Everything
smelled yellow. The cancer had spread to Mom’s liver, so that’s maybe what I sensed:
her skin was sallow. But hovering above the sharpness of hospital bleach and
bedsheets, there was also a softer smell, something heavy and warm and unpleasant
that spread everywhere in the room.
My sister
was the one who found Mom seizing in her bedroom where Mom had spent much of
the past couple months—and Lauren who called 911. Six days later, I drove Lauren,
my father, and Wendy back to the hospital at two in the morning. We traveled
in silence; I stayed to the speed limit on the empty streets over Capitol Hill—no
reason left to rush—street lamps throwing a faded brown onto the trees and
houses around them.
There
were times in the hospital when Mom was conscious and lucid, and many more when
she slept; other times, she bucked in a frenzy of pain, and a few times Mom
spoke to us a strange, twisted language that made us all laugh. The trick was
to run enough morphine to ease the pain but drop it back to return her to us.
We called this dial-a-Myrna. But like so much of the week, it felt like the
choice between love and death.
Mom wore
a blue gown with little gold patterns. The oncology wing was on the top floor,
and the window of 1211 gave an expansive view of the Seattle’s thicket of
buildings against the gray arm of Puget Sound. Mom had so many visitors every
day, so it was good the other bed in her room was empty and people could sit there.
Otherwise, we just had a low-slung pleather chair sunk further under the weight
of a thousand wretched bedside visitors, its two arms, hard and wooden.
Mostly we
would talk to each other in the room and leave Mom out of it, not worried about
our laughter louder than anything else on the floor—the black humor of Mom’s
body and likely death—laughing at Mom waking up and telling Lauren to go out
and play with the bananas, laughing because good friends were sitting together
and this is what they did, hands on each other’s backs.
We saved serious
talk for the waiting room and once, the conference room the floor below because
Mom had written a living will that made no sense: Directives to physicians
usually advise a team in the event of a stopped heart to please allow the signatory
to pass quietly. But Mom’s demanded the violence of all measures, surely to burst
her cancer-ridden organs in the process. Even success was an absurdity in such
a body. But then Louise slammed the table with her open palm. You don't know,
Louise had said. You don't know what it was like: You weren't there. You
weren't there when Myrna and I sat in the dark theater and watched the movie Dad,
where a son came to visit his father every day and told him stories and fed him
ice cream and revived him from death; you weren't there when Myrna made me
promise… PROMISE! she said. Promise that you will do that for me, that you will
come every day. But Myrna... PROMISE! Promise, Louise: Promise me that you will
visit every day and feed me ice cream and read me stories. But Myrna, it's
different, you have cancer. PROMISE! she had said.
And I was
remembering Mom, her chin up and grinning, a white button blouse with green
paisleys over breasts still there and her glasses dark from the sun pouring
into our living room, chanting a camp song about backdoor trots: “Diarrhea. Unh!
Why were you born. Unh! Death, destruction, and despair. People dying
everywhere. Diarrhea. Unh! Why were you born. Unh!” I was remembering Mom
folding Lauren into a hug, remembering the feel of the hug myself, like her
whole body was a smile.
In the
hospital, I couldn’t do much for Mom, but I could feed her crushed ice. She ate
very little and couldn’t really drink, and her throat was scratchy and dry like
a cat’s. The ice machine down the hall would grind the ice with satisfying viciousness.
I could smell decay from her pores.
For the flake of ice on her lips, I took the cloth from the bedside table. Gently wiped her mouth. Watched her chest rise and fall with her breaths. Felt my own lungs empty and fill.
