O My America: Just in Time

by Lawrence Bush
“Just in time, I found you just in time . . .” — Jule Styne, Adolph Green, Betty Comden
My mother is dying tonight, or in the next 24 or 36 or 48 hours, just short of her 92nd birthday this Saturday. She’s on oxygen and morphine, and not conscious, and I’ve spent the last two hours on the phone with funeral homes and her union and her nursing home and her caretakers — and deciding, with difficulty, not to make the 2+ hour drive to be at her bedside, not until the morning, if she’s still in our world — and I’ve been crying in my wife’s lap and playing a melancholy improvisation on bass guitar and wondering if I’m experiencing this the “right” way, both cosmically and psychologically.
She wasn’t so great a mom. She and my father had a stormy, combative relationship that was at the center of our family life and shaped the psyches of my brother and me in ways that we’ve had to struggle with in order to find our authentic selves and desires, apart from our family’s expectations. She didn’t rise to the occasion as a grandmother, either, only competed with my twins rather than coming across as a helpful adult. My mother had a powerful life force and a loving heart — she was “irrepressible,” my repressive father used to say about her, in moments of affection or pity — but she was highly narcissistic, and thwarted in her quest to be loved, thwarted in her quest to be esteemed. When I think of my mom from a distance, I feel sorrow at a life unfulfilled. (When I think of her from closeup, I want to step back.)
Yet she became a charming old lady, eager only for people to smile at her and be kind to her, and once she moved into Isabella House, her assisted living facility, some eight years ago, and surrendered all responsibilities that might provoke any anxiety (I did her finances, her taxes; others did her chores, her laundry, her cooking; challenging relationships fell away; television was a constant companion), she found a kind of peace, a pleasant hum instead of static, and she seemed very contented.
I was a dutiful son. I called her, or received her call, nearly every day; I visited her every month, took her out to dinner and a movie; I brought her books, little gifts; I brought her up to my house once or twice a year. I was dutiful — but not really loving. I could not break through the taboo of my family culture, which had made loving my mom a not-desirable trait. I knew that the parts of me that are closed down, locked up, had their origins in this taboo, but I couldn’t break through, even for my own sake. I was always buttoned up in her presence.
Then it changed, just in the past two months. My mom was hospitalized after falling in her apartment — nothing broken — and was then discharged to the rehabilitation unit of Isabella. It was obvious, this time, that she wouldn’t be going back to the apartment, not without 24-hour care, which was unaffordable for us. Then, after three weeks or so, Medicare announced that it would no longer be paying the bills. I had to scramble to get her application in to Medicaid — something I was supposed to have done a year ago but had allowed myself to neglect, what with all of my work and the misplaced forms and the obnoxious paperwork . . .
It all worked out — she is now officially “Medicaid pending” — but in the few days before I knew it would, I had this insane, guilty idea of having her live with us. One morning, I woke up at 6 a.m. with my usual feeling of dread (I am my mother’s son), and I awakened my sleepy Susan to talk about how I was feeling. With her help, I recognized that nursing my mother at home would be truly impossible, but that it expressed my desire to heal my feelings about her and to love her with an open heart before she was gone.
I went to see my mom that morning, with my guitar in hand.
As soon as I arrived, she pooped herself and had to be cleaned up. This is what you’ll be dealing with three times a day was the message . . .
A larger message was all around me, in the astounding lovingkindness that the workers at Isabella House showed my mother that morning. They cleaned her. They washed her. They dressed her. They combed her hair. They put on her lipstick. They spoke sweetly and kindly and lovingly to her. They told me what a grand and elegant lady she was. These women (and a couple of men), working for lousy wages (though they’re all members of 1199, the union my father helped to launch way back when), these people, who travel in from the Bronx, from Queens, from New Jersey, and suffer the indignities of racism and near-poverty on a daily basis — they all seemed to be saying to me, You want to learn how to love your mom? Watch us!
More than once, I restrained myself from sinking to my knees, stretching out my arms and shouting Thank you! Instead, I accompanied my mother to the cafeteria for the first time in eight years, and I took out my guitar and I played instrumental music for all of the diners there, and even sang a little bit, and my mother positively kvelled from the attention this brought her.
Three weeks later, she’s dying, as in, Mission accomplished. My son has serenaded me.
There won’t be a tahara (ritual body washing); I don’t want to handle my mother’s body, and communists and ex-communists like her don’t hire religious people for such activities. There won’t be a memorial service — there aren’t enough people left in her life, and I don’t need a crowd. There won’t be a rabbi — I can deal with whatever needs to be done at the graveside service. We won’t say kaddish at home during shiva — but I will play her favorite songs a few times a day, including the one she loved to sing, “Just in time, I found you just in time . . .”
It will be hard to invent my own mourning process, but that’s what atheists have to do — either ignore it or create it. I won’t ignore it, because I won’t injure myself any more by shutting out my emotions about my poor mother.
And in a week or two, we will gather in a room at Isabella, and I hope to go down on my knees and hold out my arms and say THANK YOU.