Thursday November 13, 2014

Adam comes to my room to let me know my mother is pretty alert, so I get up and go to her. After we have been talking for a while, she says, “I need something that’s going to give me hope. I manufacture it at night. There’s not any left, and I’m not getting better. Can somebody tell me something that will give me hope?” I just listen. It’s really hard not to offer her comfort when she cries, and when she’s so clearly in despair.

She wants to call her cousin Renate, who has been like a close sister to my mother. “I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t at least try,” she said, tearfully. So I call Mom’s sister, Christa, to get a number for Renate’s hospice.

“Tell her things are going fine here,” Mom says, “so she’s not so freaked out.” I think, I can’t tell her that. “Tell her I have a cough so I can’t talk,” Mom says. But Christa doesn’t answer so I leave a message. She calls back moments later, and after I ask her if she has Renate’s phone number, she explains that it’s not possible to call Renate, who is not doing very well at all. Mom can hear Christa’s voice coming out of the phone and begins to cry.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” Mom says. “We were going to end up in Iziba” – she means Ibiza, a Spanish resort island – “on the Strand, to make up for the crappy life we had before.”

At this she weeps again. I look at her, thinking this has been my worst fear, that she might die without having felt she lived a good life. A few months ago, when I first expressed that fear to her, she assured me that since her recovery from ovarian cancer in 2001, she has been “content, very content.” Now I’m not sure I can be comforted by that anymore.

“I can’t believe she’s going to leave without saying goodbye,” Mom says.

* * *

“I don’t like that phone,” she says, “I need to take it back.” She’s said this about her brand-new Samsung Galaxy S a few times in recent days, another clear sign that she thinks she’ll live long enough for it to matter.

I want to spare her the psychological pain of accepting that she is dying. The rallying cry of the codependent. But I’ve always struggled with those boundaries – how much must I suffer in order that my mother not suffer? Here, there is nothing I can do. This journey toward acceptance and peace is her last camino, and the prizes the greatest she’ll have ever won.

* * *

I wondered yesterday if I wouldn’t be hearing from my sister about a return visit.

* * *

The hospice chaplain comes at one o’clock. He’d called earlier to see if it was okay, and I’d said yes without asking Mom. I hoped he’d engage her in a conversation about the end, and he did gamely try to do so. At his invitation, she begins to recount things that give her joy – the clouds in the sky with their shapes – and then she cries. It’s about Renate, who might die today, she says.

The chaplain later tells me that he tried to engage her in an end-of-life discussion, “but she wasn’t going there.”

* * *

The rest of the afternoon and evening passed without much incident. Silke visited and rubbed Mom’s feet. Mom was asleep most of the time, but she did break down and cry to Silke about something I wasn’t privy to. She cried more than once today. Sometimes she’d say she was sad about Renate, and sometimes she wouldn’t say or I wouldn’t ask, and I’d wonder if she was crying because she knew or feared she was going to die.

I can see the immense comfort of a belief in life after death. All this fear, transformed, in small or large part, into hope for a beautiful adventure of some kind. I don’t know what Mom’s views on the matter are, exactly, though I have my speculations. I haven’t asked her about her views of life after death because I may as well ask if she knows we think she’s dying. It’s premature, and would only distress her.

* * *

She looks at the furniture in front of her – the dining room table, the shelving, the TV cabinet – as if seeing it for the first time. “How did all of this get in here?” she asks.

“You brought all this in here, Mom. It’s all in your house.”

“Is it in the same location?” she murmurs, though it takes me a while to understand her.

“Yes,” Adam says. “It’s the same location.”

Friday November 14, 2014

Adam got up at around 2a.m., and I went to bed about a half an hour later. In the middle, I helped Mom into the bathroom and back and Adam helped me tuck her in.

In the morning I go to her as soon as I come out of my room. “I almost went crap outside the bowl,” she says. I move her portable commode out of the bathroom and closer to her hospital bed.

* * *

I hear Mom talking to the hospice assistant. She is saying something about not being at home. The hospice assistant tells my mother that she is, in fact, at home. The next time I check on Mom, the assistant is making up her bed and Mom is sitting on her portable commode with her legs covered. She moans a few times and the hospice assistant tells me Mom is complaining of bladder pain.

“I’m so sad,” she says.

“What are you sad about, Mom?”

“Renate,” she says. “This.” Here she gestures toward her condition. “I just wish I knew,” she says. In her much-reduced voice there is overwhelming sadness.

“You wish you knew about Renate?”

She nods. “I just want to be able to say goodbye. Say thank you.”

“She knows you’re thankful, Mom.”

“I know,” she says. Irritably. “It’s not about her.”

* * *

“When is Candy coming?” she asks.

“I’m not sure,” I say. Candy had texted me yesterday to check in, but hadn’t answered my question about whether she wanted to come back.

About ten minutes later, she says, “Did Candy call?”

“She texted me a little while ago,” I say. “She’s still seeing if she can get permission to leave.” I do not know this to be true.

Mom tears up. “I don’t want her to have problems. She doesn’t have to prove her love. I remember what it was like being a single mom.”

* * *

“There’s gotta be something I’m worth it to eat,” Mom says, or something like that.

Worth?  “You’re worth plenty, Mom.”

“I just haven’t eaten in five days,” she says.

* * *

Other times, what she says doesn’t make much sense. And five minutes ago, she gestured toward “the golden thing on the table”. For some reason she had me fetch the small sculpture so that she could examine it.

* * *

“How long have we been here, in this house together?”

“You’ve been here eleven years.”

“I mean this time.”

“About two and a half weeks.”

Her eyebrows go up. She whispers. “That long?”

“Yes.”

She gazes off to her right for a while. “Was I in a coma?” she asks.

* * *

She reaches for my hand. I’m sitting on the couch, but I get down on the floor next to her bed and take her hand. “Hands across time,” she intones. “Your hands were so fat and cute.”

“You’re my favorite,” I tell her.

She smiles. I turn her hand over and lift it up to my lips. I tell her I need to get on one of the business calls I’m somehow able to keep doing. I remind her where to find the bolus of the medication pump. She grips it in her hand and raises it to her mouth, as if it’s her glass pipe.

* * *

I am leaning down to press my face against hers. I breathe in her soft grey and white hair. In her small, girlish, trusting voice, she says, “Am I getting any better?”

“Are you what?” I say, not sure I’ve heard her, or maybe I’m just terrified of where it’s going.

“Am I getting better?”

Breathe.

“No, Mom,” I say.  “I don’t think it’s getting better.”

Her eyes fill with tears and her face is a mirror of pain. She puts her hands over her face and begins to shake with weeping. She begins to keen. I am beside myself.

“I wish someone could tell me something,” she says.

“Do you want to see a doctor?”

“No, because then I would know for sure,” she says. “We don’t know what it is.”

“We know the cancer is spreading, Mom. We know there are certain signs, like the fact that you can’t eat, or your confusion.”

She cries again, ripping the flesh of my heart. Is this not just the worst conversation I have ever had?

After a while she says, “I think I knew a while ago. You just have a feeling about your own body.”

“You mean when you felt something was different, in the last few weeks, and months?”

She nods.

“You did everything right,” I say. “You have been a true warrior in every sense. And you touched and inspired so many people.”

“They used to say that when I was five,” she says.

“Say what, Mom?”

“Say I inspired them. I never understood it.”

“We’ll always be connected, Mom.”

“I know,” she says.

* * *

“I don’t know how I’m going to live without you,” she says, and she begins to shake again.
A little later, she asks her friend Inge, who is older than Mom, “When you die too are you going to come find me?”

* * *

“Am I getting better?” I don’t see myself forgetting that. In that small, pitiful voice. And how vulnerably she simply accepted my answer, like a child.

For a man whose mommy issues revolve around his desire for her to be happy, there is no test like breaking the news that there is no hope, that she is dying.

* * *

Adam and I come back from almost two hours at the local Starbucks, where I distracted myself from the heart-ripping conversation I just had with my mother. Inge and Monika have been watching over Mom in our absence, and they hug us and leave soon after. I sit down on the couch next to Mom’s hospital bed.

“Gregory knows,” she says, referring to the boy she nannied for years, and who loves her like a grandmother.

“Knows what, Mom?”

“That I’m dying,” she says.

Ah.

That’s the first time she’s said those words.

* * *

I don’t think I’ve had any experience more alien than looking at my mother, watching her sleep, hearing her breathe – and trying to grapple with the reality that in a very short while, she will no longer be lying there, no longer be in this house. Knowing that there’s nothing I can do about it – a few more days like this, maybe a week, and she won’t even be sleeping quietly in a hospital bed. She will cease to exist! How to wrap one’s head around that? I’m anxious about being in this house with nothing but memories, ghosts, of her. This is her house. She fixed it up and filled it up with memories and I can’t imagine her not alive in it. I worry about how alone I will feel. I’ve had one parent all my life; what will I do with her gone? When cooking or food comes up, I’ll think of her, want to share, and remember with a start that I can’t call her up any time I want. She once told me she experienced this when she thought of calling up Oma. When I travel, I’ll think of how much she would have liked to come. When I see nature, I’ll remember her appreciation and wonder, and her gratitude.

There will be a mom-sized hole in the world, and I can’t even begin to imagine all the ways my life will be different because of it.

* * *

Berle writes me a lengthy text full of the usual love and generosity.  In part of it, she explains that my mother recently translated the German book Perlen des Lebens for her and Peggie.  The way your Mom translated that book is a cherished memory Peggie and I will never forget. It was as though she could feel God’s presence while reading it to us which brought about some wonderful, emotional conversations. Your mom has been blessed in many ways, but mostly by having you.

At the end she writes, She is always in my thoughts and prayers and I know there’s a fabulous kitchen awaiting her in heaven.

* * *

It’s around 8 o’clock and Mom is dozing in and out, mostly out. The medication pump keeps beeping, annoying both of us. While I put in a new battery I hear her talking in her sleep. I can’t make out what she’s saying. A minute later she spots my vaporizer with one eye opened about twenty percent and the other ten, and she asks for something.

“You want what?”

“Weed!” she bellows.

I clean out the charred material in the bowl of the glass pipe and add some fresh indica. I hold the lighter over the bowl and she inhales. And once more. And without further ado she says, “Good night, my beloved son” and closes her eyes.

Saturday November 15, 2014

Last night. She asks me to join her on the hospital bed. I hold her hand until both of us fall asleep. I wake up at about 1:30a.m. Mom has forgotten how to use her pain pump, so I sleep on the couch and wake up to administer doses whenever I hear her groan. At about 6a.m., Adam wakes and I go to my bed in the bedroom to sleep until 9.

Adam says she cried a lot in the night. “She was sobbing. She said, ‘There are so many books I haven’t read.'”

* * *

Morning. She looks around her without comprehension. “I keep being puzzled by all my stuff.”

“What puzzles you?”

“That it’s here. Because I don’t know how it all got here. I don’t know how I got here.”

“From where?”

She shrugged. “From hospice, wherever.”

“Well your stuff is here because you’re in your home. Your little house. You’re where you want to be. And hospice has been coming here.”

“How long have I been here?”

“You’ve been here the whole time.”

“I’m hungry,” she says. Eventually she chooses toast with butter and jam. As I’m getting up to go to the kitchen, she says, “If we’re this close to Erlangen, why can’t I have sauerbraten?” Erlangen is her hometown in Germany.

I just lean down and kiss her forehead. I’ll never have her sauerbraten again either.

* * *

She wants a pastry. She has told friends she wants pastry for over a week, and they keep bringing pastries that no one eats. But she says she wants something with “some nice cheese on it,” so I pull on a coat and walk to a nearby bakery. I walk past the stores we used to shop in, past the consignment store that put our proceeds toward hospice care, past the salon from which a stylist came to my mother’s home a few weeks ago to do her hair, and wouldn’t take payment. This town, which my mother came to for a relationship, and which she stayed in partly because she didn’t see much evidence of my settling down anywhere else, is filled with my mother.

I don’t want to be here after it happens. I don’t want to be among all these memories. I want to be far away.

* * *

She cries about leaving us.

“We’ll always be connected, Mom. Always be together.” Remembering that yesterday she asked her friend Inge if she would come and find her, I say, “We’ll be together in no time. I’ll come and find you.”

She comes out of the frozenness of her sadness and says, “You better bring some good Camino shoes.”

Berle and I laugh with her.

“Look at that smile,” I say, and I kiss her cheek and her forehead.

“You take such good care of me.”

“That’s because you’ve always taken such good care of me, Mom.”

* * *

She tells Berle that her body has betrayed her. Berle’s face is all empathy. She makes sympathetic noises. I don’t really know what to say, so I say, “Your spirit is still untouched, Mom. That body is just a vessel.”  Berle agrees.

“I wish my spirit could take my body for a walk,” Mom says.

* * *

She complains to Berle that she woke up at 5:30am and didn’t know where she was. Someone should have explained where she was so it wasn’t such a surprise, she says. She is crying.

I’ve never been able to withstand the sight of my mother crying, but when she’s crying because she knows she’s dying, because she fears losing us, I am utterly stricken.

This unspeakable sadness.

* * *

Berle and Silke are here. They rub Mom’s feet and reassure her. She cries, as she has been crying since I told her she was not getting better. I can’t even imagine what she feels, knowing the end is near. How can she not be crying in every waking moment?

I look at her in her hospital bed, usually sleeping, and my brain seizes up while trying to imagine her not being there in a week, the bed empty, the house quiet. There she is, breathing. Huggable. But next week?

Time is running out. What to do? How to make the most of her time? Should I be reading to her? Making her laugh? Reminiscing? I’m afraid I provide no entertainment, no comfort other than the constant attention I give her. I can’t keep my hands off her head, her shoulder, her face. I kiss her every other time I pass by. I fly to her when she cries. Of course she did all this for me, once upon a time.

* * *

Via text Mieshelle tells me that our beloved Great Dane, Jazzy, is being euthanized this evening. She lived longer than average, maybe ten or eleven years. But like Uncle Horst’s death and Renate’s dying, I am not nearly as affected by Jazzy’s death as I would be if I had been there. Or maybe I just have nothing left in the grief tank.

* * *

The morning rivers of sadness fade to a trickle in the evenings. Tonight Mom sleeps. Adam sleeps. Oma and Opa’s ancient clock sits atop the heirloom buffet and audibly counts down the seconds. They are slipping away, 3600 every hour, for several hundred more hours. They will be up before I know it. The heaters blow white noise. It’s not even eight.

The last party

November 8, 2014

Last night I was sitting with Mom in bed when Mom asked Candy to join us too. Because she didn’t want to make Mom move over, Candy got herself into an uncomfortable position with one leg on the floor and one on the bed, so that we now sandwiched mom between us. I grasped Mom’s arm with one hand and leaned on her shoulder, while Candy rested an arm across Mom and held my wrist. We lay like that for a while. I fell asleep there, and didn’t wake up until about 1:30a.m., when I heard Mom groaning.
I reached for her medication bolus and clicked the button. Nothing.

I called hospice. “What’s her pain level?” the woman asked. “Scale of one to ten.” I relayed the question to Mom.

“Four-and-a-half,” Mom said.

My mother is a connoisseur of pain.

* * *

Mom slept from six to six on Thursday evening to Friday morning. Last night she slept beyond 8:30. Maybe it was the increased Ativan she took because I had her take another at 1:30am. Maybe it’s the progression of disease. Or maybe that, at her request, I stayed with her the whole night. I didn’t sleep well, woke up a lot, and when I did I often reached over to touch her back or shoulder or arm.

At a little after eight, she stirs, moans with pain — and then I feel her pulling the covers over me!

“Thanks for staying,” she says in the morning. “That was really nice.”

* * *

“What happened to this place?” she asks, not long after. “It’s a dump.”

“What’s a dump?” I ask.

“This,” she says, gesturing around her. “I used to have my coffee, all my medication in the right place, everything. It used to be a high-class place. Now it’s all gone to hell.”
Occasionally these complaints are accompanied by a slight smile, and I think I detect one here. It has become harder to tell when she’s joking. She never had a particularly dry sense of humor. In fact, she often laughed at her jokes, which was often a pretty reasonable indication that she was joking.

* * *

We are coming out of the bathroom. We move, when I don’t just pick her up, via my arms under hers at the armpit so that we are in a sort of hug. I then walk backwards, holding her medication pump, as she gamely takes small steps after me.

“Do you want to go back to your bed or out into the living room?” I ask.

“Go out,” she says. “Out. In the little time I have left, I want to go out.”

Could this be a new level of acceptance?

* * *

Afterward, she is tetchy, complaining about how Candy fixed her coffee and such.

* * *

It occurs to me that I have never seen such suffering as my mother’s, and it just goes on and on. Every day a grueling affair. I’m not exercising enough.

* * *

Mom wanted spaghetti twice today. She ate several forkfuls of it, some of them enormous. Over a half an hour later, she wanted more. “A little less al dente,” she said. She ate with her eyes closed. Is that the Ativan, now at a half a milligram every two hours instead of three?

I’m sad that Candy is leaving. In less than half an hour. I’m sad for Mom, too, and I dread the clock striking noon, when Candy must go. Several people have offered frequent flyer miles for her, and she says she might be able to get more time off soon. Perhaps she can come back.

I ask Berle to come at around the same time Candy would be leaving. Peggie comes too, though she is teaching riding lessons all day and can only stay half an hour.

“You’re cooking now!” Peggie says.

I laugh. “I’m boiling.”

“You’re doing an amazing job,” she says. She gives me a hug. “You’re not going to regret anything.” She tells me about losing her own mother, 19 years ago – her mother had complained of flu-like symptoms and the doctor she went to failed to diagnose a heart attack – something that would not have happened if the doctor were using the algorithm built by my company, Physician Cognition. She was dead within hours.

“So you’re not going to regret anything. Candy might, but you won’t.”

“I will regret one thing,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“That I didn’t or wasn’t able to make the time to learn to cook from her. That would have allowed me to cook the food she likes during this time, and to honor her legacy and feel connected to her far into the future, when my memories of her will recede into the past.”

* * *

Two of my five surviving ribald aunts on the Powell side, Jayne and Willa Kay, arrive from Rangely. Willa Kay ribs my Mom. She teases her, treats her like she’s not sick. It’s nice to see.

“I have just been overwhelmed by everybody’s outpouring and kindness,” Mom says.

I feel good about this. Unrealistic though it may be, I want her to feel only love at the end.

* * *

Mom has a hankering for shrimp. She knows there are some still in the freezer. First she wants the shrimp with something and cilantro, but she soon changes her mind and asks for a salad. And a mayonnaise and olive oil dressing, along with cilantro. “Mayonnaise and olive oil?” I say to Willa Kay. “Have you ever heard of such a thing?” She admits she hasn’t. I wonder if Mom is not thinking clearly, but Willa Kay makes the dressing as instructed and Mom pronounces her whole salad very good.

“How is it?” Willa Kay says, returning from the kitchen. “That gonna make a turd?”

This breaks me up. This is the sort of thing her mother, Gramma Powell, would say. My mother has been channeling her irascibility and profaneness lately too. Mom later refers to her glass marijuana pipe as a “flying penis”.

“Well, now that you mention it,” Jayne says, and could have been speaking for all of us.

* * *

She is telling a story and Willa Kay asks when it took place. Mom says, referring to me, “That’s when he was pregnant with me.”

“Oh, that must have hurt,” Jayne says, looking at me.

* * *

It is a quarter after six, well past five o’clock, when Jayne and Willa Kay had said they needed to leave. “We’ve had a lot of good times, haven’t we, Inge? And we’re gonna have some more.”

Mom is crying.

“How ‘bout if I come back and do up your fingernails and your hair for you? Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Mom mumbled that it would be nice.

“Jayne and I were talking about getting down here, and I finally just said we gotta git. I’m so glad we came. So you could cheer us up.”

For a good ten minutes, Willa Kay strokes my mother’s hair. She is very tender with her.

“You were kinda chubby the last time I saw you,” my aunt says. This was June 2010, when Willa Kay gave my mother a book on organic and macrobiotic eating that catalyzed a dramatic change in my mother’s diet. “Can’t say that now, can you?”
Willa Kay asks Mom what color of fingernail polish she wants.

“Teal,” Mom says.

“Teal?”

“It’s the color used to signify ovarian cancer,” I explain. “Mom’s a member of the Teal Warriors Facebook group. It’s for survivors and caregivers.  I’m a member too.”

* * *

I come in from the kitchen with Mom’s ginger tea and I see Jayne stretched out across Mom and hugging her close, their heads touching. I see the tears in my aunt’s eyes and I am moved. “I love you so much, Inge,” she says, and now I have tears in my eyes.

I see Jayne and Willa Kay out to their truck. I am so thankful they came, and so grateful for the love they showed my mother. They repeat that they will come back. I say they should try to come back in the next week or two.

Jayne and Willa Kay are gone. “They brought a wonderful energy here,” I say to Mom.” I wish they could stay here for the duration. “Boy, for how little we get to see one another, Willa Kay sure is fond of us, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Mom says. “I was surprised. Very nice.”

* * *

Mom wants the marijuana cream to put on her bedsore.

“Do you want me to keep the bed up or put it down?” I ask

“No, I’m gonna go to bed and read,” she says. “I need a little of my” – she waves a hand, which is out looking for the right word – “my routine. Take my teeth out, brush my teeth, get my oil.”

So we go through this routine. She has difficulty getting out of her hospital bed, but she still manages it. She can’t walk on her own, but if you put your arms under hers she will hold herself up and even move her feet. We walk the lengthy, exhausting camino out of the hospital bed and through the living room, across her bedroom and through another too-thin door into the bathroom. We pull her pajamas down and she sits down and I stand there because I’ve got the IV drip wrapped complicatedly around my neck. “Do you want me to leave you alone?” No. She is done.

She stands up with my help and brushes her teeth. She can stand on her own with something to hold onto or lean on. She drops the cap of the tube of toothpaste into the removable mesh filter that fits into the drain. She fumbles with the cap, trying in vain to pull it out, and I say, “Here, let me get it,” and I pull out the mesh filter, turn it upside down so the cap falls out into my other hand, and put the filter back. Is this her cognition now?

I give her half an Ativan and her cannabis oil – which she still takes, doggedly, in spite of its demonstrated inability to reverse at least her particular cancer – and then I ask, “Do you want some of your marijuana to smoke, Mom?”

She nods. “I just don’t give a shit,” she says, in that quietened, weaker voice she now speaks in. “And I want something that will enhance that feeling.”

“Enhance what, Mom?”

“Not giving a shit. I want to enhance that.”

And so we do.

* * *

I’m not feeling as depressed in the mornings. It’s no picnic, but it’s not the same heaviness I felt last week. I can still be moved to tears in a few thoughts or images, a few words spoken or actions taken.

But I am not feeling as much sadness as before. I am aware that doesn’t at all mean I’m beyond it. I’ve just moved into a different place. I’m still more likely than my sister to get tears in my eyes. Who knew I was so sentimental? But then I have lived a different story from my sister for the last few years I’ve spent with Mom. I’ve lived a story with Mom, and we’ve striven for the ending that for both of us was the only acceptable ending to the story.

* * *

I find that thinking about the aftermath is not something I should let myself do. It’s too overwhelming. And being right here, now, has been the best way not to think about my fear of depression afterward, and inability to work, or my sadness, or what I will do with the house and everything in it, or whether I should still plan to spend the winter in Telluride, as I did just a week before she started to go downhill so quickly, a week when I still thought we might get through the winter and even make it to her next birthday, May 31, 2015, and the last day of the lease.

A summary of the day I sent to my friend Grace via FB Messenger:

Me:  Mom is sleeping a lot more, and grappling with her fear and her anger that she “did everything right” and it didn’t work, but she’s not vomiting and in little pain

Grace: I wish for her to find peace in all this.

Me: yes, I fervently do. Maybe too much so. I need to be prepared for her going while angry and feeling betrayed by the universe

Grace: You have such a beautiful connection to her…

Me: It’s rarely felt that way before, but it’s good to feel now

Grace: I understand. I also understand her anger and feeling that the universe has betrayed her.

It makes sense that I’m not feeling as betrayed and shocked as my mother. No one could generate more hope for her health and survival than she herself has. Hope about organic food and smart eating, hope about the Gerson Method, hope about a long walk on an ancient pilgrimage, hope about chemotherapy, and above all, hope about cannabis oil. The oil, she believed for a long time, would save her.

How do you stay alive when you’ve abandoned all hope? Or it’s abandoned you. Maybe she has hope that something, something currently unpredictable and unnamable, will reverse this slide.

* * *

I hear my mother moaning while half-asleep. I walk in and ask if she wants to hit her painkiller pump. After I press the magic button, I put my face against hers.

“I’m sorry it’s been so hard, son,” she murmurs.

“Don’t worry about me,” I say. “I’ve been given this amazing opportunity to show love for you every day, all the time. It’s been really wonderful.”

* * *

Candy arrives back at her home in Alabama at around 9:35p.m. Mountain. She texts me as much and says I love you. I text that I love her, and that I am so glad she came. I finish watching “Belle,” which is better than I’d hoped. I write my friend and colleague Mark, in part:  I’m giving some thought to what I’ll do after Mom passes. I have a lease [in Telluride] until the end of May, but I may consider, when the time comes, relocating to Boulder in order to do a lot more networking [for the startup].

It’s 10:20p.m. and I can hear my mother hiccupping. The drawn in-breath, the high volume, higher and more forceful these days than her speech. Will I always be reminded of her suffering, every time I hear someone hiccup?

* * *

November 9, 2014

Vikki is one of the many people who barely know me or don’t know me at all but who have written with support:

I know you are having a tough time of it. Thinking of you and wishing there was something I could do to help from SC. If there is, please let me know and I will do it.

Hi Vikki. Thanks so much for reaching out. Especially since we don’t know one another very well, I’m touched by your compassion and generosity. All people can do from afar is what you are already doing. It’s also very therapeutic to blog and to hear from people about what I’ve written. It’s all less surreal than last week, but I’m still a bit disoriented at the suddenness, as is my mother. She’s surprised, shocked, feels betrayed and angry, desperately wants more time with my sister and me and others, and is scared. Those things weigh on me at least as much as her dying itself.

* * *

One commenter on the latest blog advised me not to try to delay my grieving. She said I wouldn’t be sorry. My friend Rivi told me not to feel guilty. A surprising number of people have written to say things along the lines of your writing is beautiful. I am touched and gratified, but I haven’t really understood it.

* * *

Briana Faith Powell, a cousin I have never met and who may have never met my mother, wrote on Facebook, “Drinking tea, thinking about Inge.” I cried.

* * *

10:15p.m. I am in the kitchen snacking while Mom sleeps. I hear something and walk into the living room to find her rooting around on the table that’s on the left side of her bed. It’s full of things and she’s searching around in the dark. I ask her what she needs and she says the pain pump – which has been on the right side all day, and is never on the table.
I go around and press the button for her. Then she wants to go to the bathroom, so the journey begins. On the way back she stops to catch her breath and says, “I need to find some water therapy or something.”

“Water therapy?”

“For my legs. I need to do something. I’m not going to just lie down here and die, no matter how [unintelligible] that would be.” She is crying.

“How what, Mom?”

“How gra-cious,” she says loudly, and now she is sobbing. I reach out to her. “Everybody keeps talking like it’s a done deal,” she says.

Indeed. A little earlier I had caught her crying – I thought she was crying because she didn’t want to die – and had said something about going to a beautiful place. I realize to my horror that my mother still thinks she can get better and I feel both sad and abashed for my presumption.

“I need an advocate,” she says. “Somebody to look into treatments.”

“What kind of treatments, Mom? We don’t know how to stop the cancer. Do you want to see a doctor? We can find out exactly what’s wrong with you and whether there are any treatments.”

She says that isn’t possible.

“It’s not about getting a treatment, Mom, so it won’t violate the hospice rules. It’s just seeing a doctor. You always have the right to do that. Do you want to see the doctor?”

I don’t remember her response, except that it wasn’t affirmative. She lies down on her side and cries some more. I kiss the top of her head.

“It would be wonderful if you got better,” I say. “That would be really great.”

I can’t give false hope. I can’t tell her that she will get better, or that we’ll find a way, or that it’s going to be all right. I haven’t said any of these things to her. Nor have any of her friends, now that I think of it. Not one. Under the circumstances, giving such hope would be unethical, even cruel. We simply have no evidence that this growing cancer can be stopped, especially now that chemotherapy, like surgery and radiation, is not an option, and the cannabis oil has, at best, merely slowed the progression of the disease.

* * *

Candy says, “I’m not worried about Mom, she’ll be okay. I’m worried about you.” And another time she says, “Are you going to be okay? You’re the one that will find out first. I worry about you.” I’m not used to my sister saying this sort of thing to me.

* * *

Mom is concerned about Candy and I dividing up assets, but Candy says we can handle it. “I’m not going to fight my brother over stuff,” she says. I promise Mom that we won’t fight about it. Later, in the living room, Candy says, “I’ll let you decide. You’re the one who paid for all this, who bought this house and helped her pay her rent. I’ll do whatever you want.”

That, too, surprises and impresses me.

* * *

November 10, 2014

She vomited at 5:30am this morning. My theory is that she had too little Ativan in her when she used her pain pump, twice, and drank some coffee. She was miserable.

“I don’t know how I got here,” she said.

“I know, Mom.”

“I don’t even know what I can do to get better.”

Oh, Mom.

She saw some vomit on her pant leg and she began to cry.

“It’s okay, Mom. We can clean it up. See?”

Later, when she saw that vomit was all down the front of her shirt, she began to sob. We went to the bathroom so that she could wash up.  I found her a new top and pants. When we got back to her hospital bed, she said, “I need to do something about depression. I think I’m getting depressed.”

“We can get you a prescription, Mom. But it’ll take about a month to work. Do you want me to call your doctor?”

She didn’t respond.

* * *

Close to 9am, she vomited again, but less forcefully and not for as long. Then she was cold and decided she wanted to take a hot bath earlier than planned (when Berle got here). “I think there’s not just one thing wrong with me,” she said.

We decide to watch Seth MacFarlane’s profane “A Million Ways to Die in the West”. She asks me to get into the hospital bed with her. She begins to cry. “I don’t want to go.”

“I know, Mom.”

“And that God the Father, I was always so afraid of him. I don’t want to see him.”

“That mean and uncompassionate God is a fairytale for children, Mom. There’s no such thing. No God worthy of the name is even less merciful and compassionate than humans. That God was invented by people with little godliness in them.”

“I know, it was just always beaten into me in Catholic school and Mass.”

“Whenever we go, Mom, it’s going to be to a place full of love.”

“I’m not ready to go now,” she says.

“I know, I’m just saying whenever it is that we do go.” I am making sure to use a generic “we”.

“I want to talk to the shaman,” she says, referring to a Native American she met a year or so ago. “I want to find out what Father Sky and Mother Earth say about all this.”

But I have called this shaman, Lance Little Wing, several times. I get only a busy signal, as if his phone isn’t working. I couldn’t find Lance Little Wing on the Internet. I’d never had occasion to think about it before, but if there’s one demographic I would expect to be the last to use the Internet, it would be shamans.

* * *

There are things my mother has said, or been through, that I know will haunt me.  Many times I know it instantly.  The sadness so sharp, what I feel for her on top of my own.

Ingelein, Germany, late 1940s

I am on the phone, trying to listen to a coaching client. This is harder than you might think, because I can also hear, through the spare bedroom door, the sounds of my mother retching.  My Mom’s journey through 2014 has not been what we expected.  

This is how many of her days begin, but to truly understand the beginning of her days, we need to start the night before. She goes to bed at nine o’clock. Just before she retires, she or a friend pulls a spoon out of the freezer and, from the refrigerator, both an orange wedge and a container of applesauce. The spoon is glazed with flour, so that the cannabis oil placed there comes off easily once frozen. She dips the spoon in the applesauce and collects some on the tip. She bites into her orange wedge with one hand, lifts the spoon to her mouth with the other, closes her eyes, grimaces, and swallows the little lump of cannabis oil and the applesauce. She washes away the bitter taste with the rest of the orange wedge. She may take an Ibuprofen — “half an ibuprofen,” she tells people — but for months she took no medication other than cannabis and half an ibuprofen.

Mom, early 2014

More recently, she takes with her to bed the small pump that, with the press of a button, delivers painkillers to the chest port that was installed for last year’s failed chemotherapies. The button works only every eight minutes, though my mother tries to push it only a handful of times a day. I remember when, soon after she got it, she unplugged it for just a little while, and the pain returned. “I guess I’m tied to this thing now,” she said, somewhat mournfully. She is very aware of all the things that she can no longer do, or do alone.

At times that list has included eating, one of her greatest pleasures, or cooking, which for her may rate even higher for the joy it gives to other people. She had to stop visiting me in Telluride many months ago; the altitude was too much, and she could no longer enjoy the spectacle of me singing karaoke. Walking became difficult next, and when it became too much so we got her a wheelchair. Her young friends Annika and Gregory, to whom my mother is practically a grandmother, burst into tears when they saw it.

Annika, right, at a party for Mom

On her bedside table you would find a glass pipe into which she will stuff marijuana from a local medical marijuana store, some shatter hash made by some friends, which she will smoke with the marijuana to help her sleep, a bottle of smartwater, her cannabis oil vaporizer pen, and a long bean bag made for her by her friend Madeline. It requires 3 minutes in the microwave and is a balm to the pain in her midsection.

Until recently, at about midnight, perhaps one o’clock, she would wake up in crippling pain. “It feels like there is an animal inside me that’s trying to chew its way out,” she has said.  She would take some more of her cannabis oil (which, as she will tell you, is really more of a paste), and perhaps, though she usually tried not to, some morphine. (Painkillers constipate, which can lead to pain worse than they solve). Some nights the pain was so bad she’d take three hot baths. Somehow the hot water helped where even drugs did not. On a few occasions she called out to me, or even came to my door to wake me up. But there are a few times I will never forget: waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of my mother sobbing, vomiting, as she collapses, exhausted, with her arms over the commode.

Two weeks ago, I was in Telluride when our friend Bonnie texted me to say that she was taking Mom to the ER in Montrose. I jumped in my car and met them at the hospital about eighty minutes later. They put her on pain and nausea medication, but a few hours later she was discharged. At around eight o’clock that night, the pain in her abdomen and kidneys was too much. She was moaning, gasping, with pain. The pain, she had once told me, was worse than childbirth, not quite as bad as kidney stones, but longer-lasting. I would watch her as she sat on the couch, hugging herself, rocking to and fro, tears in her eyes, and I would try to imagine that.  We had to go back to the ER.

We walked out through the back door of her house. I steadied her with one arm and carried her bags and medicine pump in the other hand. Every step or two, she would stop, bent over, sobbing from the pain. Soon I was crying too, quietly, as always, and we stood there together like that, on the flagstone path in the moonlight, and then we trudged on, one step at a time.

There is nothing in life that quite prepares one for this.

From the ER she was admitted to the hospital, where she stayed for three nights. Friends visited. She told one friend, Silke, “Das war die Grenze. Das war die absolut Grenze.” Which means, That was the border, the absolute boundary.  “I couldn’t ever go through that again,” she said to several people afterward. “I’d shoot a dog in that kind of pain.”  She longed for home. But home, when we returned, was a very different place: friendly and helpful hospice nurses were in it now, and Mom was connected to her pain medication pump at all times.

Lately, due to the intravenous medications from hospice, she gets up in the morning less with pain and nausea, and she may sleep without interruption until a luxurious four o’clock. But on one recent morning I was up at nine and found her still in bed, looking drawn and spent. “Are you okay?” I asked. She shook her head, looking forlorn. “Nauseous,” she said. “I’m just trying to get on top of it.” She says this a lot, about pain and nausea: “If I can just get on top of it.” I ask if she wants a joint, she says no, so I draw her a hot bath with Epsom salts. As I retreat to the spare bedroom where I sleep, I can hear her moaning in the tub.

This is how the new day begins. Yesterday she posted on Facebook that she wanted to go for a drive today, to see the colors before they depart. But she doesn’t think she can leave the house. I bring her hot tea and a baguette with butter, and then I get on my coaching call.

After my call we watch her German TV for a while, soaking in the images of the Bavarian Alps on some travel show, oohing and aahing with our desire to be among them. Like in happier times, when we spent many a magical time at her brother Horst’s hotel in the Swiss Alps. Horst, who died unexpectedly only four months ago, from cancer. When the program is over we watch one of the movies I got from a RedBox at City Market the day before, “The Bone Collector,” with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. For lunch we eat a thick soup made by Karla, a darling 83-year-old German friend of my mother’s. Then I go to Starbucks to get in three hours of work.

Her friends visit. Berle, who once texted me, “I love your mother!”, and who for many months brought the fresh goat’s milk that was the only thing my mother could eat. Peggy, who says my mother is like a mother to her (and she like a big sister to me), and whose house I sometimes stay in when Mom’s spare bedroom is full, or I have a friend in town. Karla makes soup and conversation. Silke brings apples and footrubs and a

Silke, center, with my Aunt Christa, left, and cousin Fiona

never-ending smile. Bonnie was with Mom during her first chemotherapy, in 2001.  She comes every Tuesday night. They used to go out to dinner, now they eat in.

Rob comes from across the alley to check on Mom, and to roll the joints that no one else knows how to roll. The neighbors next door mow the lawn. Monika brings kaffee sahne, Epsom salts, and flowers, and fixes Mom’s German TV. Lynn, mother of Annika and Gregory, brings groceries.

Gregory, Mom’s little buddy

Lynn also bought my mother a new washing machine, and insisted on giving Mom money for the new Samsung Galaxy phone I recently bought her. Another German named Inge brings books about historical Germany and fresh blueberry scones. Sometimes my sister-in-law, Jannilynn, visits from Grand Junction, bringing her young son, Braxton. Jannilynn has no relation to my mother, but she has really taken Mom to her heart.

Mom hides behind Jannilynn’s tresses

On a weekday afternoon, I will take several more coaching calls in the spare room, pacing the cramped space as I talk. And then from about seven to nine we will watch another movie. Tonight, we watch two-thirds of “Gandhi,” which I last saw in the early 1980s, when it came out.

Some nights I draw her bath, or fetch her oil, or lie next to her on her bed and rub her back or hold her as she tries not to vomit, but holds the blue vomit bag in front of her mouth, just in case.

My mother still expresses gratitude. For a call, a visit, a meal, a strawberry, a tree turning yellow and orange.

The writer and doctor Atul Gawande, in his thoughtful new book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, writes, “The brain gives us two ways to evaluate experiences like suffering—how we apprehend such experiences in the moment and how we look at them afterward. People seem to have two different selves—an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who, as the Nobel Prize–winning researcher Daniel Kahneman has shown, gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to just two points in time: the worst moment of an ordeal and the last moment of it. The remembering self and the experiencing self can come to radically different opinions about the same experience—so which one should we listen to?”

Those who love my mother believe their job is to make her most recent memories as full of love and warmth as possible. I am eternally grateful for all of them.

My niece, Brianna, visited for two weeks in June, along with her mother, Candace

Mom and I accompany my nephew Dylan to court for a traffic violation