Susan's Death - A Memoir

My mother had been ill for a long time. She was dying, but very slowly.

Years passed.    We all glided along, me raising my child, my brothers Will and Bob doing their highly important lives, my sister Alida, as always, guarding the gates to Susan.

She had been dying for a long time. When she suddenly began to die faster, to die very fast, we were as shocked as if we’d never known she were ill.

Her eyes were giving her trouble, she was having unexplained fevers and strange eruptions and rashes on her face.  She lost weight continuously.  Her hands, twisted with Rheumatoid Arthritis, became less and less like hands until they were claws, thin and straight and useless as corn husks.  Once, near the end, she held them out to me.  “Please take these handcuffs off”, she said.

She began to sleep more and more, and when she was awake, that was like sleeping too. 

I called her doctor and asked him if he knew what a fugue state was.  Yes, he did.  Because that’s what I think she’s in, a fugue state. 

Her legs began to swell, filling up like balloons, like sausages.  Nothing helped.  Tima, her housekeeper, said she was afraid they’d split. 

Ned and I  came one Friday morning early to pick up laundry.  When we got there she was doubled over, retching.

Will wanted to take her to the hospital.  She didn’t want to go.  Doctors were called and calls returned.  I took the pail of vomit outside and washed it under the hose, gagging.  The dogs licked at the grass where I flung it.  I went back into the house.

Tima and I conferred, the first of many whispered conferences.  Did she vomit up her pills?  Should we give them to her again?  Was it they that made her sick in the first place.? I couldn’t bear any more vomiting.

Somehow it was decided she would go to the hospital to get blood.  Tima’s husband Jerry drove her.

For an hour and a half we drove, Jerry in front , we in our car behind him .  Me watching every movement of her head. I saw her head sink from view, saw Jerry turn.  Her head reappears, he turns back to the road.  Like a pantomime. Over and over.

It is 8 PM. We’re at the hospital.  I’m in her room when her physician finally arrives, a cold and blunt young man we all grew to loathe. 

“How long have I got, do you think?”, my mother asks.  “About a month” the doctor tells her.  “That little?”  my mother says, not so much frightened as dismayed,  “I rather thought I’d have longer”.  Dr. Insensitive panics slightly “Well, no one can say for sure.  You could live a month, you could live a year” -  and pigs could fly

After he leaves, my mother smiles at me and says “Did you hear?  The doctor says I have another year”.  I can only nod. 

The next day we took her home to die.

I have always hated that house, the house where both of my parents died.  It was ugly and cramped, sheetrock and plastic veneer.  The spaces felt wrong like an apartment carved uncaringly from a fine old house.  I had been thrown out of that house a dozen times.

On the first day with the hospital bed in place and the couch set like a gallery into the operating room, I sat with my brother and we told her that she would never be alone again.

She was British and very upper class.  She stared across at us from her bed, fixing us all with her blazing blue gaze and said, “You can all go now!”   Will and I spoke together – “No.”  She said, “This is my house and I want to be alone so you can all get out! OUT!”  My brother didn’t miss a beat.  “I don’t think you can make me.”

And there it was, the first thing I’d taken away: her privacy.

Days followed after days,  Once my brother came in and found Tima and me, in that flat grey light, sitting in chairs, one behind the other, like people on a bus, just watching Susan.  “What?” we said when he raised an eyebrow.  "What?"

I dropped liquid morphine into her dry cracked mouth.  When she could no longer see, I told no one, kept her secret for her.

And I told my proud, proud, private mother that she could no longer go into the bathroom.  I  made her use a potty chair that if she could have, she’d have flung against the wall, out the door, and me with it.

I remember reading her a letter, Will and Bob beside me, when a strange something rolled across her face, as though someone had passed their hand over her, smooth and distorting her expression.  “Oh god!” I said “she’s just had a stroke!”  My brothers gave me that bland masculine look.  “What?” They said. “We didn’t see anything”. 

We were told not to touch her with our bare hands.  She has had so many transfusions that she’s essentially hazardous waste. Once, against orders, I leant down and kissed her forehead.  She smiled and I felt all the years of never-good-enough erased.  Then I scurried, ashamed, into the bathroom and washed my lips. 

I read to her, not to cheer her up or comfort her so much, but to address the issue before us.  Death.  What do we know of death?  Because that is where you are going, and you have to go.

I read Tolstoy’s What Men Live By , I read “Buffalo Bill’s defunct.. How do you like your Blue-Eyed boy, Mr. Death?”  And of course, ‘If there are any heavens my mother will, all by herself, have one”.  I read a lot of poetry ; she’d  taught me how.  How I wish now that I’d known Jane Kenyon’s Let Evening Come.

When I didn’t read, I talked.  Since the moment of her stroke, I couldn’t be sure if she understood me, but I had a message to convey so I spoke anyway..I spoke and I put out Alida’s incense, the sickly sweet smoke that Susan had secretly hated.  I had a martini every afternoon , and when I knew we were near the end I poured one for Susan too, like pouring whiskey on a grave.

The day before she died we had a big storm and a lot of trees were down.  Not even the Hospice nurses in their 4-wheel drives could get out to the house. 
I loved the hospice nurses: practical, compassionate and tough.  Cheerful but never cheery.  If they could, they came when we called them, but not this day.

The Last Day

The power has been off all day and the roads are blocked.  Tima and Alida stand shocked and speechless.  My mother’s face is a death’s head.  Her body is swollen here, thin as a stick there.  Here, there, there are bruises the size of my hand.  When we grasp her arm to turn her over, the skin slips like the skin on a ripe peach; she is shedding her skin like she is shedding her life. We’re afraid to touch her. She’s become so fragile they can’t clean her.

The bed is wet.  My mother is wet.

Alida has had to leave her mother dirty and wet all night.  She’s nearly in tears,

For the first time we realize that we aren’t invincible.  That we aren’t even nurses. 

I stand by the bed and for the first time I think - I can’t do this.  I’m going to fail.  In all my life I’ve never given her a gift that she wanted.  This was to be the last, the only, my only gift: that she could die here, at home.  If hospice can’t come today we will have to take her to the hospital because as much as I love her, as much as I have set myself aside for her, I cannot do this.  I cannot leave her in her own urine, I can’t bear to have her skin come off in my hand.  I’m not as tough as I think I am.

In the grey morning light without the warmth of lamps everything seems colder, harder, and the momentum that has kept us going all this time drains perceptibly.   I comfort Alida as best I can.  We hate each other.

We are used to blackouts and fall easily into the routine.  Kerosene lamps are lit, buckets of water carried up from the pond.  We can still cook because the stove is gas.

Alida goes off to bed, Tima takes a nap, and I do what I’ve done so often over these weeks; I read to her.

She hasn’t eaten in weeks, has had no water in days.  We must have called Bob, because he is on his way, flying in from California.

In late morning, hospice comes.  Somehow they get her cleaned up and into a gown – in desperation we’d cut off the one she had on.  They put a foley catheter in her and I am so grateful I almost weep. 

It’s after noon now, and the nurses are gone.  Jerry comes in to crank up the bed by hand; the power’s still off.  As soon as he has her propped up, it seems, she begins to fight for breath.  She seems to be dying.  It might be the bed I think, but I don’t want to put it down.  It’s time.  She’s in horrible pain.  She has to die.

I never knew what it meant to fight death, but I know now.  Susan is gasping, gritting her teeth and flinging her head from side to side.  I’ve made myself a stiff drink, a very stiff drink.  When Bob arrives, I meet them on the lawn, drink in hand.  “It’s rough in there” I warn them.  “Very rough”.

We are all gathered around her bed, the three children and Tima, who probably loves her more than any of us .  It’s terrible, a terrible scene, but she won’t let go.  Finally I say “Well, If you’re going to do it, I’m going to read it.”  And I begin “Do not go gentle into that good night…”  Alida has a poem; it’s like call and response..  Hers is Roethke’s The Waking , a beautiful poem I’ve never heard it before.  And at the end, at the very end, Susan is suddenly silent.  And we all know that it’s over.

Later the children come in and, one by one, put flowers all over her body.