Marrow (19 page)

I AWAKE IN THE MIDDLE
of the night with middle-of-the-nightism. Dreadful scenarios begin to form miles out in the ocean of negativity. They swell into high waves and roll toward the shore, one after the other, dragging with them cunning arguments for why their dark attitude is far superior to hope or faith. I know I should stop their advance. I know they are figments of my fearful mind, and that while they may contain slivers of possibility, most paranoia-crusted nightmares do not come true. Therefore, I should roll over, and go back to sleep. A good rule of thumb:
don't believe anything you think between midnight and dawn.

But of course, as I lie in my sister's guest room, tossing around on the futon sea, I allow the waves to roll over me: waves of blame, waves of suspicion, waves of dread. I blame my cells for not working hard enough, or maybe they contained some kind of mutant irregularity that caused Maggie's cancer cells to morph into an even more virulent strain of lymphoma. Perhaps we never should have gone through with the transplant. Before I can get battered by that one, a new wave lands: I wonder if living so close to an orchard—the very one where we picked the plums—gave her the cancer in the first place. Did toxic pesticides leach into the soil and flow down the hillside and spread through the air, making this pristine-seeming valley a death trap? And now the jars of wholesome plum jam cooling on the counter contain little poison bombs
that will detonate in someone else's body. Even as I sleep under the open window with the cool autumn breeze blowing through the curtains, I am breathing in death. The waves of doubt and doom murmur their frightful opinions; I believe them all.

I'm just about to drown in middle-of-the-nightism when, for some reason, I see in my mind's eye the large woman from earlier in the day. There she is, leaning against the waiting room wall, holding onto the orderly, reminding me that one can ask for help when drowning. So I turn on the light, get out of bed, find my laptop, and fire off an SOS to my husband. I tell him about the day—about the test and the results and also about a walk Maggie and I took at sunset, after the hospital had called. When we passed her vegetable garden she said in a voice laced with sad astonishment, “I thought I would have one more year in the garden.” And when we walked across the bridge she said, “I thought I would swim in the river again.” And when we came to the barn she said, “I have so much art left to make; I thought I would have more time in my studio.”

I tell my husband that I am having trouble staying above water; that I'm in need of a spiritual life raft. “Please help me find hope. Please remind me of the soul's eternal journey,” I pound out on the keyboard.

In the morning, this is in my in-box, written by my husband in the light of day:

Here's the best I can do on short notice. Keep a pure heart, and you and she will indeed see other sunsets and bountiful gardens and swim in flowing rivers and make art from nothing but your own visions. All the best that your heart can feel and imagine will be
realized on the next plane and in the next time you are alive here. Just stay in love now, and after she dies. And also, you can still talk to her after she has passed. I know how much you two like to talk.

field notes
•
september 12

the report shows the cancer is everywhere, from bones to organs, so this is very real. meantime, i feel pretty good. so i made a rustic plum tart, picked beans not damaged by frost, observed what frost damage occurred (minimal), and am heading to the studio because the frames arrived for a new piece and i am excited to frame it up. i may be dead by the winter craft tour, but i shall keep doing the work. i am meeting with my print photographer today who is going super fast knowing my situation, to print the new work. i am uber excited. as liz's friend says “dance the wild dance of no hope”. i have never understood depression, even in my sad illness. i am not depressed. i am sad to be leaving all the beauty. i think beauty is the answer to any problem. beauty and love. loving your kids, your partner, your friends and family. loving the growth of gardens and plants and the miracle of seasons. sharpening your awareness of the wind, sun on your face, the feel of dirt when you pull weeds, the beautiful smallness of life. i will miss it so.

IT'S NOVEMBER AND ONCE AGAIN
I am on the road, driving to Maggie and Oliver's house. By now, the three-hour drive is as familiar as my commute to work. As are the feelings that ride along with me. I start out energized. I turn on the radio. I sing along. I listen to the news. I switch to a far-right talk show for some cultural diversity. Then I get restless, bored, or overcome by worry and self-doubt. Am I doing enough for Maggie? Am I doing too much? Should I visit so often? Should I stay longer? As I get closer to Vermont, I want silence. I turn off the radio. I quiet my mind. I feel what I am feeling.

Today, as I near Maggie's house, I talk out loud to my parents, whose presence I often sense on these drives. To my father I say little—it's more of a quick check-in, as if I am confirming he'll indeed be at the dock when Maggie's ferry comes in. With my mother, I enter into the circular conversation I've been having since her fretful death ten years ago. “Why didn't you tell us you wanted to die?” I ask my mother for the thousandth time, clenching the steering wheel. “Why did you make it so hard on yourself and us? We could have helped you.” I listen closely for her answer. I hear nothing but the swish of tires on the rain-wet road. But a few minutes later a word appears in my mind's eye: “COURAGE.”
Like on a teleprompter, the word “courage” moves slowly across the screen in my head. Maybe my mother wants me to know she did the courageous thing—she spared herself and us years of disability and dependence.

“Yes, I know you were brave,” I tell my mother. “But you didn't have to be brave all alone.” I think of my mother in her final days, choosing to die instead of weighing down her daughters. It still clutches at my heart—her loneliness. It still makes me mad—the way she handed us an impossible task. We were supposed to help her die even though she denied she was dying. But this was her way in life as it was in death: hidden, nervous, never wanting to call attention to herself or to burden us. “But we wanted to be burdened, Mom!” I say out loud to the ghost in the car. “We loved you. Love means being burdened.” Now I am laughing at myself, remembering the line in the Erich Segal romance novel
Love Story
: “Love means never having to say you're sorry.”

My older sister Katy and I were hitchhiking in Europe the summer the movie adaptation of
Love Story
came out. I had finished my freshman year in college. Katy had graduated and was living in Europe. We met in London and went wherever our thumbs took us—England, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland. Eventually, we ended up in Paris. One day, tired of working so hard to speak and understand French, we went to the cinema in the middle of the afternoon. We chose the American film
Love Story
because it was in English with French subtitles, and it gave us a language advantage over the Parisians. At the end of the movie, after Ali McGraw's beautiful young character has died, Ryan O'Neal says the famous last line about love meaning you never have to say you're sorry. As the music swelled, Katy and I guffawed over the sniffles of the viewers sitting next to us and then ran out of the theater, laughing hysterically like
the snotty, sarcastic girls we were back then. That was before living and loving and losing had knocked the snot out of us.

My mother's death, unlike the one told in
Love Story
, was not a tearjerker. In fact, I didn't cry much at all during the whole confounding mess of her decline. None of us did because the seriousness of her illness took us by surprise. For years, she had not let us in on a carefully guarded secret—that her Crohn's disease was killing her, that she was in pain, that she needed surgery. We didn't cry because we didn't know, and then when we finally did, she wouldn't let us. Even after emergency surgery, even when she was actively dying in her bed at home, going in and out of consciousness, she denied she was sick. She had not eaten for days, and this time we hadn't put her back in the hospital to have nutrition pumped into her stomach.

A week or so previously, a nurse at the hospital had taken me and Maggie and Katy aside as we were collecting our tiny mother for the third time since her colon surgery. “Your mother doesn't want to come back to the hospital again,” she said.

“But she doesn't eat,” I told the nurse. “She'll die.”

“Your mother asked me to tell you not to readmit her,” the nurse repeated.

“Did she say she wants to die?” Katy asked. “Because she hasn't told us that. Is that what she wants? To die?”

“She just asked me to tell her daughters not to bring her back to the hospital,” the nurse said in an even tone.

“But if we don't bring her back—” Maggie started up the refrain again.

The nurse interrupted. “Sometimes the best a person can do is to speak in code,” she said kindly. “So, I'll say it again: Your mother does not want you to bring her back to the hospital.”

That was the clearest statement we were to get, indirectly, from our mother about her plans to die. I would say “her plans to commit suicide,” but does one call it suicide if the person is eighty-two, has had surgery she didn't want, and now has a permanent ostomy bag? Someone whose definition of life is independence and activity? Someone who was raised in a religion that denies the reality of the body but now has a graphic manifestation of its most private function strapped to her belly in the form of a plastic sack of excrement? Is it called suicide if a person just stops eating and slowly, quietly, furtively slips away, even though her doctors have told her she could live many more productive years once she got the hang of the ostomy bag?

Whatever you call her death, my sisters and I clucked over our mother as she was dying. In her final moments, we gathered around her bed. Maggie—the seeds of cancer asleep in her blood—stood at my mother's feet. My mother, down to eighty pounds, the hue of death already dusting her face, had been breathing irregularly for several minutes, intoning a sharp “ha” on the inhalation and a long “laaaaaah” on the exhalation, like the Sufi zikr chant done by the dervishes in their all-night prayer circles. Her last breaths were whispered prayers. On each inhalation she would gasp, “Ha!” She would pause and we would wait, and then she'd exhale: “Laaaaah.” “Ha . . . laaaaah. Ha . . . laaaaah. Ha . . .” She held onto her last inhalation for a long, long time and finally exhaled with a whistling sound. When that last breath left my mother's body, Maggie jumped backwards, as if the exhalation had struck her. Later, she told us she had seen a rod of light, the color of molten iron ore, leave the center of my mother's chest and come straight at her. The gold light entered her, she said, at the very center of her body. A bright yellow star, she called it, trailing a warm and soft tail of green light, like
a meteor. For days afterwards Maggie said she felt bathed in that green light. She didn't question the vision. She received it, knowingly, and took it into her own body as a parting gift of courage.

At the time, Maggie was the last person I would have imagined having a deathbed vision of molten ore flying out from our mother's heart, depositing a star of strength in Maggie's body. If anyone would have seen such a thing, it would have been me, and then no one would have believed it, writing it off as one more dubious story from the woo-woo member of the family. But coming from the pragmatic and skeptical Maggie, the apparition had clout.

Within a year of that moment, Maggie left her marriage, and in two years she was diagnosed with cancer. Had my mother been alive during Maggie's struggles, she would not have known how to help; she would have judged Maggie's decision to leave her husband, and she would have crumbled with the news of her illness. And then she would have retreated into nervous isolation. But in her final moments, my mother must have gained the grand perspective she lacked as an anxious, self-doubting human. She must have seen what was ahead for her beloved third daughter—the daughter most like her. And with that last breath, she summoned up every bit of energy left in the shell of her body and shot an arrow of courage into Maggie.

This is what I am thinking about when I pull into Maggie's driveway. I get out of the car and shake off the memories. It's now. It's not then. It's Maggie, not my mother. It's been two months since Maggie's cancer returned. No one is giving us a straight answer about what to expect now—not because the doctors are keeping information from us. They just don't know what will happen. Although we'd like them to be gods, doctors are people, and people cannot and do not know everything—especially in moments like these. In our last meeting with the team at the hospital, one of
the doctors advised us to call in hospice, while another suggested Maggie join a drug trial for a promising new cancer medicine. She chose the drug trial, although so far it doesn't seem to be changing the course of the disease.

I get my bag from the trunk and head up the path to the house. What will I find? Will she look different? Will she be in pain? Is death near? The last bend of the journey from my house to Maggie's always ends with these kinds of questions. Sometimes I will have had a lively phone call with her the night before, and I'll expect to find her up and about. Instead, when I open the front door, she'll be curled up in the window seat, sleeping in the late morning, her skin pale, her breath shallow. Or the opposite: I'll expect her to be napping, but instead she'll be hauling around a wheelbarrow full of compost.

Today, I imagine she'll be in bed, with several pain pills under her belt. But before I get to the house, I hear her voice. She runs out from the big barn, waving her arms, calling, “I'm up here! Come see what I'm working on.” Her studio is a long, bright room—the upper story of a barn that Oliver built for them just a couple of years ago, anticipating a long life with Maggie. He keeps his woodworking tools on the bottom floor. She dries and presses plants, and creates her botanical art on the top floor. I walk up the rough granite steps and there she is—a tiny sprite, looking so much like my mother it's laughable. She shows me a huge five-foot giclée print of her newest botanical creation. It's a photograph of a woodland plant—false Solomon's seal,
Smilacina racemosa
, Maggie informs me—complete with its root tendrils and its dying leaves and its brown seedpods, standing upright against a stark white background. She's taken the autumn berries off the plant, smashed them, and used the brilliant color as paint—a swash of crimson
bursting out of the seedpod and seemingly off the top of the print and out of the frame. The print is a departure from the small, careful pressed pieces she has been making for the past twenty years. While they have sold well at fine craft shows around the country, this one should be in the Museum of Modern Art.

She says she's been pushing herself to work on these new pieces—collecting plants in the woods, pressing and drying, smashing and painting, photographing and framing, racing to create enough new work for a show in a renowned gallery. She's calling the exhibition
Gone to Seed
. “I may not be able to do this much longer,” she tells me. “And this is what I want to do with the time I have left.” She asks me to help her write a few paragraphs to hang along with the pieces. This is what we come up with:

Gone to Seed

I have been tromping through the woods for 25 years, foraging for wild plants and springtime ephemerals for my botanical artwork. I've stayed close to home in the Vermont woods, stopped along roadsides all over New England, and traveled far and wide in the Alaskan forests and tundra.

Now it is fall; not my usual collecting time for wildflowers and green shoots. But I am dying. I may not have time to wait for spring. Here in the autumn woods in Vermont, my heart leaps at the broken, eaten, rotting, golden foliage and the many colored fruits standing straight up, or lying on the ground to plant their seed. Life is so rich, even as it prepares to die.

I am calling this series “Gone to Seed.” I never intended it to have such profound importance to me. As it has evolved, it has become a clear metaphor for my life. I see the whole cycle of life in the plants in this season, just as I see the whole cycle of life in me. My roots are my exceptional family that nurtured and grew me, and my children are the brilliantly colored seeds, bursting out of the pod and into the world, as I float out of the frame and into the universe.