My dad picked me up from college a month ago. He came alone because Mama was too sick to make the trip. Since I’ve come home, I’ve spent one- hundred percent of my time with her. There was no talk of getting a summer job, no applications submitted. Each weekday, my dad goes to work and my mom and I sleep in, then I drive us to her daily treatments and administer the handfuls of natural remedies my dad has researched online or learned about from friends. He, having provided all her care by himself while I was away, is palpably weary in a way that terrifies me.
I’m glad to lighten his burden, even though I can’t, really, because his exhaustion is powered not by the sharp uptick of medical management required in our household, but by the effort of willing someone not to die. I know this because it’s in me too.
Still, I would not and do not entertain the idea of being anywhere but here. I experience truth in that which people say so often: only one thing seems worse than being here, and that’s being anywhere else. I see none of my friends. I know they’re together, lying on the beach in the sunlight hours and driving wildly and without purpose along the mountain roads after dark. Sometimes they invite me to come along but I decline every time. We all know I don’t fit there right now. I don’t have the social capacity; it’d be work for them as well as for me. All the energy I have is directed instead toward two simultaneous and mutually-exclusive psychic pursuits: convincing myself that my mom won’t die and gasping under the pressure of trying to be present for every moment with her just in case. It’s wilting to attempt to inscribe to memory every facial tic, every hand movement, every vocal intonation and distinct phrase and peal of laughter and unconscious sigh. It depletes the spirit to cling to that which never had any intention of lasting.
One afternoon, my mom has to go to the bathroom. It’s the room directly across from her bedroom, but she’s too weak to walk there. I try to help, carry her like my dad has, but I’m not substantial enough to meet the task. I want to keep trying but Mama decides it’s better to crawl. My first instinct is to fight with everything I have, to block her path, protest, beg, pull on her limbs and lift her back off the floor.
The next instinct tells me to be quiet. If I make a spectacle, if I demand things she cannot deliver on behalf of my ego, it will rend far more critical gashes in each of us than if I stand back and watch my mother, my light, on her hands and knees, inching her way to the toilet.
The hospice nurse recommends that we apply olive oil to my mom’s lips and the soles of her feet so they don’t crack and bleed in the dry mountain air. Several times a day, while my mother lies glassy-eyed and moaning, I pull off her soft gray socks and rub oil into her feet. It feels more crude than compassionate, an act meant not for human skin but for preparing bread dough for the oven.
A few times a year, especially around holidays, I make a salted rosemary and garlic ciabatta loaf, and there, in the kitchen, it’s satisfying to pour out oil, dark and translucent, from bottle to sticky dough and mash it between my hands. Here, on my mother’s invaded body, it is not satisfying. But in this time when I’m desperate for her to know how much I love her, when no expression seems like enough, I’m grateful for the opportunity to be close to her skin.
While I’m crouching at her feet, my mother is teaching me one last lesson: what it looks like to die. It’s beautiful, and holy, but that doesn’t matter right now. The only things I can integrate are concrete, easily-digestible facts about death: behaviors I witness in her and then confirm or clarify with the nurse. I discover that the dying often hallucinate. They call out for people who are long-dead, speak to them across collapsed time. Mama calls for her dad, who died before I was born. I know very little about him, except that he beat his children and that my mother loved him without restraint. Occasionally in my youth, she’d think of him and cry into the space of his absence, and my dad and I never quite knew what to do. She’d seen death and we hadn’t and that maintained the slimmest forcefield between us, unwanted but impenetrable.
Eventually the momentum of my mother’s mortality becomes irrefutable. My father phones family members and summons them to our house. They arrive like pilgrims. My mom’s twin brother; his wife; my dad’s sister; our pastor Rachela. For days we gather around her. I sleep beside her in fitful hour-long blocks, day or night, curled on top of the comforter like a baby animal. Every time I wake, I occupy a bleary blessed moment of disorientation. The next moment, remembering, I shudder and gasp like someone’s pressed plastic wrap to my face.
Mama’s eyes are milky and she can’t speak. She moans and tosses. Family members take turns at her side, communing, groping their way toward goodbye. I sit cross-legged beside her and read from the Book of Psalms. My father kneels by the bed, touches her face, calls her my love.
Today, her physical pain is so palpable the air in the room thunders with it. Rachela takes her hands. She says, It’s okay to let go. I know you’re holding on for Hannah. I know you want to stay. But you can let go.
Mama rocks back and forth, her hands between Rachela’s hands. Her face is tight. A tear drops onto her cheek.
I watch and I cry, as hard as I can, to keep myself from screaming. No, Rachela. You’re wrong. She can’t let go. No, she cannot do this to me. She can’t leave me in this world.
I don’t scream. I swallow. I cut my insides with those words so I won’t say them out loud because somewhere, in a place beneath thought, I know she needs to be released from her life. I know I can’t be the one to do it. I know someday I’ll be grateful.
As is the case with most rituals, nothing happens. Right away. These words are spoken, these tears are shed, then we drop back into the nightmare. We occupy the grinding inflexibility of dying, its process.
My dad and I arrange to go across town. We haven’t left the house in days. He wants to buy a suit for the memorial service. I don’t want to go because my mother is still alive, but I don’t fight because I sense his desperation, the necessity of being out from under our roof, if only for an hour.
We’re at the front door, stepping into an impossibly bright summer day. My uncle calls to us from the top of the staircase. We hear the quality of his voice and don’t think or speak, just turn and run. I follow my father, pounding up the stairs. We enter the room. We gather around my mother.
I look at her knuckles. I press her hands into my memory. She allows us a few more breaths.
She stops.
I lie beside her body and sob. But I feel a hardness forming beneath my skin, like spending too long outside in the winter. I cry but the reason for my tears is already becoming inaccessible to me, contracting, crystallizing, lodging between my ribs like an icicle.
When the undertakers come to carry her body away, my uncle and father want to help. I hide in the bathroom alone. I don’t want to see. But I still hear. Four men negotiating a woman-shell down a narrow staircase. Afterward, my uncle makes comments about the heavy stiffness of her body. He’s surprised by the quickness of rigor mortis. He’s about to say more, perhaps, but looks at me and stops.
We eat dinner outside. There are cedar trees. Clear mountain light. My uncle wants to go out and buy me ice cream but I say no thank you. I’m hyper- alert, twitchy like a deer. My body is confused by this collection of family gathered over a meal, which I’m accustomed to associating with celebration.
The next day, when it’s just my dad and his sister and I, we go out: to the grocery store, to rent a DVD. In public, I find myself grappling with my new reality as a motherless daughter. I think, My mom died yesterday, think what a rare and brief and unmanageable thing that sentence is. I wish her death could always be yesterday. Or I wish her death could be very, very far away. I wish some stranger would ask me how I am so I could say it out loud. Or I wish to never speak the words. I try not to wish. I try not to want things to be any way but the way they are. If I do, I’ll have to admit my powerlessness, and if I do that, I may as well just curl up on the ground in the parking lot of this Safeway. I may as well close my eyes, let the asphalt make imprints in my skin.
My aunt stays with us. My dad doesn’t go to work. We cook dinner together, watch old movies. We go to the funeral home and make decisions about things we’d never considered before. We go to J.C. Penney and try on outfits for the service. I find an unfinished, handwritten note my mother left for me in a drawer by our family computer.
When she has been dead four days, a fire breaks out across town. Ash piles on car windows and front decks. Glass bursts audibly in the heat. Smoke seeps under doorframes and turns my eyes bloodshot. Two-hundred-and-forty homes are destroyed. I want to believe the fire won’t grow big enough to touch us, but there’s no reason we should be spared.
In a few years, I’ll move to San Francisco, where my mom spent her youth. Every day, for hours, I’ll lie on the ground under eucalyptus and jagged cypress. I’ll ask the dirt and the trees to rebirth me, re-form me, help me be alive again. In a few years, I’ll turn to earth as mother in the absence of my own. But for now, I look out my window and all I can see around me is the indifference of nature.
Hannah Anderson Harris has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sierra Nevada University, where she serves as the advisory editor for the Sierra Nevada Review. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, The Normal School, and Entropy. She lives in San Francisco with her wife-to-be.
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