Paradise

The scene changes. We see our blogger in a nursing home room in California, holding the hand of a very gaunt woman, her mother, who has decided that enough is enough, and is uninterested in the things of this world like food and drink, but still lights up when she knows she is in the presence of those she loves, and when we tell her just how terrific she is and exactly why we love her and just how many people feel the way we do.

Yesterday, this scene would have included a very loud television showing advertisements for tacky jewelry, a window beyond swathed in curtains, and frequent, loud telephone calls, not to mention the roar of an oxygen machine: hell for the dying. Today, we tell the front desk that our mother has less than a week to live, the supervisor listens carefully before going off to her morning meeting, and within two hours, the neighbor is moved from the room where she has been for two years, the TV goes with her, the curtains are pulled back, a very quiet lady who likes to be out in the hallway moves in, the oxygen machine is turned off, and hummingbirds can be heard in the budding rosebush, outside the window. Mom can hear me reading stories of faraway places to her, or people chatting quietly at the foot of her bed. It’s paradise.

The spiral booklet from Hospice explains very neatly and sympathetically what changes the dying go through, and how we must respect their time of transition. Eating in the room with Mom seems strange: she is beyond the mundanities of sustenance. She is living off herself, and still manages to keep rosy with it, but for how much longer? Day by day the eyes grow duller, the temples and cheeks sink, the hands and arms thinner and thinner still. We keep vigil, we gather around the bed. There is time to say goodbye, to stroke the forehead, to hold the hand, the arm.

I try not to read sentimental books and I don’t allow myself to think about Mom as she was and all she was to us. I made the mistake of doing that a week ago tonight, and my eyes were so puffy the next day I didn’t look so great for my big interview with the Search Committee next night, a week ago tomorrow. The moon was high, the clouds racing over the sky, and the first formations of snow geese were crying to one another as they passed over Thomas Park; I was in the backyard at the chiminea, feeding scrap paper, pine-cones, twigs and frankincense into it steadily, and as steadily weeping away for all that. But not this week, can’t – got to last it out and then go find a hole where the rain gets in…

There is the small matter that, since this time last week, I seem to have been chosen to be Head of a school, and that one’s blogging energies may well be siphoned off to the service of the Greater Good; already I have written several necessary Documents to address the many constituents of this institution, and many more will necessarily follow. And yet, the time in Japan still awaits, though the spouse is already on his way there now and I will not follow until the end of the month, a time to finish revising the first of the two novels, so that they may be presented to some merciful publisher (one or two agents remain untried, but one is unsure about trying them) and spread their well-beloved wings.

There are more paradises to make; one begins to make them simply by asking, and hoping for mercy.