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I am deleting the voice memos on my phone and come to one dated February 2018, without any location or title. When I hit play, I don’t know what it is. A voice, moaning, then shifting into incomprehensible speech. I suddenly realize it is my mother. I was in my mother’s room at the nursing home, Mom on morphine and dying. Why had I recorded this very painful time?
As I listen, Mom’s voice becomes clear. She repeats something again and again, not meaningful except for its tone. From groaning fear, through agitation, and into great good humor and laughter. In the background, I hear my voice and my sister’s, laughing through our sobs. And then the recording ends. I delete it—it is too painful to listen to ever again—but I am deeply moved by it, stirred to the core. My mother, who was so many things to me, sharing one last experience, so full of the mystery of life: suffering, isolation, connection, joy.
The richness of my mother’s voice comes to me again several times in the next few days: sitting in an old Congregational church with its white walls and big antique glass windows with the summer sun pouring in, I listen to the joys and concerns of my friends and neighbors: happiness at the birth of a fourth great-grandchild; worry about a big and unexpected car repair; gratitude for a timely visit from parents during a busy week without childcare; affliction of dizziness after a brain tumor was removed. The iteration of life’s rhythms.
Later in the week, witnessing a rehearsal of a new opera, full of laughter and pathos as two men sing their lives out with all the complicated and painful love of brotherhood. The music reminds me of Sondheim: clever and beautiful and starkly emotional, not what I expected from the mouths of two 62-year-old baritones and yet, so very much who these men are: vulnerable, resilient, wounded, compassionate. Human.
And then yesterday, sitting outside in more summer sunshine with a client coping with physical decline. I remember him active, able to transform space, groups, and mood into a concert hall or a spiritual temple, as required. Now he sits in a wheelchair, increasingly “frozen,” afflicted by ALS. We meet each other’s eyes, and all four fill with tears.
After a long look, he says quietly, “My eyes hurt from tears. Can you get the roll of toilet paper on the table inside?” As I walk back out to the deck, I tear a piece of toilet paper off the roll to wipe his eyes. He is too locked to be able to do it himself. As I lean over him, I realize I don’t feel awkward or shy; we’re in that zone people achieve as they move toward death: bare, and unafraid. The first wipe is, he says, “too gentle,” and I press harder as I try a second time. He opens his eye to see if the tears are gone; the pupil is hazel: green with flecks of gold and brown. His dark lashes, now thick with tears, frame the eye.
I move around him and wipe the other eye: the same breathtaking beauty, like a piece of sun-shot quartz, shocks me again when he opens this eye. Sitting a yard away, I had never seen this stunning feature in all its detail. As I help him up close like this, he is suddenly revealed. And then he speaks again, his soft voice full of laughter and embarrassment. “And now I have to blow my nose.” We laugh together as I tear another piece of paper from the roll, fold it up, and hold it against his nose while he blows. I wipe, miss a spot, wipe again. Having no children, I have never wiped anyone else’s nose before.
When I sit back down, we talk quietly about the options of disposition of his body after death, ultimately focusing on donation of one’s body to a medical school. I have made arrangements for my own to be handled thus. It is a frank and practical conversation, and he smiles when I comment lightly that his body, like mine, might be particularly interesting to medical students. “I always assume they want to see what happens with a chronic illness like my diabetes,” I say, “and I expect your body would be more rare.” Our eyes meet again, hold silently.
“Would you like me to get the information for you?” I ask, knowing that both telephone and computer are almost impossible for him to use at this point. He smiles, a rare crinkle, and says with a sturdy assurance, “Yes. That would be really helpful.”
We move on to his obituary (already written, by him), a grave stone marker (no—no children, no need). “I went to my parents’ graves once. It was awful. They weren’t there.” I know this man holds intense grief, but now is not the time to discuss the potential benefits of public memorials.
He goes on, “I want to have everything planned, so my wife doesn’t have to wrestle with anything. Decisions are hard for her. She’ll have to decide about the house, but she will have some money--if I don’t need to spend it all on the aides before I die.” I look at the house, built into the environment around it. It’s not an easy house, but it is very beautiful. It reminds me of his eyes.
He’s watching me as I look around. I smile and reach for my bag. “I should go. I’ve been here a long time. You may be tired.” He nods that he is, but again there is a smile. “It seems like this kind of talk is helpful,” I say hesitantly. “Oh yes,” he says. “No one else wants to talk about this.”
As he wheels himself toward the door to go back inside, I walk beside him. As he pauses to make the turn into the house, I rest my hand on his shoulder for a moment. He doesn’t look at me; he can’t turn his head. But we don’t need to look, or speak. Sharing the mystery is enough.
