Mother, Part II.
My mother is dressed beautifully and is announcing her intention in slightly distracted tones, to see us in the morning. We understand she is going out on a date, we all understand she is dying, and as she leaves she turns, at the door, like some 1940’s movie star and trills, "Oh, and I’ll pop into Tiffany and pick up a little something!" My Mother would never just "pop" into Tiffany or anywhere else like that for that matter: she is not some frivolous Manhattan socialite - but there you go, that’s dreams for you. My brother and I, though slightly hurt, apparently do not begrudge her a last night on the town. I whisper to him that I think she is going to Tiffany to pick out a small keepsake for each of us - a keyring, or something to remember her by. Through the large windows, the sky, well past twilight, forms the darkening blues and purples of a rapidly spreading bruise, and I say, "I cannot believe this is Mum’s last night on earth."
I thought of this dream today, Mothers’ Day in the U.S., on the phone with my mother, as she almost squealed with delight at the news her D.N.R. bracelet was arriving. "It has my name on one side and on the other it says, ‘Do not resucitate. Let die naturally’ or something like that." I say to her, "Die ‘naturally’? What does that mean - die surrounded by low fat yoghurt? Not be tied to an electric chair? Not be injected, malice aforethought, by lethal injection?" She giggles. She is most certainly back.
On March 12th, she was a 3 on the Glasgow Coma Scale. This is a measurement of how alive/dead you are. "How low can you go?" That would be it: 3 - Utterly unresponsive to anything, even pain. Were she an organ donor they would have been standing by her bed with the portable ice box, the helicopter idling on the roof.
Someone, around this time, told me about a friend of theirs who would say, obsessively, after his mother died, "There was just one thing…one more thing I wanted to ask her…" There is always something. I tried to accept this idea. I am luckier than most, after all - having always been acutely aware for some reason of death, loss and all the rest. But there was one thing, actually: in January my mother had sent me a postcard, the front divided into four smaller photos, the whole titled "Sussex Cottages". About Christmas, the first we had spent together in over 20 years, she had written, "We had fun, didn’t we?" These words, infused with some premature nostalgia, made me very sad. Sadder still in February when I noticed, turning the thing over and over in my hands, that one of the cottages was in Bracklesham Bay, the small town she and her mother had been evacuated to during World War II. Did she know this? Is that why she sent it to me? Only to have me, her careless daughter, not even notice it? Or did she herself not realise? - but if so, how very much I wanted to be able to tell her!
For now, unsupervised by any physio, she is getting herself out of bed and taking a Zimmer frame to walk the empty hospital corridor, carefully and patiently placing one foot after the other, five times a day - "no less!" (I run the risk here of making her sound like Katherine Hepburn, or some "plucky", martryish Mrs. Miniver type. She is neither of these.) She tells me the others in her ward, "the poor old ducks", she calls them, just lay there. She’d like to be outside, in the fresh air, she says. But she has discovered in the women’s toilets a small, low window through which you can just about see the street outside and beyond that, a tiny, precious sliver of sea.
But here we are on this day, I remind myself, and we are chatting on the phone. She sounds, finally, like herself again: mordant, nervous, slightly miffed at one of the nurses. "You can tell within a few days," she says in a low voice, "whether your nurse should’ve been a nurse or not." I roar with laughter at this. She is dismayed, though, to hear that on my little daytrip to Green-Wood cemetery yesterday I didn’t make my friend lie down in one of the mausoleums while I took a photo of her looking dead. "Tell her to sort of drop her chin and let her jaw go slack and suck her cheeks in and try and look leathery!" she had instructed me yesterday. (I should add here, as partial explanation, that when my mother and I visited the catacombs of Rome last Christmas, we both felt a bit ripped-off at the lack of bodies in evidence.)
There is one thing though. In every way herself as she is, there is something different about her. I am astonished at the ability of the body to fight, and her spirit, now, in continuing to do so. And yet, she has also always been, emotionally, a bit of a glass half empty kind of gal. So I was pleasantly flummoxed when she had this to say:
This struck me as incredibly self-reflective and insightful, and I told her as much. I also told her we might, as a result, have to re-think the "no brain damage" diagnosis. We laughed. But really who cares, I thought. I got to ask my postcard question, after all.