Into that good night

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

I’m now retired, but my job required a bit of traveling -- nothing like Willy Loman, but enough traveling to keep life interesting. One night I had retired for the evening in a New York City hotel room, when it occurred to me that this was something my mother had never done in her life. Most definitely not a clinging vine, my mother had been a resourceful and gifted woman who had nevertheless never done this simple thing -- been on her own in a hotel away from home.

The same could be said of my father. Both my parents were from a time when one made the best of life’s exigencies. It sometimes took all their attention to respond to fortune’s quite outrageous slings and arrows. By watching, I learned from them to roll with life’s oscillations and to get up and on with it, even after everything blew apart.

Neither my mother nor father had held a grudge against their lives. I’d never heard rancor about what happened to them -- the turn of fortune’s wheel, the cards they’d been dealt -- either individually or collectively. My parents had often lived reactively, at times too burdened to do much more than get through a day, but they always came back; they kept the ability to rebound, kept a basic and fierce love of live.

That is how I knew each of them was dying -- when first my father and then, nine years later, my mother lost interest in life. For both, it happened in the second week of a hospital stay after suddenly being near death. Each realized, when stabilized and out of acute crisis, that the body could not come back one more time. That had been the pattern in my family -- someone almost dying, but recovering in what seemed like resurrection. They escaped, lucked out, and we all rejoiced that we hadn’t quite yet needed to live with death, get to know him, share our meals with him.

My father, whose poor heart could not keep up with the blood’s relentless flow, had said in disgust, “I figure either you live or you die.” His heart’s weakness limited his life so much it wasn’t worth living. But when I replied, “I think you live and you die,” he looked at me intently and then relaxed, as if he’d finally remembered some important detail he’d been trying to recall but that had been eluding him.

My mother, exhausted by a fever, repeatedly asked me, “What do you think, honey? What should I do now?” I think her question was whether she had any decisions left, whether living or dying were up to her. Her face had the same expression I’d seen on a raccoon injured by a truck -- confused that the body was not behaving as it should, unsure whether to thrash in panic or close one’s eyes in acceptance. I stroked her hands, her brow, and kept answering, “I’m not sure you need to do anything right now.” It seemed to satisfy her; she patted my hand and said, “Then I’ll just wait.”

When my father died, I felt my soul had been burned, as if with a brand. All at once, I worried about my husband or my young daughter dying. At my mother’s death, the finality hit me; I realized I had never experienced life without my mother’s heartbeat in the world. The night before the funeral, my sister and I read aloud to each other passages or poems that reminded us of mom and dad. Then we, orphans now, made warm milk and honey to drink.

As the blessing of sleep came, I felt wrapped in great, black, feathered wings -- a loving, warm, and silent embrace.