The Stroke Escape by Mark Brazaitis
– One –
My mother, who is seventy-nine, calls me, upset. It’s mid-morning on the first day of May, and she’s in Boston with my sister, my brotherin-law, and my younger nephew. They have gone to see my older nephew, a freshman at Boston College, in a student play and are about to drive back to Washington Heights, in New York City, where my mother lives in an apartment below my sister’s. My mother says she’s being rushed and scolded, like a child who’s late for a school bus.
She admits that she hasn’t been herself lately. She’s forgetful and distracted, sometimes sluggish, sometimes revved up. She blames it on the prednisone she is taking in preparation for chemotherapy. “Even I get annoyed at myself sometimes,” she says.
I do my best to soothe her. We say goodbye.
A few hours later, I call my sister. Her tone is detached, her speech stunned to slowness: She has just brought our mother to the emer-gency room at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Driving back from Boston, they were a few blocks from home when, in the backseat, my mother started to slur her words. My sister understood immediately that she was having a stroke. Fortunately, the hospital, home to one of the best neurological intensive care units in the world, was only a five-minute drive away. The faster a stroke is treated, the better the odds are of a strong recovery. My sister’s swift action may have saved our mother’s life.
Later, my sister calls me with an update. Our mother, intubated and sedated, will be getting a CT scan in an hour. The doctors are concerned about the swelling in her brain, the extent of which the CT scan will show. If the swelling proves manageable, they said, our mother will likely be left with weakness on the left side of her body. In the worst-case scenario, she will need a feeding tube for the rest of her life. The next three to five days are when the risk of more swelling is highest. The doctors, my sister says, are “cautious but hopeful.”
I ask my sister if I should come to New York. It’s a seven-hour drive from Morgantown, West Virginia, where I live. She says I should wait until we know more about our mother’s condition.
The last time I saw my mother was in late December, when she and her long-distance boyfriend, as well as my sister and her family, came to Morgantown to spend the holidays with me and my family. On the morning before everyone was to drive home, we played Ultimate Frisbee in the parking lot of the moribund Mountaineer Mall. Even if my mother was less spry than she’d been in the past, she was no less game. She shuffled across the crumbling asphalt, caught a throw, threw the Frisbee hard and wild, and watched as my older nephew, tall and thin and fast, chased it down and plucked it from the air.
Into her fifties, my mother was a downhill skier and a slow-butnever-say-quit marathon runner. Even now, she likes to show off in the pool by swimming the butterfly.
I am afraid of what the stroke will stop her from doing, stop her from being
I’ve taught writing for most of my adult life. I am all too familiar with students’ narrative essays about the deaths of their grandmothers (and sometimes their grandfathers). There is nothing suspenseful about them. An old person they love dies. It’s the ordinary story of life, with its inevitable (and, dare I say it, boring) ending. I feel for the students; I yawn at their essays.
Am I about to live a story I’ve read a hundred times?
My mother’s story cannot be extraordinary. If she eludes death this time, she isn’t likely to live even another decade. She isn’t a twenty-year-old sniper in a war who, two weeks shy of completing her tour of duty, is given her most dangerous assignment. She isn’t a thirty-yearold tightrope walker who is about to forego a net for the first time. She isn’t even a forty-year-old with a stage four cancer diagnosis but with the chance to enroll in promising experimental treatment. She’s a few months from reaching the average life expectancy of a woman in the United States. I should be prepared for the worst outcome; if it doesn’t come soon, it will come soon enough. But I’m not prepared; I don’t think I ever could be.
Unlike the title character in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, I have no trouble imagining my own death. What I haven’t been able to picture, ever, is my mother’s. All humans are mortal. My mother is a human. My mother isn’t mortal.
– Two –
At six-thirty in the evening, my sister calls me: “I think you should come.”
Half an hour later, I am on the road.
A professor of English at West Virginia University, I taught my last class of the semester a week ago. My sister, too, is a professor. We are fortunate it’s summer, when our work obligations are less intense. I will think of this in the days ahead, when I walk past the rooms of patients on my mother’s hall and see no one by their sides.
Driving, I attempt to accommodate myself to the idea of my mother’s death. But it’s like accepting a paradox. I try to distract myself with a book on CD and, when this fails, with music. West Virginia. Pennsylvania. New Jersey. New York. I-68. I-81. I-78. The George Washington Bridge.
I think of Harry Houdini and his close encounters with death. The Chinese Water Torture Cell, the Hanging Straitjacket Escape, the Milk Can.
Let my mother be Houdini. Let her escape the Stroke.
– Three –
I arrive at my mother’s apartment at two in the morning. Her calico cat, Dusty, greets me with a yawn. The apartment is filled with my mother’s enthusiasms: playbills from the dozens of Broadway shows she’s seen, coffee mugs she has collected from all over the world, Hershey’s Kisses she gives to my nephews and their friends.
Six hours later, my sister, my brother-in-law, and I ride the subway eighteen blocks south to the hospital. My mother is on the eighth floor, in the Garden South wing, in the last room on the right. Still intubated to ensure she can breathe, she is tiny amid her bed’s white sheets and white pillows. Surrounding her are the expected machines with their pulsating green and red numbers and their cacophonous chorus of beeps and bleeps and occasional alarms. I have never seen her look so helpless.
I sit beside her and hold her right hand, which is tied to the rails of her bed so she doesn’t pull out her tubes. The left side of her body is paralyzed, although occasionally her left leg, so eerily still otherwise, will twitch or rise.
For forty years, my mother was the editor and publisher of Hammer and Dolly, the monthly magazine of the Washington Metropolitan Auto Body Association. She was always on the go: driving all over D.C., Maryland, and Virginia to interview body shop owners, repairers, painters, and office personnel and flying all over the world to attend conferences and trade shows. As a woman in a male-dominated field, she endured occasional harassment, especially early in her career, and overcame skepticism that she knew anything about aftermarket parts, airline respirators, and MIG welders.
The story of how she acquired her job became family legend. She was in an accident, and when she brought her car to a body shop, its owner asked her if she knew anything about running a magazine. She’d recently turned thirty, and up until this point, she’d been a schoolteacher, a daycare worker, and a freelance photographer. “Yes,” she lied.
Early on, my father, a journalist, helped with the editing and writing. After my parents’ divorce, I assumed his place, working on the magazine during college – my mother bought me a fax machine so I could receive and send copy quickly – and at various points in my life thereafter. What was once little more than a few photocopied pages stapled together became, thanks to my mother’s drive and talent, an eighty-page glossy magazine with an international readership.
When my mother retired in 2008, she didn’t slow down. To celebrate her 80th birthday, in October, she plans to travel with her niece to see the Northern Lights. Only a little less luminous is the birthday party she envisions throwing herself at Studio 54, in midtown Manhattan, famous in its Disco Era heyday for its celebrity guests and their hookups with each other and cocaine.
Because of her breathing tube and the paralysis on the left side of her face, my mother can’t speak. She understands us, however, and is able to write, even if her handwriting is difficult to decipher. She will return again and again to three subjects: her cat, whom she misses; her 80th birthday party, the plans for which will become ever grander; and how hungry and thirsty she is.
Responding to the latter, my sister and I explain that she isn’t permitted to drink or eat because she might aspirate – be unable to cough up what she swallows – and food or liquid in her lungs could cause fatal pneumonia. She is being treated prophylactically for pneumonia now. Despite her IV, her mouth is dry, and even after she is connected to a feeding tube, she will feel famished.
There’s a blood clot in my mother’s brain that her doctors worry could contribute to swelling. They attempted to clear it when she arrived at the hospital using a tissue plasminogen activator, a blood thinner, but were unsuccessful. To ease the swelling, they could try another procedure, a decompressive craniectomy, which would involve removing part of her skull. High-risk, it might leave her paralyzed. My sister and I decide against the craniectomy.
My mother fought off non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, although, because of a non-life-threatening recurrence, she is scheduled soon for another round of chemo, and she refused to let congestive heart failure or asthma or her two creaky hips and one creaky knee, all three of which she had replaced, stop her from living the life she wanted to live.
My sister and I ask each other if she can battle back from a stroke. If anyone can, we decide, it’s our mother.
To every doctor and nurse who comes into the room, my sister shows a photograph of our mother as she was only a few weeks ago, at the bat mitzvah of a long-time family friend’s daughter. My mother, wearing a headdress of pink scarves, is dancing.
– Four –
My sister and I decide to take turns at our mother’s side. I have the morning shift. Because the doctors suspect my mother has shingles, anyone entering her room must wear a disposable gown and disposable gloves. Because of Covid-19, masks, too, are required. In my billowing yellow gown, blue gloves, and black mask, I feel like a cartoon character. I wonder if my mother finds the strangeness of her situation even stranger now – more alienating, more upsetting – because of the way her visitors must dress. When I hold her hand, there is a thin membrane of latex between our skin.
I call my mother’s boyfriend, who lives in Ohio. They were high school classmates, although they didn’t know each other well until they met again at their 50th reunion. He’s taciturn by nature; sometimes it’s difficult to pull even a few syllables from him. My mother is ordinarily garrulous, but she can write only so fast – and I can decipher only so much of her handwriting. With me as intermediary, their conversation is halting, full of long pauses and awkward restarts. He wants to know if she’s walking yet. I don’t tell him what seems likely: She will never walk again.
My mother’s nurse, Sophie – dark-haired, with a round, expressive face and a voice both upbeat and soothing – is kind, skilled, and attentive. My mother communicates with her in gestures more than with the sentences she scrawls in her notebook.A few minutes before Sophie’s ten-hour shift is to end, my mother soils herself. Apologetically, I inform Sophie. “No problem at all,” she says. Efficiently, completely, caringly, she cleans my mother.
As I will a dozen times over the coming days, I tear up. I am moved by Sophie’s skill, grace, and kindness. But more than this, I am grateful to see a problem solved. The larger problem seems irresolvable. Could Houdini have escaped a hospital bed with half his body paralyzed and his right hand tied down?
– Five –
When I arrive at the hospital at the start of visiting hours, Sophie tells me that my mother had a hard night. Restless and agitated, she spiked a fever, and her heart rate fluctuated dramatically, climbing as high as 150 beats per minute. Arrhythmia, Sophie explains, isn’t uncommon in stroke patients, and the doctors are treating it. Also: my mother failed her fi rst swallow test, conducted with ice shards and half a teaspoon of water.
Like the doctors we’ve spoken with, however, Sophie is hopeful about my mother’s prognosis. Her medical team talks confidently about the course her recovery is likely to take. When she leaves the neurological ICU, she’ll begin rehab. Her doctors hope she’ll regain some of the mobility the stroke stole from her.
It’s hard for me to reconcile their optimism with what I see. My mother seems to be growing thinner and weaker. She has always been beautiful, with blue eyes and a radiant smile, but her stroke has reduced her expressions to a grim repertoire of worry, distress, and disbelief. She complains of pain. It’s generalized, although sometimes she pinpoints it in her paralyzed left leg, which she occasionally slaps in anger.
During my visit, she is exhausted, but she manages to write one clear sentence: Did you bring the scissors to cut me loose?
Apologetically, I explain to her again why the restraint on her right hand is necessary. Although she has been extubated – the elaborate breathing device has been removed from her mouth and throat – she is connected to tubes that help hydrate and feed her as well as provide her with medicines and supplemental oxygen.
She looks at me with her cool blue eyes. I don’t know if they’re telling me she understands or if they’re accusing me of betrayal.
She has always balked at being held back, at having her liberty in any way curtailed. Say “No” to her, and she thinks, “Go.” She perpetually seeks new experiences, the more offbeat and off-the-beatentrail, the better. One night during a summer I had a newspaper internship in Detroit, my mother, despite my protests, dragged me into the punk-rock club in the basement of the apartment building where I was living, its patrons tattooed and pierced everywhere imaginable, its music like eighteen-wheelers with bad brakes, and its lights six shades of dark. We stood against a wall, observing the spectacle. The dance floor, the size of a boxing ring, was alive with gyrating bodies.
As I sit with her in the hospital, I wish I’d asked her to dance.
When I remind her of our nightclub adventure, she gives me a thumbs up.
Discouraged and down, I remain skeptical about her odds of recovering anything close to the life she once lived. I text my sister with an update on her condition. Perhaps sensing my pessimism, she texts back with an encouraging statistic: speech and swallowing improves in ninety percent of stroke patients.
At noon, I speak with one of my mother’s doctors, Fernanda Carvalho Poyraz, and express my concerns about her pain, her thirst, her hunger. I mention the cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced between what my mother’s medical team is saying and what I’m seeing. Dr. Carvalho suggests a family meeting tomorrow to discuss my mother’s case.
When I text my sister to let her know about the meeting, she texts back: Is it to talk about moving her to a regular bed in the post-stroke floor? Or what? Do you know why they want to meet?
I tell her I don’t.
After my sister arrives, we discuss where our mother will live after she’s discharged. One possibility is for her to stay with me in Morgantown until she recovers more mobility, then move back to New York. Since her retirement, she has lived a mere flight of stairs from my sister, and I’ve envied their closeness. I haven’t spent time regularly with my mother since the year I lived at home between graduating from college and joining the Peace Corps. Even as I recognize the potential challenges of caring for her, I enjoy the thought of a reunion.
She has long made clear to me and my sister that she doesn’t want to be the victim of “granny dumping” – being put in a nursing home.
I leave the hospital to go swimming at an indoor pool at Riverbank State Park, twenty blocks south. My mother and I used to swim here together. We’d laugh about the state of the showers. Only a few worked, and only a few of these had hot water. But it’s one of New York City’s best deals: $2 a swim.
I slip into the water, hoping to lose myself in the rhythm of my strokes. But I can’t stop thinking about my mother. Of how she’s imprisoned in her hospital bed. Of her pain and hunger and thirst. Is the state-of-the-art treatment she’s receiving, I wonder, prolonging the inevitable and therefore prolonging her misery? In trying to do good, are her doctors doing harm?
As I walk back to the hospital, I talk to my sister on the phone. A few minutes earlier, a doctor whom she’d never met asked her, “What is your end goal with your mother?”
My sister tells me, “I thought our end goal was clear: to give her the best life possible. Right?”
“Right.”
What, we wonder, haven’t the doctors been telling us? What is the real story?
After I relieve my sister, I stay past the end of visiting hours before a nurse, in a commanding Caribbean accent, tells me it’s time to go. My mother clings to my hand. I think of how, when I was little, I used to feel sick whenever she left the house to go anywhere. I was afraid she would never return.
Back in my mother’s apartment, I have trouble sleeping. I keep seeing her in her hospital bed, her right wrist tied to the frame, the left side of her body all but dead, as if it had been run over by a truck or smashed by a boulder, and her face contorted with frustration, confusion, and fear. I imagine a long succession of days in which she becomes progressively more miserable, receding in slow, painful increments from the exuberant life she’d loved. I have a thought I’m immediately ashamed of: I want her to die.
– Six –
An occupational therapist comes at 9:30 to work with my mother, whose speech is returning, although she’s difficult to understand. On her own initiative, she lifts objects with her right hand – a pen, the 182 stuffed cat we’ve brought her, a box of Osmolite – pumping them like a weightlifter would. Her eyes are defiant, as if she is staring down the therapist, me – anyone who might doubt she will recover.
“You’re doing great,” the therapist tells her.
Could this be the turning point in my mother’s story, I wonder, the epiphanic moment when her body realizes it’s stronger than what is keeping it down?
This is what my students’ narratives always lack: a dramatic – and joyful – moment when a doomed loved one, by effort or luck, becomes un-doomed, becomes again someone with whom to bake pies or go fishing or discuss Plato. In Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, his memoir of the 1996 Mount Everest climbing disasters, Dr. Seaborn Beck Weathers, depleted and unconscious, is left to die near the top of the mountain. But later, he staggers into Camp Four like an abominable snowman, gruesomely frostbitten but alive. Weathers’ resurrection gives an otherwise grim book – eight people in two expedition teams, including both of the teams’ leaders, die on the mountain – a hopeful touch, even if Weathers’ gangrenous right hand was ultimately amputated.
I think about a welcome reversal in my father’s health. At age sixty-two, he’d been diagnosed with kidney cancer, but, luckily, the cancer was confined to one kidney. After he’d had the cancerous kidney removed, we were buoyant, gleefully anticipating the decades he had left to live. Months after his nephrectomy came another aboutface: tests showed that the cancer had spread to other parts of his body. He died two years later.
After the therapist leaves, my mother writes down a couple of requests: a bottle of her favorite sports drink and a plate of spaghetti with red sauce. Having been a patient in the hospital before, she knows the head chef. He’d cooked her a delectable meal. She insists I call him. Again, I explain why eating and drinking would be dangerous. Face pinched, she mouths something I can’t understand. I wonder if it’s a curse.
My sister and brother-in-law arrive for our meeting with Dr. Carvalho. In a corner of the room that the doctor has reserved, a resident is napping. He startles awake, then staggers into the hallway. We find places at a long table. Short, slim, and dark-haired, Dr. Carvalho, who is Brazilian and in her mid-thirties, speaks deliberately and with a slight accent. She reviews the medical care my mother has received, then transitions to the crux of our meeting.
From this point forward, Dr. Carvalho says, we have two options. We can continue an aggressive treatment of the fallout from our mother’s stroke, employing feeding tubes, IVs, supplemental oxygen, and medications to combat whatever conditions emerge. Even if she never ate or drank again, however, she would be in danger of aspiration and pneumonia because, Dr. Carvalho says, “her own secretions might go to her lungs” and she wouldn’t be able to expel them. The second option is to transition her to comfort care, which would treat her pain and permit her the pleasure of eating and drinking again. In the first case, my mother would need to live in a rehab facility, with aroundthe-clock care. In the second case, depending on the level of medical attention she requires, she might be eligible for home hospice.
The first scenario might give her more time, but at the price of pain. In either case, Dr. Carvalho says, it’s likely to be “weeks, not months” before she dies.
We thank Dr. Carvalho and step out of the room. My sister, my brother-in-law, and I huddle in the hallway, speaking above the syncopated sounds of machines. It’s clear what option is better. Or, rather, what option is less awful. We have tears in our eyes.
Soon thereafter, we have a plan. When our mother leaves the hospital, we’ll move her to my sister’s apartment. She’ll spend what time she has left in a familiar place, with people she loves.
I walk to the pool, attempting to rationalize away my sorrow: she’s five months shy of eighty years old, she’s had a long and exciting life, she won’t live her nightmare by spending her final days in a nursing home. But my sister and I expected our mother, like my mother’s aunt Mary, to live to be ninety-nine. She is, I believe, too extraordinary to die at the age at which the average American woman dies. In her forties, she and two other women built a car from scratch. What average American, much less average American woman, builds a car from scratch?
In the water, I thrash my grievances against a God I don’t believe in, against fate, against the failures of my mother’s body. I imagine a conversation with her medical team in which I ask how her diagnosis could go, with cruel swiftness, from cautiously hopeful to resolutely bleak. I imagine their answer: We’re trained to heal, and we do all we can to help our patients return to health – until circumstances prove it’s impossible. By the time I climb out of the water, I’m exhausted emotionally more than physically.
At the hospital, my mother is given a gift: Her right hand is untied. Overnight, however, she will pull her feeding tube free. As it is reinstalled, she will become all the hungrier.
– Seven –
On my morning walk to the hospital, I call our relatives to let them know about our decision to transition our mother to comfort care. My sister shares the news with our mother’s friends and boyfriend. In some cases, there is disbelief: Can’t the doctors do anything? Isn’t the hospital supposed to be one of the best in the world?
In my mother’s room, she opens her mouth to speak, and at last I understand her: “I’ve fed you your entire life, and you’re letting me starve.”
I tell her this is about to change. Her ability to swallow has improved, and her doctors have permitted us to give her small amounts of water and food. I don’t tell her that this is likely to be what kills her.
I swab her mouth, and a miniscule amount of water trickles onto her tongue.
– Eight –
It’s Mother’s Day. Two days ago, when I was in my mother’s apartment, I received flowers she’d been sent – by me, ordered weeks before. The hospital doesn’t permit flowers, so a photo of the bouquet will have to suffice.
My mother has been moved out of the ICU and into a room on Hudson South, on the other side of the eighth floor. There are fewer machines – one of the happier consequences of transitioning her to comfort care – and it’s quiet. The view from the wide window, of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge, is lovely. But because of her left-side paralysis and the way her bed is positioned, my mother can’t see it.
Before I left the hospital last night, my mother begged me to bring her one of the Italian ices in her freezer. I’ve brought two, and as I spoon the sweet, cold dessert into her mouth, I see signs of pleasure return to her face. I think about how our roles were once reversed, when I was a baby, helpless, ravenous, grateful for each spoonful my mother placed on my tongue.
Lunch arrives, an artist’s palette of orange, yellow, and green. Liquified sweet potatoes, squash, and spinach? I don’t ask. I feed her all she is able to eat.
Before long, she falls asleep. Her breathing is labored, her heartbeat fast – sometimes as fast as 160 beats per minute, faster than a sprinter’s after a race. Her mouth is wide open, as if to capture as much oxygen as she can. Even supplemental oxygen doesn’t slow her breathing or heartbeat. I worry about the depth of her suffering. I worry that the morphine she’s receiving isn’t offering her sufficient relief. This isn’t the comfort care I imagined.
I think about other times my mother has been in pain.
Twice in her seventies, she suffered from severe depression. During each months-long episode, I called her every day, encouraging her to take walks with me: I in Morgantown, she in New York City. Because I’d suffered two major depressive episodes, one of which required a three-month stay in the hospital my mother is in now, I could assure her that her misery wouldn’t last forever.
The year before she turned forty, she had an even more profound manifestation of despair. It was the spring of 1982, and in the wake of my parents’ divorce, my mother cried every night in bed. Although she’d initiated the divorce after my father continued an affair he’d promised was over, she was furious that he was now dating one of her friends. I was fifteen and a sophomore in high school, supposedly when I should have been in thrall to my adolescent narcissism, but I left my bed every night to console, soothe, and distract her. Beside her in her bed, I condemned my father, made fun of his new girlfriend and his former lover, and praised my mother. Even on school nights, I stayed with her until she fell asleep, sometimes after two in the morning. Years later, she acknowledged that it wasn’t wise to treat me as her therapist. “But you were all I had,” she said.
I am again by her bed, this time powerless to ease her agony.
None of my students’ essays about the deaths of their loved ones ever mentioned how compelling the idea of assisted suicide becomes in such situations. I seem to recall my mother, long ago, urging me, if she were ever to be in the kind of hopeless condition she’s in now, to do what I’m fantasizing about doing. To exorcise the thought, I write a poem about it on my mother’s paper placemat: “A pillow, she told me, would do the job/ – or my hands, one to cover her mouth,/the other to pinch her nose.”
If this were a work of fiction, I might have a character based on me grab the spare pillow in the cupboard next to my mother’s bed and suspend it over her face, debating misery and mercy, life and death. But I can only surprise the reader with a confession: Once upon a time, I came close to hitting my mother. It was during the period after my father left the house and I was spending night after night by my mother’s side in an exhaustive effort to make her feel better. In the midst of this literal and emotional tumult, my mother invited a man she’d been dating to live with us.
When the man appeared at our house, I refused to interact with him, refused to come to dinner. I locked myself in my bedroom with T.S. Eliot poems and my confusion. If my mother had a boyfriend, I wondered, why was she crying to me all night? The consolation I’d given her, I concluded, had been insufficient. I’d mocked my father and his lovers – and exhausted myself – for nothing. (My anger doubtless drew from deeper sources as well. I was about to be replaced in my mother’s bed, Oedipus exiled to his crib.)
One Saturday morning, my mother stopped me in our hallway before I dashed out the door. She told me I was being selfish and insensitive. She said I wasn’t supporting her. She said, “You don’t love me.”
Her last remark set mHer last remark set me off. As inarticulate as any teenager who’d ever lived, I couldn’t calmly, or even sarcastically, point out that it would be a heretofore unknown emotion (since there was no way it could be love) that would inspire a son to sit with his mother every night as, sobbing, she moaned about how cruel his father was. But instead I said, “I want to hit you,” and lifted my fist.
She said, “Go ahead.”
For dramatic purposes, the scene ought to pause here. But still able, after forty years, to conjure the immense anger I felt toward her, still able to sense the satisfaction I would feel in striking her, I want to rush past it lest I provoke time into returning the two of us to the worst moment in our relationship and I succumb to my vengeful fury.
I dropped my fist, stormeI dropped my fist, stormed outside, and jumped on the roof of my Datsun, doing $269 worth of damage. (I remember the amount because I had to pay for the repair from the money I’d made as a 14-yearold carnie.) It was the physical release I no doubt needed. Afterwards, I ran off to the public library.
– Nine –
My sister, on the early shift, tells our mother about our plan to move her into my sister’s apartment. Our mother understands the implications. “Hospice,” she says.
“How do you feel about it?” my sister asks.
“Sad,” she replies.
The bed she’ll use will be delivered to my sister’s apartment tomorrow.
I swim, losing count of my laps. I repeat them. I lose count again. I look at the clock. I swim more. I look at the clock again. Is it broken? Time seems to have stopped. But the next time I look at the clock, I realize that more than an hour has passed since I got in the water. I leave the pool and hurry to the hospital.
Sophie, my mother’s nurse from the ICU, stops by on her break. My mother, asleep most of the day, opens her eyes. “Hey, you,” Sophie says. She lifts my mother into a more comfortable position on the bed, tucks her sheets around her, and holds her hand. I tear up at this small act of soothing grace.
Later, my sister tells me about a conversation she had with Sophie earlier in the day. The subject: me. “She called you a man of few words,” she said. “It wasn’t a criticism.” My marriage is doing its own slow death spiral, which my sister knows. “Maybe,” she says, “you and Sophie could be a couple.” Sophie, who can’t be older than thirty, is pretty and smart and, obviously, one hell of a caretaker. What an uplifting and life-affirming, albeit sappy, twist my mother’s story could have. Even as my mother was dying, my love life was experiencing a rebirth.
I find it easy to think of myself as much younger than I am. My students are generally in their late teens and early twenties, and gazing at them I can be lulled into believing I’m looking into a kind of mirror. But inevitably, over the course of a semester, I’m jarred into acknowledging the age difference between us. All I need do is make a single reference to the pop culture or politics of my generation – ’Til Tuesday and Oliver North, anyone? – and I am not Dorian Gray but simply gray. Sophie and I were having a great time until I inspired her to dumbfounded silence when I compared her to Elizabeth McGovern.
I am fifty-five years old. I remember a complaint leveled against the then-septuagenarian singer Rod Stewart by one of his much, much younger model-wives or model-girlfriends. All he seems to ever want to do, she grumbled, is watch soccer on the telly in the pub with his mates. Her comment suggests a revision to the title of one of Stewart’s signature songs: “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright) . . . because Manchester City is playing Liverpool!”
All he seems to ever want to do, said Sophie, is curl up on the couch with a cup of tea, a cat, and a Cormac McCarthy novel.
Although my mother will not inadvertently gift me a May-December romance, she has given me plenty, including my love of words and (flattering myself here) my skill in using them.
In a letter to me dated a week before her stroke, she congratulated me on an award I’d won at my university for the teaching of writing. “You were the best writing teacher I ever had,” she wrote. “Thank you for the many, many years of lessons.” During the years I worked at Hammer and Dolly, I might have shared a few writing tips with her. Mostly, I tried to demystify the craft. Her mother, who worshipped the gods of grammar, and my father, who could be a harsh critic of other people’s prose, had made her feel insecure about her writing.
But if I’d had the chance to write her back, I would have told her she’d gotten it wrong. It wasn’t I who’d taught her to write but she who’d taught me. Her instruction started when I was a toddler and she read Dr. Seuss to me every night, filling my head with wondrous rhymes, wild plot turns, and delightfully unconventional relationships and situations. (What was the deal with Mr. Brown and Mr. Black, and why was Sam, as in “I am,” so insistent on pushing green eggs and ham?) It continued when she playfully provoked me to write poems on behalf of the office cat, some of which she published, and to drive across the country, like Jack Kerouac or John Steinbeck, to write stories about collision repair shops from Virginia to California and sidebars about my twilight visit to the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born and what happened when I showed up for lunch at a Columbus, Georgia country club without socks.
It isn’t true that creativity can’t be taught. By encouraging my imagination to go wherever it wanted, and by praising the places it traveled, my mother taught me to be creative. My father might have been the writer I most admired, but my mother was my greatest literary influence.
My mother’s breathing continues to be labored – forty breaths per minute – and her heartbeat blistering. I ask her nurse, David, if there’s anything she can be given to ease her distress. He says he’ll speak with her doctor.
I text my sister an update. She texts back: Can you ask if she is deteriorating? Like is it urgent we all come see her?
I ask another nurse, then a third, if I can speak with my mother’s doctor. But the unit is busy, and her doctor doesn’t arrive before the end of visiting hours.
I walk the sixteen blocks up Broadway to my mother’s apartment, thinking again about my students and their essays. How many did I fail to respond to with kindness and compassion? Was there ever an occasion when, feeling tired or cynical or outright mean, I wrote, “Next time please fi nd something less sentimental, saccharine, and predictable to write about, okay?”
I remember a scene in Margaret Edson’s play Wit in which a student asks the play’s protagonist, the English professor Vivian Bearing, for an extension on her paper after her grandmother dies. Dr. Bearing’s response: “Do what you will, but the paper is due when it is due.” As she is dying of ovarian cancer, Dr. Bearing regrets not acting more humanely toward her students.
I saw the play, with Kathleen Chalfant in the lead role, with my mother in New York in the late 1990s. After Dr. Bearing dies, she rises, naked, into an otherworldly light. My mother focused on the earthy: How did a nude Chalfant, who, at 53 years old, was my mother’s contemporary, look to me, age 32?
“Good!” I declared.
“Bless you,” my mother said
– Ten –
My sister texts me: I asked Mom’s nurse, Olivia, if she was actively dying. Olivia said she didn’t know because this is her first time with Mom. I told her that we needed to know in case we have to get the grandkids here. She said she understood and would have a doctor come talk with us.
Meanwhile, the hospital bed arrives at my sister’s apartment. It’s in a cozy spot, with a view of West 186th Street and its dogwalkers and delivery trucks.
My sister at last speaks with one of my mother’s doctors. When I arrive at the hospital, she tells me what he said. Reading between the lines of his nuanced assessment, we decide to call our children and ask them to come say goodbye to their grandmother.
Outside the window, sunlight glimmers on the Hudson. I wonder how long it would take me to swim across it. I think about all the places – pools, lakes, oceans – my mother and I have swum. Fifteen years ago, we traveled to Cuba – I legally, on an academic visa; she illegally, via Canada – and one morning we swam in the Caribbean Sea. She left the water first. Later, she told me about the irrational thought she’d had as she waited for me on her beach towel: I would drown and leave her all alone in a place she wasn’t supposed to be.
At four o’clock, I attend my younger nephew’s high school baseball game, at the far end of New York’s East Side, within view of Yankee Stadium. The pitchers on both teams have little control over their fastballs, curveballs, and sliders. Every fourth batter, it seems, is hit by a pitch. The players who are struck react in a variety of ways – with curses, with disbelief, with stoicism – before marching up the first-base line. It’s like life, I think. Get knocked down. Get up. Get on with the game.
But the metaphor doesn’t hold up. Life eventually throws us a pitch that, helmet be damned, smashes our brain or bashes our heart. Or it just sails past our impotent bat and across the center of the plate. Strike three. Game over.
Predictably, I’ve become morbid.
After the game, I return to the hospital. My mother is asleep, my sister by her side. There is a Yankees-Blue Jays game on the television, a game the Yankees will win by scoring three runs in the ninth inning. Given permission to stay overnight with our mother, my sister will watch the replay three times, finding comfort in the predictable and, for her, a Yankees’ fan, happy ending.
I leave to pick up my younger daughter, who is nineteen and a rising junior at Emory University, at LaGuardia Airport. Of all of the members of our extended family, she most resembles my mother in personality – funny, smart, adventurous, outspoken – and in appearance, with her open face, bold eyes, and generous smile. Changing in a locker room with her grandmother when she was three years old, she declared, “Grandma She-She, you have a fat vagina!” Far from being offended, my mother told the story to all of her friends, laughing each time. At one of her parties, she even formed an impromptu rock band she called the Fat Vaginas.
My daughter and I meet my older nephew in the hospital lobby. At the security desk, we learn that only two of us are permitted to be in my mother’s room at the same time. We don’t mention that my sister and my brother-in-law are already with her. My daughter and her cousin ride the elevator upstairs. Soon thereafter, my daughter calls her sister, who is fi nishing her senior year at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, so she can speak a few last words to her grandmother.
I haven’t said goodbye to my mother. All humans are mortal. My mother is a human. My mother will be alive tomorrow morning when I show up for visiting hours.
– Eleven –
My sister calls me at eight in the morning: “She’s gone.”
I hurry to the hospital, half running, half speed-walking down Broadway, where fruit vendors are setting up their stands, where old men are gathering to gamble on their games of dominoes.
In my mother’s room, my sister and I hug. My sister tells me about the sleepless and sad night she spent by our mother’s side, holding her hand, whispering to her, watching her leave her life.
Sophie comes by, sees our mother’s body in the bed, covers her mouth in surprise. She must have witnessed a hundred deaths, but she seems genuinely upset. She offers soothing words to us before she leaves.
Outside the broad window, the Hudson sparkles. Cars and trucks ride across the George Washington Bridge.
The hospital staff allows me and my sister to stay with our mother’s body as long as we want. After a couple of hours in which we console each other, reminisce, and say a last goodbye to our mother, we leave, she to take a nap, I to swim. On our respective ways, we call our relatives and my mother’s friends to tell them the sad news. Each call is short. At first, I am surprised by this. Later, I understand: There is so little to say, so little that can be said. We’ve reached the end of her story. The epilogue is memories and mourning.
As I step onto the pool deck, a woman in her seventies rises out of the water and points to her empty lane. “It’s all yours,” she says.
By four in the afternoon, my sister, my brother-in-law, and I are in a funeral home twenty blocks north of their apartment, paying for my mother’s cremation and death certificates. We start planning her memorial service, to be held in a month.
Here I am, a few paragraphs from the end of my essay. I’ve always been a generous critic – except when it comes to my own writing. So I’ll give myself a C minus. My mother, who once likened a terrible novel I wrote to King Lear, would have a different opinion. I imagine her consoling voice: “Your essay would have been better if I’d lived, of course, but you did fine with the facts. Next time, make it fiction. Let me pull a Houdini – the Stroke Escape! I love it! – and dance at Studio 54 and marvel at the Northern Lights.”
– Twelve –
My younger daughter and I, driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at three in the afternoon, are halfway home when a vehicle twenty yards in front of us, either a white van or a white pickup truck – my daughter, who is behind the wheel, and I, in the passenger seat, will have different memories – loses a rear tire. It bounds toward us, enormous and black and swiveling out of control.
There are a number of ways this story could end.
My daughter swerves right as the tire careens left. It bounds beside us, inches from my daughter’s door, before it bounces behind us and out of sight. My daughter pulls back into our lane. Our hearts are pounding. We’ve been holding our breath. We expel our relief.
I thank her for her attentiveness to the road, her supple wrists, her deft decision-making.
“And luck,” she says, and we drive on.
Mark Brazaitis is the author of nine books, including story collections and novels. His most recent novel is American Seasons (Main Street Rag, 2024). His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Poetry East, and Beloit Fiction Journal.