The Hour of Our Death

Virginia Stem Owens

MY mother doesn’t want to die yet. She’s very clear on that point, despite her confusion about everything else. And, during the past year she’s spent in a nursing home, I’ve come to see that she’s right. She’s not ready yet.

This reluctance is a switch, however. Ever since she got to be the age I am now, my mother talked about how she was ready to die, was even eager for the joys—and rest—of heaven, about how she didn’t understand why some people put up such a fight when their time came. I always agreed with her. My own favorite metaphor for death was setting out on a great voyage of discovery, with the excitement and anticipation such adventures afford. In my mind’s eye, the ship on which I embark on this journey is a sleek sailing craft whose sails billow and crack. My choice of metaphors is strange, considering that my actual experience on ships has not been too pleasant; I get sick in the back seat of a car.

Watching my mother not want to die may change this metaphor for me. Even if I keep the voyage motif, I’m likely to downgrade the picture of my outward-bound craft to a small outrigger canoe with its bamboo float broken off.

My mother stopped saying she was ready to go about a year ago. After months of wondering why the topic of her death had disappeared from the screen, I decided it was time we had a serious conversation about it. I have, after all, read the books urging you not to put this off. People who are dying often want desperately to talk about their approaching end, they say, but clam up because of their family’s discomfort with the topic. Before I raised the issue, I consulted a friend who is a hospital chaplain and another who is certified in spiritual formation. Yes, they agreed. This is something that needs to happen, something positive you can do for your mother. Okay, I thought, at least I won’t fail her in this particular area. So I arrived at the nursing home one afternoon, loins girded for talking about death.

Not that I had any special reason to worry. My mother is not a squeamish person. She talks about bodily functions even now without reserve. Besides, I had the precedence of all those earlier conversations we’d had before her illness when we had both agreed that, while dying might not be a pleasant prospect, the state of being dead held few fears for us. In fact, it wasn’t death at all, but a fuller life. My mother envisioned the afterlife primarily as a giant family reunion and was easier to talk about than my own version involvng the more mystical aspects of the speed of light and quantum leaps. While my mother had not talked about her dinner-on-the-grounds heaven in a good while, she had continued to make comments like “I might as well die” or, more frequently, “I’m so weary of all this.” So I figured there was nothing to keep me from approaching the subject head on.

“Do you think much about dying, Mother?” I asked her that afternoon. The weather had finally turned cool enough in September to wheel her outside onto the little patio tucked away by the front entrance. I poured part of a Coke over crushed ice for her and was drinking the rest from the can myself.

She blinked and swiveled her head to look at me. “Not especially.”

I should have taken the hint then, but, duty-bound, I pressed on, deciding to back up and ease into the subject by the pragmatism route. “Do you have two burial plots or just one at Oakwood?” Oakwood is the cemetery where most of her family are buried.

“Two,” she said. She swiveled her head back around to stare at the flag a breeze was beginning to lift.

I waited, but she didn’t add anything to that. Having come this far, however, I didn’t want to abandon the effort quite yet. I cast about in my mind for another scrap of practicality. “So . . . what would you like to be buried in?”

She stared at me again, frowning now. “Something . . . ,” she gestured vaguely, “well, not rags.”
I chuckled uneasily. “I don’t intend to do that. I just thought you might have a preference. I mean, would you like a dress or a suit better?”

She appeared to consider this thoughtfully—she was having a particularly “up” day brainwise—as if it were a question of attending an important social function. Which I suppose it is.

“It’s getting cooler,” she reflected tentatively.

Picking up this clue, I press on. “So it is. Yes. So I take it you’d like a suit then because that would be warmer?”

She nods, seems satisfied with this extrapolation of her remark on the weather. I refrain from pointing out the absurdity of her cold, dead body needing the extra warmth of a wool suit jacket. In earlier times I would have. She always prided herself in facing facts, especially hard ones, a value she taught me. Today I’m simply pleased she’s noticed the change in season.

Whatever satisfaction I may have taken in having done my psychological duty was shot down the following week, however. It is not a good day. She is in bed, having refused to go to the dining room for lunch. I have been sitting by her bedside for a half-hour, trying to make conversation, but she kept her eyes resolutely on the scene outside her window, refusing all my usual conversational gambits. Then suddenly, with unwonted clarity and bitterness, she says, “You just want me to die anyway.”

“What?” I splutter. “I never said any such thing.”

“You’re already talking about my funeral.”

After a fatal moment of hesitation I say, “I only asked because I needed to know. About the burial plots and what you wanted to wear. But I never —” I break off the protest, overcome with confusion. The old childhood fear of being caught out by my mother bubbles up like swamp gas. My voice sounds unconvincing, even to my own ears. Because she is onto me, at least to some undeniable, if small, part of me.

Nevertheless, she looks a bit abashed herself now, as if she really might have gone too far, accused me of too much or too unjustly. She fumbles for a word. “Different. Dingle. That boy.”

It takes me several seconds to untangle that word puzzle. Remembering that my daughter and her four-year-old son had visited a few days earlier, I suggest his name. “Dylan?”

“Yes. I looked at that little boy and I thought, ‘I’m not going to die.’” She hammers each word home separately and distinctly, like a ten-penny nail. It sounds like a line from a victory-over-disease movie.

What can I do but make an affirming noise, yet, for a second time, I feel the guile rise in me. Because she is going to die. It has taken me two years to admit this, and has been, without doubt, the hardest fact I’ve ever had to face.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did us all a big favor when she shone her little flashlight onto our culture’s dark secret—the way we conspire to deny that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we will die. We don’t so much refuse to believe this bald, irrefutable fact as not admit it to our consciousness for consideration. I am convinced the media could do us a big favor by broadcasting this public service announcement every thirty minutes: Remember. You die.

For at least a year after my mother’s Parkinson’s Disease was diagnosed, she would periodically declare with a triumphant lift of her chin that Jesus was coming soon. Unstated but clearly implied was the claim that this final act in the history of the world would occur before her own death, indeed before the disease reduced her to a pitiable heap of flaccid flesh.

Such desperation was unlike her. Whenever she made these proclamations, this woman who taught me the value of facing facts, I would stare at her a moment, startled by this embarrassing exploitation of her own fortitude and faith. Then I would look away. How do you point out to someone facing a future as grim as hers that she’s kidding herself, pulling the wool over her own eyes? Her conscience would never allow her to wish for a global catastrophe like a nuclear holocaust. For her, it had to be the Second Coming—the ultimate happy ending.

It’s been over a year now since she made such a prediction. Jesus, it appears, has already tarried too long to do her any earthly good. Maybe this is the reason she no longer mentions him at all.

Nevertheless, she’s still not ready to give this life up. Not now, not yet. She continues to cling. She may get depressed and weary, even at times express those feelings, but she isn’t ready to turn loose yet. Whenever I bring up loved ones she believes are waiting for her in heaven—her father, her sisters, the aunt who gave her whatever mothering she got—she turns her head away, as if signaling a certain impatience with my attempt at consolation. This disinterest in the religious ramifications of death has come as an even greater surprise to me than her recoil from hard facts. After all, faith has been her only means of facing the facts, so many of them hard and bitter, that gnarled her life like oak galls. Yet now she is loath even to take the name of her creator or her savior on her lips. Why? What has become of the spiritual strength that sustained her through an unrewarding marriage, unrealized dreams, and the ache of her own losses? She seems to have put it away somewhere and forgotten where she laid it. No, worse than that. She doesn’t appear to want to find it. She frowns at any religious reference, as if you had thrust a photograph of a stranger before her and demanded that she identify the person. And this—the amputation of her spiritual sensibility—is, I confess, a fact I am having a hard time facing. Doesn’t she love God any more, I wonder? I’m pretty sure she no longer trusts him.

About six weeks ago she seemed to be sinking rapidly for a couple of days. She lay turned onto her right side, her knees drawn up. She barely opened her eyes when I tried to rouse her. I lowered the side rail on her bed and sat down beside her, taking her hand.

“I’ve been thinking about my brothers and sisters,” she says in a low voice. “You heard about Betty going off from us.”

Her sister Betty was only an infant when their mother died. Gone off from us, I sense, is code for “died.”

“No, Mother,” I put in, still insisting on accuracy. “Betty’s at home in Conroe.” I name over her siblings, living and dead, in order, trying to engage her in listing them. But she seems disinterested, as though I had missed the point.

She asks for water but is too weak either to hold the glass or guide the straw to her lips. “Don’t leave,” she says as I settle her on the pillow again.

“I’m not. Don’t worry,” I say. “Are you scared?”

“No.” But after a moment she adds in a tone as clear as water and innocent of self-deception, “Just at night. I don’t want to be alone. I want someone with me.” She looks at me and says again, “Don’t leave me.”

Her eyes drift shut and I think she’s sleeping, but, after a few moments she says, “We had our hands tied together, remember?”

“Like prisoners?” I ask. “Do you feel like a prisoner, Mother?”

She gives an impatient little shake of her head against the pillow. “We were walking up a trail to heaven. Our hands....”

“Holding hands,” I supply.

This seems to satisfy her. “I was holding your hand.” She opens her eyes and looks into mine. “You promised.”

I have lain in bed many a night and, in the solitary dark, put the question to myself: Do I want her to die?

Yes and no.

I have tried to imagine how it will happen, devised a number of scenarios, most of which involve the phone ringing in the middle of the night.

Mrs. Owens?

Yes? What is it? Is it my mother?

I’m afraid so.

I have in fact gotten two calls from the nursing home, both around seven in the morning, telling me the ambulance has taken her to the hospital, both times for minor strokes. So I know how the heart races and every object takes on hard, bright edges. I have experienced the way the mind shifts into hyperdrive, operates with such exceptional efficiency it leaves you dizzy at the door of the emergency room. How you wear serenity like a shield to keep your panic from infecting others till the crisis eases. But after that point, my imagination falters. On some unforeseen but quite specific date in the future, when the final crisis comes, will there be light to see, air to breathe?

I used to sit by her bed while she slept and watch for her chest to rise and fall, praying to be with her at the end. So she will be less afraid. So I will know—what?

But lately I’ve wondered if this is the right prayer. Am I really as strong as I think I am? Will I be any help or comfort to my mother then?

On the other hand, I’m tired of struggling to communicate with this crumpled piece of wreckage that once was my mother. Of its constant offense against memory of all she once was.

Recently, and quite forcefully, it struck me that when she goes—this mad woman curled in the hospital bed—then I can have my real mother back, or at least my memory of her. The real her.

At the same time, I found myself highly incensed last night at a comment I heard a college student make about his aged grandmother. “She doesn’t know who I am,” he said with a snort. “I don’t even bother to correct her anymore. She was married to my grandfather for sixty-four years and she can’t remember that he’s dead.” His voice is heavy with disgust. “I figure when a person ceases to change, they’re already dead.”

I wanted to smack him. I presume he meant “progress,” not “change.” Mistaking your grandson or misplacing your husband is change, just not for the better. But to say the woman is dead? That’s just another way of not facing facts.

Enormous chunks of my mother have broken off and disappeared, like floes from a melting iceberg. But her physical presence, however, disfigured and dismaying, is still her, not some discardable pizza box.

Whatever else she has lost, she still retains a strong sense of herself. Maybe that will eventually go too; I don’t know. But, as she’d be the first to tell you today, she ain’t dead yet.

Nevertheless, it hurts to watch someone you love die, especially if it takes a long time. As they change, so do you. And for better or worse, who can tell? The thought takes root in the darkness of your heart: She will never get well, never again be the person she was. Can nothing I do help? Wouldn’t it be merciful simply to end this suffering? But whose suffering—hers or mine?

When you share someone’s suffering, I’ve learned, there’s no clean division between the parts. Here’s yours, here’s mine. It’s more like Bre’r Rabbit and Tarbaby. The harder you struggle to escape misery’s sticky grip, the more it clings to you.

It’s easy to see how his grandmother’s shrinking self offends the college student. For him, young and with widening horizons, change has always meant more, not less. He has a hard time imagining life as a contracting sphere; so far he’s only known an expanding universe. As the song says, he hasn’t got time for the pain.

At least he has the excuse of youth. But the rest of us, whose bodies are undeniably diminishing, can all too easily imagine ourselves in the place of the shriveling figure in the bed. At fifty-eight, my physical powers have undeniably begun shutting down. The power to conceive a child, to regenerate my optic nerves, to play Bach. All gone.

Today I found a note I’d written on a scrap of paper two years ago in the middle of the night and later stuck in my journal. “Mother’s fears are no different from my own,” it read, “except in degree. We’re both afraid of the dark.”

I’ve had enough experience trying to extricate myself from Tarbaby’s gummy embrace to know that the pain and the person cannot be separated. To free myself from one means ridding myself of the other.

I became acutely aware of just how hard it is to divide the pain between us the day I signed my mother’s admission papers for the nursing home. A year earlier, spurred on by my father’s approaching heart surgery, both my parents had signed a “living will,” otherwise known as “directive to physicians.” The document instructed that, in the event “life-sustaining procedures would serve only to artificially postpone the moment of my death” that those procedures be withheld or withdrawn, and that “I be permitted to die naturally.” A second document, “Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care,” designated me as the agent “to make any and all health care decisions” for both of them. I had driven my parents to their church one sunny February afternoon so that the church secretary could sign as witness to these documents. Afterwards I drove them to their bank where we put the originals in their safety deposit box.

I keep my copies in a file cabinet at home, but my friend Lee, who looks after both her father and stepfather, carries hers around in the glove compartment of her car. “You may not have time to run home and get it when something happens,” she warns.

The local hospital had copies on file following my mother’s initial stroke. The nursing home’s version of “Directive to Physicians,” however, was much more detailed than the simple form originally witnessed by the church secretary.

The day I signed it, I was sitting at a table in the conference room of the nursing home, a room that I’ve never been in since and which, I think, is not often used. Coordinating the hand-off of my mother from the hospital rehab center to the nursing home had been harder than I anticipated. It was only ten-thirty in the morning, but already I felt daunted.

After two weeks in the hospital, moving out of her room there was like packing a small apartment. Boxes and plastic bags were filled with clothes, toilet articles, plastic bedpans and wash basins, padded heel protectors, wheelchair peripherals, flower vases, and potted plants. In addition, the protocols of transferring my mother from one facility to the other were as intricate as high-level diplomatic negotiations. Both agencies take care to demarcate where their legal responsibilities begin and end. And all the while, I’ve had to keep explaining to my mother in terms that will let her down gently, that she’s going to a place, the name of which strikes terror into every person’s heart—a nursing home. While also trying to keep my father’s damaged and agitated heart from running away with him.

Already he and I have signed a number of papers at the long conference table. The table is dark and polished. On one side sit my father and I, on the other a staff secretary and a large, dark, authoritative woman in a white lab coat whose nametag reads, improbably, Daisy Blossom. I am not certain just what position she occupies at the nursing home. She jokes that she’s done just about every job there during her decade tenure.

She peers at us over half-glasses as she passes us page after page of official notifications and forms to sign or initial. Of course, there is no time to actually read them. Daisy’s deep voice is simultaneously funny, reassuring, and indisputable. A new secretary is being trained to handle records; from time to time she creeps back into the room to ask Daisy nervous questions. Daisy never loses her cool.

My father is often near tears.

Finally, Daisy hands us a document with multiple pages and explains that we must check off which of the steps in “life-sustaining procedures” we want them to take. My father is beginning to crumble under the strain of struggling to hear, to understand, to decide. I’m certain this particular document will be his final undoing, so I take it from Daisy and glance over it.

At the top of the list of life-sustaining procedures are the ones you expect, the kind involving electronic devices with beeping monitors you see in movies. Machines that artificially stimulate the heart to beat or the lungs to breathe. I instantly check that one. Next comes kidney dialysis, that no-man’s land of resuscitation. Then the choices begin to get harder. Abdominal intubation—feeding through a tube. After hesitating, I check that one too. In my mother’s physical condition, she might not even survive such a procedure.

But the easy choices end there. After those come oxygen masks, ambulance transfers to the hospital, IV drips, withholding hydration or antibiotics for pneumonia. I suddenly don’t know what to do, what I want. What she would want.

Until that moment, thoughts about my own dying had run something like this: Okay, so you know you’re going to die some day. And though you’re willing to cooperate with possible cures for most diseases that might strike you, some diseases are either incurable or the cure at some point becomes worse than the alternative. You have a right, maybe even a duty, to accept the inevitable and refuse more treatment. At that point, you may as well depart this life with whatever dignity is left you. This doesn’t mean active suicide. Just the option to say “No thanks, I’ve had enough. Don’t try to help me any more.”

My mother had seen both a younger sister and her closest friend die of cancer after agonizing chemotherapy. She didn’t want that, she had told me. Why hang on for a few more desperate, depleted months?

When I was a toddler, before technology made it possible to keep badly injured or desperately ill people alive, my eighty-year-old great-grandmother, blind and frail, had died at home. She simply refused to eat any longer, hiding the wads of food her daughter tried to get down her under the mattress.

At ninety-one, my mother’s father broke his hip and refused to get up again following successful surgery to repair it. My mother brought him to her house to die, a feat he accomplished in less than two weeks. Given her family’s inherent stubbornness in the face of death, I had expected that, following her own initial diagnosis, my mother would eventually dig in her heels and make up her mind to die. But I had reckoned without dementia.

The truth is she’s no longer able to read or understand the list I sit staring at in the conference room. I close my eyes and see her sitting beside me on her front porch two summers ago, scanning with narrowed eyes the tops of the tall oaks for the mockingbird we can hear but not spot. “I just pray I don’t lose my mind,” she says. “I think I could bear anything but that.”

The very condition she most feared has, in a final irony, defeated the famous familial will power. The person she was then would reject the life of the person she is today. But the person she now is cannot choose what the earlier version surely would. She is afraid, and can no longer fight against that fear.

Nor can I do it for her.

My friend Lee, though she loves her father, declares that, should she find him dying of a stroke or a heart attack, she would not call 911. He has, she says, often expressed a wish to be free of what he sees as a burdensome life. At eighty-seven, he even refuses to buy any new clothes. “No payback in that,” he maintains. “I won’t last long enough to wear ‘em out.”

I could not bring myself to check off more than the top items on the list, despite what my mother might want if she were clear-headed. Instead, I go by what I believe my father would reasonably agree to, were he not so worn down that I dare not even read the list of choices to him.

I realize, of course, that this question of when and how life ought to end has no easy answer. In fact, it most likely has many answers. Just like the meaning of life. Everyone’s life means something different. And we can’t know what that is until it’s finished, complete. Sometimes not then. One thing I do know is that the answer to my mother’s end does not lie with me.

My mother complains of headaches almost every afternoon. If I ask the staff for a painkiller, they will give her—a couple of hours hence—something like Darvocet, which leaves her even more befuddled than usual. So I’ve taken to bringing ibuprofen with me which seems to ease the headaches.

Yet I have grown so suspicious of my own motives that I always feel vaguely guilty whenever I give her one of the little brown pills. What if it is the fatal bit of counterweight that finally breaks loose the dam holding back the blood in her brain?

Lately she’s been having what her cousin Margaret calls “spells.” They usually happen between noon and two o’clock. Several times I’ve arrived to find her clinging to the bed rails, her breath coming fast and shallow. Her chin quivers and she appears to be sucking on her own tongue.

I sit down in the wheelchair beside her bed and take her hand. “Mother? You okay?”

She takes a little gasp of air and puffs out “No.”

“You want me to call the nurse?”

She shakes her head, gripping my hand. In her palm’s fleshy pad I can feel her pulse, always erratic, beating like a bird’s heart held in your hand. I stroke her forearm gently, rhythmically. Slowly, slowly, she begins to relax.

Once, after her panic had subsided, I asked, “Were you afraid?”

She nods her head and closes her eyes.

“Were you afraid you were going to die?” I haven’t calculated the question this time; it just comes out. I very much want her to say no.

But she nods again. I keep stroking her arm.

After a moment she opens her eyes, staring up at me as if from a deep hole. “I don’t want to go away from you,” she says.

I kiss her forehead, wordless at this naked declaration of love and need. A few months ago I would have said, as if explaining death to a three-year-old, that she needn’t be afraid, that she won’t be alone, she’ll be with God. I’ve tried any number of ways to find the switch that can flip on that steadfast faith she’s always relied on—along with will power, of course—to get her through the hard places in her life. The faith she’s worked her whole life to instill in me. So far I haven’t found that switch and I’ve pretty much given up fumbling for it.

I just keep running my fingers over the skin like oiled paper crimped across the long radius and ulna of her forearm, abashed to discover she loves me more than God.

But now, almost a year after the day I signed the papers that will keep the doctor from sticking a plastic tube into my mother’s stomach, it occurs to me that perhaps there is a second irony buried here beneath the surface of our condition. She is a broken person, yes. Her seemingly invincible self-control has dissolved in the chemical bath of her brain. All her difficult life long she relied on resolve to get her through the rough spots. Now that part of her has been—what? “Excised” implies too clean a procedure. At any rate, it’s not there any more.

And who knows? Perhaps her steel-clad will has formed a barrier between her and God. When it’s gone, when hard choices are too much to make and facts too hard to find, much less face, maybe then she’ll simply plop, defenseless, straight into the arms of Jesus.

Visit Virginia Stem Owens as Image Artist of the Month for June '03

Issue #26 • Spring 2000