All at once, in my impotent rage, I felt the
need of writing something about my mother.
—Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Splashed across the front page of the 2021 Christmas Day San Diego Union-Tribune is a picture of my mother just three and a half months before her death. She smiles with such pleasure, such complete, good-humored happiness, it’s as if she’d been abducted by aliens to a more humane, much happier universe. What you can’t see is the way her falls, repeated hospitalizations for UTIs, and hallucinations brought on by her Parkinson’s increased exponentially in the last three years. Needle sticks in her finger, insulin syringes, bloody wads of cotton, stainless steel bed pans, adult diapers. On her kitchen table, heaped-up folders full of medical bills and insurance forms. Glossy brochures of retirement homes with Never-Never Land names (Casa de Manana, Aviara, Seaview Manor, Sunrise Hills) displaying cheerful seniors with sparkling white teeth all smiling ferociously as they clink beachside cocktails. And on top of the pile, squinty-eyed columns of numbers showing dwindling bank accounts and pension statements always in inverse proportion to her skyrocketing care.
When her retirement money began to run low in her late eighties, my older brother bought her home and rented it back to her: she wouldn’t have to move! She and Emma, her shih tzu, could continue on as always, Emma’s fur blending with the white shag carpet, the messy fig tree out her bedroom door always shedding its leaves, her beloved bank of flowers coming in and out of bloom. In the journal that she kept the last twenty years of her life, my mother wrote:
The whole lot is decked with daisies, gazanias, various kinds of flowers on a patch in front, even sporting a section of varied cacti. I enjoy the yard a lot. I also enjoy the interior of my little cottage.
On the other hand, I sense a turn-down in my over-all health. I’m 87 for heaven’s sakes. It’s time. I hope I can bear up to my approaching death with courage & grace. I’ve enjoyed many years of health after all.
But peaceful resignation was hardly my mother’s way. A few pages later she writes:
Better at 87, get me some spineless toy-boy who loves dogs & while away my few last days in dalliance!
With cash from the sale, we all thought her money would outlast her. But a decade on from this journal entry, she showed no sign of giving up. So much had been taken from her: she couldn’t walk, she couldn’t play the piano because the palsy in her left hand caused it to tremble, she couldn’t feel her hands, legs, or feet, her balance was woozy—so precarious that her power-lift recliner fell on top of her and trapped her underneath it. She joked, “I guess my chair got tired of me sitting on it, so it decided to sit on me!”
And then macular degeneration began to cloud her vision. For years she’d endured injections into the whites of her eyes to stave off blindness, but slowly her world slid into a gray haze: faces blurred, and as for letters on a page, the center of it turned to a smear while the edges remained maddeningly clear. And even though friends or family came to read to her, and she listened to books on tape, her inability to read took a heavy toll. “If only I could read,” she said. “It’s been my whole life, my books and my library, and now I can’t read.”
On top of all that, she was almost out of money. My two brothers and I were happy to contribute, but her round-the-clock care gobbled up money at such a rate that she (and we) would be broke within a year. She’d have no alternative but to go to a state-run home and live out the time she had left—the dreadful truth is that once old people are forced out of their homes and into a Home, a third to a half of them die within a year.
And so my mother moved into the Board and Care. She had a large, private room furnished with her own furniture and shared the six-bedroom house with five other housemates. But it was a bitter, never-accepted form of permanent exile. During the eight months she had left to live, she spent the first four raging at us for not taking her in, and cursing herself and her luck for letting such a disaster happen.
Which is why my mother’s smiling face on the Trib’s front page won’t leave me alone. Out the sliding glass door is a little concrete patio where a small white concrete water fountain, purchased from The Cement Barn and filled with shells and rocks, stands next to a trellis nailed to a weathered wooden fence that supports a tropical-looking trailing vine. Its loud red blossoms are just the color of my mother’s calf-high compression socks—bright gaudy flowers, bright gaudy socks. The photo gives the impression of A HAPPY SENIOR WELL CARED FOR.
Moving in the shadows, though, are her housemates, some paralyzed by stroke, some stricken dumb, some whose minds and personalities have slid off into fog. And like a migraine or an epileptic aura, all that is bright and affirming in this photograph seems only to mask what each of her housemates sees coming toward them, some in slow motion, some with accelerating dread and fear. Yesterday’s housemate becomes today’s corpse even as nothing seems to change: the sudden frantic activity of removing Mr. Smith is offset by Mrs. Sleigh moving in. Still, despite hearing in the wings the faint robotic wheeze of the recliner helping my mother to her feet so she can be moved by wheelchair from private bathroom to the communal dining room and back, she looks radiant in the picture, her battered face so expressive of joy I can almost fool myself into thinking she’s still alive.
Beneath the photograph is a full-page article about her life as a teacher, mentioning how a former student and friend, Joshua Lazerson, proposed a Go Fund Me Campaign to help cover her bills. Before the story broke, I figured that Joshua and I and my brothers would contribute, a few more donations would straggle in, and then we’d be right back in the deep financial hole we were in before. She’d outlived all of her contemporaries by close to a decade, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether her old students would contribute, let alone remember her. Much to our amazement, the story went viral. Papers and websites all over the world picked it up, especially in Asia, where the elderly are still made much of. And once Joshua managed to get her old high school’s alumni email lists, the donations began to pour in. Her former students didn’t just give money: some of them began to visit her thirty, forty, even fifty years after their last class together. “These students,” she said, shaking her head in delight and wonder, “these students!”
When I was a boy in the late 1950s, except for the occasional story my mother let drop at dinner, I knew almost nothing about what went on at the high school where she taught. We lived in a tiny Mormon town in northern Utah, where the kids were all supposed to be aspiring Latter-day Saints—non-drinking, non-smoking, no-fucking-until-marriage descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Most of her fellow teachers were devout LDS. When my mother joined the faculty, she became a one-woman renaissance.
Fearless in the classroom, my mother came to despise Mormonism. When-ever a question came up that Mormon doctrine forbade you to talk about, she plunged right in—so fiercely that, as she once told me, “Behind my back, the other faculty joked that my classes ought to be called Rosie’s Remedial Religion. I thought, OK, if that’s how the dumb clucks think of me, I’ll beat them at their own game—and so I started calling my classes that myself. Besides, I liked the alliteration!”
Unlike our Mormon neighbors who accepted, or were forced to accept, that WOMEN STAYED HOME AND TOOK CARE OF THE CHILDREN, my mother fled her children and chose, as the quaint phrase ran in those days, “to work outside the home.” And why not? Hadn’t she had enough of child rearing as a Dustbowl Kansas farm girl, forced to take care of her baby brother when she wasn’t driving a tractor for her father in the fields? And what were we, her three sons, but tedious, exasperating, worry-inducing burdens—snot running out of our noses, little troglodytes who cared more about baseball and football than Thoreau and Sophocles. In her classroom anything and everything could be talked about, examined, minutely scrutinized—and if it were found wanting, strung up, skewered, and disdainfully laid to rest. She was tough as they come intellectually, and had no compunction about challenging her students’ sloppy writing, thinking, or lazy behavior. But no matter how hard she was on them in class, she was tender toward them as people. Abortion seekers, attempted suicides, kids confused about their sexuality, kids abused or misunderstood, rebellious kids desperate to break the mold—she listened to them all and did what she could to help.
As a boy, I found it hard to square the rumors of her outlandish doings at school with how she behaved at home. Once she dressed up like a cowboy to play Curly in a school production of Oklahoma! With her hair hidden under the brim of her Stetson, in her red cowboy shirt with silver snaps on the pockets and her red cowboy boots, I barely recognized her. And another time, during deer season, the male teachers scheduled a faculty meeting at five-thirty a.m. so they could get out early to hunt. My mother arrived at five a.m. dressed in a bathrobe and fuzzy pink slippers. She sat down at the piano in the meeting room and began to sing with great ebullience Tom Lehrer’s “The Hunting Song.” As the male faculty drifted in, most wearing camouflage, they were treated to the refrain, “And I shot up to the limit that the game laws would allow / Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a pure-bred Guernsey cow.” She’d practiced the song the night before on our living room piano: anticipating the shock and dismay of her fellow teachers, she belted out the lyrics with hilarious, almost manic glee.
But those rare glimpses into her world had little to do with my kid world—riding your bike with no hands, burning grasshoppers with a magnifying glass, or huddling away from a pair of arms reaching up to strangle you from under your bed at night. It was only in the last year of her life that I finally learned from her former students how rare and original a teacher she was. In my childhood, whenever the phone rang and someone asked for her, how often did I repeat those talismanic words “She’s at school”? They had an almost mythic ring to them, as if to be “at school” was to be in a place of wonder, where she wore wigs and nice clothes and make-up, and talked about things like “immersing yourself in the destructive element.”
Yes, she started every freshman English class by announcing to a room full of goggling students that “we’ve all been thrown into the sea of life that wants to drown us. You can’t escape the sea by dreaming about land. You have to learn to live in that sea.” And then she would quote from Conrad’s Lord Jim, a book she loved to teach, especially to freshmen. Talk about sink or swim! The complexity of the language alone must have gobsmacked them. And then there was Conrad’s tortured back and forth as to whether Jim’s cowardice and later acceptance of his own execution was a sign of self-destructive guilt or self-transcendence. What the heck were they to make of Lord Jim? “The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up,” says Conrad via Stein, the German trader whose slightly bent English syntax surely added to the book’s “weirdness” quotient. It must have been like holding on to an electric fence to hear such outlandish pronouncements, pronouncements worlds away from the right/wrong morality of Mormonism.
Even more important, who the heck was this weird Mrs. Sleigh who treated them like adults and seemed to value them and their opinions?
Monday through Friday, my mother would go through an almost ritual transformation: she’d put on a skirt, blouse, and high heels. She’d apply black eyeliner and ruby lipstick and then select one of her wigs. Taking a can of lacquer, she’d spray the hair so that it gleamed bright as a helmet and then drive across town to the high school. When she came home, often not until late at night, she’d open the front door and, a load of books and papers cradled in her arms, plop down on the couch and drop it all in a heap beside her. She’d pry off one high heel with the toe of her other shoe, then the other with her newly freed foot. She’d stare absently across the room and give a big sigh; home from the wars, she’d lift off her wig with both hands and place it in her lap. After a minute or two—during which time we all knew better than to bother her—she’d go upstairs to her bedroom, place her wig on a wig stand, and change into her house robe and fuzzy pink slippers. This signaled her definitive transformation from glamorous Mrs. Sleigh, star teacher and stirrer of controversy in the souls of the young, to plain old restless, often unhappy, crop-haired Mom. “Motherhood,” she once told me, “just wasn’t my thing.”
She eventually had five wigs, a different style for each day of the school week: bouffant, beehive, long and curly with bangs, French twist, bob. The white Styrofoam wig stands—shaped exactly like decapitated heads—balanced on squared-off necks across her bedroom dresser. They had eye sockets but no eyes, mouths but no tongues. Whenever I walked by her bedroom, they seemed to peer at me sternly, even disapprovingly. They were both spooky and weirdly exciting, forbidden to touch and consequently irresistible. I half-suspected that the pupil-less eyes took turns winking at me when I wasn’t looking.
Once, when my mother was at school on a Saturday to meet with her students and grade papers, I worked up the courage to go into my parents’ bedroom, something I would never dream of when either of them was at home. Whatever happened in there was, I knew, severely off-limits to a “little pissant,” my mother’s preferred term for me when she was angry. I went up to one of the heads and touched the hair: it felt sticky from the hairspray. The hair itself, set in a body wave, was coarser than I’d expected. I stared into the featureless face and saw my face reflected back to me in the dresser mirror. I lifted the bouffant hairdo off the suddenly bald head and slid it down onto my head. It covered my eyes, so I tipped it back until I could see myself: there I was, a girl like my mother. But not a girl, either, not a boy or a girl, a different someone who was and wasn’t me. Then I saw the hatpin glinting against the whiteness of the Styrofoam, a long pin with a t-shaped handle. I dared myself to touch it but felt afraid. What would happen if I did? Would my mother know that someone had been at her wigs? I noted exactly where the hatpin hole was located in the bridge of the nose, worked up the courage to touch the pin’s long shank, and then gingerly took the pin by the handle and slid it free. And without quite knowing what I was doing, I took the wig off, slid it back onto the head, and began stabbing the hat pin into the bridge of the nose, the cheeks, and then the eyes over and over, filling me with a creepy sense of power. The head didn’t scream, didn’t sigh, didn’t do anything but stare at me impassively, poker-faced. When I came to my senses, I was afraid that my mother would see the holes; but when I studied the head, and carefully reinserted the pin in the bridge of the nose, the holes I’d made seemed to have healed over. If you looked hard, you could see what I’d done, but you would have had to look closely. That was the only time I took such a risk.
After that, the wigs always frightened me a little, as if they were plotting in inscrutable ways to take revenge, especially at night when I’d walk by and see them hovering in the shadows, faintly lit by the streetlight shining through my parents’ bedroom window, the back of each hairdo reflected in the dresser mirror. When my mother put on or took off her wigs, it was both uncanny and disconcerting. Whoever she was at home, she was a radically different person at school.
What happened next could only happen in America.
About two weeks after the Trib story went viral, Joshua got a call from the producer of the Kelly Clarkson Show—yes, that Kelly Clarkson, the first winner of American Idol, who has sold, so Wikipedia tells me, “over 25 million albums and 45 million singles,” the singer of such hits as “My Life Would Suck Without You” and “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)”: both sentiments I one hundred percent agreed with as regards my mother.
She and Joshua made a ten-minute demo video, and a week later, Clark-son’s producer called back with the idea of doing a show featuring my mother and her legendary status as an educator: Teacher Appreciation Day. I was ecstatic, since it meant even more money would roll in, helping us to keep her in the Board and Care until some future catastrophe forced her to move to a skilled nursing home. Why shouldn’t she make it to a hundred, or even beyond? But part of me dreaded her eking out three more years: surely her body would continue to betray her. And though I’m ashamed to admit it, I was exhausted by her care.
Then, on her forehead appeared a raw, purplish-red bump. It looked innocuous enough, just another nodule or cyst from all her hours driving a tractor in the sun. But it turned out to be a rare, deadly form of skin cancer, more virulent than melanoma. Her dermatologist said they couldn’t cure it, but they could hold it off for a while. If it went untreated, it would metastasize—that is, if it hadn’t spread to her lymph nodes and bones already. “Bone cancer can be very painful,” he said. He outlined the treatment options, and she seemed willing to go along. She’d survived so much, so why not this?
The next day I called to see how she was feeling about the latest diagnosis. “I can’t go through with it,” she said. “It’s just too much for me.” I was shocked—her will to live had always been so fierce. Over the past few months, though, she kept bringing up how my father had chosen to stop dialysis, in effect bringing on his own death. She was terrified of what would happen if she had a stroke and became bedridden. But whenever she mentioned “doing the deed,” as she called it, she’d always wavered. It got to be a joke: “Ma,” I’d say, “you can’t off yourself. You’ve got a date with fame and Kelly Clarkson. Although maybe you should watch the show before you appear on it.” I knew what she’d think of the show—but I also knew how shrewd she was at playing the faux-hick, her “aw-shucks, I’m just a little ol’ farm-girl sodbuster,” one of her specialties when she was out to charm someone. It made me a little queasy to imagine her and Clarkson folksying it up together on the “boob-tube,” as my mother called it when I was a boy. But why be a snob about it? Why shouldn’t she sing a duet with Kelly, an old hymn like “In the Garden”? “And He walks with me / And He talks with me / And He tells me I am His own…” Hearing her clear soprano was like seeing her young again, a girl sitting down at the piano for the first time with the neighbor lady who taught her to play ninety years ago, my mother picking out by ear the first few notes.
All that was over now. She sounded adamant: “I’ve decided it’s time. I’m not going to get better and I don’t want to get to the point where I can’t make the decision. I’m a chicken where pain is concerned.”
“Ma,” I said, “you’re not in pain now. The doctor said you could go a long time, nine months, a year, before the cancer spreads…”
“I’d go on if I could see any reason for it, son, but just to keep on like this, knowing what’s ahead…it just makes no sense.” Necessity was shoving her own death down her throat. She had to choose between a painful, prolonged death or go through the terror of taking her own life. Some choice, is all I can say.
Given what faced her, I wanted to feel something bigger than what I did feel—“The masterpiece of a long-ripening death,” as Rilke put it, or some such thing. But all I felt was a flat, hard grief. That, and exhaustion.
“Well, Ma, I’ll really miss you, I’ll really miss our conversations.” My voice broke. I thought there would be tears on her part too, but I was wrong. All she said was “I’ll miss you too, son.” And while there was anguish in her voice, it was mainly out of concern for me: already she seemed a little removed, absorbed in her decision.
She sat in her chair under her white blanket and said, more to herself than to me, “I can’t see what else to do.” Then she looked me straight in the face: “Will you?” she asked me.
“Of course,” I said. Two weeks later, at eight a.m., I handed her the anti-nausea drug. She waited an hour…and without the slightest hesitation, gulped down the fatal cocktail.
That moment still feels inconceivable even after two years of thinking on it. I float through the hours in a daze I can’t get free of, its dizzying lightness overtaking me whenever I’m alone, leaving me keyed up, distracted, irritated by the sudden onset of tears but helpless to stop them. Images of her dead body won’t allow me to focus on anything but It. I feel sickened by her body’s deadness, her unrelenting corpsehood—something that I helped her bring about. Had I given in too readily to her wish to die?
At that moment, though, all I did was nod. No more cajoling or teasing, begging and pleading. I bent over her in her recliner and kissed the top of her head. At the same time, she took my hand in her one good hand and pressed it to her cheek for a long while.
And then her helper came in to put her to bed, and we said goodnight.
Tom Sleigh’s many poetry books include The King’s Touch, Station Zed, and Army Cats. His most recent book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers, recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa.