Abracadabra
We knew it could happen. The brain aneurysm she had had last year, which she was not expected to even survive, had been seen off by this determined woman so she could once again walk, talk, laugh, drink scalding hot coffee and sharpen pencils. http://britical.blogsome.com/2008/03/05/mother/
But she lived in some terror these past fourteen months, knowing the thing would creep back one day and try again - this afternoon, tomorrow, or twenty years from now - no one could know. Carpe diem, indeed. She walked, talked, laughed, and tried not to sneeze too hard, knowing there was a time bomb in her brain. And so, two Saturdays ago, the clock hit 00.00
I wonder if she felt the first gush of blood, the first burst from the artery and then, as it bloomed like Little Boy in the dark sky, a flaming, billowing red firework, a volcano spewing bloody lava running madly, joyously even, high on "freedom hysteria", through the narrow channels, destroying everything in its path. But I doubt that she did. Its force would have sent her reeling and down onto the lino in her kitchen, the whole process taking mere seconds since it was, they said, "a catastrophic bleed". She had a red button hanging round her neck for if she felt bad or ill. It was not pressed. In fact, to be killed instantly is what she had hoped for, since the fear of the thing was certainly death, but more than that: she dreaded being left disabled, paralyzed and drooling, left in some "home" that is not your Home, to lay for hours in your own piss, the air smelling of old cabbage and closed windows, your children pretending not to be repulsed by your smell. As we all do. All this she had imagined, I know, and all this she escaped, just as she had before, but with different consequences this time.
As she sharpened her pencil, I am almost sure it would have been to make a food shopping list for the next day, which was Sunday, the day before I was to arrive to see her. At that moment I was in Paris. It was very warm that day and I was probably eating an afternoon snack - cheese, bread, olives, whatever - walking through Les Tuileries, looking at the barges on the river, rifling through a bookstore. Oblivious. Later, back at the apartment, I could not reach her at her usual times and I texted my sibling, who also tried and to no avail. But, he said, this had happened the other night, too, so he wasn’t too worried.
So off I went to a dinner party, and afterwards, driving at some speed up the Champs Elysees on the way to a party, it occurred to me to check my phone messages. There were two. The first voice told me that my friend E. in New York had just died that day. But there was no time to think on this as the second came through, from my sibling: Please call. Mum’s collapsed and has been taken to hospital.
His girlfriend answered his cell and told me they were now driving the long drive down from London to the hospital on the South Coast of England near where she lived. It was past 11pm and they would arrive in about half an hour and phone me back. Having returned to the apartment, I paced, as you do, helpless. Someone sweet but a bit clueless offered me strawberries and Pierre Herme macaroons, and asked what I needed and I stopped myself from saying stupidly, ‘My Mum’. I figured, correctly, that I would not let myself get that far gone until I got back to New York.
The phone rang, eventually. My sibling had arrived. Mum was alive, just, and unconscious. She has, he said, barely a few hours to go. I thought for the 100th time: can I get there in time, how can I get there, I want to be there…..Metro, Eurostar, London…and then…? How, how, how?? She was, awfully, so near - just across the sea really. But I knew she would be gone before I even I got to London. I could never, ever make it in time. But, I thought, at least her son would be there, her only other family, extended or otherwise, who could sit with her and hold her hand. She would not die alone.
And he did. The hospital rang him five minutes later and said, "She’s gone."
Gone forever, Sunday 3rd May at 12:35am, almost two months shy of her 75th Birthday, and a day before she and I had planned to be wandering the thrift shops in her seaside town, drinking coffee, eating cake, and later, watching telly as she dozed and I ate too many crisps.
I took the train to London Monday morning. I just did it. I don’t know how. It was blissfully, no, mercifully fast, that Eurostar. I recommend it highly. At St. Pancras I found my brother’s car and my brother greeted me with a "Hello" and perhaps a nod. We picked up his girlfriend, and drove South to the coast, to the hospital. Being my Mother, the tradition since last year was to have any further medical complications occur around a bank holiday, when doing anything about them was made bureaucratically impossible. We would always joke about it. Today was the Spring Bank Holiday. But I had spoken to the head matron the day before and she had kindly agreed to find someone to come in and take us to see my Mother. Or her body, as it should more accurately be described.
At the hospital a man I shall call "Peter" greeted us. It said on his name badge, ‘Peter Mort’, which I thought was a weirdly untactful thing which rather sabotaged his quiet, careful, funeral director-type manner (which, yes, I was more than ready to find soothing and comforting). In response to this manner my sibling later remarked, "They’re trained to be non-reactive." I thought, but did not say, so are we - but especially you. He also informed me ‘mort’ was simply short for ‘mortician’ {or ‘mortuary, more like}. Still, I thought.
But Peter Death - who I find it comforting to think of as Death himself, who took pains to greet us personally, and show us his handiwork because we were Special in some way - he was clever or experienced enough to take measure of us: the woman in the inappropriate bright red coat attempting to make a cynical joke and then ask him about his job and if he liked it, and the tall, greying, poker-faced brother with a very young woman trotting along beside or perhaps just behind him. Yes, he took measure enough of us, of me at least, to preface his remark as we descended the echoing stairs (downstairs, inevitably) with, "I know it’s a cliché but…..". That is: "I know it’s a cliché, but she looks very peaceful." I didn’t believe a word of it, of course. My Mother and I were both very morbid in the sense that we liked to gleefully discuss death, dead bodies and the awful sorts of things that happened to them and what they looked like afterwards (at least we did before last year). So I was afraid of finding a hanging jaw, her eyes suddenly popping open, the shudder of a hand - or a smell I would never forget. This was just a hospital after all, not a funeral parlour with its cotton wool stuffing and plumping, its embalming and rouge, the eyelids glued down and the lips stitched imperceptibly (and forever) together. I was terrified. And horrified by standing at a bank of metal drawers, the sheet being suddenly pulled back with a nasty flourish by a testy man in white galoshes like on C.S.I. or some other TV crime show. I wanted to ask Peter Death if perhaps this bit could be done before I got in the room, so I might prepare and judge my approach slowly as one would a hurdle or, on a horse, a five bar gate. I knew I couldn’t not look.
But this was unnecessary. Peter Death showed us into a quiet ante-room, all "tastefully" decorated, which led to another tiny area with a large glass window through which was a small room (non-denominational, of course, no crucifixes or other supernatural gee-gaws). It had dark walls, I think, and long curtains on at least one of them. In the middle was a single bier, and on that lay, I had to suppose, my Mother.
We all stood at the window and stared in, as you would outside a shop. And lo and behold she did indeed look peaceful. "I tried to make her hair look nice…how…how she would have liked it", said Peter Death. I loved him for that. (Her hair did indeed look fantastic, although my sibling later said in the car, "Mum would have hated it. Anyway, she went to the hairdressers’ on Friday.")
I had asked my sibling if he minded if I went in first and also alone. (I usually like to do daunting things alone.) I walked in and made my approach. It was just a few feet. She was at waist height, a blanket covering her body. It had some tiny pattern on it, little flowers, I think, like a baby blanket. Above that, a white, cotton ruffle surrounded her neck, and above that was her face, which face looked to me utterly un-frightening because it looked asleep. (Sleeping!) She did not look covered in any make-up, "shrunken" or "smaller" or any of those things people say. I stared, to try to imprint this all on my memory. But wait! She was breathing, the chest rising ever so slightly. Same with her left eyebrow which surely fluttered, her mouth, too, about to speak…the life still be pulsing somewhere within. This was, as you may have guessed - but I cannot quite believe - either wishful thinking or the mortician skill of Peter Death.
Being informed by poetry, books and films of what to do, I gently touched her forehead, expecting it to be cold. It was cold. Ditto, I kissed her forehead and said, feeling sad and also very, very foolish and like a bad actor in a mawkish scene, ‘Goodbye, Mum’. But I wanted to see her hands before I went. They were always so beautiful and I wanted to look at them one last time. I looked around furtively and seeing no one in sight, and although fearing still that I might see something…unplanned, I pulled back the blanket slightly. But her arms were covered, bound and wrapped tight across her ribcage, again, like a baby - but in some winding cloth or length of cotton. Fine, I thought, and replaced the blanket, and, looking round at the big window again for anyone who might see me, took my camera out of my pocket. I positioned myself right over her face and, in a 21st Century attempt at the Victorian death mask, snapped a picture.
After that, we drove to my Mother’s house to start the long process of sorting, emptying, throwing away, donating and so on, the almost 75 years of her life. The house was not hers and the council (government) wanted it emptied and the keys returned as soon as possible. I saw the pencil sharpener on the kitchen countertop where the police must have left it. I saw her glasses on her armchair, and her make-up tray which, closing my eyes, and in rehearsal for the next ten days to some, I tipped quickly into the first black rubbish bag. There was her green handbag with its bits of tissue and lipstick, pension card and discount cards to here and there. There were photos, little ornaments, clothes, underwear, plates and pots, old school reports, and heartbreaking little notes and scribbled grocery lists. Every cupboard, every drawer, contained a booby trap. We found a letter to my sibling, and one to me. I read mine once and have not looked at it since.
That night, I lay in their guest bedroom and I thought about England, how in an instant every leaf, every blackbird, every noise, sight or sound typical to it, and that I associate with my Mother or my childhood, had become suddenly unbearable. I had wanted to walk down to the sea, which is where I grew up and spent so much time after we left London, the same sea that has saved me more times than I can count. If it was a movie I would have. But even that, especially that, I could not do.
I thought about how much this time was so like the year before: the wretched journey to England in February of 2008, to the hospital, to be told the bleed would leave her dead, the trip to a friend’s house as my sibling left the hospital immediately for London. Then weeks later, as we waited, they confirmed the CT showed "low density throughout the brain". They started to switch off the machinery keeping her, or what was left of her, alive. And then she woke up. And, except for the sniper in the brain, biding his time, she was fine.
Back in New York, two nights ago, my first day back, I saw a helicopter hovering over Fifth Avenue. I stared at it for a while. I could not be absolutely sure it wasn’t there to lower a basket, a stretcher, inside of which would be my Mother, wrapped tight and safe, alive after all. She pulled off that amazing trick last year, didn’t she? Like an impossible rabbit from a hat, the lady sawn in two, made whole - and I, idiotly, cannot make myself understand why then she can’t just do the trick again.
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