For the last meal we ever eat together, I drive us to a diner near the hospital where Mom worked for almost thirty years but never will again. This diner was part of our rotation because of its cheese puffs; Mom and I loved nothing more than a shared appetizer. A common meal order from the two of us might go, “The smoked trout spread, the pimento cheese toast and the goat cheese fritters.” Even now, nine years later, when a restaurant offers up a creamy dip or an innovative delivery vehicle for melted cheese, I think, I wish you could have tried this one.
On this day, though, just after leaving the doctor’s office where she gave us news that we didn’t need a doctor to tell us, I’m sure neither of us ate. Mom stopped eating months ago. Plus, weirdly, after a lifelong slugfest with my own weight, suddenly the pounds are sliding off me like a boulder rattling down a mountain. In the days to come, I will say to myself, on the downside, you are keeping vigil as your mother dies. On the upside, you are doing it in size 8 jeans!
I sit in the vinyl booth in this random diner and I look at all the people having an ordinary lunch, the bartender prepping for dinner service. How odd it is, to be having this moment across the aisle from people living just an ordinary day. We are close enough to normal life to put my hand on its shoulder, and yet, totally out of reach.
At her funeral service in two weeks, I will say, “Mom always urged all of us to Carpe Diem and in this last year of her life, that’s just what we did. We traveled to her favorite place in the world, Carmel, California. She took a trip to the mountains with her beloved sisters and they laughed for four days straight. Throughout the year, she continued to work, to see patients, to help people to heal. She died barely two weeks after returning home from a last trip to the beach with her family, one week after her 50th anniversary, which she celebrated eating fried shrimp and curry corn with her favorite people in the world.“
Those things were true. But mostly, when I look back at the nineteen months between the knock on my door and her final breath, what I see is… rubble.
There’s a really specific mini-genre of stories about “the last great year of life,” mostly written by men, like Will Schwab’s End Of Your Life Book Club, where he and his Mom read Tolstoy together as she fades gracefully away, or Tuesdays with Morrie, where Mitch Albom gets weekly lessons on life from his old mentor.
I would have always imagined that the end of my story with Mom, if it really had to come, would have been shelved in that genre, the inspirational tearjerker book club kind of story. I would have imagined us living out her days Beaches style, wearing autumnal cardigans together while she gave me her final bits of life wisdom.
Mom had a heroic life. She deserved a heroic finale. That’s not what she got.
In reality, for years after her death I literally couldn’t even look at those Male Mom Memoirs because they made a sound inside my brain like a record needle scratching. In the face of these noble tributes to a graceful death, my last year with Mom is like comparing Chariots of Fire to Carrie. Then again, those books were both written by men who were not the primary caregiver. Maybe Morrie’s wife has a story called Every Single Fucking Minute with Morrie, and maybe it’s a portrait of grief and confusion that in terms of narrative cohesion resembles not Norman Rockwell but Picasso.
But we had a few moments; a few moments in which Mom was Mom and I was me. And the last one I can replay so clear it might as well be happening right this minute.
The End
“We’re going to talk about this now,” Mom says after the waiter delivers the basket of puffs to our table. Her voice is quiet and sad but it is hers. After the past year, I know the difference. “And only this one time. I can’t talk about it any more because I’ll get too sad.”
In these last eighteen months I have loved Mom as well as I ever imagined I could, maybe almost as much as she deserves. Of course I was not alone, and neither was Mom. But to me, much of this past year has felt like a two-person stage play, a year long conversation between two people trying to find a way to say goodbye. We have walked through this wilderness together, Mom and I, but our paths are about to diverge. I’m going to have to travel the rest of the way on my own.
And just as on the day she drew me a picture of her tumor, she is not thinking about herself. She is only thinking about the rest of us.
She says a few things to me about family, about the people she loves, about all the people who have done their best for her this year, amidst the chaos and confusion.
“I think I’ve set aside enough money for you,” she says. “I’ve tried to make sure you’ll be okay.”
The look on her face asks me to be proud of her, to affirm that she has been a good mom, that she has done a good job.
“I’ll be okay, Mom,” I say. “I don’t care about money. I only care about you.”
She sounds like the saddest version of herself, but her eyes tick with pride. “You’re handling this very well.”
“You taught me,” I say. “I wouldn’t be your daughter if I couldn’t.”
Her head tilts. Her eyes latch onto mine. I keep my breathing even, my gaze steady. As long as she is present, for every minute she is here, I am going to just take it in. I am just going to be grateful.
“For the rest of your life,” Mom says. She takes a deep breath. She has spent her life teaching people how to say goodbye, and now it is her turn.
“When I’m gone. Whenever you are in a situation and you’re wondering what you should do and you can’t ask me, just ask yourself: what will make me happy? And then do that. That’s all I ever want for you. All I’ve ever wanted. For you to be happy.”
I will always remember those parting instructions. But the truth is, I have never had to be happy without Mom, and I honestly don’t know if that’s something I can do.
When we are driving home afterwards, sitting silent at the red lights, part of me thinks, you need to write this down, so you will remember it afterwards. And then I think, I can’t stand to write it down. Living through it once is all I can handle.
“I loved every single thing about my life,” Mom says a few days later, in one of her last fleeting lucid moments. “I just wish it had gone on a little longer.”
It would never have been long enough for me.
The Beginning
Mom had a long term passionate affair with the musical Les Miserables; she loved the singing, the melodrama, the deep satisfaction of a good man ending his life surrounded by love.
Her favorite line was when a dying Fontine sings “And the tigers come at night, with their voices soft as thunder, and they tear your hope apart.” A simple sentiment, even a cliche, but Mom lived it with her patients. She knew how scared people could get at 3 AM, because that’s when they called her wrestling with their demons, and she always took their calls.
“The tigers come at night,” she would say, but “People always feel better in the morning,” and she would curl up in a tiny ball on a sofa downstairs in the dark, whispering into the phone until the sky shifted pink with dawn.
Mom never told people that their cancer could never recur, because sometimes it did. She never told people that their loved ones wouldn’t die, because everyone we love will die one day. It’s the truth at the center of every authentic story.
Some of your deepest fears will come true.
Eventually something you are sure you cannot survive will come to pass.
When I was in my 20s, I had three deep fears, three tigers that chased me in the middle of the night. I was afraid I would live my life alone. I was afraid I would never have children. I was afraid I would lose Mom before I was ready to lose her. Two of those three fears came true, and here I am
Live long enough, you will find yourself at some point standing shocked in rubble, but here’s the best hope I can create, and it’s the same hope that Mom offered her survivors every single day, and it is the single truth of every story and every life:
The abyss happens. Winter comes. Darkness falls.
Someone you love will get a devastating diagnosis, you will lose the job or the pregnancy or the election. Maybe you will claw your way back to the surface after the avalanche but you’re the only one who made it out alive, maybe the thing you cling to most dearly falls away forever. When you feel utterly lost, because we all get lost, the most important thing I can say to you, maybe the most important thing I will say all year, is simply this.
That feeling of loss, of hopelessness, of total darkness, of absolute despair?
This is not where the story ends.
This is where the story begins.
Here we go.
This is the fifth chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To start from the beginning, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter every Tuesday.
I remember this sad and devastating time in your life and I was and still am so proud of the way you handled it and the beautiful person that you are.
Thank you again for your story. You are touching on the chaos of being a witness to and the shehard of the end of life very well lived.