ENDSTATION

 “I don’t know how to die,” my mother told everyone as she approached the end of her life.  When she was diagnosed with a serious heart condition in her sixties, she expected death to be just around the corner.  Her body refused to comply.  She nursed her husband through chronic emphysema and depression.  After his suicide, she moved from Southern Ontario to Saskatchewan to watch her grandchildren grow up.

 At the age of seventy-three, she migrated to Victoria to escape the ice and snow. She vowed to make two new friends for each one who died.  She cruised the Inside Passage to Alaska, bus-toured through the Rockies, and explored Vancouver Island.  When she was eighty-five, she returned to Ontario because the cost of living in her senior residence was outrunning her income.  She moved in with my husband and me, and outlived him.  When she was ninety, she moved into a subsidized supported living facility in order to have a more independent lifestyle.  She coped fairly well between trips to the hospital.

One day, she took a taxi to her favourite mall and shopped her way through the stores.  We were both elated that she was able to manage without me.  Four days later, she was found unconscious on the floor of her apartment.  She spent the next ten days in the hospital stroke unit, paralyzed on one side and speaking in tongues.  Her final coherent sentence was, “I don’t know anything anymore.”

            As the shadow of death darkened over us, I wondered how I would ever survive in a world without her. She was the only person I had known all my life, my anchor in every storm, my cheerleader in every race.  She insisted I was the best thing that ever happened to her.

She is still with me.  She peers back at me from every mirror. My hair is not as thin as hers, and I don’t use a walker all the time, but the resemblance is unmistakeable.

            I am seventy-six years old now, hungering to start a new chapter, find new meaning, new friends.  I have transitioned through three different apartments since I sold the house.  Inflation is nibbling away my buying power.  Many of the people I love are dead or going through painful passages of deterioration.  Everything I do takes longer, hurts more, and is more difficult to remember.  Worst of all, I seem to have outlived my usefulness.

            My mother often said that, if she only had the energy, she would write a book about what it is really like to be old.  The so-called experts are too young to know what they are talking about.

            My mother’s mantra was, “I will try any wine once.”  She dreamed of one big last fling.  One more trip, one more party, one more kick at the bucket list before settling down at “Endstation” to await the inevitable.  I acted as her brake, reminding her that her resources might be needed later.  “I wish I knew how long I have to live!” she exclaimed.  “Then money would just be a math problem.”

She liked to start her day singing vigorously, driving away the demons of decay. I rarely sing any more.  I prefer to live in denial regarding the creeping imperfections of my decaying voice.  I escape the harsh reality of mornings by stringing together words for a story I want to write – the ultimate story that will leave deep footprints in the sands of time.

            I have three plastic totes full of paper, my legacy to the next generation.  One contains my published hard copy -- small press magazines and anthologies.  Another is stuffed with two unpublished novels and a cornucopia of stories, poetry and random bits and pieces that seem too precious to discard. The third tote contains two versions of my mother’s World War II memoirs, fictionalized to protect the guilty and avoid complicating the lives of the innocent.  She worked on the project for over two decades, revising and reorganizing, searching for the truth and never finding it.  It became her personal albatross.  I tried to help her with editing, but she wanted to tell her story exactly as it flowed from her heart.

When she decided to give up her quest, she stuffed the manuscript into a drawer of her filing cabinet.  The drawer broke, scattering pages everywhere.  She said it was time for a bonfire.  I offered to assume custody.  I planned to bring order out of chaos and create a digital copy of a single version.  Every attempt ended in failure because I became overwhelmed by sadness. Those mixed-up pages are my albatross now.  Hitler and the Holocaust left deep wounds that never healed.  Destroying the evidence will not change the inherited guilt and confusion.  I am the keeper of my mother’s stories now, and will continue to tell them as long as I live, following her through the twists and turns of the labyrinth of lies that shattered her innocence.

Growing older is much more complicated than adjusting to an annual accumulation of birthdays.  It is often a time of great grief.  We who are approaching death are relegated to fodder for a lucrative caretaking industry.  We are not expected to contribute to society, except to pay bills. 

The White Tsunami has arrived, overwhelming public resources.  Many are entering the Golden Years burdened by an unsustainable lifestyle based on treating credit as income.  The good times are all gone, and poverty is knocking at the door of people who have no idea how to make do with less.

Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Grey Panthers, visualized the possibility of multi-generational living where people of all ages would pool their resources and share their wisdom, labour, and love.  This is much like the old-fashioned extended families, which were essential before retirement pensions were the norm.  The old kept dragon-like control of whatever property they had, forcing the young to dance around them in hope of a fine inheritance someday.  The ones who had nothing left were at the tender and often brutal mercy of family and friends driven by duty; love or guilt.  Once old people had regular pensions, the new gospel prescribed leaving eldercare to paid professionals. That set nuclear families free to pursue power, prestige and property, leaving the older generation ghettoized in the hands of complete strangers.

Seniors fight to make it work.  Some become fiercely territorial volunteers, trying to recreate the familiar atmosphere of their former workplaces.  Some hide from the world.  Some fall into a routine of endless coffee parties, lunches, and movie nights. Others quietly succumb to undiagnosed illnesses and malnutrition.  Too many wear diapers because there is no one available to help them get to the bathroom.

The geriatric poster children earn university degrees, make speeches, learn to dance, and personify unstoppability.  No one knows what happens between their public appearances.  My mother was considered alert and active and “with it”, but she spent many days in bed recuperating.  She had “diddle spells” when she could not walk safely or think clearly.  Her cognition was fading bit by bit, along with her hearing and finally her vision, leaving her lost and afraid and wondering what to do.  On her best days, she felt baby mice crawling up her legs. On bad days, the mice were giant rats with ferocious teeth and claws.  She smiled and persevered and rarely told her doctors what was really going on.  She loved writing cheques because that gave her a sense of empowerment.  Eventually, even signing her own name became too much effort. 

Towards the end of her life, she listened to my problems as she had always done, and responded with “I can’t help you.”  I was frustrated by her litany of helplessness, but I understand it now.  She was reminding herself of her limitations.  Her words echo in my head when my maternal genes demand that I rescue my children.  My fixing days are over.

There is much hoopla about how to die properly, invented by people who have never died.  I have met only two people who seemed immune from the fear of death.  One was the veteran of two life-after-life experiences, looking forward to taking up permanent residence in the beauty he had glimpsed.  The other had been close to death so many times that he just wanted to get it over with, sans medical interference.  He instructed his wife not to call an ambulance until he was well and truly dead.

I am very much afraid of death, both of the process and of the unknown destination.  My mother gave up on religion at the age of ninety.  “Why should I be the prisoner of someone else’s fantasy?”  She expected to slide into oblivion, and hoped it would happen unexpectedly some night while she was asleep.  Instead, her worst nightmare came true – immobilized in bed, unable to communicate, at the mercy of attendants whose availability and competence varied.

On my seventy-first birthday, a nurse asked me, “If the pneumonia comes back, do you want us to give her antibiotics?”  I said I didn’t know, and promised to have an answer the next day.  By the time I had walked to my car, I knew was time to let go.  

When I returned to the hospital the next morning, I asked for palliative care.  My mother’s attending physician was away, so the assessment was done by a locum.  He spent a few minutes interacting with my mother.  He had studied her chart and explained his clinical findings to me in a matter-of-fact way.  He looked around the room and then at her.  “She doesn’t want this,” he said softly, part statement, part question.  I answered, “No. She doesn’t.”  He went off to write new orders.

I told my mother, “We’re going to stop torturing you now.”  She seemed pleased. I held her unparalyzed hand as she drifted into unconsciousness.  She kept pulling it away, reminding me how often she had told me that dying is a journey we all must make alone.  I searched my memories for a hymn I could sing for her, but none seemed appropriate.  Instead, I sang Brahm’s lullaby, which she had sung to me many times when I was a child.  Guten Abend, gut’ Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht …  She died at three o’clock the next morning, leaving ninety-two years of history behind.

I miss her.  I miss my husband, my two fathers (biological and adopted), my grandmother, my uncle, even my in-laws.  I miss my elementary school classmate Lois who died in her first year of university, and my student Cathy who drew me a wonderful sketch of the Reach for the Top team I coached before the Big C stole her from her friends and family.  I miss my university friend Peter, who died of AIDS. I miss my dog Rusty, and the assortment of cats who succumbed to distemper, diabetes, and unfortunate encounters with farm machinery.  I miss the many parishioners whose funerals I played for during my decades of ministry at my husband’s side.  Every year, there are more voices calling me to the other side of silence, inviting me to touch the face of God.

I would be delighted to be transported swiftly and mercifully to a beautiful place where all my questions are answered and all the loves of my life restored.  I hope for the best. There is no way to prepare for the worst.  All I can do is learn to celebrate the life that I have, grieving my losses without being destroyed by them.  I am on a fearful and difficult journey to a destination I know nothing about.  I am my mother’s daughter, and draw strength from her example.  No matter what it costs, I plan to live until I die.