Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things Page 16

  Jane’s care would be paid for from the proceeds of my just-published book. She wouldn’t have to sell the house. I promised her that everything would stay the same and that I would try to bring her home again. She accepted my promise, even though we both suspected it was one I would never be able to keep.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Heroic Measures

  The day in February when Jane died was like all of the other days that winter: The temperature hovered near zero, and the wind sliced through you in sudden gusts. That was the year it started snowing in early November, and snow fell every day until May. Not crushing blizzards with school closings and power outages, but daily fresh blankets of snow layered one on top of the other.

  Each morning I could hear the whine of snowblowers up and down Main Street as neighbors dug out and then dug out again.

  By February, the drifts and snow piles were impressive mini-mountains. The massive bulldozed snow mound in the parking lot at the mall was three stories high. It didn’t disappear until June.

  I dwell on this, sometimes, because when my mother died, the end was such a confusing combination of grotesque and gentle that experiencing it was like being buried beneath layer upon layer of snow, which when it falls is weightless and beautiful, while what it is covering is its own dense, heavy, and frozen heart.

  She made it through Christmas, sitting in her chair in her pretty private room on the second floor of the nursing facility where she spent the last year of her life. Her bed was placed against a large window; the view outside was of a huge maple tree and a quiet street on the edge of Cornell University’s campus. The nursing home was housed in a restored Victorian mansion scattered among the other private homes and mansions of the university’s “Greek Row.”

  All winter long, waves of glossy-haired sorority girls paraded on the sidewalk below my mother’s window on their way to “rush” gatherings. They were all bare legs and UGG boots and tended to move in large and liquid groups—prancing like Lipizzaners, clapping their hands together, and huddling in clusters for warmth. The previous fall, we watched through her window as teams of shirtless boys played volleyball on the grass. They were members of Alpha Zeta, the university’s agricultural fraternity—raw-boned and muscular Adonis types who reminded me of the farm boys I’d gone to high school with three decades earlier.

  After my father left and our dairy farm failed in the 1970s, my mother went to work at Cornell, floating through various departments before settling in as a typist at the College of Engineering. She did this for seven years, and then, encouraged by her bosses, she applied to and was accepted at the university as a full-time undergraduate. She was forty-eight years old. She went on to receive her MFA at Cornell and taught, briefly, in the English department, the same place where she had once xeroxed lesson plans and syllabi for professors.

  Later on, after her death, a university administrator made a special point of letting me know that she would always see Jane as a hapless, frumpy, amusingly incompetent secretary, giving me some insight into the downside of my mother’s late-life experience in academia. By leaving the ranks of the staff, getting an education, and becoming a professional, she must have been uncomfortable evidence that, if a single mother and ex-wife of a down-on-his-luck dairy farmer from Freeville can do it, then the professors strolling the ivy-draped campus might not be quite so special as they thought. My mother later went on to a successful fifteen-year career teaching writing at Ithaca College, and she came to deeply appreciate the students and faculty of the lesser-known local college, who treated her like one of their own, until her twenty-year-long battle with rheumatoid arthritis forced her to retire when she was seventy.

  Despite her somewhat complicated relationship to the university, living in the nursing home in a big old house on the edge of campus felt right. For someone who was older than many of her professors when she went to Cornell as a commuter student and who had never lived in a dorm or had a roommate, my mother’s presence in what we jokingly called “on-campus housing” at the end of her life was symmetrical.

  We moved her into the room in the big Victorian house in January, along with her portable wheelchair, books, television, some ancestral paintings, and her cat, Sophie—delivering her to the care of professionals, whom she quickly befriended, although she never mixed with the other residents. She took her meals on a tray in her room and occasionally went downstairs to have coffee on the home’s enclosed porch. My sisters and I closed and padlocked the front door of her house on Mill Street. The late-night Life Alert calls stopped, the village’s volunteer fire department EMTs turned their attention elsewhere, and we all breathed a sigh.

  Our visiting shifts at the nursing home coincided with what we had established when she was still home: Rachel in the morning, my aunts in the late afternoon, and me for supper. Anne drove from Rochester every Saturday.

  My mother’s family and friends rallied around her. They colonized her room, and many late afternoons when I went to have supper with her, there was at least one other person there. Often, her nieces were laughing with her about a movie they had watched, a friend was trading campus gossip, or her sisters were talking about what Mika Brzezinski had said that morning on MSNBC. (Old people fall into two camps: Fox or MSNBC. She was in the latter.)

  Winter finally ended. I took her for drives, and, twice, we visited her old house on Mill Street. In advance I took the padlock off, turned on the heat, and put on a pot of coffee. I was nervous about what it would feel like to be with her in the old house again, but I wanted to reassure her that it was just as we had left it. Sure enough, there was her bed, the walker, the pipes attached to the walls. We sat and drank coffee together, talking about cleaning and organizing projects we needed to do. I told her that we could stay at the house as long as she wanted. She looked out through the ancient wavy glass of the front window toward the Japanese lilac tree. Dusk was starting to fall. “I feel like I’d better get back to Ithaca,” she said. I got her coat and wheelchair, unplugged the coffeepot, and put the padlock back on the door.

  Through the summer, when Cornell’s campus was made quiet by the absence of students, we kept the big window next to Jane’s bed open. The leaves of the maple tree just outside twirled in prisms of sunlight. We went wherever a wheelchair could go.

  Autumn slid in, and the students came back to school. The volleyball-playing bros took off their shirts, and the girls gamboled down the sidewalk in shiny-haired packs. On Labor Day, I had arranged to pick Jane up to go to the movies. When I arrived, she was being brought out strapped to a gurney. I followed the ambulance to the hospital, and my sisters and I spent the night with her in the ER, along with drunk and disorderly partying college students. I was too nervous about her frailty to take her out after that.

  For our mother’s last Christmas, my sisters and I organized a family musical for her and the other residents of the home. I hired a pianist, we chose favorite Christmas songs, and her grandchildren and her daughters—the old Gene Pool Choir—sang for her. Bruno, Michaela, and Avila came, and Angela brought Sparkle, who slept quietly on her lap. Some of the other residents were wheeled in and a fire was blazing in the big stone fireplace. Jane’s eyes were closed. I knelt down next to her. I knew she didn’t want it to end.

  Jane stopped eating. My sisters and I frantically tried to find food that would appeal to her. One day I brought her a small cup of beef stew I had made—a throwback to the hearty meals of my childhood. She thanked me, and then she said that the smell of it made her feel sick. She asked me to take it away. Heartbroken, I ate it alone in my car, sitting in the parking lot of the nursing home.

  On Christmas Eve, some of her grandchildren gathered in her room. She drank a sip of champagne. Shortly after that, she asked us to tell even her closest friends that she didn’t want any more visits. This drawing-in is fairly common with people who are dying, but we didn’t know that she was so near the end. We did as she asked.

  The medical director presented u
s with a “do not resuscitate” form to fill out. I assumed this was the standard option for anyone facing medical treatment in a hospital or nearing the end of life. Even though my sister Anne had walked Jane through filling out an advanced directive a couple years before, the DNR kept coming back at us—offered up on clipboards in the emergency room, the ICU, the doctor’s office, and the nursing home. Every time it was offered, Jane’s answer was the same: Heroic measures, please. Where do I initial?

  This time, the medical director explained that if she collapsed or stopped breathing, chest compression would likely break her ribs. She described the violent CPR procedures EMTs would be required to perform. Jane looked up at us. Her voice was little more than a whisper: “Heroic measures WILL be taken,” she said. I laughed. The DNR dance had become a joke between us. It wasn’t that she was in denial, I decided. She just wanted to stay.

  A few days later, Emily and I asked Jane if she was up for a caper. She laughed and agreed, and we took her to the movies. My mother was the original movie fiend; she had the encyclopedic knowledge of a savant and the heart of a fan. We picked her up at night. She hadn’t been out after dark in many months. Somehow, with the help of an aide, we got her and her wheelchair into the car and drove through the snow to a downtown theater. We watched The King’s Speech. I kept glancing over at her to make sure she was still okay. As fitting an end as it might have been, I did not want my mother to die at the movies. Afterward, she asked if we could drive around through the backstreets of Ithaca and past the frozen waterfall at the edge of town. Emily reached forward from the backseat and helped to prop her up so she could see out the window. A cinematic and gentle snowfall was powdering the dark, thick, and frozen air. It was beautiful, and she knew she would never see any of it again.

  Since Jane raised my sisters and me to stay comfortably off topic, our time together at the end of her life was spent stoically sharing small talk. She never discussed her death, even after a hospice aide started coming. She only ever made one acknowledgment of what was ahead: “I told Rachel she could have the carriages in the barn,” she told me. The two old vehicles were remnants of her grandfather’s life as Freeville’s doctor in the 1900s. My sisters and I loved these big ancient museum pieces. We would sit on their scratchy horsehair seats as children and pretend we were making horse-drawn house calls. I didn’t know if some long-ago agreement existed between Jane and Rachel about the carriages, and I couldn’t imagine where Rachel would put them, but our mother’s one directive seemed reasonable. More importantly, it told me that Jane was trying her best to face what was coming, without talking about it.

  I called Brad, our local funeral director. I wanted to know if there was room in our family plot. Brad pulled down an old leather-bound ledger, dating from the mid-1800s, and found our family’s page. Although the funeral home had computerized its records, he said he still used the old book to record and map out the cemetery plots. “There’s room,” he said. “We can put her next to her parents.” Then he gave me his cell number and said, “I want you to call me whenever this happens. I will come myself and take care of her.”

  I asked Bruno if he would make a casket for her. I knew he had made his father’s, a simple box crafted of rough pine with rope handles. When he asked me what we wanted Jane’s casket to look like, I told him to make a polished oak box with plain brass handles—just like the Stickley furniture that had been passed down through our family.

  My relationship with Bruno had progressed in reverse proportion to my mother’s fading. During our courtship, I would leave her side and leap into his truck. We would drive out through the countryside, lower the windows, and look at the moon. I had never felt such exhilaration; maybe the fact that it was leavened with my dawning grief made it such a happy sadness. When we decided to get married, a mere five months after our first kiss, we visited Jane, still living in her house, and held hands as Bruno asked her permission to marry me. She was taken aback by this old-fashioned gesture and looked at me. “Amy doesn’t have to ask my permission for anything,” she said.

  “Ma, I love him something awful,” I replied, giving her a line from Moonstruck to draft upon.

  She laughed. The eyebrow shot up, and she continued our movie reference: “Well, that’s too bad… but okay.”

  Bruno and I shared a life marked by emergencies, middle-of-the-night phone calls, pacing outside the ICU, and impromptu conferences in the car or the hospital parking lot. Aside from my sisters, my husband was the only person who understood my desperation to get my mother to stay.

  I left Jane’s bedside and drove several miles out of town to the carpentry shop where Bruno was making her casket. The wind had picked up; it was starting to howl. In my mind I always associate a certain type of winter howler with Little House on the Prairie and the fierce winter of 1880 described in the book The Long Winter. I scored this particular squall as a 3 out of 5 on the Laura Ingalls Wilder Scale and mentally asked myself my standard question: “Pa, do we have to rechink the logs in the cabin with rags tonight to try to keep the blizzard out?” (If the answer is no, and it always is, one does not complain out loud.) All the same, this was a coat-flapping, hat-losing, scarf-spinning subzero blast. It was 6:00 p.m. and already dark. Up the country road, I saw the carpentry shop with its lights on. Bruno’s truck was parked near the front door. I sat in the car for a minute, trying to prepare.

  Inside the shop it was warm, and the air smelled of sawdust. Bruno was working with Ben, a cabinetmaker who regularly made kitchen cabinets for the houses Bruno built. The two men stood back and let me circle the box, which was sitting on sawhorses. It was entirely plain: quarter sawn oak, dovetailed corners. A lid to be placed on top and fastened down with pegs. I felt honored by the labor of these two men, crafting a simple box for an old woman who was about to die. I told them she would love it. Weirdly, that seemed very important.

  The day before Jane died, Aunts Jean and Millie spent most of the morning with her. I arrived in her room and saw Rachel at her side and our two dear aunts sitting, huddled together at the foot of her bed. For once, these sisters who had been engaged in a lifelong conversation were silent.

  Mom perked up. “Do you hear that?”

  “Um, no, Mom, hear what?”

  “All night long, I heard a choir singing.”

  “Oh.” Rachel and I looked at each other. “What were they singing?”

  “Songs from the thirties.”

  “Like… Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians?” I asked her, referencing the cheesy pop chorus from that era that we used to laugh about.

  “Yes, sort of,” she said. We told her that even though we couldn’t hear it, we were happy that she could.

  She asked us to look out her window to see if there was a glee club practicing in the snow. We looked outside, past the bare limbs of the giant maple tree. It was quiet.

  “Is it the morphine?” I silently mouthed to Rachel.

  She nodded in return. “Must be.”

  Rachel went home to check in with her kids after school. I called and asked her to come back. “Grab a book so I can read to Mom,” I told her.

  Periodically, especially through her times in the hospital, we read aloud to her. I enjoyed doing it. Our mother was a great reader and writer. She had the refined and literary taste of the intellectual she had become. During one long stint in the ICU, I read James Joyce’s Dubliners. We finished with the peerless, melancholy story “The Dead,” with its beautiful meditation on love and the passage of time. And, of course, the elegiac setting in snowy Dublin. I also read my entire memoir aloud to her, as I was writing it. (“Make it funnier,” she always said.)

  An hour later, Rachel came back waving A Passage to India. “I don’t know what I was thinking—I just grabbed it off the shelf,” she said. She sat down and handed the book to me, and I began to read.

  I struggled with the pronunciation of the Indian setting and characters, which I was trying to express using what I thought was a vague India
n dialect (when I’d read Dubliners, an awkward Irish accent kept creeping in). Then I would try to switch to something Englishy for the British characters, but the characters, place names, and accents quickly got confused.

  I was definitely making E. M. Forster funnier.

  Jane’s eyes were closed. Was she sleeping?

  I bumbled along until I came to this description of the sky over the landscape of Chandrapore:

  The sky too has its changes… Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue. By day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference—orange, melting upwards into tenderest purple. But the core of blue persists, and so it is by night. Then the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault.

  “Oh, I love that,” she whispered. “I know just what that looks like.”

  Our mother was an aficionado of skies, clouds, and the beautiful celestial blanket that draped over our farm at the edge of the village. She claimed to even love the (unlovable) gray, bleak, lowery skies of winter. I pictured her when she was healthier, out on her porch in springtime, looking at the sky and listening to the pulsing song of the peepers on the creek as she smoked her one cigarette.

  This is the last thing I remember her saying.

  Where do we go? If you don’t believe in a heaven populated with angels, Jesus guiding flocks of children, overseen by a benevolent god sitting on a massive throne, what else do we have? My mother, although a lifelong Methodist, didn’t seem to believe in these things. She kept her own counsel about her most private thoughts and beliefs. And yet, Jane seemed to be headed somewhere. She was passing on.

  The next day, the day of her death, Rachel and I sat with her again. She took some sips of water. She ate one blueberry. It didn’t feel like a vigil to me, but more like keeping her company. We’d done that my whole life: at the kitchen table with cups of coffee, taking drives out into the countryside, weeding her garden together.