In September 2013, my mom was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer, a recoccurence of the cancer that was removed from her lung in April 2009. On January 24, 2014, my mom died at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco. I wrote this in September 2014, and it is the first thing I've written since her illness.
They say the dead never truly die as long as we remember them. These days, though, the dead live on in cyberspace and databases as well as in our unreliable, organic memories. Even as they rest in peace under the earth or scattered to the winds, they linger on in the Cloud, a 21st century version of eternal life that features demographic nuggets encoded in strings of 1s and 0s, instead of chubby angels, pearly gates or golden harps,
I think of my mom every time I go to Safeway because I continue to use her Club Card, which will be forevermore linked to her former landline, disconnected these many months. I never got around to getting a Club Card of my own back when they were a thing in the early 90s, and now never will. (Who even has a landline anymore?) Though I’ve turned off her Facebook and shut down her email, I will continue to collect gas points and free sandwiches in her name. And why not? At least the Safeway Club Card gives something back, unlike the piles of newsletters and appeals from her favorite causes that still clutter my mailbox every day. Ridding myself of them is an ongoing process: Please remove Whitney Roberson from your mailing list. She has died, and the last thing she’d want is for Your Organization to be using resources that could be better spent elsewhere. Sincerely…
Since it takes exactly three weeks for every single catalog purveyor to discover a person has moved, it’s too bad the same thing doesn’t happen when you die, only in reverse. One organization gets the word of your passing (just as some computer, somewhere clues in that a person has moved), and then your name is rapidly removed from all the lists, a virtual unraveling of a lifetime of one-time donations, ill-advised form-filling-out and change-of-address slips.
Following her death, my sisters and I dealt with our mom’s stuff—her 'personal effects,' as they suddenly became-- with efficiency I would have loved to have seen from the mailing list folks. We rented a dumpster, cleaned out the garage and gave away almost all of her clothes. This wasn’t out of a sense of hostility, but there was some desperation involved. There was so much to do, sort, process, deal with, that Goodwill was a godsend, along with brothers-in-law who could haggle with estate dealers, and the San Francisco real estate market that swallowed her house in a matter of weeks. We even had a table at her funeral with her religious items--crosses, prayer books, Bibles and the like--valued tools of her trade we couldn’t imagine donating. We invited people to take what they wanted. Her friends did the rest and thanked us for our thoughtfulness, holding their keepsakes close. We took none for ourselves. We had the stark memory of her last days etched in our brains, which felt so much more real than any icon or statue.
It’s possible that we will regret this. I don’t yet, but there has finally been enough distance to wonder if there will be a time when moldy legal pads filled with her handwriting would have helped me remember the sound of her voice. I can still hear it now, just as it was when I last heard it: full of pain and bewildered frustration that she was still alive when she had been praying so hard to die. Though I have a good collection of photos, my strongest emotion when I look at them is still disbelief, not sadness, that the healthy, smiling woman pictured is actually her. The pictures of us on Christmas mornings, in Muir Woods, around the City, mock the pictures I have in my head: my mother throwing up everything she tried to get down; my mother dictating emails because it was too hard to type; my mother stage managing her Last Rites, which is a surprisingly good memory, but miles away from the picture from Easter of 2013 of hunting for Easter eggs with her grandsons.
My final memory of my mother alive was of her demanding that the hospice people help her die, and my having to explain why they couldn’t, but that I knew what she needed to do. She taught me how to read, and then 37 years later, I read a hospice pamphlet—could it have been strategically placed?--which said, in so many words, that if the patient stops drinking liquid, they will die in about two days. She scrimped and saved to help send me to journalism school, and then 21 years later, I reported this information to her with Pulitzer-worthy dispassion while sitting on the edge of her bed and looking into her sunken eyes. It was only after she asked the hospice aide to help her go to sleep and not wake up that I’d realized what I’d done. My sisters, clustered around her bed, thought I was brave. The visiting nurse from Iceland praised me. An hour after she fell into the sleep she would never wake from, I met my best friend at a nearby restaurant, and he told me I actually hadn’t killed my mother. I ate the first full meal I’d had in weeks, but my hands were shaking. It was months later that I realized I hadn’t said good bye before the heavy drugs kicked. None of us had. At that point, her death had become just the next step in the brutal forward momentum of her cancer. That it was also the final step didn’t seem as important as that inextricable movement toward the end.
We all die in different ways. There’s a hospice pamphlet about that, too. The time leading up to my mother’s death was an asteroid on a collision course, an avalanche that brings down the whole mountain, a tsunami with the power of the Pacific. It overtook her and all of us. We knew that we would emerge, and she would be lost. We also knew that there was no steering and no rescue. But when her death actually came, almost exactly two days after she had fallen asleep, it was quick and gentle: a comet shooting across the sky, the sound of snow falling, the tide ebbing until it was all the way out.
We all mourn in different ways. We mourn in a way that’s unique to our personality, but much of our individualized grief stems also from our relationship with the deceased. In the months of chaotic and painful momentum, I took comfort in the things I could do for my mom that only I could do—things like writing regular updates to our family and friends, talking details with lawyers, educating myself on cancer and her health options. It felt sometimes as if I’d been practicing my whole life to fulfill these final tasks because so much of what I did had its deepest roots in things she had taught me.
It could be that I’m trying to make meaning where none exists. That once the junk mail stops coming and the estate is fully settled and Safeway comes up with another way to provide money-saving illusions to loyal customers, I will have replace my comforting memories with the finality of her death. But I like to think the dead live on much more than virtually, in what we remember and in what they have taught us.
