Forever and Ever

The home health aide’s number lights up my phone and she says “you need to come now.”

For a moment I imagine that Mom has come around and is asking for me, even though I saw her a few hours ago, and she was unresponsive, and this seems unlikely.

Sometimes I am told they rally, and there’s one of those last conversations.

“There’s the Happy lamb hot Pot,” my Mom would say, as I drove her home as we hit Mass ave, back when she was eating dinner with us every night, before the plague.

“Do you think the lambs are really happy?”

“Not really, no.”

“Maybe we’ll eat there some day.”

She would sing out the landmarks as we drove past them, proud that she knew where she was and where she was going, even though she was 89, mostly drunk, and suffering from severe memory loss.

The drive to Mom’s assisted living is over in an eye blink and I’m clumping up the stairs and then I don’t want to go in, but if it’s that rallying thing then I should keep moving. I listen at the door. I hear muted TV news. No screams, like the day before yesterday, thank God. But no human voices.

The door is unlocked and the overhead light is far too bright and the aide stands in a cloth mask and bandana, looking up from her phone, and in the other room Mom’s mouth hangs open in the same way my father’s mouth hung open when he died eighteen months ago. There’s some drool on her chest and she doesn’t really look like my mother, but some age-made-up version of her. She aged twenty years in 30 hard days.

I go to her. Her skin is still warm, damp with the exertion of her fight with death, her body perfectly still, and I lay my hand on her forehead, the way I comforted her while she was dying, and it feels the same, really, as if she was alive, but she’s inert. So still. So I try to hug her, an awkward leaning over the hospital bed thing,  and I say the stuff you say. Her eyes are closed. I kiss her between the eyebrows.

I stand up.

“She’s at peace, now, Jay. She’s at peace.”

“Yeah. I know. This had to happen. It’s good. It’s a good thing.””

I turn back to the body, lean in again and whisper  all the things as the aide retreats to the other room. I love you, Mom. You were a great mom. I will miss you. I am glad you aren’t in pain anymore. All the things you say. There aren’t that many.

I go and turn off the overhead lights and turn on the table lamps. MSNBC mutters continually in the background.

“I have called the hospice nurse.” The aide says. She doesn’t tell me to be strong, like she did a couple of times, to stop me from crying and upsetting my mother. When I had to tell Mom she was dying. Over and over again, because she couldn’t remember. I explained to her the cancer out of nowhere, the shadow on the lung, the blood clots, the surgery that failed to save her arm, her blackening necrotic fingertips.

Over and over again, in and around the morphine and ativan.

“They have to pronounce the death,” the aide says.

“I’ll call the funeral place. I picked one out.” Wait. What order do we do this in?

“Yes. Call them now. They will make you wait, so don’t worry, the nurse will get here before.”

I’ve already picked out a cremation place and I click on the link on my macbook but I have not filled out the pre-payment form. I meant to, but the fucking e-commerce was broken in the mobile app. Idiots. So this will cost us more. Well, me more. Who cares. But fuck.

I pace around the unit. I return to hug her again, wordlessly, eyes filling with hot tears. I walk over to the desk and pick up a photo of her holding up a glass of wine in a restaurant in Asheville, Christmas lights shining out of focus behind her. She always smiled best for my father. He took the shot.

“They should use that one,” the aide says. She means for the memorial table downstairs. I remember from my father that you get one week on the table.

Seeing her so alive and so happy in the photo hurts in a way it is impossible to describe. She will never be that way again. Never drink another glass of wine. She will be ash sometime soon. She is very still now.

I text my family. They knew when I left what was happening.

“Do you want me to go with you?” My wife asked as I put myself together to make this trip.

“No,” I said. No reason really. My wife wasn’t very close to my mother. My wife isn’t overly sentimental about death. She’s a rock, in the good and bad sense of that word.

My mother never got that close to my kids, or my brother’s. My parents chose to live 1000 miles away from us. My mom was nice to her grandkids, and they loved her in that way you love your grandparents, but she never talked to them for hundreds upon hundreds of hours. The way I talked with my mother.

“You were a great mom,” I told her, two days ago, when she could still speak.

“Why do you say that?” She asked. Details. I’m dying Darling, give me details.

“Because I could always talk to you. And you always listened. And I never thought I was boring you.” I bored my Dad.

“You were never boring, darling.. Never boring.” She pauses, groping for what to say next. “You were my favorite person to talk to.”

It’s been two years since I could say the same back to her without lying. Her broken memory made conversation a challenge for both of us. But it was one we met, every day, as I walked her around the building. Her mandatory exercise.

“Where are we going,” she would ask. “Just around the building,” I would say.

Like Pooh and piglet walking around that tree, alarmed at the ever increasing numbers of footprints.

“When I was one,” I would start.

“I had just begun,” she would answer.

The sun has set, I came too late, put the visit off, and it’s twilight and nobody in his right mind would be walking this old woman at this hour, in this cold, over the rutted asphalt and raised parking lot speed bumps, around the dark puddles.

But sometimes the sunset was so pretty, and she noticed it over and over again, and remarked on it. It was new to her every time.

That was fun, really. It made her happy over and over again.

“There is our blue dumpster.”

“Truly a beautiful sight to behold.” This was the blue dumpster that had replaced the red one with the Hillary for Prison sticker which we had covered with a Biden bumper sticker a few days before the election.

“When I was two,” I say.

“I was nearly new.”

I’m doing the easy part, the numbers.

“and when I was three–“

“I was hardly me…. where are we again?”

“Just walking around the building.”

“I live here?”

“Yes, when we turn the corner you’ll recognize where we are. You always do.”

“I know. I’m just old, that’s all.”

“You’re not that old, really. You should stop complaining.”

“But that’s what I’m best at. Complaining.”

“No, you’re not. You don’t complain much at all. Now, where were we?”

“What?”

“Four. When you were four.”

“Oh! I was not much more!”

I know the rest. “When I was five, I was just alive, but now I am six–“

“–And I’m clever as clever,” she says.

“So I think I’ll be six now–

“–For ever and ever.”

We say the last words together.

As she lay, struggling with the pain, I read to her from the Milne poetry books, When We Were Very Young, and the other one, Now we are six. But I couldn’t get through many of the poems because when you are dying you don’t have a lot of energy for such things, which is really too bad.

I skipped past this poem, that first day I was reading, and went back to it, the second day, the last day, I read, avoiding this, the best one really, because of the name… which was, which is, The End.

I don’t want it to be the end, even if it’s time.

But it is.

And now I’m in the other room writing this, and Natalie the Catily has left her post at my mother’s feet, her mission done, and she won’t let me type. She demands to be petted and the funeral man knocks and he’s in the hall pushing his shrouded gurney and the hospice nurse is sitting at the love seat doing the paperwork, after removing the morphine pump and catheter and the health aide, Francis, stands behind me, and we all wait, because there is more work to do, still, tonight.

Promises to keep, right? And miles to go before I sleep.

Goodbye, Mom. Good night.

Forever and ever.