Tag Archives: mother daughter relationship

Duetting: Memoir 65

Duetting: Memoir 65 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York Photoshops a ghostly presence of her daughter who died.

Years ago I hated taking photographs. Having a camera in front of my eyes kept me from experiencing the world, I used to say, I couldn’t be present to what was around me if I was focusing through a camera. But now, with my digital Sony RX100 that fits in a pocket, I can capture so much I didn’t even realize was there. Its postage stamp-sized plastic chip holds a million memories in tiny thumbnail scenes. Memories, and sometimes surprises. I click, drag, and drop the tiny images from the chip into the Photoshop program on my computer where I can enlarge or erase, copy as-is, or change them. Then I spend hours remaking reality. In Photoshop there are intriguing “tools” to work with. Tools geared to fixing. A Patch Tool and a Path Selection Tool, a Dodge Tool and an Add Anchor Tool. A Magic Eraser and a Magic Wand … a Clone Stamp. And a Healing Brush.

One gray day in early March 2013, I pass an old abandoned home. I stop because I’d grown up across the street from a ‘haunted’ house, and as a curious kid I’d peeked into the clouded windows to find traces of former inhabitants. Even vacated, there remained a vague residue of the lives that came and went. This other empty house just outside Ithaca now captivates my imagination. Respectfully, I approach the threshold to snap pictures and consider how I might ‘shop a ghost-image of Marika onto its porch. But back home, I reconsider as I view the images in Photoshop. The house is beautiful in itself. It wears its own stories in chipped paint that reveals familiar patterns in the weathered wood underneath. There’s no need to imprint my own longings onto it. Two years after Marika’s death, I find I’m filled with a deeper regard for others’ hearts and homes that house memories of lost loved ones. Loss and grief do not belong only to me.

Sooner or later we all lose someone we love. Then, critically wounded, we wallow in hopeless despair, suffering regrets and guilt, fatigue, denial, depression, anger … all sorts of symptoms and phases of grief. And finally we scramble to adapt, to redefine our lives, and find our new selves amid the gutted remains of our broken hearts.

Why don’t we learn about death early on, like in grade school, I wonder? Why don’t they prepare us in high school for all the dying we’re going to be faced with in the course of our lives? We should know that the longer we live, the more people, pets, and plants will die before us, and that the deaths of the ones we love most are going to scour our hearts raw. Allowing ourselves to get slammed by death over and over again—is this the humanness of us? Watching the bereaved keen and crumple every time—is this godliness? And why aren’t we taught how to use all our pain and longing as a source of new strength?

To live on after loss is to hold on, and let go, and love again, all at the same time. There are no rules, no right or wrong ways to go about grieving. This whole grief thing is just our individual journeys or unique adaptations to loss, which may eventually lead to growth, but could alternatively wipe us out.

Before she died, Marika and I were in the middle of a great mother-daughter divide. She was almost out the door when cancer clobbered her. Us. After two years stuck together sallying through cancer, Marika was ready to move clear across the world to get away from me. And one day she would have come back. There would have been graduations, shopping trips for gowns, maybe a wedding … grandchildren. All the would-haves have disintegrated. Now I hold onto Marika’s memory and her words, and let go of her future. And the future I’d imagined for myself. But I will not let go of her. Her absence is a presence. Something still remains, and even without a physical presence there is still a relationship. I watch as it mellows with time.

And I discover almost daily that all around me there are others dealing with loss. Everybody’s dealing with something. Maybe the humanness is in recognizing this. Maybe the godliness is in our simply sitting with the brokenhearted, listening, and being a silent, compassionate, non-judgmental presence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 56

Duetting: Memoir 56 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York photoshops a scene in Melbourne, Australia where she went on a grief journey to scatter her daughter's ashes.

In Melbourne, right away I regret not leaving more time to experience the city Marika’s friend Carla told me Marika really loved. Immediately after arranging the altar in the new hotel room, I take the free two-hour bus tour around town to get oriented. I snoop out the independent music scene and local street art that attracted Marika to Melbourne, and eat dinner overlooking the Yarra River. Melbourne at night is lit up like Christmas. Everywhere I turn, it’s crawling with people. There is Chinatown. There are sushi places. There is always some hanging-around dog or statues of dogs. This is it, I tell myself: wherever Marika made home there would be dogs, lights, sushi, music, and water.

In the morning, on the way to the famous Victoria Market, I scatter some of the ashes in the pretty Yarra River as people hurry off to work. By midday, I board the train at Flinders Street Station to spread the rest at the Victoria University of Technology Saint Albans Campus, home of the Nursing Program. It’s not a long trip. Leaving the train, I follow the trickle of students from the station to the school. In this corner of Melbourne, there is little else to head to.

It’s a new campus, still under construction. Fences, a few young trees, some makeshift structures … everything calls out ‘in process.’ I look around at the barren place. The single campus fountain sits dry, filled with garbage and fallen leaves. Some friendly students assure me there are flowering shrubs in the spring. A raven caws. Nervously, I hug the bag of ashes and keep walking. I try to imagine Marika going to school here. But something feels wrong.

There is no water. Anywhere. I’ve come all the way out here with the last quarter of Marika’s ashes and I can’t leave her in this place. I walk the tiny campus, twice around, looking for a good spot. Marika would have been here now, in April 2012. The students passing me would have been her classmates. But I cannot see her. I can’t feel her here.

In fact, I’m pretty sure Marika would hate it here. Is this coming from Marika or is it my own hang-up? I’ve only got today to figure this out because early tomorrow morning I’ll be leaving Melbourne, heading back home. And I need to finish her ashes. Today. 

Gingerly, I sprinkle a bit in a spot near the Artistic Café, where students sip soft drinks on outdoor tables with bird chatter overhead. Then suddenly, mid-scoop into the ashes, I find a little tag in my hand. Cheap gold-colored, tinny plastic. It has a number on it, and says Mount Hope Crematorium. I take this as a sign to stop. In tears, I stuff the bag of ashes back into my pack, and rush back to the train station, back to Melbourne proper, and up to University Student Services on Flinders Street where I pester the poor clerks who have no idea why this desperate woman is pleading for help to find the daughter she’s convinced is supposed to attend school here.

“Marika Warden isn’t on the roster for Victoria University,” one clerk says as she fusses on her computer. Immobilized, I finally remember to breathe. I’m muttering madly to myself, Think. What’s missing here? Marika said she was accepted. She showed me the letter on the computer. I paid a deposit with a personal check. Two checks. I wrote two checks to two different universities. What was the other school? “Oh, here she is,” the clerk points to her screen, “University of Technology Sydney. You had the wrong university,” she says, and I burst, howling, into tears.

Why hadn’t I paid attention to this important detail in Marika’s life? I remember being happy for her, and proud she was putting together a future for herself all on her own. Maybe I didn’t believe it was possible. Maybe I didn’t want it to be. And maybe, after all we’d been through while she was alive and all I learned after she died, maybe I could never really know who this amazing creature was.

There was so much I simply didn’t know about my own daughter. Back in March 2011, shortly after the calling hours and the departure of family members who’d flown in for the funeral from Boston, Chicago, and parts of Florida, I’d crept back up to Marika’s room and spent hours tearing through her shelves. In the days that followed, I scoured her bedroom at Limbo, where Rachel had already foraged and slept, hugging the things Marika had held. But nothing contained Marika. Not for me. Until I found her words. Then I just wanted to find more of her words. Devour her words. Read them aloud. Sing them. Hang on to every last one.

Until soon, I was not only an intruder; I was possessed. I became an addict, needing, craving, begging her brother to break into her laptop, demanding of Rachel, “Where are the rest of Marika’s words?” Over the next bleak weeks, I’d copied the poems and prose. When I typed her words, I felt Marika’s heart beating. When I gathered the best of the songs and poems, and Xeroxed them into a spiral-bound book, I could hold her. Her thoughts. Her hopes.

She wrote about her life; she wrote about her death. She wrote about what it was like to have cancer and how it affected her relationships. How it felt to be sedated and then wake up to everything changed. About feeling like two different people. About needing freedom. About love.

Some of her writing from before she knew she had leukemia frightened me. She’d been in some difficult relationships. She’d contemplated suicide. Torn between honoring Marika’s privacy and wanting to hang on to all her words, yet not able to stomach some of the dark ugly truths, I threw out one of the early notebooks, burying it deep in the trash. Then, in another journal, I found the page from the very night she was diagnosed. She’d picked up her pen immediately. One day she was writing about the frazzled love life that gave her pain so great she wasn’t sure she could go on living. And that night, in one turn of a page, she wrote about her leukemia. All the things I wish we had talked about, all the conversations we should have had—she wrote.

And there I was, three weeks after she died, sitting in the middle of her cluttered bedroom floor with a hot pink spiral-bound journal in my lap, first realizing that she’d been thinking, processing, and writing everything all along. Marika had been grieving for her life. For almost three years, on paper, and I’d had no idea. That’s when I first knew:

It was me. I had never been fully present to her, to the one who dazzled me most in the world. Doggedly pretending she could live forever, even as she lay dying, I was the one not facing reality. And I never left her an inch to talk about the possibility that she might die.

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 55

Duetting: Memoir 55 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a duet with her daughter who died despite peopkle telling her what she wants to do is impossible.

People always tell me what I want to do is impossible. And I have to wonder, what do they see when they look at me? Do I look so inept? How many times on this Australia trip have I been told I wouldn’t be able to do something? To walk to Bells Beach, to get to Port Campbell on a Tuesday, to travel without a car, … to spread ashes in the ocean without drowning myself.

“Impossible,” I’d also heard back home, coming upon the first anniversary of Marika’s death, “You can’t keep a relationship with someone who is dead.” But I was talking with my dead daughter every day and every night. Speaking to her came naturally to me after she died. How could something so comforting be impossible?

Sadly, watching the twilight turn to night over Two Mile Bay, I regret how often I, myself, have similarly, close-mindedly shot down other’s ideas. I recall a time years ago, in the middle of winter when my father had taken my sisters, and me, and my children on a vacation to a Caribbean Island. Arriving on a balmy night, the sisters and children immediately headed for the beach where we kicked off our shoes and danced in the starry dark. Until my father, flustered on the boardwalk, said, “You can’t be on the beach at night,” and then I, myself, ruined the joyful moment saying, “Okay, everybody to bed now.”

“Impossible. No way,” I’d decreed when sixteen-year old Marika begged to go off on road trips with friends. To young Marika on the edge of our pond or hanging out in the surf with her boogey board, I would holler, “Don’t fall in” and “Don’t go out too far” and “You wanna do WHAT?” Objections. Directives. Were those my only songs all those years? So much negativity, controlling, and prejudging. This dragged up a deep sadness, because there were few relaxed, neutral communications with my daughter that I could remember.

“Mom, I wanna duet. Let’s do Chopsticks,” Marika used to beg me as a kid. When I could put it off no longer, we sat close on the piano bench and she’d begin plunking keys. To duet is to take part in an activity with another in a way that achieves a harmonious effect. A unity, of sorts. But for me, keeping in sync with someone else was like trying to catch the first step on a fast-moving escalator.
“I can’t,” I’d say and give up. She asked me to play only a few times more before she gave up as well.

In early spring of 2012, my daughter’s been dead a whole year, and suddenly I need to duet with her. Not just our everyday exchanges where I’d sing, “Don’t do this” and “You can’t do that,” and she’d follow with her refrains, “Mom, what the—” and “Get a life, Mom.”

“You can’t have a duet with a dead person,” a friend insists. And I know it’s too late to have the conversations and exchanges Marika and I should have had. But, reading Marika’s poems aloud, I hear her voice. Her songs swish around in my head. Now she’s daring me to have a duet and it’s impossible to ignore. So for hours every day and into the night I read and echo her words, and scribble out my own. It’s like when we used to fight. We were mostly saying the same thing but we were bouncing against one another from two opposite planets. And now she is saying, “I will not follow you. You will have to follow me.” So I do, recognizing that we are each of us stubbornly strong women. Beautiful trouble, I used to call Marika. I had never before considered myself strong or beautiful. But something is growing in me. Something’s shifted. Somehow our relationship is changing and it’s like I’ve finally grown up. She’s grown up. And we’ve melted into one. I follow Marika’s words to find her, to find myself. To find us: who are we now, and what we could possibly carry on together as time goes on.

Line by line, I read her poems and responded. It felt like duetting. As if we were playing an elaborate game of checkers or tic-tac-toe that depended on each other’s moves. Marika’s words. My words. Marika’s. Mine. Before leaving for Australia, I pasted our words together on paper. And then I shared them aloud at the last Feed and Read, enlisting my friend Paula’s help for Marika’s part. A duet with my daughter who died. Not only was it not impossible; for me it was like delivering a divine opus.

So here, on my last night on the Great Ocean Road, I know, when one is doing something, doing anything to climb up out of a rut, anything’s possible. I understand now that to squash a person’s efforts may be to shoot the very thing that keeps her breathing. I’ve learned that anything’s possible with people cheering you on. And that getting from Port Campbell to Melbourne before dark on a Monday, a day when the buses are running, has to be possible. With all the connections between buses and trains, I could travel all day and still not see Melbourne until nightfall. By car, it’s only a four-hour ride. So Eleanor at the Loch Ard Motor Inn operates on the computer and on the phone. She finally shouts out from the front door and manages to arrange a ride to Melbourne for me with her son’s friend, Cannonball.

In the morning, I am packed and ready to move on. Locking the little room with the bay view for the last time, I count my resources: the rolling suitcase; the pack with Puppy and the last quarter of Marika’s ashes; and the iPad, my link to friends and family back home who have faith by this point that I might really pull this mission off. And now I have Cannonball.

Maybe he’s named for his gut, barely hidden under a soiled tee shirt that says QUIRKS three times in large letters. He has a long black ponytail, no front teeth, orange fingernail polish, and a car with bald tires that is packed to the gills. He tells me, as we drive off, that first we have to stop at the pub.

Uh, what? The pub? You wanna WHAT? I’m suddenly seriously nauseous, and kicking myself for being, once more, in some weird stranger’s car. Until, half-listening to his words, I realize I’m shutting my mind and prejudging again. Turns out, it’s Cannonball’s moving day so he’s driving the “dog” of his fleet of cars. He’s returning to his kids in Melbourne after working many months at a good job on the coast. His teeth got totaled just days ago in a car accident involving tourists driving on the wrong side of the road. And he has to return the keys and pay the last of his rent at the pub before leaving Port Campbell for good. There’s still no accounting for his orange nail polish but the tiny details don’t matter once I warm to his generosity and kindness. He does most of the talking during the long drive, pointing out various sights along the way, and finally drops me off in Melbourne, in sunlight, near my hotel. An engineer, well paid and compensated for his travel, Cannonball won’t take money from me. I shake his hand gratefully, because anything’s possible, and that could’ve easily turned out any-other-which way than it did.

Reply to Robin

Duetting: Memoir 52

Duetting: Memoir 52 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops old and new photos into a collage to tell the story of her journey to Australia with her daughter's ashes.

In southeast Australia, in the tiny town of Port Campbell, in the room with the bay view, I wake to sunlight and sounds of birdsong. I wake from dreams of carrying too much in too many pieces, endlessly trying to hold on to what I have.

What I have is an explosion of memories. And Marika’s poems. And a couple of photographs to guide me to where, in Australia, Marika had been when she was here two years before. And it’s Friday, so there’s a V-Line bus that runs along the Great Ocean Road. If I time my day right and catch the bus coming and going, I can ride over twenty-two miles back and forth and, in-between, spend the day walking trails in and around the sites Marika had photographed. If I hop on and off the bus like Marika did I won’t wear out my feet and energy just in traveling to all the places I want to go.

The bus lets me off near the Loch Ard Gorge, and I climb down countless sets of wooden stairs to stand in the place Marika had stood, posing with a finger to her lips, a dubious expression on her face. Loch Ard means ‘high lake,’ but I am low down in the sand between two caves and a blue bay. ‘High’ are the two massive walls of stone that surround the small beach, leaving open only a narrow gap to the sea. “Eva’s cave,” I remember from the legend, and head toward the larger cave.

When I first saw “Eva Carmichael and Tom Pearce” written in Marika’s scrapbook, I thought they were the names of rock stars. I didn’t know Loch Ard was the name of a large clipper ship that sank in 1878, leaving these two the sole survivors. Inspired by tragedy and romance, Marika had written a poem about the two eighteen-year-olds. I, too, am captivated by the story of the apprentice sailor Tom swimming out in the dark, in strong winds and huge waves, to rescue Eva who clung to a floating part of the wrecked ship in only her nightdress. He carried her to a cave and at first light climbed the high cliffs of the gorge to find help. Tom was heralded as a hero, and the townspeople hoped for a romantic union of the two, but they went their separate ways. “She’ll stay forever alone, ‘cause it’s her way, she’s going back home,” Marika wrote twice in her short poem. From the local literature, I learned that Eva fainted, was weak or unconscious for hours, hid terrified in the cave awaiting Tom’s return, and had to be carried with difficulty up the cliffs. But Marika saw her as strong and in control. I saw Marika as strong and in control. I wonder how she saw me.

For a long while I stand watching, trying to see into the long dark cave. I do not enter. My courage has not yet replenished itself from the rogue wave at Bells Beach. Luckily the waves are small here. I finally roll up my pants and wade into the shallow water. No one is at the Loch Ard Gorge this early in the morning so I sing lullabies to Marika as I toss her ashes in small sprays. Then, gathering strands of seaweed that litter the beach near Eva’s cave, I arrange them to spell MARIKA in large letters. Soon people trickle down the stairs into our space. I wait to hear them say her name aloud when they see the seaweed letters. This past year friends hadn’t mentioned Marika, afraid they would upset me, and I’m desperate to hear her name and talk about her. But I don’t want to make people sad, ruin someone’s day with the intrusion of a pathetic mother who lost her daughter. I pack up to go. Except for my footprints in the sand and Marika’s name in seaweed, I leave no trace of us.

It’s a short walk east along the Great Ocean Road to Gibson’s Steps where 86 stairs are carved into the face of the cliffs high over crashing waves. Supposedly, if I climb all the way down, I can walk on the beach and see the giant rocks rising from sea level. But I see rising frothing water below, so I sit on a step halfway down, and picnic on a cold beef-and-Guinness pie from my pack. I consider how one journey leads to another, and how in every place there is a story waiting or some lesson to be learned. If I were traveling with another person I’d be braver. I’d cover more territory and do more things. But then, I wonder, anchored to another, how much of the story might I miss?

Backtracking west a short way along the rugged cliffs from Gibson’s Steps, I reach The Twelve Apostles, the major highlight for many travelers along the Great Ocean Road. Here, twenty million years of marine organisms’ skeletal fragments have built up into steep limestone towers. Endlessly attacked by blasting winds and the savage Southern Ocean, their cliffs crack and erode into caves and gorges. These eventually collapse into towering stacks of rocks. Not quite twelve of these rock giants stand in the teeming surf where time, wind, and water continue to gut their softer spots, giving them character. Isn’t it always the most common universal elements, like pain and loss, which shape human lives as well? I wonder. In pounding waves, I picture the rock stacks as giant matriarchs bellowing thunderous laughter. Life constantly crashes down around them while nesting seabirds find comfort in the nooks and crannies of their capstones.

I throw Marika’s beaded bracelets off the overhang as hard as I can to reach them. The giants gobble up the jewels, adding the bits of glass and plastic to their accumulations. Then I spend the rest of the afternoon with them, thinking of time, ongoing life, and the hearty women back home who saved me by listening. Now over thirty women, made stronger by life’s poundings, share my stories with their daughters, cousins, and friends. They’ve sent me encouraging words. I hug the last quarter of my daughter’s ashes in awe of the greatness that surrounds me. And worry, what will I hug once the jewels and the ashes are gone?

 

 

Reply to Robin

Duetting: Memoir 50

Duetting: Memoir 50 Robin Botie 0f Ithaca, New York, photoshops an image from a dream about dying.

“It would take a miracle,” the ICU nurses said about the possibility of my daughter’s recovery. But we’d seen Marika pull off miracles before. They said, “Each day on the respirator lessens the chance of her ever getting off.” She’d been under for almost two weeks. Her lungs had not responded to the special drugs they’d ordered. So the Roc Docs used something called PEEP to force oxygen through. Then a hole developed in her right lung.

Her father and I had agreed we would allow no painful interventions, but when Marika’s right lung started to collapse, we let them shove a chest tube between her ribs. A day later, when the short-lived victory from that procedure dissipated and the left lung started to go, we allowed them to plant another tube through her left side. Nothing helped. Her lungs were shot. We continued to hope and pray past the time the doctors would have quit, pulled the plug, and sent us home.

“When you start to hear the same grim prognosis from the four different teams of doctors, it will be time to consider withdrawing life support,” our social worker said.

Withdraw life support. Is that how it was to end? Like this was an everyday procedure— you either produced a miracle, like she’d been doing for the past three years, and get wheeled out of the ICU to the unit down the hall—or you died amidst Code Blue chaos with staff shoving the family out the door before scrambling around to resuscitate and electrocute—or you got unplugged. I hugged myself, and begged my beautiful girl, “Do something, Mareek. Do something NOW.”

We’d never talked about the healthcare proxy. Armed with little more than that signed piece of paper, I did not know how to begin to guess what Marika would want. Would she want to live if she couldn’t sing or walk? If she were tethered to oxygen tanks for the rest of her life, stuck with feeding tubes forever, would she want to go on? What if she was trapped inside her head, could think but not communicate, could feel pain but not move? When it comes to considering death, people grab at every grain of hope, giving up more and more of what they once felt was important for a good life. I was grasping for anything. I’d take meager crumbs. The dregs. But what would she want? Would Marika sit, strapped to a wheelchair with an oxygen tank, living on memories, and feel life was worth living? And not fight, forever, for more?

“She wants everything possible to be done to keep her alive, unless it becomes hopeless,” Rachel said when I called to tell her I didn’t think Marika would make it. “She also told me she doesn’t want to cause more suffering for her family and friends.” Marika said that?

“We should put her on a DNR status, Do Not Resuscitate. So if her heart stops, she won’t receive chest compressions or electric shock to re-start it,” Laurie said. “That would only cause more pain from broken ribs and wouldn’t preserve the quality of her life. But don’t give up on her yet. Her blood pressure is good, her kidneys and liver are working well. Her blood cells and platelets are coming up, so the transplant is working.”
“So we just need a miracle to remedy the small matter of her blasted lungs,” I said.
“She’s been at death’s door before,” Laurie reminded me, “and has pulled out a miracle and survived.”

The Roc Docs said she was sinking. It was just a matter of time. It was not presented to us as a choice: to pull the plug or not pull the plug.
“No, not yet,” I begged on Friday when she’d been pumped by PEEP for multiple days. “Give her the weekend,” I pleaded, clinging to Marika’s feet and urging everyone to whisper, in case she could hear.

On Tuesday, the first day of March 2011, the seventeenth day on sedation, the four teams, one by one, filed in and out saying, “Sorry.” I clutched Marika’s feet and rubbed madly. I watched the life I had guarded for almost twenty-one years drift farther beyond my reach. They’d given us all the extra time they could to wish for a miracle, and over the weekend hope had ebbed away like a receding tide. A strong current was pulling me out into uncharted waters, to a place no one I knew had been before. Whose child dies before their parent? I wondered. How could this be happening?

“It’s time,” I remembered my father announcing at his end.
“It’s time,” the social worker said.
Drained and defeated, Marika’s father and I finally both agreed. I said yes, and signed the paper that said my daughter’s life was to be ended.

My bedside notebook for recording dreams caught only nightmares then: I was fished out of rushing water, dripping wet, and hauled up to the whitewashed docks above by a rope. Caught. I knew I didn’t belong there, that being there meant I’d be executed on the spot. I huddled, cold, wet and miserable, trying to make myself small on the hard dock while my captors considered me. A sympathetic one pointed to a place just above my tailbone, urging the other to shoot there, where it would be kinder. Closing my eyes, I waited for the shot to shatter my bones and end my life…. Later that day, I realized that the tailbone area was where Marika got her spinal fluids drawn and chemo injected. Maybe this was really a dream about Marika. Even in my dreams I had a hard time separating her ordeal from my own.

The second day of March was barren and gray now that we had accepted there would be no more miracles. I moved like mud. Heavy, frozen, lifeless mud. Marika’s life would be taken the next day and I had a dilemma: to tell her or not.

Even heavily sedated, she might be conscious on some level, or in and out of consciousness. But if Marika couldn’t say anything, couldn’t say goodbye or “I love you,” if she wasn’t able to express anything or even move a muscle, what would she do with this information? For the first time ever, her father and I agreed immediately on something. We did not want her just lying there, drowning in fear and anger, unable to communicate. So we whispered and tiptoed around her, holding her hands and head. I did not tell her she was going to die.

What is the bigger tragedy: losing your loved one suddenly without a chance to say goodbye? Or knowing your loved one is close to death and not talking about it? I did not know how to talk about it. So I just stood there, silently, stroking her face with my eyes.

Much later, I would find these lines crossed out, in a song in one of Marika’s journals:
“My mama strokes my hair and tells me I’ll be fine now,
‘We gonna take care of you.’ But her eyes tell me she’s hiding a lie.”

We’d had a conversation or two when she was very young, about how not saying something is like lying. So I was lying. I was not being honest anyway.

There was more. Worse. What, later, I’d give anything to be able to rewind and replay: I did not tell her, “I love you.” As she drifted farther away from me, I did not dare say it. I hadn’t said it enough. Does it mean more when you say it less? Does it mean less when you say it more? And what did it mean to my precious girl that I didn’t say it at that time?

Because if I told her then, “I love you,” she would know it was the end.

 

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 49

Duetting: Memoir 49 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a duet of a song written by her daughter who died, in a consideration of The Middle Ground.

“What’s Middle Ground?” I asked Laurie, my sister-the-doctor, at the beginning of February 2011.
“Well, first of all, it’s not a medical term,” she said. “Basically, ‘Middle Ground’ refers to a shift in the treatment plan from an aggressive, do-anything-and-everything-necessary-to-keep-someone-alive approach to a more selective one. So, if Marika’s heart stops, we’re not going to shock it or pound on her chest, but if she gets a reasonably easy-to-treat condition (like a bladder infection or strep throat), we would go ahead and treat that. In a way, ‘Middle Ground’ is a bit like ‘Limbo’, the apartment Marika shares. It’s a place somewhere in between. Between knowing that you’re winning the war and when you get those first inklings that you’re going to lose. So you wait, in Limbo, for a sign, for some hint as to when or whether she can come up with one more miracle.”
“Oh,” I said, and Laurie could hear my dread.
“Middle Ground does not mean that anyone’s giving up,” she said, “but we all know it’s the first step toward that end, the end that no one is yet ready to acknowledge.”

So we were one step closer to that place into which I had not allowed myself to go. Outside, in the ground under the snow, tender tips of crocuses emerged into the wintry world before their time. They’d be gone before spring.

After the late night call from the Intensive Care Unit, when I got back to the hospital, Marika was floating in and out of consciousness. Sleeping Beauty, strung all over in plastic lines, was once again on center stage attended by nurses, aides, all types of technicians, and now, multiple teams. Besides the ICU docs, there was the somber cluster of oncology docs, a very animated squad of infectious disease docs, and a new tiptoeing team from Palliative Care. Bevies of doctors, social workers, and residents took turns entering and exiting her room, taking notes and quietly exchanging comments. A mysterious respiratory infection, they said; we wore masks and gowns around her now. No one really knew why her lungs were failing. When she became the least bit awake, she tried to speak. She yanked her cords and tried to climb out of bed. They gave her more drugs to quiet and contain her. She was fighting everything now.

“Please don’t speak to your daughter,” one of the nurses said to me shortly after I got back. “She is at maximum dosage levels for her sedation drugs, and when she hears you it is difficult to keep her sedated.”
“I can’t talk to her?” I wanted to make sure I’d heard right. In disbelief, I quietly rubbed Marika’s feet. But soon, when I whispered to a nurse, Marika heard me and woke. She pointed at me with an incriminating index finger, as if she could shoot a dagger straight through me. She lowered and then raised her hand, slowly, like a ghost, and suddenly gave me – The Finger.

The horrified nurse sedated her more. Hurt, and afraid of what Marika might do next, I kept quiet. But what I really wanted to do was shout to all the doctors and nurses, “Damn you all! She’s my daughter!” I moped for hours in a funk until I learned she’d given her father the same greeting earlier.

A day later, while I silently rubbed her feet, she opened her eyes.
“Mom!” she mouthed through her tubed and taped lips, looking straight at me. She extended her arms like she wanted to hug me. Her face scrunched up and turned red. Her mouth stretched the tape with a concave bottom lip. She was crying.
“Mareek,” I called, and left my station by her feet to step closer. “Oh, Mareek.” I reached out to hug her. But before I could touch her, the nurse stepped up the sedation. Marika’s eyes rolled back as her lids shut. Her arms dropped in slow motion. Her words, her thoughts, everything was snuffed out. I stood over the still form of my daughter, not able to remember the last time we’d hugged. In my mind I replayed the scene. She’d reached for me. Her eyes had said everything: “Mom, I’m scared. Hold me; help me. I’m sorry. Thank you. Mom, I love you.” I stared at her face and hugged myself, and returned to the foot of the bed. And then the nurse asked me not to rub her feet.

I was blind-sided. I stood there dumbfounded. Foot-rubs were my only connection to my daughter now. I couldn’t just let her lie there alone. She’d wanted to hug me.

Greg, on a tentative seventy-two hour notice to return to Afghanistan, came to Strong to say goodbye to his sister. Marika had known he was hired to go back as a security agent. But she was unconscious now and seemed to hear nothing. He didn’t stay long. He whispered goodbye and turned to go. Suddenly she lunged for him. She flew over the bedrails, tearing the lines that tethered her to the IVs. She grabbed her brother. In seconds, she was stopped and sedated some more.

Rachel arrived for a visit, and I darted out for a fast trip back to Ithaca. Rachel’s eye make-up, the tight skinny jeans and French-tipped nails made me realize how long it had been since I’d seen Marika up and dressed. I must hurry home, I told myself, to renew my driver’s license that would expire soon. Mostly though, I just needed to get out. I needed to drive far and fast.

Rachel ambled down the long hallway with a huge rainbow balloon trailing behind her. And two hours later, at the Motor Vehicle Bureau, I stood before a clerk who tried to get me to smile for the photo ID that would be with me for the next eight years. For eight years, my eyes in that photo would say, “Marika, we need a miracle now.” I faced the camera unable to think of anyone or anything else. Rachel sat with Marika and held her head, reading aloud the goodbye letter she had written, just in case. She drove back to Ithaca that evening, stopping at a liquor store for a bottle of Svedka Vodka to tide her over. I drove back to Strong early the next morning crunching on an apple to keep awake. The Big Meeting was scheduled with the Palliative Care team. So Greg drove to Strong, as did our social worker. My children’s father and his wife were already there. We were going to discuss The Middle Ground and “options,” things I wasn’t able to hear yet. I didn’t want to listen to any of these people. I just wanted to rub Marika’s red painted toes and watch for the tiniest twitch of her pale brow.

 

 

 

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN