The Day Death Became My Mother

Fall is cold in Portland. Cold in a sorrowful, penetrating way. And my decision to spend three days in the close company of a dying woman is made to seem all the bleaker what with the powdery gun metal gray of midmorning downtown. I am standing naked in my brightly painted and meticulously organized apartment, indecisively staring into the gaping mouth of my open closet. How does one dress to meet with death? Commencing with the dispassionate announcement of my morning alarm, I contemplate one question: why did I agree to do this?
Marco’s mother is dying. And as a friend of both Marco and his waning parent, I am obliged to assist her in a sort of last wish: transcribe her handwritten book into type.
I leave my home with little more than my journal and a blank expression. I feel in all ways unremarkable. This service to Marco’s mother will give me a sense of temporary purpose, I hear my own voice trudging through my mind with pallid encouragements. Driving out of the city I do not turn on the stereo. I cannot be interrupted. I am pondering.
Pondering car accidents, knifings, floods, poisonings, and suffocation at 35,000 feet. I do not want any of those things to happen to me. I seize a bit at the thought of bearing some sort of hurting until I finally passed away and what that change would be like. Perhaps all of the discomfort would just stop abruptly and I would be left floating without a body in the middle of inky, intangible blackness.
I arrive at Marco’s mother’s apartment several miles outside of downtown. Her name is Megan. She is dying. Megan is dying. From cancer. It’s so typical. So anticipated. The common nature of the ailment almost makes it harder not to fear. It seems so well known and yet indomitable.
I lightly knock on the door with the bronze 44 just beneath the convex glass bud of the peep hole. Megan’s in-home caretaker lets me in, ushering me to her bedside. And then began the change within me.

You never know just how you’re going to feel when you get close enough to touch someone who’s dying. Will they be cold? Will they be angry? Will you get some kind of infection? The truth I realize more and more every day is that for as much as we live in a time that pretends to know death, we’re really only ever hearing or talking about the events that lead to and/or cause death, as opposed to the morbid concept of a body losing life. Becoming exanimate. Like toothpaste being squeezed from all sides at once. Or a sponge being wrung out.

It’s the second day. Megan seems to be quite empty. But it appears as if all she’s really lost is some of the water that makes up her physical body. Her ruminations and intimations seem to come out of her like majestic lions and cunning tigers slinking out of a dark stone cave. Her cold, unresponsive exterior belies a strong, radiant product. Her eyes are all stone and lassitude. And yet she’s not miserable. She’s irreversibly moving towards death and she is the essence of peace. As I sit across the room typing page after page of tidy scrawl I am again pondering.
Pondering where Megan’s consciousness will go after she dies, whether or not there will be consciousness after death, and why I am so terrified of not knowing.

We’re taught in countless forums that death is some sort of pain, or at least painful. And that immediately makes it frightening. And even when we decide not to run from our fears, when we decide to turn and truly face them, it doesn’t always mean that they will make some kind of analytical sense. Like we’ll burst some sort of psychological pimple and forever be drained of the purulency of impending doom. That kind of catharsis would only bring about unimaginable hubris in everyone anyway. Immortality seems to breed pig-headedness. Just look at the Greek gods. Life becomes a thing of sport. A bet to be levied in a grand yet ultimately pointless wager.

Day three. I am still typing. Megan is still dying. I finish entering the last line of text and note that I have considered and reconsidered everything I can grasp about my wary review of death. I go to Megan’s bedside to tell her I am finished. She raises her wavering head and the skin around her eyes seems too tired to show emotion. Her cheeks display small, spidery purple bruises from the weak blood vessels burst beneath the indent of the oxygen hose stretched ear to ear across her face like a bandit’s mask. She beckons me in to where she can whisper next to my ear. Nobody can ever be ready, honey, she says. How can they be ready for something they don’t know? she asks somewhat vacantly. I suddenly see the that the enemy is not death, but knowledge.

With the inflation in popularity over the years of such societal focal points as mass-provided news, crime and medical dramas, and vapid, materialistic “reality television” we are given a ridiculously polar outlook on death and life. While evening news broadcasts, the newest iteration of serial murder, and bedside heartbreak provide the communal imagination with innumerable examples of the menace of oncoming passing, faux-candid scenes of richness, glamor, and meaningless sensory stimulation create a paradise of insouciance. And with a dark rain cloud on the horizon of a shallow paradise, it’s anyone’s guess how much rain it will take to drown us all.

Instead we reach inside each other through the shroud of alcohol, the fog of narcotics, and the clumsiness of sex to feel something, anything permanent. The truth as it always has stood is that death is the one constant life has to offer. And as such we ought not place an undue focus on what little we know and how much that knowledge terrifies. Instead I elect to embrace its mystery as a comfort, as an assurance in its definite quality.

And with that I am safe. Safe from this myth of death because I will not pretend to know. Only to ponder.