Final Countdown
The solemn-faced man at the doorway to my mother’s bedroom wore blue latex gloves. “Would you please come in and remove her jewelry?” he asked. But Mom wasn’t wearing any, I thought, as I walked, numb, into her room. Then I realized he meant the little gold watch on her left wrist. It was such a part of her that I hadn’t noticed she still wore it. I pried open the stubborn clasp, feeling her cool skin.
I knew I would never touch Mom again. I felt I should take longer, take more care, removing the watch, but I also wanted this ordeal to be over. After all, I was sure Mom was gone. I had opened all the windows and the front door as soon as Mom died so her spirit could find a path to its new home. All that remained was her small body, a week away from its one-hundredth birthday.
***
Day Ten. Thud! That sound woke me from a cramped slumber on my mother’s leather loveseat. I heard the exit music for Saturday Night Live playing on the television. Damn! Tell me I didn’t hear that! I prayed.
I was at Mom’s apartment for one of our usual Sunday Sleepovers. I’d bring her a home-cooked meal and groceries for the week, including cookies—lots of cookies. Mom never met a cookie she didn’t like, but you’d never know it, she was so slim and trim. She also still lived on her own, but we both knew that couldn’t last much longer. This week we had begun our sleepover on Saturday night because Mom had fallen the week before. She looked like someone had beaten her with a baseball bat, her left side covered with purple bruises and even a black eye.
“Mom, are you OK?” I called. But of course, she couldn’t hear me because she’d taken off her hearing aids before going to bed. I rushed to her room and found her lying on her back on the carpet.
“Mom! What happened? I asked you to tell me if you needed to get up to go to the bathroom!”
Shit! If only I hadn’t dozed off!
“I can’t stand!” she said. “I’m sorry.”
That was Mom. She hated asking others for help. I’ll never know if she called for me and I slept through it, or if she just wanted to do it on her own. Mom gritted her teeth and grimaced as I gently helped her to her feet.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I know it hurts, but you’ve got to get up.”
I was mad at myself for not preventing her fall but also angry at her for falling. Mom couldn’t move like she used to, and she wouldn’t accept it.
It had only been a week since the previous fall. Two days later my mother, my brother Hank, and I talked with her primary care doctor about Mom’s most recent emergency room visit.
“Were you able to get up by yourself?” her physician asked about the fall.
“Yes, but do you think I need to go on hospice?” Mom asked pragmatically. She’d had the question on her mind for a while. A child of the Great Depression and a veteran of WWII and Korea, she was stoic and careful to disguise her true feelings.
“No! There’s no reason for that yet. But you might want to get a medical alert button. Then your kids would be notified and they could find you some help.”
“We tried that already,” I said. “She sent it back to the company after a week.”
On Day Nine I asked Mom how she was feeling as soon as she woke up. “Not good,” she said. “I really think I should be on hospice.”
I called my brother while Mom was having her usual pre-breakfast coffee and cookie, “Hank, Mom fell again last night.”
“I’ll be right over,” he said.
We knew the jig was up. Mom didn’t want to live like a prisoner in her own body. A former physical education major who made a hole-in-one when she was eighty years old, she felt fate had played a horrible joke on her. Hank and I didn’t want to force Mom to do anything she didn’t want to do. She had too much dignity—and too much moxie—for that. She said she wanted to die at home in her own bed. And being a former Air Force officer, she expected us to follow her orders. So, we did.
Mom and I spent Sunday afternoon sitting in her sunny living room and chatting. “I’ll ask Robyn to stay with you while I go to work this week,” I said. My best friend since seventh grade, Robyn was who Mom called “Daughter Number Two” ever since her mother died when she was fourteen.
“I’ll pay you your salary if you don’t go to work,” Mom offered. “You care more about your job than you care about me.”
“That’s not true!” I replied. “I just need a break sometimes.”
“Well, I need a break, too,” she said.
Mom’s response made me feel selfish and her neediness made me realize how sick she really was. Still, I secretly hoped I could escape from caretaking for just a few hours and go to work. I despaired about how I would manage Mom’s full-time care in the weeks and months ahead. Then I called my boss and told him I could not work that week.
Days Eight and Seven I spent trying to convince the doctor and her staff that Mom required hospice care. At the same time, I found it hard to accept how fast she was deteriorating. She had always bounced back before, even walking on her own after breaking her hip.
By Day Six, I’d finally persuaded the medical world that Mom needed to be on hospice. She hadn’t eaten anything since a bite of her pre-breakfast cookie on Day Seven.
“Gloria, if you don’t eat or drink you will go to Heaven,” the kind German-sounding hospice nurse said.
“I know,” Mom replied. She had taken to her king-sized bed by then and wouldn’t get out again. She had requested pull-up diapers because she didn’t want to have an accident. Now the nurse brought out real diapers for her, saying they were supposed to be easier to change. But left on our own, Hank and I struggled with them. Plus, Mom had refused a hospital bed, which would have helped with the diaper changes. Her king-sized bed seemed to stretch for miles.
Hank joked, “We’ve got five Masters’ degrees between us but we can’t figure out how to change an adult diaper.” Then we discovered bedsores on Mom’s poor bony rump. Our amateur efforts weren’t funny after that.
Besides our diaper battles, other instructions from hospice staff confused us or did not exist at all. “We’ll send over the morphine and the anti-anxiety medication,” they said after quickly demonstrating how to fill an oral syringe. “And we’ll deliver the oxygen machine tonight and show you how to use it.” Instead, we found a suitcase-sized machine with a bunch of tubes sitting outside her front door.
Luckily, my younger daughter is a nurse. She and her sister caught a flight the day after hospice started. I’m glad they arrived on Day Five when their grandmother, “Gramma,” could still talk and tell them how much she loved them.
“You girls are my favorites,” she said. It didn’t surprise me. Once they were born, I knew where I fell in the family pecking order.
We all huddled on Gramma’s bed that night. When she struggled to breathe, we attempted to get her to wear the oxygen mask. She refused, shaking her head furiously as we tried to put it on. We surrendered and propped her up on a triangular wedge pillow instead. My daughter showed me how to operate the oxygen machine and how to put the medications under Mom’s tongue.
“We love you, and appreciate all you’ve done for us,” we said. “We’ll be OK. We’ll take care of each other. You can go whenever you want to. We’ll be fine,” we lied.
By Day Four, Mom couldn’t talk anymore. My brother and I knew she could still hear though, so we talked to her, and reminisced about our childhoods.
“Remember how I broke my leg in third grade when my friend slid into me at home plate?” my brother asked her. “And the coach carried me to your car so you could take me to the hospital?”
“Dad was mad at himself for working late and missing the game,” I added. “When he got home that night and saw Hank with his cast and crutches, he started to cry. You were unflappable, Mom.”
Days Four, Three and Two passed in a blur of caretaking and sleeping when we could. It was like having a newborn again. I slept on a cot in her room. I tried to anticipate when she needed the morphine to keep ahead of her pain.
Over thirty worried relatives and friends called during these days. We held the phone to Mom’s ear so they could say their good-byes. It was cathartic for them, as well as for us, to see how much she was loved. “You were my second mother.” “You never gave up on me.” “You were my role model.” Hank and I heard the same heartfelt comments over and over.
“Sorry, Mom,” we told her, “It’s another call. You’re probably not happy about it, but at least you can’t tell us ‘No’ anymore.” We hoped for her sake the end would be soon.
Day One. Fabiola, the home health aide, and I dry-shampooed Mom’s hair and then she gave Mom a sponge bath. Suddenly Fabiola looked stricken. “I think she just stopped breathing,” she said. “Miss Gloria, can you hear me?” She checked Mom’s chest with her stethoscope, then called in the time of death. “Mrs. Austin passed at 9:30 a.m.,” she said, and closed Mom’s one half-open eyelid. Fabiola continued to wash and change her, speaking softly to Mom the whole time. I was grateful for her kindness.
“Mom wanted to look good for her trip back to Dad and the rest of the family,” Hank and I agreed. Then we hugged and wept, the shell of our mom on her nearby bed. We had done our best to honor her wishes. That was our cold comfort. Our mother’s time had finally run out.
For us it was Ground Zero. For her it was Lift Off.