Minnie: Rest In Peace, Mom is Nancy Ford-Young’s moving account of her mother’s death.
It is a story of a sixty-three-year-old woman’s struggle with cancer and of her family’s compassion. With simple eloquence, Nancy Ford-Young resists the temptation to sentimentalize her mother’s predicament, to gloss over her weaknesses or to make her larger than life. To my mind, it’s the very ordinariness of this story that’s so compelling.
“Death happens in an instant,” she writes, “but the dying can take longer than you ever imagined. Dying seems to have a life of its own: shifts, sorrows, surprises, and also deep humor.”
A yoga teacher for the past fifteen years and the mother of three children, Nancy Ford-Young is the founder and director of the Yoga and Health Studies Center in Alexandria, Virginia, where she lives.
Her book was published this year by Trimtab Productions, a small press dedicated to “the one life connecting everyone and everything.” Copies are available for $4.95 plus $1.25 postage and handling from Trimtab Productions, 14031 Great Notch Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20878.
We’re thankful for permission to reprint these excerpts.
— Ed.
Do you remember what it is like to wake up in a strange room? That sense of disorientation happens to me sometimes when I travel. It takes a moment or two for me to realize I am not at home in my own room. This helped me to understand what my mother may have been feeling when she asked so often, “Where am I?” I think she may have been wondering if she were dead yet. She was in a hospital in Virginia, a long way from her home in New Jersey, and rousing not from sleep but from a state of consciousness that was moving to the next life. Over and over we told her she was in Mount Vernon Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, and the time and date.
I found myself trying to understand, to assist my mother, who was near death. But hers was a unique experience, one I couldn’t totally share. Elaine, the crisis nurse, gave me a lesson. My mother had slowed her eating to tiny, tiny amounts. We all fussed at her to eat, but then realized she was making a deliberate choice not to. “Let’s tell Nancy you will eat when you want to,” Elaine said to her. This was my mother’s death, her decisions.
Suddenly I had to learn a new language, and I learned it on the job. It was not so much verbal as intuitive, not so much a matter of form as of spirit. The dying need someone to speak for them. “I need words,” my mother said late one night. Basic instruction in the language is to supply the words. When the words were right, there was an affirmation, a nod, a smile, a slight change in the face. When the words were wrong there was either no response or a negative movement. I had to listen as I had never listened before. One of the oncologists remarked after an examination, “Your mother is incoherent.” Hell no. He just did not know the language.
My mother was poised at the final part of her trip from life to death. I want now to set the stage for that time. The journal that follows is the daily transcript of her last ten days.
There is a family anecdote that at the age of four I tried to cure her headache by washing and powdering her feet. I remember that story as I put her feet into a hospital basin and wash them with scented soap. In the body contact of drying her feet all remnants of my denial fade, and I sense the nearness of death.
My mother’s name was Miriam Braithwaite Ford. Her grandchildren called her Minnie. She was born on July 9, 1916, in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of three daughters of Kathryn and Herbert Braithwaite. On her mother’s side, Minnie was second-generation Irish Catholic. Her grandmother and grandfather were both what is called “Black Irish,” that is, the Irish with coal-black hair and eyes that legend says came from contact with the Spanish during the time of the Armada. Their name, Quirke, was said to be of Spanish derivation. My mother’s extraordinarily thick, wavy red hair was bequeathed not by the Irish clans, but by her father’s Scottish and English heritage. Both her Irish and English grandmothers lived into their late eighties and were part of Minnie’s life well into her adulthood.
Minnie went to a Catholic women’s college in Brooklyn during the depression and considered herself lucky with her B.A. in English literature to get a job as secretary to an attorney. She graduated from college a few months before her twentieth birthday, married my father at twenty-three, separated from him in her mid-thirties, and settled into a job with Bell Telephone Laboratories. Her final job was as a wage and salary analyst. I remember her teaching herself how to use a computer long before they became a part of standard office routine. In her forties my mother got a double M.A. in business and economics from a university in New Jersey.
In the early 1960s, her breast cancer was diagnosed and she underwent a radical mastectomy. It is typical that she went to Bermuda to recover; illness, work, travel and her family were the main themes in my mother’s life. In the mid-1970s this lifestyle was shifting, and my mother was anxious about when and how to retire. As the stress increased, so did the physical symptoms and complaints. Mom had joint pains, facial neuralgia, an overactive thyroid, and possibly a collagen disease. She was hospitalized for the first of what would be years of tests: radioactive cobalt, X-rays, CAT scans, blood tests, urine tests, bone marrow tests. I thought that if the stress and problems didn’t get her, the tests and “cures” would. Some of her symptoms were attributed to reactions to the dozens of medications she was given. Her lungs began to fill up with fluid. However, tests done on this sometimes bloody fluid were negative for cancer and other major problems.
In May 1978, during one of her many hospitalizations, a biopsy revealed a diagnosis of cancer. It was located at the same site as the seventeen-year-old breast surgery. Since there was now no breast it was called cancer of the pleura. I remember the hasty trip to New Jersey on Mother’s Day weekend. Six of us squeezed into my brother Michael’s Toyota. Nine of us crowded into the tiny room at Overlook Hospital in Summit. Mom looked elegant: nails polished, a long gold silk robe from Japan, embroidered green silk slippers. “I am going to fight this thing. But if it doesn’t work, I want to go naturally.” Brave words, brave show, but the start of an incredibly difficult year.
My mother’s doctors in New Jersey played down the diagnosis and prognosis. They were less than totally honest with Mom. That summer of 1978 my mother had radiation treatments. She was adamant about not wanting chemotherapy. She did not want to feel exhausted, and she did not want to lose her luxurious, still-red hair.
My mother always bought the latest PDR (Physician’s Desk Reference). In it she would look up medications she was taking. I remember her looking up a hormone she was given at this time. The PDR said it was a palliative for breast cancer. My mother had an excellent vocabulary; she beat the New York Times crossword every week. Didn’t she know what palliative meant? I looked up palliative in her dictionary. “Palliate: to make less severe without curing; reduce the pain or intensity of; mitigate, alleviate.”
Our last family vacation was in August 1978. Minnie stood by the dresser in her bedroom in an old inn in East Hampton, Long Island. She looked fine, a bit thinner, a bit tired. She was combing the hair back off her face when a panic gripped.
“I am so frightened.”
“Of what, Mom?”
“Not the pain. That is not exactly it. I am so frightened of being alone.”
“You will not be alone. You have asked, and I promise you will not be alone.”
I am about fourteen or fifteen. There is a fierce thunderstorm, and I go into my mother’s room very late at night. She lets me get into bed with her, and we talk about fear and death. I admit that I am afraid of dying. She offers me a suggestion and says it is all she can think to do. Whichever one of us dies first, the other will keep praying for the soul of the departed until we are out of purgatory, and we will not let each other die alone. Twenty-two years later I remember that promise.
There was a hiatus in the autumn of 1978, a plateau when Mom felt OK and was working. She spent Christmas that year with us in Virginia. It was the last Christmas. I look back and see all those lasts so vividly. We knew they might be final holidays or get-togethers but we did not truly comprehend that, yes, those were lasts.
At the end of 1978 my mother took medical leave from work. Soon after the new year, the plateau crumbled. Chemotherapy started. Emergency long distance phone calls came through from her friends; she was too weak to eat; she was going to the emergency room for a transfusion; her white blood cells, her red blood cells, her platelets, were disappearing. We took turns going to New Jersey — cooking, doing errands, going to the hospital if that was where Minnie was. In February she had surgery to unblock her kidneys and urethra. We discovered that the much publicized home care for the seriously ill is not a reality if you have a middle-class income or live alone. Hospice required a live-in, primary care person before they would make home visits, and there were no residential facilities nearby. Besides, my mother did not want to be in a residential facility. She wanted to be around her children and five grandchildren. Even at this point, she was still denying the seriousness of her condition.
On May 1, 1979 (my brother’s birthday), after months of procrastination, my mother agreed to make the move to Virginia. My sister Jane and brother Michael took her to the Newark airport. I flew there to pick her up. Minnie looked better than she had in six months. She had on green eye shadow, lipstick, her best new wig and a soft Irish tweed suit. Before flying to Virginia she ate a big meal with us at the airport restaurant. We joked and chatted. Was there relief in finally moving into the circle of her offspring? “When you all hug me I feel this energy come from you . . . even little Seth.” It was one month before her death.
She was adamant about not wanting chemotherapy. She did not want to feel exhausted, and she did not want to lose her luxurious, still-red hair.
Death was at a distance that day and for the next week while my mother stayed at my house. She rented an apartment nearby and was waiting while we got it ready. Friends called from New Jersey. We had tea and pumpkin bread. We walked around the garden where her favorite white azaleas were in bloom.
Appointments were made with the new oncology team. Banking business was taken care of. Minnie would lie down in the afternoon on my daughter Missie’s bed, half-dozing; “I am so happy just lying here listening to the sounds of the house.” She tried to ask little of me, as I was finishing up a hard semester at the university and was taking examinations.
I finished my last exam on Thursday. On Friday, my mother asked me to take her to the emergency room of the local hospital. I felt as though she had held on until the semester was over. She was accustomed to using emergency rooms. They were places to have a transfusion when the fatigue became unbearable. The situation was not critical. She had an appointment to meet her new doctors in three days. The doctor in the emergency room said it was up to us — she could stay in the hospital for a few days and build up her strength and blood count or go back home with me. My mother decided to stay. She never left the hospital.
Mount Vernon Hospital is a clean, modern facility. Plants and huge windows that let the light in are part of the design of the building. My mother has three different rooms in the month she is there, but her final home is a double room with no roommate. It would be impossible to have another patient in the room as it becomes our place of vigil.
We move in extra chairs and a lounge for napping. I bring in my mother’s favorite perfume, Chanel No. 5, and dab it on the curtains and on her pillow. Did I read somewhere that the sense of smell is among the last to go? Propped against the window is Mom’s college graduation photograph. It shows a pretty young woman with a mild smile and a head of thick wavy hair. We bring in a basket with a variety of color snapshots covering over half a century of travel, pets, children — a woman’s life. Someone places more recent photos near the graduation portrait. Now the mass of hair can be seen as coppery red. The photos do the job! I want my mother to be a person to the nurses. While taking Minnie’s pulse, a nurse looks at the photos. “Is that your mother?” She looks at my mother, shriveled, almost bald, a dying cancer patient, then to the photos again. I tell her the big one is my mother graduating from college at age nineteen. Visitors and nurses alike look through the photos during these weeks.
The hospital has a system of primary care nursing, so that for eight hours Mom has the same nurse. We get to know them, and often at a quiet time the nurse on duty will learn where my mother was born, what she studied, her job, her life. The nurses become part of a chemical reaction — the process going on in the room.
Soft drinks and beer, salads and leftover food brought by friends sit on the “refrigerator,” an air-conditioning vent in the room. Grandchildren’s artwork is taped to the walls. We put flowers on every available surface.
The new team of oncologists meets my mother and orders a repeat of all the tests she has had already. By mid-week the tests are in. My mother is party to the results.
“Do I have three diseases? Cancer in the pleura, cancer around my kidneys, and cancer in my bones? I cannot fight all of this.”
“But Mom, that information is in those medical records you’ve been lugging around from New Jersey.”
“I guess I didn’t notice.”
We work with the hospital social worker to locate assistance for my mother after her release. The doctors say she has a few more months. Together with neighbors and friends, we set up the new apartment, unpack, have phones installed. We are planning for a future but are skeptical of its arrival. On one hand my mother denies the seriousness of her illness for almost a year; on the other hand, she gives me power of attorney and asks her Aunt Edna about grave sites.
Now there is a shift every day; our plans and feelings change. I call the Health Assistance Program at a local hospital and listen to the tape on dying. It reminds me that a family is saying goodbye to one person, but that the person who is dying is saying goodbye to everything. I can understand denial as a way of getting through such a long, hard list of farewells. In the second week of hospitalization my mother’s denial abruptly stops. I see a deliberate motion away from life, an about-face toward death, with a new-found dignity and acceptance.
I am going to have a hard job. I am not watching my mother die. I am helping her do it.
Perhaps the attitude of the doctors in New Jersey was the right one for my mother. She survived a serious kidney operation, severe emaciation, low blood counts, reaction to chemotherapy. She survived. She chose not to survive the unvarnished truth about her cancer.
“When I found out, when I found out how sick I was. . . .”
“When you found out how sick you were, you got angry?”
“No.”
“Oh, when you found out how sick you were, you said the hell with it?”
“Right.”
The Virginia doctors express surprise at the rapid deterioration of her condition.
One day my mother is sitting propped up writing notes. I fuss with the collar of her quilted bedjacket. Is it at this moment the listening language begins?
“Baby, this is not going to last very long. It is going to stop.”
“How, Mama?”
“It is just going to stop, and I don’t want anyone to feel sorry.”
“Hey, can’t I feel sorry?”
“Yes, but not for me. It is OK.”
Most of Mom’s meals begin to be left on the green plastic food trays. In previous hospitalizations, when she would refuse her hospital food, she would request her favorites — a chocolate milkshake or a Hershey Bar with almonds. We move to a time when even the milkshakes remain untouched on the bedside table. Favorite television shows are no longer turned on, and the curtains stay closed most of the day. An organized, methodical woman becomes confused. Her checkbook does not balance, or so she thinks. She pays some bills twice. It is difficult for a financially competent person to turn her business over to someone else. We grapple with this change for a couple of days. Humor helps. “Mom, do not write any checks, on any bank, real or imagined, in this universe or any other.”
It is the third Saturday of the hospitalization. Mom’s bed is cranked up part way. I realize she is not asleep and yet not awake. She is sort of sitting up. I ease down in the chair in the twilight of the room; the only light comes from the hallway. I am also in the twilight of a human life. Mom raises her left arm and says, “My wood is rotting. I do not have much time left.” She was right. She had less than two weeks to live.
“Mom, what do you think about when you are lying here so quietly? Do you think of my father?”
“No. My mother and father. It is not really thinking. Remembering mostly when I was little, or at Brentwood [boarding school]. It is sort of stream of consciousness.”
Elaine, the crisis nurse, recommended by a local mental health center, is now part of our days. She had planned at one point to make home visits, her usual procedure. She works on the floor below my mother’s and can come up to her at odd moments in the night. Elaine is visiting on a Wednesday a few days after I had overheard my mother speak of rotting wood. The bed is being made and Minnie is sitting in a chair. I am able to see even more clearly the frailness, the lightness of her body, that it is difficult for her to sit up. As I move to help her, I learn with my hands the meaning of the phrase “skin and bones.”
My mother has small, bony feet with a high arch and slim ankles. There is a family anecdote that at the age of four I tried to cure her headache by washing and powdering her feet. I remember that story as I put her feet into a hospital basin and wash them with scented soap. In the body contact of drying her feet all remnants of my denial fade, and I sense the nearness of death. “Is there anyone you want to see, Mom?” I am thinking of girlhood friends who live in New York, or friends from work. “Yes,” she says, “I want to see Grandma and Grandpa.” This is an answer I do not expect as my great-grandparents have been dead for years, but I am not really surprised as my consciousness, too, is changing rapidly. “Grandma and Grandpa Quirke?” “Yes, they are supposed to be here. I see Grandma Quirke and Grandma Braithwaite a lot.” I reach up to hug her, and my tears of this new time flow for a second. Very emphatically my mother says, “No. It is OK, baby.”
Later I call my brother and sister and say I do not think Mom has the month or six weeks now cited by her doctors. My sister closes her business. Neighbors begin to leave casseroles on the kitchen table. Friends pick up Seth from nursery school. This is the day we drop any pretense of our usual routine as an end draws near.
The next morning we learn that sometime during the night my mother had been strapped into a straight jacket, quaintly called a “posy.” She is shocked at the strapping in, but it was “for her own good.” She had gotten out of bed to use the bathroom. That does it! From then on we are there around the clock.
“Mom, can I ask you a question? What do you want us to do with this poor, tired body when you are finished with it?”
“Sweetie, it does not matter.”
“Do you want to be with Catholics or with the Quakers?”
“It does not matter.”
“But you want a white azalea?”
“Yes!”
I bring in my mother’s favorite perfume, Chanel No. 5, and dab it on the curtains and on her pillow. Did I read somewhere that the sense of smell is among the last to go?
I am out looking for a grave site. For the first time in my life I feel faint, as the salesman with white patent leather shoes keeps trying to sell me a multiperson grave in a memorial park where no plants are allowed. I call Horace Buckman, an elder of my Quaker Meeting. Aunt Jean and I go over to the Meeting House burial ground. There, Horace paces out a place under a pine tree in the 150-year-old grounds.
“I’ve done this so often,” he says, his voice cracking with emotion.
“How much?” I ask.
“Usually $50, but for you $25.”
“Fine, I’ll give you $100, and can we have a white azalea?”
“Of course.”
Mom made the decision for us.
Friday, Mom has a bronchoscopy (an examination of the bronchi through a bronchoscope under a general anaesthetic). The doctors want more information about a week-long infection. The bronchoscopy reveals a large abscess in the left lung, cancer in the lung’s upper lobe, scar tissue from radiation treatment, and tissue disintegration. This lung cannot work much longer. We are told that the higher centers of the brain, the cerebral cortex, will “click off” from lack of oxygen and her heart will stop beating. (An omen for each of us, her children and grandchildren, a hint of our inheritance of that strong-willed brain, is that it did not click off. My mother was aware of almost all that was happening until less than an hour before her death.)
Friday evening Minnie wakes up from the bronchoscopy and is fairly alert. Our overly modest mother is allowing us to take her and the intravenous drip to the bathroom. She is very weak, but I notice she also plays possum and deliberately closes her eyes and withdraws. Later in the evening, she is exhausted but awake. She is clear when asking about her gold watch that had been removed before the day’s procedure. “The damn thing cost $250!” I feel the imp in her as she quizzes the nurses. There is a wild humor in the room. I catch it, go home late and wash all the floors in my house.
For the past several weeks, as I ride the elevator or walk up to the third floor I say, “Spirits gather round. Help. We cannot do this job on our own.” I go through this rite, take a deep breath, and walk around the corner to my mother’s room. It is early Saturday morning. When I left late Friday night, Mom was alert and resting. Now less than twelve hours later she is in acute respiratory failure. A priest is called. The sides of the hospital bed are up, and in it my mother is gasping for breath. I call my sister Jane at home and rouse her from sleep. My brother comes back to the hospital after being there most of the night. My aunts, Jean and Kathryn, arrive from New Jersey, and nurse Anna says, “This is it.”
Mid-afternoon, Mom whispers something about Janice, Michael’s wife. Jane asks her if she wants to see Janice and Mom says yes, emphatically. She seems relieved when Janice arrives. “Thank God, I have three children and one stepchild and five grandchildren and they are all great.” Later, Janice telephones their daughter Deidre. We are surprised that Mom wants to talk to her too. We are geared for the death scene. “How are you doing, Minnie?” we hear Deidre ask through the phone. “Not too well, sweetie,” Mom replies.
On a table beside Mom’s bed is a writing tablet. Suddenly I hear inside my head, “Start writing it all down!” I had made notes on bits of paper about some of the moments, but on this Saturday night we start a systematic log of the last days of a human life. Each day is grueling, remarkable, as Minnie lives beyond the crisis when we all thought she would die. She does not die, but hangs on despite her intent. These extra days are unique . . . unlike any others we have lived so far. I can only believe them to be a gift, an opportunity for profound learning. My mother is weak but not in pain. Her biggest discomforts are a raw bedsore at the base of her spine and a hacking, nonproductive cough.
At times I felt that I was part of a mortar-and-pestle process, and that by her continued precarious life my mother was grinding down our resistance, the conditioning of all the members of our family. One by one we succumbed to the intense pathos of those days.
The dialogue that follows between my mother and members of her family or friends looks clear and concise when written down. But in those 200 or more hours of vigil there are perhaps three hours of recorded speech. My mother weighed about eighty pounds, had received the last rites of her church and could hardly swallow. We sat in chairs listening to her labored breathing and experienced moments of communication that are not recorded: a kiss on the forehead, a hand held for a few minutes, faint smiles, a tear. I share it exactly as we wrote it. By the second day the nurses were jotting in the book.
Saturday, May 26, 1979, 10:00 p.m.
Mom: I can’t describe to you how I felt. How my face felt. I can’t describe it . . . that first day . . . that second day. I had such a hard time telling you all. Michael actually said I was senile. Sometimes I thought I was in an insane asylum. Dr. Fisher said he thought I was a little confused. I said, “Do you mean screwy?” He said, “No, just confused.”
Nancy’s friend Phyllis Myers and her husband Jack come in.
Nancy: Phyllis and Jack are here.
Mom: God bless you, Phyllis and Jack — they are so nice.
Nancy: Phyllis brought us tea.
Mom: Isn’t this called elevenses? [a reference to the British morning tea-break] I must apologize for your books. They took them when I went to the operating room.
Nancy: Do you want me to give Jack his books?
Mom: Well, I would like to finish reading Shogun.
A few minutes later
Nancy: Do you want to get up to use the pot?
Mom: Where the hell else would I go? When you have to go to the pot you have to go.
Nancy is looking at some of the old photos and laughing.
Mom: Hey, is she laughing or crying?
Nancy: Do you want me to laugh or cry, Mom?
Mom: A little of both.
Midnight
Mom: Who is here? Who is here? A young man is here.
Nancy: Someone’s here?
Mom: One of the black Irish.
Michael: Who is the black Irishman?
Mom: He is fine. He makes up for all the damn other Irish I’ve had to put up with.
Mom looks over flower arrangements from friends at work.
Mom: The flowers are beautiful.
Later
Mom: One hand is cold. One hand is warm.
Sunday, May 27, 8:50 a.m.
Mom: Who are the young men?
Michael: What men, Mom?
Mom: Those two young men.
Michael: Are they here?
Mom: Yes.
Michael: What do they look like?
Mom: One is tall and thin and the other is much the same.
Michael: What are they doing?
Mom: They are here to help me.
We realize Mom’s vision is expanding and she sees presences we sometimes feel.
10:40 a.m.
Mom: Japanese deer are cuter than anything.
Michael: What makes you say that?
Mom: I’ve seen lots of them.
11:15 a.m.
Mom: I do not think I could stand that.
Missie: What, Minnie?
Mom: Being eleven feet tall.
11:50 a.m.
Nancy: The nurses call you sweetie pie.
Mom: I am a sweetie pie.
2:30 p.m.
Mom is tilted up in bed. Nancy is lying on the bed. Mom raises her hand with an I.V. board strapped to it. She is trying to pat Nancy on the head.
Mom: Baby, you have to understand that mothers and fathers understand about sadness.
Nancy: Can’t I miss you?
Mom: I want you to miss me.
Nancy: But not too much?
Mom: Right.
7:00 p.m.
Mom is helped to use the portable potty. She is very weak and shaky.
Mom: I have never done all this before.
11:30 p.m.
Jane comes in for the night shift. Mom rouses and hugs her.
Nancy: Can I change your pillow? It really bugs me. Some things bug Jane, and some things bug Michael, and your scarf and pillow bug me.
Jane: What bugs you, Mom?
Mom: The cost.
Monday, May 28, 8:00 a.m.
Mom is coughing a lot; no Hycodan [cough medicine] all night.
She is clear when asking about her gold watch that had been removed before the day’s procedure. “The damn thing cost $250!” I feel the imp in her as she quizzes the nurses. There is a wild humor in the room.
Mom: You know what I would like? A sleeping pill, regularly.
Nancy: You are having a hard time sleeping?
Mom: Yes.
Nancy: I wonder what is stopping you from sleeping.
Mom: I don’t know, but I want a sleeping pill regularly.
Is Mom speaking of dying when she says sleeping? I consciously release her from staying “awake.”
Nancy: Mom, I am OK! Jane and all of us are OK! I have been accepted into graduate school, and I am going to knock them out!
Mom: Oh sweetie, I am so glad.
Noon
Mom is having a sponge-down.
Mom: Nancy, I sure am glad to see you.
Nancy: Jane and Michael or I are here all the time. I promised, didn’t I? You remember the bargain?
Mom: Yes I do . . . I can only take so much of all of this.
Mom: It’s the most amazing thing.
Nancy: Sometimes I think you want to tell all of us.
Mom shakes her head.
Mom: I can’t. I can’t tell. It is amazing.
Nancy: Do you know we are here?
Mom: Yes.
Soon after this Nancy sits in the chair at the back of the room. Breathing deeply, she asks to please be able to experience what her mother is experiencing. Her eyes are closed. Nancy sees light, green and yellow-green like an early spring day, sunlight maybe, on leaves, and all of it is moving, swirling in spirals. Beautiful spots of light and then it gets very dark, like a whirlpool and then light again.
1:00 p.m.
Aunt Jean comes in. Mom tries to hug her.
Mom: Where are the boys? Who is taking care of them? Where is my purse?
Jean: In the drawer. Do you want something, Minnie?
Mom: No, thank you, but no one is going to steal my purse.
Jean: Well, I might.
Mom laughs.
Mom: Oh, you might.
1:30 p.m.
Leslie, Jane’s friend and Adam, Jane’s son, come in. Adam gets a big hug.
Mom: Now I just want to be quiet.
Father Muldowny comes in and speaks about God and forgiveness. Mom asks him to keep on talking.
Nancy: Mom, you have told us all you love us, but sometimes I think you want to tell us you are sorry for old business.
Mom: I think you are right. Sometimes I feel I’d do things differently.
Nancy helps Mom make a sign of the cross.
Nancy: Bless Mom.
Mom: That’s the wrong hand, baby!
So much for the brain clicking off.
Nancy: You’ve paid your dues with this goddamn cancer.
Mom nods, smiles.
Nancy: Mom, do you mind if I ask you a silly question? Don’t try to answer if you can’t. What are your favorite songs?
Mom: “Ave Maria” . . . “Danny Boy.” I can’t sing anymore.
Nancy: I’ll sing them for you.
Mom turns to attending nurse.
Mom: She can really sing.
6:30 p.m.
Pill time, and a nurse is fixing the bed.
Jane: My mom’s bottom is sore.
Mom: You’re telling me! Does all of this [fussing] make a difference?
Nurse: Missie is here.
Mom: I love you. You are sweet.
Missie: So are you, Minnie.
Mom: I know.
Nancy: Mom, you really brought this family together.
Mom: By golly, I did it.
One, two, three . . . Mom is counting sips of apricot nectar. She is having a hard time swallowing.
10:30 p.m.
Mom: I am getting scareder and scareder and scareder because I think you are leaving me alone.
Nancy: You are not alone; two or three or four people are here all the time. We are being quiet, but we will make noise. Uh oh — there is the worried look. You’ve been worried because you wanted to tell us what it is like?
Mom: Yes, but I need some ideas.
Nancy remembers.
Nancy: A little scary and a little happy. A little dark, but also light and pretty. Are those good ideas?
Mom: Yes, I think so.
Onto the pot. Ruth, Nancy’s friend, lifts her, and Ruth gets a hug.
Ruth: We’ve been quiet for you, so now we will make more noise.
Middle of the night
Mom is startled awake, and calls for the nurse.
Michael: What’s up, Mom?
Mom: I am.
Tuesday, May 29, 10:30 a.m.
Mom is very worried.
Mom: Where am I going to go?
I think: she is asking me where she is going to go? Me? Humankind has asked that question for millennia. What the hell do I know?
Nancy: I don’t know, Mom. You are in Mount Vernon Hospital.
Mom: Yes, and I guess I am going to stay here.
Nancy: You are going to stay here?
Mom answers in a plaintive voice.
Mom: I guess so.
Nancy: It is very hard, Mom. We know it.
Two tears and a sad face from Mom.
Nancy: Hey, Mom, I know where you are going — home. You are going home, and your family will be there to help you. Family here or there.
Mom’s face relaxes and there is a bit of a smile.
12:30 p.m.
Mom rouses from a nap.
Nancy: What is it?
Mom: Surely my dinner is here by now?
Nancy: Are you hungry?
Mom: Yes.
Nancy: What would you like to have? Jello, juice, sherbet, pudding . . . ?
Mom: Sherbet.
Everyone scrambles gladly. This is the first food in five to seven days. Mom has one teaspoon.
Nancy: Would you like some more?
Mom: No, thank you, mother dear.
Nancy: OK, baby dear, you go to sleep.
Jane, Nancy, and Michael have been at the hospital for about ten days. By now, however, they are going in shifts and do not always see each other. At this point in the journal they enter notes to each other, and mark them with an asterisk. They refer to each other as family nurses for Minnie.
1:00 p.m.
*I catch Mom pushing back covers getting out of bed. Watch it!
Nancy: Would you like to go to the toilet?
Mom: It wouldn’t hurt.
Mom is up for 10 to 15 minutes and sits in a chair.
I am able to see even more clearly the frailness, the lightness of her body, that it is difficult for her to sit up. As I move to help her, I learn with my hands the meaning of the phrase “skin and bones.”
*Mom needs to be wrapped up in blankets while her bed is cleaned.
Mom: Do you know what I would like to do?
Jane: Go back to bed?
Mom: Yes. Rest.
8:00 p.m.
Mom rouses when Janet Boberg, a nurse, comes in. Mom calls out in a faint voice.
Mom: Water. Will you tell the people?
Jane: Will I tell the people you love them?
Mom: Yes!
9:30 p.m.
Mom starts to cough. There are small tears in her eyes.
Mom: Water. No, wait a minute.
Nancy: Now, Mom dear, that look means you are afraid of being alone, but there is always someone here.
Jane: Mom wants to have water.
Mom interrupts Jane and speaks to Nancy.
Mom: No, no, go ahead!
Nancy: And you are afraid of being helpless, but you are doing real well at ordering us around.
Mom goes to the pot, has her bedclothes and her hospital gown changed. A new nurse (from China) comes in to check I.V. drips. She looks around and takes in the people, flowers, pictures that fill the room.
Nurse: You must have done something right!
*Let Mom suck water on washcloths, seems to help her dry throat.
*Butt work causes pain.
*Very important — move her off to her side if possible, off bedsore.
Later on
Nancy sees tears on Mom’s eyelids.
Nancy: Oh, hell, there is that worried look, little Mama. Let’s see, you’ve been afraid of being alone. . . .
Mom nods yes.
Nancy: You are not alone. Aunt Jean and Aunt Kathryn are here and Jane and Michael are on their way back. You have been afraid of being helpless but you are doing real well in helping us know what you like and what you don’t like. But even if you don’t talk, we understand.
Later
Mom: What is it like where I am?
All: It is like home, Mom. Pictures and flowers, and people are eating and drinking, and we have magazines and books.
Wednesday, May 30, 8:00 p.m.
Mom: Nancy is a big squirrel.
Thursday, May 31, 9:30 a.m.
Mom opens her eyes to greet Nancy.
Mom: Hi, sweetie.
*Mom is only saying yes and no to pot, water, juice.
10:00 p.m.
A nurse is giving a heat lamp treatment for a bedsore. Nancy questions her.
Nancy: What are you going to do?
Mom interrupts.
Mom: I am going to scream.
Clearest statement all day.
11:00 p.m.
Nurse: Mrs. Ford, will you open your mouth for me?
Mom: No.
Midnight
Nurse: Mrs. Ford, is there anything I can do?
Mom: Yes. Say goodbye.
Friday, June 1, 1:00 a.m.
This note was entered by Mary, private duty nurse.
*Mrs. Ford states that her grandmother was supposed to come see her.
10:00 a.m.
Mom has some cereal and pears. She is very alert and playing possum.
Nancy: It has been four weeks since you’ve been here. Do you think of going home?
Mom: Of course I do.
Nancy: Do you think of your new apartment or my house? You could go to either place. You are not going to answer?
Mom: No, I am not.
Nancy: You can come to my house and Renny [Nancy’s son] and I will not fight.
Mom gives a big smile.
Nancy: And I sure would like to know why you called me a big squirrel.
Mom: What!?
A sun lamp comes in on wheels.
Mom: I love a parade!
*Mom has asked for votive candles to be lit.
Sunday, June 3, 10:30 a.m.
Mom has eggnog and juice drink. She opens her eyes wide to greet Nancy.
Nancy: Would you believe it is raining again?
Mom: Is it really?
Nancy: I think about you coming home to my house. We could do it.
Mom emphatically shakes her head no.
11:30 a.m.
Mom has a complete tooth brushing. A lay minister comes in with communion.
Mom: Where am I?
Nancy: In Alexandria, Virginia.
1:00 p.m.
Bed is being fixed.
Nancy: Your hair is really growing in.
Mom: Isn’t that wonderful, my hair is growing, and I’m not going anywhere.
2:10 p.m.
Mom pulls off her oxygen mask.
Mom: Take this off. I do not want it.
7:00 p.m.
Mom is very sweaty and agitated during the bed change.
Nancy: I love you, Mama.
Mom: I love you too, dear.
9:00 p.m.
Another bed change. Mom is sweating a lot. I look at the medical charts and try not to think about what is happening. I’m alone now and afraid. I turn on a radio and sit on the floor reading near Mom’s bed.
9:30 p.m.
Nancy: God bless you, Mom.
Mom smiles.
Nurse: Are you in pain, Mrs. Ford?
Mom: No.
10:00 p.m.
The bedsore dressing is changed. Mom opens her eyes.
Nancy: It is me, Mama. I am here.
Mom smiles and nods. Missie and Seth come in for a few minutes. Mom’s breathing is very labored.
Midnight
Mom greets Mary, the night nurse.
Whichever one of us dies first, the other will keep praying for the soul of the departed until we are out of purgatory, and we will not let each other die alone. Twenty-two years later I remember that promise.
Monday, June 4, 1:00 a.m.
Mom smiles and greets Jane.
9:00 a.m.
Dr. Ueno: Are you cold, Mrs. Ford?
Mom: Yes, I am.
10:30 a.m.
Mom: Are we still in Alexandria?
Nancy: I’ve been to the bank. We are still in Alexandria. IBM split 4 for 1.
11:30 a.m.
Mom: What are you doing now?
Nancy: I am fussing with your oxygen thing. It is lopsided, but I won’t fuss anymore.
Mom: Oh yes, you will.
*Very clear and very irritated at fussing and at Nancy.
Nancy: Do you want your bed up more?
Mom: No, just leave it the way it is.
Nancy: I can’t lift you to cough the way Jane does.
Mom: If you are going to hold me up, hold me up.
Nancy: Spit, Mom.
Mom: How the hell can I spit?
1:30 p.m.
Nancy and Phyllis and Nurse Barbara are in the room. Elaine comes in for a few minutes. Mom speaks to Barbara.
Mom: Call the doctor.
Barbara: Are you afraid?
Mom: No.
Phyllis: Then you feel ready?
Mom squeezes her hand and nods to Phyllis.
Mom: Yes.
Phyllis: Are we ready, Miriam?
Mom nods.
Mom: Yes.
2:00 p.m.
Racked breathing. Mom’s body is shaking. Mom awake and aware of it.
2:30 p.m.
Mom’s gown is changed and the bed is changed by Barbara and Elaine. Barbara gives her a shot of morphine prescribed by the doctor.
3:00 p.m.
There are two or three gurgles and the breathing stops. Barbara is holding one of Mom’s hands, Phyllis the other. Nancy is at her head.
Nancy: Well done, Mama, well done.
Within seconds Jane is there. She comes off the elevator with a priest who has come to America the day before from Ireland. Phyllis and Jane, Nancy and Susan, the priest, and nurses who drift in from all over the hospital hold hands in a large circle around Minnie’s bed.
This testament being my last opportunity to speak to my children, I want to assure them of my love for each of them. I hope I have left them some happy and sustaining memories, and the strength and understanding they will need to lead proud and good lives. If I have succeeded, I have given them a far better legacy than the material goods I dispose of in this will. I hope they will miss me but not spend time in needless and useless mourning. With faith that God’s judgements are both merciful and just, I am starting a new adventure whose ending, I am confident, will be happy.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I, MIRIAM F. FORD, have hereunto set my hand and seal to this my Last Will and Testament.
MIRIAM F. FORD
© Copyright 1986 Nancy Ford-Young
