In Liminal Time

Photo Credit: Tom Kates

She died in the living room.
She died with her head turned to the right,
face raised toward the soft June leaves
of the grape arbor,
which were unseeable of course at 3am
and also forever.

She died turned away from the view
that faced her all the last
two weeks at home: The rhododendron
with its long and deep green waxy leaves,
and the stained glass hangings,
and whatever birds bent their whims
toward the nearest branches,
for a moment or awhile. She died

and left questions as unanswerable
as birdsong: Was she aware? How much?
Do our heavy brains, stripped
to their reptilian origins at the end,
protect us from the agony of consciousness?

I hope so.

Oh Mom, I hope so.

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In early April of an earlier year, my parents came to visit.  What they brought: A thin cutting from my childhood backyard lilac, all wet stem and small leaves. What they also brought: the seeds of leukemia, buried in my mother's body, growing quickly, sending tendrils and roots through her bloodstream, killing off the native vegetation. We planted the lilac, still hopeful and unaware. It looked tiny in the soil, spindly and vulnerable, the way my mom looked later in her hospital bed in extra small pajamas that were still too big. All summer I watched the lilac and into fall. Its growth was sometimes imperceptible but it hung on, pointing its dusty leaves to the sun, wilting only slightly when water was scarce. And as I watched I thought about the coming April, and the ones beyond: the sun shining on my newly vigorous mother, alive and healthy, my tough little lilac putting out tender pale green leaves, rooted firmly in the earth, anticipating flowers.

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I will lawyer the story. I will put together a case.

Exhibit A: This woman, who has been known to go to work with broken ribs and not complain, suddenly is talking of how tired she’s been feeling lately.

Exhibit B: She clings to every proffered explanation, and in her voice a patina of longing, and under that, bald terror.

Exhibit C: Someone asks how is your mom? and you say she’s been feeling tired lately, and why is that important and why do you say it? Because you know even before you know.

Exhibit D: A picture. One year after your daughter’s one year birthday, you look back at the picture from her party and see what you missed before: how gray your mom looks, like a foreshadowing of death.

Exhibit E:  She goes to the doctor. She never goes to the doctor.

Exhibit F: Leukemia is a pretty word. This makes it hard to remember its genocidal heart.

Enough.

I gather the evidence, seal it in a box. I throw it in the river. I watch it spin away. I turn around.

My useless brain, again, gathers.

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The week before her diagnosis, she is already crawling with mercenary cells, sick to the marrow, white as bone. She travels:

To Maryland for my little girl’s first birthday.
Home, to Highland Park, New Jersey.
To Wisconsin. Gives a speech. Walks to dinner, three miles.
Home, to Highland Park, New Jersey.
To Manhattan, for dinner with friends, and home.
Into the Jersey woods, unraveling the intricate ecosystem for an eager class of students.

She works:

Teaches a class, three hours.
Teaches another.
Conducts experiments, writes articles, and reads.
Cooks dinner, every night.
She goes to the doctor.
She answers the doctor’s call.
She packs her suitcase for the hospital.

Flying forward as fast as it feels in retrospect, fourteen months, lush June. The nurses and orderlies line up in her hospital room to say goodbye and even the barest conversation is too much for her. She cannot rise and so is wheeled down to the ambulance and slowly driven home. Gently she is moved to the rented hospital bed. For two last weeks we only lift her rarely, and when we do her leg stalks hang down uselessly, she pants and flinches, sleeps deeply when our ministrations end. Talking is impossible, holding a pen takes the full force of her tremendous will. Sometimes she is in another world, and then mostly, and then always. 

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Leukemia demands: Give up everything you love!
Soil and forest
Fruit raw from the earth
The pleasure of company
The pinnacle of career you have reached just now....

Leukemia dangles the carrot of salvation just out of reach, which itself would be hard enough if the loss of hope didn’t happen in agonizing stages, if by the time all options were exhausted you weren’t exhausted too, not strong enough for the woods, in too much pain to eat, too sick to socialize, losing your grasp on work - not even a day or week left to flee the cage you’ve lived in for a year, not one tart green bite of apple, not one deep inhalation of the loamy wet air of the swamp.

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I give these memories to the page. The page can have them.

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How did we get here? Have we always been here? Nature photos on the wall, the skeletal IVs, the hive of nurses, humming…The routine takes over, the place becomes a background, beige and easy. How hard the brain works against chaos! We compartmentalize so neatly, and when that fails we doggedly hammer and saw a new compartment for the unexpected. So now this not-home, not-work, not-normal, not-safe tower of stacked square hallways becomes just what we do here in New York, and we navigate its corners and round its edges and blunt its foreboding with numb surgical precision, guarded always against the unaskable question: How did we get here?

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The waters smooth. My mother’s voice across the distance is bright and hers, no drugs or nausea, terrible anxiety, to blunt and dull. There are new stem cells coursing through her marrow, as rich with promise as the baby so recently cut from the cord from which they came. We talk mundane – the cat, my little girl, a bit of this and that. A Saturday in late summer begins like those before, and then continues on that way: play and breakfast, park and picnic, nap and pool, dinner and crib, movie, bed. I hold my breath and calm my bones. If I pare my movements down to only the essential, if I hold the panic underwater until it drowns, will it be enough? Or is the shadow looming right behind me? With my teeth to the wind, have I put my naked back to the imminent disaster?

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Hope pours down on us. We are crazy and blind with it. We hold up our hands, feel it rush slippery across our palms, drip onto our desperate tongues, slick and smooth each fold of our ever-anxious brains, pile thickly over what we know and have been told. We write each other cards and letters and messages with one theme only. It is the answer to every question, Google’s antidote, the happy face of our greed, the present rejection of past and future, the end of the sentence.

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The lilac, alive, refuses to grow.
Rimmed with a
wire fence to keep the
rib-thin deer away,
it sends up many
fingers of defiance,
but gets no taller.
Everything is backward.

In my mother’s marrow,
rampant regrowth, sick
cells in terrifying abundance.
Her doctor weeps.
In my office, dry-eyed,
I sit staring at the wall,
afraid to move,
as if by stopping,
I could stop time.

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The on call doctor emerges fluster-eyed from the lab. He is a bastard, but not really – just not fit for human contact. It is time for rounds. He goes door to door, measuring and jotting notes, relaying information. He is at my mother’s door. It is the dinner hour, the only hour of the waking day when my mom is in her room alone. He knows this but it is her turn and so he enters anyway, reading figures, writing numbers, scanning her thick charts. In the lab results, destruction. He tells her: chemotherapy has failed. There is nothing left for you. (The unfinished thought: You are going to die, and soon.) He leaves the room, leaves her pulverized and finished, leaves her savagely alone.

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One howl: we stopped fighting. We didn't fly her to Texas or Seattle, bang down the doctors' doors, pry open all the research protocols, seek every possible opinion. And so we let her die. 

Two howls: Mom, sitting at the kitchen counter after a doctor's visit. Glasses off, looking more naked than naked. Holding the bitter word hospice on her tongue, trying to choke it down.

Three howls: first cancerous Mother's Day, by her hospital bed and the news finds me of my three-time former student now (forever) fourteen and murdered in broad daylight on his way to buy presents for his mom and grandma. I am weeping and she cannot hold me in her mother arms for fear of a lurking infection.  I can feel her ache from across the room. I know she can feel mine.  

Four howls: We wrote her obituary before she was dead. It was the best use of our time, considering.

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I cut my mother’s toenails. The pinky nails are thick and soft and yellow, the clippers slice through without any resistance. I spread ointment with my finger on her scabbed lips, the rough black igneous skin raised around her nostril. I feel my stomach skittering, and then a wash of guilt. This dying woman is not my mother. This dying woman is my mother.

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In my family, the women are strong, and die of cancer.

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I am a fool,
standing with a spitting hose
in the breathless heat of summer
watering my lilac,
expecting miracles.

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Coward. Tell us about the night she died.

That night?

We arrived maybe 10 or 11. Everyone was there. We arrived and I carried my daughter in to say good night to her grandma. Her grandma was already wearing her death mask, yet my little one did not seem scared. Her grandma did not seem scared either. But I was.

We split the night into shifts. I took the first, the midnight shift. I read to her from her beloved texts: books on music, books of poetry. I sang back to her the songs she had given me: Shenandoah, The Golden Vanity, The Arkansas Traveler. It was the Sabbath so I sang Sabbath songs, for familiarity and tune only, not because anything was different about her or me, in that foxhole. I went to the kitchen for small snacks, because I didn’t believe in any of this, because my denial had hungry edges. I rubbed her papery arm. I dripped morphine. I dripped water into her mouth, black with sores. The house was silent.

It was two o’clock. I leaned into her, put my head down on the pillow next to her, reached down into and past my agony, pulled out the words she needed: It’s okay Mom. You can go. Go. We love you. I stood. I woke my youngest brother. I dropped into sleep like a stone.

It was three o’clock. My brother opened the door. “Mom just died,” he said.

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Vigil.
Vigilant.
Vigilante.
We kept a vigil.
We clutched together.
I braced my palms against my knees to stop the shaking.
We were quiet.
The hospice nurse, also quiet, arrived.
She had to bathe my mother.
My sister and I volunteered.
No, we had to help.
We picked clothes.
We brushed her hair.
We waited as the nurse sent all the potent drugs down the toilet.
We thought about how our ecologist, our water scientist mom, would have felt about that.
We moved her starvation thin limbs, and rinsed each part of her with cool water.
Cool water, hot water, what did it matter?
We tried not to think about that.
We finished.
We kissed her, feeling for any hint or wisp of lingering life.
We huddled all of us in the kitchen, as two suited bureaucrats of death zipped her into black plastic and hauled her to their van.
Meanwhile, upstairs in her crib, my little girl slept on.

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In this world of seven billion, one hundred and seven people die each minute. Do you think of them? Are you thinking of them now? We did not clock her minute. My brother, sitting beside her, knew. For him that minute grew to fill the room, the sleeping town, the sky, the universe. Maybe one hundred and six others, or more, marked the minute too, the unforgettable minute, the closing minute, the sixty second doorway between now and everything after. Don’t feel bad for missing it though. If you paid attention you’d do nothing else. And besides, you know I missed that minute too, although I should have been wide-eyed and sleep-free. That minute, portentous and hellish, tore by without me.

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We are balloons with strings. We are balloons without strings.

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Her favorite hat, the one that says “Plays In the Dirt.” The sick funny thought rises like an unstoppable sneeze, that her sometimes-dark humor and her biological, un-mystical, no-choirs-of-angels philosophy might have allowed a laugh at the thought of being buried in that hat.

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Where I want to be: on my knees.
Where I am: at her funeral, throwing clods of earth on her casket.
The rabbi eulogized: She was among the rarest of people, who could see a universe in a handful of soil.
A thousand universes raining down upon her pine box home.
I push back against the urge to throw myself down and clutch the dirt. My knees are bending. My husband is holding me up.
Moons later, earliest of mornings. I’m back and on my knees now, where I have to be.
I’m running my hands along the marble shoulders of her headstone.
With all of my body and all of my want, I’m feeling for a pulse.

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I hate the life that lets me laugh and sleep and eat. Whatever this is called – strength, denial, perseverance – I reject it. I don’t want to be the creature, four-limbed, brute-brained, who paws the carcass, sniffs or licks or nudges, and then moves on down the trail. I don’t want to be caught up in the steel gears of a coping mechanism, clicking, clicking, clicking through the motions of a life.  I want to be my little girl in the paroxysms of a disappointment or a hurt, slick sweaty hair plastered to red forehead, mouth a dark, wide tunnel, throbbing with grief, choking on it, hurling it around the room. I want to be inconsolable.

Who is this calm woman on the phone, the one who just buried her mother, trying to figure out why the food is late, juggling all the relatives, arranging forks on the table, popping ice from tray to bowl? Who is she?

Tell her: take that fork, raise it high, jam it into your arm. Be that woman instead.

She shakes her head. She goes calmly to answer the doorbell.

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Let us catalogue the loss:

A world of music, melody’s tongue, all those librettos yellowed and worn.
The plants she knew down to the roots, the plants she would have learned.
The cycles and systems of the earth, both delicate and hard as clustered carbon.
Meals that sprang from her hands, from forgotten books or clippings, rounded to the nearest pinch or palmful or guess.
A card catalog of family history, each small square hook-handled drawer a resting place of moments whose details and story arcs no one else remembers fully, or no one else remembers quite right, or no one else remembers at all.
What dying felt like to this mother grandmother scientist daughter sister wife musician woman, the depth of her perception, the breadth of her heartbreak.
What living felt like to this mother grandmother scientist daughter sister wife musician woman, the depth of her perception, the breadth of her heart.
And this is where I stop, to bow down to her privacy and guarded heart, to humble my thin transparent self before her unscratched surface.

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A helicopter zippers through the thick air. A Carolina wren warns me away from his nest. Inside the nest, a female sits frozen, looking lifeless. This mother will come back to life when the danger recedes. I walk, new baby papoosed to my chest, through the hot morning, searching for my mom. It is one year exactly since she left. She seems a universe away, hard to reach, hard to see, hard to feel.

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This is how real daughters mourn:
Twisting their cars off of highways,
fingers wet and slipping on the wheel,
windows hot breath fogged, grief heaved and alone.

Or:

Ambushed in a forgetful moment
by a pair of reminiscent shoes passing by,
cold knife to the back, flattened.

Or:

Letting habit call her number,
curling fetal around the phone
when the ringing announces her never answer,
doing this over and over and over.

But:

This is not how I mourn.
I mourn like a soldier.
I mourn like my mom.
Like the wren, I freeze.

But:

Destruction comes in plain brown paper packages. A dream in autumn. Nothing specific, nothing vivid, nothing. Just a long hall, and my dad and my sister and my brothers, and the shared knowledge that she is gone. I wake, weeping, struggling to breathe. I feel for my heart. I find nothing but shreds.

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You think I’m going to tell you everything? I don’t even know what everything is.

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It is Sunday afternoon in the lion’s mouth of March, and I am sitting in the balcony at Mozart’s Requiem, thinking of the composer with his prescience and his agony, listening to the music as it soars away from the Shadow, then turns to sweetly welcome death, then turns again. I am at the Requiem and searching for my mother in the choir. I am searching for my mother but nothing is right: This woman too tall, this one too short, this one’s hair too blonde, too gray, too red, too dark. I search the rows slowly to the last woman, then search again. I forget and remember and forget: by now she is only fleshless bone, under the settled soil, between two privet hedges in New Jersey.

Agnus Dei. The voices lift the Lamb of God to the rafters. Agnus Dei.

After the final notes fade out I will return to my home, remove the lamb leg, butterflied and bloody, from the fridge, make dinner for my family. But all through the evening and all through the night the visions will swell and ebb, swell and ebb, of fleshless lamb bones, whitening in the ground.

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Are you in my head Mom?

Where are you?

You don't want to imagine. In the ground, grinning my endless bone grin.

You always had such thin shoulders. I remember my arms around you. I can still feel you against the soft skin of my inner arms.

Is that what you remember?

Rarely. Only if I try. Mostly I remember the end. It wasn’t pretty. Is that awful? I'm sorry. I want to remember you beautiful. I want that more than anything.

You can't write a different ending you know.

You were my first death up close. And you were my mom. So what am I supposed to do with that?

Carry it.

It’s heavy.

Carry it.

I have three little girls now. The two who came after, named for you. Did you know?

No.

What is it you do know?

Wooden walls.

And?

The science of decay.

And?

The memory of a sound, dirt clods hitting a hard roof. The sound slowly muffling, then the earth’s loneliest silence. And I heard you crying.

I couldn’t stop, Mom. I couldn’t stop until I went numb to the bone. It was always a story someone else was telling. I loved my mom. She died. She’s dead. I was 35 and motherless. These are the things I hear. But how can they be about me?

And now?

I’m on this island. The sea around is wild. You could fall through it for days and still not hit bottom. The island is small but here’s what I have: three daughters, the chaos of mothering, a crazy fear of drowning that keeps me rooted to the shore. On the other side of the water is a better place. I dip a toe in, retreat. I breathe in salt and hopeful air blowing from somewhere safe, go down on my knees, crawl forward, crawl backwards, stop. I stand and watch the water. I turn away from it all. Nothing changes.

Didn’t I teach you how to swim?

You must have. I remember your long hair tucked into a swim cap. I remember you swimming laps alone. In the rearview mirror of my own life as a mother, I see you breaking away for a few short isolated minutes, to a place we couldn’t follow you, some small heaven in a life without much room for solitude.

But...

But this is different. You didn’t teach me this. There’s no trial run for death, so you never had the chance to perfect it for us. And so by the time the time came for conversations we had all avoided, your throat was full of sores, and your tongue, and your lips, and conversation was snatched away from us. Instead you gave a few instructions, then closed your eyes and left us.

What did you need?

I don’t know.

What did you need?

Your arms around me. The soft skin of your inner arms against my thin shoulders. Words of strength and courage. A reminder of infinite love. A light at the end of the long long tunnel.

That’s what you needed?

Yes.

And you know I had those words for you somewhere deep inside me, in a place that maybe had no exit?

Yes.

Then you truly needed nothing. Then what you thought you needed you had all along. You had 35 years. Are there any words I could have said that could have changed that? Or added to it?

No.

It’s time to stand up then. It’s time to lay those geraniums red and delphiniums blue right here on the soft grass by the cold stone. Take a deep breath. Dry your eyes. Swim home.