25 p.m. Vomiting and pain on right side of chest. Called lead nurse to change battery in morphine pump.
7:30 p.m. Eve wants to watch “Strangers on a Train.”
9:20 p.m. “The Maltese Falcon” (again).
2:15 a.m. Eve is awake, nauseous, in pain, disoriented, anxious, angry.
5:20 a.m. Eve said she had to go to the bathroom, sat on toilet for one hour, said she couldn’t go. As I lifted her up she had an accident on the floor. Cleaned up.
11:45 a.m. Eve awake, eating spinach and garbanzo beans, alert, happy.
FOR THE OSCAR party, the chef made scallop ceviche for my mother. She made the Chinese food, too: Summer rolls and bok choi, scallion pancakes with hoisin sauce, pork tenderloin and shrimp shu mai.
Maia flew in for the weekend.
Maxito adjusted the lights.
And we all sat on pillows around my mother’s hospice bed as The Artist and Hugo won the statues. She said, “All this is heavenly,” then cried, “I can’t believe I never wrote my screenplay,” she trailed off, “never won my Oscar ...”
“YOUR MOTHER ISN’T following any of the normal patterns,” the lead hospice nurse said when I arrived the next day. “We could be here for many months.”
I washed dishes, scanned the log, opened a bar of dark chile chocolate.
“Normally a patient might go from soft foods to liquids. Then she might start refusing food all together. That would tell us she had just a few days. But your mother has graduated from soft foods to complex solid foods, and ...” she bit her lip. “The bedsore is beginning to heal.”
“That’s good, right?”
The hospice nurse nodded. “It’s unbelievable.”
I popped a piece of spicy chocolate into my mouth. I believed it. With all the marijuana Leslie’s ex was feeding her and the chef’s food-why wouldn’t we get a miracle?
THE CHEF WAS in my mother’s kitchen making miso soup for the week when another prospective caregiver knocked on the open door.
We didn’t usually interview caregivers. Milagro Home Care just sent them over and I wrote the checks. But this one, Sherman, said he had some questions for us.
“Sure,” I said. “Come in.”
He wore a zebra-print jacket and white leather boots, smelled like cigarettes. “Well,” he puckered. “I have some needs. I’m wondering if I can bring my two poodles with me.”
It occurred to me that Leslie or Maia had somehow had this guy sent over from Central Casting, that we were being punked.
“Poodles?”
“Yes, you know, I used to be a poodle groomer? In Hollywood?” He flicked his wrist. “Can I meet your mother?”
I led him into my mother’s room where she sat with Cloud. She liked Cloud, but she always called him Ocean or Storm or Mist. He didn’t seem to mind. One weather-related noun was as good as the next.
“SERIOUSLY?” THE CHEF said when I stepped back into the kitchen. “Poodles?”
I dialed Milagro Home Care, said we could do without Sherman and his needs, but after he’d left my mother shrieked, “How could you send him away? He’s a Hollywood hairdresser. He’s going to do my hair!”
“He’s a poodle groomer, Mom. It’s different.”
She glared at me. “I want Sherman.”
So I dialed again, told the scheduler I’d misspoken. We wanted Sherman after all. We wanted Sherman, poodles and all.