Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (39 page)

What I was capable of doing well, it seemed, was cooking for my mother. She described some craving—old-fashioned buttery dumplings in chicken broth or fluffy tea cakes made with cinnamon and nutmeg—and though it had been years since I’d tasted or even thought of such things, I’d snap to it and make efficient use of the tools at my disposal in our kitchen. Even if it was just a plate of eggs and a cup of milky coffee, my mother beamed when I returned with a tray of the food she had convinced herself to
want. “You’re so good and so quick in the kitchen,” she’d say, and I’d feel as though I was valuable after all, as though I were doing more than mucking around amid my own mess of feelings about what it was we were living through, more than merely indulging in thoughts of my own life and how it was on its way to becoming, I was certain, as weightless, silent, and inhospitable as a moonscape.

Between hospital visits, my father busied himself among his woodworking tools in the garage, or else he disappeared helping a neighbor hang drywall or lay a new floor, tasks that had always been a cinch for him and in which, I suspect, he could lose track of the larger reality riding him just as it rode the rest of us. Surely the clarity of such things, the indisputable right angles, the certainty of joint meeting joint, was preferable to the cloud of mystery that hung over our lives in those months. Still, why didn’t he or I know how to stop, sit down, and begin the slow process of saying goodbye? Did anyone? Yes, we talked to one another. We hugged, reminisced, said “I love you” again and again, just like we always had. But what if goodbye sat deeper than any of those things? What if goodbye was about dragging the depths and finding new words, words capable of saying something much bigger and much more permanent? Were those the things that Jean and my mother were saying when their heads were close together and their voices barely a whisper?

“Your father has always had a hard time with goodbyes,” my mother said one afternoon, after Jean or I had made a comment about how Dad always seemed to be chasing after some or another chore to do. “Well, when his parents were dying, he couldn’t deal with it and found ways of running away.”

When she said the word
dying
, it struck me that she knew very well what was happening, had come to understand where all of this was pointing. Of course she had. Hadn’t the doctors, hadn’t
even her own son the doctor, made it clear what could and could no longer be done? Still, no one wanted to talk about it, not even her. She was fifty-nine years old, after all. Death should have had no business with her.

It occurred to me then that I was angry with my father. I was infuriated by his inability to respond to the death leaning toward us from just out of frame. I should have been angry at myself for the same reasons, but I chose to direct the anger outwardly instead. Through my own stress-addled reasoning, my father became the source for everything we were going through: my mother’s going away from this life was really her going away from him and whatever pain I had come to believe—to be very certain—he had caused her. Maybe it was the result of all the time she had been made to spend alone, waiting for him to come home—all the time he’d been away from her in the military or in his apartment in Silicon Valley. Maybe that longing had planted the first seed of the cancer. If not that, then surely he’d done something else. He was a man, after all; wasn’t that crime enough? Don’t all men lie to women at some point, hurt and betray them? Hadn’t men been responsible for the only pain I’d known up until that point, a pain that had, at times, felt capable of making me turn against myself in mind and body? I desperately needed a target for the anger my grief had launched, and so I convinced myself that, in simply being the man to whom she was married, my father had fostered the cancer and taught it to thrive.

One night, I was so desperate to let out some of what had begun to eat me up that I found a reason to scream at him. “This is your fault!” I cried, standing halfway between the living room and kitchen, shouting loudly enough that my mother must have heard. And when he was surprised, taken aback rather than shamed, I
turned up the volume. “You’re the one who’s doing this! You’re fucking killing her!”

I could see him flash on. He looked at me as though he were Moses and I the Israelites who had proven themselves incapable, yet again, of keeping God’s law. And he was that big, it seemed to me then, a man on that everlasting scale, a man built from first fire, from unbreakable stone. His mouth tightened, but the words came out quietly. “Watch your language when you are in my house,” he told me. And, remembering that it was still in his power to say so and that I was still his child to punish, he added, “Go to your room.”

Some nights during the daze of that autumn, while my mother drifted in and out of sleep with the half dreams and hallucinations of narcotic medications, I’d lie on the floor at the foot of her bed. Jean would lie down on the floor to her side. We kept blankets and pillows there in her room just for that, a precaution we’d begun taking once our father’s presence in the bed had begun to cause her discomfort and he’d moved into the small bedroom across the hall. I’m sure he, too, must have felt discomfort, knowing how delicate she had become, how much the physical reality of his wife had already begun to elude him. He stood back in deference to Jean and to the hospice nurse who came by each day. From the outside, it seemed that his knowledge of his wife’s body had been erased. When he lifted my mother from her wheelchair, it was with a nervous caution. When he wheeled her around the neighborhood for a little fresh air, he seemed so much more awkward, so much more tentative than he did, say, wheeling a barrow full of stones or dirt, things I’d seen him handle with a confident, offhanded ease. It was as if he was struggling to attend to this person who was already only partly of this place, almost no longer his.

I wondered if he felt lonely or banished in the twin bed in the room across the hall or if that little bit of distance kept him from feeling that his presence—not the physical one but the real one, the sum of who he was and who he had been, with and to and in response to her—wouldn’t wound her, if ever it had. I was drawing from my relatively new knowledge of what happens to people who have become intimate with one another, how you can be devastated by someone’s actions and feelings, even as you hold him near and breathe in the close smell your bodies create together.

I had been home six weeks, and the necessity of that time made everything that had come before feel remote, not only far away but vague, only half-remembered, as if nothing but that new Now was real. One night, my mother began talking to someone in a low voice. Though I knew the medications caused this, it always startled me, as if she could see through this world to the next, to the places where ghosts and angels sit and walk and gesture unseen among us. Very calmly, as if she were speaking to someone seated beside her on the bed, she said, “Yes, I know she will, if that’s what she wants to do.” My eyes filled with tears. I felt instinctively that she was talking about me.

“Who is there with you?” I asked.

Usually, she’d laugh and say a thing like, “Oh, this medicine has me confused.” But this time she said, very clearly and now very much awake, “There are two angels sitting here, Tracy, and one of them just told me you’re going to become a writer.”

Jean and I must have asked her what they looked like, what else they’d said, but all I remember is the ensuing silence, the feeling that something powerful was there at her side. Did it mean she might live after all? Could the angels, or whoever had sent them, see to that? Or had they come to usher her away, to orient her to a new and altogether foreign realm?

I was afraid. Suddenly, she seemed far from us, more spirit than flesh. We were a whole lifetime away from those nights when, still a child, I’d lie in bed beside her, talking and then saying my prayers before sleep.
Dear Lord, thank you for a good day. Please give us a good night’s rest and watch over us. Please bless…
Nights when I’d inhale the scent of her, pace my breathing to hers, and sometimes toss my arm up around her side or warm her back with mine. It was simple then, a kind of perfection. There was a perfection even to the times when I struggled with fear, when my eyes played strange tricks on me, and everything would appear as though it were very, very small and at a much greater distance from me than it ought to have been. As if the house around us had become a toy house. I felt like a ghost, stranded at an infuriating distance from the things and people I loved and needed, or a giant, too big to make use of the place where I thought I belonged. “Everything is fine,” she always assured me, and then I’d squeeze my eyes shut and lean against her until morning.

But now, she was the one who was larger than all of us, the one who no longer belonged here in the world that felt, all of a sudden, so small. Finally, I could accept that she was going. She was already partway gone. What I felt, inescapably just then, was earthbound: anchored to this world, caught inside a merciless finitude. Then I heard her breathing the steady, slow, ragged-sounding breaths we listened for so closely in those, her final weeks.

If I were Jean, I’d have known what to do with my emotions, the self-pity and the fury and the fear of what it would feel like when what we were waiting for had finally happened. If I were Jean, I’d remember that, no matter how shipwrecked I felt, no matter how lost and deprived of air, it was our mother who came first. Jean had always known that, had lived by the fact. Jean, who’d been present for every medical appointment. Jean, who’d learned to
counter our father’s nervous energy and his distress-induced impatience with gentle nurturing. Mother, my grandmother, who was living with my aunts in New York by then, didn’t have the faintest idea what was happening to her oldest daughter. She was lost in the recesses of her own mind, in a labyrinth of memories she no longer possessed the words to describe. And so it was Jean who became for our mother the one thing anyone who cannot care for herself longs to have: a mother of her own.

I wish I could have looked what was happening in the face and stood my ground, not as some version of myself amped up on misguided rage, but as me, the Tracy my mother saw in her mind when she called my name and waited for me to appear. I wish I could have said to myself,
Your mother will be gone soon
, and known to take in that truth without rushing to hide it behind some other, smaller truth. I wish I’d been adult enough to let what was happening reach me in its totality, rather than just thinking of it in bits and pieces when I was alone, away from a witness or potential companion in my fear. It was my mother, after all, the woman I was born to, built from, the one I turned to for every morsel of truth I hungered for as a child.

In November, having been told by her doctor and hospice nurse and by our own sense of her ups and downs at that stage in the cancer’s progression that she was at the very end, everyone came back home. My brothers brought their wives with them and moved into the upstairs guest rooms. Wanda reclaimed her old bed. For a stretch of days and nights that dark late autumn, we all found ourselves sitting vigil around our mother’s bed, watching her and talking to one another in quiet voices while she slept. Pastor Gainey, who had been coming by the house to pray with us, but also, I came to understand, just to spend time with his sick
friend, was often with us in her room, basking in her presence, which still felt palpable despite the fact that she was, by then, rarely awake.

“Sometimes, I think if I can just come over and touch Kathy’s foot, I’ll feel good. It’s a kind of blessing,” a longtime neighbor said, laying a hand on her blanket. And I didn’t mind the comment or the gesture, could understand the urge to see her as slightly more than human. She
was
becoming more than human, letting go of a body riddled with signs of its own mortality.

But mostly we were silent, listening to her breath as it rode in and out past the fluids that had built up in her chest and throat. That burbling sound that pained us but that we were on edge to hear.

There was a long silence during which her chest didn’t seem to move. It felt like the moment of stasis after an object tossed in the air has reached its apex and before it begins its fall. Was that how it would happen? Was that what we were gathered there for, what we had been dreading and perhaps also hoping might come to release her and us from the grip of such grim anticipation?

Before I could react, Pastor Gainey took my father’s hand and my brother’s, starting a chain reaction that linked all of us together around her bed. And he began to sing, in a voice I’d grown up with but that I seemed to be hearing just then for the first time:

While I draw this fleeting breath
,

when mine eyes shall close in death
,

when I soar to worlds unknown
,

see Thee on Thy judgment throne
,

Rock of Ages, cleft for me
,

let me hide myself in Thee
.

Tears streaked my face as I struggled to accept that she could go without waking, without even signaling goodbye, without hearing our last words to her, words I had at last begun to rehearse to myself.

But her eyes flicked open, like a doll’s eyes, wide and round and surprised at the group of us. She was still there, still alive, still one of us. She opened her mouth to smile a child’s wide smile. “Hi,” she said. It was a long, lilting salutation, as if we had arrived with a cake on her birthday.

A STRANGE AFTER