Work Song

(Sometime in mid-October)

My mother is dying while I am writing this. It’s what she’s been doing for some time, but in these past few weeks, her work has intensified.  When I say dying is “work,” I am not speaking figuratively. To look at her here on what is clearly her final bed, a sleek contraption of wheels and gears, you would think it’s the hardest work there is. Every day brings another indignity, another long series of moments when breathing becomes difficult, memory fails, joint pain overwhelms, and the confusion of time and place terrifies. I see only a fraction of what she has to put up with, and yet it’s more than enough to make me seriously consider an easier way.

She would say her curse is that of living too long – she turned 97 a few months ago – but from what I hear and read, a lingering and painful departure is a common plight. A few years ago, one of my older friends, a well-loved poet, said shortly before she died that it was “awfully easy to get into this world but damn hard to get out.” Amen to that. I almost envy the early birds, the ones who go down in a plane or get hit by a truck, even those who take a bare month to leave, the victims of some fast-moving cancer. When my mother could still speak in coherent sentences, she would often say she had never imagined she’d see the 21st century, almost as if she was apologizing, as if she might have made some different decisions had she known. The irony is that when she was born, the doctor told my grandmother not to get too attached to “this one,” so sick was my mother with rheumatic fever in the weeks following her birth. Nearly a hundred years later, she’s still beating the odds, if you can call uninterrupted days of disorientation, immobility and discomfort beating the odds.

I remember stormy afternoons on my father’s millstone of a boat, when my mother had to grapple her way to the foredeck to wipe the salt spray from the wheel-house windows which were not equipped with electric wipers, how precarious and vulnerable she looked to my sister and me from the inside, one hand holding on to a stanchion and the other smearing the glass with a rag, her face full of terror. I’ve always thought it was a miracle she didn’t lose her balance and keel into the sea, but I’d be willing to bet now, given her current level of discomfort and disorientation, that she might wish she had.  Which is not to say that those who attend to her needs are not doing their jobs. They are, and more. The women -- they are without exception women -- that I have come to know even the little that I do are probably the closest we have to saints on this planet, for their professionalism, for their genuine concern for my mother’s comfort and happiness and for their buoyant spirit in the face of unremitting reminders of our common mortality. I go to work each day like most people, but not to a job where I’m compelled at every turn to contemplate the manner of my own demise. How do they do it?

It’s not as though any of this should be a shock. If I’d been listening a little more when I was young, I would probably have registered the conversations of my parents when they spoke of friends and relatives whose passages out of this world were troubled and lengthy affairs. When I was nine, my father spent evening after evening in the hospital with my dying grandfather, sometimes heading up there immediately after work, forgoing the dinner my mother had made. His devotion and grief were so strongly visible on his face that one day I asked him if I should come up to visit the old man, too, thinking that I might be able to help in some way. But my father declined my offer, saying he wanted me to remember “Uncle Billy” as the person he used to be, not as he was now. Fifty years afterwards, I can see quite clearly that I should have demanded to be there at that bedside staring my future in the face. As it was, my father spent ten long years himself coping with the cruelties of dementia, and, having seen the toll it took on both him and my mother, who looked after him in those hard days, I would not wish his fate on anyone.

And I’m lucky. I have a sister, an older sister, who by definition is certainly more mature, and by nature far more responsible than I am. Together we spell each other off with bedside visits and the preparations for the next stage in our mother’s journey. It’s good to have her to talk to, but hard not to see both of us as a couple of kids out of our depth. They say we never really grow up until we have lost both our parents – Lady Bracknell comes to mind here for obvious reasons – but I think when that moment arrives, I will feel more at sea than anything else. Our parents place us in a narrative, a drama which they act out for us as they go, but when they exit the stage, all that remains for those left behind is doubt and fear. I’m sure they felt the same when their parents passed, but somehow they were better at hiding their feelings. My kids may not be so lucky.

My sister and I used to ride with my mother on the city bus to the fringes of Victoria where her mother and stepfather rented a small home next to a grocery store. It was a long ride, but my mother, who was not fond of driving, made the trip every week with us in tow. Our grandmother spent most days in a wheelchair, stricken with rheumatoid arthritis and had done so for over twenty-five years. My sister and I drank the ginger ale we were offered and played outside in the garden while my mother helped with household chores that were beyond her stepfather and which she knew her mother wanted done a particular way. My grandmother was a proud woman, who had sacrificed a lot for her children, but I never got the feeling she felt she was owed. Her health slipped away, and what money she’d saved dwindled too quickly, so that she spent many of her last years in government homes for the elderly. There was a stoicism about my grandmother, an attitude that probably arose from having to endure two world wars, the depression and her own challenging illness. She had no illusions about life and understood more than most that to make it through this world demands a thick skin and a spine of steel. When the old woman’s time finally came, my mother was in England on a rare holiday, a trip to kick up her heels in a modest way and to shed some of the gloom of the passing of my father a few years earlier. I felt bad for her as I spoke the news on the phone – a lifetime of being the best daughter only to miss the moment of her mother’s farewell – but she said she had been expecting the call; she had sensed something was wrong, even those thousands of miles away.

Her premonition was not lost on me. I was in Spain last year, on the island of Menorca, and one night I dreamed of coming home after a long day’s work only to look up and see my mother trapped on the other side of our skylight, holding on with both hands as though the wind might sweep her away.

“Mum!” I yelled through the glass. “How am I ever going to get you down from there?”

She waved a book at me, one that she said she had written. It was called Sketches on the Edge of a Day, and she said I should read it.  I woke up with a terrible feeling.  Shortly afterwards I received an email from my sister saying our mother was down for the count. She’d fallen prey to an insidious infection and that some drastic measures might be necessary. The next few days were hard ones, but then I received news that the doctor had persevered with my mother to see whether she wanted any intervention. It was difficult, my sister told me, just to get her attention, but, finally, in a lucid moment, she told the doctor a little cryptically,” I have a lovely family.” He interpreted her words as a stay of execution and put her on Prednisone, a drug so strong that, ironically, it often sends people on their way even after it’s beaten their disease. By the time I got home she hardly knew me, and, while I was happy to have the chance to say good-bye, I felt guilty that she had delayed her departure and prolonged her suffering just for me. The infection the doctor had treated would probably have been a less painful exit, and I can understand why they often call pneumonia the “old man’s friend.” Sometimes, it’s good to have nature take such a decision taken out of our hands. We have a tendency not to listen to what the facts are trying to tell us and, instead, invoke whatever measures we can to avoid the inevitable, even for a week or a month.

It is evening now, and another day has passed for my mother. She has slept a lot of it, and for a few hours she rotated through a series of questions I answered as truthfully as I could: where she is, when she will go home to have tea with Aunt Florrie, dead sixty years ago, and why the nurses haven’t brought her baby to her.  What she has really been doing is working hard, putting her back into it, no intention of punching the clock any earlier than she has to. The lights are low, a soft incandescence that mutes the institutional linoleum and ubiquitous beige walls. The big screen TV that has done its best to entertain her for the last few years is tuned to light classical music, a Chopin waltz playing quietly. One of the aides pokes her head in to see how we are doing. She registers me, my sister, my wife and daughter at our posts.

“If I could choose,” she says quietly,” this is the way I would want to go.” Then she leaves on her rounds.

I don’t disagree with her, even though I’d like to.

Terence Young lives in Victoria, British Columbia. He is a co-founder and former editor of The Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for younger writers. His most recent book is a collection of poetry, Smithereens (Harbour Publishing, 2021).