Chapter 1
Death had been kind and had granted us more time than anyone expected. It had waited longer than the doctor had estimated. Had granted minutes that became hours and hours that blended into days. But the odd suspension of Death’s arrival to claim the soul of my mother, Faye Martin, seemed wrong, like something stolen. As it drew closer with each unexpected day, I often found myself casting nervous looks over my shoulder. The little hairs on the back of my neck standing up. I expected to see the grim reaper holding its scythe, glowering at me.
Sometimes I would stand beside her bed as she slept, adrift in her medication–induced sleep. Staring down at her, a mantra in my brain: Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die. Not tonight. Not yet. I won’t let you! You’ve got to talk to me! There isn’t much time left. I would stand like that in the darkened bedroom. Guilty for wanting to keep Death at bay not for her, but for my own sake. Some nights, my frustration and impatience that had accumulated for decades got the better of me and a deep-rooted anger would rise inside, its tentacles spreading throughout my body, burning in my chest like a hot liquid. In those moments, I wanted to grab my mother by the shoulders, lift her off the bed, and shake her over and over again to make her wake up and talk to me.
Still, I would always kiss her goodnight. In all honesty, it was an insincere kiss that I planted on her forehead. Next, I would tilt my head to her ear and whisper gently, convinced that she could hear me, “Mama… please, please talk to me. Tomorrow. Please. We’re running out of time.” I wanted to scream, how can you be so goddamn cruel to me, your own daughter? You will talk to me. I will make you!
Instead, I would take deep breaths to calm myself and then simply tell her goodnight and insist that we would talk tomorrow That it must be tomorrow, that I had waited long enough. On one of those nights as I stood by her bed and swayed wearily, waiting, and watching for some sign from her, unexpectedly, she moaned. A sudden excitement overcame me. This is a sign! She had heard me. She would not die. Not yet!
I had made an agreement with Death. Silently negotiated, I had promised Death that in exchange for giving my mother more time, it could take the equivalent time off my life. I convinced myself that this had been deemed acceptable because Death had not, despite all the grim predictions of immediacy, arrived.
No one knew about my agreement with Death, but others reminded me constantly that it was near. I knew the Hospice staff and some of the hired home health aides meant well when they whispered to me their warnings. The end was near and that Death, though delayed, could come at any time. Any time! I had confided in them my need to have an important conversation with my mother and they had expressed sympathy but lately, they would cast worrying glances at Mama then back at me as if they knew this would never happen.
Likewise, I am sure in his own way, my older brother Neal meant well even as he rolled his eyes at me when I shared my plan to persuade our mother into having a final conversation with me. For it to be about our father who had died nearly forty years ago when I was just two. Despite years pleading, she had refused to speak to me about him, never once uttering his name. Her stubborn defiance to share anything about the man who had given me life turned my interest in him to an unhealthy obsession and I needed some resolution before her hardened heart finally stopped.
“Mama isn’t going to talk to you about Daddy so get over it,” Neal had said to me the day after the visit to the oncologist’s office where we had just received our mother’s terrible diagnosis: Multiple Myeloma. The stage four cancer had spread from her skull to her feet. Terminal. She was given two weeks to live. Sitting in the doctor’s office, Neal and I had burst into tears. But Mama, strikingly pale from anemia and rail thin having lost twenty pounds from her already slender body, had sat in quiet shock, staring straight ahead. Her mouth hung open as if it knew it should say something but could conjure nothing. It was a most unusual response from a woman so typically outspoken. I had reached over to hold her hand and she had roughly pulled it away from me. A moment later, she grabbed my hand with such a strong grip that I winced.
“No, Neal. It’s different now. She’s dying, and she knows it. This is when families resolve these things.” We had been sipping beers and waving away mosquitos on the patio of Mama’s house on the muggy August night, trying to come to terms with her fate. “It would be nice if you’d try to help get her to talk to me,” I told him. “At least you can remember Daddy. I can’t.”
“You know I’ve tried. She’s never gonna forgive him. And talking about him would be like forgiving him so I’d say it’s a lost cause. Get over it.”
The beer loosened my emotions and my simmering anger surfaced. “Get over it? She owes me this conversation. She owes me answers, while there’s time.”
“Well, there isn’t much time left. Don’t get your hopes up.”
Hope is all I have, I wanted to scream. But instead, I nodded and planned.
ASIDE FROM MY DETERMINATION TO HAVE A FINAL TALK WITH Mama about my father, it fell upon me to oversee her care. There was no other family living nearby. Mama’s remaining siblings all lived in her hometown of Second Chance, a former coal-mining town, in West Virginia. They were all older and, due to health issues and economic hardship, did not travel. Neal couldn’t afford to miss any more days at the printing company, plus he would need more time off and even more hours without pay when he took leave for the funeral in West Virginia.
I had the time, since I was working as a substitute teacher, and as it was summer, I was entirely free. The divorce two years ago from my ex-husband Phil meant that I would eventually go back to teaching full time to support myself and our ten-year-old son, Christopher. But for now, I was available. I readily agreed to leave my nearby apartment and move with Christopher back into my childhood home to help care for Mama. Her modest, three-bedroom house was in a neighborhood called Potomac Manor in Virginia just a few miles outside Washington, D.C. We moved there after my father was killed in 1962 when Mama decided to leave West Virginia and make a fresh start. She purchased the house with the life insurance money from my father’s death claim and it proved to be a good location for Mama when she became a proud U.S. Civil Servant and took a secretarial job at the Pentagon.
As I settled into my old childhood bedroom and set Christopher up in Neal’s old room across the hall, memories engulfed me. If the walls of the house could talk, I knew which stories about our family they would tell. Some stories contained laughter, music and happiness; some contained ugliness, anger and discord. And too many were composed of tragedy–heartbreaking events that occurred both to our family and to our country. News of these catastrophes came to us through the electrical wires running inside those very walls. The announcements, and our reactions, reverberated off the walls, leaving them untouched, but us forever changed.
I thought a lot about our family’s story and my relationship with my mother when friends and relatives called to tell me what a good daughter I was. How they admired me taking on such a difficult role. Was I a good daughter? What would she say? These thoughts went through my mind as I stared at myself in the mirror above my old dresser. A woman I did not recognize stared back. My eyes were red from on and off crying and dull from sadness and they revealed my deep fatigue. My brown shoulder-length hair needed trimming. The golden highlights I had applied every few weeks had dulled and the gray roots atop my head betrayed my forty-one years. My face without make-up was pale. This made the dark circles beneath my eyes look stark. I forced myself to smile but frowned instantly as I noted my chubby cheeks. They had become fuller now from the weight I had gained caused by drinking too many glasses of wine each night. I turned away. I did not want to see any more of her.
If I hadn’t been a good daughter up until this point, did moving in to care for her as she was dying make up for my past failings? I was tortured by both a sense of duty to Mama and equal amounts of anger toward her for many things, but mostly for withholding information about my father. Being Faye Martin’s daughter had never been easy for me and having well-intentioned people praise me felt wrong, like I was wearing an ill-fitted coat that hung on me and dragged along the ground when I walked.
The truth? I was glad to have my mother to myself, needing me in a way she never really had and with me in control. Selfish? Maybe, but I believed that staring death in the face would cause her to do the right thing. She was a complicated person and often hypocritical to be sure, but she had sometimes revealed a steely courage and sense of purpose that I did not believe I had inherited. I was counting on that. As Death lurked, all I could do was hope she would find the courage to answer my questions. To share stories about my father only she could tell, and perhaps reveal if she had a photograph of him hidden somewhere since I had no memory of his face. I also needed her assurance that he had loved me and that I had mattered to him. If I knew better who he was, I reasoned, I would know better what I was made of and find the sense of purpose and courage I lacked.
And for her own sake, I needed my mother to tell me that she had at last forgiven my father and that, despite his final and fatal mistake, he had been a good man.
“JESUS H. CHRIST! I’M ONLY SIXTY-NINE YEARS OLD!” MAMA wailed, “This cannot be happening to me!”
But it was. I was distraught, trying to comprehend the fact that this woman who had so dominated my life would soon be gone. I scurried about in a daze, trying to comfort her, chart her medication schedule, care for Christopher, keep Neal posted, make meals, carry Mother, who was Mama’s old and nearly deaf Welsh Terrier (named in honor of her own mother and purchased in honor of John F. Kennedy’s Welsh Terrier, Charlie) outside for its business, get the mail, pay bills, run to the pharmacy and make all the phone calls for all the preparations dying at home required–all while looking for an opportunity to talk.
Soon after the diagnosis, Hospice sent a social worker to meet with us. Anne McClay immediately put us at ease with her gentle manner. Her voice was soothing with the trace of a Scottish accent. She gathered Mama, Neal, and I into the TV room off the kitchen for a conversation about death with dignity. The room was a time capsule from the late 1970s, with its shaggy brown wall-to-wall carpet, a sofa covered in a swirly floral pattern of orange and brown and a glass-topped coffee table. Next to the sofa, sat Mama’s favorite recliner like a throne in all its faux leather glory. Directly across from that stood her 27” Sony TV, which was the newest item in the room (it had replaced our old 1969 RCA). The Sony sat regally on a quality wood cabinet. The remote controller, however, was always to be on the arm of Mama’s recliner (and God help the last person who used it and failed to leave it there).
If the kitchen was the heart of most homes, the room with the television was the heart of ours. TV had always been central to our lives. In my earliest memories, it seemed always to be blaring. I think the endless banter from the TV comforted Mama and was an electronic replacement of the large, noisy family she had left behind in Second Chance.
Now the TV sat silent and seemed to be brooding over its exclusion from this most serious family gathering as Anne, seated on the sofa, explained how Hospice worked, what their role was and what would happen when death arrived. Mama, sitting in the recliner with the footrest out, kept shifting uncomfortably during the conversation, grimacing. “Just put me to sleep like a dog,” she told Anne. “That’s the humane thing to do. We put animals to sleep. We ought to let humans do the same. I don’t want to feel nothing. I don’t want to hurt! I don’t want to know I’m dying. Give me as much drugs as you can!”
“But Mama,” I interrupted before Anne could reply. “You don’t really want that, do you? I mean, don’t you want to be alert and able to talk and–”
“Hell no! I don’t want to feel nothing! And who the hell do I need to talk to, Laney Mae? I’m done talking. I’m done… living.”
“But Mama, what about Christopher?” I asked. I was seated close beside her on a chair I had dragged into the room from the kitchen table. “He needs you. He needs to see you and talk to you so that he can spend time with you and accept this. This is his first death.” I reached over to stroke her arm just once (more than that and I think she would have slapped my hand away). And there it was: “the look”–the expression that Neal and I knew and dreaded. Her eyes narrowed into a glare, then one eyebrow arched upward, her lips forming a tight, angry line. It was the “what-the-hell-did-you-say-to-me” look; the look that stopped us in our tracks from the time we were kids.
“His first death?” Mama exclaimed. “Well, isn’t that special? This is my first death, too!”
"Oh Mama, I–I didn’t mean that–” I stammered.
Neal seemed to enjoy this. Seated next to Anne on the sofa, he rolled his eyes and shook his head. Did I hear him chuckle?
I spoke quickly. “Oh Mama! That’s not what I meant. It’s not just Christopher. Claudia and Frank and Harrie and everyone will want to be able to talk with you on the phone.” I turned to Anne, “They’re her siblings. Up in West Virginia.” Anne nodded in understanding.
“And Mama,” I continued, ignoring her scowl, “Gladys is planning to visit. You’ll want to be able to visit with her and talk, won’t you?” I turned again to Anne. “She’s Mama’s lifelong friend.”
“That’s wonderful that your friend is visiting,” Anne said, coming to my rescue. She took Mama’s hand. “Faye, listen, we’ll keep you comfortable. I promise we’ll manage your pain. And when you are to the point where you feel it’s unbearable and what you’re on now isn’t working anymore, the Lorazepam and morphine will help manage the pain and yes, help you sleep easier. How does that sound?”
Mama’s bony shoulders shrugged. She shook her head, her steadfastly dyed blonde hair neatly coiffed, defying, the scourge of the cancer consuming her body in its fullness and shine. “What is that . .. Lorza–?”
“Lorazepam. It’s usually called Ativan. It helps when patients are really anxious and scared.”
Mama nodded. “Yeah. That stuff sounds like what I need. But I still say we treat dying dogs better than we do people! If I could put myself to sleep right now, I would. I mean, if I’m gonna die, let me die, you know?” She had shifted her eyes from Anne to Neal to me and then back to Anne. With resignation she said, “Oh hell. Your plan sounds okay to me Anne.” Then she raised a finger and pointed at me. “For now,” she said firmly. “For Christopher.”
Next, Anne inquired about Mama’s faith, “Are you religious, Faye? Do you belong to a particular church? Faith can be a great comfort.”
Mama seemed taken aback. “I consider myself religious, Anne. I don’t go to church no more but when I did, it was to the Methodist Church near here.” She motioned toward me and Neal. “They went to Sunday School there.”
Anne smiled. “So, Christian.” She made a note on her paperwork.
“A loving Christian,” Mama said.
Anne looked up and tilted her head to the side, quizzically.
Mama continued, “I don’t like what some folks have done to Christianity! They use it to divide and to spread hate. The ones on TV? They’re hypocrites! Raising all that money? For what? I’m not that kind of Christian!” I resisted the urge to ask her what kind of “loving Christian” would not forgive a husband who had died nearly forty years ago and would not speak his name or share anything about him with his daughter.
"And, Anne, I do believe in Heaven and a spiritual life after death,” Mama offered. “I have faith I will see my mother and my father and all my brothers who have died and my sister who passed. And there are a lot of historical figures I look forward to meeting, too or seeing again, like President Kennedy.”
I hesitated but could not resist this opening. “Mama,” I said, bracing myself as she turned to look at me. “What about Daddy? Will you see him, too?” I heard Neal let out a groan, but I didn’t care. Anne was my witness; maybe she could help me get Mama to talk and why not now? Again, I received “the look.” I swallowed uncomfortably. Mama’s voice was filled with contempt. “No, I will not. We have had this conversation before, Laney Mae. He. Is. Not. Up. There!”
I frowned and looked at the carpet. We had indeed had this conversation before, the first time was when I was eight. There had been so much upsetting news on TV that year about death: Martin Luther King, Jr. then Bobby Kennedy had been shot and killed. It seemed that every evening on TV there were more ghastly images of American troops and innocent people dying in the tragedy that was Vietnam–all this happening just a couple of years after my uncle Rob, Mama’s brother, had been killed there. My young mind was consumed with death. This had triggered in me an urgent, new concern about my daddy: what had happened to his soul?
I decided to ask her in a round-about way one evening when I had her to myself. We were having popcorn and watching The Carol Burnett Show. During a commercial I turned to her and asked, “Mama, what happens when we die?”
“Why you asking me that? You’re too young to worry about dying!”
“I just wanna know–”
Exasperated she replied, “If you’re good, you go to Heaven. If you’re bad you go to the devil and burn in hell.” I had asked her if I was going to hell since she had often told me I was bad: bad for not cleaning my room, bad for not coming home when she called me when I was playing outside, bad for fighting with Neal. She scoffed. “That’s not the kind of bad I mean, Laney Mae! I mean serious bad like people who do awful things like murder. And people who lie and cheat.” She paused before adding, “Like your father.”
I remember my mouth filled with saliva and I was sure I would throw up. I made quick excuses to run to my bedroom. I prayed to a God I did not know very well. Please, oh please, allow my daddy out of hell and into Heaven.
Mama turned to Anne, waving her hand at me. “Do you see what I have to put up with? She is always badgering me about her father, and I do not wish to talk about him.”
That did it. “Badgering?” I stood and hovered above her. “That’s a horrible thing for you to say, Mama! I’m not badgering you! I’m asking you like I have asked you for the last three decades to talk to me about my father. I have a right to know about him and from you!”
Anne tried to interject, “Many families have unresolved issues like this and–”
“It’s her issue,” Mama barked, “Not mine. I’m resolved!”
I huffed with anger but was emboldened by Anne’s presence. My voice rose. “No! It is your issue, Mama. Always has been! You’ve refused to talk to me about him and now you’re dying!” This harsh statement hung in the air. The “look” on Mama’s face collapsed into a frown and her bottom lip trembled.
“Thanks for that news alert,” Mama hissed, fighting a sob.
“Well, I’m sorry but it’s true!” I took a deep breath to calm myself and lowered my voice. “But before you die, Mama, you owe me a conversation about him.”
Her eyes widened in shock at the audacity of my demand. “I owe you? How dare you say such a thing? I don’t owe you anything! I provided for you all your life! He sure as hell didn’t! And let me tell you something, if I could stand up now, I’d slap you in the face for saying such a thing! You lean down here and let me slap your face!”
I laughed at her. “You want me to let you slap my face for asking about my father?”
Neal had had enough. “Stop!” He stood and put his body between mine and Mama’s, always the peacekeeper and diplomat. “That’s enough! Both of you knock it off,” he said sharply. “Let Anne finish up what she needs to go over with us.”
I sighed and sat on the dining chair but then quickly scooted myself back away from the recliner to be sure I was out of Mama’s slapping range. We scowled at each other while Anne smiled at Neal and told us she had covered everything she needed to, and asked if we had anything to share or questions?
Neal frowned at me while Mama simmered in anger; “the look” had returned. She composed herself and turned to Anne and said, I’m sorry you had to see that. My own daughter attacking me! But I do appreciate you going over everything.”
Anne gave us a sympathetic smile. “Believe me, lots of families have issues.”
Mama nodded. “Well, speaking of family, my family back home will handle all the–” She stopped, her voice breaking. She looked down at the floor, struggling to compose herself. She had never had patience for tears–“Don’t turn on the waterworks”–she’d say to me when I was young and about to cry. “They’ll handle all that. My nephew Jake works at the funeral home there.”
“Thank you for sharing that, Faye. It’s great that your family is able to help.”
Mama bowed her head. She slumped in exhaustion and brought her hands up to cover her face, whimpering. Neal rose and knelt before her. He took her hand and leaned in close to her and murmured words of comfort.
Anne and I smiled politely at each other, but I could not hold her eyes very long due to my guilt over losing my temper and putting Anne in the middle. I looked back at Mama as Neal knelt beside her and felt a pang in my chest as I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be told I would soon die. I could not comprehend having such information handed to me. I bowed my head, feeling shame over my outburst and insistence that my mother talk to me about my father before Death’s arrival, while I planned my next opportunity to do so.
