Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (38 page)

hours. With help from a hospice social worker conducting shut-

tle diplomacy, he and my mother began talking again, this time

in earnest, and with care. He spoke to her for hours about the

pain of their intense, difficult relationship, stretching back to

his childhood. “I had no idea,” she said, when he was done. “I

can’t fix it. All I can do is listen and acknowledge.”

She updated her will. She copied out a line from Helen

Keller on a three-by-five card: “The best and most beautiful

things in the world cannot be seen or even touched—they

must be felt with the heart.” A hospice nurse cut off her

long beautiful white hair, because she was now too weak to

shower or wash it on her own. She took digitalis and squirted

morphine under her tongue when she needed to manage her

intense heart pain. She needed more care than her struggling

son or the limited nursing hours provided by the underfunded

hospice program could give her.

She needed someone there all the time. She needed me. But

she did not say, “I need you,” and like a fool, or a workaholic,

or a human being in denial, I did not have the sense to simply

come. Nobody lectured me on my moral obligations, as my Vic-

torian great-grandfather James might have done.

My mother watched a moth emerge from a chrysalis brought

over by a neighbor child and took her last photograph of its wet

crumpled wings. She took out her calligraphy pens and wrote

out a poem by the ancient Chinese sage Wu-Men for Brian’s

upcoming birthday:

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Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.

If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,

this is the best season of your life.

Then, on a small piece of paper, she brushed out her final

circular
enso
and wrote beneath it, “For my memorial service.”

Sitting under the fig tree in my California garden, I felt

something descend from the sky and pour through me like

grace. “Your mother is dying,” said a voice inside my heart. “This

is a sacred time.” With the support of my editor, I decided to

abandon my nearly finished article and fly to Connecticut. The

phone rang. It was Michael, calling from Pine Street. He and

my mother, he said, were continuing to talk. There was more to

resolve, he wanted more time alone with her, and she, he said,

wanted it too. I called an old colleague of my father’s in Middle-

town. My mother was still full of beans, he said, and had even

gotten up from the couch, trailing her oxygen tube, to make him

a martini. She would probably last months. I deferred to my

brother, ignored my heart, and pushed back my flight.

Three days later, I called her. I’d just come home from my

local bookstore, where a former student had read from his new

book about the ritual of tea, and I couldn’t stop thinking of her. I

remembered how she’d swirl boiling water into her beloved Japa-

nese iron teapot to warm it, pour it out and add fresh hot water

and loose tea, putting on the lid and tucking the pot under the

indigo-blue tea cozy she’d sewn herself. I remembered her atten-

tively setting out thin, white bone china cups for my father and

me, and a white plate holding six fanned ginger snaps. I remem-

bered how, no matter how badly things were going, we’d gather

each day at the kitchen table—waiting as the tea steeped, enjoy-

ing each other and simply being alive. Then the ritual drinking of

the tea itself, making us relaxed and alert at the same time.

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katy butler

But I had been too defensive and clumsy, too afraid of her

criticism, and too much of a feminist bookworm to learn from

her how to do this.

In an outpouring, I told her all this. She was the one who

could get through a meal without reading the paper; she was the

one who got up at dawn to meditate when things with my father

got rough. She was the one who put her compassion into action

and honored her vows and took care of the man she’d loved.

“But Katy,” she said, her voice weak, after I finally stopped

talking. “You are yourself. You’re good at other things.”

Then she said, “There isn’t much time.”

That night she could not stop vomiting. She was taken to

the hospital with Michael following the ambulance in her white

Camry. “Don’t call your siblings,” she told him when they got to

the hospice unit. “They’ll only panic and come.”

Eihei Dogen, the great Buddhist teacher who revitalized Zen

in Japan in the twelfth century, had these words to say about

dying: “In birth there is nothing but birth and in death there is

nothing but death. Accordingly, when birth comes, become and

manifest birth, and when death comes, become and manifest

death. Do not avoid them or desire them.”

My mother died like that.

She told the hospice nurses that she wanted to stop eat-

ing and drinking, that she wanted to die and never go home.

Her heart management nurse stopped by her bed and said she

hoped this was just a bump in the road. My mother said, “It

feels like an avalanche.” She had dry heaves and could not catch

her breath. She took off her hammered silver earrings, and said,

“I want to get rid of all the garbage.” She told Michael to call

Jonathan and me. By the time he came back from the phone,

she was dead. He broke into sobs.

It could have been too much self-administered morphine or too

little potassium. It could have been the stress of the cardiac cath-

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eterization. It could have been getting up and making martinis for

the people who stopped by to see her. In the end, does it matter?

She died of old age, sickness, and death. She died of a heart

calcified and broken by six years of nonstop caregiving. She died

of being eighty-four. She was continent and lucid to her end. She

took back her body from her doctors. She died the death she chose,

not the death they had in mind. She reclaimed her moral author-

ity from the broken medical system that had held her husband

hostage. She died like a warrior. Her dying was painful, messy,

and imperfect, but that is the uncontrollable nature of dying. She

faced it head-on. My brother Jonathan called it a triumph.

I would have liked to have sat with her body in her hospice

room, or brought her home to her house on Pine Street one last

time and put her in the living room in a plain wooden coffin sur-

rounded by candles, the way the family managed it for my great-

grandfather James. I wanted to wash her body in sweet tea, the

way her friend, the Zen priest Issan Dorsey, did with the bodies

of young men who died of AIDS in the 1980s. I would like to

have cared for my mother’s body as freely as the poorest peasant

in a straw-thatched hut in Ireland in the nineteenth century.

But we had no rituals to follow by rote in our numbness; hospi-

tals run on schedules, patients need beds, and Medicare does not

reimburse for care to the dead. Funeral homes have rules, as do

states. In Connecticut, a body cannot be released to anyone but a

funeral director. By the time my flight landed, my mother’s body had

been gurneyed to a freezer in the hospital basement. Over the week-

end, the morgue staff would call us repeatedly to urge us to move it

out, just as Discharge Planning had pressured us, eight years earlier,

to quickly move my stroke-ridden father to a rehabilitation center.

My brothers and I settled on the funeral home on Long Island

Sound where my father’s body had become white ashes a year and

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katy butler

a half earlier. We had to threaten to take our business elsewhere to

get them to allow us to be with her body for ten minutes, and to put

flowers in her cardboard bier, before it was consigned to the flames.

Cremation remains an industrial rather than a hallowed pro-

cess. We would have to sneak any sense of the sacred into the

cracks. The cremation worker, whose name we did not know, was

quiet and treated us with sensitivity. There was no ceremonial

lighting of the gas pilot, as there is a ceremonial tossing of the first spade of dirt onto the coffin. There was no chanting of “ashes to

ashes, and dust to dust.” There was nothing like the beauty I’d seen

in Bali, where I saw the bones of the dead placed in the stomach

of a heavy, black-painted wooden bull and paraded through the

streets on the backs of relatives and villagers, to a park where the

gamelan played for the crowds and the flames were lit.

We put lilies in the cardboard box that held her, but we could

not prettify her death. We’d asked the funeral home to dress

her in her scarlet silk
ao dai,
but someone had put it on back-

ward. The fabric stretched awkwardly across her maimed chest,

and the delicately knotted frogs she’d fashioned herself were

unbuttoned at the back of her neck. Now that she was stiff we

could not make it right. Her mouth was stiffened and pulled

to one side. Her hair was shorn. Her skin was gray. The beauty

and elegance that had awed and intimidated me all my life was

gone. She was naked of the silver earrings and bracelets she’d

always worn, then dangling from my own ears and wrist. For the

first time that I could remember, I was not afraid of her.

I did not feel at peace with her death the way I’d felt at peace

with my father’s. She’d died too soon for my taste—though not

for hers—just as my father had died too late. My good-byes felt

incomplete. I wanted to ask for her forgiveness, or better yet, to

turn back the clock and care for her more tenderly during her

final year. But time moves forward, not back. We had done our

best. We had expressed, in our own peculiar and broken ways,

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our love. She died the way she wanted to die. She had not been

a perfect mother. I had not been a perfect daughter. It had not

been a perfect death. I would never live the perfect life.

Jonathan, Michael, and I watched through a plate-glass win-

dow as the cardboard box containing the remnants of our moth-

er’s fine body, stripped of its temporal beauty, slid into the flames.

The next day, the undertaker would deliver a brown plastic box

to the house on Pine Street where, for forty-five of their sixty-one

years together, my parents had loved and looked after each other,

humanly and imperfectly. There were no bits of metal mixed with

the fine white powder and small pieces of her bones.

After her memorial service, I would fly home and learn to say to

Brian, “I need you” and “I love you.” I would undress my sixty-

year-old body in front of him, and hear him praise my beauty,

just as my father had done for my mother when she was my

age. I would wear my mother’s worn Japanese cotton bathrobe,

bought decades earlier on one of our trips to Tassajara, until it

fell in strips from my shoulders. I would wear shoes that she’d

bought at Marshall’s during my father’s death watch, a half-size

too small for me, until they gave me a painful corn.

I would vow that in the future I would not wait for the immi-

nence of death to say,
I love you, thank you, please forgive me, I forgive
you, good-bye
. I would settle her estate, take down her photographs and the whorl of dried sticks she’d hung over the fireplace, and give

my brother Jonathan her Bernina sewing machine and Michael a

quilt she’d sewn of patches of Japanese indigo, under which she

and my father had once slept. I would find her long silk underwear

in a drawer, and finally understand how she’d stayed warm while

keeping the heat turned down so low that I was always freezing.

I’d sell her beautiful house on Pine Street to a couple who would

set up the husband’s Lionel train set in the basement where my

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katy butler

father had labored over his unfinished book. I would distribute the

inheritance she preserved for her children by keeping her husband

out of a nursing home. Still driven by our rivalry for the love of the

dead, my brothers and I would fight over things that seem trivial

now, and I would discover that I would need to ask for people’s for-

giveness, for things big and small, until the day I died, because I am

human. I would soften my heart. I would commit to Brian in a way

I couldn’t when I stood in the long corridor of my parents’ dying.

On the first anniversary of my mother’s death, I would borrow

a Jewish ritual, buy a twenty-four-hour
Yahrzeit
candle from the kosher section at Safeway, and put it, with a vase of flowers, next