Mors Sanctissima Non Stupuit, Day Five (Foto--Piers)

Dear Piers,
° I slept so well last night. At two I wakened from a dream of a mother and son, tenants on the farm, who were washing clothes and hanging them on the outside of a barn, under the roof overhang, to dry. And yes, the rain had picked up, was actually a downpour. Well we need it. Of course the washing dream was preposterous, such a thing never happened. I was just dozing off when I recollected that the mother and son were dead.
° My waking dream was me at the threemanual console of a pipe organ. All the keys were level, I thought it would really strain the hands to play it. The keys were painted over with a thick middarkblue paint. The stops were in no sort of order at all. I tried the cornet, it turned out to be a very acute, very thinnish sort of cymbel instead. I tried the trompette, it was very fine indeed. But I gave it all up when I noticed that the bench was tottering backwards, and that there was enough fall behind to give one a concussion. I thought about gmailing you, thought you’d be interested that some church had so feckless an instrument.
° It’s so disrespectful to feel any normal feelings, any normal interests at a time like this. But I did forget everything yesterday while I was gardening. I do feel the lure of the Bouvier gossip. I feel normal.
° The lower Terrace is flooded, such a rain. Crook has thrown up on the porch. Asia’s toilet needs cleaning, in the worse of two ways.
° No light is flashing, no phone call. No panic, no rush. I’m writing to you.

° The phone rings, I rush to save the document, but pick up while my brother is still talking. There’re two messages on the answering machine, it was while I was emptying the litter box.
° At 8 o’clock this morning Mother died. My brother and sisterinlaw had spent the night in the room, had been home for about an hour when the first call came to them.
° The paperwork begins in earnest at 11 o’clock, then the “closure” service and family viewing, then casket closed forever, then visitation off and on till Friday. Phone calls, gmails, food.
° How do I feel? I don’t know. At 8 o’clock I felt fine, I didn’t even feel so very guilty about feeling fine. At 8:15 I feel fine, or maybe numb, which is also fine.
° I didn’t know the morphine would still leave Death looking like that, I didn’t want Mother to continue to look like that.
° It’s 8:30, and I’m not feeling fine at all, my eyes are welling up. I love you and all my family and all my beasts.

° Giac.

Mors Sanctissima Non Stupebit, Day Four (Foto--Piers)

Beloved little Piers,
° It was that flashing light just before bedtime last night. My brother transmitting a call from the charge nurse: “Your mother’s breathing has become very light, she’s gone down ‘a lot’ since y’all were here ((only a few hours ago)).”
° At 2 o’clock I awoke, not from a dream, with a sense of profound insecurity, of light panic. My legs began to ache, as they used to do when I was a child. And I was bigeyed, no drowsiness promising a quick return to sleep. A few avemarias, the only prayer I know that has any real point, a brief preamble, then cut to the chase: ”I’m frightened, comfort me.”
° But I was still frightened.
° So I used all the popquantum physics I know to summon my beasts. Panama, the magickal and magnificent Panama, to guard the window. Tira the wolfhound to guard the foot of the bed. Octavia the Siamese to drape herself on my neck. Asia, to cramp my legs the more. Whip and Crook, too young to do anything but get underfoot. Artemis the Unlucky I sent into the Breakfast Room to eat her fill of Asia‘s kitty numnums. Then I remembered she had no teeth. So I felt bad about that too.

° Got up at dawn, walked, dashed off the requested obituary--the new dominy never knew Mother as a person, he wanted some anecdotes, some sense of her active life. Was rushing out the door--everything to escape before the phone could ring--when I remembered I’d left out something very important, a Freudian slip. Supplied it hurriedly, reprinted, no harm done, no offense given. Out the door, no flashing light.
° Mother’s head was still visible through the window of her room, so she wasn’t dead yet. The tv was off, the roommate watching and waiting, she’s seen so many roommates die in her time; young as she is, she may see many more. Christmas carols on piano were playing softly by Mother’s bedside. I opened the blinds, spoke to her, her eyes opened and stared full through me. Then I put on the Mozart, then I yammered and yammered and yammered. The morphine took over, she closed her eyes.
° The lids are swollen, red, itchy. The eyes themselves seem to have shrunk, the blue much paler. She has supplemental oxygen through the nose, but breathes through the mouth. The tongue is crusted with yellow mucus or--. The nurses swab the interior of the mouth from time to time. I just pour a bit of water onto the side of the tongue, catch the dribble with a towel.
° But I never stop yammering. I tell her I’m sorry I wasn’t a better caregiver. I tell her all the tales of her childhood I can remember. I rub her feet. I’m horrified at what her appearance will be if this goes on and on, like Terry Schiavo.
° The dominy comes in, he was alarmed by the urgency of my obituary. I yammer at him. He listens like Leggero, like the charge nurse. He plans a moment of “closure” for the family at bedside, perhaps this afternoon.
° I thank Heaven we’ve got a Protestant. He’s dressed like a normal human being, he has normal human feelings, he’s free of that insane institutional sense of mumbojumboist selfimportance.

° That afternoon I rake the sheared and strimmed trimmings from the Terrace. It’s warm, I have a vague sense that folks might be coming to the house this week, better prepare. For the last half hour it rains, but I finish the job. It’s a warm rain, it won’t kill me.

° Indoors I remember that Sister Death is close by. I fidget, can’t concentrate on the text in front of me, can’t concentrate on the monitor either. I visit your new website, your staff foto won’t download. Don’t care, I know what you look like better than they do. I visit your old website, no sign of a successor, news of Pietro Bouvier.
° I search out Mother’s living will. I read it word for word. “No artificial means of providing food or water . . . . terminal condition as determined by the attending physician.” That is what it says, that is what it means. This is it. My brother and I have done what she directed us to do.
I just didn’t know it would look like what it does.

° By bedtime I feel okay, I mean, I fall asleep with no trouble.
° The answering machine light isn’t flashing.

° Love, Giac.

Mors Sanctissima Non Stupebit, Day Three (Foto--Piers)

My beloved Piers,
° I thought I couldn’t stand it when you were gone. Until I finally found that you aren’t gone. If you so much as prick your finger, I bleed.
° And this morning I found that you already knew--had you read labuonastella?
° My coffee scum--still the Christmas gift Starbucks Blend--immediately settled into an arrow piercing a body; later, when it had run and dried it was the Pelican pecking her breast to feed her single chick her own sustaining blood.
° But it wasn’t dry when I drove in to the nursing home.
° I had to see for myself.
° Mother was very alert, trying but unable to speak, reaching feebly with her jointfrozen arms, obviously conscious that something was bad wrong.
° Of course, by now the tranquilliser is nearly out of the system. Forehead not hot, unable even to develop a fever now.
° I repositioned her, raised the bed, offered her water. Two or three times her lips moved to sip, one time she even bit the edge of the cup. In half a dozen tries I got perhaps a tablespoon of water into her mouth. It all dribbled back out, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Wet her tongue.
° The roommate’s tv blaring (why was I so prudent, why not a private room? My brother’s reminder: Mother actually benefited from the oversight of her more mentally active roommate. But why didn’t we ask for a private room six months ago, when we signed onto Hospice?
° Again, not a rhetorical question. But this time I know the answer. After 3 ½ years of Medicare and Medical and Blue Cross Insurance shiftings and dodgings, after 3 ½ years without any meaningful information, I mostly and my brother partly had lost all faith in the Medical Establishment. Remember FEMA, remember Katrina? That’s how our rulers do things. American health care is just Katrina FEMA on a giantly wasteful and mentally deficient scale. And doctors are too busy. And doctors are too omnipotent. And medical science is too backward.
° And in the end, the doctor was right and I was wrong. But up till then the Mexican Medicine Man in Overton had been ten times righter than the Gringo Medicine Men in Kosciusko.)
° No chance of a private room now. Mother must die listening to the braying of game show hosts and network hucksters. The charge nurse offers to play Mozart cds quietly at bedside.
° The charge nurse listens listens listens--”As soon as your mother’s agitated spells last more than a few minutes, we’ll start placing the morphine drops under the tongue.”
° Brother and sisterinlaw come in. I fall through the floor when the undertaker is mentioned. I say nothing. No dying patient will ever hear me admit it, if I have to yammer and yammer till I blither.
° But they’ve been gathering pallbearers--every male family friend of Mother’s age is either dead or weakly--and relatives’ phone numbers, and sorting fotos for the display table.
° And freshening up the dress.
° And arranging for the last hairdressing.
° And selecting the casket.
° Lord help us all if I had to do those things.
° But if anybody can out cheerful yammer me, I’d just like to hear it.

§§§§§

° In the back of the mind: why not IV antibiotics?
° In the back of the mind: are we murderers to follow the advice of everyone who’s ever said yes to them, are we murderers for drawing the line absolute at the feeding tube?
° All decided negatively years ago. Let it go let it go. Too late soon.

° Your Giac.

Mors Sanctissima Non Stupebit, Day Two (Foto--Piers)

My beloved Piers,
° Slept well, rose before dawn, ate, washed, dressed to drive up to see Leggero. If I could just get out that door . . . .
° But, can’t leave the house without passing the machine, the blinking red light.
° The Call, from my brother. Doctor, Hospice, Charge Nurse, the daily attendants--all agree. Mother is dying rapidly. Inevitably.
° Phone back. Well there it is, no denying, all the animal panic of the Wolf smelling his own species’s blood and hearing the specific whimpers of terror and pain.
° No denying. Rehearsal over. Live audience.
° (How many times over the last 3 ½ years has Mother been at Death’s door? Not a rhetorical question, but I myself don’t know the answer. Emergency Room, Intensive Care, some newer and fiercer antibiotic, some gentler and less distressing psychotropic. Ever and again at Death’s door, but escaping so many times that by now, who would believe it?
° On Hospice for the last six months, but who would believe it? That flareup of being at herself last November, complete sentences, smiles of recognition--didn’t I gmail Lettye that I hoped that wasn’t what it was in her own mother’s case, in so many cases anecdotally, the last flareup?)
° Gmailed Lettye. Prepare those two hymns (you know the two I mean).
° Phoned Charlene: Prepare those two hymns.
° Went into shock, drove up to Overton, smiled more than usual, jollied folks more than usual, was just a bundle of good cheer. Even more fake than usual.
° I didn’t feel a thing. It had been for real there for a few minutes, but now it wasn’t either real or not real. It was just locked in that compartment way back.
° And I felt the whole day as if I were fixing to jump out of my skin.
° Leggero offered what he could, said what he could.
° Vic catches me up on his own situation. Takes me back to those dreadful days of athome caregiving. “O how I suffered.” (To the extent that I’d rather Nathan paint my tonsils with toadstool juice than for me dementedly to give another human that same trouble myself. If not demented, I can prevent myself giving that trouble all by myself.)
° “O how I suffered.” The violence, the stench, the overwhelmedness.
° Only, Vic, who works fulltime, has not only his mother, but a physically helpless sibling as well, and not only does he not have the help my brother and sisterinlaw gave me, he faces the more normal situation of genuine obstruction and carping from his ablebodied kin.
° So I’m just shutting up. How easy I got off, as a caregiver. Barely a couple of years, really.
° Slept soundly till the Cat clawed my ear. Six o’clock sharp.

° Love, Giac.

Mors Sanctissima Non Stupebit, Day One (Foto--Piers)

My beloved little Piers,
° This morning I had a comparatively brief visit with Mother. I yammered and yammered the way I yammer and yammer; bimeby I blithered. Mother opened her eyes once, did not recognise me, did not speak, closed them again. All about as usual.
° And yet animal panick kept building inside me the whole time. Why?
° I returned to my car, parked conveniently in the fire lane just outside her window. The charge nurse came in to medicate, the customary little plastic cup of pseudo milkshake laced with tranquilliser, antibiotic, thyroid extract, I don’t know what all.
° She tipped part of the viscous fluid into Mother’s mouth, then stroked and chopped her throat, massaged vigorously her cheeks, just as you would do to trick Jackson Ng into swallowing a hated worm capsule. She added water, then dashed to the bathroom for towelling. For it all flowed back out.
° So I knew.

° I knew why I’d had that same dream three times already this week. Mother and I are out walking through the neighbourhood, the day is sunny and pleasant, we encounter her friend Jan (she was her classmate, then neighbour all her life in Kosciusko, is now her neighbour just down the hall at the nursing home). All so pleasant, all so normal.
° Only, atop every wall we pass, and in writhing masses underfoot, are countless rattlesnakes.
° I knew what it meant. And I denied what it meant, till I saw the charge nurse’s failed efforts.
° The throat muscles have lost their coordination.
° Mother cannot swallow anything, no liquid, no medicine, no food.
° I gmailed my cousin up North, reported the dream, suggested that Mother might be getting a little worse.
° For I was back in full denial. But I did sleep without the nightmare last night.

° Love, Giac.