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.)