My mother dies at 11:30 p.m. on July 21, but the nurse does not arrive until after midnight. She calls time of death on July 22. I am also a hospice nurse and I understand the protocol, but the inaccuracy unsettles me. The date is wrong on her obituary, on her gravestone. The date matters, even though I know it doesn’t.
Her death from Alzheimer’s is expected. My mother, always overweight, always wishing not to be, starved to death when her body forgot how to eat. The cruel irony is not lost on me, her oldest daughter, also always struggling to be thin. After she is gone I force myself to eat because she can’t, then feel ashamed of my full belly.
The night she dies, the 21st and the 22nd, I grit my teeth and beg the universe for sleep. I have been waiting for her to go, wishing for old mom, real mom, pre-dementia mom, to come to me in a dream. Everyone says she will come, and my mother does not fail her daughters.
We haven’t had a real conversation in a year or more, and a few months prior to her death, my mother stopped speaking at all. Before that, she still remembered my name, but when I pointed at a photo of my son and asked if she knew who he was, she said, “He’s your little boy.” His name gone. Her grandchildren, her reason for existing, erased. My dad tried to reassure me by telling me that once, when my sister phoned to speak to Mom, she passed the phone to him.
“Who is it?” he asked her.
“That girl from California,” she said.
No dreams come for months, and when they finally do, my mother remains absent. I talk to her when I am alone, whispering, embarrassed. I do not hear her voice and I do not feel her presence or smell her perfume. I listen for her in the silences, but she does not speak.
I stay awake, waiting for the in-between time just before dawn, when the veil between worlds lifts. The air seems thinner and I hear the echo of something lost, but instead of feeling close to my mother, what I feel is fear. I wonder if there is a line of dead hospice patients attached to me and my mom can’t find her way through them. I picture her, bony and hollow-eyed, nudging the saggy-skinned dead, pushing past their empty bodies, unable to reach me. Just when I decide to dismiss the thoughts, to call bullshit on this veil I read about somewhere, my husband, eyes closed, sits straight up in bed. “The ghosts are here,” he says.
Mine, or his, I wonder. We have so many.
The long process of grieving is a current I can’t pull myself free of. I weary of paddling, my arms heavy. I give up and float.
I dream of my mother only once, a year after her death. She sits on a wide red throne of velvet worn of its sheen, and she wears a crown. I stand before her and she says five words.
“You should try a Baconator.”
Which is weird, because I don’t eat bacon.
