The waiter was a gangly young man with a shock of brown hair and the exuberant manner of an Airedale puppy. We had only asked for water, but he seemed delighted by our request. The light glinted enthusiastically off his hornrims.
“Bien sur,” he said. “Il n’y a pas de souci!”
There was nothing to worry about—water would be forthcoming. In fact, we could have anything we wanted. Bread, butter, Dad’s request that coffee come at the same time as dessert and not before: everything was “pas de souci.” Emphasis on “pas.” There is no worry.
It was Thanksgiving, and my sister Claudia, my Dad, and I were in the market for some good news. That morning, I had gotten off a plane laden with the kinds of provisions Americans miss when they live abroad—two jars of Skippy peanut butter, a tube of Colgate, and a box of Trader Joe’s cornbread mix. But before I even got to the house, Mom fainted on the way to the bathroom and hit her head. She had been sick again for about six months, and the doctors had just decided to suspend treatment, so Claud and I had flown in for Thanksgiving, worried about waiting until Christmas.
So we had traded our day of baking cornbread in the parents’ high-ceilinged kitchen for the grind of hanging around the emergency room at the Hopital Saint-Louis, in an eastern quadrant of Paris. Ordinarily, this would be a fairly exotic locale for a girl from a row house in Northeast Philly, but Mom and Dad, hometown sweethearts, had lived in France since 1966, so it was just normal.
Once the doctors told us they wanted to keep her overnight, Mom sent us home. We were half-guilty at leaving her alone, half-elated at getting sprung from the place. On our way, we had stopped off at this half-timbered restaurant on the river. It was a clear night, quiet but for the hum of activity emanating from the handful of restaurants along the quay. After the aseptic glare of the ER intake hall, the restaurant was warm and comforting, with copper pots on the walls reflecting firelight and roasting smells curling out from the kitchen. Maybe there really was nothing to worry about.
By the time we got home, I was too tired to do anything, even get ready for bed. I was just talking to Claud about a screenplay she was working on when the phone rang. The phone in the parents’ house has a long insistent tone, like a bratty kid. Claudia and I looked at each other. There is no good news after 1:00 a.m. The phone rang again, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to get off the bed to answer it. Waaaaaaaah, it whined. Not yet, I thought. We just need a little more time. Waaaaaaaaaaaah, insisted the phone. I stood up. The phone stopped ringing.
I didn’t get the chance even to pretend it was a wrong number because the hospital called right back. Dad talked to the doctor, then I talked to the doctor, then I asked them to repeat everything again to make sure I had got it all straight. The impact had caused a cerebral hemorrhage, which had formed a blood clot in Mom’s brain, which wasn’t operable due to the fact that Mom was already dying of leukemia and was too weak to withstand surgery. There was a chance it might resolve on its own, but we’d have to wait and see what happened.
Dad sank onto my bed. He looked haggard.
“It was the fall,” he whispered.
***
Eventually, we each went to bed. I took an Ambien, but I couldn’t sleep. In fact, I never wanted to sleep again. I felt strangely powerful, as if I could keep Mom aloft, like a bird in the sky, through sheer force of will. If I just kept thinking of her, in some bizarre way, I thought I could keep her safe. And if the night didn’t end, things could still go either way.
When I woke up, the dread in my stomach was so thick it was almost tangible. I couldn’t believe that yesterday might really have been the last day we had together. It had been so boring, so uneventful, Mom just lying on her wheely bed, eyes mostly closed, and Dad and Claud and I chatting amongst ourselves, letting her rest. When we left, I kissed her, but it was so anodyne, so see-you-tomorrow; it felt like that couldn’t possibly have been goodbye.
But when we got back to the hospital, Mom seemed a little better. The doctors told us that if she made it through the next five days, then the clot might be treatable. In the meantime, we had to watch for any neurological disturbances, any slackening on one side of her face, any violent headaches.
In the interim, Dad decided it would be better not to tell Mom the truth. Since she didn’t seem aware of anything more wrong than usual, there was no reason to frighten her. I wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t she want to know? What if she wanted to talk about it?
We had been here before, 20 years earlier, when Mom had a bone marrow transplant, a treatment for non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I had gone to see her on the eve of the procedure; Claudia, six years younger, was still in college in the States. I was 27 and terrified. Life without Mom seemed an unimaginable catastrophe. I didn’t see how people could go on after losing a parent.
I had sat on the side of her bed. The transplant had the potential to cure her. Or it could fail and she would die.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do if you die,” I said, and burst into tears.
“Don’t say that,” said Dad sharply. “She’s not going to die.”
“Sam,” said Mom, warning in her voice. “Don’t interfere. I want to talk about it.”
Dad kind of melted away in the corner.
“I’m so scared,” I sobbed.
Mom stroked my hand. “I know, sweetheart,” she said.
As it turned out, the procedure was a success. She went back to make sure the cancer hadn’t come back every month, then every six months, then once a year. And so 20 years passed. Mom saw my sister get married and have kids. She saw me get married—at last!—when I was 41 and, even more improbably, have two kids of my own.
***
Now here we were, back at Saint-Louis. This time, I just let things be. We played Go Fish. I read Mom a long and really boring article in Vanity Fair, which pleased me by its very boringness. We asked her repeatedly if her head hurt. She always said it didn’t. It looked like it might be possible that Mom would be discharged on Tuesday and we could just have a late Thanksgiving then.
But the next day, the left side of her mouth started twitching uncontrollably. There was something violent and cruel about it, like a goblin was pulling her lip by a string, just for fun. Mom didn’t seem to notice. She couldn’t raise her left arm. The mental timeline I had made myself—that Mom could make it through the holidays, that she might even see the spring again in her garden—always as fragile as a soap bubble, shimmered and vanished. They sent her for another brain scan.
Dad looked green. “Could you go?” he asked weakly.
When she was wheeled out of the MRI room, we were left alone for a spell. She is going to die, I thought. Today, or tomorrow, or the day after that. That hematoma isn’t getting reabsorbed—it is going to compress her brain and kill her. The desire to tell her, to confide in her, bubbled up in my chest. How could I not tell her how scared I was, how much I would miss her? How could I not ask her if she was afraid too?
“Mom,” I said. The words you are going to leave me squirmed on my tongue. I hesitated. “I just want you to know that I am honored to be your daughter,” I said finally. “I love you so much. I don’t think anyone has a mother as tough and brave and loving as you.”
But she had stopped reacting, as if her mind had abruptly walked off, like someone leaving a tedious conversation at a party. She was staring fixedly off to the side. Her eyes were open but dull. I felt sick with fear. Was she angry at me? Had I made her think, “That’s just what everyone says when you die”?
When we got back to her room, she still had that fixed look, but she was looking right at me. I sat by her bed and took her hand. I tried to make my face look like the sort of face you would want to see if that was the only thing you could focus on. I tried not to look the way I felt, which was worried that, in order to relieve my feelings, I had burdened her. But a little later, when she was herself again, she motioned to me.
“It made me so happy to hear that,” she whispered.
“Well, it’s true,” I said. “I just needed to say it.”
In fact, the big declaration was a Mom Special. She was so intense that she always operated in a zone beyond embarrassment. Like a character in the operas she loved so much, she would launch into lengthy soliloquies that expressed how she felt about us, how she saw me. She was the one who divined “something poetic” in the nature of my prosaic, baseball-hatted husband.
Once, when I was particularly lonely and sad, leaving her at the airport to go back to my single life in New York, she told me, “You think nobody sees how hard it is for you, how much you’re trying, how difficult it is for you to be alone. But I see you. I see how valiant you are.” She looked at me, her eyes shining with tears. “I am your witness.”
I wasn’t quite as baroque as Mom, but I still couldn’t keep things inside. Back at the hospital, I thought about the links forged between us.
“We’re kind of alike like that, aren’t we?” I said. “You were never afraid of expressing the big emotions. Even the corny ones.”
We were quiet. My heart glowed. We were so connected, so alike—everything I hated hearing when I was growing up felt so good right now. I always had my mother’s face (“Little Myrna!” lesser-known relatives would exclaim, making me wish I could curl up into a ball) and I shared many of her traits, most of which I wished I could shuck off. She was so dramatic, so easily hurt, so self-critical. If she happened to come into my room late at night, what could otherwise have been a cozy midnight chat could easily devolve into tears.
“I’ve made so many mistakes!” she would lament.
There was a downside to all that feeling as well—bitter silences, violent rages, times when she would scream at me, “You don’t love me! You don’t care about anyone but yourself!” Mom, who never swore, would sometimes call me a bitch when she was upset. And then she would forget she had ever said anything like it.
I only reacted by retreating. I’d go into my room, shut the door, and refuse to come out or to speak to her. Mom would eventually send Dad in to broker a peace deal, and he would ask me to apologize.
“I don’t have anything to apologize for,” I’d say. “She should apologize to me.”
“You know how she is,” he’d say.
What kind of an excuse is that? I wanted to scream. But that’s how it went. We lived with Mom’s volcanic rages because that was just the way she was.
Sometimes I would try to get her to admit she was wrong.
“You told me I didn’t love you,” I would accuse her the next day.
Mom would frown in surprise. “Did I?” she would say vaguely. “I’m sure that’s not right. I would never say that.”
“But you did,” I would mutter.
Accordingly, I spent most of my childhood trying to be my Dad. He was the cool one, always charming, always even-keeled. But right now, I was happy to be of one mind with Mom. As the afternoon wore on, she got worse. She couldn’t feel her left arm, she had a couple of epileptic fits. The doctors gave her some antiseizure medication and she dropped off to sleep.
On Sunday, Mom slept all day and couldn’t be woken. It was the medication, they said. All day I just wished that she would wake up, that I’d be able to talk to her one more time, that we’d have one more chance to be together. Please don’t go, I whispered to her. Please come back.
I got my wish. But as in the stories, you don’t always want what you ask for. Mom was awake, all right, alert and fully conscious. Up until then, she hadn’t been uncomfortable, she was glad to have us with her, she didn’t seem entirely aware of her impairments. But this morning, she could feel everything. She had been breathing through her mouth all the previous day, so her mouth was completely dry. She could barely speak. She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t move her arm.
“I feel like a prisoner,” she rasped, her voice rising in panic. “I can’t move, I can’t speak!”
I watched her helplessly. I kept thinking about how, back at home in Atlanta, a bird had flown in through the chimney, then flapped around wildly, hurling itself at the windows, trying to break out. By the time I was finally able to wrench open a window, it had left a small dark smear of blood on the ceiling.
This was worse.
“I have to express myself! I can’t speak!”
I had wanted so much for her to wake up. But not to this.
“Mom—” I said.
“I’m fading,” she moaned, “I’m fading!”
Why had I wanted her to wake up? Irrationally, I felt like it was my fault.
“It’s like Pet Semetary!” I wailed to Tommy during a telephone break.
“How is that?” he asked patiently.
“You know how the guy’s kid gets hit by a car and he just can’t accept it and so he buries his son in the old Indian graveyard so he can come back to life?”
“Uh huh,” he said cautiously. I often wonder what goes through his head when we talk.
“And the kid comes back as a homicidal zombie? I wished Mom back and now she’s in torture and this sucks and why isn’t it over?”
By the afternoon, she was calm again. Her voice was guttural and faint, and she couldn’t open her eyes at all, but she was able to talk.
“You mean everything to me, Sam,” she told Dad. “Everything. You and the children.”
He clasped her hand, then passed it to me.
“Having you and Claudia here has been a bomb,” she whispered.
I thought she was talking about how Thanksgiving had been ruined. “It wasn’t a bomb, Mom,” I protested. “We’re just happy to be with you.”
“She didn’t say ‘bomb,’” Dad said. “She said ‘balm.’”
Of course. Only Mom would use vocabulary so unexpected in her last hours.
There was a brief moment of peace. Claudia and I talked to her about our kids, who were each trying, in their own way, to help. I told her about the drawing Rachel had done for her, of a rainbow, and a moon, and a tree.
“That’s beautiful,” murmured Mom.
After that, she got confused and started speaking French. I think she thought I was a nurse. I helped her suck a tiny bit of water out of a compress, but she could barely close her mouth over it. Then she started worrying about things left undone.
“I haven’t bought any presents for Hanukah,” she gasped.
We are not a family that plans ahead. A Hanukah present is never ready to be bought until the absolute last minute, when you’re forced to spend $14.95 on express shipping. But I thought of the enthusiastic waiter of our first night.
“They’re already bought,” I told her. “I’ve wrapped them. Everything’s ready.”
“But I didn’t put the flowers in the kitchen.”
“Ne vous inquietez pas,” I said. “We took care of it.”
“I forgot to take my cowboy boots upstairs.”
This one made me skip a beat. Mom, a tiny woman with an outsized sense of style, pretty much always wore floor-length skirts and flat slippers, often embellished with a bow. She had them in all different colors—gold and purple and forest green. But I don’t think she had ever even been in the same room as a pair of cowboy boots.
“You really haven’t worn your cowboy boots in a while, Mom,” I said. “But do not worry. We brought them upstairs. Il n’y a pas de souci.”
At the very end of the evening, she switched back to English. We told her we loved her and that we would see her tomorrow.
“That would be good,” she said.
I was holding her hand and squeezed it. Very faintly, like a radio signal coming from a long way off, I could feel the ghost of a return pressure.
That night, I found the box of Trader Joe’s cornbread mix sitting in the cupboard. I flinched. It looked wrong, and not just because it was a foreign interloper among the French biscuits and British teas. It belonged to a different time. A time Before. Before, when there was supposed to be a Thanksgiving dinner with homemade pie. I glared at the box. Its cheerful yellow lettering seemed to be taunting me. I shrieked and hurled it into the trash.
***
I was so grateful to have Claudia there—the only person in the world who knew what it was like growing up in France with our particular parents, with their white-tornado energy and insatiable appetite for Chinese art. We could admit to each other how much we wanted to go home and see our kids, and how sad we were. Every afternoon, we’d give Dad some time alone with Mom and go out to lunch. The hospital is on the edge of the Canal Saint-Martin, a formerly working class neighborhood which has now become a hipster heaven. We tried every café and bakery within a 15-block radius, on the hunt for the mythical Pastry-That-Would-Make-Everything-Better. I had eclairs and croissants and pains au chocolat, lemon tarts, and millefeuilles. We critiqued the frothiness of the different café crèmes we tried. Sometimes it helped.
Every evening, we’d spend hours on YouTube tracking down French ads that used to make us laugh when we were children. There was something comforting about going back in time and revisiting the man with the moustache who looked a little bit like Dad, explaining how Vicks pastilles soothe the throat and refresh the nose. We were delighted to find the sour-looking cleaning lady who methodically sprays Pliz furniture polish on a long dining room table, then, still sour-looking, takes a flying leap and slides all the way down the table on her stomach. Apparently, the Pliz shine lasts a long time. “And a good thing too,” says the sour cleaning lady, “because I wouldn’t do that every day.”
As the days passed, Dad and Claud and I developed a kind of symbiotic balance. Two of us remained functional at all times, while the third was free to fall apart. Then once that person could breathe again, we’d regroup and it would be someone else’s turn. I had a couple of those episodes. One was while we were walking from the stairwell to the car in the hospital garage—a distance of approximately 30 feet. I started after Dad and Claud, then abruptly could not take one more step.
I started yelling. It wasn’t fair. Why didn’t we even have any family here? Why did we have to do everything ourselves? And why wasn’t there someone to bring us a goddamn casserole?
Claud and Dad waited patiently at the car until I could walk again.
***
Tommy’s family was pretty much the opposite of mine. First of all, they are a gigantic Catholic family. Second, none of them ever left. They all live within a 10-mile radius of Gulfport, Mississippi. They have fifty people at Thanksgiving and eighty people at Christmas. And when Tommy’s cousin Mike had a follow-up hernia operation, there was a crowd of people at the hospital. His wife, their kids. His parents. Her parents. Three aunts. Two uncles. Six cousins. For an operation. Mom was dying and it was just the three of us.
On the one hand, it made sense. Mom and Dad had bought burial plots near their summer house in New Jersey, so the funeral would be there and we couldn’t really ask people to go flying back and forth across the Atlantic. But on the other, we were alone. Like a handful of shipwreck survivors on a raft.
Fortunately, I had my friend Al. Al Prazolam. Mom has a dressing room off their bathroom, a small room, higher than it is wide, with a lovely arched window overlooking the garden. Built-in cabinets stretch up to the ceiling. And in one of these cabinets is the parents’ pharmacy. For some reason, be it long familiarity with the pharmacist, or a more relaxed attitude in France towards doling out medication, my parents have accumulated enough prescription drugs to stock a small dispensary. They’re piled in wicker baskets, to which Mom affixed cardstock labels on a little ribbon, almost illegible in her spidery handwriting: Antibiotics. Dermatology. Painkillers. For years, I used to go through the piles, throwing out anything expired, a process usually punctuated by me running into the next room, yelling, “Hey Mom! These antibiotics are from 1988!”
That day, I was on the hunt for something stronger. There was a small mountain of sleeping pills, all with their pharmaceutical names, since again, in France, you don’t have to “ask your doctor about Lavista” or whatever. The boxes with names ending in “azepam” or “azolam” looked promising. And there, finally, on the box marked “alprazolam,” was a note in Dad’s larger, clearer writing: “Xanax. For anxiety.”
After five or six days, Claudia and I changed our return tickets. Then we changed them again, an operation that necessitated multiple calls to the booking agency. After the third phone call, Claud switched off the phone and looked up.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “I’ve got nothing left.”
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll just say I’m you.”
Why I couldn’t just say I was calling on her behalf I’m not sure, but at the time, it seemed essential that some version of “Claudia Myers” make the call, so verisimilitude was key. Fortunately, Claudia and I have exactly the same voice, the same cadence, the same timbre—so much so that more than once, when Claudia has left me a voicemail, I’ll wonder why I called myself.
I put the phone on speaker.
“Hello, and thank you for calling Expedia,” said a man with an Indian accent. “My name is Mike.”
“Hi Mike,” I said, “This is, um, Claudia Myers. My mother is in the hospital so I need to change my ticket—it would be the second time.”
“Very good, Claudia,” he said. He pronounced it CLOW-dia, so that the first part of the name rhymed with “plough.” “I’m just checking your reservation now, CLOW-dia.”
Why did he keep saying “Claudia”? It was as if he suspected I was an imposter, and was trying to make me crack. Meantime, there was no way his name was Mike. The idea that there were two of us pretending to be people we weren’t seemed, for some reason, utterly hilarious. I could see Claud trying to suppress a giggle, her shoulders shaking.
“Stop it,” I hissed at her.
But Mike was relentless. “I will just put you on hold for a minute, CLOW-dia.”
Claud snorted with laughter.
“Stop laughing!” I told her. “What is the guy going to think? We’ve just told him Mom is in the hospital!”
“You stop laughing,” said Claud, wiping her eyes.
“I could if he’d stop saying CLOW-dia,” I protested.
The line clicked back to life.
“Thank you for waiting, CLOW-dia,” said Mike. He waited for me to say something. “CLOW-dia?” he said. “Are you still there, CLOW-dia?”
I gave up and buried my face in the pillows.
Claudia picked up the phone. “Yes, thanks so much, Mike,” she said.
***
Saint-Louis specializes in hematology and oncology, but because it’s France, they don’t bustle people out of the ward and into a hospice once there’s no hope. Instead, they just quietly shift to palliative care without even moving the patient to a different floor. It was how I imagined dying in another century might have been—no machines, no respirators, just an IV drip and the stately buildings you could see out the window. Even the nurses had old-fashioned French names—Honorine, Aurélie, Celeste, Manon. They were improbably lovely, with low musical voices and refined features. It was like being attended by the cast of extras from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
One morning, Honorine called the house at 8:00 a.m.
“Your mother has started having pauses in her breathing,” she said. “You should probably come to the hospital as soon as possible. How long will it take you to get here?”
The parents’ house is in the suburbs on the west side of Paris, near Versailles. Saint-Louis is all the way on the other side of Paris, at least an hour and a quarter’s drive away.
“An hour and a half,” I told her, obviously confusing us with some other family.
I threw on some clothes and went to wake the others, figuring we could be out the door in ten minutes. But in classic Myers style, it took closer to an hour. Dad wanted to shower. Then Claud wanted to shower. Then Dad started slicing oranges for breakfast. I eventually caved and took a shower too.
When we finally got there, Mom was indeed pausing in her breathing. She would breathe in, then stop. Claud and I watched her, unconsciously holding our breath. Then, well after we had given up, she would exhale. One pause was so long, Claud and I looked at each other and burst into hysterical giggles. Dad looked confused.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“The pauses, they’re just so long.”
“I don’t hear any pauses,” he said.
After a while, Mom started to change. First, her left hand became really cold, then her arm, then her whole side. Her hands began to swell and stopped feeling alive. With her head back and her mouth slightly open, her throat got larger and larger. Her body seemed to be turning to clay. Only her forehead remained the same, warm and smooth. Aurélie explained that her kidneys were shutting down, which is why fluid was pooling in her limbs. But when I put my head on her chest, I could hear her heart thumping away, still strong. It was like Mom’s body was a factory where all the workers had shut off the machines and turned out the lights, and only her heart was still working—somehow it hadn’t gotten the memo—alone in that giant, darkened warehouse. Still going. Thumpetathumpetathumpeta.
On Thursday, Claudia and I went coffin shopping, so Dad didn’t have to. We walked out through the palatial stone courtyard—Saint-Louis was built by Henri IV in the early 1600s and it still has its original buildings—and picked our way across town to see the funeral director. His office was on the third floor, up a flight of marble steps spiraling around an ornate elevator cage. It was somewhere between the second and third floors that I stopped being able to breathe.
“I can’t do this,” I gasped to Claud.
“I’ve got it,” she said.
So I just sat mutely while Claudia gave the somewhat cheesy funeral director all the information he needed. Since Mom was to be buried in New Jersey, there were shipping costs and additional forms to fill out.
Then we turned to the coffin issue. I was expecting there to be a room with an array of sample coffins, but it turned out that this tiny office was all there was. Instead, the funeral director handed us a brochure, which for some reason was plasticized, as if it were the menu at a rest stop off the highway. The choices ranged from gaudy to garish, with preposterous embellishments like metal scrollwork and tiny Corinthian columns that didn’t hold anything up. Mom would have hated it. “It’s not my style, hon,” we could hear her saying. We chose the least bad option, wood rather than gilt metal.
In the last days, when Claud and Dad would go for a quick walk, I would curl up with Mom. I would take off my shoes, drag the armchair close to the bedside, readjusting it until I could get my head and shoulders on her bed and the rest of myself on the chair.
“Really, Mom,” I said, “If you hadn’t let yourself get so fat, there might be some room for me. You’re so inconsiderate.”
I snuggled up to her shoulder and put my hand around her upper arm. It was still warm. I closed my eyes. Her heart was beating fast. I told her about the beautiful things Danny had said (“I love you, Mommy. But I love Grammom more”). I recounted an afternoon the previous June we had spent at Auvers, where Van Gogh died. Mom was weak but still game to go places. We sat on the terrace of a restaurant, Mom and Dad and I, gazing out over a valley and drinking rosé so pale it was barely a color. I was utterly happy.
“It’s a funny thing,” I told her another time. “You were never really the cuddly kind. But this feels just right.”
Mom never seemed that comfortable with certain kinds of physical affection. Dad, conversely, was easy. With Dad, I could just leap out with a bear hug. But around Mom I was the physical equivalent of tongue-tied. When I hugged her, I sometimes didn’t know what to do with my hands, or how hard to squeeze, or whether I should squeeze at all. I’m 5’3” and probably count as “petite,” but next to Mom I felt hulking and uncouth. It was Mom who pointed out that I slouched, that I sat with my legs too far apart, that I didn’t cover my mouth when I yawned. I felt like a barbarian.
I sometimes wished she were more like some friends of the family—the earth mother types who would envelop me in their arms and kind of squash me into them. Mom was delicate, like a doll. She couldn’t have enveloped me if she wanted to. But the few times I was just able to just lie with her felt like a distillation of love, as pure and untroubled as holding a sleeping baby.
More than once, we were told that Mom had hours left to live. But she just kept on stubbornly not dying, and the doctors started making impressed, not-bad-for-a-75-pound-old-lady noises. As time passed, I started to worry that something was wrong. Why wouldn’t she let go?
By the eighth day, I wanted so badly for this in-between state to be over that I just sat by the side of her bed and thought: Let go. It’s okay. Please, just let go. I couldn’t face coming back to the hospital one more day just to sit and wait for her to die, dreading to think that she was holding on so fiercely because she was afraid and scared and sad.
Friday morning, Claudia and I laid in wait for the doctor because I wanted—I needed—him to give me a time limit. As soon as he showed up, we pounced on him. Dr. C was youngish, handsome, and so well groomed that in the States he would track as gay, but in France, he just looked French.
“Assuredly,” he said, “your mother is very tenacious. But she is going to leave us soon.”
I felt a pang of gratitude, almost affection. “Elle va nous quitter bientôt,” he had said. He didn’t say Mom was going to pass away, or expire, or die. She was going to leave us. And not just me and Claud and Dad, but Dr. C as well.
And then, all at once, I stopped needing it to be over. Maybe just having asked the question had put it to rest. It would take whatever time it would take. And maybe Mom wasn’t holding on because she was afraid.
It hit me when I was at a café with Claud, sampling my eleventh entry in the search for The-Pastry-So-Perfect-It-Suspends-Grief—this time, a chocolate religieuse.
“I don’t think she is afraid to go,” I told Claud. “Mom, I mean. I think she’s doing it for Dad—she wants to be sure he’s going to be okay before she goes.”
“Sounds right to me,” said Claud.
“Right?” I said. “She’s doing it for love. Anyway, that’s what I choose to believe. I mean, really, who’s going to contradict us?”
The third time I cuddled up with her, after Claud had to fly home, I told Mom about it.
“Claud and I have a theory,” I said. “We think you are holding on for Dad because he’s not ready. But I think he is getting there.”
I listened to her heartbeat. Thumpetathumpetathumpeta.
“I think you’re helping him get used to the idea. So you take all the time you need.”
Then I just closed my eyes and lay next to her. Her arm was so shriveled that I just rested my hand on her shoulder. I sang to her like she was my baby girl, my voice barely above a whisper. Such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there. I had started calling her sweetheart, like I called my kids. But oh my dear, our love is here to stay. I never wanted to get up.
That afternoon, coming back over the Canal Saint-Martin, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to leave if she was still holding on. Even if all that remained of Mom was a shadow, a breath, I still wanted to be near whatever was left. I would miss these days, once they were over, because she would truly be gone. I broke into a run, suddenly afraid it was over already.
I burst into Mom’s room to find everything the same. Dad was typing, one-fingered, on his computer. Mom was still breathing and pausing, then breathing again. I sat down next to Dad. I told him, more or less, what I had told her—that his life wasn’t going to be empty, that he would still have love in his life. He had me and Claud, and his grandkids, and friends. He was going to be okay.
Dad made some kind of agreeing noise.
Then I noticed that the room had gone quiet.
“Wow, that’s rather a long pause, Mom,” I said.
But she was still. I got up and bent close to her. Her eye had opened just a bit. It was completely dull.
“I think she’s gone,” I said.
Dad looked stunned.
“What? No, she’s not. She just took another little breath, right there!”
“I’ll get the nurse in,” I said. “She can tell us for sure.”
I rang the bell. Mom’s throat made a weird convulsive motion. Dad gave a faint cry of hope. But I could tell it was just some kind of reflex. I had never seen anyone dead before, but it’s unmistakable. They’re just gone. The nurse, then a doctor, came in. “Your mother is deceased,” he told us formally.
Dad broke down and sobbed. I felt like I was underwater; everything around me was quiet and moved slowly. I was able to put my arm around Dad. I kissed Mom on her still warm forehead.
“Rest now, sweetheart,” I told her.
***
Mom was buried in New Jersey, on a wet, rainy December morning that could not have been more grim. The tombstone next to hers is for a man named something like Marty Fishbein. Mom’s tombstone is unpolished granite, sober, tasteful, with Mom’s favorite typeface that we had to special order. Marty’s is laser-etched with a photograph of his face. Mom would have rolled her eyes at how tacky it was. And yet the inscriptions on his stone are heartfelt messages from his wife and his kids, showing a man who was dearly loved. I think Mom would have liked him. When I’m feeling fanciful, I like to think of her and Marty, sitting on their tombstones, swinging their legs, chatting companionably, waiting—but in absolutely no hurry—for their spouses to join them one day.
Image at the top of the page is of View of the Canal Saint-Martin, a painting by Alfred Sisley done in 1870. It hangs in the Orsay Museum.