Death/In Place, pt 2

It had been strange living in my mother’s empty apartment, empty even of the scent of her cigarettes and perfume. It was stranger in a way to return with my mother so changed, so shrunken, to feel the withdrawal of her presence to the bedroom and her energy from the chairs and tables she brought to life. The smallish one-bedroom apartment with the walled off dining room suddenly felt enormous, as if her retreat to bed had stretched a cord between us to the point of breaking.

The hospital had promised us “home care”; indeed, it was part of my mother’s insurance plan from the United Nations, the part that made all the bureaucratic wrangling with hospital administrators worth it. It was, I would say proudly, wearily, thankfully as I explained the process for what seemed like the hundredth time, “European insurance.” According to her plan, Gladys could have, I think, three visits a week and could pay out of pocket for more. In anticipation of the first visit, my mother refused to let me bathe her: “that’s what nurses are for,” she said. It was a version of the phrase “leave it to the professionals” which rings in my head, in her voice, to this day, although I often don’t listen and do things myself, badly. When the first nurse came, it was clear there were things she could/would do and things she could/would not. Baths were in the second category. Almost everything else was too, except for temperature and blood pressure checks and the dispensing of medication. “I don’t need to know my temperature,” said my mother. She dismissed the nurses with a flick of the wrist and a flicker of her pre-illness personality.

In the few weeks before the end of semester when my husband and son were due to arrive, the apartment became our life. This is an echo of a phrase from Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, when the heroine describes what it was like to nurse the dying Miss Marchmont: “two hot, close rooms thus became my world.” I read many long novels, although not Villette. Most of them were by Anthony Trollope whose 47 books had seen me through labor and nursing. I wrote two papers for the annual Modern Language Association Conference to be held, this year conveniently—if that is the word-- in New York after Christmas. I would, I thought wearily, be able to go. Sometimes I would forget which paper I was working on at a given time. Unlike the sentences I tried to write after giving birth, these had main verbs in them, but they were missing any semblance of an idea. I cooked my mother’s favorite foods, making sure that there were mashed potatoes with every meal, even the ones with pasta. I thought about how when I was little, my mother would embarrass me by playing with her food, squishing the mashed potatoes through the glamorous gap in her teeth, and sometimes onto her glamorous silk and linen dresses. I thought for a long time about her glamor.

December came, and with it the end of the Rice semester, and the arrival of my husband and toddler son.  The apartment filled with sound. Keeping Ross from my mother’s precious possessions—all of which seemed designed to be broken by—or to break the bones of—a small boy—was a fulltime job for one parent. The second was also busy, cooking for and medicating my mother. The household gods I grew up with—the Tiffany vase, the mosaic table with the tiger on it, the very chairs themselves—cried out to me in their fragility even as they spoke of danger to my son. I longed for my own home, and to bring my mother there.

She was to fly with us to Houston and stay in our first house and our proudly designated “spare room” while receiving chemo at M.D. Anderson. As I write the word “chemo” I realize that I have not found a place to tell what is in some ways the most important part of the story: that at some point, when we were sitting quietly in our hospital room above the river, a new doctor had arrived to tell us that my mother had large cell lung cancer. Although I hear the doctor’s voice even as I am writing this, the moment for me resists any kind of narrative: I cannot tell you the when, the just before, or the just after. I cannot even tell you if he broke the news in front of my mother, or ushered me out into the hallway. There is a blank where the news ought to be and then my mother’s voice after she heard it, perhaps that day or perhaps much later. “But I feel so well,” she said to a doctor—but which one? Whoever it was, he was at that moment kind and fully present: “That’s good,” he said “That means a lot.” He did not tell us what it did mean. 

In the aftermath of the diagnosis, every instinct in my body told me that my mother should come home to me, to my family, to Houston. The doctor concurred. “M. D. Anderson, he told me “was a very good place.” At first, my mother had baulked at the idea: it was not just leaving her apartment that bothered her, but her conviction that New York was the best and indeed the only place to receive good medical treatment. Her recent experience had changed her mind to a surprising extent: she now spoke of M.D. Anderson as she had spoken of aspirational schools for me: Dalton for middle school (where I did not get in) and Princeton (where I did—from a waiting list). After NYU hospital, after New York, anything in Houston was easy to plan, even long distance. I registered my mother as a patient at MDA; they made no trouble about the European insurance. My colleague, Bob Patten, generously arranged to take over one of my classes so I could accompany my mother to chemotherapy sessions. My colleague, Thad Logan, arranged for household help, hiring two women who had looked after her father. “Of course they do baths,” she said.  Bring your mother home.”  

After a sad Christmas with my uncle and aunt, in which Scott expertly reproduced our family holiday dishes and my mother could not eat them, and after an MLA conference where I gave my terrible papers in the casual summer clothes I had packed in Houston in October, we all we got in a plane and flew to Houston on New Year’s Day. It was when she left the protection of her apartment, that it became clear how sick my mother was. In bed, she looked frail but like herself. Out in the open, she was like a sea creature without a shell, exposed to the noise and the light and the smells, first of the taxi, then of the airport, and then of the plane. Once in the plane, it was as if she were on some flight of her own: I held her hand as if to tether her to me as she muttered uneasily about babies, blue babies, babies choking for air. I looked at her, that now even tinier woman who took up less of her seat than my son did his and knew then to stop planning. I would not have to worry (“for a while,” I said to myself) about whether we would eventually have to buy a new house in Houston with a set of rooms for my mother—my real estate agent had promised, after checking in with me, to find a house with a “mother-in-law” apartment. I closed my eyes and clung to the present, to my mother moving away from me as she moved into my home.

I was still unable to let go of the fantasy that once we got to our house, things would be better. Such was the power of home for me, and also, more specifically the power of our new house, the first house anyone in my family had ever known. My mother had been to visit before, and shared with me the almost talismanic power of the place—the fact of a garden, the big windows, even and especially the mortgage-- spoke of something new and magical for both of us. During her first and only visit as a well person, she had sat with me at the kitchen table looking out in wonder at the trellised patio attached to the garage. At first it seemed like part of the magic that as we watched, the trellis, covered in confederate jasmine whose name my mother refused to believe, began slowly to collapse and then to crumble. Safely back in New York, she listened more quietly than usual as I described what I had learned was the problem (boring beetles in the garage) and the solution (tenting the garage and poisoning the beetles). Houses were mysterious to her-- as they say, out of her comfort zone. 

When we landed in Houston, Bob and his partner Seth met us in two cars; we put the luggage in one and the people in the other. Too soon but not soon enough, we were outside our turquoise front door, with our dog barking on the other side of it. We “settled” my mother in what was to be her room. Someone had put a vase of roses on the bedside table where I carefully arranged her medication. I asked my mother if she was confrontable and she said no. Although this was disappointing, dismaying even, given the pillows, the quilt the carefully adjusted shades, the door closed just enough to exclude the dog, I was relieved to have something to do. In the next few days I was to open every drawer and closet in my house in an attempt to produce its magic for my mother: a softer pillow from the cedar chest; a board from the (debugged) garage to help raise the head of the bed. Homemade broth from the freezer. I could, I realized as the evening wore on, find nothing, do nothing, produce nothing that would make her comfortable.

If the day was bad, the night was worse. During one of my rummages I had found and given her a tiny silver bell that she had doubtless at some point given to me from her hoard of small and precious objects. She rang it often, but when I came to her room she would not or could not speak to me.  Finally, I found an air mattress and lay on the floor by her bed. She woke me up to tell me I was trying to poison her and that she wanted to go home. “You are home” I told her, wondering if I were lying. In that moment I flashed back to scenes from my early childhood: when I was very sad or very angry, I would tell my mother that I wanted to go home, even if I was sitting with her in our apartment. Sometimes she would react with anger, sometimes with hurt, always with those same words “you are home.” I knew at the time that this was the way to hurt her, but I was also expressing a an overwhelming feeling in the only way I knew how.