It's 11:51 as I begin to write this, sitting beside Margaret, who lies and breathes and through her struggle illustrates our entanglement. We stay sometimes because we cannot leave. The world is, in fact, too much with us, and we, well, we are also too much with the world and though we might hope to let go without pain and discomfort, it may well be otherwise.
When my Mom died, I wasn't there. The night before, I had listened to her rattling rasping breaths, skin drawn back over her bones, and found perhaps that there was just too much to see and hear then. So I left. I had to work the next day. Since I could leave, I did, and took the call during the work day, that she'd passed.
That was 20 years ago and I don't trust my memory. My impressions are unclear, but for the vision of her gaunt face, mouth agape to draw in the air it could not refuse. We'd known by then, for a few months in fact, that she was no longer making conscious choices about living. Without her permission her body marched onward, obedient to some other force over which she no longer has control.
Now Margaret reprises that moment, and again this gives me pause. I am both in awe and in great fear of just this sort time in which, stripped of conscious volition, you may find yourself enslaved to a dance, a seeming propulsive whim, that demands you continue - that marionettes you. I'm showing my bias here, but I wonder what is sacred about this moment. To me, just now, it feels hopelessly profane.
The distinction is, of course, ours. We've parsed it out this way for some reason. Heaven and hell. Paradise and expulsion. Holy and earthly. We want, it seems, to declare our moments as one or the other, and in doing so we simultaneously create and avoid the gap, the ironic middle ground in which we actually live most of our days.
At risk of discomfort, it could not be more clear to me tonight that Margaret wishes for an end to her journey. She breathes because she must. Just as fitfully as I was two nights ago when, unable to sleep, I grumbled and threw back the covers, only to wrap myself in them again, sigh, and wait once again, restless in the face of my own haplessness. There was nothing to do but wait. Four hours. I recall the clock reading 3:48 and then it read 7:10. The hard evidence of a small reward.
Is it mean to think it? What will be the evidence? What the reward for the wait?
---
By 5 am Saturday Margaret could wait no longer. She headed off alone, though following a path that we all, single file (with or without looking back?) will follow. After we'd called the morticians, we sat with her body and cried and talked. I sang some songs with Dad. We talked some more. We had coffee and cinnamon buns. We made plans for the next few days.
Though thinking back on it, the spectre of her silent form in the room seems macabre, at the time it was not that strange. It became regular, in its own way. Initially Dad tried to get her mouth to close fully. He wept and caressed her face and told her that she finally had her wish - to go home - and then he gently pinched her lips together, as they were about half an inch apart, but to no avail.
We left her face uncovered as we waited. It never occurred to me, nor to anyone else, that we should do the "TV" thing and veil her. Over the course of the 6 hour wait it seemed to me that her lips did slowly move back together. Perhaps it was just the mechanics of rigor mortis. Perhaps it just took time for her spirit to fully exit.
No comments:
Post a Comment