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Monthly Column... |
The Right Decision
by
Jeff Stimpson
Everybody thinks it's the right decision -- Betty, me, Dave, the Hospice nurse who comes in to give her a bath -- everyone except, we think, the person at the center of the decision. At the idea, says one of my nieces, mum will "flip out."
While Dave is getting the tires fixed on his Oldsmobile, Betty and I decide that he should tell mum.
"I promised her," Betty says, "I promised her I wouldn't take her to one of those places." Dave will tell her the next morning, just before the ambulette pulls up. Betty remembers that she'll be baby-sitting another granddaughter, Chelsea, at that time.
"I'm just gonna tell Chelsea that they'll come in with a stretcher and take Nana-Net where they can help her get better," Betty says. That's the plan, or at least the pitch: just for a few days, so they can get the pain under control.
But my mother has come to a special time, a time that's hers, and she fades from our control with breathtaking speed. She stops seeing, hearing and pretty much moving on Wednesday night -- except twice when she sits herself up on the side of her bed and stares. "Scared me to death," says Betty. This might be a good sign except that mum's urine turns orange, which we will later be told is a sign of renal shut-down. That night after the spaghetti we do laundry and play Rummicky. I look in on my mother, watching her chest go up and down, up and down, up and down. It will not simply stop.
Unseen by us and undiscovered until next morning, one of the kittens, the one who never really opened his eyes, dies.
Next morning, Betty, Dave, Chelsea and I wait for the ambulette, which is supposed to come at 10. The phone rings while I'm finishing my second cup of instant coffee and watching Sally Jesse Rafael. Betty gets it. The ambulance will be late. Betty, Dave and I go into mum's room.
"She's not coming back today, is she?" mum asks.
"Who?"
"That nurse."
"No, she's not," says Dave. "But we're gonna go over to the Hospice in a little while."
I wish my mother did flip out then. Instead she just says "No we're not," and tries to roll over.
"Yes we are," Dave says.
"It's just for a while mum," I say. I tell her it's to get her pain under control, that she needs some medicine that Betty and Dave can't give her right now. "You need to do this," I tell her. "You need to help Betty and Dave now the way they helped you..." I will never know if she believed me, agreed with me, or just wanted me to leave. She closes her eyes and lays unmoving on the pink-and-white striped sheets.
Sally Jesse is still going on -- I think the show has something to do with the KKK -- when I look out Betty's living room window and at the curb I suddenly see a van. It's a hard white in the Arizona sun, and it has blue words. One of the words is "Medi." I poke my head around the corner where Betty and Dave are watching the TV and say, "They're here."
Paul's our driver. His partner didn't show up for work this morning, he says, so I help him wheel the gurney out of the van. It's a fat padded wheelchair that collapses into a stretcher, and it would sure wheel better with two guys on it. Provided one of the guys wasn't me, wheeling the thing into my mother's view.
"Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Just leave me be."
"OK," says Paul, and he shows Dave and me how to use the sheet to lift my mother onto the gurney.
"Oh no. Oh no. David, no."
"Nettie," Dave says, "don't do this to me."
What we three haul off the bed and onto the stretcher is not my mother. It's too light, and it says "No!" too loudly. She grabs the doorjamb as we flash by Betty's bedroom. Inside I glimpse Betty holding Chelsea, head-down. I think they were rocking.
"Where we goin'?"
"We're going to get you some medicine, mum."
The driveway is already 100 degrees, the sun pounding the cement; I place my white baseball hat over her eyes. "Pretty warm, huh, mum?" How many sub-zero nights did I pick my mother up at work back home in Maine? How many times did we shovel a driveway side by side? How many January afternoons did I see her walk to the thermostat on the wall and "twist the tail on the furnace?"
I know one thing: I will wheel her down this blistering driveway just one time.
Paul gives as smooth a ride as he can. But in a move I suspect will haunt me for years, I've forgotten to bring water or even a cool cloth, and in the van the air conditioning is weak. My mother bounces and moans. "Oh Jeff where we goin'?"
The nursing home smells clean -- which is to say, not of urine -- and as I walk the pink and pale-blue halls and slide my hand along the fat wooden handrails, watching the incredibly old people move their wheelchairs by shuffling their feet, I think, "I'm glad my mom will never be in a place like this." Except she is. They deposit her on a bed and pull the pink curtain to separate her from the roommate she will never know. The roommate's head is shaved; her head lolls to one side. In the hallway a guy in a wheelchair watches them bring my mother in. "Is that guy dead?" he asks my sister.
"She's tough as a boiled owl," I tell the hospice people, "but she needs morphine. I've had morphine and I know she needs morphine." The hospice worker looks at my mother's sheets of pills as if trying to find a familiar name in an out-of-town phone book. Nurses come and go, and my mother never stirs from her left side. Chelsea takes my hand and we walk on to the sizzling lawn to get a hot dog from the guy at the grill. We walk down to the nurses' desk, where a nurse gives Chelsea a lime ice. I see the "Activity Calendar!" confirms that this is Cookout Day. Tuesday will be Pets-on-Wheels Day.
The administrator has questions for my sister. Is your mother querulous? Does she socialize well with others? Does she talk about ending it all?
Is she frightened? "Well I don't know, I guess so," says my sister, looking at me. "I don't know, because I've never been there."
We return to the room, and she's still on her left side, and we know where my mother is going. I tell her to give Dad a hard time when she gets there. I tell her about my happy memories of Christmases in the mid-1980s, when I would come home for two weeks and she'd feed me to a stupor. My brother lived at home then, and he had a cat with whom my mother lost every argument. I tell her I'm sorry I haven't seen her enough over the past few years. Then I lean over the black hairs on her chin and kiss her cheek.
"Good-bye, mum," I tell her.
Her eyes open. "You still here?" she says.
My mother dies a little after 7 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, September 19, 1998, three days after her 76th birthday. For some reason, I have only bubblings of sorrow until that Sunday. On that day, I usually called her. I call my sister, who says the mother cat is still taking care of only one kitten. My sister thinks she'll lose another one soon. She says she could faint away right in her recliner, too. "Hope you caught up on your sleep today," she says over the phone.
I didn't. I thought of my mother and cried twice: once in my wife's arms on the floor of our study, and once while mixing tuna fish for lunch. I still can't figure out exactly how I'm going to miss her. I guess I'm also still wondering when Bob Barker got so goddamned old.
Copyright 2003 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
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