“We’re throwing everything we can at it,” the doctor says, giving me a weak smile. “It’s overwhelming her lungs anyway.”
I take a breath, press my eyes closed again. All I want on this earth is for Zenny to be holding my hand right now, to be rubbing my back. To be in my arms so I can smell the sweet rose smell of her and bury my face in her hair.
“If we talk to her and she says the directive still stands,” my voice is a charred nothing of a whisper, just dead air saying dead words, “what does that look like?”
“She can keep the mask on,” Dr. McNamara says softly. “And it will still help. A couple days, maybe. Or if she’d like, she can take the mask off.”
I swallow. I wish for Zenny like I’ve never wished for anything before, but she’s not here, she’s not here to hold me or to comfort me or even just to stand next to me. I’m alone, because even with my brothers here and my father here, I have to be the strong one. The one leading the way. “And then what?” I ask in a raspy voice.
“She’ll be more comfortable. We’ll take out the NG tube and she can drink to thirst. We’ll also be able to provide morphine. It will help with the air hunger.”
“Air hunger?” Aiden repeats, looking stricken.
Another weak smile from Dr. McNamara. “It’s what it sounds like. It’s very uncomfortable, but the morphine muffles the sensation almost to nothing. We can start out low, so she will be lucid at first, and then increase it as needed.”
“And if she’d make it a couple days with the mask, how long could she make it without one?”
“It wouldn’t be long,” Dr. McNamara admits. “And if this is something you talk to your mother and she wants to pursue, then we’ll bring in her palliative care doctor for a more in-depth discussion. But I will say this, as an ICU doctor and as a daughter myself: life isn’t measured in days. It’s measured in moments. When you decide with her what happens next, consider what moments you want to create for her now.”
I turn back to Mom, I don’t know why, but I just need to see her right now, reassure myself that she’s still here. And she’s holding up her whiteboard.
It says, mountain dew?
Chapter 30
We take off the mask and swab Mom’s mouth with ice water, not Mountain Dew, which earns us a fuss from her.
She’s tired but lucid, and we talk. Alone as a family, and then again with the doctors at her bedside.
The DNI stays.
She wants to take the mask off for good in the morning.
I make the phone calls I have to make, and then I stare at my phone for a long time before letting out a mumbled fuck it and sending a text to a number I have memorized by heart after only a month.
hey. it’s sean. i know things ended badly between us, and i know you probably have real reasons for staying away. that’s my fault, and i don’t deserve anything from you right now, but mom is coming off her ventilator tomorrow morning and i just miss you so fucking much. i keep trying to pray—for mom, for me, for everyone—but i think i’ve forgotten how.
when I try to pray, all i can hear is your voice.
Tyler’s somewhere over Illinois when Mom starts insisting on removing the mask, or “getting started” as she calls it. Overnight, she had a final X-ray and it became clear to everyone—even Aiden—that the pneumonia has her in its snowy claws; there’s barely any clear part of her lungs left. There was never going to be time for the cancer to finish eating up her insides, there was never even going to be a trip back downstairs to the regular rooms.
This was always going to be it.
It’s reassuring, in a grim kind of way. And there’s a sense of relief and levity as Mom’s care begins to transition to strictly palliative. The doctor comes in with a tender smile, going straight to Mom’s bed and holding her hand. They talk for a few minutes—the doctor taking off the mask to hear Mom’s answers—and then the doctor gives a serious nod and puts the mask back on.
The morphine is ordered and hung on the pole. Soon it will be flowing through her system enough to keep her air hunger at bay, and then we can take off the mask.
The nurses are chatty, and they ask Mom if she’d like to brush her teeth and comb her hair—and then looking at the room full of clueless men—they grin and offer to do it themselves. They bring in extra blankets, and most bizarrely, some kind of gift basket from the hospital full of Shasta soda and off-brand potato chips.
“We bring it in for every family transitioning to palliative care,” a respiratory tech explains, like it’s a door prize and not a congratulations on choosing death box filled with cheap snacks.
It’s somehow more depressing than anything else, that box. None of us touches it, and when Mom discovers there’s no Mountain Dew inside, she eyes it like it’s personally betrayed her.
They take out her NG tube, which is met with applause from everyone in the room, myself included, and then Mom wheezes something to the nurse who did it, and the nurse smiles and nods. Disappears and reappears with her purse. And with the respiratory tech’s help, they take off the mask for a few minutes at a time and put makeup on my mom’s face. Concealer and mascara. Dabs of blush and red lipstick. And after they comb and pin back a section of her hair, it’s almost the real Carolyn Bell again. Fierce and friendly and ready to laugh.
My dad bursts into tears.
The palliative care doctor gives the okay, and we take off the mask.
Mom takes a breath without it, and right away the monitors start binging and bonging, complaining noisily about her oxygen levels, but one of the nurses reaches up and mutes them. “Mountain Dew…please?” she asks, and we dispatch Ryan to go get it. Which is when I get a text from Tyler that he’s landed and he’s going to grab a cab as fast as he can.
Mom reaches for me and Dad and Aiden. “Want…to pray…”
“We can call for the hospital chaplain,” I start but she shakes her head. I notice with some dismay that there’s already a certain kind of paleness blooming around her lips and eyes.
“Don’t want chaplain,” she pants. “Want…family prayer.”
Dad, Aiden and I share a look of mutual panic.
“Babe, Tyler will be here very soon,” my dad pleads. “He can pray for you.”
“No,” she insists. “Now.” Her eyes dart to mine and there’s an urgency to them that can’t be denied—not now.
“We can pray until Tyler gets here,” I assure her. “Um. If I can remember how.”
Aiden laughs awkwardly, but I’m not actually kidding. My last successful prayer was an I hate you directed up at my bedroom ceiling, and all the times I’ve tried to pray since have slid sideways into wordlessness, a flat wall of failure. And, to be brutally, grossly honest, I almost don’t want to do it. Despite the fact that it’s her wish, despite my slowly shifting relationship with God, there’s a part of me that still balks. There’s a part of me that still thinks, I’ll do anything for my mom, but I’ll be damned before I pray.
Except, when I open my mouth, words do come out. They come out even though I’m surly, even though I’m panicked. They’re not my words, they’re thousands of years old, and at first I feel stupid, because I’ve always seen it as a sort of filler prayer, the kind you mutter while your thoughts wander away to sports and girls. But as I pray it now, each and every word feels painfully fitted to this moment, a bespoke chant of motherhood and compassion.