Then Again - Diane Keaton [90]
We ate tacos around the dining room table. Everyone looked worse for the wear. Robin went to drop Riley off at the airport. Dorrie left to get more supplies. The caregivers took a break. It was Mom and me alone together for the last time. I looked at her face, not her ice-cold ankles, or her yellow feet. Nature had been so damn inconsistent. How ironic that Mom’s handsome face made it all but impossible for people to trace the fragile soul hiding behind such stature. I leaned in close. Safe within the perimeter of Mother’s pale aspect, I wondered what she’d seen before her eyes shut. Had the landscape of bobbing, once-loved faces been an intrusion, all those perplexed nodding heads? Mom, what do you hear in the land of no words? The dishes being washed? The ocean pounding against the seawall? Does the chorus of voices whispering “Mamacita” and “Morning, Mom” and “Dear, dear Dorothy” and “Mrs. Hall” mean anything at all?
Alone together, I hope you can identify our voices. Or are we another refrain you can’t make out? If sound is the last thing to go, I hope our chorus soothes you. It’s our lullaby of heartache. Can you hear us cooing? Does it reverberate? It’s our song of loving you from the other side of your white sheet.
I guess it’s safe to assume your eyes won’t be opening anytime soon, will they, Mom? I see you’re still clenching your jaw. No one’s messed with that mouth of yours since the day you bit Suzy D’s finger. “Dorothy’s Last Stand,” that’s what Dorrie called it. I wish you didn’t have to grip so hard. I know you’re trying to hold on to what little is left. I would too. I’m sorry there’s only one door left for you to open.
Everything seems arbitrary and haphazard and distorted and out of whack. Remember Grammy Hall harping about “health is wealth”? Only now do I know what she meant. Duke and Dexter are covered by a host of physicians. There’s Dr. Sherwood, Dexter’s orthodontist, and Christie Kidd for her skin care. There’s Dr. Peter Waldstein, Duke’s pediatrician, and Dr. Randy Schnitman for his many ear infections. As for me, the doctor list gets longer and longer. There’s my dentist, Dr. James Robbins, who recently made me a bite plate; yes, I grind my teeth. There’s his wife, Rose, the dental hygienist; and Dr. Keith Agre, my internist. Dr. Silverman gives me the yearly eye examination. There’s ninety-six-year-old Dr. Leo Rangell, my irreplaceable psychoanalyst. And I can’t leave out Dr. Bilchick, for my sprouting garden of skin cancers.
Remember my first squamous cell at twenty-one, followed by a series of basal cell carcinomas in my thirties? Warren used to bug me all the time about sitting in the sun. Why didn’t I listen? This year, more than forty years later, that mean-spirited invasive squamous cell revisited the left side of my face. I drove to Cedars-Sinai, put on a shower cap, and lay down on the gurney. As the anesthesiologist injected me, I began to drift through a kind of flip book of images. I saw you, just like me, lying on a gurney, only you weren’t alive. I saw Dad on a gurney too. I saw the extra-long needle putting Red-dog to sleep. Should I have given him more treats? I saw my friend Robert Shapizon sitting under his Andy Warhol with the giant dollar sign, discussing the emotional effects of inoperable lung