Mother
There have always been two very distinct universes for me where my Mother is concerned. The one which has been in existence for as long as I have been alive - and the one involving the envelope, which, as I got older and realized what it actually meant, I came to occasionally dread.
Last week, standing temporarily immune and clueless on the South West corner of 23rd Street and Third Avenue, I was pondering a dream I had had that morning which, in the way that sometimes happens with dreams, I had been unable to shake: standing in a small, stuffy room I had been asked to empty the contents of a large jar of vacuum cleaner dirt and dust into my mouth as some sort of sacrifice. Buried in the middle of it was a large, bloated spider, but the person standing there - someone I know in real life - assured me it would be extracted as soon as I had it in my mouth. Rigid with fear, I tipped the jar into my mouth and immediately felt the creature wriggling and struggling through the suffocating dirt, against the insides of my mouth, my tongue. Trying to open my mouth as wide as possible, to scream, in an impossible attempt to get the thing out, I could see the person standing there, arms by his sides, laughing.
The large, brown envelope was in the second drawer on the left of Mum’s dressing table. If Something Happened to her, we were to take it to Mr. Gatward, Sr. who would “know what to do”. This was drilled into me and my brother when we were very small children. It was just the three of us in our family; there was nobody else. It was very important to be prepared. This is what we understood, and, I suppose, in some abstract way, we knew what the envelope meant. Still, I would often rehearse the retrieving of the mysterious envelope in my head in some childishly self-dramatising way and wonder where Mr. Gatward Sr. was and plan my brave quest to find him.
My first thought, as I stood on the corner staring stupidly at the ‘Walk’ sign, was probably a common one: “I must call Mum and tell her about this.” But there is no calling to be done. She is unconscious, sedated into oblivion. My brother, his voice familiar and not, advised me to wait just for now because “it could be weeks” and she would have no idea anyway if I was there or not. I waited. A week later, there was a text: “Her lungs are collapsing and her heart is deteriorating fast”. These terrifying words were barely believable to me – my mother, after all, is a tall, fit, strong woman who practices tai chi and works out – how could this be?
Friday night I got on a plane and sat there until it was Saturday morning. Scurrying anxiously through the airport, I was aware of the heavy, funeral-appropriate dress in my suitcase. I hoped that by bringing it I might not need it, and thus ward off the inevitable. I wondered if the passport control person would ask “business or pleasure?” - even though I am British and they usually just take a cursory look and nod me through - and felt guilty as I thought up all the various dramatic ways I might reply.
But the nurses stunned me. They had that infinite patience and Nurse Nightingale quality more akin to the gauzy nostalgia of a World War II era hospital than the hard steel and cold corporate attitudes of our own. I would ask some vacant question and they would explain gently, thoroughly – and then, as I lost my words and turn to stare at the woman in the bed, they would follow my gaze, waiting in silence with me until I could find some other idiot question they had already answered to ask them. I suppose they’ve seen it all before, but still.
Insultingly enough, Sunday was Mothers’ Day in England. Wandering through the grey, crappy town, trying to kill time before returning to the hospital to speak to some doctor or other (who, it turned out, would forget about us and go home), the streets were teeming with little herds of smiling mothers holding daffodils, and beaming little kids clutching homemade cards. Either these, or deeply ugly purple and pink mylar balloons saying “MUM” – like a sappy something from a particularly tacky funeral. Surely these people had all been bused in from Central Casting just to annoy me. I could not remember there being so very many of them on Mothers’ Day. Even trying to find a place to just sit and drink a cup of coffee was impossible: all the cafe tables had been pushed together to hold the enormous, careless families, all the better to display their temerity at laughing, joking and eating cake.
Monday, and the doctors gather in a room with us with their sombre faces on (they must hate this, and the unexplained presence of a superfluous nurse suggests they are ready to foist us off upon her if one of us bursts into tears). But there’s no chance of that. We are stony faced, my brother and I, and full of shocking matter-of-factness. I’ve not seen him for so long I can’t stop staring; it’s the first time he’s spoken to me in over 17 years. He looks older, of course, but with an almost shaven head, and with his round eyes and face he has the air of a tall, thin, very solemn Buddha. The main consultant looks from me to my brother and back again. He appears nervous, slightly intimidated by us both; even his eyes, I sense, are slightly wider than they would normally be. I can’t say I blame him.
They ask us what we know, and nod and listen and speak to us in the careful ways they clearly hope will manage our expectations as if gently breaking the news that Christmas has been cancelled. They say, “We can’t know right now, but you have to be prepared because…you see, even if we can bring her round there may be a lot of …disability, physically and…otherwise…” We say, “Of course, yes, we understand..”, but my brother and I, we exchange a glance. We both know what they’re talking about and we both know what must be done if this happens. Such things have been discussed since the creation of the envelope and we are not going to wimp out now. But we keep this to ourselves.
My brother is civil throughout but, after 17 years, seems not to require or want my presence beyond our meeting at the hospital. The doctors say, “If we’re lucky, probably nothing will happen for the next week or so.” And I, having rattled around her small, cold house for three days, endlessly picking up and putting down her clothes where she’d thrown them, her reading glasses she’d just taken off, her coffee cup still rimmed with her lipstick, I know I must come back to New York, for now, because of the mundanely awful need to salvage some work, to get to school and pay the rent. These thoughts sound to my ears like mealy-mouthed excuses even though I know through and through that my mother would be horrified at any other choice, were she able right now to be horrified by anything.
I lay awake here in bed, an atheist trying to keep her alive by sheer force of will. To repair the physical things that must be repaired by some absurd, magical telekinetic power. In my mind she lies unstirring at the bottom of the sea, further down than even the fishes will venture She is pressed down by seawater and starched bed linens, surrounded by the detritus of her everyday life, strewn across the seabed - an open packet of crackers, her reading glasses, the coffee cup ringed with her lipstick. She does not appear in my dreams at night. I find this odd and, mad as I sound, I want to know what this means.