The contents of my mother's drawer

At the end of her life, my mother had hardly any possessions--some clothes, an ancient television, a couple of pieces of furniture (were those even hers?). But she did have the contents of a bed-side drawer, where I found all of these items except a photo of my dad, which was perched on a ledge above her. It appeared to have been folded and injured, probably by her: one of her neighbors is infamous for destroying family photos unless they're contained in the sealed box outside her door. There are photos we sent her of the kids; a Ph.D. graduation photo; some birthday cards, the most recent of which was 2007 or so; there are lyrics to religious songs, including "Mansion Just Over the Hilltop," which begins: "I'm satisfied with just a cottage below, / A little silver and a little gold; / But in that city where the ransomed will shine, / I want a gold one that's silver lined." Finally, there's a small ripped out section of a novel that belonged to another resident, namely Hobgoblin by John Coyne. (This resident turns out to be one of the lovebirds.) The first page of this copy, which is page 277 of the book, has quite a sex scene on it; at the bottom, etched into the page from an earlier one, can be found seven question marks.

A shadow-talk with Roland Barthes on mourning

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard.


RB's mother died 10/25/1977, which was my mother's 60th birthday. I found his mourning diary at Bridge Street Books today. Many entries do not resonate for me, but some do quite profoundly. He wrote his notes on index cards; they were only published in 2009 in France, and in 2010 in the US. I want to talk back (the belated talking to, when one party is unable to speak in the present) to him about many of his notes.

So, RB like this, SMS like this. We're at a cafe somewhere, calling and responding.


--I don't want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it--or without being sure of not doing so--although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths. 10/31

The strange phrase here is "without being sure of not doing so," but more so because the full sentence turns on that pivot between the fear of literature and acknowledgment that this is what it's made of. Why the fear of literature in the face of death? Or is it the too-sudden emergence of literature, before the mourning period makes it somehow appropriate? When I began my blog, I had no idea it would record her death in some near-present tense; had I thought toward the moment . . .


--A strange new acuity, seeing (in the street) people's ugliness or their beauty. 10/31

This rhymes with my experience, though usually without the suffix of "ugliness or beauty." I simply notice them more, when I notice something other than my thoughts--not distractions, except when I'm driving (or riding my bike). Altered states are not states so much as wobbles, the inside of a balloon as the air comes in and then exits, quickly. Pfffft.


--What's remarkable about these notes is a devastated subject being the victim of presence of mind. 11/2

Again, I don't think that the word "victim" sings to me, but the rest of the sentence does. During her last hour, her hand seemed to be melting, mottles into skin, skin into nails, fingers into fingers. When my urgency was not to save her, but to send her on as well as I could.


--henceforth and forever I am my own mother. 11/4 (which was the day of my father's death in 1992)

And henceforth this writing about my mother will be writing about me. And that is some of what makes me feel nervous, awkward. Until now, I was not the story, the story was my mother's dementia, that of her colleagues at the Alzheimer's home, the story of care, of pain, of memory jostled, necessary, in the face of forgetfulness. To what extent can writing about grief be about the person who is gone? Or are we now left with ourselves as subject, object, verb? During dementia, there were losses but there was not Loss. Grief is official now. But whose is it? Hers, mine, that of the cloud in which our information is stored?


--Struck by the abstract nature of absence . . . Which allows me to understand abstraction somewhat better; it is absence and pain, the pain of absence--perhaps therefore love? 11/10

Abstraction used to feel like a place of refuge. Like the place you could go when the kapu was broken, and you'd be safe. Now it is not only a spirit (instead of material person) but a spirit that is moving away. Not public transport, nor private, but transport nonetheless, and not (necessarily) solitary. I must follow the track of the Tibetan Book. I lost it on Tuesday. Bard, bardo. A soul in search of her next incarnation. One hopes she's not in northern Virginia's traffic pattern, blocked arteries on a Saturday afternoon.


--Mourning: a cruel country where I am no longer afraid. 11/17

The mind softens, the Buddhists say. Every blow makes us more pliable, more liable to adjust, not to duck but to face forward, absorb punishment as something more loving than that. When Barthes writes of not being afraid, he means that he has suffered until he knows how. It's not alleviation of suffering, at least not at first, but the promise it will at once go and be our guide. In the middle of the woods and all that.

and especially:


--[Status confusion]. For months, I have been her mother. It is as if I had lost my daughter (a greater grief than that? It had never occurred to me.) 11/19

She was neither mother nor daughter at the end. I have a daughter, who is not powerless, says what she means to say. But she was not my mother, either, except as the living memory of her. The body is memory, even after the mind checks out (extended stay is not home). She was like the spirit in Beloved, at once a person and a ghost. But those who stop visiting Alzheimer's patients think ghost, not person. Person is there to be seen.


--What I find utterly terrifying is mourning's discontinuous character.

In my stupor today I watched golf on television. There is a new golfer; he's Irish. He was wearing a baby blue shirt, an ad on his white cap. But to watch golf is not to know where you are in time or place. It's not on a field you can take in, the players all in the same space, time. Instead, the game discontinues, from hole to hole, frontwards and then back. It's grief without the affect, merely the motion of grieving, the arcs that are not yet circles, the holes that have not yet been filled with flags (mom died on Flag Day at the home). It's important to die at home, they told me.


After that point, Barthes' entries replay themselves, a circling that fails--that does not try--to close. Love for mother becomes love for grieving over her (perhaps). He's not reached mourning; he's at the many stations of melancholia. At some point in late 1978, when he is still taking these notes, I attended one of his talks at the Sorbonne. I remember nothing of it, except a solitary man sitting in front of our semi-circle of seats, audience rapt in its devotion for him.

'The key is in the sunlight at the window in the bars the key is in the sunlight.'

--Your mother was in the common room after dinner on Tuesday, wasn't she? I was surprised to see her there, says the new resident's relative. The new resident is Io, who screamed help! the day my mother died.

--No, she died at 6 p.m. She couldn't move.

--My mother always asked why her husband never visited after he died. She had psychic powers. She worked on them. I have them, too, but I'm scared to push; you can get to the dark side so quickly. Your mom was sitting in that chair. She would usually greet me, if only with her eyes. But this time there was no response.

--I don't usually tell people, she adds, so they don't think I'm loony.


--I left deliberately, says the gentlest caregiver. I pray for you, you know. You're always here alone. Be strong. Yes, I heard the story from R. about your father's voice. He told me.


The lawyer says it doesn't matter about the will if you're an only child. There's some hierarchy, her assistant tells me, before she arrives. Marriage, children, unless you remarry and there are more children, or earlier ones. I get lost in the possibles.


--No, there's no funeral, I tell the cook, who asks about a bewing. She gave her body to science, and then I'll get the ashes. Never wanted a funeral anyway.

--I can see that! I'd love to have my remains spread in the ocean waters.

--Let me do it for you. We have lots of ocean.


She will rest in peace, the old neighbor writes from his Android. Everything an ad, an alert, a pointer toward. The lawyer says her niece, the one going to Vandy, loves Walmart. Let me tell you, she said to her niece. How you spend your money.


I always get lost in Arlington. I plot out my route, and I follow it. Up to a point. The Washington Monument appears and it's not what I want. Circle back, find the lawyer. Are you lost, too? asks S, when I say good-bye to her. She carries two purses, full of apples, oranges. No, not this time, I say.


I say good-bye to Mrs. L, to whom I gave mom's orange dog, the one with alien eyes. I kept the rabbit she held when she died. Mrs. L. looks at me and laughs. I say good-bye again. She laughs.


I say good-bye to F, the woman who talks, even if sentences are not plotted against a graph of sense. I'm tired, she tells me. So droopy. She was fighting the caregivers the other day, didn't want the girls to have to help her in the bathroom. Her white narrow-cabled sweater has a stain on the front, like my mom's when I left it in her room to be given away.


I thank T for her kindness. She says her daughter brought her here, holds out her hand, as if her daughter were seven or eight years old. She turns the wrong way. G. says they haven't served lunch. Only a cracker. Only cheese and a cracker. She's hungry. Walks to the clock in the right corridor, where I've led them. Two hours until they feed us!


M practices telling time over dinner, looks at the hands, the every other number on her father's watch. Her brother walks us through his trilogy. Templars, an Academy, children being misused to violent purpose. He and a friend infiltrating to save them. A hole in the wall that's meant to look like a hole in the wall, though it isn't.


I say good-bye to them, too. There's no reason to return, if you take family as the baseline, "blood relation" as trump card, though blood thins. That's odd, her pulse is normal, just weak, said the nurse, a minute before mom passed.


She fought so hard to stay alive. It was time, L tells me.

Amazing how they know when it's time to die, says E. Shook her head. No food. No more. Willed it.


"Strange to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the pavement of Greenwich Village."


Whom to believe, the one who saw her struggle to live, or the one who saw her choose her exit? She was in her bed when she was in the chair after dinner. She was a ball of light in my hotel room. She was whatever was intended.

__________

Two lines of poetry from Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish and Related Poems (1959-1960) from his Collected Poems.

Thank you to Josh & Gini, Sam & Meera, to Kyle, Pia, & Esben, & to Steve, Ellen & Max for three mind-lifting evenings of good & loving company this week. To Jerry, who gave me back my father's voice so soon after my mother died. To Elizabeth Wildhack, Esq. & the adroit accountant, Arlene Millican. And to everyone who called, wrote, facebooked, emailed, took time. Thank you to the caregivers, the hospice workers, the doctor (Hermes!) who arrived at mom's door the very moment she died, the compassionate people who populate this world that I leave, for now, & to which return is required, but not always to be feared.

June 14, 2011: After the Hyphen

An hour's sleep & then my thumb pulls the peel off a ball of light.


Panic attack without panic. Hours & days before the end, I read in the brochure that hospice left, the dying person experiences surges of energy. I saw none in her, but now in me a rivered string of lights is coming down the street, house by house, as it did after a power outage in what, 1968?


An hour before she died, her breath kept catching, as if her body forgot intake out take intake & out. Then habit returned effort to her open mouth.


Dying is a verb.


T wanders in and out of this. She was my mother's neighbor on Country Lane, hair dyed black, jacket checked black & white, slacks black, arthritic fingers painted off-red. What's going on, she asked at Martha's door, yesterday, which is now the day before. My mother's sleeping, I said. She'll be ok. No, she's not, T replied, reaching a hand out to mom's forehead, shaking it back and forth. Tried to pour water into mom's mouth before I said no, they did that with the sponge.


After mom died at 6 pm, E teased R he'd need a new girlfriend. He was the one who, when he told my mother to get up for dinner, she did. E got her elbow in the ribs. Not R, the tall man. She always did like men, I said. T, standing next to E, called out, Yes she did!


Ellen took me home with her and Steve. They & Max asked about my father. I offered history: Michigan farm, auto plant, air force (when it integrated, he knew Tuskegee airmen), IBM, Western Union. Ellen said, Jerry Lawler. Jerry Lawler! My father's Irish friend, office roommate of Col. Dudley Stevenson, Tuskegee airman. Steve called Jerry; we explained the coincidence. He darted off to find a letter. Please, do you mind? I'm looking. Dear Jerry, the letter read. My father's voice, Irished. Jerry, you never put yourself above others, gave credit to them & did not take it. The experience of an Irish immigrant. Martha & Susan join me in wishing you a long & enjoyable retirement.


Ellen's family in the concentration camps. Mom there when Dachau was liberated. Her memory was stronger than the first impression. Men in striped pajamas making shelters out of anything they could find.


C & R wash mom's body. Suddenly, from C's phone, the voice of a child singing in Tagalog. My niece, she's three years old. The only Tagalog she knows is what she sings.


The day I left Hawai'i I took my usual bike ride. Was side-swiped by a silver pickup truck that didn't stop. As I tried the bike, a man called out from down the road, asking if I needed a ride. Should have gotten the plate number, he said. He was a windmill worker from Pahala, living in Hau'ula, who picked up my bike, put it in his truck, drove me home. I tended to the bleeding elbows, later found a deep bruise on my right hip. Only when I arrived in Virginia did I feel the heart bruise, blue circle embedded near the center of my left breast.


R dressed mom in navy blue pants, & a blue & white striped shirt. When I came back to walk her to the black SUV with flashing lights (give my body to science, she always said, and we did), a man in sun glasses attached a tag to her big marbled toe. Check the spelling, he said. E had already witnessed the act.


Om mane padme hung.

A death in the family

Martha Jean Keefe Schultz, October 25, 1917-June 14, 2011

Like a Walking Meditation Without the Walk: Travel Day 1

On the television this morning, auto racing (delayed for rain in Montreal) & motorcycle racing. Engines whine. The tracks are circles we cannot trace. The man who taught us to make fish hooks has his students draw. Unless you see the form in your mind, you cannot make the makau, he says. Ernesto Pujol walks toward me at the gallery cafe; I know him from his videos, photographs, I know him from his walking. I heard about you from a hotel clerk in Lawrence, Kansas, I say. That was his student in Utah. (The link is an orphan.) I do not say that I love Albert Pujols, that his slump is over, that he shaved, that he too walks a lot.


A mode of art that is not power, but offers us a model. When I watch you walk, I see feet, legs, knees, hands, narrow sideburns. Robes make it harder to see the legs, the knees, though they make the body whole. Anne says when we die, she likes to think we become one with ourselves. Without the seams. Unseamly. Unseemly blog, you carry me forward to your own end. Shall I grieve for you, too? This odd & backwards walk, like memory but without the memory. (They hand out flash drives like candy these days.)


Mode, model, make. My Versa followed by a white hearse yesterday. Pick-up truck whose license read "Viet 67." Combat plates.


The epiphany for me is in the first 10 minutes or so about meeting form with formlessness as the way to neutralize violence. I cannot say that death is a form, but it is not violence now. Is the meeting of. Dogen: "to accept a body and give up a body is an act of generosity." To speak of death is not violence. To write the blog is not violence. To walk is to meet formlessness with two feet, awkward prosody.


The man who taught Radhika to play the nose flute was Percy Kipapa's uncle.


"She floats," the soccer moms say. "Did you see that?!" Radhika jukes & feints & leaves another girl stuck on the gym's wooden floor. Kicks from mid-court, over the keeper's head, into the net. But when she tried to make a $100 bill out of a $1, only a repeated swish of air. How can she know the court so well, when she thinks Kalihi is Hawai`i Kai? You know your way by turning the opposite from my mother, Radhika. Glint in your eye.


Floakers. There are characters in Embassytown who sound out a language, but cannot speak it. They say it to each other as a French speaker speaks English to another Frenchman who speaks English in return. The way we stuttered French on the buses, children staring at us with dilated eyes. But when they speak to a native, none understands sound as meaning. It's a mother tongue that cannot be transferred. She is your only mother, the one who is dying like a language, steady distress of verbs & nouns breaking into pieces. But this is not violence. Is mending. Words falling petalwards into color, fabric--out of lamination and into air. Lamentation, air.


Paul writes to say he'll publish Memory Cards. His father was in hospice for four 1/2 years. No typo where none intended. Deck of cards. House of cards. Even in board games, my mother refused to gamble or borrow money. Would not mortgage Boardwalk, would not collect $200, would not obey the little yellow cards.


Sina is meeting me at the airport with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Translated so many times, there's more than one page on amazon. It's Thurman, the one whose daughter acts. That's the one to read. On the plane. Honolulu to Somewhere, Somewhere to Dallas, Dallas to Washington, DC. Your car will be in Baltimore on Thursday. Synchronicities happen, but not through priceline. I want a fucking person on the goddamn phone.


Martha is "the same." She has not eaten today. It took three tries to get a voice on Country Lane. This voice is more soft than usual. She's having a hard time swallowing. See you tomorrow. Thank you for taking care of her.


When see you tomorrow is an act of faith. When an act of faith is an entirely present thing. Like the row of raindrops under the dark brown rail on the lanai. When an act of faith is not simile, or simulacrum. Fulcrum. Fullness. Air


__________

With deep thanks to Norman Fischer & Caroline Sinavaiana, whose words are appropriate(d) here.

Shatner Chatter: Or, Post-Human Travel Plans

Last night:

Hi Susan,
Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, it does seem like your mom is getting weaker. I'm so sorry. Please keep us posted with regard to your travel plans. Also, if you need us for anything, please don't hesitate to give us a call. We'll be around all weekend (in and out).
Take care.
Love,
Ellen


This a.m.: Secure and on the Arden Courts waiting message sounds at first like "cure."


--She ate 25% of her breakfast. We couldn't get her in a wheelchair to go to the community room. She's very weak. [I ask.] Yes, come earlier.


Nurse says the same thing.


Got tickets for Thursday arrival through priceline.com. Plane and rental car for less than a round-trip ticket. I booked the hotel on the wrong night. Can't ever remember the red-eyes take up the night. I call priceline, get William Shatner, a phone tree, no persons. I look at united.com, but there are no phone numbers. There is no phone number for United Airlines in either of my Honolulu telephone books. They merged, so I call Continental, get Daphne. Daphne looks up my reservation, says United owns it, gives me their number. Phone tree. I speak loudly--too loudly--to the automated voice. I get a person. I tell him how grateful I am to have a human being, and he thanks me. It's then I realize that he sounds automated. He is sorry to hear about my mother, but he can't do anything, because I made the plans with an agent. I call priceline again, more Shatner, no human being.

hi susan,  thanks for letting me know.  very tough and poignant times for you i guess and beautiful too.  i send love.  if you want to send me your mom's name we can chant for her and hold her and you in mind.    Yrs, Norman 

I can get a one way ticket to DC, which is not Baltimore, where I will have a rental car on Thursday, the day after my hotel reservation begins in Fairfax, and where I'll return from. I can get a one way ticket to Baltimore, but it's crazy. I will get the ticket to National. I will beg them to change my rental car reservation and they will tell me they cannot. It's not them, it's priceline, and I refuse to talk to William Shatner any more. He can beam me nowhere.


I call the cousin down the street. I will leave Radhika with them tomorrow. They can pick up Bryant and Sangha in the evening from Kauai. Or I can leave the car and let them know where it is at the airport and they can tell Bryant when he arrives. Bryant cannot be reached. He is on High Adventure with the Boy Scouts.


I am on High Adventure with priceline.com. I hit the purchase button. The screen tells me they are negotiating deals. Little dots flash at me. Birds on a wire. William Shatner is there, one fist jabbing the air toward me, the other held back. He is shadow-boxing, as am I. They have made me a good deal. Too bad it's the second deal I've made this week. Two good deals do not one make.


My mother broke her pelvis a couple of months before our wedding. She canceled her flight reservations. "I got my money back!" she told me on the phone. She was well by the time we married. She would not want me spending her money this way.


I call Arden Courts back, say I'm coming Monday, please keep her going until then. "We're trying," says the caregiver.

> I'm visualizing you sitting with your mom. > > Much love, > Sina >