Goodbye, Ma

A lot has happened since the last time I wrote here. My mom had another heart attach two weeks ago and passed a few days later. By the time it came it arrived as mercifully as a pill that says 'this will make the hard part go away," and we more glad to see that after a week of seeing her suffer and feed her ice cubes and figure out which of her gestures had become part of her pantomime to identify her needs, which had gotten fewer and fewer as time passed along.Ice cubes in my mouth, cool cloth on my forehead, "soft" had become her code word for "I'm too hot, take this damn blanket.
None of us knew how much was pain or how much was inflicted by mercifiul morphine. She couldn't tell us. She didn't know. She wasn't having a good time.
What I was sure of is that my only method of communicating with my mother had been reduced to squeezing a finger or a thumb to express, I know you're here. I'm glad to see you. It's alright.I love you. I love you. A week before, once she'd had the initial heart attack. The one we didn't know until a week later, when the doctors worked it in as part of their usual updates like "by the way, she had a heart attack last Friday."
She and I were sitting in her hospital room, talking lucidly about the same stuff we always did. Robbie' Cub Scout Activity, the Red Sox suckituded that had opened the 2010 season.
This was not the first time we had brought this subject up of her checking out. Once someone passes what they consider middle age and enters old age. Maybe it just starts when someone decides they've done all they plan to do and each day becomes another race against the sun, starting watching the Guiding Light, reading Reader's Digest, sashaying into that night's Jeopardy.
Death becomes that elephant in the room. You're already paying taxes, there's only one other constant and it's sitting there with an abacus counting down your time.So she brought the subject up once again. "I should be home in a few days," she began. "But if this is it, I'm fine. I've done everything I've ever wanted to do. I want you to go on.I tried shaking my hands and go, ok, ok, I understand. We've talked about this and so much other stuff over the years that there wasn't much that had been untouched.
"I remember the first time you brought this up," I told her. It was the first year I brought Melanie home for Christmas dinner, it was you, me and her."We were having the roast beef dinner with potatoes and the usual trimmings and Ma mentioned how she didn't want a lot of rigmarole at her funeral. This would have been a buzz kill at any event outside of Christmas. I excused myself to the bathroom and spent the next ten minutes getting the crying out of my system. Melanie and I discussed it on the way home and how Ma and I didn't talk about this a great deal and the novelty had more that a little bit of effect on me.
Then she said it again in the hospital.She was determined to let me know, just like she had every day, that any debt that existed between us on my part or on hers, were square and covered.I knew Ma had plans written down and contracts and to do lists for everything she wanted done if she didn't make it out of the hospital.So when she started in again.
"Listen, If I die, I don't want a lot of rigmarole," she said. While I still had neglected to look up the literal meaning of rigmarole I knew where she was going "And no boo hoo-ing, I'm ready. There is no reason for anyone to get this old."
"I'm glad to hear you say that, Ma," I told her. "We've already rented the wood-chipper."It wasn't shock. It wasn't anger. It was just a silent sink in of what she'd just heard her on say. Then she started to laugh.
"A wood chipper?" more laughs. Louder. Deeper. Faster.
"Yeah, we thought it would be fun for the kids."More laughs that turned into a laughing fit.I knew I'd won when she was laughing as hard as I'd ever seen her laugh and she managed to say "I have rotten kids."
That's how I got completion with my Mom. I made her laugh for the last time.
Thanks, for that, Ma. Love You.