Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dot was recalcitrant.
“Lifetime of habit,” she said.
This meant the nursing wing—which might have been the nursing wing but at least was only a skybridge away—was not to be her last stop after all.
“I’m too tough a nut,” Dot informed us, regretful but not unrueful. “They’re sending me away.”
“We aren’t able to effectively manage her symptoms here.
” The Vista View nurse was just regretful.
And not even that regretful. “She’s having breakthrough pain, even with the patches.
She’s having trouble breathing, even with the concentrator.
” She turned back to Dot. “You need intensive pain relief. You need high-flow oxygen therapy. It’s beyond what we can provide. ”
“But I’m dying,” Dot said.
“Not to extend your life.” The nurse blushed. Even here, even now, death was so embarrassing. “To keep you comfortable. We partner with a dedicated hospice center. You’ll have a beautiful view—garden, trees; they even have a pond.”
I remembered move-in day, my first hour here, standing in the forecourt with Max and coming to terms with my new reality: that Vista View was to be my very last home. But this turned out to be true only if you were lucky.
And Dot was unlucky.
We took the bus to the hospice center every other day, though it meant leaving the building and not even in one of the kids’ cars.
The horde had, refreshingly, been joined by well-wishers.
Is it okay if I pray for you?
Is it okay if I leave you this card/teddy bear/bouquet of flowers?
Is it okay if I stand close to you because you are clearly close to God?
Is it okay if I touch you? My husband and I are trying everything to get pregnant, and I’m hoping you’ll literally rub off on me.
(Why not. Why not. That’s a little too close. I guess, but only because you know what “literally” means.)
The Vista View nurse was right—there were gardens and lovely big trees and a pond—and also wrong: Dot did not have a beautiful view.
A view is only beautiful, only a view really, if you can open your eyes and see it, and Dot could not.
I thought she would get better at the hospice center, at least a little better, at least for a little while.
But as soon as they had her pain and breathing under control, she got right down to the business of dying, no wavering.
It was a blessing she wasn’t in pain anymore, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t painful.
“Maybe we should stop coming,” Moth said one morning toward the end.
“She wouldn’t want to be alone,” I said.
“But would she want us to see her like this?”
We all three looked at Dot to see how we saw her: pale, sunken, her face entirely closed. People like to describe this state as “peaceful,” but it felt to me more like “absent.” Maybe “elsewhere.”
“No one should have to do this part unaccompanied,” Maisie insisted. “That whole thing about ‘Everyone goes the final leg alone’ is such bullshit.”
I reached over and took Dot’s very still hand. “We’re here.” Somehow, somewhere, I hoped she knew it.
Maisie narrowed her eyes at Moth and me. “I wonder who’s next. Probably me.”
“What makes you say that?” Moth pulled at his hair triangles.
“One: I’m oldest. Two: This one seems to have the biological clock of a thirty-year-old. She could live another sixty years.”
“You say that because you didn’t go to the meeting with the medical team last week,” I said. “I’m high risk for everything. Name something you could die of, they think I’m probably going to succumb to it within the next few hours.”
The gerontologists maybe were only mildly alarmed and not unimpressed I wasn’t that much more decrepit than I’d been twenty-eight weeks ago.
But the obstetricians couldn’t believe I wasn’t dead already.
Dr. Kim had always been professionally concerned about me, so her professional concern comforted rather than alarmed.
But the other doctors’ concern—which they wore unmasked, which grew every time we met, which they communicated less with listening than lecturing—wasn’t comforting at all.
Instead they hid thinly veiled panic behind numbers I couldn’t understand and statistics that couldn’t possibly apply to me.
They were all plainly terrified. One wrong move—on their part, on mine—one weak moment, one errant symptom, one ill wind could topple this whole delicate balance.
Our being here in the first place was so mysterious, who could say what would make it all go away again?
Doctors didn’t like it when their ordinary patients died; if an extraordinary—and famous—one did, it had to be that much worse.
It’s not that I didn’t share their fears.
Of course I was scared too. Of course I didn’t want me to die either.
But the line we found ourselves in was long.
It was only recently, relatively speaking, that a pregnant woman of any age went into labor reasonably confident she’d come out the other side.
People die giving birth. They die because of giving birth.
They bleed to death. They get infections.
Their organs fail. It was true I might not survive all this, or that I might survive and that survival wouldn’t last. It was true my situation was extreme.
But my doctors’ concerns were not unique to me or my outrageous circumstances.
Throughout most of human history, death by pregnancy was a heartbreaking but well-founded fear.
“Or shit”—Maisie was older than everyone on Dr. Kim’s team, so more used to thinking about life and death than they were—“maybe this pregnancy thing is just step one of your miracle biology. Maybe you’re also immortal.”
“What about me?” Moth said. “Men die earlier than women.”
“Look, you can’t both die,” I said, exasperated. “Then I’ll be all alone.”
“You’ll have the pupacorn,” Maisie pointed out.
“To take care of by myself,” I finished. “And anyway, how’s the pupacorn going to feel?”
“About what?”
“About its parents dying before it’s old enough to deal with death.”
Even Roger and I had talked about this, and I was only twenty-five when I got pregnant with Darcy.
Deep down, we felt indestructible, perdurable, but even so, we made a will, made ourselves envision our not-yet child here without us.
We didn’t believe it though, not really, not even after I got sick.
In fact, we imagined my getting sick indemnified us.
By our twisted calculus, my sudden mortality made Roger invincible.
Our children might be unlucky enough to lose their mother far too soon, but surely that shielded Roger for years and years to come.
They couldn’t possibly lose both of us prematurely.
Even Romeo and Juliet weren’t that star-crossed.
That this was untrue—sometimes even when both parents were young and healthy and believed they had decades before them—had nothing to do with it then and nothing to do with it now.
I knew no matter what happened the pupacorn would not be alone.
Somewhere between one and all of my kids would take this one in when the time came.
Though brother-father sounded creepy, I knew Max would make a fabulous one.
I knew Darcy and Alice would be wonderful parents because they were already.
So it wasn’t being dead that concerned me so much.
It was dying. I couldn’t shake the witnessing part.
This part—where Dot’s mind was gone but her body was still here, wasting away—was hard to watch, hard to be present for.
Imagine if you were seven instead of seventy-seven.
“This is hell. It’s torture. And Dot’s not my mother. ”
“Maybe,” Moth said.
“You think Dot’s my mother?”
“No, but—”
“You think we’re going to live forever? Or at least until a child born twelve weeks from now matures emotionally enough to handle it?”
“You’re never old enough to handle it,” Maisie said. “My mother died when I was in my sixties, and it wrecked me.”
“It’s not so bad,” Moth said. “Dot seems comfortable enough. She gets to sleep through this part. She’s had a good innings.”
“Not so bad for her maybe,” I said. “But very sad for us. And we’re old enough to understand what it means.”
“Maybe you’re not so done in if you’re young,” Moth said.
“Maybe you’re not so gutted if you’re surrounded by other kids with lots of life ahead of them, kids who want to play and run around and jump on you and all sorts.
If you chat to them, if you don’t lie, kids can handle sad things. It’s adults who muck it up.”
Dot had made clear her son should stay put in California rather than attend her on her deathbed, but Petey insisted on flying down.
Maisie explained on the phone that his mother was sleeping all the time now, wouldn’t know he was there, hadn’t wanted to take him away from his family, but he had come anyway.
And what did we know? Maybe she did know he was there. Maybe she was grateful he had come.
Or maybe she was pissed at Maisie for calling him.
Either way, we could see that it was hard for Petey, and he was an adult.
Children, though, seemed simply too young to deal with death.
But maybe Moth was right and this was another erroneous assumption people held, like senior citizens being too old to have sex.
No one wants to contemplate kids confronting death, just like, apparently, no one wants to contemplate geriatrics having sex, but as soon as you think about it anyway, you see all your suppositions can’t possibly be right, not all the time. “Adults do muck things up,” I conceded.
“And you know what else?” He pulled at his hair triangles some more. “I’m honored to be here with her like this. I feel grateful to be able to remember her with her, while she’s still here. I’m sorry she’s going, but I don’t mind being with her while she does it.”