The Fullness of Time

I am walking down the hall in Archbold Hospital on Christmas Day 2010 while the nurse does some kind of procedure on my father that a daughter should not watch. At the end of the hall is a kind of sunroom with a gathering of armchairs. I walked my dead mother down this hall ten years ago in what they call a Geri-chair. She was frail and weak and had to support her head with her hand. She had just come back to life from a near death experience and any kind of light reminded her of the true light. She turned her face toward the sunshine and closed her eyes, trying to get back to where she’d been. “I’m glad you are better,” I had said to her when she’d come out of the coma. “I’m glad you’re glad,” she’d said with bitterness. Later she’d tell me that she hadn’t wanted to come back, but they’d made her do it, for me.

“You are always the one to accompany them through their life or death crises,” Margaret reminds me over the phone when she hears that I am again in the hospital with a parent. And it does seem like a fluke: my mother bleeding out within three days of my returning from Italy as though she had waited for me to get home before she actively started dying. My father’s heart attack the same: his waiting for me to get home from Italy. And now within a day of my most recent arrival we’d both come down with the flu and his flu has gone amok and landed him in the White Hotel.

He is not going to die of the flu, I tell myself. This doesn’t happen. But all the signs are with us.

I knew my mother was going to die the day I realized that all the nurses on duty had been my former students. I’d entered an altered state, an altered place. “Dr. Clough, is that you?” one by one they moved through the ethers, angelic beings more than human, each of them saying to me with a glance: “You planted me in the future that is now your present.”

There was the one whose grandmother died while she was in my writing class and I had encouraged her to write an essay about the death.” She had seen something out the corner of her eye and wanted to catch it and I wanted her to catch it. Some years later she appeared in my life to throw back to me what she had caught. It seemed no accident that Katherine was my mother’s nurse. Here we are, something pulsed between us. She greeted me with a kind of non-surprise.

Maybe it’s not time for my father to die. Katherine still works this floor, these years later, but she no longer seems to recognize me. Have I changed that much in ten years that I am no longer recognizable or is it the light, not shining on us the way it would in different circumstances?

At almost the moment I am convinced that my father will not die this trip, he begins what I’ve heard some people call “sundowning.” It is indeed just after sun down when he begins to tell me that my mother is calling him and it’s time to go. “Come on, “ he urges, twisting to get out of the bed, his I.V. pulling dangerously at his vein, the oxygen tubes slipping from his nostrils. “I’ve got to go!” he says in exactly the voice he would have used when he was thirty and impatient over my mother dawdling or misplacing her purse. He suddenly thinks I am my mother. There is no holding him back, though I do struggle and find a way to press the “call” button for the nurse without letting go of his arm.

The nurse who comes is, however, the kind of ghost from the past that may or may not herald anything. He is a black man named James Ivey, the grandson of Hazel Ivey, my grandmother’s maid…son of Hazel’s daughter Pineapple Ivey and perhaps the very baby grown up that I wanted as my own baby when my sister was born because James was tinier and cuter. Hazel had bought me a black baby doll to represent the little black baby I wanted. Lately that black baby has been coming to me in meditation so it seems significant that the baby suddenly grown up is now here attending to my dying father, if he is indeed dying. People don’t die of the flu.

“Of course he will be fine,” Dr. Westbury says as she makes her evening rounds, “just dehydrated. He’ll go home Sunday, maybe Monday. Go eat some dinner.”

I go out for awhile. I come back to the hospital far later than usual. When the elevator doors open, I find an undertaker with a corpse I believe could be my father. The corpse is under the burgundy velvet blanket the funeral home uses when they whisk bodies into the hearse. My mother once lay under the burgundy velvet blanket. My father will soon lie under the burgundy velvet blanket, I find myself thinking but remind myself that he is fine. The undertaker is the same undertaker who had come for my mother’s body. Rocky, a boy who had been in Margaret’s class in highschool. When he’d come for my mother, he had still seemed a boy in an over-sized undertaker’s suit. I had asked him how on earth he’d come to be an undertaker and he’d answered, “I don’t know. I just fell into it,” as though I’d asked him how he’d come to work at Wal-mart. Now he has grown into the role. He’s beefier and has a goatee. He is a man, not a boy. He looks like he was born to be an undertaker. His eyes meet mine as we change places. I get out of the elevator and he and his corpse climb aboard it. It feels like a sign, but I don’t want to believe in signs, at least not tonight.

My father is sleeping soundly as I climb in the chair beside his bed. This is my second night of sleeping in the chair that won’t quite lay back. I am suddenly excruciatingly tired. I, too, have the flu, I remind myself. Of course I am tired. As I settle into the chair, my father reaches out and pats my arm sweetly. “Do you need anything?” I ask him. He looks at me and communicates something I don’t understand with his smile: “Just you,” he says.

His last words.

Wait for Me

I once worked on a committee writing church history with a man in the community—Jimmy-- whose wife, Trudie, was nearly comatose with late-stage Alzheimer’s. I ran into him a few years later at the post-office and he asked would I be available to help him write his memoirs. My encounter with him seemed providential because earlier that same day a Hospice friend had expressed to me how concerned people were about him. Trudie was clearly “on her way out,” yet Jimmy refused to believe she was dying. He clearly needed help “letting go”, but refused Hospice help. When Jimmy approached me in the post-office about helping him write his memoirs, I instantly recognized that I was in an ideal position to be a kind of “undercover” Hospice volunteer. His house was a stone’s throw from the college where I taught, so I could stop by easily and regularly to help with both the memoirs and the situation with his wife.

The situation I encountered when I first went to visit Jimmy was indeed as worrisome as had been suggested to me. Jimmy had set up his writing office in the bedroom where his wife lay rigid and unresponsive in a hospital bed, propped up on pillows, her white hair brushed and glistening across a pillow, her milky eyes fixed on something beyond this world. There was a caregiver, a kind of nurse hired to bathe and tend to Trudie’s bodily needs and to prepare meals for Jimmy, but she was generally delegated to the kitchen, while Jimmy held a vigil at his desk by Trudie’s bed, consulting her about the things he was trying to write about their life together. His efforts to write were, however, undermined by the fact that he could hardly make his bent, arthritic fingers strike the keys.

We resolved that I would stop by a few days a week during my lunch break, so the nurse could run errands and I could take over the typing of the stories that Jimmy narrated to Trudie. I was deeply touched by his dedication to his project and reticent to express my concerns about his holding Trudie hostage to it. At the same time, I also felt operating in me some vague Hospice mission to help the couple overcome an apparent deadlock in their relationship. Wasn’t it imperative that Jimmy learn to accept his wife’s parting and let her go so she wasn’t forever imprisoned in her limbo state?

Jimmy spared me from having to broach the topic by announcing, early in our alliance, that he was fed up with people telling him that Trudie was dying and that he had to let go of her. He knew that she was waiting for him to die and that he would die before she would, but he wanted to finish his memoir first. There was no hurry, really. She would wait for him. She always had during the marriage, during the war, during that time he went land prospecting in Florida and left her for months to square things away before she came down to join him. What a fiasco that venture had been, as I would soon hear, in the book we were writing. But not to worry, he knew he had to strike out for heaven and prepare the way for her. She would hang on until he was ready. She would wait for him.

At the moment Jimmy first told me this, I felt a deep sadness for him. It was clear that he was nowhere near death. He was a robust 86 year old man who had lived his life on a Georgia plantation—an outdoorsman, a farmer, lean and healthy as they come. His only physical complaints were the arthritis that bent up his fingers and an unsteadiness in his feet that probably warranted a cane but he was too stubborn to use one. He hurled his lithe body through space with confident enthusiasm, losing ballast now and then in a way that was momentarily worrisome, but he never actually tripped or fell or endangered himself. His blue eyes sparkled with health and intelligence. He had plenty of life left in him, while the poor woman lying next to him day in and day out, barely nourished from the food the nurse was able to spoon feed her, seemed poised at the threshold of departure. I gently suggested to Jimmy that I could not imagine Trudie outliving him. Shouldn’t he at least consider what he would do with himself should she decided to go first? He wouldn’t have any of it: “Nah…she won’t leave until I’m gone.” And he would not let me call in Hospice. Trudie was not dying. She was waiting.

Jimmy and I worked together on his memoir for the better part of a school year, my stopping by his house a few days a week to call forth stories that became chapters. During this time, very little changed in the living situation. Trudie lay there as though in a thrall, the nurse bathing her, powdering her, brushing her hair, turning her body every other hour, Jimmy talking to her as though she were fully sentient, engaged, and capable of loving every word that he recited to her from his ever-evolving story. He reminded her of the births and antics of each of their children, of the men who’d worked the plantation, of the dogs they’d had and lost. He did indeed tell the story about getting swindled out of a farm in Florida, about other business mis-adventures, about his own sense of culpability when one son had fallen from pine to wind up forever paralyzed and how that same son had lost both wife and child in a fluke accident and yet had spiritually survived. I’d find him always at the computer, cursing his bent fingers, which seemed to always hit the wrong keys. I would take over the typing—a kind of dictation—and do the daily quota of pages. He’d read them back to Trudie. She’d lie there as though dead. Sometimes I’d even check to see if she was still breathing.

By February, we reached the end of the book and sent the manuscript off to one of those self-publishing companies that offer all sorts of perks like posters for the book signing, internet promotions, and so on. We organized a reading and book signing at a local bookstore for the 18^th of March, a date we chose because I had plans to visit my son in New York for his birthday, March 20^th. There was a good turnout at the reading. Jimmy hammed it up as he read his favorite parts. On the slick professional book-jacket, there was a picture of a boy-Jimmy on horseback, wielding a pistol. He was delighted with his accomplishment, and told me, as I said good-bye to him before leaving, that Trudie was, too. Absolutely thrilled.

I did not hear about Jimmy’s fall until I got back to Georgia a dozen or more days later. My father announced the news, but did not seem too concerned about him. I ran into the preacher at the post-office and asked about Jimmy and he did not seem to think the fall was serious, but he was in the hospital. I went from the post-office to the hospital and found Jimmy’s four children standing around his bed. Jimmy was unconscious. The fall had been serious. They were concerned that he would never wake up.

And in fact, he never did wake up, but neither did he die, for awhile. The family set up a hospital bed next to Trudie’s hospital bed in the room where Jimmy and I had worked on his book. The couple lay there in twin comas side by side with the nurse whom I’d befriended during my months of frequent visits sitting in a wing-backed chair in a corner. Since she no longer had to cook for either one of them (by now they were fed intravenously), I offered to come by and sit with them for an hour on my way home from teaching summer school so she could run out and get a bite to eat. I would sit there for an hour and sometimes read or talk primarily to Jimmy. I believed what is said about people in comas hearing and knowing when another is present. I believed it important to talk to them. But beyond that I was simply confronted with mystery and the extraordinary peace and love I seemed to find when I was in the presence of these two souls in their unfathomable predicament.

At the end of my summer school, I was heading to Italy for a conference. At the time I did not realize that I would be offered a job while there and move to Italy permanently. I thought I’d be gone for a month. I stopped by Jimmy and Trudie’s house for a last visit. I was in the habit of talking to Jimmy. I stood by his bed, holding his hand, explaining that I was going back to Italy for awhile, but I’d be back come September. I kissed his forehead and studied his face for awhile, again in awe over his strange slumber.

And then the most astonishing thing happened: Trudie opened her eyes, looked right at me and said, “We’re going to miss you.” This momentary waking so startled me I found myself telling anybody who would listen about it. No one really seemed to believe me.

Jimmy died two days after I arrived in Italy. My father called to tell me. Trudie held on another few weeks before catching up with him.

In Search of the Silver Shoes

I knew my mother had turned a corner when she discovered Great-Grandma cutting out the silver dress. “Oh, Cindy!” she called out to me from her nest of feather pillows. “It’s almost ready and it’s stunning. Silver and cream.” I looked at Rossie and Rossie looked at me. We could feel the tingling in our arms and the goose-bumps that meant the light was changing. Rossie had been a Hospice nurse long enough to rely on these signs more than fickle physical announcements. “It’s happening,” she confirmed with a whisper. “Now,” my mother announced to us, her accomplices, “we must find the silver shoes. Run upstairs and check in my closet.”

During the months of my mother’s dying, I had accumulated a library of books on death and dying and caregiving, my favorite among them Maggie Callanan’s Final Gifts detailing the stages of “nearing death awareness.” Through decades of work as a Hospice Nurse, Maggie had observed consistently that “when the time was near,” the dying would often produce metaphors of departure, images from the kinds of journeys they were accustomed to making in life. Those who had been passionate about international travel might, for instance, start searching for their passports. Those who had been devotees of road trips might look for maps. These sudden lapses of awareness of the exigencies of their worldly circumstance were not truly lapses or confusion but a breakthrough in awareness of the pending journey of death. These intimations of immortality were the “final gifts” they could offer caregivers if only the caregivers would listen and participate in the journey with them.

It made sense to me that my mother—an aging Southern Belle with a childlike passion for fairytales and picnics—would worry about her wardrobe and packing her picnic basket. She was escaping to Grandmother’s house, after all. She was crossing the great wood. My Great-Grandmother had been a seamstress, known for the elegant dresses she’d made for my mother’s trousseau and wedding journey. It would make sense that she would be one of my mother’s Fates, stitching together some celestial gown my mother would wear into the netherworld. The shoes were Dorothy of Oz and Little Red Riding Hood wrapped into one. She also had a totem animal—a stuffed cat that I had bought her during a stint in the hospital when she couldn’t take my live cat with her. Over the River and through the Woods, to Grandmother’s House we Go,” I could almost hear her singing whimsically, replete with a giddy…wheeeeeee. The prospect of her death didn’t seem to worry her at all. She seemed even excited. Thrilled.

Within a day or two of encountering Great Grandma, she stopped eating and started entertaining other ghostly guests. “Cindy, you remember Bettylu’s sister, Alicia and her little Poodle dog, don’t you?” she said offhandedly to me one day, by way of introduction. She was sitting up in bed carrying on the brightest conversation. Her face was radiant, her aspect so happy normal, it seemed a quirk in my own vision that I could not see this woman and her dog, standing at the precise point in the room that my mother was attending. Again, I was utterly credulous that there had to be someone “there.” I could feel presence even if I could not see presence, could feel the change of light, the change of atmosphere. Still, these changes didn’t seem evidence of dying so much as evidence of a certain kind of quickening. She seemed better than she had been in weeks. Could she possibly be getting better? The not eating made Rossie shake her head, no. This happens, she confirmed. People do get better to die.

She seemed to see angels as well, though again I had to trust the tingling sensation and heightened energy in my body more than anything I could actual see, and the testimony of the old black woman Christine whose face would go bright with wonder at the exact same time my mother’s did when these beings would fill the room with their wings of light. “Yes, darling, yes, darling, that’s your own special angel,” Christine would say and I would strain my heart to see, because indeed it did seem that love was what made it possible to see past what the mind did or did not believe. Christine herself seemed like an angel. She’d appeared out of no where when my father and I decided we needed to hire nursing help. She wasn’t truly a nurse and could neither read nor write, but I later came to believe her not tying her brain up with reading as I myself had done had kept her vision clear for these other dimensions. I longed to see through her eyes and could almost, but not quite.

The other thing my mother could see in those days that I did not understand, but have come to understand and even to see myself in recent years is the Core Star, the essential light of the soul. “You have a white flame right there,” she first told my sister—pointing at the place just under her belly button. And from that moment on, she seemed to look at everyone in the belly rather than the face, at least when they stepped in the room, their light appearing to her before their features.

One day my mother asked me would I run out to Captain D’s and bring back an order of the Shrimp Special and a carton of chocolate ice-cream. By this time it had been more than a week since she had eaten anything. My mother loved fried shrimp and her sudden craving for fried shrimp seemed to be her way of defying expectation. I couldn’t wait to tell Rossie she really was getting better—she wanted to eat. She’d asked for shrimp. She’d asked for chocolate ice-cream. I was a little bit worried about fulfilling these wishes. Could shrimp after a week of not eating anything and a month of eating very little possibly be good for her? Still I believed my going to Captain D’s in search of the fried shrimp was somehow like the journey in search of the silver shoes, something I had to do for her, for better or worse. A knight’s mission, so to speak. Something that would either help her get better or help her cross over. Perhaps this was the meal she wanted to pack in her basket to take to Grandma’s house. I went to Captain D’s. I stopped by the supermarket and bought chocolate ice-cream.

Back in those days I had a Golden Retriever named Chloe and a cat, Precious, the living counterpart to the stuffed cat my mother had been clinging to since the day she almost “bled out” because of the leukemia that was killing her. My cat Precious kept a permanent vigil at the foot of my mother’s bed, while Chloe parked herself on the floor by the chair I generally sat in reading books about death and dying. The day of my mother’s Last Supper, the tableau was no different from how it usually was: the stuffed cat under my mother’s arm, the live one at her feet, the daughter in the wing-backed chair to her right with Chloe a footrest of fur at my feet. I set up the dinner tray for her with the Shrimp Special arranged somewhat decorously on a china plate. She sat up with great joy and took a shrimp between thumb and forefinger. She admired it for a moment and then she tossed it to the cat. She plucked another from the plate and she tossed it to the dog. When she’d fed the entire contents of the meal to cat and to dog, she asked for her ice-cream and spoon and proceeded to feed every lick of it to the cat. When the cat had licked the bowl clean, she looked at me with great satisfaction and then handed me the stuffed cat. “Take this and put it in the basket,” she said. My heart spasmed with agonizing recognition. “Final Gifts,” had mentioned the dying giving up some last cherished thing when they were ready to go. I recognized the stuffed cat as her last thing. She was done, I knew. And in fact, by morning she was in a coma.

Things in my own life started to quicken as soon as she began to truly slip away. It was a Friday when she failed to wake up and that very day I got a call about a teaching job, would I be able to start on Monday? I had been worried about what I’d do with my life once my mother was gone. I’d quit a job in Italy to come home and take care of her. What possibly would come next? I tried to trust the call to teach, though it did not seem to be time to actually leave my mother’s bedside. Still, the next day, I went to the school first thing to collect materials and work up some kind of syllabus. It took me most of the day.

When I got home, my mother was lying precisely as she had been when I’d left her hours before…her mouth fixed open and strange, her body stiff as though she were dead, but she was still breathing.

I told her I’d done my syllabus. I now had next steps. No sooner had I said these words than her breathing changed. For a minute, I thought she was struggling. I called Hospice; Hospice told me I was describing the death rattle. No, I thought. Death could not be that easy, that predictable. My sister and father and I gathered around the bed. As soon as we were all there, my mother’s face came back as though she were waking, but instead of opening her eyes, she scrunched them up tightly as though she were making an effort, leaping from a diving board, say. And as her heart beat for the last time, she leapt. We could feel her leaping, the relief of it. And we could feel light fill the room and a mysterious giddiness, her giddiness, transferred to us the privileged witnesses.

My Mother’s Vendetta

“I’m not even dead yet, and that woman is trying to get her claws in my husband,” my mother seethed from her throne of pillows as I stood in the doorway with the chocolate cake. I couldn’t get over it—this abiding jealousy that she would no doubt take to the grave. My parents had been married fifty years, had known and loved each other since kindergarten, had “gone steady” since Jr. High, save for the one year in high school when they’d broken up for a couple of months. It was during that brief hiatus in a 70-some year relationship that my father had dated my mother’s only rival. My mother was still haunted by the image of this woman riding on the handlebars of his bicycle (“She looked so smug!”). That betrayal had happened in 1946 and my mother was still fuming in 2001! “Get over it, Mother. Get over it!” I said to her this time as I’d said to her again and again throughout my lifetime of hearing about “that vixen Jane.”

Jane had never gone away, in part because she’d married my father’s first cousin, in part because people in Thomasville rarely go away. Though my father had lived all over the world throughout his 30 year army career, he’d spent the 20 years of his retirement in the same house, in the same church, in the same social circle he had spent the first 20 years of his life and had not truly been absent during his thirty year’s absence, given Christmas and summer home-comings and his years in Iran or Vietnam when my mother had chosen to live with her mother. Jane had therefore been omnipresent at church, at family gatherings, at high school reunions, at the country club, at the Plaza, at the Culture Center. And, I had to admit, Jane was one of those Southern Belles who had kept her looks and her figure and still dressed the part. Never did a hair flutter from her crisp Nancy Reagan-do. Never did her lipstick or mascara smudge. There were rumors about a face-lift, but I chose to believe she had good skin. Her perfume pulsed. And yes, she was sweet, chatty, charming, Cousin Jane.

But I had never once believed my mother had anything to worry about. In fact, I believed that my mother was slightly insane, frozen in a perpetual adolescence, unhinged from present-day realities. My father was one of those aging southern gents who sought his pleasures in such boy’s club activities as Rotary, Historical Society, Golf, Hunting, and Booze. He liked women, but mostly for their cooking and lunatic antics than for their sex-appeal. Not once in the 40 years that I had known Jane had I picked up a single vibe between her and my father—no surreptitious glances or flirty banter, nothing. If confronted with his long ago lapse in affections for my mother, my father would come back with: “Hell, I gave Jane a ride on my bicycle. Your mother dated Worth Upchurch, who had an airplane. They would fly around all day in his airplane and buzz me! Jane Watt! Why on earth is she jealous of Jane Watt!”

The funny thing is: By the time Jane delivered the third chocolate cake, I had picked up on something. “Jane!” I tested. “Come in and say hello to Mother. I’m sure she’d be delighted to see you.” Her eyes took on that caught-in-the-headlights terror. She balked. She stammered. “Honey, I just can’t. “ My father appeared from the den. “Keep ‘em coming!” he called after her as she made a hasty retreat down the front steps. “You know I’ve always loved your chocolate cake!” “You know I will,” Jane called back, over her left shoulder, clearly pleased. “Was that Jane Watt?” my mother screamed from her deathbed. “The nerve of that woman. I am not even dead.”

My mother died. The first irony came to our attention the day of the funeral. My father was reading the newspaper with his coffee on the back porch. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he called out to me. “Worth Upchurch died.” I was used to morning death announcements from my father because he had reached the age of knowing everyone in the obituaries. He reminded me that Worth Upchurch was the other boy my mother had dated in high school. The one with the airplane. He looked at me as though spooked. His eyes flared with sudden wonder and then jealousy. “You think they ran off together?” I confronted him. “It does make you wonder, doesn’t it?” he affirmed.

A couple of years passed. I stayed with my father for awhile and then went back to Italy. He decided to sell the house, which had been my mother’s childhood home, and move into a retirement community. There was generations’ worth of stuff in the old Victorian home, which warranted an estate sale. On the Friday before the actual Saturday of the Open House, members of the extended family were urged to come by and have first dibs on the family antiques. Among the first family members to appear was Cousin Jane, but while climbing the stairs to the front porch, one of her high-heels got caught in a wooden slat and she fell, banging her head on the sidewalk. She seemed fine at first, and gathered herself to mount the stairs once again, but felt a little dizzy.

My father called me in Italy. He spoke at length about the sale and then added as an afterthought: “Jane Watt is in the hospital,” and then described what had happened. “Mother tripped her!” I teased. “Oh, get out of here!” he sort of chuckled. “Don’t think the thought did not cross my mind. Don’t think it hasn’t crossed everybody’s mind! No way would your mother have wanted Jane to get her claws on any of her belongings.”

Jane died the next morning. I didn’t know what to think when I heard the news. I didn’t know what to say to my cousins, Jane’s children. I felt embarrassed for some reason. I felt I owed them some kind of apology.