Exit Laughing (24 page)

“You don’t have to get all gussied up,” I told her. “He’s a
hospice
rabbi. He’s used to seeing people in their bathrobes.”

“I’m not people,” my mother said, propped up on the hospital bed that had recently replaced the single bed in her apartment at the retirement place. “And I don’t parade around in a bathrobe when company comes.” Even now, at ninety-five, impossibly frail and tethered to an oxygen tank, Irene looked glamorous in her blue silk nightie with the ivory lace trim.

“He’s not company,” I protested halfheartedly, though, really, there was no point in arguing. My mother, the former belle of Pittsburgh, would die before she let any man see her in bedclothes without her “face” on.

Which is exactly what would happen, but we didn’t know that yet.

Two weeks earlier, before the buildup of fluid in her lungs started squeezing the breath out of her, Irene called me on the phone sounding frantic. Hearing the wheezy panic in her voice, I panicked, too. Could this possibly be
it?
I wondered. After years of serial near-death experiences, had my mother—
the woman who joked that she was too mean to die—entered her final days, possibly her final hours? Could she be on the brink of disproving her point?

The answer was no. Maybe Irene had been telling the truth when she claimed that she was too mean to die. Maybe, like fictional characters bitten by vampires, she belonged to the ranks of the Undead. Maybe
she
was a vampire and, as her daughter, I, too, would be granted eternal life.

“Barb, help me, please,” she implored over the phone. “I’m absolutely going out of my mind. You’ve got to tell me, the bronze silk or the leopard chiffon?”

It so happened that the retirement home was holding its annual black-tie ball that night, and Irene was in knots over what to wear. Forget that she was wobbly on her feet, even with the walker. Forget that she had lung cancer. The lady was a coquette—adored by men, envied by women—a flirty knockout with a smart mouth. And she had her reputation to uphold. She often boasted that when she walked into the dining room in the evenings, all heads turned in her direction.

“Every night they can’t wait to see what I’m wearing. You wouldn’t believe what some of them show up in,” she’d scoff.
“Gym suits!”

I counseled the leopard chiffon.

As happens so often, the thing you worry about most isn’t what nails you. Irene’s cancer diagnosis seemed to come out of nowhere two years before. She’d been admitted to the hospital for chronic, unremitting back pain when a routine chest x-ray (standard procedure in hospital admissions) revealed a
few suspicious spots on her right lung. The biopsy confirmed adenocarcinoma. Lung cancer.

My mother chose not to treat the disease—or think about it. The tumors were small, and she didn’t have a cough or any other symptoms. “I’m going to put it right out of my mind,” she announced, taking the Scarlett O’Hara approach. “Then it won’t bother me.”

Other family members—doctors—were less optimistic. “Chances are, she won’t make it to ninety-four,” her first cousin, a Boston internist, told me privately. This man, along with a gastroenterology nephew from Pittsburgh, was devoted to Irene and had been making pilgrimages to her “deathbed” for years. They came rushing to her side after the emergency colostomy, the bleed on her brain, the hip fracture—and always left astonished by her ability to bounce back.

“I’m afraid this time it’s for real,” Jerry, the Boston cousin, predicted sadly.

“She doesn’t have long,” Ken, the Pittsburgh nephew, agreed.

They should have known better. This was my mother they were talking about.

A CT scan taken six months after the initial diagnosis revealed no change in the size of the tumors. Another scan taken six months after that was even more striking.

“I’ve never seen this before, and I’ll be damned if I can explain it,” the oncologist said. “The tumors appear to be
shrinking
.”

I was stunned. The doctor was stunned. Boston and Pittsburgh were stunned. Irene seemed relieved, but not as surprised as the rest of us.

I took her to a deli to celebrate. She wanted tongue.

The deli lady held up the sliced meat for Irene’s approval. My mother wagged her impeccably polished fingernail at the woman and rejected the meat.

“But I did just like you asked,” the deli lady said. “I sliced from the tip.”

“I said
near
the tip, but not the tip. The middle is too fatty and the tip is too dry.”

At which point the deli lady heaved the whole fleshy V-shaped organ onto the counter. You could see the taste buds, the narrow groove down the center. “You show me where exactly,” she pleaded, looking close to tears.

“There,” Irene pointed with her scarlet talon.
“Near the tip, but not the tip.”

Sometimes my mother really did seem too mean to die.

Most people, except for certain family members and service professionals trying to please her, found Irene charming.

It wasn’t her fault, really, that I was impervious to her charms. Or that she, for most of my life, seemed disappointed in me. We were so different, both products of our times, as well as our singular quirks and talents. I often felt as though we were mismatched, like two landmasses that don’t fit together—say, Greenland and New Jersey. Irene longed for a daughter who would be just like her: a princess to her glamour queen, a stylish girl who prized glittering surfaces, powerful men, and a good address. But I was an arty, waifish girl who rejected the whole package. I shacked up with a stoned cowboy in hippie outposts from Boulder to British Columbia. When my man and I stayed in one place (with electricity)
long enough to have a phone, I kept the number unlisted so she couldn’t call me and tell me I was ruining my life.

That was in my twenties. By my mid-thirties, I’d dumped the cowboy, relocated from the woods to San Francisco with my young son, was earning a living (more or less) by my pen, and had married Hugh, a man my mother approved of—grudgingly—but later grew to adore. My parents were living in Florida then, so we saw each other infrequently, mostly on state occasions: big birthdays and anniversaries, plus the annual visit. Always, within a day or two, Irene and I would start to drive each other crazy, so I deliberately kept those visits brief.

I never dreamed I would become my mother’s caretaker.

My mother never dreamed she would need a caretaker. Or that my father would die and leave her to fend for herself—or worse, leave
me
to fend for her. She never dreamed she would suffer agonizing physical pain or a bleed on the brain or a broken hip. And cancer didn’t figure into her plans any more than the improbability of her own death.

Taking care of a sick, aging parent is not a job you can train for. The training happens on the job, by the seat of your pants, and you are always one step behind, playing catch-up with the latest crisis. The only predictable thing about this job is its unpredictability. And, in my case, the stubborn resistance of the caretakee.

Irene hollered and called me a bully. She accused me of turning her into an invalid, stripping her of her independence. The body that had been her calling card was betraying her,
and I was the safest target for her rage. She fought me over everything. The aides, the walker, the installation of grab bars in the shower, the little alarm button she promised to wear around her neck but left in the bathroom the night she fell and broke her hip. The clincher was the move—urged by social workers and family members—from Florida to the retirement place in Washington, DC, where I live now, so that Hugh and I could look after her. Soon after she arrived, my mother started addressing me as “Mother” in a tone so sarcastic she sounded like me dissing her when I was a teenager.

At first becoming Irene’s caretaker seemed like a joke, one of those crazy karmic twists of fate I might have found amusing if the story hadn’t been mine. Rebel daughter spends entire adult life trying to escape clutches of fiercely narcissistic mother—only to have said mother wind up in her clutches.

My friend, the author and psychologist Mary Pipher, once told me that it’s human nature to love what—and who—we care for. I never doubted that I would be a dutiful daughter to Irene, but I wasn’t so sure I could let go of the defenses that had been hardening inside me since childhood like bad arteries. Compassion, yes, but love? I was determined to do everything possible to ease my mother’s suffering, but could I unblock my heart?

I worried that I’d be an outlier, the rare exception to Mary’s law of human nature.

My mother was a party animal and had been a celebrated hostess among her set in Pittsburgh, New York City, and Palm Beach. Although for years she’d been threatening supernatural
retaliation if I dared to include her age in her obituary—
if
she ever died—I decided to throw a bash for her ninety-third birthday. She wasn’t doing well (this was just a month before the cancer diagnosis), and I worried that she might not see ninety-four. But by the time ninety-four rolled around, her willfulness seemed to have driven the cancer, like defeated warriors, into retreat, so I decided to hold off on another party until the big ninety-five.

Plans were underway over Irene’s protests—
I don’t want a party, Barb!
which meant that she did—when the cancer finally caught up with her. Her right lung filled with fluid, and she was having trouble breathing. The pulmonologist wrote prescriptions for hospice and oxygen, and recommended draining the fluid from her lung so she would make it to the party. The procedure nearly killed her. Still, I refused to cancel. The caterer had been hired, and Irene’s cousins and grandchildren—including my son, Clay—were flying in from around the country. Anyhow, this was
herself
. The smart money said she’d rally, and somehow, on the night of the party—one week after the procedure—the Belle of Pittsburgh showed up looking like a million bucks in the bronze silk.

I think Irene had the time of her life at that party. After the toasts, she confessed that she’d always been jealous of her own mother, envious of how much everyone who had known Bessie had adored her. If Irene had the looks, my grandmother—also a beauty—had the charisma.

“I finally know how my mother felt, and it’s wonderful,” Irene said, glowing, her paper-thin skin practically translucent. “Because tonight I feel that way, too.”

It occurred to me that this might be the first time in her life that my mother felt worthy, good, deserving of love, just for herself—not for her appearance, her zip code, her fine antiques, the rich and famous people she met, the five-star hotels she stayed in, her Chanel suit, or any of the rest of it.

I’m pretty sure Irene knew that there would be no ninety-sixth birthday fête, and that the procedure that had siphoned off a liter of fluid from her lung was a temporary holding action. Still, she went right on as before: getting her hair done, complaining about the food at the retirement home, barking at the help for multiple offenses, agonizing over what to wear to the annual gala. For once, she took my advice and went with the leopard chiffon. It was her favorite, the dress she’d worn to my son’s wedding.

The real clue that Irene knew something was up came in the form of a card she gave me on Mother’s Day. The front of the card pictured five children in old-fashioned bathing costumes, holding hands as they splashed in the ocean. Inside, in her rickety scrawl, she wrote: “Happy Mother’s Day! I know why Clay has turned out to be such a wonderful person. You have been a great mother. I know this is true because you have been a good mother to me. On Mother’s Day and every day. I thank you for your caring and helping me in every way. Thank you, dear Mother.”

This was the first time that Irene had addressed me as “Mother” without a soupçon of sarcasm. It made me wonder if she’d been expressing gratitude (in her backhanded, wisecracking
style) all those other times. Or if somewhere along the way, her tone had shifted, and I simply hadn’t noticed.

Six weeks after the lung procedure, two days after I’d asked the nurse if they were going to kick my mother out of hospice because she was doing so well, the phone rang early one evening. It was Irene, sounding scared and short of breath. “Can you please come over and help me?” she said. “I can’t stand up.”

From that moment on everything happened so fast: round-the-clock aides I rehired the minute Irene fired them (which she did often), stepped-up visits by the hospice team, delivery of the hospital bed and bedside commode, an emergency call to the fire department to bring oxygen the day the power failed because my mother had rejected the standard backup tank as too ugly to cross the threshold of her apartment, the start of morphine. Irene hated it all, except for the sudden, saintly appearance of Boston Jerry and Pittsburgh Ken at her bedside.

We all knew this crisis was no false alarm. This time there would be no astonishing resurrection. Yet, we were like dazed revelers on the
Titanic
. It was hard to believe that my mother’s long-running exemption from the immutable laws that govern life and death was about to expire.

A few days into the final phase, which lasted two weeks, Gary, the hospice rabbi, came to call. He’d met with Irene several times before, and she’d grown to trust him and rely on him to help soothe her restless, fearful mind. (Plus, Gary was youngish, handsome,
and
Jewish! She liked flirting with
him, too.) That afternoon I sat in with the two of them for the first time. No one had to say the D-word aloud for us to know what we were talking about. My mother said she missed my brother, who hadn’t visited her in almost two years, and made me promise to stay in touch with him. When Gary asked her what it was about me that she was most proud of, she paused. “Who she is,” she said finally. “Just. Who. She. Is.” That may have been the first time in my life—certainly, in my adult life—when I felt truly seen by my mother.

A dear friend of mine once wrote, “You learn the world from your mother’s face.” That day I learned my goodness from my mother’s face—even though her sight was failing and she could hardly see me. I told her I loved her and that I would miss her. This time there was no holding back, no going through the motions, no saying “I love you” with half a heart.