Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (10 page)

The way I see it, there are two kinds of mistakes we could make.

On one hand, we might discover that we've made bad choices in terms of what we were aiming for. What if my father had stayed in Pomona to read children's books aloud to me on the couch rather than driving twenty-five hundred miles cross-country to present his research to Harvard medical students?

On the other hand, we might find that even if we made the right choices in terms of our goals, we dropped the ball in terms of actually accomplishing what it is we were trying to accomplish.
Dear Rolf, I'm 48 and still alive and nobody.

What I mean is that we have to be careful in our aims and we have to be careful in the execution of our aims. Death forces us to be careful. Yes, we've got the chance for do-overs, but we don't have time for a whole lot of do-overs.

 

Twenty-Four

 

Visalia, California (2012)—

A team of ER doctors and nurses scurried around us. They prepped my mom for surgery as we gathered round to say our goodbyes. She'd probably die any minute, one of the doctors had whispered to us in the hallway. Once the aorta burst, and it surely would, she'd be gone in three to ten seconds. “We don't expect her to make it to the operating room, but we'll prep her anyway—because, well, because it's the right thing to do,” he said.

The social worker holding my hand interjected: Dr. C happens to specialize in this. He's the number-one doctor in all of California in his particular specialty.

“Get in there now,” Dr. C said to us. “Hold her hand. Tell her you love her. This is your last chance. And if she doesn't go unconscious before we wheel her out, just keep talking. Talk while you can.”

My brother and I must have been in some sort of stupor for them to give us such explicit instructions. I imagine we stood frozen, looking like we needed a push, a verbal list of what to do, caught in the transitional moment between hearing the information and understanding what it meant. The social worker let go of my hand and placed her palm on my shoulder, physically guiding us back into the room where my mother lay naked, her entire torso, collarbone to hips, slathered in brown liquid. She appeared to be covered in thin, translucent mud.

My mother's best friend was with us by now, and my husband, too. My brother and I held her hands while the nurses inserted catheters all up and down her arms.

But what do you say when you say goodbye?

How do you say goodbye without letting the person think that they are
supposed
to die now, that they shouldn't keep fighting that internal battle that could make a difference, ignite some sort of willpower that would enable them to miraculously survive? Among other things, I decided to talk about memorable events—good times, cherished memories. At first it was easy to name and describe a few good times. But to be honest, my mother and I have always had a somewhat contentious relationship. As a teenager and young adult, it seems like all we did was either fight or avoid each other. When I was twenty-nine, we went a whole year without speaking. But then, sometime after my thirtieth birthday, we made amends—tacitly agreed it was time for a do-over—and eventually learned to work around each other's quirks.

My mother's body seemed to shrink as we leaned toward her to speak, to touch her fingers. We leaned back when the nurse reached and poked, then we drew into her again.
Lean. Let up. Lean.
Over and over. All the while we talked, careful to speak in the present tense: You
are
a great mom; We
have
a great life together; Like, remember the time…. And the time….

By now my brother had Googled “aortic dissection” on my husband's phone, which we passed silently between us. The cause of Lucille Ball and John Ritter's sudden deaths.

Talk while you can.

Three seconds turned to ten seconds. Then one minute, then five, then ten.

I struggled to keep talking.

Because, really, after “I love you” and all the obvious declarations that pour out of your mouth during the first few minutes, what else do you say when you say goodbye—when you get an unspecified amount of overtime? A deathbed do-over?

I paused to think. Memories? Memories. I needed more memories. In reality, I probably only paused for a split-nano-fraction of a second. But everything moved in slow motion, so it seemed like a long pause. A long silence. The silence stretched like a balloon, over-inflated and thin, spreading asymmetrically between past and present.

Then, click. The trip to Ecuador my mom and I had taken many years back, where we'd gone to the Amazon and the Galapagos Islands. The trip was amazing, but miserable, too. My mother and I didn't get along too well during that month-long trip, and she and I both got so sick we needed a doctor's care while traveling. My mother hated the entire trip—she discovered that she wasn't cut out for international travel, at least not in a developing country. I, on the other hand, found a new sense of freedom, a sense of empowerment that would later lead me to travel to all sorts of places, all over the world. But it wasn't the fact that I loved the trip, or that she didn't, that made me talk about it there in the surgery prep room. If my mother only had a few seconds left to live, I wanted her to remember what an adventure we had shared. How it had changed my life for the better. How I wouldn't have become who I am had she not invited me to go in the first place. So I talked. About the Galapagos Islands. The iguanas, the shark—remember that shark?—the small sailboat that carried us seven hundred miles from the shore. I talked about the Amazon. The jungle, the piranhas—remember the piranhas?—the brown water we drank each day, still slightly muddy even after being filtered. Mud every-where—remember the rubber Wellies, our legs covered in mud from the knee down each day? Remember?

We talked of other memories, too. My brother and I growing up. The grandchildren. You
are
the best mom, the best grandma. We
are
so lucky to have you. Present tense.

Draw strength from the past, but stay in the present. Lean into, inhabit the space where time sits up, independent of past or future.

My mother's eyes remained closed as we continued our goodbyes—without ever actually saying the word “goodbye”—but rather, “Remember us while you're in surgery. These memories will give you strength. You'll go to sleep in a minute, and when you wake up in post-op, you'll be transformed. No more pain. Everything will be better.”

She doesn't remember any of that now—she has no recollection of the medical event, the ER, of us that night. But I believe part of her brain heard what we said, was awake and active during that liminal phase, that in-between place where her existence teetered on the threshold between life and death.

 

Twenty-Five

 

(2013)—

I push open the blinds in my mother's room so she can see the garden outside her sliding-glass door. Sitting upright in her brown mechanized recliner, she complains that the peach tea I give her is too hot and tells me to add some cold water.

“What have you done today?” I ask.

“Sit here,” she says.

“What else?”

“That's it.”

I ask if she's looked at the new books I left for her, if she had the caregiver wheel her to morning exercise class, if she's watched TV, if she's written (scribbled, in her case) in the notebook I left on her table.

No, no, no, and no.

“So you watched the paint peel off the walls, then?”

“Pretty much.”

The room brightens even more once I turn on all the lights. Instead of a dank cave, it now feels like an inner extension of the garden outside—cheery, cozy, and colorfully decorated with Tibetan prayer flags and Eastern Indian tapestries, framed photos, her own paintings, and pink twinkly lights strung over the sliding-glass door. I ask my mother which activity we should do today. We could work on the photo album—I brought Ecuador photos—or I could read aloud, or we could watch
Monk
or
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.

She doesn't answer the question. “I've been thinking about the stupidest things all day,” she says. “While I watched the paint peel.”

Ah, humor. Her brain is healing. I savor each nuance like this, any sign of cognitive improvement.

My mother says she's been thinking about her childhood, and about her life with my father during the ten years they were married (the first time), and how she can't believe she put up with his behavior, especially back when they were newlyweds.

Her prefrontal lobes are waking up.

She recounts stories I already know—about the tent in the backyard, about the girlfriends who moved in with us—but I listen intently and ask lots of questions because it's good for her to talk. Cognitively therapeutic.

“My brain must have atrophied when I was a kid. When I lived in Arkansas,” she says of her traumatic teenage years. “Because otherwise, why did I put up with your father?”

So instead of watching
Monk
or transferring photographs, I listen to my mother recount various episodes in her life, about how in hindsight she wishes she would have done some things differently, and how other choices she's grateful for.

“The Amazon?” I ask.

“I didn't like it.”

“No?”

“But I loved it,” she says. “I'm glad we went. Somewhere I saved the magazine article you wrote. Find it at my house.”

“It's here in the box. An essay, though, not an article.” I'm compelled to correct her, as the terms are nuanced, significant to me. Yes, my first published travel essay. Not an article—just the facts, ma'am—but an actual essay. A new beginning for me, a do-over—from third-grade teacher and moonlighting stringer newspaper reporter to literary writer. A transition from one career to the next.

“Let me see.” She holds the open magazine in her lap but does not read the words. She sits in silence. She's thinking, lost in thought. Today begins what will be my mother's ongoing recall of isolated events—sporadic, unexpected slivers of time during the next several weeks where she flits momentarily from one memory to the next, relating snippets of her life, of my life, in no particular order, neither chronological nor discernibly associative. Random memories in random order. Articulated, reanimated, in sparse detail. But at least that's something. For now, though, she just gazes at the wall and rests her one good hand on the open the magazine for less than a minute. “Okay.”

“Okay what?” I know what.

“I'm done.”

“So what do you want?” I know what she wants. But I make her tell me in words.

“Put it away.”

A bird flutters briefly outside the sliding door. It rests for a moment on the bistro table next to the hedge, then darts back up to the white sky again, disappearing.

 

Twenty-Six

 

Amazon River, Ecuador (1997)—

I was swimming alone, deep in the Amazon jungle. Pure bliss. The deep, black water of Laguna El Pilche was a cool, refreshing respite from the unrelenting humidity of the rainforest. I was treading water in the center of a muddy lagoon, about fifty feet from a swampy bank where countless water lilies, ferns, and orchids sprouted in thick masses. In the distance I could see the thatched roof of Sacha Lodge, a group of huts I'd called home for the past several days. The huts were empty. I glided farther toward the middle of the lagoon, turned onto my back, and closed my eyes. Floating belly up with my ears submerged, I heard the distinctive roar of approaching howler monkeys, their treetop cries rolling through the canopy like far-off thunder. Ah, the beauty of untamed nature.

beau•ty:
The quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind.

na•ture:
It's my nature to define things. There's something soothing about the organized, categorized labeling of things and concepts, a shorthand to and for myself.

def•i•ni•tion:
It's difficult to define my experience in the river. There's the sheer adventure of it, of course. And then there's all the backstory that leads up to the moment of clarification, the contextualized mother-daughter interactions of the past that eventually rise to the surface. Perhaps words like “parent” and “child” are impossible to define.

I'd been informed by the locals a few days before that the piranhas in these waters didn't bother people, so it was safe to swim. “As long as you're not bleeding profusely, like from an artery,” I'd been told by an English-speaking guide, a young Australian woman with pointy red hair and an accent like Crocodile Dundee. “The piranhas stay down at the bottom, where it's cold and dark. Feel free to swim—all the locals do it.”

So there I was. Swimming. Alone. In the Amazon. Thinking about...piranhas?

I'd read about various water-lurking creepy crawlies of the Amazon: Electric eels that produce shocks of six hundred volts; stingrays that deliver a crippling sting; and the tiny candiru catfish that can swim up the human urethra and become lodged there by implanting its sharp spines. Of course, we've all heard of the dreaded piranha. The name piranha literally means “devilfish” in Tupi, the indigenous language of this region. Little devils with razor-sharp teeth and an aggressive appetite for live meat. Sometimes human meat. A large school of these carnivorous fish were reportedly responsible for the deaths of some three hundred people several years back when their boat capsized in the Amazon River—but that was in Óbidos, Brazil, miles and miles from here. How many miles? My edition of Lonely Planet didn't say.

death:
the total and permanent cessation of all vital functions; accompanied by a bright light, and then what?

And what about the animals I'd seen myself, just hours or days before? The anacondas—one of the largest species of snakes in the world, known to occasionally attack fishermen. I'd spotted them curled in the trees the previous day, and I'd read that they often lurk just beneath the water, with only their nostrils poking above the surface. And the caiman—a species of alligator that floats silently down the river at night. I was pretty sure one slept beneath my hut during the day.