Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  After all, everything had been leading up to this—the glue of the family was becoming unglued because she was tired of the chaos. She was tired of living through my father’s never-ending lawsuits—his financial unevenness. Being married to my father would have given anyone cancer. My mom was tired of fighting, and she was enervated. Her idea of heaven was dreaming about life while she slept, so in her mind, I’m sure, she was actually looking forward to being able to watch all of us without having to participate. In the afterlife, she would have a front-row seat to all of our lives, but from a higher perch and without the need to get dressed in something other than a housedress. She was worn-out.

  I didn’t feel sad that my mom was going to die; I felt sad that no one in my family seemed prepared for it. When I saw my sisters suffering at the prospect of her leaving, I felt like they hadn’t learned their lesson the last time. There was my lack of empathy again. Never understanding that other people may be receiving things differently.

  That’s okay, I told myself. I didn’t need my sisters to be fighters. I have enough spinach for all of us.

  Death.

  This, I know how to do.

  Move over, everyone.

  * * *

  • • •

  I went straight to the hospital when I flew in from London, where I found my brother Glen and my dad sitting in a hospital room like two useless cartoon characters, with my mother lying there half-unconscious, weak, and listless—with a fucking roommate who had visitors who reeked of cigarettes. My mom hated cigarettes.

  I may as well have seen a priest raping a child. The hell I raised at the nurses’ station was so disruptive and hair-raising that there were people who didn’t come back to work the next day—or maybe ever.

  I remember Glen grabbing me by the shoulders in the hallway, telling me I had to calm down, and a nurse threatening to remove me from the hospital if I didn’t, and me telling her that she would be the one getting removed. The next thing I remember was wheeling my mother’s hospital bed into the hallway while I instructed my father and Glen to grab onto any machines that were attached to her body and to follow my lead.

  For the record, I would like to state that never in the history of humankind has a woman been told to calm down and then calmed down. We don’t like that.

  Once we got my mom situated in a private room down the hall, I got into bed next to her. She put her hand in mine and said in the thirstiest of sounds, “Please help me die.”

  This was the opportunity to show my mother that she could depend on me, that for all the times I fucked up and for all the grief I caused her by never listening to anything either of my parents ever said and constantly getting into trouble in and out of school—that for her last wish, I was listening and I would show up. I was going to prove that she wasn’t wrong about me. That finally she could depend on me. Those were my marching orders, and I wasn’t going to leave until I had fulfilled her request. It didn’t occur to me that she may have said that to all my siblings, looking for anyone to bite.

  She spent the next week in her private room, surrounded by her children. I slept on the bed next to her every night. Sometimes, in the morning, I’d leave her side after her first dose of morphine—when she would drift away again—to go to the cafeteria for some eggs, and then be sick at myself for having an appetite. I would remind myself that I needed to stay strong to help my mother die. I was in full-on Joan of Arc mode, and I was not going to make dying a problem for my mother. I hadn’t been so laser-focused on anything in my life, ever.

  The one time I left her to go home and take a shower, I came back to find her covered in her own vomit, most of it pooled in her newly cavernous collarbones—like two gravy boats. My father was sitting with all four corners of the newspaper facing her—as if he were in his own living room—and hadn’t even noticed. He was proving to be as useless as a gorilla underwater, and took up about the same amount of space. I never left her alone with the nurses—or my father—again.

  In between bouts of unconsciousness, she would spring to life and utter these fully formed sentences that would render you speechless.

  “Once I’m gone, you’re going to find out what a piece of work your father is, and I will be laughing at you from heaven,” she’d say. Then she’d turn her head, close her eyes, and drift off again, and I’d be left sitting there, looking at my clueless father reading the op-ed page.

  I remember looking at her, wondering how she could be so sharp and so with it, while also floating in and out of consciousness. I learned that people have moments of clarity when they’re dying, called “terminal lucidity.” Or that they’ll sometimes seem like they’re getting better only to fall further the next day, kind of like a death rally.

  “You don’t know your own strength,” she said to me one afternoon, squeezing my hand. “Please use it for something good. I know you are going to have a big life, but don’t forget about your brothers and sisters. And promise me you’ll always wear your seatbelt.”

  “Get a spoon,” she said to me with her eyes closed, the day I was cleaning the vomit out of her collarbones. Then she opened her eyes and said, “Promise me you’ll take care of Roy and Shana.”

  I had no idea my mom thought I was capable of taking care of anyone, but she empowered me to think that I was, thus creating the certainty that I would be able to do so.

  One day she brushed my cheek with the back of her hand and said, “He needs to let me go.”

  I looked at my father, who was sitting five feet away—in his diurnal spot, always with the newspaper, this time with a half-eaten Egg McMuffin sitting on his knee. The fact that he hadn’t inhaled it in one fell swoop meant that he must have had another meal on the way over.

  “You need to say goodbye to Mom,” I told him. “She needs you to let her go.”

  He peeked over the top of the newspaper to make sure he’d heard what he thought he heard.

  “Keep her alive, no matter what. She can be on life support.” I got up and ripped the paper down the middle, with my hands trembling. It was dramatic, but my mom deserved drama. She had put up with too much shit from both me and my father for way too long. If there was ever a time she would accept a fuss being made over her, it was in her death—and by one or both of the people that caused her the most grief.

  “Keep her alive, no matter what?” I was standing in his face and his eyes widened. “Do you know how selfish that is?”

  “I’ve got to go show a car,” he announced, bracing himself to get up from the chair he was smothering. My father never sat in a chair. He assaulted it, and the chair was seldom the same.

  “A car?”

  “Yeah, a guy called me about a car. He’s in West Orange.”

  That was when I knew my father wasn’t equipped to deal with what was happening. Death had happened once, and he didn’t like the way that turned out, so it wasn’t going to happen again. I thought about how sad men are. How little they know about helping women with their feelings. I realize it’s not entirely their fault, because they’re wired differently and they’ve been raised for thousands of years to act like this, but it’s still hard when you see it up close and personal—especially when it’s your own father.

  “Okay,” I told him. “Go do that. Mom and I will probably just go waterskiing.”

  * * *

  • • •

  There were supposed to be four hours between drips of morphine, but when she was uncomfortable, I would summon the nurse, who would come in and reiterate to me that it had been only two hours since her last dose.

  “Do you have a fucking mother?” I wailed. I hadn’t left the hospital for five days and was starting to look like Gary Busey.

  The nurses had stopped communicating with me soon after I arrived, and I can’t blame them, but a four-hour pain-medication protocol when someone is clearly dying is a set of rules th