“Go play the piano,” Mama’d say. She knew it was a good diversion, she knew I could take the frustrations and disappointments of my teenaged life out on the long row of black and white keys. So I’d sit at our antique white upright and let all the pain flow from my heart, into my fingers, as I banged out all the verses of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” or “I Need Thee Every Hour.”

Now, Mama has been gone one month.  The walls of family are gone, too. The pain is stifling, and the only keys I have are short rows of black ones that silently type words and sentences on a lighted screen. I have a voice that has grown edgy and sharp and angry in recent days, and I choose to linger with it for a while and see if it sticks or if it passes. Grief can do that. Especially when new grief comes on top of another grief still in the process of being resolved. I lost a husband to a catastrophic death 15 months before I lost a mother to a catastrophic death.

I have made the following statement and I will say it again: I am going to cultivate some hemlock. On my 70th birthday, if I live that long, I’m going to have a big celebration, and then I’m going to take the hemlock, or smoke it or do whatever it is you do with it and be done with life. This is an ugly world, of horrific natural processes. This is not a world to grow old in. Life ceases to be revered and respected by others when gray hair comes in and wrinkles show up and Medicare kicks in and the body gives in to slow and chronic deterioration. It seems that old people have no value. I’ve been with my mother to doctors’ offices and listened as the staff talked to her like she was a four-year-old. “Here, Honey, sit down now and fill out this paperwork,” they say in a slow, loud, high-pitched voice. And I want to say, “You damn fool, she’s eighty, she’s got four college degrees and is Kappa Delta Pi, she can hear, talk to her like she’s an adult, show some respect,” but I don’t, because society wants me to be quiet and take it, so I just throw a glare over my shoulder, then smile like the sweet Sunday School girl my sister expects me to be so I won’t embarrass her when she has to take our mother back to the same office.

Mama suffered the last two years of her life. Her back hurt, her stomach hurt. We couldn’t figure out what would make both hurt. Was it the concrete block she had lifted in August of 2007? Was it the fall down the step into her den? Doctors couldn’t figure it out either. “It’s my colon,” she’d say. “And it’s pushing on nerves and hurting my back.” I played doctor and set her diet and told her to take Milk of Magnesia. The doctor told me three months before she died that all old folks obsess with their bowels.

One year ago Mama hurt so badly and couldn’t ride in a car because of being bounced around that she didn’t want to go anywhere for Thanksgiving, so we left our 87-year-old mother home alone — the first holiday of her life to not be with family, and sadly her last. The Christmas before that, she was so miserable that she made my sister and brother-in-law drive her home from their house on Christmas morning. So last Christmas, pain or not, we made her take a two-hour trip to be with us at my son’s house. Her pain and suffering intensified and for the last year, it was all we ever talked about till it got to the point that I told her in exasperation, “Mama, you are one big colon. You’re not a whole person any more. You’re just a colon. That’s the total existence of your life and our conversations.”

Her doctor didn’t want to do a colonoscopy because of her age. I called and requested a passive test like a CT scan to rule out cancer or blockage or diverticulitis, but my phone call was never returned. I was enraged and cussed and complained about it but didn’t pursue it because my sister didn’t want me to act unladylike and yell at the doctor or his staff.

That CT scan came three months later, when my sister in desperation took our mother to the emergency room one Friday night. The radiologist’s report said there were worrisome signs of colon cancer, lung cancer, and follow-up with other tests was recommended. This was never divulged to my mother or the family.  Two months later a colonoscopy was finally recommended and scheduled and showed a blockage. Laxatives were recommended.

Mama had dementia, too. It had been coming on a long time. It began as she obsessed with certain issues that bothered her, like Muslim women who were circumcised. Then she began to lose her words. She couldn’t pick out the right word to use in the right place, so every other word of every sentence was “thing.” I couldn’t find that thing that turns on the thing over there on top of that thing. [The remote.] My sister had pushed for two years to get her into a nursing home. I refused. It was my preference to leave our mother at home. If she falls, so be it. If she burns up the house and herself with it, so be it. Hire a part-time caregiver and let her stay at home where she is happy. Let her live out her days and take what comes naturally. We called Home Health for in-the-home care, and they tested her, and said she needed 24-hour care. We had to send her to a Senior Care psychiatric unit for 16 days for evaluation. She’s confused, they said. She only answered 18 out of 30 questions right. They also said she had lung cancer and after a bone scan, we were told she had bone cancer.

So I lost the battle for at-home care and helped my sister put our mother in a nursing home.  When she entered the Home, she was walking, talking, socializing, laughing, strong, peppy, somewhat confused, agitated at times, and fought those who got in her way. In 23 days, she was dead.

Two weeks before she died, she and I had a long phone conversation. She was laughing and slurring her words and not making sense as she talked. “Mama,” I said. “Have you been drinking?” She laughed, and I laughed. “I’m ruuuuuuuum,” she said. “I’M RUM!” Then we spent fifteen minutes simply laughing out loud. My sister said she used that word because she used to drink rum and coke. They were upping her morphine. Quickly, it got to the point that she couldn’t talk at all, and she couldn’t walk at all.

I was with her when she gave up her fight to live, one week before she died. She was lying in her bed, alone in her room, writhing and moving from side to side, moaning, and literally scratching the wall beside her in long desperate strokes. The nurses came in and forced her into a wheel chair and took her to a common room where they tried to feed her sweet potatoes and peas, which turned out to be the last meal of her life. She was uncomfortable in her pants outfit and pulling at it, holding it away from her and constantly moaning, so I asked the nurses to change her into a gown. She slapped at them and told them to stop. Another nurse came in with a shot for agitation and stuck it in my mother’s thin arm. And then this once strong woman who hadn’t been able to find a single sensible word all day quickly found some words and uttered her last sentence and gave up her spirit. “Oh, well, I just don’t give a damn.”

The coroner wrote on her death certificate that she died of lung cancer and bone cancer. But I know she didn’t.

And I am left with questions.

What really happened to my mama? Did she get good medical care? Is this what I have to look forward to in thirty years? Will the doctors ignore my complaints, too, and will my children stick me in a home because nurses in Home Health say I’m confused? Will they put me flat on my back and shoot me up with enough morphine to kill an elephant?

After retrieving Mama’s doctors’ records and test results from appropriate facilities, I learned that her tests were not definitive. They said there was a possibility of lung cancer, a possibility of bone cancer. But the defining tests were never recommended or carried out. So whose idea was it to put her on morphine? Whose idea was it to render her to a semi-comatose state? Was this the only way to manage her pain? And why the hell was she IN pain? My God, nobody ever cared enough to pursue it to an end result and find out! Was her life worth no more to anyone than that? As I said before, old people have no value. Shoot ‘em up, put ‘em in a stupor, lay them flat on their backs, shut ‘em the hell up until they die — that’s the art of medicine.

God, I need some everlasting arms to lean on because I know for a fact how my mama died. She died of massive pulmonary embolisms. I don’t know what caused them. She did have lung cancer. She also died of intestinal infarct — she had a blockage in her colon, and her intestines exploded.

How could this happen?  In the 21st century, is this all we can expect?

“My country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country. It lies flat, like a badly drawn half oval, with Memphis at its northern and Vicksburg at its southern tip. Its western boundary is the Mississippi River, which coils and returns on itself in great loops and crescents, though from the map you would think it ran in a straight line north and south. Every few years it rises like a monster from its bed and pushes over its banks to vex and sweeten the land it has made. For our soil, very dark brown, creamy and sweet-smelling, without substrata of rock or shale, was built up slowly, century after century, but the sediment gathered by the river in its solemn task of cleansing the continent and depositied in annual layers of silt on what must once have been the vast depression between itself and the hills. This ancient depression, now filled in and level, is what we call the Delta. Some say it was the floor of the sea itself. Now it seems still to be a floor, being smooth from one end to the other, without rise or dip of hill, unless the mysterious scattered monuments of the mound-builders may be called hills. … “

William Alexander Percy

Look what came out of the pumpkin patch! It’s the grandtwins — Hardy and Jillie.

It’s surprising, when the person is gone, what objects or possessions have meaning. With Mama, I wanted some of her kitchen things, like bread pans and muffin tins and cookie sheets and a jelly roll pan. I brought home her two dresser lamps and put them in my bedroom. I have a candy dish, an antique sugar bowl she used every day for her tea, and a framed Irish Blessing. I also kept her pink chenille robe. I slipped it on yesterday morning and pulled it close around me, and when I stuck my hand in its pocket, I found a hair net. Mama was big on hair nets and the very sight of it crumpled me.

My son was the first to set his eyes on one particular piece of furniture that best defined his grandmother — a butcher-block table in the middle of her small kitchen.  Mama had it made back in the Seventies, before the grandchildren were born. She took an old desk from the school where she was principal. She painted it and applied wallpaper that matched the kitchen walls to its sides. Then she had the lumber company make a butcher block and glue it to the top of the desk. It was put together with layers of wood and protected with cooking oil.

For forty years, Mama made bread, cookies, pies, jelly rolls, and cakes on the butcher-block. Every meal was either prepared or served here. When the grandchildren began to come along, each one had ample opportunities to stand on a little stool and help Mamaw knead bread or cut out biscuits or cookies. Even my dog had a turn; every time we’d visit, the cocker spaniel would stand with both front paws on the tabletop and watch Mamaw fix each dish.

Mama loved that table and wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world. Now it is in the kitchen of my son. He removed the butcher block, sanded it, and built a new base and legs. He applied a copper patina basecoat and antique black crackle topcoat. He put wheels on the bottom so they can move it around conveniently.

The butcher-block table has new life in a new home with two new babies. Two more little children to grow up watching their mama and daddy carry on traditions — the passing of the spatula to a new generation.

The twins are now six months old — pretty, sweet, and smart!

Twins, Together

Hardy has made a discovery!

Jillie is crawling.

Saturday evening at dusk I am sitting on the couch eating a bowl of chili fresh from the crockpot and watching Brady Bunch reruns because there’s nothing better on TV. The dog is beside me, intent on getting at least a bean. I hear a faint noise, a familiar hum that I haven’t heard in a while, and it comes to me that my garage door is opening. I used to listen for that sound every evening about 6:30 when it was time for my husband to arrive home from the office.

How could my garage door be opening? Who is opening it? Why? I can see the interior door to the garage from my spot on couch, I set my bowl down, and I rush through the kitchen to open it and check. Yes, the garage door is wide open and the light is on, meaning that the door has just opened within a minute or two.  I close and lock the door, I race to the back door in the family room and lock it and secure the doggy door. I grab the phone and call my son in North Carolina.

“Something just happened. My garage door opened for no reason. I’m kinda freaking out here. I don’t know if someone’s in the garage or not. Stay on the phone with me, I’ve got to go outside and check it out.”

“Okay. Where are the garage door openers?”

“In the cars.”

I exit the front door into the front yard and look into the still-lighted garage. It is dark in the yard; the spots are not on yet. No movement, no sign of any intruder in the garage. I check all the doors of the car parked in the driveway. All locked.

“Do you see anything?” he asks. “You need to get a flashlight and look around the perimeter of the house and yard.”

“I’m sort of scared, I’ve never been scared here, but I am now. I’m afraid to go in there and look. Should I call the police?”

“I think you need to check it out, but if you’re too afraid, then call.”

“Okay, well, let me go, I’m gonna call Todd and see what he thinks.”

Locked in the house once again, I call the other son in Mississippi. “I was sitting on the couch and my garage door opened for no reason. I’m a little freaked out.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Anybody who has the ability and the technology to open your garage door wouldn’t be trying to get in your house; they’d be in Belle Meade.”

“Should I call the police?”

“No, I’m sure it’s fine…”

“But I’m afraid…”

“Well, then, just call and see what they say.”

I do and within ten minutes an officer rings my doorbell.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“I’m a little freaked out,” I say. “My garage door just opened for no reason. I’ve lived here 15 years and that’s never happened before.”

“How many openers do you have?”

“Three. Two are locked in the cars. One doesn’t work and it’s in the house somewhere.”

“Could something have fallen on them?”

“No, they’re attached to the visors. Have you ever heard of this happening?”

“No, maybe it’s just a fluke.”

“Will you please check in my garage for me? My husband died and I’ve got all the stuff from his office stored in the garage under tarps and covers and I’m afraid someone might be hiding.”

“Sure.” He takes his flashlight and looks all around and under things, checks doors, checks the cars, gives it a thorough going over. Nothing. No logical reason for the door to have opened. I try to convince myself it’ a one-time thing.

Later, it comes to me that it was probably mama. She died two weeks ago.

Sunday morning my son calls.

“I’m still alive, the door hasn’t opened again, I figured out it was probably Mama.”

I tell him the story. Decades ago, Mama had told it to me.

Mama had a favorite sister-in-law. Marge. Marge was Bill’s wife and five years older than Mama. They were best friends. When they were young women, someone told the story about two people who were wondering about life after death and thought they’d resolve that question once and for all. They each told the other, “If you die first, you knock on my front door, and I’ll know it is you and that you are still present and able to communicate after you die.” Much later, one got a knock at the door. The other told the story about life after death.

Mama and Marge laughed and scoffed and took up the joke. “Okay, Marge, if you die first, you come and knock on my front door, and I’ll know it’s you,” Mama said. Marge returned the challenge with sarcasm. Marge was a chain smoker and died of lung cancer in November of 1970. I had just married and moved to Texas, but Mama made a point to call me.

“A knock came on our front door the other night. I answered it and no one was there. Your dad and I looked up and down the street and around the house and could find no one. I learned that Marge had died that night.”

“Oh my gosh, she remembered, she came and knocked on your door! Just like you two planned it!”

Then I took it up. “Okay, Mama, when you die, you come and ring my doorbell.”

“Naaa, you don’t want me to do that,” she always said.

“Yes, I do, I really do, you better come. When you die, you come ring my doorbell.”

We laughed and talked about this many times over the years. The last time I mentioned it was about a month ago. But when Mama died, I was at her house with her, and she did not have an opportunity to fulfill that promise. So two weeks later, when I am home alone, and finally still and quiet, she comes…and my garage door opens?

My son listens to the story and then softly replies. “You know, um, you do have a doorbell for a garage door opener.”

I stammer around and attempt to follow his train of thought, and all of a sudden it becomes very clear. Beside the door that opens from the garage into the house is a doorbell-like fixture. You push on the button, like ringing a doorbell, and it opens the garage door, or closes it.

Mama was just trying to ring my bell like I’d told her to. Only this doorbell was connected to a Genie Blue Max garage door opener.

“You are now at a crossroads. This is your opportunity to make the most important decision you will ever make. Forget your past. Who are you now? Who have you decided you really are now? Don’t think about who you have been. Who are you now? Who have you decided to become? Make this decision consciously. Make it carefully. Make it powerfully.” [Anthony Robbins]

The 21st Southern Festival of Books, October 9-11  at War Memorial Plaza and the Tennessee State Capitol in downtown Nashville is now one for the history books. It went from a tornado warning on Friday to a cool, crisp Saturday to a perfect, sunshiney Sunday. The Council for the Written Word displayed books of its members in Booth #3.

CWW Booth

Manning the booth above are Sally Lee, Bob Gross, Kathy Rhodes, and Nancy Allen. CWW members who displayed their titles were Bill Peach, Kathy Rhodes, Nancy Allen, Ginger Manley, Sally Lee, Max Sanders, Bob Gross, and Currie Alexander Powers.

Promoting CWW and Gathering

On center display was our new council anthology, Gathering: Writers of Williamson County. Shown above are Dave Stewart (2007-2009 CWW Vice President) and Kathy Rhodes (2007-2009 CWW President).

Gathering on the Ingram table

Gathering was sold at the big book table in the signing colonnade, shown above next to Bill Peach’s new book.

Panel

At noon on Sunday, Madison Smartt Bell, Currie Alexander Powers, Kathy Rhodes, and Bill Peach led a session on Gathering. Attendance was good, surprisingly, as it was so close to church time. We each read from the book and discussed CWW, Southern writing, and how Williamson County has influenced our work. Then we proceeded to the signing colonnade and sat behind the long row of tables to sign a few copies.

Signing Schedule

Our panelists are listed on the “big” official signing schedule in the colonnade.

It was a fabulous experience!

Visitation for Mama is tonight. Judi and I went to the funeral home this morning and set out pictures and added special touches to the room.

Mama was the solid rock of our family. This house is not the same without her. I feel the balance of my world shifting, and I liked it much better when I was the young mother with babies, and I had a mom who would be with me forever, and I had a grandmother who was healthy enough to walk the wooded paths on the family land.

Mama’s funeral is tomorrow. Afterward, I will leave Cleveland, and it will never be the same. I will come back again a few times to take care of business … but this town, this place that is so much a part of me, will be lost to me forever. The tears finally come with that thought.

I’m washing her good china in the sink — thick Palmolive suds and fine white china. I have to do something. I can’t just sit. And wait. While the dishes are air drying, I wipe her mouth and lips and tongue with lemon glycerin swabs.

We are close to the end.

I don’t even recognize her now. Her appearance resembles nothing of her former self.

My sister and I have gone through this before, with Dad. We should not have to do it again, with Mama. It’s just so … wrong. Dad died three years ago of end-stage dementia, which means he died of starvation and dehydration. Mama has cancer. And she can no longer eat. It has been 5 days without food or water.

In the back corner of the china cabinet I find a blue pill bottle with PROPO-N/APAP, TAKE 1 TABLET TWICE DAILY FOR PAIN, dated June 1, 2009. Four months ago. This was Mama’s treatment for bone cancer. Pain pills.

Nobody could figure out why she had pain. She went to a handful of doctors over the course of two years with all the tell-tale symptoms: chest pain, difficulty swallowing, cough, congestion, weight loss, shortness of breath. And phlegm. How many times did she complain about that and go to the doctor for that? So for lung cancer she was treated with Benadryl, Chlortabs, Sudafed, Mucinex, Flonase, and other OTCs and prescription drugs.

Her cancer is not only in the lungs, but in the space between the lungs, in the adrenals, and in the bones, and probably in the brain, and now, everywhere. It must have metastasized two years ago because she has been in intense pain since the winter of ‘08. She couldn’t ride in a car because of the jarring of the bones, she has cut the waistbands out of all her pants because she couldn’t stand anything to touch her, she has sat in her chair on a heating pad for days on end.

A few months after I called her doctor’s office and left a message requesting a CT scan to find out what was wrong — and my call was never returned, it got so bad that my sister hauled her to the emergency room one Friday night where she got 2 CT scans and 2 more with dye and X-rays and spent 10 hours and left with a diagnosis of “constipation” and got suppositories. Mama told me the next day that the technician said, “Your lungs are full of stuff!” What stuff, and why was nothing else ever said about that?

That was May 1. And Mama took Tylenol and PROPO-N/APAP (Darvocet) all summer for the excruciating pain of bone cancer. And we kept on taking her to the doctor, asking What is wrong? We didn’t learn about lung cancer until the last of August when we put her in a Senior Care facility and said, Find out what is wrong. We didn’t learn about bone cancer until September 2.

So while I scrub dishes and keep an eye on Mama’s breathing pattern and squirt morphine in her cheek and swab her parched dehydrated mouth, my sister goes to the hospital and gets a copy of Mama’s test results from May 1, the results that were sent to her doctor to be discussed at a follow-up visit.

It’s all there. “Several worrisome signs for malignancy, colon cancer, or lung cancer.” “Minimal left basilar airspace consolidation/atelectasis.” “Something eating away at T12 vertebrae, possibly a mass…” “Destruction of the T2 vertebral body and there appears to be involvement of the right pedicle suggesting that this is a metastatic process…” RECOMMENDATION: A PET/CT would be ideal…A bone scan.”

Nothing was ever mentioned in follow-up visits. Nothing was done to address these findings.

At the very least, she could have been kept comfortable the last years…months…weeks of her life. But she wasn’t.

Now she has hospice, and she is getting good care.