Grief. I write a story about watching my mother die, about wiping away the brown ooze that was coming out of her mouth as her organs shut down. Did you know there were four stages of mortis? Pallor. Algor. Rigor. Livor. I write about learning this as my mother’s skin turns a pale waxy yellow, cools to match the late November air coming through the open window, as her body stiffens, the blood pooling on her backside. The hospice nurse, Sula, who comes to “declare the body,” at 5:30 am, an hour and half after she stopped breathing, tells me that her blood will turn to dust. I don’t want to write another heavy story, but I can’t find the hook to grab on to, to climb up and out into daylight.
There is no ordinary
Dream. My mother is covered in dust, clawing her way to the surface, she’s still alive and struggles to find her way out. She emerges, clumps of dirt hanging off her silver hair, still in the flimsy piss-covered nightgown she wore when she was living with my father. Several nights a week, she appears to me like this. My therapist tells me that I am dreaming about myself. “You feel smothered, buried alive,” he explains. I recount this story to a friend who says the same thing happened to him when his mother died decades ago. He tells me he understands but I don’t want understanding or empathy. “That’s horrible. No one has experienced this before, you poor, poor thing.” Why can’t I hear this?
There is no ordinary
Suffering. Please tell me that you can’t imagine what I went through. That changing my mother’s diaper, showering the shit off her body, wiping the blood from her nose when it gushed in torrents down her chest, dabbing it from head wounds she repeatedly caused with her falls, is unprecedented in its horror and specificity. She and I would sing together when mediocre musicians came to play for the residents of Menorah Village Memory Care Center. She forgot many things but not the lyrics to songs. One time she held my hand as we belted out Those Were the Days my Friends. “Look at us, we’re just two songbirds,” she said. I want to write you a story that dazzles, but the words are stuck in my chest, as if someone has their boot pressing on it. I worry that I have no more stories left in me except this one and maybe this one’s not enough. Or too much.
There is no ordinary
Joy. My father dies, and my brother, sister-in-law and I go to dinner. He neglected my mother, threw her down the stairs, things we could see – her emaciated figure, blood on their carpet – but she didn’t remember, the one good part of her dementia. She couldn’t stew in the recollection of what her “partner in crime” did to her when her mind started to go. We eat oysters and steak, drink Manhattans and red wine; the server thinks we are celebrating so brings us a large piece of cake with a candle in it. The three of us grab our forks, stabbing through layers of chocolate icing, gorging. I played my mother her favorite music as she lay dying – Simon & Garfunkel, John Denver, Françoise Hardy. We listened to Sal Sol Orchestra’s Christmas Jollies and Feliz Navidad by José Feliciano. After they put her body in a grey bag with a pocket for her paperwork, I ate a gummy and cried in the shower until the water ran cold.
There is no ordinary
Song. My niece is a Swiftie and has sent me a playlist as comfort. I’ve movedinto her childhood room, to be closer to my mother’s memory care facility. The pale-yellow walls are covered with purple magic marker, scrawls from my niece and her friends when they were pre-teens, the names of boys they liked from school – there are a lot of hearts – and famous ones, Justin Bieber, Cody Simpson. In a zoom meeting, a co-worker asks if I am in the room of a mad person or a child. “Both,” I message back.I mishear the lyrics to The Last Great American Dynasty and think Taylor is singing about a “motherless child,” not a “marvelous time.” On November 25th, 2023, my sister-in-law says: “You’re an orphan now.” I’ve entered my Orphan Era.At 54, this is not unusual, many of my friends don’t have parents either. But I feel alone.
There is no ordinary
Ending. Because there is no ending. This is the diaspora of grief, an eternal search for a resting spot, just when I find it,think that I ammaking progress, making sense, it comes back around and kicks me in the ass. At an artist’s residency, a sculptor teaches me about the technique called “écorché,” a French word that means “flayed.” I feel like I’ve lost my skin; my muscles and bones, the fat I accumulated caring for a dying woman, are exposed. My French friend tells me it also means “thin-skinned.” Sensitive. I talk about my mother any chance I get. I see my interlocutors’ eyes glazing over but I can’t help myself. They say, “I’m so sorry,” and I keep talking. “Can you imagine what it’s like when your mother forgets who you are?” Shut up, Rebecca.
There is no ordinary
Story. There’s this one, told many ways. As my skin slowly grows back, mottled and scarred, I peel it away for another look at what is underneath.
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