If Only You Would Read Proust

Rachel Cline

Word Count 2202

We had been sitting for an hour or so, the visiting hospice nurse and I, while my mother breathed. I had the better chair, which gave me a view of the woodcut above her bed, in which Mom sat cross-legged on the beach, dressed in red, drawing on a pad. It was titled “At Work,” and she’d made it twenty years earlier, not long after she’d first started to draw.

Outside the sliding door, I could see a sliver of bright bougainvillea draped over the recycling and garbage bins in the alley. Three days earlier, I had been summoned by a phone call from a different hospice nurse, and I’d flown from New York to Los Angeles. The message had been chipper sounding, and—as always—the stranger referred to my mother as “Mom,” as though she and all the rest of them were my recently discovered siblings. She had included instructions for how to get through if I were to call back at (for example) “three a.m. your time,” so I knew that this was probably it, the final turn. I called for the details: her breathing had changed and she was no longer responsive to her name. I knew it would take me eight hours to get there, at least, but I went. My mother was not going to die among strangers, if I could help it.

She was at that time living in a care home staffed by Russian women in West Los Angeles. The other five residents were also old but seemed mostly ambulatory: they sat at the table for meals and occupied a row of lounge chairs in the front room in the mornings—reading newspapers, or at least handling them. No one ever coherently replied to my greetings. The place was clean, never smelled of anything worse than cabbage, and was usually enlivened by Russian-language soap operas broadcast from the wall-mounted TV. The women were unfailingly kind to my 93-year old mother, rubbing her with lotion, calling her darling, telling her she was pretty, and eliciting smiles if not words when they did so. Mom had recently run out of words and had only moans and screams left to offer. Her cries were not of pain, though. They were more like those of an infant, declaring I’m here! I’m here!, except that the gleam of sarcastic mistrust in her eyes was something no baby will ever muster.

“You should just move her to New York,” my best friend had said at every previous crisis. “Why can't you move her to New York?” asked my boss, each time I took time off work to intervene. “Is there some reason she can't just come live with you?” asked a clueless social worker, upon learning that I had a one-bedroom apartment in an elevator building, and no partner or kids. But I could not move my mother into my apartment. If I did my blood would boil down to rust. Nowhere in the five boroughs was distant enough: if the subway could get me there, I might wake one night from an Ambien-induced sleep to find myself stabbing Mom repeatedly.

Author’s mother in younger days. Photo by Henry Cline

Three days later, she was still not dead. I watched her sleep, and stare, and fend off imaginary enemies with a Dracula’s cape motion of her arm. On the night of my arrival, I had found her awake and alert: upon seeing me she had issued a noise that I recognized to be the words, “You came!”, but by the next morning she had resumed her semi-coma. The hospice team had her on morphine as well as a transdermal patch of Fentanyl that the nurses handled as though it might bite. They'd showed me how to keep her mouth moist with fruit-flavored glucose swabs that she latched onto with gusto, sucking like an infant. She also had an oxygen cannula, which accounted for her generally good color and appearance. On that third morning, a new hospice nurse named Laura noticed that the dial on Mom’s oxygen was turned up to ten. “Why’s it so high?” she asked me. I had no idea. “It’s not really doing her any good,” she said.

“Should we turn it down?” I asked.

“We could, but that will speed up her death, so you should think about it.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, and she had a big gold cross around her neck, which I took to mean she had God on her side. Everyone in my family is an atheist, although my mother had pursued other options at various points along her way, including Sufism, Jewishness, Transcendental Meditation, and Quaker Meeting.

Laura had asked me a few questions earlier that morning: where I lived, whether I was getting paid for time off from work, and how long all this had been going on. I had asked her some in return, learning that she’d grown up in Boyle Heights (a long-ago Jewish, but more recently Mexican, neighborhood) and that she’d gotten interested in hospice when her own mother was dying from leukemia. I’d told her I was sorry for her loss, that she must have been very young then, which had caused both our eyes to fill. It seemed to me that Laura understood how it felt to be me—watching and waiting in this house full of strangers, then spending my nights in the unfamiliar apartment of a recently divorced friend I hadn’t seen in years; I had run out of clean clothes and small talk by day two.

“Speed it up by how much?” I asked.

“She could go in a few hours."

I went to ask the Russian lady on duty why Mom’s oxygen was up so high. “Higher is better, no?” she answered. In other words, life at all costs and for as long as possible—an honorable position, but not one I had ever held. I then sat outside in the fierce August heat and asked myself if it was really this simple, could I just turn down the volume on my mother?

I had blown the chance to end her life once before. On an equally hot summer day seven years earlier, Mom had slipped into an unresponsive state in her room at Cape Cod Hospital. The nurse pressed the “code” button and I stood by as the medical team rushed to Mom’s bedside and returned her to life. I knew I had the legal power to yell, “Stop, she has a DNR!”, but I also knew that I was furious at my mother and to allow her to die in the heat of anger would be to murder her, so I had let the moment pass.

I’d been angry at her for many reasons, starting with her decision, when I was ten, to leave my father (who had loved her helplessly) for a man who declined to marry her; and then for moving us to the suburbs with a different man when I was halfway through high school; and also for failing to notice when that guy’s 26-year old son kept trying to rape me. Of course, none of that was as straightforward as I’ve made it sound and, in my forties, I found my way to Alanon, where I learned enough to try again at being my mother’s daughter. I loved her, after all, and as she lived alone in a place where the road, the phone line, and the electricity succumbed regularly to coastal weather events, it seemed increasingly likely that I would outlive her.

There followed a period when things between us were relatively calm, as long as we limited our conversations to politics and books (“If only you would read Proust, Rachel. Then you would understand me!”) But the combination of dementia and alcoholism eventually spoiled the peace: Mom crashed her car and had her license revoked. She broke her ankle on the ice-pond that was her driveway and almost froze to death. She set her house on fire and was rescued by the NY Times delivery guy. There was black mold in the guest room, a mouse infestation in the pantry, and a peeping Tom (possibly imaginary) at the edge of the marsh. On one visit, I found that she was hoarding Milk of Magnesia like an alcoholic with a secret stash—the shitstorms were literal. There was also her escape from rehab midway through a round of IV treatment for Lyme disease, and her subsequent commitment (by me) to a psych ward, where drugs ultimately produced such a profoundly positive change in her that I wondered if she had been mentally ill the whole time I’d known her, and just too smart to get caught.

After the psych unit, I’d hired caregivers: one, an adorable and competent RN named Katie, referred to Mom and her friend Nell as “kike cunts” and (it later turned out) had been squatting—with her husband, the local heroin supplier—in the home of a recently deceased client, attempting to declare ownership by eminent domain. Mom accused the next one, an extraordinary beauty with green eyes, of molesting her in the shower. There was one who lived in her car, one who had diabetes and drank like a fish, and one who came by public transportation (a journey that included a five-mile walk on Mom’s end). Finally, there was one great one, Pam, who gave my mother two last years in her own home.

Nevertheless, there came the day in August 2016 when I tricked my mother into getting into a car with a “physical therapist,” who was going to take her to spend a few weeks at a “spa” so that my brother and I could get her house ready for another hurricane season. (She had bitten me the last time I had tried to talk her into entering a residential unit voluntarily.) I had spent two weeks preparing: secretly packing her bags, setting up her room at a wholly artificial place called Bridges, preparing talking points for Pam, Nell, et al, and desperately attempting to re-home or, if necessary, euthanize Mom’s near-feral cat, Dido. The look on my mother’s face when I showed up at Bridges later that day was not at all demented. She had clocked my careful arrangements of books and décor from home. “I’m never going to leave this place, am I?” she said, icily.

“It’s just for the winter,” I lied.

I often revisited my failure to let her die at Cape Cod Hospital, and wondered how I might behave if I got a second chance. I researched death rates for women in their 90s with dementia in institutional settings who were taking olanzapine, sertraline, lorazepam, and atropine. It seemed highly unlikely she would last more than a few months. It also seemed highly unlikely that she had survived the preceding years of drama and mayhem, but there she was. I recorded my thoughts in a shapeless document titled “Ethics,” where I also argued with myself about whether it would be okay to withhold her flu vaccine, or maybe the antibiotics for her next (inevitable) urinary tract infection. If she could no longer chew (as happened at one point), and would not eat the slurry that Bridges presented as food (she wouldn’t), could I permit her to starve? (It turned out she had thrush. I had it treated and her appetite returned.)

I wrote in that document that Barbara—my real mother, pre-dementia—would never have consented to fork over $8k per month to “Epoch,” the corporate owner of Bridges (though Mom, the demented version, ultimately concluded that her residency there was a new job she had gotten—or, occasionally, a cult she had joined: “Who is this Epoch guy, and why do we all obey him?”). I wrote that she would have hated for my brother and I to sell her beautiful house on the marsh to finance that cult/job/abomination and that, if she had heard us screaming bloody murder at each other the way we began to as the listing date for the house approached, she would have wept. She would definitely not have wanted us to throw everything she owned into the dumpster that moldered and rusted in the driveway for several months, nor would she have found it funny that I had filled fifteen large trash bags with her collection of throw pillows.

After a year, Mom was thrown out of Bridges for biting. Six months later, the same thing happened at the next place we sent her. The care home with the Russian ladies had been a miraculous find.

An hour after turning down the oxygen, Laura tapped me and indicated my mother’s stillness between breaths: “She’ll go soon, I think.” I had already called my brother and told him Mom was dying, I had also packed her few remaining belongings. I got up from my chair and sat beside my mother’s diminished body, looking into her eyes and stroking her thick white hair. I knew she was frightened. “It’s okay,” I told her, “I know you did the best you could.” She jerked forward a bit as she took her last gulp of air. “I love you, Mom,” I said, weeping.

Her blue eyes were clear and focused, but not on me.

Rachel is the author of three novels including The Question Authority. If Only You Would Read Proust is an excerpt from a longer piece that she will probably never stop rewriting.