Carry Me Home

And all that I want, and all that I need
and all that I've got is scattered like seed.
And all that I knew is moving away from me.

"Sadie"
Joanna Newsom

Vigil

Silence. My mother in her golden yellow sheets on her deathbed, a soft, warm light breathes a golden glow into the room.... She is hollowed and beautiful. The only sound - the ever slower rising and falling of her breath. You watch the sheets. They move, then they don't. They rise again. You wait for the next breath which is a long time coming. Shallow, shallow breaths like a wafer thin cloud passing by a cold, bright moon. My father, my sister, my wife and our great and good friend are sitting around her. My father cries.He holds his head in his hands. No one moves. She will not wake up again, will not whisper "water" to us again, will not ask for ginger ale ice cubes or gatorade or ice cream, or whisper sweet nothings that we cannot make out.She will not play scrabble, tell my father he shouldn't drive, make a sandwich or laugh. That's for us, the living, to do for the dead.The sheets rise softly again...

"Water"

Saturday, as if the day or time or the place matters. All that matters is water. Parched and spent my mother lifts her eyes every once in a while with a single plea: "Water." She can hardly swallow so we give her an ounce or two via a small syringe.
And she drifts back into the ether, into sleep, into dreams.

She gather me, man.

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

-Toni Morrison

A Dream

A dream. A light bulb overhead. Bright, so very, very bright. I reached up and pulled on the small chain and that bulb, that bulb of light exploded into an inky black darkness. POOOFFFF!!!!!!
I nearly flew out of my bed.

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

-Raymond Carver
May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988

The Conversation

I forget the day. It was a few weeks back. I was alone with my mother and she could still speak at short lengths... "Make sure you tell her what you need to tell her. Make sure." This sentence had been ringing in my ears for weeks...ever since a friend of mine told me.

I thought in the course of my life I had said everything but who has said everything?

She was doing okay at the moment. No nausea or vomiting. She was beyond exhaustion but still wanted to see my sister and me as much as she could...

I knelt by the side of her bed and took her hand.
"I want to tell you something."
"Uh-oh," she said softly.
"No, no," I said. "It's a good thing."
"Oh, okay," came the low throaty whisper.
"I want to tell you how big this is for everybody. This is so huge. So many people are so deeply affected. You have no idea. It's truly, truly unbelievable. It's incredible."
She cried.
"But why?"
"Because you took the time to care about people. To love them."
She closed her eyes and tears ran down her face.
"I'm not finished," I said.
"I want to tell you that your belief in me was so, so huge.
I carried that belief with me every single day, every minute, every hour.
It never left me. It changed everything. You can't believe how big that was."
I was crying now.
She lay her head back and cried and cried.
"Isn't it wonderful we can be here and say this to each other," she finally said through her tears.
"I know, I know," I said through mine.
"I always knew you could do whatever you wanted to do."
Her shoulders sagged in relief as if the weight of an entire world of worry had suddenly been lifted away.
"Oh my god, you've made me the happiest woman on earth."

"I Love You More"

A woman on her deathbed. She has not eaten in five weeks and takes only tiny spoonfuls of ice water and microscopic portions of ice cream. She is a picture of unspeakable exhaustion. My mother lives on and no one knows why or how.

Her hospice care person is Mary Jo. Mary Jo's heart is as big as my mother's is strong. A few nights ago she arrived to bathe and change and care for her patient as she always does.
She went directly into my mother's room and bent down close to my mother's face and in that lyrical and kind Mary Jo sort of way, softly said,
"Hi. I love you."

And my mother's eye's barely lifted and she whispered to her friend,
"I love you more."

As I Lay Dying

children
husband
mother
father
brothers
sister
nieces
nephews
cousins
FRIENDS
marriage
world
birth
life
love
tears
water
forgiveness
worry
fear
memory
guilt
laughter
time
dream
regret
joy
heartache
pride
work
struggle
Rose
Roma
Muriel
Annette
Alphonse
George
Collette
Richard
home
shadow
light
sleep
breath
heart
"Water."

This Boy's Mom

Poems & Stories written by Richard & Jeannine Pelletier ~ The little haiku style poems below are a sneaky collaboration. I took my mother's emails and simply played around with the language and found in them some poems that told her story in another way. I worked on these a couple of years ago and had to put them aside to pursue other things. I had thought about calling this tiny collection of odds and ends

M o m m y + D a d a

The Shirt by Robert Pinsky is here simply to pay homage to my mother's time in life as a seamstress (relatively short) and her heritage in the trade...


Our Father is Sleeping
A chow mein liberal
In the company of salty, exhausted friends

Dust mops, cat scans
Keyboards, cooks

Somehow it
Does not always work

No doubt my desperate eye
Needs a clean window


Music to my Scotch Ears
Like a bad penny
I am getting old

I was quite sure
Seabiscuit called this morning
Wishing you more success


What Done Him In
It is cloudy and cool
Felt good after
All that sleep

The word housewife
should not apply
I certainly am not a cook

Do you remember this sixtyish woman,
alphabetizing her canned goods?

Carry on my son,
Carry my regret

I am chagrined
All my telling-

I recall my elderly mother person


Another Fifty Years
You are sad
the two of you
the power, the traveling
all the traveling,

switched relays, procedures, information

Luckily
I am sure it is
nothing drastic, this outage.


Hearts Out
The telephone interrupts a nice lunch
seems to me
everything is always about the money
is that not so?

Ebay has been a godsend
I keep forgetting
Mother said enjoy
Do not lift a finger


The Shirt
by
Robert Pinsky

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist.
The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze


rhea quintin 14 years old
At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her.
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord.
Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt.
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.


1938
I was unaware
The sudden wonderful sea
of Reading and looking
And memories-

A most destructive storm
Called today
More news tonight


Remember Where They Live
Good morning
Did you get paid?
Of course
I am kidding
Was there any significance
to the message?


I am Angry
All circuits were busy
Dad was long gone
We had forgotten you

The weather, however
Was beautiful
Daylight is quite funny
At 7pm

Further south tonite
We tried to reach you
You did not answer
Sandwiches, scrabble


This was written for a writer’s workshop. The assignment was to find a way to get “Maraschino Cherry” into some sort of narrative.It is largely true. Up to you to figure out which part is true and which isn't.

The Fall River Herald News
August 11, 1982

Retired French Canadian Bookkeeper to Inventory Entire Kitchen
In a brief interview today sixty-two year old Jeannine L. Pelletier spoke to reporters about her intention to catalogue in alphabetical order every food item in her tiny, avocado colored kitchen. Armed with a mountain of 3 x 5 inch index cards and a quiver of sharpened pencils, the newly retired mother of two stood before the vast empty plain of retirement fully prepared to engage her senses and manage the household.

“My husband’s a nutcase,” she sighed. “If I’m down to one can of tomato soup, I’m saying two hail mary’s, an act of contrition and the Lord’s Prayer on the way to the Stop & Shop. Hopefully, I can get back before his highness runs out of soup.”

Cleverly color coding her inventory, (yellow cards for soft foods, green for hard) the softly spoken former bookkeeper acknowledged her family was struggling with the new system.

“Well you know, they’ll be flipping thru index cards looking to see if we’ve got something and they’ll yell at me “’Mom! Pringles! Hard or Soft?
And of course I tell them, Pringles are hard food. They crunch. They’re really confused about eggs. For instance I classify hard-boiled eggs as a soft food, but eggs in the carton as hard.
“I’m much further along in my hard food inventory than the soft stuff,” she said wistfully. “I’m well into the P’s in my hard foods but I’ve only got to ‘M’ on soft foods. Here’s the card right here see? One-half jar maraschino cherries.”




Within
No word from you all day
Just please say yes

Time and reason can no longer
Help me

What happened was going to happen
He is older than I
Puttying up disappointment and hurt

You buy your own
Only ninety-nine cents.


Sometimes He Can Get Civil
There is still some inflammation
They will send us
all the pertinent information
waiting patiently

I was a sewing machine operator
Batting zero
On my first day

All these women,
painful sleeves, tiny flowers.


It is Always Time for Lunch
So many will suffer
Before I go to bed

The days are so much shorter now
I guess you owed me
that three pints of blood

Dad will pick up our sandwiches
Talk, talk, talk

The Heart Has Its Reasons

A bare whisper and then nothing, like three dots at the end of a sentence..."Whatever happens to me..." my mother whispered to our miracle friend Lynn who is here to help us. The rest never came or was too faint, as if she were on the dark side of the moon.

A quieter day than yesterday as this dear, sweet woman who simply wanted to be kind to others is taking the long way home. She'd made up her mind early on that she was not going to prolong this but her heart has other ideas.

The heart has its reasons of which reason has no knowldge, said Pascal who was one Frenchman who knew what he was talking about.

Here's what I wonder: I wonder if my mother is trying to forgive my father. My mother had worked up a lifetime worth of anger at a man who in spite of endless attempts to get through, could not be made to understand. He couldn't understand that his wife was not his mother, his domestic, his chief cook and bottle washer. He could never understand that his wife was not only his equal, but in a lot of ways his better. His pride, that stupid male pride that has brought down many a better man, would never let that stand.

Our friend Lynn was talking to my mother today. Reassuring her, stroking her forehead, saying her name. My father came into the room and sternly told Lynn, "Her name is not Jean. Her name is Eva. She has never been called Jean."

His mother was Eva. Later he said to Lynn, "Have you figured out who your patient is yet?" And Lynn tells him, "George. Your wife is named Jean. Your mother was named Eva. But the woman in that bedroom is Jean and she is your wife."

Somehow the words found their way home. "Ohhh..." And then the capper. "I'm so sorry for arguing with you." George does not often apologize. But when he does, it is only to people outside the family.

Who can say what love is? You watch an old man crying, almost beside himself with grief at the suffering his wife is living with. But the world is full of men who break at these moments and grief is no indicator of virtue.

My father is not a bad man. My father is a man of his time, a complicated man who, in his own way loves his wife but was fastened too tight to the mast and held his course steady for the whole trip. No course changes allowed...

The tragedy here is that his wife knew they were badly off course - and that the cost would be high - and she was fighting for all she was worth to take a different route, but no...And she became angry and bitter and sick.

My mother had many aliases. She was Jean, Jeannine, Jerky Lucy, jlp620@peoplepc.com, and she was Mom. In more ways than I will ever understand, she was my muse.

I have this disturbing thought. I am afraid I did not fully appreciate and celebrate how profoundly unique and special my mother was.

As she lay dying, she told me I ought to give the 'too big' sweaters that my father got for Christmas to "Eugene." Eugene is a poor black homeless man in Baltimore that my wife and I help out sometimes. I told her, "Mom if we give the sweaters to Eugene, he will sell them."

"Oh," she said. "Ok."

Dance Me to the End of Love

Words fail utterly. But words, along with each other, are all we have. My mother is sputtering and coughing and vomiting to a hot, sickening, exhausting end. She is half in this world, half in the next. But after thirty years of going to the gym, she is surprisingly strong even on the doorstep of death.

The tiny hospice worker comes each day with a smile, a warm knowing hand and each day her eyes grow big as half moons and she says the same thing, "Unbelievable. Your mother is unbelievable. So strong." The nurse says much the same: vital signs after forty plus days of no food: normal. Heart rate, blood pressure are surprisingly good. That well developed muscle, the one responsible for the flood of cards and calls and countless acts of incomprehensible kindness and generosity, beats on. Her pulse is normal. My mother's heart is betraying her.

This last day of winter, a sunny, cold and windy Sunday in late March, blew my father to the far reaches of his own sanity. He stood helpless at the foot of his wife's hospital bed and watched her wretched and racked with nausea and bile and sweat and shit and piss and found himself nearly broken in two at the sight of it...He stumbled to his place on the couch, placed his 83 year old head into his bony hands and wept. We all did.

For the last 72 hours she was back with us. Clear headed, funny, focused, engaged. But the nasty bargain had to be made... As she slips closer and closer to her end, she was relentlessly sick. Relatively clear headed, but agitated and profoundly restless. "I need to go the commode." So we would lift her out of bed and put her on that humiliating potty and wait. She cannot stand without help and struggles to bend her knees to sit. My sister would clean her and we would lift again and put her back in bed. Then 15 minutes later. "I have to go again."

It's a "stage."

As in "Your loved one will become increasingly restless. He or she will pick at things that are not there, will shove blankets aside, speak of people long since passed. They may ask to do one thing, and then ask to do it again. This is normal. Try not to be alarmed as your loved one is simply reacting to the changes occuring in the body and mind."

We are alarmed. We are very much alarmed. Her limbs jump and shake. Her eyes do not focus. She can barely speak and we had to do it.

We gave her the powerful suppositories that give her the only peace she will know until she dies. She grows quiet, calms down and her mind and senses go south as the pharmaceuticals take over and do their work and that loving, charming, funny little woman recedes. Somewhere...she is somewhere between hither and yon, neither here nor there. Not fully alive, not yet gone...

Her sister-in-law visited. Estelle. Her mind is half eaten away by Alzheimers, yet she wanted to see her good friend Jean. She sat by her bedside and held my mother's hand and sang to her. Over and over the same song. She sings it all day long. "I love you," she said to my mother over and over. Finally the visit was over and she and her husband and my father all ambled out of my mother's cramped sick room, with the Tibetan Prayer flags and the card filled mirror, and the humidifier and the Kleenex boxes and the flowers and the TV that no longer works and they were all singing from

"Ain't Misbehavin"

Be sure it's true when you say
"I love you"
It's a sin to tell a lie
Millions of hearts have been broken
Just because these words were spoken

I love you
Yes I do
I love you
If you break my heart I'll die
So be sure that it's true when you say
"I love you"
It'a sin to tell a lie

Slowly and gingerly down the front steps they went, Uncle Renee and Aunt Estelle. I helped him put her in the car and she sat happily singing..."It's a sin to tell a lie...."

A woman named Pat came to give my mother Reiki massage. My father told her, "I'm angry because the love of my life is dying." We told him that Pat was from hospice because if we told him the truth, that Reiki is an alternative form of healing, he might have thrown her out.

I'm hanging with Leonard Cohen tonite in my old bedroom where I used to play "Louie Louie" and "Stairway to Heaven" and "Southern Man" but the night belongs to Leonard.

"Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance Me to the End of Love."



(This entry marks the very beginning - or end, depending on your approach - of these posts that focus on my mother's death.)