Okay, so in a crazy procrastination fervor, I checked out the book with the essay, and will now type out the missing pages from the Google Books Roar Softly edition . . . (just in case you're interested)
. . . In the elevator she sat in the wheelchair and reached out to tug at my pants. She rubbed the fabric between her fingers proprietarily. "Perfect," she said. I was twenty-two. I believed that if a doctor told you that you were going to die soon, you'd be taken to a room with a gleaming wooden desk. This was not so. My mother sat with her shirt off on top of the table with paper stretched over it. When she moved, the room was on fire with the paper ripping and crinkling beneath her. She wore a pale yellow smock with strings meant to be tied. I could see her soft back, the small shelf of flesh that curved down at her waist. The doctor said she'd be lucky if she lived a year. My mother blinked her wet eyes but did not cry. She sat with her hands folded tightly together and her ankles hooked on to the other. Shackled to herself. She'd asked the doctor if she could continue riding her horse. He then took a pencil in his hand and stood it upright on the edge of the sink and tapped it down on the surface hard. "This is your spine after radiation," he said. "One jolt and your bones will crumble like a dry cracker."
First we went to the women's restroom. Each of us locked in a separate stall, weeping. We didn't say a word. Not because we felt alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two. I could feel her weight leaning against the door, her hands slapping slowly against it, causing the entire frame of the bathroom stalls to shake. Later we came out to wash our hands and faces, standing side by side in the ladies' room mirror.
We were sent to the pharmacy to wait. I sat next to my mother in my green pantsuit. There was a big bald boy in an old man's lap. There was a woman who had an arm that swung wildly from the elbow. She held it stiffly with the other hand, trying to calm it. She waited. We waited. There was a beautiful dark-haired woman who sat in a wheelchair. She wore a purple hat and a handful of diamond rings. We could not take our eyes off her. She spoke in Spanish to the people gathered around her, her family and perhaps her husband. "Do you think she has cancer?" my mother whispered loudly to me. There was a song coming quietly over the speakers. A song without words . . .
. . . Once he clutched my thigh when Joe left the room and told me that if I came to see him alone he'd give me heroin free. Another time he held his baby daughter, just a month old. I looked at her and smiled and told Santos how beautiful she was, and inside of me I felt the presence of my real life. The woman who I actually was. The kind of woman who knows the beauty of a baby, who will have a baby, who once was a baby.
The days of my mother's death, the morphine days, and those that followed, the heroin days, lasted only weeks, months -- but each day was an eternity, one staked up on the other, a cold clarity inside of a deep haze. And unoccupied as well. Just me and my mother, or the ghost of her, though others surely came and went.
Some days flowers came to my mother's hospital room, and I set them on the edges of tables and windowsills. Women came too. Women who volunteered for the hospital. Old Catholic women, with hair cut close to the scalp or woven into long braids and pinned to their heads. My mother greeted them as she did the flowers: impervious, unmoved, resolute.
The women thought it would be for the best when my mother died. They sat next to me on the vinyl furniture and told me in low tones about the deaths of their own mothers. Mothers who had died standing at kitchen sinks, in the back seats of cars, in beds lit with candles. And also about the ones who made it. The ones with the
will to live. Of tumors vanishing and clean blood and opaque bones. People who fought it, who refused to die. The ones who went and then came back. The survivors. The heroes. It would be for the best, they whispered, when it was over. Her life, that is. My mother's.
People whom I knew came, and I did not recognize them at first. It seemed they all wore strange hats or other disguises during this time, though I am certain that is not true. They were friends of my mother's. They couldn't bear to stay in the room, so instead they left chicken pot pies and bread. Scalloped potatoes and blocks of cheddar cheese . . .
My mother was not dramatic or concise in her dying. She hadn't offered a single directive in the past days, and I was desperate for guidance. "That you won't allow me to be in pain anymore. I've had too much pain."
"Yes," I said, "yes"
There was using heroin and also not using it. In the mornings when I woke, groggy and drained, I'd stand in front of the mirror and talk to myself. I was shocked by my own life.
This was not meant to be, I'd think in the mornings.
Stop it, I said.
No more. And then I would shower and dress in my black pants and white shirt and black bow tie and take a bus downtown to serve people coddee and pancakes. At two in the afternoon I'd take the bus home again with hopefully sixty bucks in my pocked for another score of heroine. This is how it went.
Joe waited for me to get home. He cooked me macaroni and cheese and called Santos. He pulled me into his bed and jumped up when the phone rang. I made him stick the needle into me the first time, and then he taught me how to do it myself. What I loved about Joe is that he didn't love me, or himself. I loved that he would not only let me but help me destroy myself. I'd never shared that with another person. The dark glory of our united self-destruction had the force of something like love.
I get to do this, I thought.
I get to waste my life. I felt a terrible power within me. The power of controlling the uncontrollable.
I get to be junk, I thought.
But this was not to be. My husband, Mark, called me. He was in town and wanted to see me. The friend I'd come to visit in Portland had told him about Joe and about my using heroin, and in response he drove from Minneapolis to talk to me. I met him within the hour at our friend's house. He sat at a table in the kitchen with the branches of a fig tree tapping on the window nearby. He said, "You look, you look . . . different. You seem so, how can I say this -- you seem like you aren't here." First he put his hands on mine, and we held on to one another, locked hand to hand. I couldn't explain it to him. The why. And then we fought. He stood up and screamed at me so loudly that I put my hands over my head for cover. His arms gestured madly into the air, at nothing. He clawed at himself and ripped the shirt . . .
. . . Pacific Ocean roar in while Joe locked himself in the public restroom to shoot up. I held myself stiff against the desire to join him. The ocean inched nearer and nearer to me with each passing minute. I was both sickened by Joe and compelled. I felt in the presence of a dying man, a young, dying man, and I knew that I could never see him again if I wanted to live. And I did.
My mother didn't have time to get skinny. Her death was a relentless onward march. Ther hero's journey is one of return, but my mother's was all forward motion. She was altered but still fleshy when she died, the body of a woman among the living. She had her hair too, brown and brittle and frayed from being in bed for weeks. From the room where she died I could see the great Lake Superior out her window. The biggest lake in the world, and the coldest. To see it, I had to work. I pressed my face sideways, hard, against the glass, and I'd catch a slice of it going on forever into the horizon. "A room with a view!" my mother exclaimed. "All of my life I've waited for a room with a view,"
I arranged the flowers closer into my mother, to the edges of the tables, so that she could see them without having to turn her head. Bouquets of pink carnations, yellow roses, daisies, and tiger lilies. Flowers that originated on other continents and were brought here to witness my mother's dying.
My mother wanted to die sitting up, so I took all the pillows I could get my hands on and made a backrest for her. I wanted to take my mother and prop her in a field of yarrow to die. I covered her with a quilt that I had brought from home, one she had sewn herself out of pieces of our old clothing. "Get that out of here," she said savagely, and then kicked her legs like a swimmer to make it go away.
I watched my mother. It was March, and outside, the sun glinted off the sidewalks and the icy edges of teh snow. It was Saint Patrick's Day, and the nurses brought my mother a square block of green Jell-O that sat quivering on the table beside her. It was the last day of her life, and my mother did not sleep, she did not wake. She held her eyes still and open. They were the bluest thing in the room, perhaps in all of Duluth. Bluer than the lake. They were the color of the sky on the best day of your life.
My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames disappear to smoke and then smoke to air. She never once closed her eyes. First they were bitter and then they were bewildered and they changed again to something else, to a state that I have had, finally to see as heroic. Blue, blue eyes. Daggers of blue wanting and wanting. To stay, to stay.
(End)
