The Right Decision
by
Jeff Stimpson
Everybody thinks it's the right decision -- Betty,
me, Dave, the Hospice nurse who comes in to give her a bath --
everyone except, we think, the person at the center of the decision.
At the idea, says one of my nieces, mum will "flip out."
While Dave is getting the tires fixed on his
Oldsmobile, Betty and I decide that he should tell mum.
"I promised her," Betty says, "I promised her I
wouldn't take her to one of those places." Dave will tell her the
next morning, just before the ambulette pulls up. Betty remembers
that she'll be baby-sitting another granddaughter, Chelsea, at that
time.
"I'm just gonna tell Chelsea that they'll come in
with a stretcher and take Nana-Net where they can help her get
better," Betty says. That's the plan, or at least the pitch: just
for a few days, so they can get the pain under control.
But my mother has come to a special time, a time
that's hers, and she fades from our control with breathtaking speed.
She stops seeing, hearing and pretty much moving on Wednesday night
-- except twice when she sits herself up on the side of her bed and
stares. "Scared me to death," says Betty. This might be a good sign
except that mum's urine turns orange, which we will later be told is
a sign of renal shut-down. That night after the spaghetti we do
laundry and play Rummicky. I look in on my mother, watching her
chest go up and down, up and down, up and down. It will not simply
stop.
Unseen by us and undiscovered until next morning,
one of the kittens, the one who never really opened his eyes, dies.
Next morning, Betty, Dave, Chelsea and I wait for
the ambulette, which is supposed to come at 10. The phone rings
while I'm finishing my second cup of instant coffee and watching
Sally Jesse Rafael. Betty gets it. The ambulance will be late.
Betty, Dave and I go into mum's room.
"She's not coming back today, is she?" mum asks.
"Who?"
"That nurse."
"No, she's not," says Dave. "But we're gonna go
over to the Hospice in a little while."
I wish my mother did flip out then. Instead she
just says "No we're not," and tries to roll over.
"Yes we are," Dave says.
"It's just for a while mum," I say. I tell her
it's to get her pain under control, that she needs some medicine
that Betty and Dave can't give her right now. "You need to do this,"
I tell her. "You need to help Betty and Dave now the way they helped
you..." I will never know if she believed me, agreed with me, or
just wanted me to leave. She closes her eyes and lays unmoving on
the pink-and-white striped sheets.
Sally Jesse is still going on -- I think the show
has something to do with the KKK -- when I look out Betty's living
room window and at the curb I suddenly see a van. It's a hard white
in the Arizona sun, and it has blue words. One of the words is "Medi."
I poke my head around the corner where Betty and Dave are watching
the TV and say, "They're here."
Paul's our driver. His partner didn't show up for
work this morning, he says, so I help him wheel the gurney out of
the van. It's a fat padded wheelchair that collapses into a
stretcher, and it would sure wheel better with two guys on it.
Provided one of the guys wasn't me, wheeling the thing into my
mother's view.
"Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Just leave me be."
"OK," says Paul, and he shows Dave and me how to
use the sheet to lift my mother onto the gurney.
"Oh no. Oh no. David, no."
"Nettie," Dave says, "don't do this to me."
What we three haul off the bed and onto the
stretcher is not my mother. It's too light, and it says "No!" too
loudly. She grabs the doorjamb as we flash by Betty's bedroom.
Inside I glimpse Betty holding Chelsea, head-down. I think they were
rocking.
"Where we goin'?"
"We're going to get you some medicine, mum."
The driveway is already 100 degrees, the sun
pounding the cement; I place my white baseball hat over her eyes.
"Pretty warm, huh, mum?" How many sub-zero nights did I pick my
mother up at work back home in Maine? How many times did we shovel a
driveway side by side? How many January afternoons did I see her
walk to the thermostat on the wall and "twist the tail on the
furnace?"
I know one thing: I will wheel her down this
blistering driveway just one time.
Paul gives as smooth a ride as he can. But in a
move I suspect will haunt me for years, I've forgotten to bring
water or even a cool cloth, and in the van the air conditioning is
weak. My mother bounces and moans. "Oh Jeff where we goin'?"
The nursing home smells clean -- which is to say,
not of urine -- and as I walk the pink and pale-blue halls and slide
my hand along the fat wooden handrails, watching the incredibly old
people move their wheelchairs by shuffling their feet, I think, "I'm
glad my mom will never be in a place like this." Except she is. They
deposit her on a bed and pull the pink curtain to separate her from
the roommate she will never know. The roommate's head is shaved; her
head lolls to one side. In the hallway a guy in a wheelchair watches
them bring my mother in. "Is that guy dead?" he asks my sister.
"She's tough as a boiled owl," I tell the hospice
people, "but she needs morphine. I've had morphine and I know she
needs morphine." The hospice worker looks at my mother's sheets of
pills as if trying to find a familiar name in an out-of-town phone
book. Nurses come and go, and my mother never stirs from her left
side. Chelsea takes my hand and we walk on to the sizzling lawn to
get a hot dog from the guy at the grill. We walk down to the nurses'
desk, where a nurse gives Chelsea a lime ice. I see the "Activity
Calendar!" confirms that this is Cookout Day. Tuesday will be
Pets-on-Wheels Day.
The administrator has questions for my sister. Is
your mother querulous? Does she socialize well with others? Does she
talk about ending it all?
Is she frightened? "Well I don't know, I guess
so," says my sister, looking at me. "I don't know, because I've
never been there."
We return to the room, and she's still on her left
side, and we know where my mother is going. I tell her to give Dad a
hard time when she gets there. I tell her about my happy memories of
Christmases in the mid-1980s, when I would come home for two weeks
and she'd feed me to a stupor. My brother lived at home then, and he
had a cat with whom my mother lost every argument. I tell her I'm
sorry I haven't seen her enough over the past few years. Then I lean
over the black hairs on her chin and kiss her cheek.
"Good-bye, mum," I tell her.
Her eyes open. "You still here?" she says.
My mother dies a little after 7 p.m. Eastern Time
on Friday, September 19, 1998, three days after her 76th birthday.
For some reason, I have only bubblings of sorrow until that Sunday.
On that day, I usually called her. I call my sister, who says the
mother cat is still taking care of only one kitten. My sister thinks
she'll lose another one soon. She says she could faint away right in
her recliner, too. "Hope you caught up on your sleep today," she
says over the phone.
I didn't. I thought of my mother and cried twice:
once in my wife's arms on the floor of our study, and once while
mixing tuna fish for lunch. I still can't figure out exactly how I'm
going to miss her. I guess I'm also still wondering when Bob Barker
got so goddamned old.
Copyright 2003 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
