This is not my mother’s eulogy. She’s not dead. In fact, today she tells me (in a very lively voice) to put the two on the three. She tells me this four times before I tell her that I can’t because both the two and the three are red. “They are?” she asks, leaning forward to look over the table without getting up from her automatic recliner. “Oh, yes.” She sits back.
I play Solitaire while visiting my mother because the game allows me to stay still for a few hours a week and listen to her try to talk, which is all she wants from me these days. To listen. At ninety-four years old, Mom fights to find words that will help her remember the life she has lived. The life that has brought her here forgetting the names of people she loves and the dinner she ate an hour before. My mother has not been diagnosed, but we (my five siblings and I) speculate—dementia, Alzheimer’s, old age. She dismisses the idea when we suggest seeing a doctor and pity the person who mentions medication. Mom prides herself on her over-the-counter mode of survival. She proudly displays vitamins for this, Bayer Aspirin for that, and a family-size container of Tums. Pills for high blood pressure, however, disappear soon after they are prescribed. “What do I need them for?” She asks the same question in regard to the Home Health Aides who were assigned after her short hospital stay. We try to explain the risks of living alone, but she interrupts. “I have the right to make my own decisions.” So, we let her. Sometimes, I can figure out the words to fill in the blanks for Mom; most times, I have absolutely no idea what she is trying to say.
One thing she is clear about: she wants to die.
Before solitaire, but after the pandemic, Mom and I played Bingo. We did this via conference call on speaker phone through the senior center. She’d set up TV tables in her studio apartment—each holding two bingo cards, six graham crackers topped with peanut butter, four bite-sized chocolate bars and a bottle of seltzer with cranberry juice. I’d rush in after a two-hour commute from where I live in Vermont just in time to hear the first number called through Mom’s phone. “You’re late,” she’d snap, but halfway through the first game, we’d settle into the excitement of covering squares and the comfort of each other’s company without having to talk. When one of us got lucky, Mom would bounce up in her seat and fumble for the mute button, screaming into the receiver, “Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!” The one time I won the coverall, the eight-dollar jackpot, Mom got so excited that instead of pressing MUTE she pressed END. By the time she figured out her mistake and how to call back, the game was long over. She tried to convince the woman on the other end that her daughter “you know the one…the youngest, number seven, my baby” had won the game fair and square, but to no avail. My eight-dollar winnings went elsewhere. Soon after that, we stopped playing Bingo. One day, I got to Mom’s house, and the tables weren’t set up. When I asked why, she waved her hand above her head, mumbling something about someone “not doing things the right way.” Then she brought out the graham crackers, peanut butter and Milky Ways.
Before Bingo, but after Mom gave up her driver’s license (thankfully, this she did willingly at age 87, after a mishap in a busy parking lot), I’d pick Mom up once a week, and we’d have lunch at her favorite restaurant and then shop at Sam’s. We’d start by splitting a pizza and Greek salad and talk mostly about her “seniors,” the people she had taken care of, most of whom were younger than she. Inevitably, someone from the Senior Center, where Mom worked for thirty years, would stop by the table to say hello to Mom and tell me how much she had helped them.
After lunch, I’d follow Mom around Sam’s Club for an hour or two, where she’d buy in bulk for one, tossing forty-eight rolls of toilet paper and four cases of water into her cart. On the way home, she’d insist on stopping for gas, whether I needed it or not, so she could pump and pay. Then I’d pull around to the back of Mom’s apartment building. “Don’t get out,” she’d insist, loading her bags into a cart to wheel up to her second-floor apartment. Watching my mother, from inside my car, maneuver through the double doors and down the hallway, I didn’t think of her as being old.
Since Mom’s hospital stay six months ago, she spends most of the day in her recliner, reminding me that she’s “ready.” “Ready for what?” I joke. I know exactly what she means, but I’m not ready to talk about death with my mother. I think about it daily—what life would be like without her—when she gets her wish— closes her eyes one night and that’s that. I imagine this not because my mother’s wish is my wish, too, but as a way to prepare (or maybe protect) from the pain when it happens. I think about what it would be like not to call Mom every night after dinner and listen to her try to explain to me what she’s watching. “You know the show…the one with the guy…the guy who died.”
“Jeopardy,” I tell her.
“But these aren’t the ones with that guy…the one who was on for a long time…you know the guy?”
“Alex Trebeck.”
“That’s right,” she says. I imagine the proud look on Mom’s face as she settles back into her seat, having conveyed the right clues once again.
I listen to her start and stop sentences for fifteen minutes more and then we say good night. “Love ya,” she says.
“I love you, too.”
Today, at Mom’s, my partner P sleeps next to me while I play solitaire. Her studio apartment is his favorite place to nap. “Is he okay?” Mom asks (not in a whisper) every few minutes. Between Mom’s asking and The Price is Right on high volume (she refuses to wear her hearing aids), it’s amazing P can sleep at all. But he does because “it’s comfortable in here.” Comfortable and clean. Her closet categorized by color.
With P sleeping and Mom trying to make sense of Monty Hall, I slipped out to the hallway to take a call for work. This irritates my mother, I know, but it’s a waste of time to try to explain that I have to work, and that I also want to see her, and that it’s not always convenient for me to drive four hours round trip to do so. I also know that not having to make the trip will mean something worse.
On the ride home, P will recount their conversation while I was in the hallway. How my mother told him about her father, the grandfather I never met and knew nothing about until I was well into adulthood. Mom did all she could to protect her kids from the stuff she had to suffer. “She was on her own at 16,” P will say. I know this, but never thought much about until my own daughters turned that age, and I realized they were still children. It’s still hard for me to think of my mother as anything but the woman who figured out how to feed a family of nine on next to nothing. She’ll also talk to P about Kevin, the child she lost when he was twenty. Some days, my mother shows me her prayer cards. Sometimes, we say the Lord’s Prayer together, and always she kisses the cards and says, “Love ya” to both my brother and my father, her hubby of forty years, who passed over twenty-five years ago. “I’m ready to see them,” she reminds me. When I was thirteen, the age mom was when her own mother died, she told me that her only wish was to live long enough for her kids to reach adulthood. Her youngest (me) turned sixty this year.
“Do you want anything?” Mom asks for the eleventh time since we’ve been there. Yes, Mom, I want something. I want to go back two years to when you were driving me crazy from the passenger’s seat, pointing out the speed limit and telling me when to turn left a half mile before I needed to. Or better yet, five years to when you drove yourself to our weekly meetups. What do I want? I want you to use your walker so I don’t have to worry about you lying on the floor for two days until someone finds you. I don’t say any of this because I know it will only upset her. What I really want is patience. I want to not get frustrated when I have to tell her something five times then have to tell her again five minutes later. Patience is what I want because someday, sooner than I am ready, no matter how much I try to prepare myself or plan for it, this will be her eulogy.
P stirs, Monty Hall makes a deal with a man wearing a spaghetti strainer on his head, and I continue flipping cards.
“We’re good, Mom.” I say. “We’re good.”
Kassie Rubico’s work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Guide to Kulcher Creative Journal, Insight Academic Journal, Parnassus Literary Journal, the anthology River Muse, Tales of Lowell and the Merrimack Valley, and Toska Literary Magazine. She received a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and Literature at Rivier College and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Pine Manor College. She has taught writing and literature at various colleges and is currently teaching in the Changing Lives Through Literature program. Kassie lives in Cambridge, Ma.
