Gone

It was cold the morning she died. I awoke in the guest room to my step-father's light rapping on the door and a calm, yet ominous "Your mom's not breathing." I was on my feet and across the room. What awaited me---what I had been waiting for, already seemed, sounded..final. A light was on low at a side-table in her room and, there she was, there she was, gone. Frozen in the position she had been moving towards for days, her mouth wide open and raked upward, her eyes fixed forward, her bony fingers stretched out across her collar bones and grazing her lower cheek. My eldest brother and I were leaning in on either side of her, our hands resting on her legs and side, one of us said, "She's dead." The other repeated it. We searched each other from across our dead mother for what to do next. I reached for her hand, as I had many times over the last several days; sometimes to hold, other times to move it down along her side. Now it was cold and locked in place. For days she had been dead, but now she was.

The Cleaner

After a couple of days in the hospital bed, we could all see changes in my mom. The Hospice nurses normalized her lack of appetite and not taking water. They described how the body shuts down, how it knows exactly what it's doing, that despite seeming completely bizarre, everything we were seeing was natural and part of the process. I was relieved and suspected they were right, but its hellishly challenging to watch death's late stages as compared to the Eskimo man(you know the guy), "who knows it's his time to die" and sets out across frozen snow drifts to pass with his back up against a three thousand year old Redwood.

My step-father was/is a lifelong Presbyterian. My father identified as agnostic, though baptized and raised Roman Catholic and my mom was atheist, though baptized and raised Episcopalian. When she and my step-father married, a Minister friend officiated and she became close with some of the congregation over the two or so years they actively had together. At night, when we would talk on the phone, she'd try to find something positive to say about the church, but overall, she was not an organized religion type of woman. She didn't get it and much of it, she didn't like.

My step-father asked me after breakfast how I felt about a Minister from his church coming to say a few words for my mom. "What did Rick say?" I asked drolly referring to my brother. "He said to talk to you." He went on to tell me that my mom had enjoyed some aspects of the church and did, in fact, think highly of this particular Minister. I thought about what my step-father had been through; losing his first wife to cancer many years prior, then marrying my mom, knowing full well she, herself, came with a foreboding metastasized colo-rectal cancer diagnosis. He had prolonged her life---truly brought her happiness and love. I reckoned that it was something he needed and rationalized it would be alright, and would pass, most likely, unnoticed by mom.

My step-father made a call and his cell rang with a return call within minutes. He said the Minister would be at the house within an hour. It was closer to 15 minutes and not anything what I expected: He was harried, arriving in street clothes, made the cursory half-bows, and moved on down the hall. Red flags were going up everywhere. As he passed into my moms room, he started to yell, "Oh, hello dear, how ARE you, Dear! Can you hear me...oh she's not well." My window to kick him out of the house was closing fast. And... I didn't make it. "Oh,Father Lord Jesus, let us pray!" He started reciting some verse that seemed appropriate on a bumper sticker. He reached for her hand with an "Oh Jesus!", and she pulled away, producing a sound that was half low scream half groan, it was louder than anything she had uttered in weeks and she sustained it for 5 seconds. The Minister seemed pleased with himself--as though he reached her, but I knew I had just betrayed my mother, underestimated her awareness and presence in the face of her physical state.

Leaving down the hall, the Minister announced that he had been called away and would need to hastily depart. Previously, my step father had sold the visit on the premise that the guy would stick around awhile and help my brothers and I process the situation. I was glad to see him go. He had brought nothing but a stale script of Hallelujahs, a form letter.

At my mom's side, I swept up her hands in mine, she was rigid, her upper back bridged up in an arc over the bed. I apologized for not asking her. She flattened a little and appeared to be breathing more deeply, her chin dropped and the words that she was to trying to speak emerged as garbled sighs in varying pitch. She was tired, I was disgusted.

Poppy

My mom had been in the hospital bed for a day. She seemed to have calmed somewhat, but it was becoming more difficult to understand her words. Her mouth seemed to be drying up, all of her did, really. I couldn't believe (or accept) that she had stopped eating and was taking in only a few droppers of water throughout the day. I made shakes and mashed bananas, added protein and for awhile, she would take a little, her mouth moving long after the spoonful was gone. In those early days, we could give her water from a straw, she'd vibrate with a long "mmmmmmm." She would look up as though she had just sipped from a Swiss mountain lake, still hopeful, smiling like a little girl. Once following a dose of morphine---when she could still get a few words out, she leaned in as if to tell me what nobody else knew, "I really think I'm going to beat this thing." She had tried to be positive for so long; through two surgeries , through years of chemotherapy and the entire western worlds pharmacological arsenal. "I know you are,"I said holding her hands, affirming her secret. Then simply, matter of factly, with the raise of an eyebrow, "I've got to." She looked determined. I was grateful for Afghanistan, Kashmir...poppies.

Totem

I went for a drive one afternoon. I went to a Flea Market and bought my wife a knit cap embroidered with The Virgen de Quadalupe on it, I stopped in at a cemetery and read headstones--imagining families and the way death coiled through and struck each of them. A train roared by.

I dreaded going home, I dreaded the outcome, I hated the smell, the sound, the results of what my mom had been reduced to. On my way back, I followed roads I didn't know well, but ended up around the bend from an old house I had lived in with four friends for a summer during college. I continued up the road, confident of my location and the way home. A few hours away from the house, separated from the droning sounds of death and the dolling out of meds had given me the necessary resolve to face it all again.

Just then, a jack rabbit darted out from my left. I heard and felt what could have been a softball hurled full force at the lower grill of the car. I had slowed, waited for the second report of rear wheel crushing grotesquely over bone. I was clenched in readiness for the broken mass of fur to roll in and out of the rear-view. When it didn't, I pulled over, stepped out of the car and took a wide sweeping arc around the open drivers door. Clearly I had hit a rabbit, and clearly it hadn't reappeared. I seriously hoped it wasn't lodged somehow in the front of car. It was. It's head had broken through the lower grill and was stuck, a hind leg was broken clean and bloody. It was flinching chaotically, the broken foot dangling from a thin piece of tissue and helicoptering around erratically with each spastic flailing.

It was at this point, I stepped back a few steps from the car and raised my arms to the sky, I asked (audibly), "What are you trying to tell me?" I bent over and assessed the situation, which wasn't particularly rosy, I might add; bloody rabbit caught by its head in a small hard opening, won't come out without pulling head off rabbits body, not advisable to drive home like this.

Reaching in I broke the grill piece away from the rabbit and pulled the long animal free. I carried it to the side of the road and laid it in some low weeds running alongside a vineyard. It was moving the way I imagined someone might actually move while dreaming they are running. It was scared, it's large brown eye staring up at me--it's head strangely motionless. My attempts to comfort it, to pet it only made it more frightened.

I imagined crushing it under my shoe, but realized both the inhumanity and ineffectiveness of that route. Nevertheless, I knew I had to do something soon. I rose back up to my feet after stroking its whiskered cheek and a farmer called out, "You all right over there?" I said, "No, actually my mom is at home dying of cancer and I just hit a rabbit, it's suffering here." He asked if he could get me a gun. I said yes get me a gun and immediately knew that a gun wasn't going to do it. Looking into my hands, I imagined mustering all my strength in the swiftest move and rehearsed it in my mind...delaying the actual act. I had never strangled anything. For a moment I played out the scenario of taking it to the vet. I slid a hand under its neck and interlaced the fingers of my other hand around it. I squeezed and turned its neck. It took too long. I watched its eye, I watched its pupil contract a bit then slowly walk its blackness out to the edges. In that blackened eye, that slack mouth dabbed in blood, I saw my mom dying that night.

I popped the trunk latch from inside the still open car door and carried the rabbit around, laying her inside. Streaks of dark dried blood had stained my fingers, they appeared out of place against the posh leather and wood dashboard of my moms car. Back home, I carried it in by its ears and through the backdoor to put my backpack down. My step-father looked over the paper he was reading and paused. I lifted the rabbit up to my chin level and made a look that must have conveyed, "You're not going to believe this." I turned and went outside to the cabinet where my parents keep tools and gardening things. I grabbed a shovel and pushed threw the fence to the back yard, the rabbit was long and would have dragged on the ground had I not held it up. Past the pool, I opened the gate leading out to the levy, out where mom, dad and I grew vegetables, out by the pool pump, out where I had my fort. Years before, we had planted a redwood seedling, it now towers above the power lines. In its dark rich loam I dug. After I had laid the rabbit in the hole, braced the broken leg and smoothed its ears down, my step father emerged through the gate and gestured for the shovel. We didn't speak. He wanted to be a part of the burial. The understanding, the symbolism was implied. When my stepfather had covered the animal, he tamped down the soil with the back of the shovel. We collected fallen twigs, snapped them into a cross and pushed it into the topsoil. We had concluded that the rabbit was unequivocally Christian.

We stood. our eyes red and wet with tears and glanced over the fence together--we stared across the yard to my moms window, its shutters closed. From the backyard, the window looked as it always had, but the world behind the trailing rose and white shutters was completely different. My mom was going to die in that house, in that room,behind those shutters.

My head seemed to be shaking from side to side on its own...the picture was stunning, completely surreal...what had been a week of intense and repeated tragedy was bordering on the comically insane. I needed to go check on my mom.

Don't Try This at Home

My mom had started to fall out of her beloved bed and for safety, it was suggested (mandated, really) that we move her to a hospital bed. Her vocalizations at this point were minimal. She had started expressing herself more with actions and guttural noises interspersed with just a few hoarse words. However, when the hospital bed came piecemeal into her room, she made her distaste with it very clear. Pointing her fingers, her hand trembled and in low whispers, I could hear, "No,"followed by "I don't need that.." then her voice trailed off. Moving her into that bed felt cruel, the coldest, meanest thing I could ever do.

For the first two days, she constantly struggled in her weakened state to get out.She didn't seem comfortable and we tried every combination of pillow and propping. Invariably she would fall, becoming horribly tangled in the bars designed to keep her in the bed. Once, I found her trapped in the rails, her nightgown had pulled away leaving her painfully thin body exposed. Having never come upon my mother in a such a state, I paused in the doorway and averted my eyes. I realized she couldn't make the corrective moves to cover herself on her own and was at risk of hurting herself. I crossed a threshold as I crossed her room. I pulled my mom's near-naked body free from the bed rails and laid her on her real bed, untangled her nightgown---pulling it straight and smoothing the wrinkles out over her knees. Credit to mom, she had made passage back to her California King, soft in its abundant yellow down trimmings. Her eyes were wild, they seemed to be imploring me to do something. My mind imagined the things she was longing to say, the places she wanted to be. With my brothers help, we gently lifted her back into the bed. She groaned and the corners of her dry lips turned down. After my brother had left, mom was still restless, she pawed dryly at my hand and wrist, her nails longer than I remembered. "Kill me, please...kill me," she whispered lowly, roughly, discernibly. Her eyes flitted from side to side, looking back and forth at each of mine. She seemed to be scanning me for a reaction, for a look in my face that would say" Yes...okay, I will." I said nothing, just slowly shook my head from side to side. Not to say "No,"necessarily but rather, in complete disbelief of what I had just been a part of.

Final Jeopardy

My mom died in the morning. My step-father knocked at my door. I wasn't asleep, but rather waiting. He said, "Your mom's not breathing" and stepping into the cool hall, the first thing I noticed was the silence.

For days, her breathing had filled the house with deep, raspy gurgling. It was inescapable and unmistakable. Impossible to ignore or normalize, It shouted over the whir and spinning of the dryer. During meals with my step-father and brothers, it blatantly interrupted Jeopardy and our attempts to forget, to believe we were having a nice dinner together....that our mom was dying down the hall in a hospital bed that she detested and hadn't eaten anything in three days. The death rattle is a death knell, it speaks loudly and makes sure that those around are called into the present. Maybe it serves as preparation for what is soon to come, perhaps it is us it means to rattle..... If I had gotten out for a walk, it was there as I cracked the back door, growing louder as I made my way through the kitchen and down the hall to peer in and check on her. I found myself pacing around in the two-part awareness that it wasn't going to stop , but that, "Oh yeah, it was going to stop." You could hear it at night down the hall, you could hear it from behind a closed door with your head under a pillow.

Days before her death, she had started bringing her hands up to rest at either side of her neck...a Pharaoh...a bird. Her fingers, long and chalky, felt like a cool wax. Her once electric blue eyes had grayed, they were locked in a distant stare under eyelids that had slipped half way down. Thinking she would be more comfortable, I would take her arms down one at a time to stretch out along her side. She offered no resistance, but over the course of hours, would slowly bring them up again, elbows darting pointedly to either side, fingertips grazing her sunken cheeks and her lips moving around a string of silent words.

Her gurgling rattle seemed untrue. I would stand over her and listen, I would swallow hard imagining her parched throat, I would clear mine for her. I would cry and dribble water down her throat with an eye-dropper hoping her eyes would widen blue, hoping her lips would soften red, hoping her hand would warm pink and slide behind my ear, hoping she'd say something in the voice I had already forgotten. Instead she would burst into a violent series of coughs that I was sure were going to end with her dying ---me standing over her with empty eye-dropper cum smoking gun.

Chippings

Last night the rain started about an hour from my mom’s house and was preceded by biblical clouds of some low-flying insect peppering the windshield. Running the wipers succeeded in creating two smeared arcs of wet bug matter and frustrating visibility. The elements seemed about right, metaphorically, in light of my destination and situation: incomplete clarity in the face of deaths messy aftermath complicated by rain.

This morning, in the house, the rain comes in trickles through fog and rattles down the metal gutters. Besides the intermittent warm-up and eventual roar of furnace—which seems over-burdened by the task of warming the house, it is very quiet and still. I have been moving around this morning from cupboard to shelf to odd letter-filled box to odd-stuffed animal-filled box. All the while in black underwear and consuming cup after cup of green tea. In the half-light I half expected to see a ghost—half hoped I would and, yet, entirely glad I did not. Seems she isn’t here and I’m relieved by my rationalization that my mother isn’t trapped in some sort of purgatory and being made to walk the halls in one of her old polyester negligees precariously balancing a Salem Light about to ash on the white carpet.

Pawing through things, peering into closets, their upper shelves stacked with Mousetrap and faux wreaths, I’m left with questions. Little ones. Simple ones, I never asked. People in photos I remember mom pointing to, but whose particulars are gone. I’m grateful for the names and places I do remember, if only minutely, it ties me to something bigger, something I am a part of ---something shrinking in front of my eyes---something like the moon being crossed, eclipsed and covered by the shadowy body of time. I feel sorry (and helpless) for these sepia-toned eyes staring out from the white-bordered photographs—imploring me to remember, to stop the steady advance of shadow falling over their page in time.

Death advances and is always at work. Composting. Slowly turning things over. Death moves in stages. People die in front of us, but live on. Eventually all the relics, all the hard-working, memorization and note taking-- the family historians slip off, fall off and, themselves, die. The part they held, the descriptions, the stories are gone. People die off slowly in small chippings. This morning I reached for my mom’s curly-corded phone (the one I always begged to replace with a cordless) (the one with the same number for 40 years). I would call my oldest friend as I had done a million times. I would stretch the 20 foot cord across the kitchen and into the laundry room, its curls now pulled straight, the plug straining to stay seated in the handset. I’d close the door, pinching the cord in the jamb, relieving the pull, to stand alone in private conversation.

I punched in his number, each time my finger pushing in silence. Holding the phone up against my cheek, I redialed, but, the line was dead.

Bonfire

Yeah, well, we didn't leave today.

I've been back to the house only twice since my mom died. The trip, anymore, is mired in things to be done, divided and eventually boxed up and moved out. The museum is closing down. The one place where you knew every exhibit is selling off the collection. Certainly everything that fills the house are the possessions of my parents, but they were mine,too, in that I could count on finding them in the places they had always been. There is comfort in knowing someone, namely a parent, is managing the family photos, the early finger-paintings and report cards. To a large extent it allowed me to stay a child, knowing mom would "take care of it." Shouldn't we all have that guarded receptacle of home? And it's protector? I don't know what is worse in the death of parents; their actual loss or the sudden responsibility for the artifacts of our entire life. Artifacts minus the person who collected them minus their voice describing them minus their meaning to them minus your meaning to them. Nothing. Please pass the Zippo and gasoline.

The house is a thing filled with many other things. Each of them must be turned over and looked at, taken out and transported from the only place I ever imagined them. Breaking up the shells and rocks and sand that two people had gathered in their socks and pockets. Tis times like these when a proper burn seems not merely the easiest approach but the only logical means by which to cast back a set of things that makes no sense divided.

Tomorrow

Yes, tomorrow I return to the family home. Where I grew up. The place my parents bought for 64K when I was eight. The place with the diving board and endless lawns. The place where my mom died with her mouth stretched open and dry after days of rattling her way down cancers death. The house is for sale, in escrow, actually---and I'm conflicted.

My Mom died 10 months ago--my brothers and I rolled her into the December mornings fog atop a cold metal gurney. Mom lay in a red naugahyde and zippered bag lined in red fleece. I didn't understand the bag, beyond its intention of covering and taking away my mom. Red was surprising. Red was hot and bloody and flush and pulsing. Nothing standing or lying there that morning was any of those things. She was twig thin and brittle. She threatened to snap. She was dead.

The house has sat empty and haunts me, both as something I long to keep and simultaneously imagine burning down into low columns of black ashed two by fours. Cremating her home and all the things filling it, refrigerator magnets and all.

Tomorrow, I pile into moms car, the blue Acura my father bought her in 1998 as a birthday gift. Dad died 12 months later, mom kept the car, held it as a testament to him and their bizarre love. She wanted me to have it. Smells like mom, like peanuts, mint lifesavers and leather.