A Million Years with You (42 page)

On second thought, maybe she was a hard act to follow.

 

When she was in her nineties, she left her house in Cambridge, where she had lived for more than seventy years, and came to live in our house in New Hampshire in an apartment we had made for her.

She settled in with us comfortably. I was able to find some superior caregivers to help her. A day did not pass without my mom saying how glad she was to be with me. We were glad too—all of us. One of our dogs, a Belgian shepherd named Misty, immediately adopted her, as did two of our cats, all of them seeing her as a welcome refuge from the three higher-ranking dogs and four higher-ranking cats, who favored me and Steve. One of the cats once caught a mouse, whom I rescued on behalf of my mother. Thinking she might like to keep him for a while, I put him in a cage with an exercise wheel and put the cage on her table. But all this did was enthrall the cat, who watched the mouse with burning eyes, then tried to push the cage off the table, perhaps expecting it to burst open and release the captive. Quietly, my mom asked the cat not to do that. The cat looked at her, then jumped off the table and walked away. I'm not sure why this happened, but it seemed almost miraculous. One wouldn't expect a cat to be so sensitive to a human request, or, for that matter, so obliging.

All in all, my mom's apartment was an interesting place. One of her caregivers, whose name at the time was Susan Culver but later became Susan Campbell, had three dogs whom she brought with her to work. By this time my mom was using a wheelchair, so Susan's dogs would sit on the couch and Misty would sit in the armchair. In the evenings Susan and I with our seven dogs would go for a walk in the woods. We'd assemble in my mom's apartment, where she'd enjoy watching all of us get ready, then she'd watch us cross the field as the sun was setting. When we came back, she would want to hear what we'd seen—such as a barn owl that flew over us—or what the dogs had done. In the daytime they would have run everywhere, but at night in the woods with bears and coyotes afoot, they stayed right with us, close together like soldiers on patrol. My dog Ruby, a little German shepherd, would be out in front as the scout, and Susan's dog Betty, a big part-basset, would bring up the rear as the commanding officer. Betty was not the tallest dog, but she was the most massive. As such, she was Dog One.

 

Over time my mom's confusion deepened. She wanted to sleep. One snowy morning in mid-January I got a call from her doctor's officious assistant, who informed me in no uncertain terms that the doctor wanted to see her so she must come to his office that afternoon.

Oh really? I said she was a hundred and four years old and fragile. I said it was snowing. I said there was no easy way for her to get from a car into that doctor's office, and even if she did, the office was freezing and my mother couldn't sit up in a chair for the half-hour or so that the doctor always kept her waiting. In short, I said, she wasn't going anywhere. If the doctor wanted to see her, he could get his ass to our house. I'd have an icy room ready where he could wait for half an hour. And I slammed down the phone.

Then I looked at it thinking,
You know, she never would have done that. She would have found a way to communicate her message without losing her temper or saying
ass. Obviously I had not achieved her social graces. But maybe I didn't really need them. Guess who came trotting up our walkway that same afternoon.

 

I have no idea why the doctor wanted to see her. I suspect he was wondering how close she was to death. He never did tell us what he'd learned from his visit, but at least he never bothered her again. She had been accepted by hospice, and the hospice nurses took care of her. They knew what she needed, and if the doctor didn't want to renew her prescriptions without an office visit, they'd bully him until he did.

By spring my mom was eating very little. We made custards and other high-calorie dishes and fed them to her with a spoon. In June I began sleeping on the floor of her bedroom in case I was needed during the night.

I didn't think of her dying—I'd spent too much time with her Christian Scientist mother to have a negative thought like that. I knew she didn't want to think about death either, despite the hospice nurses, who seemed to feel that all dying people are anxious to discuss their deaths and are prevented from doing so by the fears of others. I think I persuaded the nurses not to discuss the subject unless my mother brought it up, but I couldn't be there all the time.

So I suspect that some of them privately asked a few probing questions in case she wanted to discuss her death but felt shy about doing so. Also, without asking me or my mom, one of her caretakers gave her last rites. The caretaker obviously meant well, but my mom didn't need or want last rites. If she didn't want to think about dying, why should she have to? If she wanted to talk about it, nothing was stopping her. I thought she should take the lead on that issue, and that others should mind their own business. That's one reason I slept on the floor.

One afternoon in July, my brother and his fifth wife came for a rare visit. My brother had written a lengthy poem entitled “Lorna Jean” (her name), which he read to her aloud. He was a filmmaker of international reputation, but no one told him that a poem doesn't need to rhyme, and if it does, it goes better if the rhymes aren't forced and are spread around a bit. But that his poem was a dreadful jingle didn't matter. It's the thought that counts. Our mom was asleep and barely woke up when they came in, so I doubt that she understood the poem, but if she did, she would not have been critical. She liked just about everything my brother and I did, or she seemed to. And even if she didn't take in all of the poem, she would have heard my brother's voice. She would have been glad that he was with her.

When my brother finished reading, he and his wife stood up to leave. I asked them to stay at least for dinner because our mom might not live much longer and my brother's presence would comfort her. But owing to some differences involving my mother, the fifth wife didn't like me, so they refused to stay. As I walked them to the door, I begged them to change their minds. But they had come so my brother could read his poem and that had been accomplished. They left.

I went back to my mother's room to sit beside her and hold her hand. She knew I was there—now and then I'd feel faint pressure from her fingers. The windows were open to the warm night air. On the Wapack Range, we heard coyotes calling.

 

I didn't sleep on the floor that night. Our son, Ramsay, was in Yosemite, where he and Heather would be married the next day. Steve was with them, and if my mother had been well I would have been there too, but under the circumstances, that was out of the question. However, I wanted to talk to them, which meant going to another room.

So one of my mother's companions slept in her room. I went by several times to see how she was doing and found her quietly asleep, so I took a nap on my own bed upstairs. Before I fell asleep I heard the coyotes again.

Toward morning, the companion called me to come quickly. My mother had taken two deep, shuddering breaths. I hurried downstairs to be with her. She seemed to be asleep. I held her hand. Now and then she took a shallow breath—a whisper, really. I didn't try to take her pulse because I didn't want some curious probe to be our last contact. So I just stayed there quietly, holding her hand as the sky turned gray and then pink with the sunrise. The coyotes called again and again. May they do that for me when I am dying.

 

Within the next few hours a medic had pronounced her dead—as if we didn't know that. The hospice nurses had taken her medications—as if we might sell them on the street.
Hey, kid, you want some eye drops?
And the undertaker's assistants had taken her body, wrapped in a sheet.

It was too late to postpone the wedding, as most of the guests were already assembled. I called my son, my daughter, and Sy to tell them what had happened, and told them I would try to get to the wedding. Sy came and drove me to the airport, where I got a flight to Reno. My daughter and her husband met me there and drove me to Yosemite. So I attended my son's wedding after all, dressed in black.

 

Sy wrote an obituary for my mother which she read on National Public Radio. She told of a time in the Kalahari Desert in the dry season when my mom was washing her face in a basin. Suddenly she was surrounded by a swarm of African bees, who were attracted by the water. Instantly the sides of the basin were covered with bees and more were coming, trying to shove their way to the water, pushing and crowding so that many were falling in. My mother was coated with bees, but she wasn't frightened—she quickly rescued the bees in the water and floated pieces of wood in the basin so that every bee had somewhere to stand and could drink her fill. When they were gone, no bee had drowned and none had stung her.

The name of the wife of a Bushman god was Mother of Bees. Perhaps she was something like my mother.

17

E
XCEPT FOR ONE'S GENES
, one is more or less the sum of one's experiences, so for someone like me who is not particularly reflective, it can be instructive to write a memoir. At first a focus on one's past yields the adventures and the scary stories, but a closer look shows that tiny events, especially those from the deep past, were those that shaped one's persona. A few hikes through the juniper on the Wapack Range when I was six or seven had as much influence on me, say, as two years of college, and more influence than anything I did after I was forty. The insight I got from this was that I'm glad my lifetime took place when it did. Much of my childhood was during World War II, when my brother and I and the kids from the neighboring farm would roam the woods looking for German spies. Rumor held that they were out there, and—never doubting that the Third Reich needed to know what was going on in our woods—we considered it our patriotic duty to find the spies and report them to the authorities. Thus our early years were different from those of many children today with the cell phones and the social networks, to say nothing of the drugs and the addictive pharmaceuticals. We smoked a few cigarettes behind the barn, but nothing more.

Then too, even as late as the 1950s, large parts of the world were still unexplored. It was my enormous privilege to go to one of those places. It was also beneficial to go at a time when we could penetrate a part of the African interior in trucks, a very different experience, and safer too, than that of the Paleo Indians crossing the Bering Strait on foot or the Vikings rowing themselves across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland. But in some ways the world has since become more dangerous, not that it wasn't always dangerous. The dangers change with time and apply to different people.

It's common enough to look back at one's early years and think that times were better then—just about everybody does it. My mom remembered that when she was young, a distinguished old gentleman said that civilization is finished. That was in the 1920s and he was thinking of the 1800s. But in many ways it's true. Certainly our planet is in worse shape than it was when I was born, but it's not as bad as it's going to get unless we take better care of it. My maternal lineage, which is to say me, my mom, and her mother, did not favor negative thoughts, so I've learned to put a positive spin on everything and therefore believe that no matter what we do to our planet, Gaia will make something out of it, even if it's just more bacteria. As for my lifetime, it's true that it's almost over, but it took place during a reasonably good historic interval. Yet if the planet was in better shape in the 1930s, I was too, so aging seems worth consideration.

 

I turned eighty in 2011. It felt kind of strange, but I wasn't sure why until I read a brilliant article in
The New Yorker
by the poet Donald Hall. The title is “Out the Window.”
¹
From his window, Hall sees the land in New Hampshire that was farmed by his family. That spoke to me because from my window I see the same thing. Hall sees the cow barn built by his grandfather in 1865. I see the hay barn built by my father in 1938. Such sights are evocative.

Before I read Hall's article, though, the view from my window seldom evoked the deep past. Often enough, my window evoked the cougar mentioned earlier, whom I saw in our field, also the possible cougar who, more recently, had killed the whitetail doe. Cougars were one of my most persistent visions, even though New Hampshire Fish and Game insisted that they didn't live in our state. I wanted to see them again.

I never have, but to expect to see a cougar was to live in the moment, which seemed a good way to deal with aging. Or so I thought. Yet I was merely dodging the issue, which I realized after reading Hall's article. He saw aging more deeply, his article caused me to think more deeply, and my thoughts caused me to look less often at the field where a cougar might appear and more often at the Wapack Range. I'd think of the age of the granite, and of the glaciers that shaped the granite. I'd think of climbing those hills with my dad. I'd think of the years that have passed since we did that. During those years, tall trees grew where once there was juniper. I grew up, did some interesting things, and grew old.

 

On my eightieth birthday we had a little party. Ramsay and his family came to dinner. We had spaghetti, a salad, and a little store-bought cake with birthday candles shaped like an 8 and a 1. We would have used candles shaped like an 8 and a 0, but the store had run out of 0 candles. Ramsay took a photo of me lighting a cigarette from the 8 candle. I wanted to use it as the author photo for this book, but my family wouldn't hear of it because they so disapproved of my smoking. But everyone must die of something, so smoking was another response to aging, a privilege for those of us who don't have much life left to lose. “This woman can do what she wants and you can't,” says the cigarette to younger people.