Into the Mystery

One of the symptoms of my mother’s illness is that her healthy blood cells are being replaced by proliferating white cells, and not the good kind. This can lead to anemia, infections, and low blood oxygen. It’s this last one I blame for Mom’s “visions,” as she calls them, but it could also be the dying process in general—one foot on either side of the thin veil.

My mother has always had a blurry line between dreaming and waking. She talks and laughs in her sleep, her hands wave & gesture & work, and when she wakes, she’s sure what she dreamed has really happened.

Now, however, even that blurry line is gone. Waking and dreaming are one fluid, undulating space. Memories come in waves, some from the smallest details of her life 70 or more years ago. When she’s able to sit at the kitchen table, I can see on her face the almost-excruciating concentration it takes her to hold herself in the present moment. It exhausts her. Sometimes she can’t do it, and she drifts into that timeless liquid space again.

When she loses her tenuous hold, language leaves her too. This is especially hard for her, a person for whom language has been a matter of pride—until this last hospital stay, she was a constant, voracious reader. She wrote poems. She regularly beat us all at Scrabble, then re-told stories of her victories for days. But in this new life, things are sometimes renamed: Sherbet becomes “shaggy”; a velvet sweat suit she wants to wear becomes “furry elegance”; she scrunches up her brow, quietly mumbles a couple tries, then gives up trying to remember “coffee”. But then, when I ask her how she feels one morning, she rises to the surface and her wit returns: “Just ducky,” she says.

My mother’s emotional landscape is fuzzy now too. She can go from weeping and tender to anxious and angry in a sudden, sharp u-turn that defies understanding. She laughs in her sleep. Or yells. Or begs. One night, she asked me to lie down with her and keep her safe, and when I did, she said, “Get up. You’re crushing me,” though we weren’t touching. One minute she’ll say I’m starving her and waiting for her to die, and the next minute she’ll cling to my arm, telling me over and over how much she loves me. Sometimes silence is the only thing that will settle her. Sometimes silence terrifies her. I know this is all the filters dissolving. I’m learning not to be jarred or hurt by anything she says, and I’m learning when to respond and when to keep still.

The visions can sometimes be alarming. In recent days, she thought someone was making noise in her closet; she thought someone was trying to open the back door in the middle of the night; she thought nine women were in her room having dinner. She saw a man sitting in her rocking chair and sat up in bed to ask him, “Sir, will you please turn on the light?” She scolded me for spending every night at the bar (she often thought the nurses in the hospital were drinking and smoking down the hall late at night). She told me she needed to get “out of this place to somewhere where they’ll take care of me” (I wouldn’t get up at 4 a.m. to bring her sherbet). At 3 a.m. one morning, I found her at the kitchen table with all the lights on, waiting for someone to bring her sherbet. No cane, no walker. It’s a miracle she didn’t fall. Yesterday morning, after a particularly good night’s sleep (a record 5-hour stretch), she said a little girl woke her up, saying “Welcome, welcome!”

I believe much of what’s happening right now is her nervous system unraveling. I believe it’s biology and chemistry. But, some idealistic child in me hopes these night visitors are angels, spirit guides, or loved ones gone before her, come to comfort her and help her find her way through the veil. And in truth, in spite of science, in spite of the fact that everyone who’s ever lived has or will die, no one really knows what’s on the other side. For my mom, who is not religious and has always pooh-poohed most belief systems, this mystery may be the hardest part of the process.