Hauntings
The True Story of a Great Woman and Magnificent Ghost
By Robert Locke
Mom on her 90th birthday.
“I hope I live long enough to let people know what a nice boy Bob is.” These words, among my mother's last, haunt me.
On so many levels they haunt me: foremost that my mother, on her deathbed, should have as her foremost concern her son; mother, first, last, and always, mother, my mother.
Then, too, there is the expense of these words because they did come at high cost. “Do you suppose,” she had asked me the previous morning, “you could bring your laptop in here? I can't seem to write by hand any more. I tried to write 'red onions' yesterday, but I couldn't even read it after I wrote it.”
In fact I had seen that note. In fact that is part of my hauntings, that little yellow sticky with the illegible scrawl “red onions” on it. That had been Mom's Wednesday morning effort at normalcy, and the pathetic heroism of that scrawl haunts me.
She had been feeling somewhat better that Wednesday morning, the last morning of a ten-day round of antibiotics. That she even asked for the salespapers was heroic, her weakness was that great. We always used to make our weekly grocery lists out of the Wednesday morning salespapers, but it had been weeks since she had had the strength, or the will, to make that effort. Just turning the papers was a huge effort for her. But beyond that, she had had no appetite for months. Still, this Wednesday morning she was intent upon making that struggle with those salespapers because that is what Wednesday morning meant.
Red onions—she had not eaten onions of any kind, in any dish I would fix for her, for more than a year—yet out of that struggle with the salespapers, “red onions” was what she had decided to try to scrawl, red onions, obviously, and merely, for her child, as purely motherly an act by any dying woman through the ages, red onions, to haunt me.
“I thought, since I can't write by hand, maybe I can still type. I have some things I need to say.”
“Maybe it would be easier, Mom, if I just did the typing for you. Or I could handwrite it for you on one of your tablets. What is it you want to say?”
“Well, but not today after all. Maybe tomorrow. I'm too tired now, son.”
Every effort so tiny was now so great, and they all haunt me. Since I always did whatever I could to follow through with whatever her wish, the next morning I took from her dresser one of her yellow, ruled tablets and said, “So what did you want me to write for you, Mom?”
She thought a moment, then dictated, “I hope I live long enough to let people know what a nice boy Bob is. He changed my wet bed and clothes without fussing at me, or without finding fault.” I wrote down the words right out of her mouth, wondering to myself who, who are these “people” to whom my mother, this most private woman, wished to convey this very intimate and pitiful information?
My mother had pride. Months earlier, facing a tooth extraction, she had confided to me, “Now, son, this tooth is close to my brain. If something happens, and I lose my faculties, you won't talk about me the way you and Bill talk about his father?”
Bill is my oldest friend and one of my housemates in my own home out of which I moved seven years ago into my mother's house after my father's death. Alone, Mom was losing vigor and she and I both thought she was dying, even then; I'm sure my moving in added these seven years onto her life because I gave her quality time, which she repaid equally. Bill's father has Alzheimer's, and often Bill would share with me some of the ironic, or pithy, or in some bizarre way comic or tragicomic things that might come out of his father's mouth, some of them laugh-out-loud funny. Bill's father had had a formidable brain, as formidable as my mother's. So her concern, now, about the outcome of this little operation to extract her tooth was telltale. I shared my mother's comment with Bill and—I realized some time later—he stopped sharing those funny, ironic tidbits from his father with me. We had meant no disrespect, but yes, I think we both appreciated now that there was, in fact, a kind of betrayal there.
My mother's pride had always been her brain, since beauty was the inheritance of her sisters—she thought—not hers. And what a brain she had, up to the very last, able to sort through all sorts of memories and confusions to pierce to the heart of truth. Even when the deliria would come, her keenness of memory was astounding. And problematic. The Hospice doctors and nurses kept advising me to just go along with the delusions that arose from her deliria, many of them paranoid, but I knew that this advice was bad. Unlike most of their patients, my mother would remember absolutely everything. Therefore to go along with her delusions was to incorporate myself dangerously into her increasing paranoias. She would not forget them, as the doctors and nurses thought; no, she would remember them starkly, just as she had remembered the delusions from her last visit to the Emergency Room, more than two months previously. I took notes in the ER of the things she was saying in that delirium and under the influence of an antibiotic drip that brought on hallucinogenic nightmares. I typed up the notes later, and they did make fractured sense—the string of dire events, automobile wrecks and fires that I was supposed to run take care of—so it did not surprise me that those events would turn into paranoia about me. When she came to her senses the next day in her hospital room, she was convinced that I was in league with the hospital personnel (only she thought we were in a hotel) to do her harm. What did surprise me was how those hallucinations stayed with her. Even after several days in the hospital when I was driving her home, she said to me very quietly, “Bob, don't ever do that to me again.”
I never knew just what she meant by that because she clammed up. I wrote an email to her doctor—on my own email account since he is my doctor, too—asking advice about how to deal with paranoia. How do you take care of someone who suspects your every move? Our doctor was immediately understanding in his reply where he explained carefully about delirium arising from fevers, never once falling into the same trap I had fallen into of using balder words “delusions” and “hallucinations” which he no doubt intuited would carry extremely negative connotations for my mother relating to insanity. I stopped using those words myself, with my mother, though I use them here. I even decided to read the doctor's illuminating email aloud to Mom, hoping it would get her over this new and worrisome hump, mistakenly trusting honesty to be indeed the best policy. However, she accepted his email without comment, and after a couple of days when I followed up with a question about it, she said merely, “I've decided to forget about it.”
Bad news, since she never in her life forgot anything. So I began to understand that somehow she could believe dichotomously that the fires and wrecks were real and that this gentle and solicitous son (and the little boy whom she had often, jokingly, imagined was also in the house—me, also, morphed?) was plotting against her. I was unhappily prepared, then, for the new hallucinations—floods, too, this time—and renewed paranoia when she came down with the next fever two months later.
We don't know just what caused her fevers. They probably had something to do with her progressive pulmonary fibrosis, but her lungs were so compromised that x-rays presented no clarity. These fevers would cause her to sleep so deeply that sometimes she would not wake in time to ring the bell for me to help her to the potty-chair, and the sheets and her gown would be soaking. This loss of control must have been not only mortifying for her, but terrifying. Clearly, from her own words, it signaled to her that the end was near: “I hope I live long enough to let people know…” Each new ignominy and loss of control must have freshened the comprehension of approaching death, and her apprehension of it.
Her sheer exhaustion: that haunts me. She dictated those few words to me, and that was as much as she could get out. “Let me think more about it, son.” Later that day I did find where my brother Clay had continued the dictation: more words about her “nice boy” Bob, to deepen how she haunts me now. “He also makes the most delicious breakfast for people with no teeth.”
In fact these breakfasts were simply hot apple sauce and bran muffins. I would triple the eggs in the muffins to give her more protein and double the bran to help her regularity, but they were merely bran muffins. Still, she would always be sure to make appreciative noises as we worked the crossword puzzle together every morning, all the while eating less and less and contributing fewer and fewer words as she neared the end, every bite and every word at greater and greater cost. And now those final words that she dictated to Clay about those damned breakfasts haunt me: dear praise for her son and his puny efforts on her behalf.
Seeing that Clay had added these words to the tablet, I asked her if she wanted to say anything about Clay, too. She was ready to be helped back to bed, exhausted, but she paused a moment, then dictated, “Clay is such a sweet boy to make this long trip down here.” Clay lives an hour away, but she well understood his remoteness was more than geographical. He rarely called or dropped by, but indeed in her last couple of weeks he did come through like a champ.
“And what about Janet, Mom?” I pressed despite her exhaustion. It seemed too important not to press; these words were bound to be her last written communication and she would want my sister there along with Clay and me.
“And Janet has been so wonderful with her bed making and bedpan work.”
Those four sentences, three in my handwriting and one in Clay's, sit today on a piece of yellow, ruled paper, in the funeral home memory book, haunting me. If I were to simply wad up that paper and throw it away… but that is a speculation that I cannot allow to proceed. That piece of yellow, ruled paper is precious, no matter how haunting: legacy.
Inside
that same memory book with that yellow, ruled paper is a printout of one of the
last emails that she dictated to me,
I think I don't have long to live. I want Dr. Jones to tell me how terminal I am. I'm getting worse every hour. It's not that I want to prolong it but I want to be right with everyone. Like my sisters. I have avoided them the last year. I want Dr. Jones to be straightforward with me about my prognosis. I don't know that he has avoided it. Every time I go to bed I don't know whether I'm going to wake up. I don't think that's normal. But maybe it's not normal to be 93 and think otherwise.
It seems to me that, by way of follow-through, I must include all these important last words here. It would be wrong not to, somehow. Yet … am I merely haunting myself?
I
did, also—and by the way—follow through on that red onion directive of
hers. I did go to the store on that
Wednesday and, although I already had a bunch of onions in stock, I did buy a
single red onion. And, by way of
follow-through, again, I did purposefully eat that red onion on the next
Wednesday, the day following my mother's death at
I am haunted by all the facts of that red onion, but I believe what haunts me most about it is that all the while my mother was using the last of her precious energy to scrawl “red onions” for her son to eat, and to dictate final words of such pathetic praise for this son, she believed that he was trying to kill her.
I should say perhaps more correctly that she knew that I was trying to kill her. This is perhaps more correct because in fact I did kill her. It was not my intention to kill her, of course. My intention and all my actions during the last weeks of her life, through her fevers and deliria, were to keep her alive. But in that, of course, I failed.
I had brought in a battery of nurses and nurses' aides and social workers—the good, kind people of Hospice—to help me get through what I needed to get through. And what I needed to get through, in fact, was her death. On a certain level my mother must have understood this, though I did not.
My mother understood that the medications the Hospice people gave me to administer would be killing meds, not life-saving meds. These “kill-her-off drugs”—as my mom called them to my niece, a nurse—were Ativan, Haldol and, yes, morphine, though I made sure always to call it Roxanol. In fact I instructed everyone to never slip and call it morphine, but I just imagine that Mom did know all along that it really was, yes, morphine. And indeed these meds, prescribed to relieve anxiety and allow her to breathe more easily, did kill her off: they took away not only her anxiety but that mighty will of hers to fight, to fight to live. I thought we were doing her kindness, and I do still think that indeed it was kindness, but this kindness would kill her. And she did know it.
A keen part of my haunting is an expression on her face midafternoon on that last Tuesday as I was trying to get her to take an Ativan, to be followed by a squirt of morphine. She was refusing to open her mouth. With her lips clamped together, her eyes rebellious and locked on mine, her expression was exactly the same as on the little girl in the photo when she was three years old. She was angry that day because her baby sister got the rocking chair and she had to stand. She had wanted to sit on the rocking chair with the baby in her lap, but the photographer had a different idea, and his will prevailed. That fact alone—that my mother could remember her thoughts as that three year old girl—astounds me.
Mom is at left, angry and obstinate.
That facial expression is not the only one to haunt me. My father's expression, on the last morning of his life as he again and again raised his head from his hospital bed, his eyes rapt as he looked all about him in a kind of wonderment, his gaze passing without recognition across my face as I sat urgently beside him, his absorption in whatever he was seeing instead of me… that haunts me still, all these years later.
That haunted my mother, too, when I told her about it. I didn't know that, though, until years later. I was sorry then to have revealed it to her. “That haunts me, son. He was looking for me, and I wasn't there.”
“No, Mom, I don't think so. I think he was seeing something else. He was in a world of his own.”
I had thought that with her Christian beliefs she would take his expression to mean that he was looking at the wonders of Heaven in those moments before he died. That was not, however, anything that I could say to her directly, in part because she always suspected that I did not share her religious beliefs. This was a subject into which neither of us wanted to venture for the sake of the other. Still, I hoped she would make that connection, but no. “No, son, he was looking for me. And I wasn't there.”
“You were exhausted, Mom. You couldn't be there.”
But my mother continued to haunt herself with this thought. Perhaps we all haunt ourselves, instead of being truly haunted by others.
I
continue to haunt myself, too, with the last expression on my brother Richard's
knowing face, before his expression became unknowing when he fell into the coma
on his ninth day in the hospital,
Richard would not look at me on that last day. Instead, he would avert his eyes—so peculiarly bright and so like my father's eyes on his final day after so many days of being glazed—and I now understand that that aversion was knowing. When his doctor friend, Mike, came into the room and I said, “Richard, look who it is, Mike!” Richard's eyes followed Mike alertly, almost hungrily as he came around Richard's bed to hold his hand. Yet Richard would not look at me even once on that day.
Before I left the I.C.U., however—with the sun setting spectacularly outside the window—I did force Richard to look at me. I walked into his gaze—the place where he had been keeping his gaze, averted from me—walked deliberately into his gaze so that he could not avoid seeing me. But did he see me? I think so. He kept his gaze on me, unblinking. The expression in that gaze was resentment. I would live and he would die.
The next day the doctors took my mom and me into the Quiet Room and told us that it was time—past time in some of their opinions—to begin taking Richard off some of his life support systems. We did it in stages, according to my executor dictates. The first to go was that terrible antibiotic drip that was so ravaging to his system. After that was gone, the life-saving part of his support systems, it seemed cruel to leave him on the merely life-maintaining systems. One by one, hour by hour the machines and drips and tubes came off, and the ICU room grew quieter and more peaceful until at last only the respirator was making its insistent belching, forcing oxygen into Richard's lungs. The removal of that one was most horrible, of course, and so I took Mom home so she would not see. She intuited, though, my intention, and her last goodbye to him—weeping, sobbing, patting his body up and down the length of it—rends my heart still.
I did slip away from the crowd at my mom and dad's house, and I did go back to the hospital and give the order for the respirator to be removed, and I did stay by Richard's side despite my own horror that his last breaths would be desperate gasps and choking. To my eternal peace, he died peacefully. He was so weak after so long and valiant a struggle that he died within ten minutes of being removed from the respirator. His last breaths merely came more and more slowly, until there came that one breath which was, indeed, his last.
Mom's last breaths, too, were peaceful. With her, too, I watched every last one, wondering with each whether indeed there would be another to follow. And with my mother, too, there was no suffering in those last breaths, simply and finally peace.
“Peace in the Valley” was always one of my mother's favorite hymns. I clutch that now. “Peace in the Valley” and “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” provide me an eldritch measure of comfort because I believe that I witnessed my mother actually coming face to face with her Lord in that very valley.
Because I am a writer and therefore am, I suppose, compelled to write every essential, I had begun a computer file in early February called “Mom's Passing Chronology” which had grown by the time of Mom's actual passing to twelve dated entries filling twenty-seven single-spaced pages. With each entry I was quite sure that I had just witnessed the last moments of her life, and I had left her alone so that she could die in peace. There I was setting down those last moments by way of faithful follow-through. These words that I am typing here now are, in fact, the first words that I have typed since the last entry in that Chronology, June 8, eighteen days before her actual death. Somehow this seems important to me to set down, to get it straight and correct and honest for my mother's passing. I've checked my calendar and notes…
(…my “daybook” as my mother might have called it if she had known that I was, in fact, making this chronicle of her death—and maybe she did know since she did say to me one night when I asked her if I had managed to get her comfortable, “Yes, and you can write it in your daybook; we are comfortable now.” Those are words that I am having engraved on her tombstone, in fact, but that takes me even further away from what I intended to set down here, which is…)
…I've checked my calendar and notes to make sure of the exact date of my witnessing that face to face meeting between my mother and her Lord, and it was the morning of Thursday, June 21, just at dawn, the morning after the Wednesday that she had scrawled “red onions” on that yellow sticky.
Just
before
It
was
Yet upon this confession that I was going to pursue respite, fear patently overtook Mom. That, she understood, would mean her going into a facility. This sudden fear surprised me since through the years she herself had often suggested such a solution so that I could return to my own home, my own life. Each time she made such a suggestion, however, I would argue her out of it, reassuring her that I preferred to be here with her for my own sake as much as for hers since we both had comfort and privacy. Secretly I also had the goal of allowing my mother to die at peace in her own home with me beside her but that, however, was too dire a truth to say directly to her.
“Well,” she said finally, weakly, “I guess I'm in the Lord's hands now.”
Those words struck me doubly. I remembered having heard the same words from her many years earlier just before she underwent open-heart surgery. Those words meant, at that time, that she had taken all her faith and her mighty will out of the doctors' hands and put them into the hands of her Lord. And now those same words meant that she placed all her faith no longer in her caregiver's hands—her caregiver who was failing—but again into the hands of her Lord. My mother was deeply and fundamentally religious. Every night she said prayers for everyone in need, and they were prayers of the best, most generous kind, prayers simply for guidance. And so I know that my mother and her Lord were on good terms.
Toward dawn I gave up on the pallet and any sleep that I might get there. I closed the lid of the potty-chair and sat on it, resting my head on a pillow on the railing of her bed. It was a hospital bed we had brought in more than a year earlier when Mom sustained an extremely painful fracture in her spine. There was a dear moment now—a moment that I do want to remember without haunting—while my head rested on that pillow on that railing. I felt my mother's hand on the nape of my neck, stroking my hair and neck gently. In the midst of her dying, her concern went to her weary son, the son who she believed was plotting her death. Even so, she embraced me.
Some little time later she snatched her hand away, crying “Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” I looked up to see her clutching the rails of the hospital bed with all her strength and staring straight up at the ceiling.
I believe I know now what was happening, but it took me several moments then to figure it out. Many years ago I read a book called Life After Life by a doctor named Raymond Moody. Moody had interviewed hundreds of people who had experienced near-death traumas, many of those people actually pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital but later coming back to life. Moody categorized their experiences in this book. Common to many of these people was the sensation of being dragged through a tunnel or hallway or valley—through the valley of the shadow of death—toward a light in the distance. When they would arrive at the light, they would find themselves in a peaceful, warm place of iridescence and great beauty. They would be confronted by a border of some kind, a river or frontier beyond which they might perceive—beside the light—welcoming souls or spirits, often of people they had known and loved but who were now dead.
The light, they would now find, was a Being. If the people were Christian, they might call this Being “Christ” or “The Lord” and if they were of another religion, they might call this Being “an angel” or some other term relevant to their religion. If the people were of no religious belief, they would still recognize the light as a Being who would articulate to them, though without words, a question: “Are you ready?” or “Are you free to come?” or “Have you done everything that you need to do?” The question would seem nonjudgmental to them and they might find themselves giving a quick, almost immediate accounting of their lives. I think this might be that phenomenon often recounted by drowning survivors: “My life flashed before my eyes.”
A woman I myself interviewed at the time I read this book—while I was writing a screenplay that was based upon an out-of-body experience—told me that her own response to the Being was, “No, I can't stay. I have two small children; I have to go back.” What was most convincing to me in this woman's story was her hard-bitten throwaway comment to me, “Do you think I'd have come back to THIS crap, if I didn't have to?”
Watching my mom now, and hearing the panic in her voice as she cried, “Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” and remembering the experiences of these people and, above all, wishing to give comfort to my mother, I kept repeating to her, “You're in the Lord's hands now, Mom. Trust in the Lord.”
After some moments, I don't know how long, my mom quieted. In a voice that was calm but in a tone that sounded bewildered, she murmured, “I can't. I can't.”
I was watching her closely during all of this, but my eyes were so fatigued from lack of sleep and the crepuscular light was so dim that I did not really trust what I saw next. Very like in a movie where one face briefly superimposes itself over another—the way it might surface out of murky water—a face not my mother's came briefly out of my mother's profile, a face looking directly at me. My mother's right eye became the left eye of this second face, her cheekbone was the nose, her ear became the right eye. I remember asking myself, though without words, “Is that Dad?” And then, “Is it God?”
Then as my mother turned her face to me, that second faded into hers as incorporeally as it had appeared. The impression was indistinct but remains indelible in my mind. I am willing to believe anything, but it seems most likely to me that it was merely a hallucination of bleary eyes.
“Help me up,” my mother said, I think to me since it was now her face alone that was looking into mine.
There was nowhere to help her up to except the potty-chair, where I knew from nightlong experience that she did not really need to go. Nevertheless, I helped her onto the potty-chair, and while she was sitting there, she said—not necessarily to me—“It's touch and go with Janet.”
Janet had made sure for several weeks to drop by every day or so for a little visit with Mom. During these past several nights, however, Janet had been in the house practically continuously, stationing herself in the recliner in the living room, sleeping or—since she had the television going day and night—blankly watching whatever program was playing.
Significant to my mother's journey to the light—if that is what it was, and I do believe so since we now have so many testimonials on record that such journeys are part of near-death experiences—was Janet. I think Janet is why my mother came back from that journey to the light. “I can't. I can't. … It's touch and go with Janet.”
Janet is a person of many handicaps. Not blessed with natural intelligence or sociability, Janet has been problematic to most people in her life, not the least to our mother and father. Mom had wondered aloud to me, with unnecessary guilt, if hormones she had taken while pregnant with Janet, or the fact that she had dropped Janet as a baby, might have been the cause of Janet's backwardnesses which, in turn, led to Janet's rebellious and deliberately antagonistic nature. Janet may be as full of love as she is hurt, but her nature is to turn her love into hurt. Her children have suffered from it. Certainly I have suffered from it. And Mom and Dad suffered more than their share, loving her and generously extending to her their love again and again despite Janet's disdaining it all the while she demanded it. They tried their best with Janet.
“I can't. I can't. … It's touch and go with Janet.”
Six
days later, on the night that my mother did die, did take leave of Janet, Janet
changed her pattern. Instead of
remaining in front of the television that night, Janet sat beside my mother's
bed and held her hand. I do not know if
words were spoken between them, or by Janet to my mother. By around
Janet left the room when I came in with the antibiotic, but when I found Mom so deeply asleep that I could not wake her by gently rubbing her arm, I decided to forego the medicine for awhile, and instead sang hymns to her, hoping she would wake peacefully to my voice. She did not wake, though I sang for about an hour, amazing myself at how many lyrics to how many hymns I could dredge up after so many years. Then Janet returned and resumed her vigil and I again left the two of them alone together.
At
NOTE
TO SELF,
Rushing out of bed straight to the laptop without even making a cup of coffee...
After all these weeks of struggling to get my own last words down right, chronicling my mother's final days, perhaps this morning I finally understand what the reader has perhaps understood from the beginning …
“I hope I live long enough to let people know what a nice boy Bob is …”
With these last words, all my mom wanted to say was, “Thank you, son.”
My dad used to say, “We're all just going to live and die.” These are words that do not haunt me. In fact I've said them myself many times. Even this morning as I was wrestling with my thoughts in bed trying to ignore the glare of the moon through the open window, that “selfsame moon” …
... and wondering with annoyance if I was going to have to get up and find that poem, Keats, I think, something about that selfsame moon that shone down upon Ruth as she stood in tears amid the alien corn, that selfsame moon that shines down on all of us being born, living our lives, and dying …
… or is it “selfsame song”? …
… oh, or does it even matter? …
… even then, wrestling with sleep-weary thoughts in the glare of that selfsame moon shining through my window, these wise words of my good old dad came to me, without haunting, because in fact we are all just going to live and die.
You are not Hamlet, Bob. Rest, rest oh perturbèd spirit.
And so, Mom, I am writing it in my daybook, for you: “we are comfortable now.”
The End
Mom and Dad, in love and so good, shortly before I was born.
Copyright © 2007 Robert Locke
All Rights Reserved