Norma Marder

On the Left

    for my mother, Gertrude Rajeck Mintz

Recuperation

MAMA WAS A LITTLE TIRED that day, more than a little tired, but she walked six blocks to the doctor along tree-lined Brooklyn streets, leaning on her shopping cart. Late afternoon, the end of September, leaves falling. She was eighty-eight, a small, tough woman, half deaf. “I don’t give up,” she liked to say, “you know me.” The doctor said something confusing about her carotid artery and gave her a prescription, and she walked two blocks to her sister Dinah’s apartment for supper.

EARLY EVENING IN ILLINOIS, cicadas chirping. The radio is on; my husband and I are making supper. I go up to the bedroom for a sweater. Our younger son’s wife phones.
    “Gertrude had a stroke,” she says.
    A luminous oval space spreads around me, very cold and still, and in that space a soundless chord-the dreaded theme arriving, unfolding, the beginning of the end of Mama’s life.
    “What kind of stroke?” I ask.
    “Right hemisphere,” my daughter-in-law says, “massive. I’m so sorry.”
    Herbert calls airlines while I find Mama’s health care proxy and pack for various outcomes. I reach my Aunt Dinah. Mama was eating chicken soup with her and a friend, Dinah says. They were eating chicken soup in the kitchen, and suddenly Mama slid off the chair sideways, her face drooping, soup pouring from her mouth, begging in a strange, deep voice as she fell, “Give me soup—give me soup—give me chicken—give me compote.” I see Dinah trying to catch her. I see them on the floor between the table legs and the poppy-flowered wallpaper, Dinah soothing her while her friend calls 911.
    A stroke. Mama expected cancer.
    Next morning I fly to New York, to Dinah, also small and tough and still leafleting for social justice. We take a bus to Coney Island Hospital.
    “She loved the soup so much,” Dinah cries indignantly, “but she didn’t even finish it.”
    Mama lies in the first bed in a ward of six women, on her back, mouth open, her face bleached, a feeding tube in her nose. Her right hand bangs her right shoulder like a piston, the wrist loose. She bangs her shoulder, shakes the bed rail, and fingers her only tooth, a lower incisor. My mother has traveled somewhere, leaving this old woman behind. Mama always liked to travel—a fortuneteller said she was born with a suitcase. I stroke her forehead, dry skin over bone.
    “Mama,” I cry in her good ear.
    Her hazel eyes are hooded—the right milky and the left frozen. A deep gravelly voice comes out of her, each word on the same pitch.
    “Tell the young man to lift this,” she says, “he can do it, please you tell him, will you tell the young man? He can get me out of here—I’ll give him a few dollars—tell the young man, he can lift this—he knows my sister—will you tell him?”
    She touches her tooth. Such a familiar hand, pudgy and soft, the fingers curved-fingers that sewed and pared potatoes—a competent hand, an emissary from her normal self, or perhaps all that is left
    I imagine chaos in her surviving brain cells, synaptic reorganization, molecules scurrying to assess damage and make repairs; emergency, aftershock. A deep need to escape.
    “What’s your name?” she asks.
    “Norma,” I say in her good ear. A pause while the word travels through drugged corridors.
    “I have a daughter Norma,” she says.
    “It’s me, it’s me—Norma—I’m here, Mama.” I stroke her forehead, her hair.
    “I have a daughter Norma.”
    “You see her, the Big Boss,” Dinah says, “and then like this—terrible.”

THE NEXT DAY her eyes are brighter. Her hand still performs its ritual dance from shoulder to bed rail to tooth.
    I brace myself. “Hi, Mama—it’s me, Norma.”
    “Your name is very dear to me,” she says in the gravelly monotone that is her new voice. “I have a daughter Norma.”
    She looks in my direction, closing her right eye in an ominous squint. “Do you have babies?” she asks. I bend over her ear and tell her two sons. “My Norma has two boys. You should have a daughter, too. It’s good to have a daughter.” She studies my face. “How old are you?”
    “Sixty-two.”
    “My daughter is sixty-two. When’s your birthday?”
    “June 8,” I say.
    “My daughter’s birthday is June 8. You should have a daughter. Sixty-two isn’t too late—as long as your insides are all right you can have a daughter.”
    It takes my breath away: the greatest good is having a daughter. My mother the pessimist, notorious for turning God’s commandments into bleak, secular certainty—my mother has become wildly optimistic
    “I have a happy family,” she says, reciting our accomplishments. Gone are the old criticisms about ill-chosen mates, disappointing professions, and small incomes. Everything is wonderful—we are all brilliant and successful and happily married. Which is how we see ourselves and struggled for years to make her see us.
    “Norma’s son Michael is a physicist,” she says, “he’s an eminent man, married to a Greek archaeologist, an important woman in her country—their daughter Nike is fourteen, she wants to be a doctor. Norma’s son Yuri is a great photographer, freelance—sometimes he has work and sometimes he doesn’t—married to a potter—a talented boy a good boy, he took me to the hospital—their daughter Zenobia is four months. Zenobia will be a great singer, mark my words.”
    Burnt crust gone, sweet truth beneath.
    I show her wallet photos. The first few mean nothing, then she introduces me to Michael and his family. Hesitantly, I hold up my driver’s license. “It’s my daughter,” she says emphatically, “show the nurses, they’ll want to see what she looks like.” Jolted through the looking glass, I catch her flying hand and kiss it, hoping to electrify the gap. She pulls her hand away and beats her shoulder.
    Yuri arrives. She tells him the other Yuri’s rent and insurance costs. Says he should enter the academic profession. “My grandson Michael is a professor,” she says, “and my son-in-law, too—he’s retired—it’s a good life—he only taught three days a week. You should consider it.” Yuri winces and says maybe he will. She blows her nose, unaware of the feeding tube, wipes and blows, beginning her love affair with tissues.
    She shakes the bed rail vigorously. “A place like this must have fix-it men,” she says. “Jerry can get me out of here—he’s good at moving things—he moved things before—Jerry will lift this and then I can get out of bed and go to the bathroom. I have to go to the bathroom right now. If I don’t go I’ll make in the bed. Why am I here?”
    Who is Jerry? Does she mean Yuri?
    The third day she recognizes Dinah, and the fourth day she recognizes Yuri and me. “I said to the other Norma, ‘Your name is very dear to me, I have a daughter Norma.’ ” Her reality, like her vocal tone, is uninflected. The other Yuri is a photographer and should go to grad school. The other Dinah had parents in a concentration camp. “Terrible things were done to people in concentration camps,” Mama says, “they did terrible things to them there. But they were survivors and now they’re ninety-one and ninety-three and in good health. How can you be ninety-one and ninety-three in good health?”
    The fifth day she is sleeping when I arrive, her arm, for the first time, lying peacefully on the blanket. She wakes; I kiss her.
    “You didn’t come to me!” she says. “I chased you all over the hospital—how could you do such a thing?”
    Her eyes are pained and furious. She must have had a bad dream.
    “Where am I staying, Mama?” I ask in her ear.
    “In my house,” she guesses dutifully.
    “How did you chase me?”
    “I ran,” she says.
    “Mama, can you run?”
    Her arm begins its agitated flailing. “I haven’t slept a wink since I got here,” she says. “Why didn’t you come over? I rang the bell and you ran away from me. Give the nurse five dollars. Without her you’d never come.”
    No more glad welcomes. From now on she fires accusations the moment I step over the threshold. I regress, feel guilty. I have abandoned her. Of all her narratives—about destruction, confinement, and abandonment—this is the saddest, the most painful: in a parallel world, I live in the hospital and run away from her every morning. I write her a letter about bad dreams; Mama has great respect for the printed word. She reads it aloud carefully. “Maybe it’s just a bad dream,” she concedes, “but you weren’t at the elevator-how could you do that to your mother?”
    I can’t stand her scolding and that flailing arm. I want to tie a scarf over her mouth and handcuff her to the rail. Then she fades for a few days, her voice weak and her arm twitching like the tail of a sick dog. She sleeps a lot. Watching her small hurt body curled under the sheet, I say foxhole prayers for that delicious scolding and flailing.
    It is an indentured life, oddly satisfying. Every morning I make her lunch of pureed soup and mashed sweet potatoes. I bend over her bed for hours, talking into her good ear (no chairs—it is a public hospital—and her good hearing aid was lost in the emergency room). Dinah sits on the bed when the nurses aren’t looking; I can’t sit on a soft mattress and talk in her ear. Family fuels my spirit. Dinah. Yuri, Simone, and Zenobia. Herbert.

LIKE THE DREAM, other new experiences take root in her midterm and short-term memory fields. A nurse’s aide wipes her with a cold washrag, and ever after, until she dies, every time she goes to the toilet or the bedpan, she says reflexively, “If you use wet, make sure it’s warm.” She is conditioned faster than Pavlov’s dog—eight months of warm water don’t cancel out the cold. On the other hand, when she can eat again and has Jell-O, she thinks it is potato salad and enjoys institutional food ever after. Her memory is robotic, jerking from one field to another. I plant new memories. Her great-granddaughter Zenobia is eating cereal and applesauce. Her great-granddaughter Nike is a vegetarian. Every day she feeds on stories of these young girls, on their meals, talents, and futures, creating survival narratives, lodged in hope.
    When she gets stuck in an obsession, I hand her the Yiddish paper. Snap. Read. Memorize. Report. But visiting hours are only from 11:00 to 2:30. Alone, she hallucinates, keeps her thumb on the call button, screams for help. I hire aides round-the-clock to keep her from going insane. Our doubles stay hardwired in her memory. Periodically, till the end, she mentions the marvelous coincidence of the other Norma and the other Yuri, winding up courteously, “I know you say I was confused.”

I AM GRATEFUL TO WRITERS who describe lives built on mental deficits, particularly the neurologist Oliver Sacks and the autistic animal behaviorist Temple Grandin. Thanks to them I honor Mama’s point of view. She is my guide; I improvise on her signals. When she says the man across the room was murdered at night, I ask what happened, and when she asks if the New York Times reported it, I say not yet. Unless her safety or sanity is at stake, I don’t contradict her or impose my reality. She had the stroke; the reality is hers. My job is to bring her up as far as she can go—to wake what can be woken and keep her secure.
    Deeply connected, we talk a lot—about family, about the past. She is happy when we have the same idea. “What are you making for supper?” Chicken, I say. “I was just thinking you should make chicken. You see? Two minds with but a single thought.”
    I sleep badly. Wake in the wee hours, fretting, planning. One night I have a cheerful fantasy: she lifts her bad leg, and I scream in delight. When I arrive that day she looks mischievous. “Last night I lifted my leg all the way up,” she says. “If you were here you would have screamed.”
    “Very good,” I say politely.
    “Take off the covers,” she orders.
    I peel back the blanket, and she raises her bad leg twelve inches, straight from the hip. I scream.

IMAGINE BEING HALF OF YOURSELF. Sensing a wholeness that is only half. Being paralyzed on your left side. Are you evenly divided? Are there zigzags and curves? What shape is that whole that is a half? That good right side. One arm, one leg, one breast, two eyes, the other ear. Half a heart? Half a stomach? Half a nose? What do you make of yourself? Who are you? Your depth perception is gone. Colors a rough guess. Luckily you recognize black-and-white photos, even from long ago. Process is gone—you remember positions but not how things got there. The psychologist calls it missing the big picture. I call it missing avenues. “How do I get here every morning?” Mama asks after six weeks, when she seems quite sane. “Do they send an ambulance?”
    Left is a theme in Mama’s life. She was a leftist, left wing. Left wing derives from liberals sitting to the left of the presiding officer in European legislative assemblies. Growing up poor in a Polish stetl, believing in equality instead of God, Mama joined a communist youth group in her teens. Her father, gone for sixteen years, sent letters from Russia, enthusiastic about the revolution.
    The Mama of my childhood was active in what was proudly, secretively called “The Party.” She baked cookies for meetings, subscribed to the Daily Worker, and cared about the rights of workers and minorities. When FBI agents visited her during the McCarthy period, she wasn’t fazed. “For every question they asked,” she said proudly, “I answered with a story about my zeide Schloime and his passion for justice.”
    The left still governs her perception; neurologically she is a leftist. Is it poetic justice? Lacking the right brain’s perception of space, time, and shape, she invents a better world, peopling it with memories, loopily turning nurses and patients into friends, living and dead.
    “Listen, Norma,” she calls, “come here, I have something very important to tell you,” and beckons insistently, her wrist loose. It is the pumping arm, restored to the horizontal plane, making an old aggravating demand. Come here. I have something very important to tell you. That is what the flailing meant. She was demanding help.

MY MOTHER IS IMMORTAL; she has been alive all my life. I see her once a year. Past tense, excuse me. I saw her once a year. For the past forty years, we spent an annual week together. More than that and we started screaming. She nagged and I screamed. There is no preparation for past tense. Continuity snaps, and suddenly she is in the past tense. Her ashes are on my mantel.
    She used to say, “Don’t bring me to Champaign unless I’m so bad off I don’t know it.” Herbert and I bring her here by plane and car, first to a rehab hospital and then to a nursing home in a senior community. Private nursing in our house is not an option, so while I was in New York, Herbert visited every nursing home in Champaign-Urbana. They all cost the earth after Medicare runs out, and he chose this one, founded by two local women. There are pianos, gardens, and an aviary. Paintings in the corridors. Concerts. Good food. Good therapy. She shares a large room with a sweet demented woman. Herbert and I prop her up: we coach her therapy practice, do her laundry, wheel her to the library, encourage her to write. When her handwriting is a mess, I transcribe her letters and keep copies.
    “We’ll write a book together,” I say. “I’ve written two hundred pages from my point of view. You write about stroke from your point of view.”
    “Sure, sure,” she says, “me write a book.” And proceeds to write nine page letters to her sister and her friends. Writing keeps her going.

                I will probably never be home again, not this winter anyway. A lot of                 things happen as they do. You can’t hold anything back. I wish I could                 move my left arm. So far I can’t. That arm is a dummy. I just have to keep                 on hoping. I have no other choice.

    Sometimes she scrawls one sentence over another. Her vision, like her hearing, depends on her mood.

                They say I had a stroke. As for me I don’t know anything about it.                 Therapy is very hard. I don’t know if living to an old age is such a
                good idea.

    Sitting on the toilet she is sociable, entertaining. She can barely transfer to and from the wheelchair, even with assistance, so I tape visual and verbal cues around the bathroom. I help her pull herself to her feet, and we hold each other as the aide wipes her and pulls up her pants. She looks up happily, sagging, struggling to lock her knees, and tells me she loves me.

I TRY TO WORK on my novel. Bills arrive. The phone rings. It is Mama, asking me to bring face cream, her affectless, gruff voice frightening on the phone. My novel has no meaning. What is important is Mama’s safety-stick lollipops. She lives in my mind, blotting out the story-making sector. I have enough time to write, even with visits and paying bills and taking her to the dentist and doctor and solving endless nursing home problems and maintaining a supply of necessities from hearing-aid batteries to potted plants. I have time, but I have no new ideas. I can only rewrite. I have rewritten my novel and printed it up to the last section—eight years of work. It cries for its end. But when I enter the quiet space where visions and voices live, I see foot pedals on Mama’s wheelchair. Why does she have pains in her chest? How can I help her sleep and has she lost her teeth again and is her skin tear healing and why is she anemic?

I IGNORE NEGATIVE PREDICTIONS and signs of decay, lagging in the realm of hope while Mama’s body travels, light-years ahead, toward its final stages. Periodically I catch up in sudden jerks, surprised at time’s snap. Each stage is shocking.

SHE IS A SMALL WOMAN. She sits in a wheelchair, good arm on a tray, dummy arm strapped in a trough, the hand in an edema glove. She has lively blue eyes, short white hair, and an endearing lopsided smile. She wears half glasses with only one lens. She reads the Yiddish newspaper and Pearl Buck novels. Her speaking voice is gravelly. Her pitch got fried along with her pessimism, so she can’t sing anymore, but she can rhythmically recite her songs. I cling to the positive; I am magnetized by the positive. Her spirit is delightful; she hears better and has normal blood pressure. In Brooklyn deafness isolated her; here she knows everyone’s name and marital status. She is ecstatic when Michael and Nike come for Thanksgiving, and she calls Herbert her son. My friends discuss Yiddish culture and literature with her. She brings the past into the present, and her passive vocabulary has become active. She wins prizes at bingo. Knows how to get what she needs. Pessimism and depression used to cloud her intelligence; now that she is hopeful, it shines.
    Mama would trade all her new advantages for the freedom to turn over in bed and walk to the bathroom. Who can measure her imprisonment?
    Being magnetized by the positive keeps me from despair. I could make a different list. She worries about time. Needs schedules. Suffers from anxiety. She has always suffered from anxiety, a condition she claims doesn’t exist. She is anxious when someone disappears behind her chair, when she anticipates change, when she has to wait, when she takes a bath, when the sun goes down. In hospitals and nursing homes, at dusk and dawn, an anxious ripple flickers through the population like wind across water.
    “Don’t tell me—I live here!” Mama says. Twice she throws away her lower teeth. The first time she has just arrived in the nursing home, angry over leaving the rehab hospital, and leaves them on her breakfast tray. Luckily her name is on them, and they surface in the laundry room. Mama is not demented; she knows how to complain. The second time we are in Texas visiting Michael. She wraps her teeth in a paper napkin, accidentally tosses them in the wastebasket with a wad of tissues, and out they go in the trash. Her reproach drills through my conscience. You’re indispensable. Accept it.
    I do. Mama routinely walked six blocks to save a penny on a box of prunes. She denied herself small satisfactions, was a martyr to frugality. “I might need it someday,” she always said. And now she does. Her money keeps her alive, but she wants more than life. She wants me. I give myself generously. It robs me of visions. All I have is thoughts, a poor substitute.

TEMPLE GRANDIN SAYS an animal’s primary emotion is fear. To allay fear you must apply optimal pressure. Too great a pressure makes the animal resist; too little and the animal stays agitated. Optimal pressure is calming.
    Independence calms Mama. Freedom to choose. Mama loves tissues. Tissues are soft and abundant—she reaches into the box and pulls one out, wipes her mouth, tucks it in her bosom or up her sleeve, and takes another. She can take as many as she wants, rub them across her lips, throw them away, or save them. And there are more in the box. And more boxes. “Two things they have in abundance in these places,” she says, “milk and tissues.” Tissues substitute for money and checks. Tissues are comfort. Her blouses puff like pigeon breasts, and doing her laundry is hazardous.
    She also loves one-ply paper napkins, flat lollipops, and two purses. Her little pink purse is for lollipops; she loves it as much as she loves tissues. The canvas purse is for tissues or napkins, depending on her destination. Paper-stuffed, it is slung across her shoulder.
    She skips around in books, content to read randomly. A book should be realistic, she says, combining romance with social significance. In current events she interrupts a recital of football scores to report that Syria is developing nerve gas.
    “I will not resist,” I say to myself. “This is the time of life it is.” I feel happy in the nursing home; I belong to the community. I donate my novel to the library and sing a recital for President’s Day. Mama helps plan the program and attends rehearsal. “How do I clap?” she asks. The day of the recital, she makes a change in the program, and I oblige. She hasn’t lost her critical edge. “You should have announced each song one at a time,” she says, “not all in advance.” We enter the Mother’s Day apron contest, and I win for the most seasoned apron.

Stability

WHAT IS THE FUTURE? I set goals. March, I will take her to a fundraising pasta dinner. April, we will have Passover. June, she will come to a choral concert on my birthday.
    Every spring I make a mammoth pasta sauce in a church kitchen as a fund-raiser for Amasong, a lesbian/feminist chorus. She will enjoy meeting the singers, I think. She will ride in the elevator and do one-handed tasks. That plan turns out to be unrealistic. But Dinah comes for Passover, and we bring Mama home for the Seder. Herbert drove in the car, she writes to a friend, and a few men by Norma’s carried me in the wheelchair up a few steps. It was a nice Seder. She enjoys the soup and matzo balls. Makes sure we sing all the verses. It is her first visit to our house since the stroke. And her last. Only one visit. I expected to bring her home once a week in the mass-transit wheelchair van. Take her to the faculty art show. To the Amasong concert. Milestones come and go. In June she is hospitalized with anemia. Blood clot in her leg, congestive heart failure.
    She is released from the hospital the day before my birthday, much diminished. That night I dream a music van rolls down the highway, a tin box on wheels, propelled by an old woman sitting at the back, feet padding along the road in laced black shoes, playing “Old Folks at Home” on an organ. The music floats along the highway and into the forest, to a cabin where an ancient baby girl lies wizened and grotesque, kicking and flailing as babies do, but with withered limbs. The ancient baby looks at me lovingly, hovering between smiles and tears. Out the window, the old woman propels her music van down the road, playing, “All the world is sad and dreary / Everywhere I roam. / Oh, darlings how my heart grows weary / Far from the old folks at home.”
    The dream colors my birthday party in the nursing home lounge. I blow out the candle on a white cake and wish for stability. No more progress; progress is an illusion linked to the past, to a return. The present matters. How can we hold on to the present? How can she live like this? Nibbling a bite of food until she falls into a trance. Her ribs bruised from blood thinners. Sleeping during the day. No more progress; we don’t look for progress. We don’t look for rehabilitation. We hope for stability. Scaling down into a new reality as she grows thinner and thinner.
    We make a grand plan. Yuri, Simone, and Zenobia will visit for the first week of July. Eat, Mama, eat, Yuri is coming. She has lost fifteen pounds or more. She barely eats anything. Says she can’t swallow. She is very frail, her eyes still alight, but scarcely reading anymore. She writes one last letter to Yuri for his birthday.

                Happy birthday, Yuri. I can’t help thinking of your last years birthday                 party. Oh how I wish I could have done the same now. The only thing I                 can wish for is to be able to do it next year. There is no harm in wishing.                 I’m happy there is a chance even slight seeing you and your family. I can’t                 wait. There is a big change in Zenobia since the time I saw her. Yuri, I was                 happy to hear you are having work. Can’t wait till you come.

    I feed her yogurt, ice cream, graham crackers. A friend brings halvah. She tries. Mama, Yuri’s coming. You’ll see Zenobia dance. I sing her Yiddish songs. I wheel her in the garden. The sun shines. She wears a white cotton hat. She enjoys purple flowers, sips milk and Resource, nibbles halvah. She recites the last lines of “The New Colossus,” the Emma Lazarus poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, which she knows as a song, “The Lady with the Lamp.” All week she is obsessed with it.

                                        Give me your tired, your poor,
                    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
                    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
                    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
                    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

    She says she belonged to the Emma Lazarus Society-every year they visited the statue and sang the song. “The same woman always sang the solo,” she says, “but she’s dead. Guess how many times I sang it in my life.”
    “A hundred,” I guess.
    “Right,” she says. “Sing it.”
    I dredge it up from high school glee club. It is the wrong melody.
    “Phone Dinah,” she commands. “Dinah will sing it correctly.”
    The next morning, Dinah teaches it to me, and in the garden after lunch, I sing it. Mama corrects me. “Not ‘masses,’ ” she sings on a croaking pitch ‘masses!’ ” The second pitch, alas, is the same as the first.
    “Let’s go,” she says with her old spirit, adjusts her hat, and takes a sip of Resource.

Dying

AND FINALLY I WISH, not for recovery or stability, but for one day. One day for her to see Yuri, Simone, and Zenobia. May she live through the night. May she live five hours. That wish, too, isn’t granted. She dies three hours before they arrive. But the important wish is granted, the most important. She always wanted to die without pain. “I just want to go to sleep and forget about it.” She has the most peaceful death. Renal failure. Her lungs fill with water like twin wells. She lies in bed on her back looking as she had nine months ago, eyes glazed and mouth open, but thinner and more beautiful. The beginning terrified me;,the end seems right. Herbert and I are with her. She has morphine. Mama lies on her back, on oxygen, breathing with great effort. She makes the sound I have read about, a death rattle, caused by fluid in her lungs. Eyes glassy. She has suffered complete renal failure, and her abdomen is distended. She struggles to speak between breaths. “No breakfast,” she says. On the silent closed-captioned TV, the British are handing Hong Kong over to China.
    A terrible struggle to breathe, the breaths of a drowning woman. She stares at the historical transfer on TV, the pageantry of an era coming to a close. Prince Charles nods.
    “Other pink purse,” Mama says. I bring it. She touches both ears, meaning ear stopples. “Bath,” she says. “Monday.” She touches her hair. “Nice for Zenobia,” she says.
    I tell her she is probably too tired for a bath today. Not to worry, her hair looks very nice. How does a dying woman remember it is Monday, bath day?
    Our doctor arrives. His name, appropriately, is Dr. Day. We all brighten. “Look who’s here,” I say. She asks him to check the lump on her chest. She is so thin, her bones protrude. “It’s benign,” he says, “nothing to worry about.” He pats her reassuringly and gently tells us to expect death within a few hours.
    Herbert and I sit at one side of the bed. Ertha and Emma, two special aides, sit at the other.
    “Would you like me to sing to you?” I ask.
    “ ‘The Lamp,’ ” Mama says.
    The newly learned melody has faded. I make up a similar tune, stricken desperate to sing the final, stately, rising line. I experiment and apologize, stop and start, cry, make up a new tune, break down, and move on to another song.
    Months ago I decided I would sing Mama’s songs to her when she was dying, and now is the time, now I really begin, sitting bent over to hold her good hand, which is opposite her good ear. I sing and cry, sing and cry. It is hard to sing and cry at the same time. I sing “Dona Dona” and “Oifn Pripitchik.” “Rozenkes Mit Mandlen,” more tears than song. “Eli, Eli.” She is breathing her watery, drowning breath, struggling so hard to keep breathing, mouth wide open, making the death rattle.
    “Look at Gertrude struggle,” Ertha says. “She could let go, but she don’t do that, she keep on struggling.”
    I sing with her breaths. She dozes, eyes open. I ask if she hears me. She nods. The charge nurse injects morphine every fifteen minutes. Herbert begins to sing with me, introducing lively Hebrew songs. Her breathing is a bit easier with the morphine. Herbert is singing with enthusiasm—we really make music together.
    In a pause between songs, I say good-bye into her ear. No surprise declarations. We have had nine months of loving declarations; every visit has been a loving declaration between us. Tears, now, only tears. Good-bye, Mama, l love you, you’ve been a good mother, Mama, good-bye. I ask Herbert to give her some words. The previous day she had said, “Herbert takes care of all the details.” So he reassures her now. “Everything will be all right,” he says into her ear. “No need to worry. I’ll take care of the details.”
    I sing “Eli, Eli” again. “Tumbala-laika.” Mama’s lungs are twin wells filling from the same source, the water rising, rising. Her breathing sounds even more watery. The nurse says water from her lungs has flooded her throat. I sing her favorite spiritual, “Wade in the Water,” without noticing the irony.
    A few times Mama draws her gums together with ropy effort and swallows. A determined, willful gesture, jaw thrust forward, lips compressed, swallowing the water that is drowning her. It is about 8:45 A.M. From now on she stays in an open-eyed sleep and no longer nods when I speak to her. Hearing is the last sense to go, so Herbert and I keep on singing, sometimes together, sometimes me alone.
    A dark brown liquid leaks from the corner of Mama’s mouth. As Ertha wipes it with a washcloth, Mama sticks out her tongue, and Ertha wipes her tongue. I sing “Margaritkes,” mainly the tune. Sometimes my voice has its old beauty, and I am pleased I can sing well for her.
    Mama’s feet are purple. Her right hand, which I hold all the time, is blue. Her breaths are lighter, shallower, quieter. I have been singing to her breathing, following the pulse of her breath for tempo. I am singing the chorus of “Rochele” over and over. She loved singing “Rochele”; it was one of her best songs. More brown liquid comes out of her mouth. I try to catch it with a washcloth. Emma and Ertha go for towels; Herbert goes for the nurse. Brown liquid is pouring out of Mama’s mouth. I can’t catch it; it pours onto my hands and spreads over her nightgown, staining the clean cloth. I can’t stem the flow; it pours and pours. I can’t catch it or wipe it up. The women return with cloths. “What’s that brown stuff?” I ask. “Blood,” Ertha says, looking surprised. The nurse, Jan, presses a folded cotton blanket under her chin. Her head is turned a bit to the side. I wash my hands. All that blood has poured out of her, but she is still alive, her breaths shallow as a newborn. Jan listens to her pulse through a stethoscope. “Is she still there?” I ask. Jan nods. I keep singing the last two lines of “Rochele.” Can’t sing the words anymore, just the melody. Jan listens. Still there? I keep singing. And sing and sing—still there?—and sing until Jan says, “She’s at peace now.”
    They leave us alone with her. Her skin is soft and warm. She looks beautiful. I settle her head on the pillow. Say a few words. Hold Herbert’s hand.
    Ertha says we must lay her out before she gets stiff. Women laying out the dead, which is how it should be, like a family. My mother lies half naked. Her shoulders and chest are skin and bone, her breasts lie to the side, neat and flat; her stomach and hips spread softly. By the time Yuri arrives, her face is cold and noble,

Afterward

THE LAST TWO LINES of “Rochele” repeat themselves in my mind like a ritual prayer.

                    Gut iz mir gevehn a mol Mit dir,
                    Yetst bist du veit fon mir, alts loift farbei.

                    Once we were happy together,
                    Now you’re far from me, everything passes quickly.

    How strange and natural to watch life ebb away. How awful to watch my mother’s life ebb away. My mother. She didn’t seem to know she was dying, but she wanted to hear the Statue of Liberty song, calling it, “The Lamp.” Her practical self, prolonging life with plans, asked for ear stopples. Her spiritual self, making deeper plans, envisioned the lamp beside the golden door, the exile in the promised land, the age-old eternal light.
    Day and night, for sleep-deprived weeks, the last lines of “Rochele” go round and round my brain, turning dark and obsessive, carving guilt and sorrow. “Once we were happy together.”

AND NOW IT IS THE PRESENT without her. We have had a memorial service in her apartment, with stories, music, and food. Her relics are on a shelf in my study, and her wheelchair stands in the hall by the piano. On the mantel a ceramic urn made by Simone holds most of her ashes, and the rest nourish a bulb garden in the front yard. A red lily-tulip was the first to bloom, followed by white and orange daffodils, then a host of flowers, glowing and nodding.
    September to June were the months she was pregnant with me. September to June were the months of her illness. The form is musical: crescendo, decrescendo. She nourished me in her womb from fall to summer while I grew big enough to live; I nourished her through the same seasons while she grew small and died.
    I remember us dancing together at the Brownsville and East New York Benevolent Society party. I remember dreaming her as a purple, wizened baby in a shoebox. I remember us holding one another in the white-tiled bathroom with its grab bars and signs while an aide washes and dries her bottom. Crystallized in music, a primal waltz, she sags and rises, trying to lock her knees, talking continuously. Our bodies press close. When she manages to stand erect, she looks up at me, eyes shining, and says lovingly, “Funny face.”

NORMA MARDER grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in a landscape of hills and smokestacks. She is the author of a novel, An Eye for Dark Places (Little, Brown), and her stories and personal essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Literal Latté. She is looking for a publisher for her second novel, The Age of Cage, and recently completed a nonfiction book, Deceptive Cadences: A Writer’s Life. She lives in Champaign, Illinois, and Monhegan Island, Maine.

“On the Left” appears in our Spring 2002 issue.

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