Itch Itch Itch: notes on a mother's death

Online: P.S. I love You, 2020

In Print: Meat for Tea, Volume 14, Issue 1, 2020

ITCH ITCH ITCH

“Scribble scribble scribble.” At the end of letters, emails, even phone conversations. Or sometimes, Scribble!!! Scribble!! Scribble!!! or scribblescribblescribble. Sheila Barbara Strongin Berger’s mantra for her only son. Part tongue in cheek, part earnest encouragement, part nag, part self-mocking, she started signing off with it early in the millennium, when writing really, this time I meant it, became The Thing I Was Doing, again. With every creative career decision I’d made, every turn I’d taken, every pursuit I’d abandoned 3,000–5,000 hours in (at least 5,000 short of the magic 10,000 hours needed for expertise that Malcolm Gladwell made famous), as always, Mom, in turn, got angry with me for changing course again, then panicked, then worried, then came around to my new pursuit and began her planning and organizing how I would accomplish my goal. Well, everyone knows the only way to write is to write and write and write, which I had (and still have) never steadily, regularly done, not as a poet in my early 20s, not as as a writer-performance artist in my late 20s and early 30s , not as a would-be features and fiction writer in my mid-to-late 30s. Thus, her hope-against-hopeful Scribble scribble scribble as I headed back east to be an older creative writing MFA-er at 40.

Fall 2007 she was diagnosed. There was surgery, then chemo, then a good prognosis. Then six months of waiting, then some celebration of what appeared to be recovery at my wedding, in August 2008. A few weeks later, though, there was a shadow on some scan or other, then another test and a result: a little cancer left, but a good prognosis, and a plan: more chemo, starting right away, She was weak all that fall, and sick, much more so than the first round. In November, Mom finished chemo, but remained weak longer than expected, spent time in the hospital, then a few days in a rehab center. So another test. Our Thanksgiving plan had been for me to drive from the small town in Western Massachusetts where I live, the two hours due West to Albany, pick Mom up, and bring her back out to the little town where my wife Anja and I live for her first visit to our new house, on what has always been our favorite holiday. The Friday before I was to come for her, she called and gave me The News. I don’t remember just how she put it, but it was very simply. I do remember her voice sounding more worried about my reaction than her demise — an odd combination of incredible generosity and megalomania, as I look back on it now. How would I ever live without her?

Four weeks to four months, that’s what they gave her. Funny word, “gave,” as if the doctors get to choose. I got off the phone, packed a bag, and drove to Albany, stayed with her for two nights. Then drove back the two hours to force my reluctant UMass freshmen to learn how to write one more time before they headed home for the long weekend to overeat and party at Homecoming. At Sheila’s insistence, I stayed in Mass and went ahead with Thanksgiving with Anja, her parents, our friend Janel, and our dogs and cats.

Black Friday. I wrap the wishbone in a piece of paper towel and head back over the river and through the woods, the two hours to Albany. My ferocious, unsentimental mom nearly cries when I unwrap the bone for us to snap. In the kitchen, we pull at it, or, well, my now-tiny mother holds on tight and I pull — my wish, of course: that she win this stupid fucking contest. I bend the bone just so with my fingernail to try to make it break in the middle and it does and she smiles and says, with tiny-mother astonishment, “I won!”

Sheila Berger has always been short, and small, but no one ever thinks of her as 5’ 2” on a tall day because she has a largeness, an elegance — her long, high-cheekboned face, her big, at times daunting personality, her grace. Now, though, she is is just plain tiny everywhere but the belly, swelled with fluid around the tumor — she is seven months pregnant with cancer. The cancer is gloating. She lies in bed and thinks and sleeps and wakes, and sometimes still worries, as she has every night for my entire life, sometimes til well past midnight, at the kitchen table, over items on her incredible lists, but not so much now, between her inherent weakness and the xanax and the morphine. And from bed now. Did I have lunch? Does her Saab need new tires before we give it to Anja? Her list gets shorter every day — mine grows and grows.

I sit by her bed. Watching her sleep offers something vaguely like solace. She wakes, “I just remembered that I love poetry,” almost smiles, closes her eyes again.

I am Sheila’s magnum opus. Unfinished. I haven’t finished my homework. I have no career to speak of, creative or otherwise, just jobs. No one told me there was a deadline. And now it’s too fucking late. Sheila Berger’s existence will not accept any more papers at this date. I FAIL. I fail her. I fail me. She fails? I was the Big Project, after all. I’m 44, I’ve had plenty of time, been given extension after extension. But I’ve dabbled and dabbled and dabbled. In acting and poetry and performance art and voiceover and comedy and journalism and fiction and nonfiction, and now, in the middle of grad school, much to her chagrin, a huge digressive turn, co-owning a bar and restaurant. Dabble dabble dabble.

I leave the apartment to go shopping. “Life goes on.” Clichés exist for a reason. Out in the world, “Sheila,” all over Albany. On a sign, for “Sheila’s Wines and Liquors” I’d driven by all my life and never noticed before.

On the radio: “Sheila was going to be the tallest person in the house.” I lol for real at that one. Must be one tiny bunch of roommates. She always laughed at being called elegant.

When I first get to Albany, I bumble about the apartment I’m still getting used to, since she sold our house, trying to please her. I talk too much, am “oversolicitous,” a word she would use. “Stop trying so hard,” she says. “Stop talking,” she says. “I’m too tired,” she says, confused, forgetting she’s dying. I am wearing her out just being here, wearing her out bringing her the juice she asked me to bring her. I get it. This is a different kind of tired.

One night, I visit my father, who lives about fifteen minutes away, to watch a Knicks game. While I’m gone, Sheila gets up to go to the bathroom, flips a light switch, sees a spark jump from the switchplate, then nothing, darkness. Something has blown in the shoddy wiring of the recent, shoddy refurb of the “upscale” old building right off the park. She calls, asks me if there’s anything I did that might’ve made it happen. Then she tells me it’s fine. It is so not fine. She’s furious, with the landlord, the contractor, the building manager, my father, with me for leaving. A bit of the old Sheila, the demon-strength bubbling up, one last time. She pauses, then tells me to enjoy my visit with my father, come home after the game is over, not to worry about it, enough lights are still working. I worry about it at my father’s for a few more minutes, then head back. The Knicks are awful this year anyway. When I get there, my mother sits up in bed, crosslegged, and starts talking, and rocking, slowly, quietly, at first, then faster and faster, but with no strength for volume. A rage torrent, at my father for existing and for the fact that he gets to keep on existing, at me for suggesting that she might want some to have some friends visit the other day. How could you have suggested those people to me what would I say to them what were you thinking I can’t stand it I can’t stand those people why would I want to see them don’t you even know me you do know me though so how could so what were you . . . . and on and out it comes it pours. This is her last rant, last burst, barely above a whisper. She sits and rocks as speaks, then stops looking at me, just looks straight ahead, murmuring on, in a trance. Fucking Mark Berger your goddamn father just wants to see me because he wants to cry . . . maudlin bullshit . . . wants to feel sorry for me, for himself. I sit with it. Go Sheila Go! I don’t want her to stop, but she is running out of gas. She finally stops, starts to cry. Tells me to leave her alone, so I leave the room, wait for it. Calls me back in a minute later. Apologizes, but still doesn’t understand how I could think she’d want to see those people. . . . I tell her I’m sorry, I won’t suggest any visitors again. I tell her I’m sorry I don’t understand, but I don’t understand the not wanting to see anyone. One of my main jobs is to be her sentry. She has cut everyone off but me. In her position, I imagine I’d want to see every dear face, touch people, hold them. Sheila’s deepest fury right this minute is that I don’t know the inside of her head as well as she does, that not enough of me is her, not enough her is me. She reaches to pull me in for a kiss, holds me for three four five seconds, then says she’s sorry again, tells me to go away again. I look in maybe five minutes later and she’s dead asleep.

Now she’s in bed all the time, except to go to the bathroom, which she still gets up and does on her own. Occasionally makes her way to the kitchen to try to eat a few crackers, drink some ginger ale, maybe try a piece of a slice of canned pear. She doesn’t like me to linger, just to be nearby, on call in the living room.

It’s gotten completely dark in the past hour. I sit down in my chair by her bed, in the dark. She wants to tell me about crackers. Those crackers, the ones you like. The salty-sweet round ones, you know. Up in the cupboard above the sink. But if you open them sweetie, please tie them up in a baggie with a twisty. (long pause, as she gathers her strength, something important is coming) It would not improve the end of my life to see a mouse. Okay mom. I laugh. I’m not joking. Okay Mom. I know it’s funny sweetie, but do it, okay?

Jamie? Jamie! Coming, Mom. What were you just doing out there? Making a drink? No, Mom, but I was thinking about it, want one? (a joke — I still try) She: hint of a smile and a look. She is not worried about my drinking, she’s fears me not self-medicating. What was all that noise? I tell her I’m just doing some dishes, going through the mail, tossing old magazines, like she asked. But I kept all the clippings, I tell her, like she asked. All her life she has clipped clipped clipped articles images comics, from the Times, the New Yorker. Clippings? it’s too late for fucking clippings. Ha! — this laugh, and the Mouse/Cracker Directive, momentary bursts of not-dead-yet energy I’ve come to savor — she’s still rolling, There’s a title for you, Sweetie: “Too Late for Clippings,” but no one would know what you’re talking about, she weak-laughs again. She’s out of breath from all the talking. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write about my mother. Okay, go away. Go have a drink, sweetie. Have some dinner.

I tiptoe back in a little while. She lies there, sleeping, facing the windows in the late afternoon graying, on her right side because that’s the only comfortable way for her to lie because of the fluid, looking out the window. I imagine she’s drifting in and out of sleep, thinking of poorly re-wrapped crackers and mice and clippings and lists and chores, and maybe poetry, or some Hardy or Virginia Woolf, or maybe a song, maybe some jazz, or Bronski Beat, “Smalltown Boy,” which I bought her the 12-inch of, a million years ago. Lists only in her head now. Not like before, the nightly ritual, papers sprawled out around her on the kitchen table, pens and highlighter and pencil and scotch the tape and post-its and Wite-Out at the ready, to scratch off, add, cover up. So much of her daily life for decades, adding things to and scratching off those gorgeous chaotic, sculptures, monthly desktop calendars covered by layers upon layers. The anxiety as they grew, what needed to be done, then got done, the joy of scratching things off. The end of that joy. I do the listmaking and scratching-off now. She is on my list now.

I watch TV in the living room, sitting on the floor in front of the couch, volume very very very low. Young women are competing to be Paris Hilton’s best friend. I am watching young women compete to be Paris Hilton’s best friend. Sheila Berger is dying while I watch young women on TV compete to be Paris Hilton’s best friend. I don’t watch these shows. I don’t know why I’m watching this one now. A girl sits in a hot tub telling the camera, telling Paris, her voice a-quiver, why she wants this soooo bad, “I’m not here to be a rock star, I’m not here to get anything, I’m just here to be your friend.” The season is just starting. Sheila Berger will leave the world without knowing who will become Paris Hilton’s new best friend.

Anja visits. At first, I wrote the words “my wife,” which felt cold. We are much closer than that, of course, but in the scope of things, here, right now, she is “my wife,” a distant thing from a far place from here. She and Sheila sit in the dark together. Very-thin Anja looks downright stocky next to my mom, her arms wonderfully thick, full of warmth and vigor. It’s almost unbearably good to have her here, because I know she has to go back home, to go to work tomorrow. We stay up late, tiptoe around, silently scream at the horribly redone supercreaky floors.

In the morning, I burn toast in the decades-old toaster oven I’ve known for half my adult life. Anja throws the bread in the sink, but it’s too late. Mom smells it, calls me. She’s sitting up. How could you, you know that toaster, you know I — I’m sorry I’m sorry you didn’t mean it. But dammit — . Sorry, Mom, Sorry. And then I realize that while Anja’s rushing around the apartment fanning smoke I’m burning the next batch as we speak and run out of the room. Toast is on fire this time, fuck fuck fuck. Anja and I, running around, opening windows (in December), fanning with towels, praying the smoke alarm doesn’t go off, as Sheila goes on talking from her room. Yes yes you’ve got a lot on your mind, of course, and it’s just burnt toast, not much in the grand scheme of things — no — no not much at all, but how could you? You know that damn toaster oven.

Sheila wants to talk to me about something, but tells me to have some breakfast first. I very very carefully make more toast, then join her. Sweetie, when I’m gone . . . when I die . . . you like to eat . . . and you might gain some weight. This has always been an issue between us. Always checking me, sometimes even patting my stomach, giving me one or another version of: You’re getting a belly. Don’t get a belly, sweetie, don’t be one of those thin men with a belly. I’ve always had a belly. I inherited it from her. As an adult, I’ve never gained or lost more than ten pounds. I exercise. I am healthy. She continues, When I die, you go ahead and eat if it makes you feel better. You’ll gain some weight but that’s okay. You’ll get back to normal in time. Do what makes you feel better, don’t worry about it. . . . Okay, Mom. I will. I feel I might cry. I decide not to. This is an odd, powerful gift, an oddly powerful gift. This is grace, letting go of control, of me. This, it turns out, is what grace feels like — ridiculous. She sends me away. I sit on the living room couch and really cry for the first time since I got The News.

It’s time to go. Two giants arrive to take my mother to hospice. Humongous ambulance men. The smaller one is about 6’2” 250lbs. The huge one is much bigger in every way — he lifts my mom out of bed like she’s a toddler. Her not-5’2” is now well under five feet. Her 135-some pounds that she always wanted to lose five of now down to what must be 85, tops. “Just pretend we’re dancing, sweetheart” the giant says, as he hoists tiny rag-doll Sheila, incredible, into a wheelchair. Sheila Berger is dying, fast, but she’s just 73, not nearly as old as she’s come to look in the past month, flesh hanging off her bones, face sunken more each day, more of a skull than a head. Deathly. The two giants don’t realize they’re taking her in for good and all, they just know we’re going to the hospital. They talk to her in ways that someone talks when someone is going to the hospital for the normal reason, to get well. The way you talk to someone who’s going to be coming home again.

I have always trusted doctors, even liked going to them, because they tell me what’s wrong and eventually fix it. Until they can’t. This is what we learn, now, Sheila and I. Until they can’t. Sheila has always driven doctors up the wall. There’s a public service announcement on TV lately encouraging people to ask their doctor questions. It shows some guy asking a million questions to the phone store clerk, his car mechanic, a waiter, but then in the doctor’s office, Doc says, “Any questions?” and the guys says, nothing, shakes his head, nope, uh-uh, I’m good. That ad was not made for Sheila Berger. She researched and printed out articles and clipped and copied and brought her lists into their offices and got her goddamn questions answered. She’d sit down in their offices, unpack her bag and begin the interrogation. She made doctors miss tee-times. Male doctors especially hated it. But a month from now, when I call the woman who was her long-time GP for the last time to tell her Sheila is gone, she cries. That’s how it is with Sheila Berger. She’s a great pain in the ass, great meaning “big” and “overwhelming” and “wonderful.” A wonderful pain from which I will soon have horrible relief.

Three days after her 73rd birthday, here we are at “The Inn,” The fucking Inn, the hospice wing of St. Peter’s Hospital. No more research to be done, no choices to be made. No more questions to be asked/answered except for a few about time and pain, and I’m the one doing most of the asking. Everyone gets a single room at the Inn. People are dying to get in and then they die to get out. Ba-dum bum, tshhhh. I’ll be here all week. Good, she says, out of nowhere, once we’ve got her set up, I don’t like the number 72. You don’t like twos, it’s true, I agree. You and your nines, she replies. Me and my nines, her and her threes. When my father and I went to the track once or twice a summer, she’d always give me three dollars to bet on the three horse in the third race.

Today, the intake nurse talks to us. Sheila tells her she wished she lived in Washington (state) so she could pull her own plug, that she hates this waiting to die, that she doesn’t want to watch herself waste away. The woman tells us that at hospice they don’t think of it as waiting for death but as “another phase of life.” My mom looks the poor woman dead in the eye: Well I don’t see it that way.

Done versus Finished. I remember a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner conversation about “done” versus “finished.” Walter, my mother’s mentor and friend, her former professor, former chairman of the English department they were both in for thirty-some years, disgusted with his students for not knowing the difference between the two. “It’s so very simple.” Walter, tall and aristocratic, a British-y, deep-voiced Canadian — formerly competitive tennis player, decorated WWII vet who came back and went to Harvard for his Phd, Walter Knotts, truly elegant, probably life-long closeted gay man. “How, how can they be so daft?” To this day, with my two-going-on-three degrees in English, I can never remember the difference. Sheila is done? Is finished? When food is cooked it’s done, when we’ve eaten it all, it’s finished. Is that it? Is she done, ready to come out of the oven of this life, ready for carving? Or finished, all eaten up, nothing left but scraps.

Sheila Barbara Strongin Berger lies in her hospice room at The Inn becoming a skeleton and I think I am fucking hungry I really want to go eat some fucking KFC I really want to go flirt with that bartender girl (she’s 24, Rachel, a girl compared to me, certainly, if not the word I’d use in public) at the Thai restaurant next to the KFC. I really want to go play online poker. I want to consume, I want action action action! I crave action. There is very little action available to me right now. Sedation is much easier to come by, via drinking, via Mom’s xanax. And so I go the bar of the Thai place next to the KFC where the Rachel girl works and I drink and I chat with her and she chats with me, seems relieved to have a stranger to talk to on a dead night and when she goes off to serve someone, I read my book I’m reading. Action and sedation, perfect. She tells me about school, about her punk-rock boyfriend. I tell her about my mom. I read an amazing page I love and I read it again, and repeat: sip whiskey, flirt, watch her healthy young hands and arms make drinks, watch the rest of her as she walks away, read again, and repeat, and the world softens a bit and I am grateful and thankful for reading and sad for Mom who doesn’t even have the energy to listen to me read to her, and then for myself for not ever taking the time it would take to even conceive of writing such a page I’ve just read and reread, such an important page, a page that makes some people think about something momentous in a new way, makes others think about it for the first time, and laugh and shake their heads and maybe later take action. Read, sip, watch, repeat. I write a note about the page in a small black notebook, and now I’ve typed it here. Scribble.

Back in the apartment, I chomp down my Three-Piece, Original Recipe, holding on as long as I can to this couple-hour respite/reverie. It’s extremely hard right now to see the point in healthy living when someone who, for the past twenty years, measured her portions to the ounce, exercised exactly as much as the books told her to, did her yoga, drank her green tea . . . you get the idea … is where she is right now four weeks to four months from her end, at 73.

No more tiptoeing around the apartment. I stomp the fucking creaky fucking floors. I turn the TV up. I sleep in my mother’s bed. On the sheets she’s been sleeping on. They don’t smell like anything. Nothing left of her to smell, no sweat, no shit or piss, nothing. The idea of sleeping on this bed feels kind of creepy, but what a great mattress! I get good and sedated with one more pill and one more drink, and actually sleep six hours straight.

Through this all, friends on the other end of the phone — enlightened, liberated (what we now, a decade later, call “woke”) men, tell me to “be strong.” BE fucking STRONG. How ridiculously macho and useless a thing to say. What the fuck is in that for me. Women do not tell me this.

“Be weak. Feel EVERYTHING!” That’s my fucking motto.

Not that I live up to it or anything, but it’s good to have a motto. Carpe Mortem.

Five days before my mother is to die, 17 days after they “gave” 28–120, I sit in the huge leather lounge-chair in the fluorescent dayroom at the Inn. A pair of overweight, early-teen cousins watch TV. Visiting a parent or grandparent, I wonder. One is on the phone, she is whiny-sarcastic: You know? Why I don’t? find that funny? she asks.

I play Wurdle, a Boggle-ish word-finding game, on my iPhone, at 3am, at her bedside. I love my iPhone. Each game is three minutes: ready . . . go! Dead, Deadly, Deathly, ade, deed, dad, done, donut, enod (well, I tried), node, noded, nodes. No “mom” this screen but she does seem to show up a lot lately.

I sit, I pace, I watch TV in the day room in the middle of the night. I leave the hospital, I go to the seedy, old-man dive bar across the street. Behind the bar is one very old man, the game on the TV. I am the lone customer. One too many, by the look on his face. I have a shot and a beer and go “home.” I look at porn, I play poker online. I watch TV. All at once. It starts to get light out, so I go to sleep. They will call me if anything happens. I am positive they won’t reach me and I’ll miss it, somehow, and I’ll have fucked up again.

Daytime. I visit my father for lunch. He actually asks “How is she?” I look at him, I look across his living room. I notice he’s bought a home blood-pressure machine.

That time she said she wished I was gay. Or did it ever even happen? I’ll have to ask her. I know it happened, but in what context? There’s a sentence I won’t be thinking for long: “I’ll have to ask her.”

At the end of freshman year of college, she called me in New York and screamed and screamed at me on the phone for looking for an apartment and a summer job before finals were over. Fucking this fucking that, you’re a fuckup! The Sheila rage. (The apology a few hour later, of course.) She, obsessing over my life of distractions, of unfinished projects, flawed, unrealized, undone, distractions stopping scribbles from being more than just scribbles, sketches, beginnings so many beginnings of stories, novels, poems, plays, artifacts of unrealized potential. Teachers telling her that I had a great deal of it, it all the way back to middle school. I remember screaming back at her over the line, until I cried, she was being so unfair, but, as always, also spot-on, a C+, some Bs, an A-: it’s the life I’ve more or less led, a 2.99999 GPA life (back when a 3.0 was a B).

Day two at the Inn. She is finally getting comfort, aka more morphine. Hospice is largely about comfort/morphine. A place to go to be given it, to give in to it. A little more each day. We say we don’t euthanize, but that’s exactly what we do, if subtly. Thank God. The head nurse, an actual her-real-name Donna Reed, is very nice, and good. A bit too hospice spiritual-self-help-y peppy, of course — “What do YOU need?” she asks me, often — but good. She cares. For the first time in weeks Sheila sleeps for hours at a time, and peacefully. It’s just about all she does. When she wakes, one time, I gently rub at the furrow lines between her brow. I am getting used to touching her more. Holding her hand, petting her arm. I will do these things. She will let me. Sheila Berger is teaching me how to die. She is an excellent teacher, as always.

Sitting on the toilet in the little bathroom next to the kitchen that’s available for all to use, at The Inn. They’re nicely set up for people to stay a while, to settle in. Outside someone sits down at the dayroom piano and begins to play a player-piano-sounding version of “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” It is December after all. Plinky plink plink. A rush of memory comes:

Christmastime, years ago. Up our block were two houses shared by six of my mom’s Consciousness-Raising-group friends, her radical lesbian friends, the people she won’t let see her now. Judy wears a cashmere cowl-neck-sweater. Joan plays the piano while Francine directs us in rousing “We Three Queens of Orient Are” and other re-gendered holiday hits. Here at the Inn, the dayroom piano plinks on.

Sheila’s neck is all spine and two ropey hints of muscle. Her body is eating her to stay alive but all the while the cancer belly grows and grows. The cancer still gloating. We let it gloat. We don’t worry about it any more. Just about comfort. To get mad at it now is just to lose again.

Back at the apartment, half-drunk and rageful and full of bad Chinese food, needing sleep and wanting action action action. I google “strip club” and “Albany.” In my life of porn and peeps, I’ve never been to a strip joint in my hometown. A few minutes later, I’m down in a seedy edge of wrong-side-of-the-tracks Albany I never even knew existed. Down by the river, at “Ciro’s Place.” The club has a parking lot with a barbed wire fence around it — promising. Inside the club is very small, dark, not terribly filthy, but somewhat rundown. The dancers are black. As is the bouncer. And the bartender. A Bud is just $4.00, a bargain for a club. It’s an empty weeknight, after midnight, and it’s just me, the bouncer, the dancers, the bartender. A dancer comes up. We have the usual chat, what brings me here, do I want a lap dance, I’ll think about it. She is half drunk and pouty. I buy her a drink. She rubs against me. Hand on my thigh. Tells me about her daughter, about moving up from Philly. Do I want a dance yet? Maybe soon. How ‘bout now? Okay, sure. I really really don’t want a lap dance, but her daughter’s future education really wants me to. I pay her $15 for the dance. She rubs around on me. And I’m not even attracted to her, she’s so obviously bored. I pay for a second dance. I manage to beg off on a third and get out the door. Action, yippee.

In the living room, I watch TV and pretend that I can write while I’m watching TV because I’m allowed to do whatever I want right now, tap out some notes about the evening. Eating is just one of those escapes of mine, Mom. But she knows that. The rest was inferred. I can do whatever I want because my mother is fucking dying and she said I can, that’s why. You got a problem with that? I know how to touch-type because she made me learn how between senior year of high school and college — so YES I CAN ABSOLUTELY write and watch TV — thanks, Mom! I’m doing it right now, to NBA highlights. So there. As I sit here, post Ciro’s, I wonder, what are your secrets, Mom, where are they? You must’ve written something down, you wrote everything down. And if I find something? Or if I find something in my head that I really really want to ask you, something I want to know, some advice I need you to give, I can’t because YOU CAN HARDLY TALK ANYMORE. And in a day, maybe two, you won’t be able to talk at all. And a day or so after that . . . . I stay up late. Late late. 5am late. I will be in no shape tomorrow. I don’t need to be in shape. This is a fucking vacation. A vacation of grief. I have nothing else on my calendar, no commitments at all.

Donna Reed tells us she needs to perform a procedure to see if my mother is retaining urine, something like an ultrasound, to peer through cancer belly and look at her bladder, to insert something in her to drain fluid, maybe. My mother breathes, Is this . . . for longevity . . . or for comfort? Comfort, Donna replies. Sheila nods, this is the answer she wants. If we’d met under more pleasant circumstances, I’d fire “It’s a Wonderful Life” lines at Nurse Donna Reed. “Mary, dontcha know me?” It’s probably on TV every day now. A movie my mother and I watched together many times. My favorite Christmas movie. I think she likes “Miracle on 34th Street” a little better.

Sheila Barbara Strongin Berger is ready for her life to end. Time’s up. Pencils down.

In the day room. Lights are off, late afternoon again, dusky. Quiet but for hum of hospital. I walk down the hall. They have drained the fluid, offering some relief. My mother sits upright, her electric bed has seated her upright. After being scanned, drained, and sleeping all day, she can barely speak: I’ve been sleeping so much. Usually after they drain me I’m so much stronger. Don’t know why I’m sleeping so — . . . The pause is long. She takes a deep breath, a big effort. I’m dying.

We go to doctors, to hospitals, expecting to be made well, no matter what we know to be true. We expect. To go on. To keep scribbling. Stopping makes no sense at all.

I sit in the day room, three-AM, lights out, visitors gone except for the one family on death watch all packed into the room down the hall. I’ve been to the old-man bar plus half a xanax, but I can’t go back to the apartment, can’t bear to leave here, to sleep, can’t risk missing it. So I play poker on the screen with people awake, somewhere, people in Vegas, and Sweden. Notoriously, bizarrely aggressive, the Northern Europeans. I bet and I raise and I fold, I win and I lose, and I . . . go look in on her. I turn out the bedside lamp. “Bedside,” lovely word. Her lungs pump air, in out in out, in and out. The fucking horror. All my life I’ve had nightmares of my father dying. Never her. She is supposed to keep driving me up a wall forever. My heart won’t stop pounding and I have no more drugs for it right here and … fuck. Where’s MY morphine? Does everyone visiting The Inn think this at some point?

I am the only visitor. No one but me. They will not will not will NOT see her like this, her dictum. All those so-called friends, all those people who’ve betrayed her in one way or another. These last years she sees betrayal everywhere. Somehow never in me. They will not remember her this way. This is part of her thinking. See Mom, I do know you. I do. I just hoped there was someone, anyone besides me and Anja, you could let in, we could let in. But I am the gatekeeper, and I have kept that fucking gate. No one has dared disobey Sheila’s rules, certainly not now. The word is out. They don’t come. They sit at home and wait for word from me. At the memorial next spring they will talk to me about it, some of them, their anger a burden, impeding their sadness, their mourning, their closure of the Sheila Berger book, that I try to help them unload, that day, and we will all feel better, at the angriest memorial ever.

My mother is about to die, but I will keep on living. A simple, declarative, complex sentence. Declarative? Complex or compound? How many years teaching English in one way or another and do I even know what that means? It is a sentence making a declaration, but is that what a declarative sentence is? Did she ever teach me this? I don’t think “finished” vs. “done” meant much to her, but yes, I know she taught me compound and complex sentences. Does anyone even use those terms anymore? Sorry Mom, sorry Walter. Words don’t always mean what they mean. This I declare. This is how it goes. It goes this way. Suddenly I’m writing like Laurie Anderson. Yes. “Oh Mom and Dad, Mom and Dad, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha-ahhh.”

One of the nurses tells me she’s stable, that I can go back to the apartment and shower and rest a little. I do shower — long, hot. I hang on to that bar she made them install when she moved in and lower myself into the tub. I sit, and sob, really really go at it. I force it, like puking, until I really am almost gagging. I sleep and wake and go back to the hospital. Morning people coming to work. Others checking out. Shift change. Something very alive about all this. I want to hug them all for this bustle. In her room, Sheila tosses and turns, opens her eyes looks around, but can’t see me, can’t see this world anymore, zombified, her gaze, like nothing I’ve ever seen. Mostly just reflex. She was always so present, direct: Look at me when I’m talking to you, Jamie. Now she’s all horizon, far away. She scratches and scratches her arms, her belly, then she turns, suddenly stronger, turns and looks right at me, out of nowhere, says, Itch itch itch, assertive, almost annoyed, but resolved, an almost comic what can ya do? statement. Lies back down, closes her eyes, scratches and tosses and turns. The pamphlet told me about this restlessness near the end. I tell Donna Reed. She ups the morphine. Mom stops tossing and scratching. Donna Reed turns to tell me something. Then she doesn’t. Knows I know. That Sheila probably won’t be tossing any more. That she’s really not here any more. Nothing more to worry about. No more scribbling, no more itching. Itch itch itch — famous last words.

First the old woman with the big, weepy family was gone. Then, just today, the younger woman, middle-aged at best, heavyset, who would cry out undecipherable sounds for hours to whichever loved one was at her bedside or out in the hall. I could only see her through a crack in the door as I paced the halls. Her people scowled at me, as if I didn’t belong there. But I come this morning and they’re the ones who have no place here anymore. I’ll be staying from now til the end. Getting so close. Can’t miss her going. Can’t bear to let her go alone. Not to see her go, not to see her off. Need to see it to believe it. Sheila’s dying and death itself. To accept it. A boy can dream.

I call Anja, tell her to come in the morning. Morning comes, and here she is. So good. Young woman, those arms so warm with blood. Alive. Her lovely loving face. So alive, so warm. It’s midday, nothing changes, but it’s coming, coming.

Donna Reed adjusts my mom on the bed, ups the morphine again, for comfort, always for comfort. Sheila moves around now a little, but hardly at all. Is a mind working in there, even to dream, or just a brain sending signals to a body pumping stuff around for a last little while? Donna leaves, shutting the door behind her, and soon my mother’s breathing starts to slow. Five seconds, ten, twenty, between breaths. The inhales are gasps, the exhales define expiration. We think it’s over. Then one more…. Then one more…. Shorter and farther apart. Something still fighting. Then nothing for a long time, thirty seconds, a minute, ninety seconds. Nothing. We cry, we hold each other. I take my dead mother’s picture, I don’t know why. She would get it. She always got it, got me. We say goodbye to someone who isn’t there. Soon they will take her away. Unbearable. I keep kissing her right at the bridge of her forehead/nose. The horrible horrible relief. Cold little bones. Done.

***

Bio

I, Jamie Berger (tired of writing third-person autobios) can be found on Facebook, or on Twitter/Instagram @15minsjamieb. I am the host and creator of 15 Minutes: a podcast about fame, which can be found on iTunes and Spotify and pretty much everywhere pods are cast. I also wrote the essay “Peep Show.”

Jamie Berger is the host and creator of "15 Minutes: a podcast about fame," which can be found pretty much everywhere pods are cast or at 15minutesjamieberger.com. Guests have included David Sedaris, George Saunders, Mira Bartok, Sarah Fran Wisby, John Hodgman, Robyn Hitchcock, Beth Lisick, Andrew Leland, Penny Lane, and about 50 others, so far. He also wrote the essay “Peep Show” which can be found online at https://psiloveyou.xyz/@15minsjamieb and is on twitter/Instagram @15minsjamieb. He has graduated degrees in Creative Writing from City College of New York and UMass Amherst, works as a tutor and academic coach at Northfield Mount Hermon and independently, and is returning to writing after an accidental decade-long hiatus.