Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

The End

(August, 2002)

I didn't need a doctor to tell me it was over.

On the way to no longer being, a person suffering from a terminal disease like cancer ceases to be his or herself. During this time, which is hopefully as brief as possible for all involved, family or friends (or medical staff, if they're sufficiently human) will get the message and take immediate action. The objective, you quickly ascertain, is no longer to help the person get back to being the person they were, but to help ease the resolution that Nature is not always interested in accommodating.

The five weeks beginning in late July were not unlike portions of the previous five years in miniature: good days, okay days, bad days, and awful days. But there hadn't been too many terrible days (most of those involved what each of us, in our own ways, experienced when we were alone, when we could finally afford to let our defenses down and enable our fears and suspicions to stalk us in the open, usually at night when the silence conspires against anyone who is hiding from something).

Eventually, and entirely too soon, based on what the doctors told us-even though they told us nothing-the worst days arrived, days worse than anything we ever could have conceived or prepared for (which might explain why the doctors don't tell you anything).

Eventually, and not entirely too late, hospice arrived. We told my mother about it, and she endorsed our decision (What took you so long, she didn't need to ask). The morning the nurse arrived-a gentle saint sent from heaven (because, as you may see for yourself someday, some clichés are true, and you're grateful for them)-was the worst day. My mother, shaking and distracted, an innocent bystander as pain and fear reverberated inside, each struggling to assume full possession of her decimated body.

(My sister and I looking at each other, relieved that at least we had been together-in our mother's room, in the house we grew up in-the previous afternoon, the day our mother finally succumbed, the day the pressure and the dread-at long last-had become too overwhelming for her to bear; when she told us to make the suffering go away; when she begged the God who was not in that room to help relieve her agony; when she reverted back to being the child she couldn't remember ever having been, sobbing at the impunity with which this disease assaulted her; when she resignedly looked into our eyes, no longer a mother or a wife or a woman, now just a cornered animal in a cold alley, unable to see or understand what was tormenting her, and beseeched us with a desperation I hope never to hear in another person's voice to make it stop; when she said Please, make it stop, and we said, earnestly and with as much honesty as we could convey, We will.)

Her grandchildren, the two beings she loved best of anything in the world, buzzed obliviously around that same room the following morning, the morning the nurse arrived, August 13, 2002, the moment, the exact second, she became somebody else. She frowned (she was still twitching, her system yet to respond to the new medicine she had yet to receive); her expression, first impatient, then indifferent; the way she waved her hand (Take them out of here, she didn't need to say). She didn't say that and she didn't necessarily think that; she was incapable of thinking that.

This is when I knew it was over. This is when I understood that the end had begun, because this was no longer my mother sitting-distracted and shaking-before me, this was instead a woman who had entered the last stage of a long, drawn-out, devastating dance with the illness she had loathed and feared more than anything else her entire adult life. She was no longer herself and she was no longer entirely with us; she was in a different place, that place some of us are obliged to go when our bodies then our brains are assailed, inhabited by some malignant host, and we heed a primal imperative to follow that path until we arrive at the place where we no longer need to walk or cry or breathe or believe.