Then Again - Diane Keaton [91]
The Day Before
Suzy called from downstairs. She was looking for a pair of tweezers. I went into Mom’s workroom. It’s funny how you overlook the obvious. Along with THINK, Scotch-taped to the wall was a quote I’d never seen. “Memories are simply moments that refuse to be ordinary.” I hope Mom has kept a few tucked away in some retrievable part of her mind. Hunting around, I came across a few random pages Mom wrote after Dad died.
Cyrus, the cat, was mercifully and painlessly put to sleep this morning. This is a statement of sorrow at losing my beautiful Abyssinian cat, a real cat who understood his position in life and until his death did his job magnificently. I already miss him.
I don’t know why the verse from Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, came to me as I sat in a hot bath trying to get over the fact that Cyrus is no longer alive, but it did. I got out of the tub, picked up my mother’s old Bible, and found it. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, a time to dance. A time to get and a time to lose.”
I find peace in these words, probably because death is a mystery and at times a torturous burden to live with. It’s so hard to understand the complexities of our human existence. Why were we created with emotions of love only to be left with such emptiness when those we have felt love for are taken out of our lives? I will never know the answer until I die and join those who have gone before me: Jack, Mother, Mary, Sadie, Cyrus the cat, and quite probably I, next.
The Long Haul
After eleven days, Suzy D’s incessant “Praise the Lord, I pray for our Mamacita morning, noon, and night, God bless Dorothy” rant was driving me nuts, so nuts that I put my finger in Mother’s mouth, hoping she’d bite me, just to shake things up, but Mom’s fight-back spirit was gone. I was free to feel the jagged edges of her teeth. She was flunking her last test, or maybe she passed it and was ready to let go in order to join Jack.
Dorrie and I pushed her hospital bed in front of the picture window, where we tore off the hanging sheet. Enough with the darkness. What exactly had we been protecting Mother from? Certainly not the sun. With Mom only three feet away from Dad’s picture window, Dorrie and I stood looking at our still life. That’s what she’d become—a still life, a painting, an object. What did any of our gestures matter? Picture window or not, prolonging Mother’s life felt like cruelty, even a form of subdued torture.
We washed and bathed her. We held her hand as she was turned from one side to another every hour on the hour. We swabbed her mouth with a wet sponge. The hospice nurses administered morphine. Dr. Berman consoled us much in the same manner Dad’s doctor at UCLA had done. It was the quality of life. The quality of life? As far as I could see, there was no quality left for Mom. She couldn’t swallow. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t see. The only part of her body that moved was her left hand, and its only function had been reduced to clutching the railing of the hospital bed. Now, with our mother’s face directed toward the warmth of the sun, she no longer clutched the railing either.
September 18, 2008
Sitting at the edge of the bed, I monitored Dorothy’s condition while Suzy D went upstairs. She was holding steady at sixteen breaths per minute. I didn’t see it coming. There was no sign. Only when the purple in her hands began to fade did I understand Mother had passed away without so much as a single involuntary sound.
We dressed her