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.