OCTOBER 12, 2023 – By early 2017 Mother and UB were locked in competition for final landing. In mid-March, however, UB summoned the energy for one last display of obsessional behavior. On the 16th, I recorded in my journal:
Yesterday and the day before UB called me about eight times. I never answered. [Queequeg] sent me a text saying the worry was payment of [RE] taxes [due April 1] and that UB wouldn’t stop until I called back. I hated to torture the old man, but I simply cannot manage a conversation with him. It would go nowhere and sideways and backwards. Sadly, he is simply impossible. But apparently he’s feisty despite the medical assessment last week that he is “failing to thrive,” code for, “he’s going downhill rapidly.” The call from CareOne was to recommend that he be evaluated for hospice.
If UB was obsessed with one certainty in life—taxes—while in denial of the other (his impending demise), Mother’s mind was in the afterlife ahead of herself. I recorded the scene:
[March 27] Old age has not been kind to Mother. For the past several days she has been in pain, non-communicative (apart from moaning). When I visited her she was lying in bed. She said hardly a word. When I held a water cup up to her mouth and had her draw from the straw, she could barely do so—but then she didn’t swallow, so the water just dribbled out on her pillow. Later, with great effort she sat up; later still, and also with great effort, she stood up, but then became all disoriented and turned, facing the bed with her walker behind her. I got her eventually to sit back down on the bed. She looked up toward the ceiling and said, “Angels.” I have little doubt that she did, in fact, see angels.
Six days later, my journal entry captured the latest news from New Jersey:
I received a text from [Queequeg] yesterday that hospice care was now in place for UB and that a chaplain had talked to UB about funeral services. The end is approaching for the old eccentric. I found myself pondering this as I progressed through the day. I’m not sure that he’s enjoying much in life.
On April 3 I wrote, “We stopped at Mother’s on the way home. She was moving very slowly and though her destination was the dining room table, she seemed to be set against arriving there. She said barely a word to us.”
Less than a week later, Mother took a bad fall, and according to a caregiver, Mother had “made a large crashing sound.” (No one was present as an eye-witness.) We worried about a head injury—ironically, the same misfortune that had led to Grandpa’s demise at exactly the same age. My sisters held vigil. I wrote about it:
Elsa and Jenny were at Mother’s bedside or close to it most of the day trying to comfort Mother and interact with the staff and hospice personnel. I was on hand twice—once late in the afternoon and again in the evening when Cory, Blake, and Illiana were on hand. Beth joined me then too.
Mother has had a difficult past seven to 10 years. In her old age, her mix of mental conditions prevented her from enjoying much in life. It is hard to see a person this way and with no hope of improvement. Her faith, which seemed to serve her so well, or at least so visibly and constantly, seems to have abandoned her. Even music, which played such a significant role in her life, has gone quiet.
Easter Sunday came four days later. Mother was on final approach. Her wings no longer had lift. My journal account for the day reflected the descent of Mother’s life juxtaposed to the ascent of the Christians’ Lord and Savior.
“Alleluia! He is risen!” so say the Christians of their Lord and Savior, Jesus. The whole story is rather fantastic, as is the story of each of the world’s major religions and a good many of the minor ones too. But in any event, the sun has risen yet again—or as the scientists tell us, the world, the earth continues to rotate.
Mother clings to life. I thought she might end her earthly existence this weekend—today, as a matter of fact; a day particularly appropriate for her, given the time and dedication she devoted to her faith.
The next day I wrote,
Mother lay on her deathbed, detached from life in all but the final way. Beth and I visited her late in the afternoon. We found her in a deep sleep. She looked different—smaller, more frail, wizened, as I would imagine her appearance if she were to live another four or five years. The face twitching is gone. She does not have long now. [A]fter dark I returned to the place when I learned that Elsa and Jenny would be there too. If Mother was going to die while they were there, I wanted to be present too. She didn’t die, though I thought her shallow breaths could now be counted before her last. [. . .]
When it became apparent that it was not time for Mother to leave this life, I felt an urge to go, but my sisters remained, and I did not want to be the one to break up the gathering. I did not say anything, but I wanted for all three of us to stay together or leave together.
As 10:00, they finally showed signs of the latter inclination. As we exited the home, I noticed the bright stars leading the way to our parked vehicles. With Jenny walking on one side of me and Elsa on the other, I put an arm around the shoulders of each and remarked how much Nina would want us to be together in our vigil at Mother’s side.
My journal entry two days later recorded the inevitable:
At 10:59 a.m. yesterday, Mother breathed her last. Jenny was with her. The message by text read, “She is gone.” A day so long anticipated finally arrived but its inevitability does not fully prepare [you] for [your] reaction. Only when you actually cross the line do you know how it feels—on one side of the line, before the person leaves, you have one set of emotions, and on the other side you experience another set. You can envision them from the perspective of the first side, but you cannot know for sure until you experience them.
A tremendous sadness has filled my present emotional reservoir. Late yesterday evening I hiked over to Como and walked south/southwest from the large holding pond to the tee at the top of the ski hill. The darkened sky was filled with a thick overcast, yielding no starlight or moonlight. Earlier rain had soaked the earth, like tears of sorrow on the face of humanity. From the hollow, the silhouetted trees higher up the slope and along the ridge gave the impression of macabre figures in the night. The gloom and sorrow associated with Mother’s death fell upon me.
Before Mother’s funeral, Jenny flew back to New York for a short stay. She was assigned the unhappy task of telling UB in person of Mother’s death. In the event, however, Jenny altered the script—on the advice of the caregivers at CareOne. UB’s condition was too fragile to hear such troubling news. As she later reported to me, she’d enjoyed a nice visit with UB. She’d taken him outside in his wheelchair to enjoy the fine weather and spring flowers and landscaping in the immediate surroundings. He was very frail, said Jenny, and tired and wracked by a terrible cough, though his mind was still sharp. When UB asked about Mother, Jenny answered that Mother “had taken a really bad fall and was not doing well at all.”
I was struck by how much Jenny’s message to UB resembled her message to me when she was seven and I was 10, and Dad and I had just returned from a two-week trip to the Boundary Waters. He and I had arrived home when everyone else was out. The living creature I’d missed the most had been my cat, and it was nowhere to be found. Its dish wasn’t in the kitchen corner where it had always been. I feared the worst.
When Mother and Jenny pulled into the driveway, they were happy to see us. Jenny was all smiles. When I asked, “Where’s kitty?” Sudden gloom and sadness chased all delight from her face.
“Bad news,” she said, looking my straight in the eye. “Kitty’s gone.” Her honest bluntness surprised me. I knew what that meant, and I couldn’t bear it. I tore up to my room and cried my eyes out.
On that same call with Jenny when she was describing how she’d fielded UB’s question, I also thought about what she’d observed a few months earlier—that UB’s attachment to his cat had been so deep that when the pet finally expired, “something about UB changed.” She ascribed to his cat’s death, UB’s own subsequent precipitous decline.
Mother in her tattered biplane had won—or lost—the competition with UB, whose rag-tag plane had buzzed the tower one last time. It had been a close race in the end. Mother had landed, but UB was on final approach.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
