Mama lay as rigid as a poker; still and motionless on the rumpled, soiled, hospital sheets that day when I entered her room. The pungent odors of the aging permeated the nursing home’s air like stagnant water.  A putrid scent wafted to my nostrils, adding to the smells of urine. She had soiled herself again; I recognized the unpleasant odor of bloody stool that was an indication she was bleeding internally in the process of her self-imposed starvation. Large bedsores ate away the tissue of her buttock and shoulders. The nursing home staff was supposed to turn her every two hours to prevent the sores, but they never bothered.  After all, she was there to die.

When I attempted to turn Mama myself, the loose folds of skin where muscles once were, slipped like cellophane beneath my fingers. I could feel the pain in my back and neck from the effort to move her.

“Pull your right arm across your chest, Mama. I have to turn you, okay?”

She shook her head affirmative and complied.  I heard heavy steps in the hallway just as I knocked over the plastic glass from her tray, but no one bothered coming in to investigate the noise, even though the glass struck the floor with a deafening clatter and rolled noisily across the room. Ice and cold water from the overturned glass drenched my feet, trickling and oozing between my toes through the open sandals.

Just as I painfully lifted her weight with the pull-sheet beneath her, Mama threw her right arm back and caught me sharply in the lip and nose with an audible thud, making my ears ring and star like sparks to flash like fireworks. A slight, amused smile tugged at Mama’s lips; she was aware of what she was doing, and I felt the familiar twinge of sorrow, like a stab to the heart, as the salty taste of blood tingled on the surface of my tongue.

“This is her wish,” the nurse told me when I arrived the week before.  “She doesn’t want to live anymore. She refuses to eat or drink with exception to an occasional swallow after days without, and she refuses her medications.”

“Isn’t there something you can do?” I beseeched, “She’s obviously very depressed!” My voice caught, but I refused to cry. Too many tears were spilled over the years because of my mother’s pleasure in seeing my pain, whether physical or emotional.

“No. There’s nothing we can do,” the nurse said.  “She signed a DNR, a Living Will, which states that we can’t even give her an IV for dehydration. We have to comply with her wishes, and she wishes to die. That’s her choice, not ours. We’re here to save lives, not to helplessly stand by and watch someone die, but we have no alternative.” 

Her choice? It shocked me to be informed Mama was doing this to herself. Why would any mother want to see her children suffer through this kind of anguish, watching her slowly die? Wasting and withering away like leathery fruit clinging to a dying vine, no longer supple or plump, physically deteriorating, and permeating the odors of death and decay. Why would a perfectly healthy woman wish this indignity upon herself, much less upon her children? If she felt she must end her life, to kill herself, why hadn’t she chosen to do it quietly in private without forcing her children to witness the act? The doctor said she could conceivably live for months in her present state; with her children watching her slowly waste away, knowing there was nothing they could do.

It is her choice. It is her choice. The words rang painfully like an echo in my ears.

Swallowing the blood tainting my mouth, I dragged Mama’s weight to the side of the bed with the pull-sheet and began to gently cleanse her. She was like an infant; her muscles were wasted and gone. She had absolutely no bodily control left, and no dignity.  Uncontrollable tears trickled down my cheeks leaving a cool trail in their wake as I bathed her, and the saltiness competed with that of the blood on my tongue.

"Why are you doing this Mama?" I beseeched aloud, but she only smiled that amused smile on the verge of a smirk, her eyes closed, unmoving.

“Are you angry with me?”  Her head shook slowly “no,” with absolutely no facial expression except for the spiteful smile.

“Then who are you angry with?” The smile widened, flashing insidiously, followed by cold silence.

“I love you Mama.”

There was no reaction. There was no “I-love-you” in return. There was nothing, ever, throughout my life in regard to affection toward me. When I was a child, she even pushed me away if I tried to hug her. Only once do I remember anything resembling affection, and that was merely a phony display of tenderness meant to impress one of her acquaintances.

Mama talked to others throughout the week of my visit; she spoke with my brother, his wife and kids, even to strangers, but she didn’t speak to me. She told others she loved them, from what my sister-in-law said, why then couldn’t she at least say the words to me? I felt my nails dig deep into my palms, and my heart ached with the too familiar pain of sorrow for the love I sought from my mother but never received; the love I knew I would never have.

As I stood beside her bed with my lip swollen, my mind drifted back to the baby picture of myself hanging beside my husband’s baby pictures on our bedroom wall at home; a picture of me as an infant of about three-months-of-age sporting large, dark bruises on one wrist and bruising over my right eye. The roundness of the bruises on my wrists in the picture appear to be finger marks; I recognized them through experience, having seen enough of them throughout my childhood of being pinched, punched, whipped and beaten by Mama; with her hands, fists, or anything at hand; for transgressions along the lines of not sweeping the kitchen floor well enough before her boyfriend’s visits, thereby embarrassing her; or for forgetting to polish her white work shoes before I left to catch the bus for school in the morning.

The care of my three younger brothers, as well as keeping up the house, were my responsibility from the time I was age nine while my mother worked a double shift at a local restaurant. My two older sisters had already left home, although they were both barely teenagers, to avoid the responsibilities of caring for the younger siblings themselves. My third older sister merely refused to take on the task, and stayed away from home as much as possible.

I often wondered if I had earned the punishment meted out to me.  Being despised and emotionally and physically abused by the one who gave me life. If I had indeed earned such hatred, why then couldn’t I at least remember the sins and deeds I had committed that merited such treatment? Was it because I reminded Mama of my father, whom she professed to also despised? Or was it because I reminded her of her own mother, as she once implied? She hated her mother as well, or so she had claimed.

Unlike my mother, I could never bring myself to hate my own mother. For some reason God hadn’t seen fit to create me that way. As painful as loving my mother had been throughout my life, I was grateful God saw fit to give me a heart that wasn’t as cold as hers. Although I’ve always been stubborn, I never considered myself a martyr. Even so, I always turned the other cheek where Mama was concerned, even knowing the other cheek would only end up hot and bruised in the process as well. It was the emotional hurt that inflicted the deepest pain, while I clung to the hope that someday my mother might somehow find it within her heart to love me in return for the love I held for her.

I took Mama’s gnarled feet into my hands and gently massaged them each day during my visits.  The nurse said Mama willed herself to retreat into a self-imposed shell, drawn deep within herself and voluntarily shutting down her mind and body. The nurse said Mama was only aware of the sense of touch now, so I touch her gently and lovingly, with the love I’d always held for her, even knowing she would never reciprocate in kind. Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter anymore that she would never love me in return, because I was certain that inability was her problem and not mine; her inability to love all of her children equally.

One of my older sisters suffered the same fate in childhood as I had at the hands of our mother, although the other five siblings appeared to have been spared from her, often hysterical, wrath. Mama was never really able to explain why she despised the two of us, my sister and I, although we both asked her about it at one time or another. I came to the conclusion over the years that maybe Mama resented us because she saw an unacceptable part of herself, or someone else, within us. Mama resented weakness, she once proclaimed, and she alluded that she felt I was weak because I was sensitive and cried so easily. “People with a soft heart have a feeble mind,” she professed.

As I massaged Mama’s feet with a tender touch one afternoon, in an attempt to keep her in touch with the world outside of herself, the lines of her face relaxed. I love you Mama, I thought. God only knows why, but I love you. Maybe I love you because you worked so hard all of your life, and you never gave me away to strangers, or left me alone on someone’s doorstep. Maybe I am feeble minded, to love someone who chooses not to love me in return.

I came to Mama’s room for one more visit before leaving for the very last time.  I couldn’t bear the emotional pain any longer. She told me years before that as far as she was concerned she had only two children left, since my oldest sister and my two younger brothers passed away. Mama stated at that point that I wasn’t one of the two children she claimed to have left, because I had chosen to move away with my husband and children, and I wasn’t there to do the things she felt I should be doing for her; doting over her; putting up with her emotional abuse; tending her bills, cleaning her house and keeping up her yard.

Now Mama was angry that one of the two chosen children, she professed were her only offspring, had placed her in a nursing home after she fractured her hip. He had placed her there to die, she warned, and she promised him that if he didn’t take her back to the home she bought for him and his wife, she would make certain to bring her life to an end, and it would be his fault; she vowed he would have to live out the rest of his life with the knowledge that her blood was on his hands.

When I offered to bring Mama home with me and my husband to live two years before, so that I could take care of her following surgery to remove a pituitary tumor, she stated that considering she couldn’t stand to be around me, and couldn’t even stand the sight of me, why would she want to live with me?

My mother was now willing her own life to end through self-starvation, and I was compelled to leave her in the care of the children she professed to love; the same two children who now didn’t want the burden of caring for her, and didn’t want the imposition of her living with them in an invalid state. There was nothing more for me to do, but to go home. Being self-employed, my husband had to work in order to bring in our living, and I had to be there to help him.   Although I debated about staying on with Mama to continue caring for her in the nursing home, I knew I would be doing it at my own emotional and physical expense, just as my daughter and husband insisted it would be.

“You’ve gone through enough, Mom!” My daughter strongly insisted.  “You have your own medical problems to consider. Besides, Dad needs you at home. You have to remember that Grandma is doing this to herself. It’s what she wants, and as hard as it is to accept, that’s her choice. She wants to die and your being here won’t make a bit of difference.”

I knew she was right. My brother said the doctor had stated it was already too late; too much internal damage had been done for the process to be reversed now. Besides, what made me think I could encourage Mama to want to live anyway? Me, whom she had already stated she couldn’t stand the sight of, and whom she didn’t want to be around; I knew the outcome was truly out of my hands, but a lifetime of doing whatever I did to please others, especially Mama, was a hard habit to break.

I entered her room to say my final goodbye feeling as though I were being drawn and quartered, pulled in too many different directions.

“I have to go home, Mama, I came to tell you goodbye,” I said, as I stood beside her bed.  Taking her hand into mine, I softly stroked her arm with my other hand. When she abruptly pulled her arm and hand away, I felt the familiar lump swelling in my throat.

“I love you,” I whispered, willing myself not to cry.  Mama didn’t speak to me, although I heard her speaking to other family members just before I came in. Her eyes remained closed and her only reaction was a smirk, and the indifferent shrug of her shoulders.

“I love you Mama,” I repeated hopelessly to her one last time, receiving a repeat of the indifferent shrug in return.  There was only silence, but in my heart the silence rang out deafening.

“Goodbye, Mama” I murmured, while the other family members in the room shuffled and shifted about self-consciously.

The smells of death clung to my nostrils as I turned and left her room without looking back. There was nothing I could do to change things. There never was anything I could have done to make a difference. It was just the way things always were. I took a deep breath to clear my lungs of the stale air and to clear the cobwebs from my mind.  Straightening my shoulders, I walked on.

It’s her choice. I must remember that, I thought. It had always been her choice, not mine. I can’t own something that doesn’t belong to me. We can’t change or be responsible for the choices or the actions of others, and that was always such a painfully hard lesson for me to learn.

“Goodbye, Mama,” I whispered into the echoing hall, swallowing the lump in my throat.  As tears trickled down my cheeks, I looked at the light streaming through the double doors at the end of the long, dark hallway.

“I love you,” I stated aloud one last time.  The ensuing silence echoed like my retreating footsteps within the empty hall.  My husband’s arm rested supportive across my shoulders and my daughter’s hand slid forth and lay nestled within mine.

“I love you Mom,” my daughter said almost in answer, and the painful lump in my throat softened.

“I love you too, honey.”

“Thank God history doesn’t always repeat itself,” I thought to myself with an overwhelming love for my own daughter.

My husband’s arm squeezed my shoulders, “Don’t worry honey, you’re nothing like your mother,” he said, reading my thoughts, “It’s time to let go.”

“Don’t look back, Mom.” My daughter squeezed my hand, also reading my mind. They both know me so well.

*****

 Mama died of sepsis three weeks later. I had said my goodbye, and not having the financial means, I couldn’t make it back for her graveside services. I sent flowers instead. My sister, one of Mama’s chosen children, and I were the only ones who sent flowers.

True to Mama’s word, my other sister and I were disowned in her Will. When Mama told me that was her intentions some years before, I told her that was her decision to make. I didn’t want her material possessions. I told her then that all I ever wanted from her was her love, and if she couldn’t give me that while she was alive, I didn’t want her material possessions following her death. Feeble minded as I may be, I guess I’ve never measured love in the material sense.

Mama’s final Will was the ultimate in pitting one child against another, her final manipulation, something she’d done throughout my life. Her Will pitted her two chosen children against one another in a battle over splitting her estate between them, and the fray was not a pretty sight to see.  Whatever your intended purpose was, Mama, thank you for sparing me the grief of being a part of the battle. And by the way . . . don’t ask me why . . . but I love you.