Laughter blurts out—a release valve accidentally knocked open as, nearby, screws that fasten grief’s door shut inexorably work themselves loose. Example: arranging the limbs of a sleeping person gently, hoping for a restful pose but finding an arm or leg oddly askew, like a Barbie doll in an awkward pose. It isn’t really laughable, but in a way, it is.
Is she looking askance at me now because I said too much? Too little? Am I boring because I am here every day and night, while my sister’s less frequent visits make her a dearer treat to behold?
LEARNINGS There are so many layers of family etiquette to peel away, before just “being real” with each other sets in. On a vigil, there is growing tension to become real, or to flee. Day by day, as we settle into the fog of the vigil and all the world becomes about being us, with her, the layers fray off and fall onto the dinner table, demanding explanation. Mom is transitioning, and so is the foundational mythology of our family. In this raw state I dare to say what has been unsaid, and we glance at each other as lost strangers united by our love for the one who keeps us sitting here, striving to find a better way, orchestrating our paths always back toward caring, as we care for her, when it would be easier in some ways to abandon each other in the debris.
I know you so well in some ways, Mom, and in other ways, know nothing of you.
DOUBT Doubt washes in and out, over huge decisions as well as tiny details. Am I too close to her face? Too far away? Is it time to stop the intravenous drip that brings her the only fluids she can take in?
Breathing changes over days, in cycles, but also in progression to the end: deep breathing of a deeply resting brain; feather-light breathing of a diminishing physical frame; apneaic staccato of a body in transition; gurgling wheezing you’ve heard about but have never heard a body make, until the final days.
In the dim of night, does this familiar livingroom, beautifully appointed with collected treasures, become mysterious and puzzling for her? Does she wonder, “Why am I here at night? Why is my daughter sleeping on the couch?”
Whispers in my mother’s ear, in the deepest nights of the vigil, seem as loud as shouts. But they are even more powerful—I hope—in the intention and care they speak to her.
Will having raised my own child, then caring for ailing parents, sandwich into just a few years the chance to make choices that consider myself only?
SOUNDS Birds and squirrels find the new feeder in view of Mom’s bed—for our entertainment if not hers—and their voices, even sometimes raucous, are a sweet percussion of living things. Saving and guarding lives becomes so very loud at night in the hospital: the electronic chirping of the IV drip, when another batch of sustenance runs out; the authoritative, calm voice over the intercom calling codes in the hospital as someone’s crisis is flaring; the whining alarm on Mom’s bed whenever I lean over the bar, closer to her.
1/10 ChronograM whole living 73