June 12, 2018
It is her birthday today, and she is dying. Curled up in a fetal position, in a cloud of morphine, she is not going to recover. On her Facebook page, a string of tender and tentative birthday wishes on social media soften the blow. Distance – virtual and real – helps conceal the truth.
The man I love watches – helpless – as his mother struggles in that space between holding on and letting go, a bewildering space that both tightens and expands without warning.
There is no greeting card section for a birthday like this, no adequate words to mark 79 years that were mostly lived with boldness, with his mother at the helm of her own life. What does he say to her – watching as she watches her life slip from her grasp?
In barely a year, Estelle has lost her husband, her home, her ability to move in her tiny bird-like body, but never her mind. Quick and smart, just two weeks ago, she emerged from that cloud to ask Alexa to play a song. “Neon Moon,” I think it was. Minutes later, spirited and defiant, she announced to those gathered around her that she couldn’t wait to get out of this place, inquiring with all clarity on the pending sale of her home. Or maybe it was The Chair by George Strait. It doesn’t matter. Any song her son sings is her favorite. I find myself recalling a night last year when she watched on Facetime one of his live performances on a rooftop she never could reach. Bedridden yet buoyant, ‘in and out of the beams of a neon moon …’
Gathered around a tiny bed in a beautiful home that is not her home, are her son and daughter and her grandchildren on the verge of what will release her from the brutal bedsores, the litany of indignities of a merciless and unrelenting illness that is killing her slowly.
She’s not quite ready to go. She knows how much he will miss her, but her indomitable spirit persists. Only she knows the terms of her surrender, and on her birthday, she is taking the lead.
Goodbye, Estelle. You will be missed.
Goodbye is the emptiest yet fullest of all human messages.
