A covenant
After January’s crisis my mother’s health got better for a few days, maybe a week or two, before returning to its slow decline. She did not feel well enough to show up for her doctor visits, and her doctor and her caretaker did as well as they could do on video. He restarted the medications she’d been taking, which caused her nausea to worsen, which caused her misery to deepen past the point that any medication, from a head shop or otherwise, could help. One evening, out of breath, she asked to be taken to the hospital. On the phone I told her caregiver the same thing I’d always said, which her caregiver knew well enough by then to not need me to repeat: My mom hates hospitals. Don’t let her go.
Her caregiver, who has always been infinitely patient and understanding with my mother, and with me, suggested we call the paramedics anyway. Let’s just see. The paramedics found my mother’s blood pressure too low, her heart rate slow, and now there was no arguing with them about anybody’s wishes—not even my mother’s, who by now had changed her mind and did not want to go anywhere. It’s just her numbers, one of the paramedics said to me. She has to go.
It turned out one of her medications was the problem. Absent a recent blood test, her doctor hadn’t known how high her potassium had risen, and now she needed emergency dialysis, which the hospital’s nephrologist informed me was both absolutely necessary and could kill her. Would I consent to it? she asked me. I asked her what she would do if this was her own mother in crisis, and she told me she’d do it. So OK. We’d start that morning.
The four of us—my brother and my mother’s two main caregivers and I—had our hospital routine established by then. Her nighttime caregiver would feed the dog and bring the nicotine. Her daytime caregiver would receive the paperwork and doctor’s notes and take pictures of everything and text me. I’d dutifully look at the texts, translating the doctors’ Spanish as best I could, which wasn’t much, and I’d handle the phone, receiving calls from every doctor who rounded my mom that day. They all had to ask me the same question, every time, one that always came with the same long preamble about her fragility, her health, and which, after the third or fourth one, I started interrupting. Yeah, I know, I said. She’s dying. Yes you can write down “DNR.” It never got easier to say.
It fell to my brother to make appearances in person. On her second night, after she made it through dialysis alive, he sat with her while she asked him helplessly, repeatedly, to take her home.
This time, she had good behavior. Maybe because my brother was around, or possibly because she did not have her cell phone. She did not call the cops, at least. She qualified for rehab. She was on new meds and had her caregiver around to make sure that the doctors and the nurses who took care of her in rehab understood her situation, did their best. Finally Matt and I flew down to see her. We brought the kids straight from the airport, and discovered that the rehab center was a clean and well-lit place with a good-smelling cafeteria and quiet wards and that under no circumstances did it let in children. Luckily for us, it had a patio. Some trees. In the hedge between it and the parking lot our kids discovered brown anoles and some slow-moving muscovy ducks. My mother’s caregiver wheeled her down. She looked good. Upright in her wheelchair, glad to see us, cold under a hot sun, anxious for her lunch. She still forgot the kids’ names as soon as we reminded her, but she watched them chase the ducks, who waddled for their lives, and took the gifts of sticks and rocks they brought her. Our two-year-old showed off her “yoga” move, which consisted of beding so her head was in the grass, then falling over. Our four-year-old asked her why she was sick.
We spent a week in Miami, dividing our days between visits to the rehab center’s patio and trips out to the beach on Key Biscayne and to the Frost Museum and Fairchild Gardens and the zoo. For the first time in my life, I was in Miami and at the same time happy. Happy to afford a place to stay that had a swimming pool instead of sleeping in my mother’s living room, blocking out the neighbors’ lights with sheets taped to the windows. Happy to have two kids to entertain and the cash to do it. (I want to write you an entire newsletter about the Frost Museum, which costs $29 per person and features a three-story aquarium, and about Pat Frost, the former principal of my elementary school, who once beat my brother with a paddle as a punishment for talking during Spanish class.) But anyway—we were in Miami. By the end of our week, my mom was home again. It was March now, the morning air just warm enough for swimming in the pool, hot in the afternoons but not yet hot enough to stun you. My mother’s caregiver was determined to get her out of bed every morning—if I let her stay in bed, she told us, she’ll never get out again—and not just out of bed but through the kitchen for her breakfast and down the kitchen steps into the driveway, where we sat together for our last two days, between outings for the kids, and did what there was to do. Our four-year-old made a castle out of rocks and bricks. Our two-year-old pretended to be afraid of my mother’s dog, then couldn’t stay away from him, then found a toy dog in the house and dragged it through the yard as she issued orders for it to hurry up. My mom and I did not talk to each other much—mainly she wanted to know, every few minutes, if we needed any lunch—but we looked up a lot, into the trees. Looking up at trees is what we’ve always done. We’ve never had a lot to say to one another, apart from monologues from her about the past, but we’ve always sat in that yard and looked up. This time we were listening for the blue jays and the cardinals and seeing all the lizards—mainly anoles, green and brown. Alert to passing airplanes, people passing with their dogs. A pair of barn owls had a nest at the top of a palm tree in the neighbors’ yard—my mom’s nighttime caregiver had discovered them—and on the last day of our trip we spied one. It was more brownish than white, and looked tired, I imagined, peering down at us with that typical owlish expression: big-eyed, watchful, very still. Any animal that can look down at you will appear to disapprove, as this one did. My mom could not get far enough in her wheelchair to see the nest, but she understood that it was there, its nest marked by a spatter of white birdshit on the sidewalk, straight below it. She seemed well.
Before we left her for the airport, though, I noticed there was water on her legs again, like condensation. “You have to keep your feet up,” I said. She dutifully put one foot up, on the short footstool that was as high as the arthritis in her hips allowed, which was still uncomfortable. A minute later, she forgot and put her foot back down. “Mom, I’m serious,” I told her. Like this might really make a difference. “You’ve got to keep your legs elevated.” She looked at them. She looked at me. “What’s wrong with them?”
Heart failure, kidney failure, lack of exercise, of circulation. A nurse had come to see her in her driveway the day before and informed us that my mom had “crackers” in her lungs. It wasn’t every day that she saw patients who spoke only English, and it took us a few minutes to figure out the nurse meant crackling, as in water. My mom was drowning.
“You’ve got water in your legs,” I said. “You’ve got to keep them up.”
“Oh,” she said. She looked at them again. “All right.”
She put them up. She put them down. She asked the name of our four-year-old, and if we’d ever given him a haircut (yes), and if we needed any lunch. My brother and his wife and step-daughter came by. We ate slices of watermelon and a pizza, and looked at the owl nest one more time. Then we got into our rental car and left.
A covenant
My mother lived for ten more weeks. She was better for a long time, outside in her driveway every day, and then she wasn’t better. Slowly, she lost consciousness, then died in her sleep.
I don’t want to write her final chapter because it all feels like a mess still. Hospice care, her caregivers, who struggled through their grief, and then the sudden urgency of plane tickets, of the obituary and the funeral and the burial and the memorial. Her bookstore. Emptying her house.
In her memoir Lost & Found, Kathryn Schulz explains that one of the Roman goddesses of death was Tacita, “the silent one”:
Ovid reports that, to propriate her on the Day of the Dead, the devout sacrificed to her a fish with its mouth sewn shut. It was an apt offering, to an apt deity. Death sews every mouth shut; everything about it defies language. The dead themselves can’t speak, and the living can’t speak firsthand about dying, and even finding appropriate words for mourning can be extremely difficult.
I know that I spoke in front of a roomful of people at her funeral, that I had to resort to imagining a string of letters, one for each room of her house, in order to keep track of what little I had to say. (“I hate death,” I started. I think I ended somewhere with how I’ll spend the rest of my life thinking of things I want to ask her, as I’ve done with my father for the past eleven years, and how with her the memory of an entire generation is now gone: the grandmother of hers who could hit a spittoon from across a room, and the grandmother who’d lived through the San Francisco earthquake, who’d fled from California to Miami in a covered wagon. What lived in my mother of the two of them is gone.)
Mostly the language I’ve been wrestling with is legal. A restrictive covenant, in writing, to appear as an addenda on the documents that someone signs to buy her house, protecting three trees in her yard. Two gumbo limbos and a live oak. My mother planted them herself. They’re thirty-five years old and massive now, with crowns that intersect to form a canopy that, together with the neighbors’ trees, span a third of a city block.
To wit:
Buyer must agree to comply with City Ordinances in place to protect the removal of any trees, specifically, Oak and Gumbo Limbo, from the Property, and is hereby informed to abide by the City of Coral Gables Ordinance No. 2017-45, § 2 (Att. A), 12-5-2017) Chapter 82, Vegetation, Article II, Tree Protection and Preservation, and is enforceable by law.
It might be the neighbors’ bowls of dog food, left out all night, that feed the rats that bring the owls, but it’s those trees that made them choose to build their nest next door. Together with the neighbors’ trees, they form a canopy that spans most of a city block. The chicks have fledged and now the owls have built another nest, in another neighbor’s yard, on the canopy’s far side.
I know that when we sell the house the new owner will likely tear most of it down. It’s got termites falling from the windows, it stinks down to its studs of cat and dog urine and smoke. But if I can help it they will not take down those trees. Fill the pool my father and I swam in, rip out of the floorboards cut from near-extinct Dade County Pine, take the copper scuppers off the roof—it’s just a house. Her memorial will be the owls’. Those trees.
Read, read, read
My sister-in-law gave me a copy of Kathryn Schulz’s Lost & Found, about the death of Schulz’s larger-than-life father, that has been a source of comfort and catharsis as I read and reread. (Thank you, Andrea!)
That thing about imagining letters in a house in order to remember stuff was a technique of the Ancient Greeks that survives in our age thanks to Frances Yates. Her masterwork, The Art of Memory, can be an intimidating doorstop, but if you’re a fan of ancient history, the middle ages, or psychology, you’ll probably love it as much as I do. Or at least you’ll find in it a few tricks for memorizing your next speech. I’m rereading it now as I vaguely freak out about my own chances of one day developing dementia.
One book I don’t recommend at all is Jim Crace’s Being Dead. Unless you’re fascinated by the process of human decomposition, gore, and/or the vast interiority of a pair of middle-aged white academics, maybe. I picked it up for a few bucks on the sidewalk, along with a copy of Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, because I’d read and loved Crace’s later novel, The Pesthouse, and because it’s a lot of fun to buy random used books on the sidewalk. Read The Pesthouse if you’d like to visit a postapocalyptic version of the United States where the Founding Fathers are remembered as figures from a distant history who are one day coming back to save us, if you don’t mind a graphic account of butchering a horse (the protagonists were hungry), or if you like things that are relentlessly bleak for 250 pages then surprise you with a heartwarming ending.
A picture
At the Phillip & Patricia Frost Museum of Science, where we got to pet some stingrays, check out that three-story shark tank, look into the eyes of a live indigo snake, and found no sign of a certain paddle.