October 1, 1999

Mother’s blood pressure is lower, the nurse says, but to me she seems the same. Maybe that’s because I see her every day. Her body looks so pitiful lying here in the bed. She’s in a fetal position, much like a baby, diapers and all. She even smells like baby powder. Part of me knows she’s getting near the end, but another part believes Mother and her illness will go on for forever. I’ve never known a world without her.

I doubt if she knows I’m here, but I still like to come by to say hello, just in case.

October 2

Today I need to finish reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead for my class on Asian Religions. I wish Buddhist writings didn’t annoy me so much, with all those dry categories and enumerations. I’ll take the book with me when I run errands to Trader Joe’s, the bank, and the nursing home.

I’m actually fascinated by some things I found in the Book of the Dead. It says that being close to a family member who is dying is a considered a great teaching. It keeps repeating the phrase: At this time there is profound instruction. I’ve heard the word “bardo” before, but I didn’t know it meant gap -- the interval after we die and before we come back into life again. It says it only takes forty-nine days to be reborn.

Mother doesn’t want any of her lunch. She’s down to 92 pounds.

October 3

When I arrived this morning, Mother’s diaper needed changing. Now the air has cleared and I’m sitting on a white plastic chair watching Mother breathe. The sheet barely goes up and down. The sliding glass door is open to the patio where the fountain splashes in the autumn sunlight and a pigeon pecks at the cement.

Today Mother’s sharp face-bones jut out under her taut skin. Her lips pull back from her teeth exposing a big gap on the right side where her partial denture used to go. She was such a pretty woman; she’d be so horrified if she knew.

Mother has been the riddle of my life. She always seemed to love and hate me equally, and I never understood her, though I desperately wanted to. Even today I feel as though if I just tried hard enough I could find the magic key to make contact, and we would have a real conversation and would understand each other at last. But I know that’s impossible; she’s been mentally gone for years. The best I can do is say, “You’re getting ready to die now, Mother. Thanks for everything. You don’t have to worry about the family. Everyone is fine. You did a good job ...” things like that. My tight shoulders tell me how much I want to believe she can hear me, even how much I long to believe she would want me to be here at all.

As her illness engulfed both of us, it seemed that I became the mother while she became the helpless and confused child. The problem is that I feel helpless and confused too, as though I’m trying to be mother to us both. I wonder if this would make sense to anyone if I tried to explain it.

Clearly the end is near, but how near? The nurse says people can hang on like this for a long time.

October 4, 12:30 p.m.

After an hour at the nursing home, I went home and made a plate of brownies, then stood at the kitchen sink and ate the whole batch. Now I’m back on the white plastic chair. This place needs better chairs. My tailbone is killing me. And I admit that’s a pretty minor complaint compared to what it must have been like in the old days when people died at home. I wonder how anyone coped with the tension, let alone the smell and unsanitariness. Both the processes of birth and death are awfully protracted and messy for modern people. We’re not used to things that can’t be expedited.

Borrowing phrases from the Book of the Dead, I lean over every few minutes and tell Mother not to be afraid, that God is waiting for her, that she will be safe, that she will be more whole after she passes over. I wonder if any of it is really true, if anyone really knows.

7:47 p.m.

This evening Mother is wearing a hospital gown with little blue flowers. Her chest is going up and down, up and down. She isn’t blinking at all and when I try to give her water, she can’t suck from the straw, as though her lips forgot how. The nurse was here and says she can’t get a blood pressure reading. But the little blue flowers keep going up and down. The heart and lungs have their own mandate, I suppose, and keep working after everything else has given up.
The nurse says she’s “getting close,” but could hold on for days, even weeks.

10:00 p.m.

I’m sitting here thinking about breath. When Mother took her first breath on a winter night in Colorado in 1917, some Civil War soldier was breathing his last; some young man was dying on a battlefield in Europe; some old lady in Japan, Brazil, or Cairo was on her deathbed breathing like Mother is. In Santa Barbara tonight new babies are birthing into a new world. Impermanence. Change. Birth. Death. Breath. Once we’re here, it all goes by so fast.

11:13 p.m.

Mother is fighting for each breath, her head thrown back, her eyes rolled upward. Her mouth stretches open in a silent scream. Her breathing rasps louder and louder in her throat -- I guess that’s what old timers called the “death rattle.” I count six beats between breaths, then ten, occasionally twelve, then back to six. On and on.

11:38 p.m.

Well, Mother is gone. Finally her breathing shifted to little pants, no longer deep in the chest, but just moving the skin of her throat. For a disjointed moment, I almost called the nurse. “She’s going to stop breathing, do something!” I clenched my jaw and braced myself, and then her throat was still. Her face hadn’t shown any animation for a long time, but once her breath stopped, it became a gray mask. Her soul had fled. Her body looked like old clothes cast aside. The room felt different. All the long waiting and now it seemed over too soon. I felt numb and cold. I wiped my tears and covered her face with the sheet. Maybe that’s only done in movies, but she looked so exposed that I felt embarrassed for her.

I thought I should report to the nursing station right away and started for the door. But I stopped myself and sat down on the white plastic chair, annoyed yet again at my impatience. The Book of the Dead says this is a time of profound instruction. Couldn’t I allow myself a moment to breathe and let it in?

Janis Jennings, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist with a practice in Santa Barbara, California.