Consolation in a View of Crumbled Left-overs

As it turns out both my parents have died in the month of March, one late in the month, one in its first few days, though nine years apart. In the wake of my mom's passing on March 3rd I find myself reaching out again, the way I used to do, to the unseen beyond what I can even imagine to ask: where is she? out there? anywhere? If someone we loved with an unsurpassed depth has died it feels at the very least like an anticlimax not to know what, even though the personality may disintegrate, the individual's escaped energy has drifted into--if it's in some degree intact. Are they somewhere else or are they a part of the whole nearby surroundings or, as some people believe, are they reduced down to an essence and recycled into someone newborn? But I find myself in no hurry to get caught up in disciplines, or organized religious teachings, in pursuit of what must be indeterminable till we die. Knowledge, if there really is any on this topic, is intermittently my hope, yet it might come at a crippling price.

Old folks in the chilly latitudes have been said to die, more than at any other time, in late winter, faced with mounting hardships of the kind that prevailed during the era of widespread fireplace heat. Now, just upon the spring solstice the whole time period we're in has the feel, not to mention the look, of an aftermath, golden snow-mashed stubble out this window blurring into abstraction, an essence of late winter's colors blending, not the way mixed paint blends into a drab splotch, but into something dark yet luminous, winking multi-hued, no tone quite lost, the very emblem of a gentle accommodation of all strangeness. This vision itself might be Ruth, my mom. She maybe turns a little to and fro, like something hanging, with glints of color as if she remembered through me, the rememberer. This might be how she'll linger in my memory for as long as I live.

So by now I am at home again in late March, the look of the land comparable with other Marches and Aprils in a soothing continuum that, in the case of so many energetic people, impels them beyond that static-seeming prospect in impatience and boredom. My mother was a continuum the way emotionally stable people are who have absorbed a lot of cultural history and acquaintance throughout a career followed by retirement. In her last weeks as I took care of her and enjoyed final conversations, I went out on the net or outdoors and brought out bits of what I found there to distract and intrigue her however it might be possible. Through the need of movement I walked many circuits via the sidewalks, once taking a neighboring state park's trails, near her building spying a flicker browsing on a staghorn sumac still crowned with berries. The flicker was a tie with the growing springtime in the Midwest and Canadian border region where I'd be returning when this momentous interlude had run its course. Several evenings, as I explored the allegorical imagery of Angels in America on paired DVDs, I absorbed the background for the scene in heaven, an imaginary place seeming to have nothing to do with my mom, peopled with souls that appeared to have lived nowhere near as long as she did. Heaven in the movie had stone ruins and the kind of hush that is common to high vaulted places including California redwood groves, cathedrals, museums or even halls of government. Heaven's people were faded, at complete ease and in no hurry wherever they walked. Children there were giggling. My mom by that point was outspokenly impatient to die.

The sun-soft and misty portrayal of heaven in the movie followed me like a comfort down to New York City where I drove a load of inherited furnishings for Lea, my daughter, and back westward through Pennsylvania and the Lower Midwest and up the varying roads northward. The ruins in the artwork below, inspired by the movie, tell of places both missed and yet to be seen, since I've never been to Europe or to the pueblos or historic Spanish missions of America. Stone ruins affirm that not everything we've either alone or jointly effected in this world goes away but stays for ages, upholding the grace a few people envisioned for it in the physical designing, that is itself a part of our heritage. Cracks, broken edges and tumbling chunks bear evidence of our limits as the world goes on, incorporating all that we were and left of our handiwork. These ruins that I drew and painted were part of what I showed my mother in her last few days, and are everyone's history; the sumac is a tree of troubled, reworked soil and the flicker signifies ever-returning opportunity.

Flicker in a Crumbling Gateway

Heart Surgery, However it Happens

Since I've been sitting in my mom's terrace-level apartment for longer than two weeks now while she starves her sturdy old body of food and most fluids I figure I should, after all, be unsurprised at how long it takes for her process to run its course. Many, many people by my age have undertaken one or more death-watch, but this is my first.

It is at a few moments horrible; as often as not it's mundane, in the sense that we're all so equally mortal, on a par with rotting tree trunks. Even the beloved. But it's been gratifying, giving me days and days of opportunity interwoven with a long, dwindling goodbye.

We were a small family headed by mature parents, my sister and I their only two children despite their previous marriages and upheavals and re-beginnings. We thrived on our folks' loving gratitude for one another set against their memories of much less harmonious households. From my mom I feel I've received a lifetime of intentional and inadvertent gifts made most valuable by the remarks and adventures that came with and followed from them. Early in our lives we girls in our sheltered, gently disciplined, freedom-filled years must have sensed that we had a degree of family contentment, along with the trips and holidays we could always anticipate, that most of the kids we met through school were all in all lacking. We certainly had affectionate parents, especially our mom, who grew up missing affection from her mom, and so my mother's unique sweetness to this day pervades the mood of this apartment half-buried in Boston-area snow, like a burrow I have largely disappeared into. Today, again, I felt myself stepping out in the sun.

The harshest parts of this age-appropriate dying that I witness in its progress have been the dunks into bereavement coming after little respites ever since before mid-February when I arrived from Minnesota. It's up till now been as if she keeps dying only to reawaken when I come to greet her in the next hour at her bedside. My mom chose this destiny months, or even years, before turning 90 because the recommended surgical reconstruction of her heart's main valve would have meant an uncertain recovery, possible death in the operating or recovery room, long and likely incomplete rehabilitation with a short future of narrowed scope afterward not to mention major expense to the family. There was too much risk for too little reward. When she told me her decision in the beginning of winter she said, "I've done everything I want to do." She denied that she had been depressed, instead summing up her recent years and months as a period of contentment. Somewhere in the late fall of last year she wrote the following to share with her community of well-educated retirees many of whom continue to enjoy lives of privilege:

DECISIONS!  DECISIONS!

Have you ever noticed how often your days are governed by your  decisions?  Simple choices, such as when you will get up to start the day, activities in which you will participate, or whom you will join for evening dinner?  Gone are the days when we were governed by job or family obligations!  Now we organize our time by which day of the week it is, what times we are due for appointments, for participation in club activities to which we are committed, or for time alone to watch favorite television programs or read interesting books.  Or, if we don’t want to do anything at all, just sit and ruminate, we can do that, too.  We are free agents.

We do, however, have one more obligation, should we decide to accept it.  We need to decide how we want to end our days -- a gloomy subject to contemplate, perhaps, but that’s where we are in life.  We’ve fulfilled our family obligations (or not, depending on the circumstances); we’ve made our financial decisions; now we look to an abbreviated future.  And this is when one item rears its insistent head:  how willing are we to die?  Call it what you will -- meeting your end; going the way of all flesh; passing away -- the fact remains that sooner or later all life ends.  Energy flags.  When a life begins, it will one day end.

So, the question remains:  How willing are we for our lives to end?  If the idea is abhorrent, then we will go to all available means to prevent or extend our lives.  No medical treatment is too extreme; no daily routine too fatiguing; no diet too restrictive.  If, however,  whatever is is, then we become more philosophical. We accept our diminished energy; we perform as best we can the duties and/or activities to which we are committed; and we carry on.  No hard feelings; no extreme life-prolonging measures.  Just acceptance.  So be it. 
                      
by Ruth Katherine Beyer

By now she's lingered in her bed several intervals beyond what everyone expected. As I seize my daily chances to hustle outside for an hour or two I rehearse, again, dwelling in the knowledge that my mom is history, only a living presence I carry inside me, not a live person any more whom I can talk to. Unlike many survivors I've been given a chance to rehearse, since the likelihood has till now remained that I would go back into her apartment to share yet another conversation, if brief and repetitive. I walk in a madcap swinging manner in lug sole boots between the walls of snow and remember the character Prior Walter in the epic movie Angels in America which I was last week watching piecemeal each evening to my mom's amusement (she was no longer able to fix her attention on a movie whether she lay in bed or sat up to see the monitor.) Prior had climbed the flaming ladder to a godless heaven in order to confront death and plead for more life even in the face of all the suffering known in the 20th century and during the AIDS epidemic, to which he had fallen victim. He says of life that for him it's never enough; he can only, despite everything, want more of it. So, looking on the death that's most painful of any yet for me to behold, and most ever feared, do I.

This particular day I am watching her leave our realm of awareness; the nurse said the inevitable transition was coming soon.

To switch to another dramatic comparison, she reminds me of Sayward Luckett, the pioneer matriarch in Conrad Richter's novel The Town, unable to die yet even though she is days beyond being able to see or speak or gesture. She is a huge leftover tree from a virgin forest in territory that's been in her lifetime mapped and named Ohio, but is lying down, breathing, taking no sustenance. Her story was set before the American Civil War. My mom's is now, with upset of our climate set in motion. Live roots of her are tugging and snapping loose in my heart, and that's the heart-ache that's set me wandering between doorways inside her apartment as my sister and I keep the vigil with our mom's prescribed morphine and Ativan. Where a root pops free of my own live nerve endings, I console myself--having prayed as I'm skeptically not given to doing--a replacement petrified root will fill the empty socket, because there's no way so long as I live but that she will linger in her own established place in my heart. Devout people are correct: praying softens grief. Something nebulous comes to fill a void and then we merge into hugeness, where we find ourselves adrift but easier in ourselves.

The gifts borne to me via the energy currents of my mom have kept coming through life and through the approach of death. Conrad Richter's trilogy in paperback, The Trees, The Fields, The Town itself was a physical gift that lives on a shelf in Minnesota--I don't recall the year she gave it to me. Since I've come to Massachusetts to see her along I've reveled in the gift of time, to expand a website and set up a marketing newsletter in email, to learn to use this Apple computer for my various purposes that are beyond the uses she had for it. I've sat here by the big window that by comic accident lost its curtain rod and drapes, exposing sky and treetops and neighboring rooftops to my mom's wandering eyes in a way that was quickly a blessing for her, and begun on my third miniature watercolor in just two weeks.

Sometimes now I am for a few seconds afraid that I'll never get over this sorrow, it's so deep and chaptered back into childhood, but after all I'm still sitting here with Ruth, my mother, who hasn't died yet. She has that matriarchal body, with a hardihood that I'm sure she's passed to me. Out these walls I know of infinite unfolding stories that would shrink our particulars all to drops of water. This newest miniature watercolor she saw and enjoyed in its early development: it was due and proper to work on, given what the wide window shows of Massachusetts snowpack and what the bed shows of a woman's body shrinking ever deeper into slumber. The birds are a reminder of what has kept making people want to come back.

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