Death/In Place, pt.1

My husband’s mother, Margaret (Peg) Derrick, died two weeks ago, in a nursing home. I feel compelled to add the last detail--the place of her death--because at this moment in time, the place of old people’s passing has defined so much for them and for their families. There is no better way to say it: she was incarcerated-- first in the building and then in her room as COVID broke out in one hallway or another. In this time of terrible timing, her death—or rather, her dying-- came at a slightly better time. The ban on visitors to nursing homes was in the process of being lifted, so her grown children could gather around her bed and sit with her. They could hold her hand, and talk to each other unmasked. The strange temporalities of the pandemic helped in another way: my husband theoretically reached peak immunity the day he stepped on the plane that would take him to his native Pennsylvania to say goodbye. I did not make the journey, in part because I was unvaccinated. I took comfort in imagining my husband, my sister-in-law and my brothers-in-law sitting quietly in Peg’s room, in part because sitting quietly with Peg, on the same couch, say watching tv or reading cookbooks, was one of my favorite things to do with her. 

I have found that the death of someone you love takes its place in a chain of deaths, as if separate acts of mourning were one continuous space, entered at key moments but running parallel to and perhaps below the exigencies of daily life. I have pictured that space as a dark thread or a road. Now, perhaps because of Harvey, that dark place is a river always unfolding beneath my feet. The road has many entrances, the river, many points of access.  I visited it when my father died, and then a beloved dog, and then my mother, my uncle, and my aunt. I remember how mourning feels from time to time and from death to death, but each entry into it illuminates past deaths, takes me back against the current one death or two or three.

I loved my mother-in-law and I mourn her. My mourning, though, is not the mourning of a daughter. The sadness I feel is not the sense of drowning, of crashing waves, of salt on the tongue that washed over me when my father’s early death at 55. It is not the feeling of unmooring I felt when my mother died about fifteen years later. Peg’s death returns me, perhaps in a more gentle way—and Peg was very gentle-- to those feelings, to those earlier deaths. The death of my mother-in-law took me back with startling speed to the death of my mother and father. 

Thanks to Peg’s death, thanks to Peg, I am exploring those feelings and returning the times and places of my mother’s dying. For Gladys’s too, is a story of place. My mother started feeling sick in the summer of 1992, in New York City, in the middle of what has retrospectively been shelved away as “the AIDS crisis.” Ironically, or not, this happened at a time when I felt that our relationship was changing for the better. I had given birth to my first son; this had helped me, as they say, establish boundaries, to be able to get off the phone sometimes or even not to answer a few of her nightly calls. Gladys had, for the first time since my father’s death, struck out independently—first travelling to France with one old friend and then, improbably, going on a cold-weather cruise with another. We were both growing up. 

In the months before she was officially sick, Gladys gave up smoking. Although I should probably have recognized this as a symptom that something was wrong, it fit at the time into a euphoric narrative of our improving relationship. All my life, all our lives together, this had been an issue: the smell of smoke, the taste of it in the air, the overflowing ashtrays, the interruptions of childhood pleasures for smoking breaks. As a child I would cough and run from the room; as a teenager I would resort to the medicalized term “secondhand smoke.” As an adult, I tried to bear it without comment, to take it as a given, something in the air of our relationship. Insofar as one can be an adult in a replica of one’s childhood bedroom, I would huddle under my ancient blue and white quilt, as smoke wafted in through the slats of the door to the dining area where my mother would be chain smoking and drinking coffee, talking to my loving and patient husband deep into the night. Smoking became a shorthand for everything my mother did that, in my own mind at least, affected me.

When Gladys was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and was admitted to NYU hospital in the fall of 1992, I was on sabbatical. I left my husband and baby son and flew to New York to take care of her. Dropping off my bags at her apartment before walking to the hospital, I was struck by her absence, but also by the freshness of the air. While I can’t say I wished for smoke, I did not feel that I was coming home.

I found my mother in a hallway outside the emergency room, where she had been for days. As with COVID, AIDS had meant that hospitals had run out of space. Doctors and nurses would stop by-- and sometimes stumble over--her bed, asking her questions to assess what they called her “orientation,” something they were probably asking, with a different meaning, in other rooms, other hallways, at that historical moment. The first question they asked her was always “What day is it?” Without a calendar or a watch, without access to windows, and with the fluorescent lights of the ER always on, she would inevitably get this wrong. The doctor or nurse would take notes. When I read her chart, I saw repeated the term “disoriented,” or sometimes “disorientated.” There was no day for her and no night, just an endless waiting for a place to be put out of the way. Oddly invested in these labels, I argued with the staff about their questions. My uncle, the surgeon, yelled at them about everything else. When a room became available, the nurses were, I am sure, as relieved as we were.

My mother got moved to a room overlooking the East River. I could not help thinking how much she had coveted such a view when looking for an apartment. Although she had twice lived near the river, she had never been able to afford an apartment high enough to see it.  

I opened up the curtains to expose the October greyness of the water and the sky. I brought bunches of daisies, and cookies from Greenblatt’s, and her black and white Viyella robe that she had worn all my life. I brought pictures of her grandson, and books for myself. I snuck her wedding ring, removed when she was admitted to the hospital, back onto her finger. It fell off and I put it in my pocket to take back to the apartment. My mother, who worried in all circumstances about muggers, imagined them lurking on every corner of the six blocks I had to travel. She managed somehow to call me to see that I made it home safely. It felt like old times.  Also familiar was her reaction to the I  very nice letter I showed her from a famous person in my field praising my book. “Get her to review it,” my mother said. I promised, fingers metaphorically crossed behind my back, to look into it. 

For a few days, we lived the high life above the river. Then we went home.