“Have you called the nursing home in Ferring?”
It was only afterwards that I realized that though there probably were nursing homes in Ferring, this one was only in my mother’s mind.
Reality has always been a challenge for me. The picture of reality that was painted for me as a child was defined by the theories of a religion that both my parents had been steeped in from a young age. Reality is purely spiritual and good, while the material world with its evil, sickness and death is an illusion. The world is an illusion? What kind of compass is this? It points only to insanity.
She hadn’t eaten for days. Weeks even. She had been living off ginger ale and hot chocolate, sipped reluctantly.
“They’ve never heard of diabetes here,” said my mother, the woman who claimed to control her insulin levels with mars bars.
“It’s a nursing home, mom, of course they have. Hasn’t a doctor been coming in to see you?”
“Oh yes, but he doesn’t know anything about diabetes either, that’s why I need to go to Ferring.’
She was stubborn and had that look in her eye which reminded me that there was no room in her mind for anything except her own truth. There was not even a speck of doubt. She has been conditioned that way. That is what had seen her through – the polio, the paralysis, the loss of my sister, of my father. Sickness and death had surrounded her and yet she had gazed off into the distance and her beliefs had persisted through it all – “know the truth, I am god’s perfect child” – humans have an extraordinary capacity for denial. I don’t know how old I was when I realized this made no sense. How could they be telling me that everything I saw, felt and heard was an illusion?
That morning the nursing home calls me, I am on my way to visit because just a week ago they said they would have to expel her. She had been behaving badly – abusing the nurses, claiming that she was being mistreated, but worse than that she was causing mutiny amongst the other residents. In short, a troublemaker. They were worried about liability.
I was the perfect child, the perfect student at school. The only criticism ever levelled at me was that I was too timid to speak up in class.
I take the call on the train platform, they say she has taken a turn for the worse. They are calling an ambulance. I tell them I will go straight to the hospital and meet her there.
The tables have turned, except I am parent to a child that I did want, did not give birth to, that I did not raise. I am parent to a child whose map of the world distorted my early experience of life to an extent that has left me reeling into my forties, still trying to decipher what is real and what is not. I am parent to a child that I have no control over.
I am reminded of the first months of my own child’s life, born helpless but day by day gaining skills that will one day allow her to develop into a fully functional and independent human. It was joyful being a witness to that process, but here, with my mother, I have the opposite. She is descending towards helplessness and I am left wiping her mouth, her butt, dressing her and scolding her when she does not act appropriately.
By the time I get to the hospital she is still on the gurney from the ambulance. They struggle to get an IV in, they are trying to administer fluids although the paramedic says that if she had had an end of life plan they would have allowed her to stay in bed in the nursing home where she could have died more peacefully.
The young ER doctor is doing his best. He says she has an infection. They can try antibiotics, although to be honest he says, her vital signs are very poor. They could try to get her blood pressure up, put her on a breathing tube, get more fluids in, but between the lines I hear what he is saying – it would be futile. Or, he says delicately, we can let nature take its course.
A parent will do anything to save their child. HHe won’t say it in so many words, but his professional opinion and the look in his eye tells me that there is no hope. I am strangely willing to accept this.
She didn’t believe in medical intervention. Her religion said that if I had the strength to know the truth none of this would be happening.
She is babbling incoherently. I hope she recognizes me. I try desperately to decipher what she is saying. I am imagining wise words, but I don’t understand one single one.
Next of kin. She has signed a “do not resusitate order” but beyond that all decisions rest with me.
I tell him we will let nature take its course. I tell him I want them to make her comfortable. They put us in a private room for the night. They put her on a bed that inflates and deflates automatically every few minutes. She drifts in and out of sleep and when she wakes and becomes elevated in her speech (still unintelligible) they give her more morphine. There is no way to know if she is in pain, but just in case.
They make me up a bed beside her and I play some relaxing piano music on my phone. I hardly sleep that night. My mom was in labor for days with me. It was back in the days when they would allow labor to go on and on. Eventually I was an emergency C-section. My mother was there for every pang of my journey into life and here I am now feeling every pang of her journey out of it. I hold her hand which is cold and clammy. She is losing moisture through her skin.
Eventually I do fall asleep. When I wake, dawn is breaking. Everything is quiet. I can hear the mattress inflating and deflating like an artificial lung and when I turn over I see that she is deeply asleep.
The next time I look, her breathing has stopped. There was no great rattle or rasp, it has just stopped.
Before I leave the hospital, I have to sign a lot of papers, confirming that I had refused treatment, that the doctors had made me fully aware of the possible outcome, that the hospital was in no way to blame for the death. They also mention that on examination, they have discovered that she had a dislocated shoulder and is this something I might want to question the nursing home about? No, I say, it’s not.
The world comes full circle.
It’s not true what they say about the umbilical cord. It might not hurt the mother, but the child feels everything.