Lorraine Murray

  The call comes from Chateau Westmount. The numbers stare out from the screen on my cell phone,
   “There’s been a change in your mother.”
   It’s Poubek, the nurse in charge on the third floor.  The third floor where my mother has lived for four years.
   “I’m coming right away, I’ll be there in about five minutes. “ I look at my watch  it’s 10:30 in the morning. I’m at my usual coffee shop, at the Vic Market. Two blocks away. Under the Pilates studio and yoga gym where the wealthy Westmounters  go to maintain their svelte forms.
   Already I am thinking why did I go for coffee, I should have gone to visit her first but the truth is I couldn’t look at her in the morning, bleak in her bed, where she had to be strapped in for so many months.

  The call comes from Chateau Westmount. The numbers stare out from the screen on my cell phone,
   “There’s been a change in your mother.”
   It’s Poubek, the nurse in charge on the third floor.  The third floor where my mother has lived for four years.
   “I’m coming right away, I’ll be there in about five minutes. “ I look at my watch  it’s 10:30 in the morning. I’m at my usual coffee shop, at the Vic Market. Two blocks away. Under the Pilates studio and yoga gym where the wealthy Westmounters  go to maintain their svelte forms.
   Already I am thinking why did I go for coffee, I should have gone to visit her first but the truth is I couldn’t look at her in the morning, bleak in her bed, where she had to be strapped in for so many months.
   “She doesn’t remember that she can’t walk,” Dr. Gauthier, a renowned neurologist had told me that almost three  and a half years  ago.  After a fifteen minute assessment of my mother he informed me that her slow decline and gradual loss of speech was caused by Alzheimer’s. That was August 2008. Since that time her speech had shifted to a tumble of syllables merging with each other.  She was convinced she was still talking to us. Occasionally an intact word like “tomorrow” or “yes” would surface out of the mumbles.
   In October, two months previously, as I was leaving her, I said, “See you tomorrow, Mom,  tomorrow.”
   She spoke it clearly and looked right in to my eyes.  She was sitting in her wheelchair in front of the nursing station, her usual place when we had to leave her. My sister and I got used to searching for meaning in the way she looked at us, the little blink of her eyes in happy surprise, clapping her hands upon seeing one of us coming out of the elevator, raising her eyebrows in disapproval.  
   My sister and I arrive about the same time.  My mother is lying on her back, under a powder blue quilt. Her face is pale and slack, her eyelids open a margin. I have looked at her before,  thinking this is what it will look like when she is dying, this is what it will look like when she is dead. I go to her and put my arms around her, raising her back a little, not wanting to disturb her, careful not to move her bandaged legs. I want to take her to me, my little mother who always was dressed fabulously with a Betty Ford hairdo, clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue, now she is lying, breathing a little too quickly, ma petite maman.
   I go and speak to the nurse, I ask about my mother’s breathing patterns. The breathing starts to shift – there is a longer space between breaths. The slow breathing continues. Now there is a slight gurgle in her throat. The nurse is beside me, quiet and calm. I like the feeling I get when she stands next to me. She checks my mother and says she can give her something for the rattle if it gets worse. Do you think she can hear us?   I ask the nurse. She nods. Do you think she will open her eyes more?  The nurse shakes her head. 
   In my mother’s room my sister and I sit and watch her breathing. We are poised waiting for the next breath. Everything is still as a Blue Heron at low tide. That is my mother’s favourite bird, my mother who loves blue.  When I come upon a Blue Heron I know I will always think of her.
   I call our minister – he is not exactly “our minister”. Neither my sister nor I actually live in Montreal. We have been back and forth over the last four years to attend to our mother. Our minister has come to us in a serendipitous way through the sister of a mutual friend.
   I have his cell phone programmed into my phone, thank God for that – 
Please pick up the phone, he does.
   “My mother may be dying, can you come today?”
   “I think so – I have to rearrange a meeting, I will call you back as soon as I can organize that.”
   Please, please, at one o’clock he arrives – he has brownish red hair the colour of a robin’s throat, a boyish smile and a humble manner, he comes to her right side. He begins to read “The Lord’s My Shepherd”.
   I stand beside him and lay my hand on her brow. Brow is such a beautiful word, the front of the seat of human intelligence. My mother’s brain has shrunk 40 percent – that was the declaration by Dr. Bacher on Sept. 20th, 2007, the frontal temporal lobe, shrunk. Until then, shrinking was only a problem associated with laundry –  this was definitely more serious than laundry.
   My mother who loved to do laundry, my mother who was like the great laundress Mrs. Tiggy Winkle, immortalized by Beatrix Potter.  Mrs. Tiggy Winkle, who, under all her starched petticoats, was a hedgehog who did all the laundry of the wild animals in the wild wood. My mother loves Beatrix Potter.  I read to her from Mrs. Tiggy Winkle and Squirrel Nutkin when she was in the hospital two weeks previously.
   She sat up in bed and held the small white books and looked at the water colour drawings of Mrs. Tiggy Winkle in her frilled bonnet and Squirrel Nutkin holding an acorn in his paws. As if these curious creatures with light hearts could stave off the long darkness.
   It is two days before the winter solstice, about five in the evening.  The light is draining from the day. I suddenly get the strong desire to sing Compline for my mother. I call Polly from my meditation group. Can you give me Kerry’s number?  I call Kerry  he picks up the phone. Normally he doesn’t answer long distance, he explains, but because it is a 250 area code he thinks it could be his brother who lives in BC.
   I need someone to come and sing Compline for my mother, can you come? Can you get in a taxi and come right away?
   Twenty minutes later he arrives.  Marvelous, how he comes so easily to our side. Formal and quiet, he says hello to my mother and hands out the small booklets, weighted with Latin verses, interspersed with English. We start to sing to my mother, the pleas for help when all human help has proved insufficient, the song of sweet rest that will carry my mother into the immensity. My son comes in and joins in the singing. The singing moves through the room in a kind of up-swell, lifting us beyond confines.
   Running through these hours are ripples of meaning, running with the outgoing tide.
   After the singing Kerry and my son leave. Earlier that day, my son sat with my mother and spoke softly his goodbye. I decide to lie down beside my mother around dinner time, my sister is drinking wine, white wine;  she states it like this is one time that no one can give her a hard time. I am drinking tea from an old metal teapot and eating Scottish shortbread, nibbling it, making it last, tea gives a kind of rosy comfort now.
   Suzanne, from the dining room downstairs, in her black and white French waitress uniform, Suzanne, who sometimes clanged the dishes as she put them in the grey tubs, enters softly, formal. She stands beside my mother’s bed.
   “Je veux dire “au revoir” a Mme. Murray. Elle à toujours été très gentille.”
   “Merci, Suzanne, merci beaucoup.”
   Words are a strange economy now.
   Betsy comes in to the room. She looks after her 98 year old mother, Helena, who looks like an enormous cherub parked in her wheelchair, her apple cheeks, her eyes usually closed, the hair tied tightly back in a mother’s bun. Betsy is always beside her mother, feeding her, wiping the dribble from the mouth, much better than my sister and I have ever done.  Betsy’s mother is 98, her birthday was celebrated in the spring at the penthouse with white cake and special Greek treats Betsy made. I went and ate white cake. My sister is alarmed at such a life that refuses to quit. 
   “God, if Lally lives to 99 like Betty Saudek – she’s going to be 100 this year.”
   “That’s not likely to happen – that’s just one person that you happen to know – you can’t fixate on isolated cases,” I reassure my sister.  
   From the other side of my mother’s bed I command Betsy “You’re Greek Orthodox – sing a prayer for my mother.” She pulls herself up straight and strong and breaks in to a Greek prayer that is thick with Greek words like a Galactaburrico. Betsy leaves the room. The words of the prayer remain beside my mother like a Greek column.
   As I lie down beside my mother, I think that is what Shannon did when her mother was dying. Then I wonder why I didn’t just think to do it myself and had to have this little prompt.  My mother is at last someone I can embrace completely. I hold her and lay the little red mohair sweater I knit for her three years ago, to keep her warm in the evening – it was scratchy and she resisted wearing it at first but then came to like it. Now I lay it across her chest which is flat and working to guard the holy breath. I rub my hands back and forth over her chest, back and forth, my hands tending my mother’s breath. 
   You are my little mommy, you are going to go to heaven, you are a good mommy, I speak in to her ear I tell her over and over, I keep looking for the little slit of open eye and wish I could enter there, a little twitch of her eyelid, she understood, I tell my sister Madeleine, I am sure, I am not sure, I am sure, I am not sure.
   We are leaning towards heaven, I am sure, I am not sure, heaven wards, I want to help her get to heaven, how can I help, I have no ideas, there are no ideas, only my mother’s body against mine, her precious body which will soon close its portals.
   It is almost ten at night. My mother’s breathing is rapid. Between the breaths there are periods of no breathing. I go and tell the nurse. Apnea, the nurse calls it.  She says the rapid breathing could mean it is close to the end. I go back to my apartment across the street to get my night gown. I am afraid to leave. My mother may die when I am gone. Who ever thought you could control such a departure, but in our culture we have these notions of how it should go. All notions are washed away. I am standing in an immensity not of my understanding,
   I come back and tell the nurse that her breathing has become more rapid. She checks my mother and then leaves the room.
   I am alone with my mother. I lie down beside her, another nurse has brought a mattress in and put it at the end of the room. I am prepared to spend the night should she have distress and need me but I am already wondering will I get a good sleep, and thinking why should I be worried about such a thing at a time like this.
   I lie beside her in my red Scotty dog emblazoned nightgown and lie there for a few minutes, then I see her neck muscles twitch slightly. This is unusual. I lay my hand on her chest. And wait for the rising, wait for the rising,  wait for the rising,
   Her chest is still – I draw my hand across her cheek, her colour starts to wash out, her lips grey, I go to get Penny, the nurse. I don’t want a grey mother. Penny comes back. She pulls the sheets back and checks my mother’s legs. I look away. I don’t want to see all the signs of death. That is for her to do.
   My mother has her curly golden stuffed dog, the one my sister gave her to keep her company.  My mother has the little golden dog across her chest, clutched in her small bruised hand. 
   “Now you can walk your dog in heaven,” Penny stands beside her:  Penny with hair the colour of lemonade, she loves my mother,
   “Goodbye little spitfire.” She smiles down at my mother, ma petite maman.