Voices / Essay
There is an ocean
By Susan Westlund
My mother looks up at me with a childlike expression that I am beginning to find familiar and surprisingly sweet. “Am I going to have my hearing checked?” she asks me. The psychologist looks up, startled.
“No, of course not,” Mom apologizes, after I remind her that she already had her hearing checked.
Soft as they are, the words my mother and I share punch tiny holes in the white silence, scaring us as though we are surrounded by snipers and land mines. “Yes, yes,” Mom admits. She was told she was going to have her memory checked. She just forgot. She forgets everything now, she reminds me — her laughter polite, shallow; that’s why she’s here.
The woman asks my mother questions. I listen.
No, Mom says, she doesn’t worry about Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t remember anyone in her family who had Alzheimer’s.
And there are questions for me too, the daughter: Do I worry?
Mom has had two heart attacks, I say. I wonder if she’s had little strokes that affect her memory.
And the psychologist person just has to say; “Your mother says she has trouble understanding, not just remembering or hearing.”
I want to leave.
Instead, it is the psychologist who leaves, with her polite and insubstantial handshake, passing us on to the next in command — another woman, a technician who will administer the test, a barrage of standardized questions typed on triplicate forms.
A month later, I wait in Mom’s apartment for the boys from Bibles for Missions to pick up the furniture and household items she can’t take with her to the nursing home — the orange floral sofa that no one in the family can use, the yeasty pastry cloths and dented measuring cups. There are also boxes of photos, letters, and mementos. In one, I find a cloth-covered journal. Recipes for date cake and my Grandma’s raisin bread are mixed in with what Mom calls her “homespun philosophy” and memories of a trip to Florida’s “beautiful coast.” She writes about the “vast body of water, and says: “If there is a heaven somewhere, I sure hope our great creator will have an ocean there.”
I go for a walk.
Everywhere I turn I see my mother, and the fragments of the life she lived away from me: the church where she volunteered, her dentist’s office, the path she used for her daily walk . . .
Seed-laden bits of fluff from the cottonwood trees hover, still as a painted snowstorm in the quiet of the pale blue sky. They are everywhere, soft and silent, even intimate, as I watch the trappings of my mother’s life go on without her. It is June; the timing seems off. My memory would have me believe the molting took place later in the year, but it has been a long time since I lived here and then my attention was on other things.
“I like it here.” Mom says of her new place with its cheery staff and cozy décor. She has a brand new walker. “I get around real good,” she says. It is stiflingly quiet among the residents despite the invitational conversation of the staff. I wonder how my mother will make friends among this vacant, fragile group; then I notice her staring in the same sleepy way as the rest of them. She fits right in.
For the next three years, I fly from Seattle to Minneapolis to see her every three months. We spend little time in the Center, grabbing a wheelchair and donning jackets almost as soon as I arrive, to window shop in nearby shopping malls and drink coffee in restaurants that welcome older folks and where she won’t insult well meaning servers with her new habit of making Goldilocks complaints: too hot, too cold — or simply a grimacing “Yuck.”
In the meantime her entourage — my brother and me, our spouses, the grandchildren, my uncle and our cousins — lean gently across the changing tables of restaurants, family dining rooms and kitchens with Mom smiling beside us, “forgetting” with her as we let go of much that sent us spiraling away from each other all these years. Things are okay. Entranced in the moment, we forget that nothing goes on forever.
Then the nursing home is sold to a large corporation. Our favorite nurse leaves for another job. The manager moves to another city, and we worry. Sometimes when I call, Mom is scared; she doesn’t know where she is or what day it is and wants us to take her home. Finally my brother calls: Mom is in the hospital. She has pneumonia.
When I arrive, she strains a raspy “Hello.” Her breathing is labored; it hurts her to move; she hasn’t eaten for three days. We talk over and around her, as though she can’t hear or understand; the unspoken question an unwelcome visitor. Even the kindly-faced doctor doesn’t voice it, though he suggests that in a day or so we may want to consider hospice. “Sometimes,” he says, “they come out of it.” I don’t ask who “they” are — don’t even think it yet, but I sense an invisible cocoon growing that separates my mother from the rest of us. Sharp, momentary glances dart among the doctor, my brother, and I, each of us waiting for another to take the lead, to set a tone to this business of dying in the middle of our busy lives.
Mom receives fluids intravenously. She can’t tolerate more than a few drops of water at a time, which I give her from a sponge on a stick, like a compassionate popsicle. A new nurse is assigned, and matter-of-factly repositions my mother so she breathes more easily. She suddenly tolerates water better, and mouths the word “more” as I dip the sponge in the cup. My brother and I are amazed, almost giddy at her resilience in response to this simple change.
She smiles to see me sitting next to her, and presses her cool, light fingers against mine. It is difficult for her to speak; her throat is dry and her voice a rough whisper, but her face glows for a moment. One syllable at a time, she says: “I-am-hap-py-to-see-you.” My heartbeat must have a tear reflex. “I love you, Mom,” I tell her peering through the guardrail of her bed. She gulps for air and punctuates each word: “I-love-you-more.” Encouraged, I continue to swab her mouth and stroke her forehead lightly. “I love you, Mom,” I tell her again. She smiles. and with tired but radiant eyes takes another breath and shapes each word carefully, repeating “I-love-you-more.”
I can’t wait to tell the doctor. We’re making progress. Mom’s coming out of this. Maybe she will get well and we’ll be taking her home soon. “You just never know,” the doctor says, his laughter subdued. Then he grows quiet. Her blood tests aren’t improving and the level of infection is staying the same. He sighs.
The next day Mom is not speaking at all and we see no improvement; then she begins to decline. The doctor says we can wait one more day before we decide to give her a feeding tube or not. We look into my mother’s weary face as he further explains that sometimes the therapies used to stop the infection cause complications that prevent recovery and increase discomfort. I don’t want to hear him.
Outside, my cell phone works. My long- distance friends call me “Sweetheart” and offer “I’m so sorry’s,” while giving me back my own words, “You heard the doctor: It’s time.” I crouch on the cement steps. I complain of sadness and an inability to buck up, but hear a friend say something about “the sweetness of being human” and “the tremendous support on the other side” as I pick a seed with white fluff off my jeans... then another. Looking up, I see it everywhere, as though I am enveloped in a glass ornament tipped by an invisible hand to make it snow. It’s June again — this is the time the cottonwoods shed.
At the suggestion of the hospice staff, I bring familiar things — a few photo albums, her favorite coffee cup, and a worn quilt from her apartment, to make her room welcoming to visitors. We tell stories over her, holding the photo albums in our laps, say: “I love you” and give our thanks.
The morning sun tints the thin hair and casts bars of light across her profile — her jaw and the faint blonde hairs, the barely perceptible down on her cheeks. Mottled hints of purple darken the insides of her fingers. Pain no longer provides her with the raw energy to moan a throaty “No” or to resist the nurses who hoist her body while turning her. The whir of the morphine machine shocks me every 15 minutes, much like her breath that comes in quick puffs now, the gaps between them lengthening like the elongated clouds that skirt the horizon outside her window. For hours we listen. There is little of her left here.
At two in the morning I wake up. Something is more expansive, lighter. Her breath is faint, but I’m sure she’s already gone. The hospice pamphlet says something about “sea and sky” mingling with each other, and about a ship “like a speck of white cloud.” Someone calls: “She is gone.” Another asks: “Gone where?” I don’t need to read the answer. I know. There is an ocean there.
