“Joni, do you get mad?”
I was sitting with my mother as she lay dying, and that question came out as she struggled to find a more comfortable position in the bed that was her prison. She spent most of those dying days in an underwater sleep, waking occasionally when some discomfort forced her to surface. She would then startle me with some question or statement, which she did this day. But she never stayed awake long, and did not stay then to hear my answer.
My mother was in a nursing home when she stopped all resistance to her dying. She was there initially to rehabilitate her foot and to learn to walk with the aid of crutches or a walker. Once her left leg was amputated — the toes of her right foot had already been taken — I believe that she knew that she could not go to live again in the house my sister had rented for the two of them: it was not “accessible.” The last bit of her fierce independence had been taken, leaving her with what she jokingly called her “nub and stub.” She told my sister, “No more.” She was on dialysis to augment her poorly functioning kidneys and she wanted no more medicines, treatments and remedies, and she demanded that they all stop. The doctor told my sister that without dialysis, the toxins in my mother’s blood would build up and she would grow sleepier each day, until death. My sister and I took turns sitting at her bedside, listening, laughing, talking, waiting and asking, “Do you want some medicine,” hoping that the answer would not again be “No.” I learned the term “palliative care.” I also learned more about my mother’s triumphs over tragedy, knowledge that shook loose other childhood memories.
My mother was no stranger to anger: her husband beat and battered her, bashed and bruised her children. I remember trembling in bed, a pillow on my head to muffle my mother’s pleas. In the morning there were black eyes and a swollen mouth. (I once asked my sister what she recalled of our abused and ragged childhood, and she told me, “Everything.” Later that night, I sat and cried for her memory.) And I believe that I was an angry young man with a temper so volatile that I was forbidden to own a knife. Perhaps it was fortuitous of my father — if he was the one who forbade that ownership — for when he placed a knife against my throat when I was sixteen, I might have created a need for this space to be filled by someone else.
I don’t know what my mother was asking: she had to have seen me get angry. She was there the night when, in defense of my battered sister, I struck my father. I have no idea of the nature of the question, whether there was some larger, philosophical contemplation going on in her dying mind. She knew that I had never hit my first child, and also knew how ashamed I was that I had spanked my second two children, but I ache at the thought that she might have believed that I was angry with her.
Yes Mom: I got mad. I did not want you to leave. I’m not sorry that I was angry, but I’m sorry that I let you see it. The last thing you needed in the last days of your life was a kid whining for you to stay when you had to go. For who was I to say that you may not lay you down to sleep?