How Did You Want To Die, Again?

My stepmother died, and she didn't mean to. It was hard to watch her laying in her death bed, unable to talk or really communicate at all, except through her eyes, as the days counted down. "Are you comfortable?" "Do you want some ice chips?" "Should I change the TV channel?"

When you are dying, can you tell me what TV channel you want to have on as you go? Indignant Rachel Maddow? Angry Fox? Or a sitcom with a laugh track? How about that cliffhanger you wanted to binge? Did you want the TV turned off? If yes, blink twice. Do you want me in the room? Do you want to be in the room. Or outside? Or in a room, but at home, instead of on the third floor of a hospital full of strangers and beeping alarms and tubes snaking to secret places under your gown and a vent coming out of your throat?

How did you want to die? I never asked, because I never thought you would. Not yet. Your mother lived into her nineties. You barely broke the eighties. You didn't believe in God, but god, you worked to make the world better. Did you know what was happening? I don't believe so. You felt ill, and went to lie down. That was in the fall. You didn't really get back up. By April, you were gone.

When we visited you in March, you were walked from your bed where you lie for twenty-two or twenty-three hours a day, out on the sun porch and you presented yourself on the patio to the assembled party, arms wide open as if hugging us all. It was a fine lunch. You made a speech. "Once I get over this, my husband and I are really going to live!" you declared. That did not come to pass. I say this with grief, because I really wanted you, and my dad, to live. To really live. To seize, as much as any pair of tentative eighty year-olds can, your moment.

You'd been putting off travels for awhile, mostly because you had so much paperwork to attend to. Months of it. Years? Years. Years you spent out on that sun porch, filing papers, preparing the taxes, accounting for slips of paper and fees and balances. A classically trained administrative manager until the end. You never used a spreadsheet, or a computer. I did not even find a calculator. Just boxes and piles and mounds of slips of files, and mail, and notes jotted on edges of more paper and more notes and more mail. Phone numbers, "Sandy 386-727 ..." Memos, "water bill overdue!" Mountains of credit cards swaps, chasing that ever changing interest rate. And a journal of sorts of the decline into confusion, not only in written words but in how the words were written. The beautiful, firm cursive loops gradually bending into jagged, twangs of forced will and ink spilling sideways. And all the questions you had about what was happening to you. The uncertainty.

I found your will. It was from 1985. That was the responsible thing to do, then. In 1985, as a professional, to get a will. You left everything to your mother. During the interim forty years, she passed away, though, and I could not find an update. I found lots of things, small trinkets and mementos. ID badges from graduate school. Fancy keys to who-knows-what secret boxes. Currency from wondrous continents. A large collection of two dollar bills, US. Remainders of the miracle elixirs you started taking to try to get better (and sometimes, the receipts showing how expensive they were, all imported). A pile of stamps, torn from envelopes for you to frugally reuse. Utility bills for every month going back twenty five years, bank statements, official notices, and similar filings, accounting for decades.

At the end, I knew you were consumed by infections, among the other ailments. As I sat in your chair, at your desk, necessarily sorting your mountains of papers so that your husband could persist, it did occur to me that I was touching, breathing, inhaling all that you did, before those infections killed you. Was the disease still here, I wondered? Would I get sick, too? I admit, sometimes I held my breath for long periods. As long as I could.

I found the cat vomit covering a box of phone bills. It was under another stack of papers. The box was from Asia, a carpeted, very ornate affair. Red with gold embroidery. I suppose you remembered buying it, favored it. Kept it prominently positioned in the order of your daily administration. What have I bought that I love, that is bound with memories of freedom and wanderlust and mind opening joy, that my cats will vomit on and I will nonchalantly cover with paperwork as I busy myself into the grave? I cleaned it, and would have set it aside for dad, but the cat burst the sides apart from months or years of laying in it. I can see you there, at your desk sorting papers, with the cat sitting in the box, soaking up the sun. Then something stuck in his throat, and he expunged it where he sat, but you kept on working without noticing, or noticing but forgetting. Busy busy busy.

While you were lying idle, still alive, I remember watching you pick up your iPad and press on it, but then seem to forget what you were doing. Even for our octogenarians, society has created motor memory with devices. Was it a game you wanted to play? A news app? An email you meant to send? The glass face is unforgiving, asking all of our time through life but giving back no guidance at the end. You looked confused and set it back down. A few minutes later, you picked it back up again and made to press the screen. But you still looked confused. The devices are not our friends.

"Are you there?" "Hello, I haven't heard from you in awhile." "I'm worried." The messages piled up, waiting for me to read them after your departure. Should I respond? I do not know these people. If I do respond, do I write from your account? A voice from the beyond? I did not mean to read them, they were just there when I had to use your device to check for unpaid bills and find out how to help dad get access to the bank.

Dad, I got access to the bank. "Am I going to be OK?"

Yes dad. I'll take care of it. By the way, how did you make it to eighty-five and not know how to pay the light bill?

We are really going to live.

One year later, I will visit that sun porch again. All the children are traveling to Florida. This is for your one year anniversary, your Celebration of Life. We have a program printed up, and music, and a lunch reservation limited to forty people at your favorite place. In the interim, dad has totaled two cars, but doesn't remember either. He visited me twice - flew on big planes! and remembers none of it.

He lurks from room to room through your home, looking for you, seeing you everywhere. He's called me several times, asking where you might be since he couldn't find you. Once, in a terrible moment of lucidity from his dementia, he said, "I have to relive her death over and over and over again." We've spent a hundred and fifty thousand of your fortune, perhaps, on deferred maintenance and audits and bills and expenses. It doesn't leave dad with much, but enough. Assuming he can stop eating out twice a day and buying meals for anyone he can entreat to join him. But I told you, the last time I saw you, I told you that I would take care of him. And so I am. I know you loved him, and I do, too, and I loved you, so I will keep at it. He will forever be your husband, he will also forever be my dad.

The mountain of papers has been reduced to a few excel files. The taxes were paid on time, and the business is an official LLC now. With deductions and everything! It turns out, there is real money to be made there. I like to think that you would approve, though I can never be sure because, as generous as you were, you kept some things quite quiet and close, like the super secret finances (which were in total turmoil, it turns out) and the business (which was more like a charity, to be fair) and the reason why you spent so much time on that sun porch, endlessly shuffling papers (maybe you simply enjoyed watching the cat sitting in the sun, in your favorite red box).

Piles and piles of papers. An administrator's task. You did your duty, now I pray you rest in peace.