Mornings, We Talk About Dying

The innate right to choose your own time and method of death is a part of who we were as a family, one of the few things all three of us agreed on. My father wanted to live—he was more focused on quantity than quality: emphysema, prostate cancer, spinal stenosis, seizures of unknown origin requiring Phenobarbitol which dulls the senses, reflexes, responses and the ability to think clearly. Still, he wanted to live.  To live and smoke cigarettes right to the end.

I was never particularly enamored with being alive. Recurring dreams had me convinced I’d die a few days after my twenty-third birthday, and when I didn’t, I was, well, lost. I’d made no plans for anything past that marker. So, for the next ten years, until I sobered up at thirty-three, my behaviors virtually begged for someone to take my life.

Two years ago, on her 88th birthday, Big Edie got what she wanted from me–a medical ID bracelet inscribed with Do Not Resuscitate orders. Decades earlier she’d codified that in a Living Will, naming me her healthcare proxy. If a plug is going to get pulled, I get to choose when.

Her mother had died in her late fifties, after battling breast cancer for ten years. Big Edie had her own bouts with breast cancer, twice, neither of which slowed her down at all.

Her uncle Henry succumbed to skin cancer. After her fourth surgery for skin cancer, Big Edie stopped going to the dermatologist, deciding skin cancer might be an easy out.

My father died at seventy-five. Her boyfriend died in his mid-nineties. Most of her friends have passed, and the few left are either bed-bound by Parkinsons, or live far away so visits are rare. She recognizes well-loved voices, but not the names of those who love her – Kristine, Ethel, Magda, Lynn, Rachelle, Maryanne – neither does she recognize them in photos, remember who they are, or any history they’ve shared.

She remembers bad things: childhood sexual abuse, loneliness, slights and hurt feelings, shame, struggles raising me, being trapped by her own choices–all these things continue to taunt her when she is alone. When she reviews her life, the successes and warm moments are few and far between.

“I was alone too much as a child. Children shouldn’t be left alone,” bookends memories of men who tried to grab her and of loneliness. She goes back there for just a few minutes, and comes back, “Children shouldn’t be alone.”

Born in the Bronx in 1930, a year after the start of the Great Depression, growing up in a single parent household they were lucky to have an house (apartment, actually) to hold at all, with thousands living in shantytowns and standing in breadlines.  My grandfather had walked out, changed his name, and started a new family. My grandmother, a seamstress and milliner survived and supported her two children doing piecework when sweatshop workers made six dollars a week and worked fifty, sixty, or seventy hours to get that. Occasionally, she sent Mom to visit the missing father—Ben Mills (formerly Isadore Millstein) was a union electrician and the construction industry was actually booming— in the hopes he “might give you five dollars.” My mother remembers seeing her father when she and her mother would go to get money—child support, I imagine. She tells me there were two lines: one of men delivering cash to an intermediary, the other of women coming to pick up the cash from that same intermediary.

Maybe that’s true. She’s had that one since long before her memory started to desert her.

That was then and this is now. Mornings are bad. Occasionally she’ll wake with cats on her bed nudging her to be cuddled, or me sitting there, waiting for her to open her eyes, and it’s a nice start to the day. Usually, though, by breakfast (after having showered and dressed and rested from that exertion), she is what she calls dizzy and needs to catch her breath. Dizzy means fuzzy means thoughts are spinning in her head and she can’t seem to catch one, get things to slow down or make sense. Catching her breath means taming her mind and buying time so she can figure out what is happening, and what is expected.

This is when we talk about dying. Over breakfast, almost every morning.
“I wish I could take something and just go to sleep forever. I don’t serve a purpose anymore.” / “I wish this life would be over already.” /  “I just want to die, it’s enough already” / “It’s time, she’d say, I’m not having any fun. It’s time you got your room back.”

Getting my room back has become code for “I want to die, now.”

It passes by the afternoon, except when it doesn’t, but usually it does. Mornings can be hard, for both of us. Maybe she is coming out of a nightmare that felt like real life, or a dream that was more pleasant than real life she’d like to have stayed in. The answer to either is the same: “Its time you got your room back.”

She’s been planning her final exit for as long as I can remember, at least as long as I’ve been part of the conversations about dying, hoarding enough pills to overdose on. Antibiotics and laxatives along with pain killers, sleeping pills and Valium. She was never sure what she’d have to take, but she knew there was a way and took it personally when I explained that sleeping pills no longer contained the barbiturates she’d dreamed of in her long-term plans of going to sleep and not waking up.

A lethal does of Seconal, the drug of choice if you’re looking to die in your sleep, has gone from $50 to $3000 since assisted suicide has been legalized in certain states, but even in those, you must qualify by being within eighteen months of the end of a fatal disease. Neither depression nor dementia are considered fatal diseases. Simply being “done” as my mother is (having outlived almost everyone, losing her memory, sight and hearing, and being left with no option outside of living with her only child) is not enough. Clearly, those establishing the qualifications have never suffered from debilitating depression, or experienced a life where your memories are erased as you move forward. With every step, more disappears.

We were playing cards; I accidentally drop a card.
“Ha! Now, I know you have a Queen!,” she said.
“Yeah, but you’ll forget in a second.”
“Nice, that’s nice the way you talk to your mother. Your poor, sick mother.” She laughed and discarded a Queen, having already forgotten. I pick it up to make a lay of three Queens in our game of 500 Rummy, which she invariably wins.

When she decided on shooting herself in the head, I pulled up a piece about a woman who’d tried and only succeeded in blowing her face off. She was one of the first full face transplants. Many people don’t die, looks are very important to Big Edie, and face transplants do not work out as seamlessly in real life as they do in movies like Face/Off.

“I’d shoot myself so I’d die,” she says.
“I’m pretty sure these people thought that, too, Ma.” We talked about the difficulty of getting a handgun in NYC. I didn’t bring up the ease of getting a shotgun.

“Do you even know how to load a gun?” She doesn’t.

Heading out to the grocery store, I ask, “Is there anything I can get you?”

“A gun,” she’s said so often she started just silently miming shooting herself in the chest, until the day I handed her what she’s been asking for. A gun. Her gun. It is small enough for her hands, lightweight and loaded. It is also green, plastic, and filled with water. Mine is orange. We have a shoot out in the kitchen until we are both soaking wet, collapsing in laughter, possibly peeing in our pants, because while we both agree everyone has a right to choose their own expiration date, today it’s funny. Today it’s not sad. There is no crying. Today.

She gets constipated—because of pain killers, or not walking, or the fact that she hates to drink any liquid. Heading to the store for Miralax, “Can I get you anything?” She starts to mime the gun. “I know, I know Ma. The gun. You know where the gun is? I hide it up your ass, and you need to shit it out. You start shitting, eventually, you’ll shit the gun out and all your problems will be over. Drink your water.”

She smiles and laughs.

She thought of cutting her wrists, but had no bathtub to lay in.

I know a dozen easy ways to die that I don’t share with her.

“What floor are we on,” she says nonchalantly, asking about roof access. Our building is only six stories, the door to the roof is locked, she’d have to climb the waist-high cement railing and the backyard is grass. She is more likely to re-break her back than she is to die.

“If you’re thinking of jumping don’t bother. It’s four floors, yeah, but down to soft ground. You’d break bones, but pain won’t kill you.”

She makes a face at me, sticking her tongue out, annoyed I keep throwing the proverbial monkey wrench into her plans to die. “You’re no fun,” she gets up from the kitchen chair, grabs the rollator, and heads back to the bedroom to watch Judge Judy, Judge Faith, Judge Mathis, Judge Milan (People’s Court), Judge Toler (Divorce Court), and Family Feud.

“I’ll run into traffic,” she’d said, still healing from a L1 vertebrae fracture. She’d begun using pull-up panties because she couldn’t get out of bed at all. “I’ll run into traffic and get hit by a car.”

“So you’ll ruin someone else’s life? Let them carry the guilt around for the rest of their life?” She looks at me, mortified at the thought of hurting someone else. Years ago, I’d started calling her “Wobbles” because of her pinball trajectory as she attempted walking straight down the hallway of her condo. Were it not for walls, who knows how she would have righted her course. And that was before assisted living, the fall, the rehab, the second fall.  She uses a rollator to get around now.

“Don’t worry, Mom. They’d see you coming from blocks away.” I cannot keep a straight face as I imagine and imitate her “running” into traffic. Wobbles has matured into Shuffles, and while she eventually got strong enough to pull herself up several flights of stairs when our elevator was out, walking on flat ground will always be a time-consuming process. I picture the cars, bearing down at 50 or 60 mph, while she runs at five or six feet a minute. I mimic her with the walker, slowly walking into traffic. Make the sounds of cars stopping. Waiting. I paint the picture. She laughs so hard we’re both grateful for the pull-up panties.

By the time she moved out of the assisted living and in with me, walking my short hallway was a reason for celebration. That was the end of July 2018. By early October she was walking around the block, down a few streets to the pharmacy, and standing for almost all of the Qigong class I’d talked her into trying.

“I’m so proud of you, Ma. Really pleased for you. The walking.” She’d thought her back would never heal. “You know what this means, right?”

“Yes. Now I can run into traffic,” she says, cracking up.

It’s funny because it’s not her first thought in the morning anymore the way it was.

And then there is the “willing” oneself to die. Simply giving up the will to live. We set dates, because, I explain, this is the kind of thing you plan for. It shouldn’t be a spur of the moment decision. Everyone needs something to live for. My mother lives for the day she will die.

Mom moved into my apartment in summer 2018.  I painted, added grab bars, remodeled the bathroom entrance, installed a second television and cable, filed a change of address with all the official places one has to, and had her phone number moved over. My plan was to make her comfortable. Her plan was to stay two weeks, then die. I thought two weeks would seem “suspicious” and maybe she could wait a little longer? Three weeks was agreed on, and forgotten.

She’d wanted to go at the end of August, but I was already booked to speak at a writers conference. “No. You’re not fucking that up for me. How about September 11? That’s already a shitty day.” September 11 it was. And that day was forgotten.

“Thanksgiving, Ma? No. Nah. Then my warm and fuzzy holiday memory is always gonna be that’s the day my mom died?” We compromise on the Thursday after Thanksgiving. And that passed.

I nixed anything close to Christmas, or New Years.

On February 10, she woke up and said she was dying. She knew she was. “I give myself no more than two weeks and it’s going to happen. I’m forgetting more, my brain works less and less. I forget things. I can’t remember how to shuffle cards. Or cook. Or any of the aides names. I can’t read, and I can’t understand what people say on the radio (radio means television) because they talk too fast.”

“Okay, but not your birthday or Valentine’s day. I’d like to have a nice romantic one one of these days, and I don’t want it ruined by that memory.”

I understand what she wants and why. Her world gets smaller every day. Her options disappear. It’s valid. I wrote it down. Two weeks from the 10^th, that would be the 24^th of February, 2019.

We spent that day in the Queens Zoo, she walked for hours, talked to children and parents, saw animals and sky and trees. We shared a steak dinner. The day had started with her distraught over having “lost” her hearing aides. I found them in the garbage. “I don’t know how you put up with me. I’m crazy, I get crazier every day.”

This morning the hearing aides were in her ears, but, I pointed out, upside down and the wrong ears. “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”

I’ll worry when she stops beating me at 500 Rummy. When she no longer gets pleasure from two of the cats, “One-Eye” and “This one.”

The mornings have gotten better, if later. She is convinced that the later hours of waking up are “telling her something.” I imagine she thinks eventually the wake-up time will get later enough to meet the go-to-bed time and there will be no more need for waking up. But for now, mornings are better thanks to an adjustment to her medication. She rests on the bed, in the sun, hesitant to get up because it “feels so good.”

“If it feels good, stay there, Ma.” She flings her head to the side, slack. “You’re not dead, Ma. It doesn’t work that way.”

She smiles, still not opening her eyes, but turning her head back to the sun.