If anyone had asked me at the time, I would have said that Harrison was upset in the way that any grieving spouse would be. My mother wasn't dead yet, but he might be forgiven for his coldness, for the temporary erasure of our relationship. I could respect temporary insanity over my mother's illness.
He hustled me into his Chrysler straight from the airport, haranguing me right after I tried just a warm hello. A bottle of malathion insect poison had broken on the front passenger seat, so I rode in the back, while he insisted that we "talk about your mother." As we sped across the causeway, I felt less like a chauffeured passenger and much more like a prisoner in a police cruiser's caged back seat.
He spoke continuously, but I don't remember learning anything about my mother, especially how she felt right now. Instead, he told me how to feel, just as he had spent 10 years telling my mother how she should pronounce words or complete a swing dance step.
He never managed much more than trivial directions: My mother was a woman of powerful, sweeping passions that none of her three husbands came close to taming.
As we sped along, sealed in a car thick with poison fumes, I listened as my mother was reduced to a background blandness, colors leached to a uniform beige. I wasn't being driven toward my mother, but toward nurses whom he found comforting in their brash certainties, toward egg crate mattresses that would remind us that my mother was instantly breakable, and toward morphine tablets that, I was warned sternly by Harrison, could kill her if given too freely.
One might think that chronic, searing pain would focus the sufferer in the present, in the exact now. Instead, I suspect that the sufferer lives in the before now, so wound into pain that she wishes for the next moment not to come, since its beat will bring her screaming up from the bed, away from her dignity that remains etched in sweat upon the bed sheet.
Maybe, a humane doctor told me a week after my arrival, the only choices are either to medicate into unconsciousness, possibly coma, or let her scream. If she is screaming for pain relief, shouldn't we attend to that first, without worrying that she won't be lucid much of the time? Her breathing will slow each time she is medicated, slow down, slow down, until the moment it stops. Quietly, he outlined the problem of determining the precise line between medicating and precipitating.
The devoted and redoubtable nurses in the first medical wave refused the path of strong pain management, convinced that consciousness is a virtue. Despite my mother's obvious decline, Harrison would not consider hospice care until scant days before she died. (If they can't provide money, what use are they? Where, I wondered, was my mother in that question?) Hospice did finally arrive. Here were people who listened to family members, who specialized in causing patients as little discomfort as possible.
The nurse now assigned was a death artist, privileged to spend the last moments of a patient's life helping in some manner. Just changing my mother's bed sheets without disturbing her remains one of the kindest acts I have witnessed.
I witnessed others. But, superimposed, were surreal images that even now make me shiver: my brother, a lifelong addict, nodding out in my mother's sewing room on some morphine he had lifted. A decorative urn from my childhood filled inexplicably with fingernail clippings. The gaunt dog that kept running next to my mother's car as I drove fast, fast to escape the poison vapors.
At the end, when my mother was curled up like burnt straw. Harrison never asked me anything until a day or so later: When are you leaving? But I already had left him the night my mother died, fleeing to a lounge where the cocktail server inquired gently if I wanted another cognac - yes, I did - and whether she should bring another one for the empty seat - yes, she should. The dog paced me the next day, and every day after, for a few months. I never told anyone.
Years ago I stopped thinking of Harrison as my stepfather. I never use poisons in the gardens that surround my house. I don't have to worry that my car is inhospitable to my own stepsons. I look at them when we talk. Sometimes we ride in the car together. I remember to ask questions. I remember not to tell them how to feel about anyone, especially their mother.
- Jeff Karon teaches writing at the University of Tampa.
