saint Rita

Mar. 10—My mom died at 7:15 a.m. She had passed a relatively peaceful night—wind chimes, light rain, and morphine—and went gently into that good morning. I had spent the night on the couch next to her in her home hospice bed in the living room, which had been delivered earlier that evening, along with instructions and hourly doses of morphine to ease any unrest. Her chain-stoke breathing had reduced to 6-7 breaths in sequence before a 25 second pause, down from previous nights’ 15-17 breaths. They were deeper and less urgent, but as the night progressed they also grew guttural, apneal. I woke at 3:45 to dose her and didn’t fall back asleep until six, counting breaths, timing pauses, reflecting on the inchoate meaninglessness of the universe and all life in it, as well as the meaning that arises from it. (Today was the 32^nd birthday of Rita’s first grand-daughter, asleep upstairs, and named for “life.” A coincidence that must now be made sense of—or not.) 

My sister Beth arrived at 7:00 a.m. to check in before going off to her school nurse gig. All was as well as we could hope, though, to be honest, we didn’t have a lot of it, given the steepness of her physical and cognitive decline over the last few months. After making her examination and kissing our mother on the forehead, Bethie reminded me that the hospice nurse would arrive sometime later that morning and departed. I lay back on the couch to sleep, first returning to her breathing cycle. The pause struck me as strangely silent and now, inordinately long. I rose and in the absence of her breath, looked for the subtle pulse in her neck, which no longer pulsed. Her smooth cheek appeared to have sunken ever so slightly, and her face was cool, cooling. I patted her cheek, called lowly to her, “Ma,” shook her shoulder, but only with such force as to get her attention or to awaken her from sleep. I had long been anticipating that moment, both in dread and as relief. The notion of thumping her on the chest or even respirating her struck me as abhorrent, impossible violence. And then I let her go.

Orhan Pamuk has written somewhere that he did not become conscious of his own mortality until his father died. That seems to me a bit obtuse for a writer or very fortunate—unless his beloved father died early, I don’t recall. My mother was the last of her family’s generation, the sole survivor of eight siblings until this morning, now yesterday. My father, the youngest son of his family, survives with his two younger sisters, of a family of eleven. Their sister died this summer. My sense at the passing of my mother is less of my own mortality, immediate or less so, but of the passing of that generation. We are the next in line to die.