Authors: Victoria Zackheim
I watch my mother throw her bills into the recycling bin, try on coffin wear, and decide which shoes go with her eternal crepe turquoise dress. This seems like a good time to ask her if she’d like to say anything particular in her obituary. She pauses, looks heavenward, and says, “No matter how my life has been, I’m glad I had it.”
I’m so happy for her. I’m so sad for me.
She’s still taking excellent care of herself, taking all her medications and keeping to a proper renal diet. She says, “I want to look good and feel good when I die.” But after eight years of a chocolate-free existence she has consented, with some coaxing from me, to have dessert every night. “That’s the point, isn’t it?” I tell her. “You need to live a little,” so she does. The chef at Garden of Palms starts to cry from joy when we tell him she’ll have dessert from now on.
After getting word of her imminent departure, three of our family clans gather on that very weekend to pay homage to my mother. She’s having a going-away party.
On Sunday morning, we all meet at the French Market on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. These are the kin my brother and I grew up with but haven’t seen for a long time. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and such, everyone squeezing together
in the restaurant’s little centrally located indoor gazebo and ordering a lot of fried food and dips. And dessert, of course. It’s like musical chairs up there. We all exchange seats to have a chance to visit the past, then we converge back at the Garden of Palms, where other residents are offended at the joy we share in just being together. One angry grandma says, “They have some nerve.”
My generation and our kids sit in the umbrella shade of wrought-iron patio tables and listen well. We get to hear stories from the elders of the great migrations of our great-great-grandfather through Mongolia, and our great-great-grandmother’s trek through Czechoslovakia with her six children. We tap the root. Together there are thirty of us, cross sections of three generations who have come to pay respect and gratitude to my mother, who over the last seventy years has brought us divine messages, manic comedy, true forgiveness, unconditional acceptance, and love, love, love.
So, in effect, she is orchestrating a ritual of death with dignity, compassion, and celebration. I hear the symphony. It is an extraordinary expedition into the complete unknown, trust, beauty, and surrender. I am not aware of any families that have had the privilege and good fortune to participate in a positive death experience, where one has the ability to have an intimate conversation with the dying—not fraught with suffering, misery, and fear but instead infused with liberation and exaltation.
Monday morning is more intimate. It is imperative that my mother have alone time with her sister, her nieces, my brother,
and me. Door closed, sacred and divine apologies, confessions, forgiveness, and looking into the face of death, confrontation of immeasurable degree. Looking into the face of someone you’ve known your whole life, knowing they are going to die shortly and saying goodbye, is powerful with a capital P. My youngest cousin says goodbye to my mom in the dining room. She walks out and collapses in tears into my arms.
The family is departing in waves. By Monday afternoon, it is just me and my brother. I ask if there’s anything she’d like to do. We agree that it’s a relief that she doesn’t have to be at dialysis. She says, “Let’s go to the theater.”
Two years earlier, my mother had gone around the block to the Lee Strasberg Theatre and submitted her play
Love as a Dying Art
. It is a black comedy about a middle-aged woman desperate for attention from her family, who pretends she is dying of cancer so they’ll treat her with more love and respect. The receptionist had promised my mother that they would at least do a staged reading, so she could hear the play out loud. She was still waiting to hear it.
I say, “Great, let’s go.”
My brother says, “I’ll drive her.”
My mother says, “I want to walk.”
I say to my brother, “I’ll walk with her. What’s the worst that could happen? She could die.”
We laugh.
We leave the Garden of Palms and wobbly-walk about fifty yards to the corner, and then enter the theater. The woman at the desk recognizes my mother and begins apologizing, adding, “We haven’t forgotten about you.”
“Oh, I’m glad,” says my mother, resting her arms on the counter. “I’m dying.”
The lady goes pale. “Oh, I’m …”
“Well, I’d just like to hear my play before I die.”
“Of course, I’m so sorry.” She pulls out the calendar. “How’s next Thursday?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Oh, ummm, how about this Thursday?”
My mother shakes her head.
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Oh, definitely,” says Mom.
“Let me get your number, and I’ll arrange it right away. I’ll call you as soon as I get the actors together, and we’ll do it in the little theater.”
What an extraordinary feeling of revenge for all playwrights who have waited weeks, months, years, and sometimes forever to hear back!
By the time we return to Garden of Palms, it’s time for dinner. Hamburger, zucchini, kugel, and chocolate cake for dessert. My mother is excited: everyone in the dining room is happy to see her. She has been a friend and kind angel to all of them. Some look confused because they know what’s going on. Others are oblivious. I join her at the table with her best friends, Ruth, Phyllis, and Gloria. They know she’s not long for this world, yet at the same time they are so excited that she is eating the same food as they are and that they can say “Isn’t this delicious?” out loud. The chocolate cake tastes like it’s been sweetened with Splenda, but they all like it very much.
It’s seven o’clock. We go upstairs to her room. She conducts her nightly ritual: sponge bath, brushing her teeth, and flossing. Running around her room naked, she looks like a badly wounded little bird, with terrible bruises from the dialysis portals, flesh hanging where it used to be stuffed to the brim. She looks so fragile. It’s hard for me to leave. I ask how she is.
She says, “I’m nervous.”
I say, “What are you nervous about?”
She says, “Dying.”
I ask, “Do you want to practice?”
“Yes.”
We sit on the side of the bed where the oxygen tanks are set up. I take the tubes and place them gently around her head and place the hoses up her nose. “So, if you feel like you’re dying, get into bed with these on, get comfortable, lie down, and relax. Breathe.” She does a good job. “Either you’ll fall asleep and wake up feeling better, or you’ll die.”
“Okay, that’s easy.”
We take off the apparatus.
She says, “I can’t wait to see your father. I know he’s waiting.”
“Yes.” I hold her hand. “I’m going to miss you so much.”
“I know, my baby, I know. It’s time for me to go.”
I hug and kiss her goodnight. I ask if she’s sure I should leave. She asks if I want to stay. I’m confused.
Earlier in the evening, the hospice nurse had taken her blood pressure, pulse, temperature. Normal. I thought: It’s been a busy weekend with the whole family, I have quite a journey ahead, it could be a week or two before she goes, so I decide
to head north on the 101, as opposed to the hotel, ten minutes away, to get some acupuncture and bodywork from my cousin Linda.
I tell her that I’ll see her in the morning.
After my acupuncture treatment is over, I fall right asleep, only to wake up a little while later and wrestle with myself about getting up and going back to the hotel. But it is so warm and comfortable at my cousin’s house, I can’t even get my body to cooperate, so I surrender.
My mother wakes up at 5
AM
, like she does every morning. She takes out her list of prayers from the bedside table, blessing us all and asking again for world peace. She takes her medication. She washes up and makes her bed. She falls. She gets up and gets dressed in a pretty aqua sweat suit, fixes her hair, and puts on her makeup. She goes to breakfast.
I wake up with a start and check my phone for messages. My mother has called at 9:09. I call her at 9:20, and she says, “I’m falling apart. I feel really cold. I walked down to breakfast, but I had to come back to my room in a wheelchair. I think you should come. I’m cold.”
“I’ll be right there. Is there anything I can bring you?”
“Chocolate.”
I leap from the bed and am dressed in thirty seconds. I ask my cousin if she has any chocolate. She hands me a box of Dove chocolates in the shape of hearts. Perfect.
I get in the car and drive. My mother gets on the computer and makes a $10 donation to Doctors Without Borders.
I had such marvelous plans for my mother’s final moments on earth. I had special music to die by. I intended to read the love letters written by my father to my mother when he was in the army for six months, before they were married. I had a stack of those and would use them to set the stage, the mood for their heavenly reunion. I had my yoga mat in tow and would stretch and breathe and use my physical body to release hers. Then I imagined, in the last minutes, I would crawl in her bed to be with her, take her in my arms, lay her head on my breast, and kiss her forehead until her last exhale.
But, as my great-grandfather used to say, man makes plans and God laughs.
So Tuesday morning, while I’m sitting in traffic on the 101, my mother dies. God must have gotten a real kick out of that.
I understood pretty quickly that I was where I was supposed to be. My brother was also in traffic at the time, and my sister-in-law, always at my mother’s building, being the director of operations there, happened to be on the way to the dentist. It was Diane, a kind nurse who worked at Garden of Palms, who held my mother’s hand as she took her final breaths. Just like we had practiced, Mom put on the oxygen, lay down, took three breaths, and then she died.
My mother’s body is still warm when my brother and I arrive. We kiss and hug her one last time and cry a lot. While the man from the mortuary wheels her out on the gurney, the woman from the Strasberg Theatre calls.
“We have a cast ready for tomorrow evening.”
“It’s too late. My mother died this morning.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Yes. I’m sure you are.” Ah, the revenge of the playwrights.
According to the family psychic, Gloria, with whom Aunt Florrie has been consulting for the last thirty or so years, my father, in heaven, was standing in a circle with other family, and my mother surprised him. He knew she was coming, but it usually takes a week or so to get through purgatory and all the final arbitration of one’s good and bad behavior. Yet my mother, pure of heart and soul, went VIP, express elevator, right to the pearly gates, where she was welcomed by archangels who recognized her as an old friend, and held open the gates as she waltzed right in.
According to the psychic, my father spun around, lifted her into his arms, and immediately drew the curtain. I guess they had some catching up to do.
Now, some of you might say, “Well, that’s silly,” or “How do you really know that happened?” I admit that it’s challenging to trust. It requires faith. And we are filled with so much doubt, how can we trust that there is an afterlife, that it’s good, that our dreams of heaven can be real? Well, as a family, we discussed this with my mom, and she agreed to send us a sign that in fact she was in heaven. This is just one of the blinding messages we got from the other side: My uncle, the family photographer and videographer, wanted to share some old movies with us after the funeral.
One of the tapes he pulled from his archive, which contained hundreds of hours of video, was a VHS tape my
mother and father had recorded twenty years ago, as a birthday gift to her sister, Florrie, for her fiftieth birthday. The title of the tape was
Florrie Raises the Roof
, in which my mother parodied all the songs of
Fiddler on the Roof
and sang them as a tribute to my aunt. My mother crafted cardboard cutouts of the family, images that perfectly suggested our characters. There was a circle cut out for the faces, so my mother could stick her face into the hole and impersonate each of us, like my Uncle Paul singing, “Now I am a rich man, di di, did ididi dum.” It was hilarious and very touching to see her portray us with such love and affection.
So what was the epiphany? It came with my mother’s introduction to her production. The very first image we saw of her—and this was Saturday morning, after we buried her on Friday afternoon—was the beginning of the tape, in which my mother was dressed, as—a drumroll, please—a guardian angel. Yes, halo and all.
My mother’s death was not traumatic; it was relaxing. She took the tragedy out of death—quite an accomplishment. She had no unfinished business, no loose ends. She went in peace. My mother put the wonder in wondrous, the marvel in marvelous, the truth in trust, the will in must. As our family tries to comprehend this
happy ending
, the ultimate oxymoron, we realize that each moment is precious, fragile, and more so because we witnessed her farewell to friends and family, in utter humility that serves us beyond measure.
She taught us how to die. A lesson that could, in a funny way, save our lives.
It’s amazing to me that, at the age of seventy-eight, I’ve seen a dead body only once.
I left Sydney at the age of twenty-one for Montreal, so when my parents, aunts, and uncles died it was always at a distance, few places being more geographically removed from the rest of the Western world than Australia. Close friends have died but, again, always at a remove. I’ve seen them sick and debilitated, but never actually dead. The only death I’ve ever witnessed was that of my maternal grandfather, Wolf Sniderman.
I can’t say I loved my grandfather, but I was in awe of him and at times even feared him. He was a remote figure with whom I had no emotional connection whatsoever. Adding to this lack of connection was the fact that he spoke mainly Yiddish, his heavily accented English being the source of much embarrassment to me in 1930s Sydney.