Stiffarming the Grim Reaper

 (The following is a bit of a departure from the normal mishegas around here, and probably more for my sake than yours, so feel free to visit the rest of the Internet, and we will be back to our regularly scheduled foolishness here posthaste.)

            I lost my mother a year ago today. The impact has been much greater on other parts of my life than my imaginary internet persona here, but still present. I lost my father in 2006, and was able to share that here on The Gurgling Cod in a way that felt good. I followed up with another reminiscence on the second anniversary of his death, and I was pleased with that, given the circumstances.  Somehow, my mother, certainly a larger figure in my life in terms of food, was harder to celebrate here.

            Back in September, I read this, which inspired me to try to tell the story of those first three weeks of December, 2009. There is some exposition before we get to the part of the story that is food-related.

            My mom got a pretty grim cancer diagnosis in August of 2003, and managed far more and far better years than the odds would have suggested. When the end came, it came relatively quickly. In mid-October, she was still driving herself; in mid-December, she was dead.  We got news of metastasis to the brain in early November, which began the shift to hospice care.

           Hospice is great. I am enormously grateful to the many nurses who worked with us in those last weeks. As bad as it was, it was much better than being in a hospital. There are, however, two challenges for the family of the hospice patient: first, shifting the paradigm from trying to help someone get better to trying to help someone die gracefully takes some getting used to, if the hospice patient is, say, your mom. Second, as people who are in possession of a system which they think is better and different than the usual system, folks who work for hospice, like Quakers or Linux users, are keen to remind you of the virtues of their system. One of the things they say is “hospice seeks neither to accelerate nor to delay death.”

            This part did not work well with our family’s plans. At that point, my brother and I, as my mother’s only two children, had not managed to produce any grandchildren in our combined 86 years on earth, to my mother’s abiding sorrow and disappointment. As it happened, that was about to change, thanks to my brother, and especially thanks to his wife, who was pregnant with twins and nearing the end of months of bed rest in December of 2009.

            The imminent arrival of the twins, and the imminent departure of my mother, presented some challenges, one might say. More bluntly, my mother was desperate to live long enough to see her grandchildren. There was nothing I could do to accelerate the arrival of the twins, so it was a question of working with hospice to let them let me bend the rules a little bit, and try to delay my mother’s death just a bit so she could meet her grandchildren. On the hospice end, this meant a few things like arranging for IV hydration. That's why I know how to flush a PICC line, even though I am not that kind of doctor.

            Fortunately, if a problem is a nail, this was one I had a hammer for. Evidently, dying of cancer does not do much for the appetite, so eating was a problem for my mom. Less food in means less energy to resist the disease. (I did not say “fight.” I would like to take all “fight” and “war” imagery used to discuss cancer, put it in a vacant lot, and have Sgt. Frank Kilgore napalm the words.) Thus, if I could get my mom to eat I could, in defiance of the hospice rules, and the implacable ravages of cancer, maybe extend my mother’s life long enough for her to meet her grandchildren.

            As it happens, I enjoy cooking. The notion of walking into the kitchen and stiffarming the Grim Reaper was galvanizing. My mother was a serious cook, and she cooked for us steadily and seriously just about every night growing up. I am still amazed to look through her cookbooks and see an annotation next to something like veal Marengo that she just whipped up after work on a school night. But I suspect a few decades of that wears you out, so she was delighted when my brother and I started cooking. At least the praise sometimes seemed more effusive than one would expect, going strictly by what was on the plate.

            So figuring out what my mother could and would eat was a blessing, in that it gave me something to think about and do besides watch my mother die. (As an aside, one of the challenges of hospice is that you, rather than doctors are in charge. To steal back one of those war metaphors, there was a moment when the hospice nurse and I both realized that we expected the other to make the call on tweaking the combo we were selecting from the array of narcotic and non-narcotic palliative meds at our disposal [there was enough opium in the fridge for a Johnny Thunders episode of VH1 Storytellers], and it felt exactly like the moment in Apocalypse Now when Willard asks the soldier firing blindly into the jungle who is in charge, and the soldier replies “ain’t you”? There was also the Uggs-sporting hospice social worker who looked like she'd just come off the lacrosse field at UNH, but I digress.) 

        Chewing and swallowing were difficult, so the challenge was soft, but interesting – I wish I had kept track, of what I cooked but it would have been sort of macabre. Until very near the end, I would poach an egg for my mother every morning. I made fettuccini carbonara, a favorite of hers, I recall. Also green Thai chicken curry, a grad school staple of mine she and my father both loved. Some braised things, served with real grits. I wish I could remember more details. But she liked what I was cooking much better than the covered dishes well-meaning folks had been bringing by. If it's bragging to say that I can cook better food than the average 60-something Vermont Episcopalian, then I'm bragging. 

       When I was not feeling helpless and devastated, it felt sort of heroic to be able to feel as if I was making a difference. The twins arrived on the eleventh of December, but with the complication that neither they nor their mother were up for a six hour car ride from NYC where they were, to central VT, where their grandmother was. As of the eleventh, my mom was lucid enough to know that the babies were here and safe, and to look at pictures of them on the computer. I liked helping to make that possible. 

       It would be a better story if it ended differently. The twins, and more especially their mother, were heroic in enduring a long car ride shortly after being born and having a Cesarean, respectively. But, by the time they got to Vermont, their grandmother was only marginally conscious of the world around her. It would be pushing the meaning of the word to say they met their grandmother, and I hope it will be a while before I witness something as heartbreaking as the two infant girls encountering their grandmother when she was on the threshold of death. There are pictures. I am glad they exist, but I do not like looking at them.

           So my effort to prolong my mother’s life by feeding her as well as she fed me for so many years was sort of inconclusive. In a screenplay, there would have been either a devastating close-but-no-cigar moment, or, more likely, an epiphany where mom gathers her grandkids to herself, dispenses wisdom and dies with a smile on her face. Unfortunately, life is prone to be more messy and inconclusive than that.

         My mom hung on for days after she and the twins were together. She did nothing but breathe for the last three of those days. There is no good way to ask or answer a question the gist of which is “is your mother dead yet?” In spite of all of her suffering, and the knowledge that death would take away that suffering, there was a selfish part of me that wanted her to keep breathing.

      She died on the evening of December 19^th, 2009.  She slipped away while her sister, her most loyal caregiver, and my wife and I were eating. I do remember that that meal was the Zuni roast chicken and bread salad. In the last days, even getting my mother to take a sip of water was impossible, so I wasn’t cooking for her any more. That said, I think she would have been pleased to know that I cooked something nice for people she loved on the day she died.

 

Comments

[Jay Porter]

Thank you for sharing that.
With all best wishes, joy and love from San Diego,
Jay

[Marco]

Thanks for this, Cod. It must have been very hard to write.
My mother died at 58 in 1974 at The Deaconess in Brookline of multiple myeloma, which at that time was not considered a form of cancer, at least not by the staff at the hospital. Her birthday was December 21. I wish that I could have cooked for her. I lost my father in 1979. The world's a lonelier place after you lose your mom and dad.

[BK]

Well done, J.

[Margaret]

I will never forget what it was like to have you arrive, after several days of trying to coax Holly to eat anything, and to see her perk up and start spooning down those poached eggs and intricately reduced sauces and savory soups. I love your mom, and I love you too. I miss her terribly.

[Teddi]

Especially in my present place in life, with my mother having been coaxed out of a coma this spring (and still on ground that is shaky and not likely to become less so) this was a poignant and tear-evoking account. I appreciate you sharing it.

[Addison]

Very moving. Thank you.

[gastropoda]

Beautifully written.

[Tanabutler]

Thanks to Gastropoda for posting a link to this beauty.

You are fortunate to have been raised by a woman who passed down her love of cooking, and equally blessed to have had a chance to care for her in her waning.

Thank you for this lovely, loving post.

[TSWSarah]

Lovely writing from a loving child. Beautiful.