1.
I arrived at the intensive care unit in the early afternoon.
I was shocked to find my mother rising and falling atop a motorized bed with no nurse in sight.
2.
My mother, who resembled Elizabeth Taylor, even as they both aged and who was now unconscious, or partially conscious; terrified, or without a claim to dignity—with her tracheotomy, her heart monitor, I.V. drips, with a macerated open chest cavity, my mother was being tortured to death in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire hospital on an ordinary day in September. Outside you could see the beginning of autumn foliage.
3.
What to do? Stay calm of course. Despite the bungled surgery and the failures of post-operative care you need the nurses on your side. Everybody who has ever been in a hospital knows you need the nurses on your side. Don’t yell at the nurses. Don’t spit in the soup.
4.
"Excuse me, excuse me, sorry, sorry, but you see I’m blind so I can’t make eye contact and I could hear you over there—yes, hello. Yes, is my mother’s bed supposed to be rising and falling since as I understand it she has an open chest cavity?"
5.
Stray, affiliated questions asked over a 24 hour period:
"Why can’t you sew up her chest cavity?"
"Why can’t you find a chalk board so she can communicate?"
"Why did they perform the heart valve surgery if her sternem was too fragile to close?"
6.
Because I travel with a guide dog I discover things. Even the oldest hospital apparatchiks like to see a Labrador wearing its professional harness.
Discoveries:
My mother’s surgeon is called "the Italian Stallion".
He was once the doctor of a famous TV personality but he left New York and fame and glory for rural New Hampshire.
Since he couldn’t sew my mother up, the stallion put a staple in my mother’s chest but it wouldn’t stay in.
They’ve placed a sort of weighted pillow contraption over her breasts.
7.
Autobiography ain’t the movies. When a loved one dies there is only paper work and seemingly endless journeys to the Salvation Army. We gave away my mother’s favorite clothes. We bundled up the bed sheets and threw them away as if we were Victorian charwomen. What the hell else do you do with the landlord breathing down your neck. They wanted to show her apartment before she was in the ground.
8.
The funeral director handed me a black plastic garbage bag as we stood in the cemetery. "I forgot to give you this," he said, "It’s her teddy bear and her bathrobe. You know, left over from the hospital."
I can’t believe that he’s handed me a garbage bag with a teddy bear inside He might as well have handed me a bundle of shorn human hair and a sewing machine.
9.
My mother’s death was so ghastly it’s taken me 8 years to confront the business. She was an old woman. She had congestive heart failure. She was diabetic. Her body was malnourished owing to years of alcohol abuse. She was a high risk patient for heart surgery. Then the Italian Stallion discovered while leaning above the operating table that he couldn’t sew her chest back together.
10.
And so she slowly bled to death while rising and falling atop an electrical bed.
11.
Homer’s Odyssey, Book Eleven, tells of the journey of Odysseus to the underworld. The man requires words from the dead. Everyone knows that if you want to get home you need the dead on your side. D.H. Lawrence said the dead stay around and help. Or something like that. The Greeks were less certain. Ancestors were no more trustworthy than the gods Odysseus leaned into the smoky underworld and put a bowl of blood on the ground. Soon the shades of the dead came forward and Odysseus saw his mother. She was unloved, grieving, bloodless, thirsty, kept from the world of solid form by the two dimensional forces of Hades. The Swedish poet Gunar Ekelof wrote that everything in Hades is flat. The dead navigate there like sting rays.
12.
Is memory real? Yes and no. Longitudinal studies in "memory theory" report that human beings "see" specific incidents poorly; they remember experiences incorrectly; and after time has elapsed they are convinced of their misapprehensions about the past.
Freud saw that we do not remember the past; we re-arrange it in symbolic figuration. In other words we are at every moment re-inventing the personal pastand we are doing so with the signs and symbols that we have absorbed along the road of life.
Just as there is no "true green" in nature there is no "true memory" stored in the human individual.
13.
I used to believe this. Until I found my mother dazed and bleeding, rising and falling in a malfunctioning bed that was designed to prevent bedsores. Her mattress heaved her wounded torso up, then with a merciless sequence of chirps and a grinding of gears it would drop her back down, leaving her flat for twenty seconds, flat with her leaded cushion over her chest,her eyes wide open, her throat blocked with a tube.
14.
"No, no," said the nurse. "That bed isn’t supposed to do that!"
"Well how long has it been doing this?" I asked.
"I don’t know," she said and then quite literally ran away.
15.
A bowl of blood.
Shadows of early morning.
Good bye
Good bye
A Roman carnival spins at the top of the narrow street.
It’s spring and they are honoring the dead.
Look.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Hi Cecilia: you are so kind to write about “Flawless Memory” and with such thoughtfulness. I genuinely appreciate this.
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Hi, Steve,
It’s Cecilia again, the one with the long note — hope this brief note finds you and yours well — I just wanted to make a small adjustment to the long note —
So, where it reads, “We have your dear mom, Elizabeth Taylor, instead of Helen” (par. 2),
please accept the correction to,
“We have your dear mom, Elizabeth Taylor, instead of Penelope” (par. 2).
Thank you - blessings of continual healing to you and yours –
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Stephen,
I’m sorry for your Mother’s passing, I was saddened by her torturous treatment in what should have been a “never event.” May God provide you and yours with His paradoxical comfort and healing as only He can. I don’t know you personally and, yet, your text impacted me in many levels.
With remembrance of the best of times and the worst of times; how to overcome the fearful ghosts that roam our minds? For therein lies their source of power. Unchallenged, these foes plague us in our unawareness or inability to face them. “It is too painful; I’d rather not think of it.” Or, “I will do whatever so I might forget.” But there are dreams or, rather, nightmares. Depression. Palpable bitterness. PTSD. What’s one to do, then? “Stay calm of course” (par. 3).
The untouchable, undying qualities of the human spirit here demonstrated. Resilience in the face of evil; bitterness will not overcome when confronted.
“A bruised reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick He will not snuff out. In faithfulness He will bring forth justice” (Isaiah 42:3).
Oh, for the gift of writing, a tool like a powerful laser beam, cutting through and removing the bitter-sweet plant by its root, exchanging nightmare for dreams. Expressive writing in the face of trauma is like medicine—so simple and, yet, so profound. Life-restoring. Improves PTSD—as the ghosts are no longer faceless shadows—Journaling is to a traumatic event as sunlight is to a seed, promoting growth and, at times, even a silver lining, as in sharing. Why would you write such an account, true and truly tragic? Yes, for healing. Personal. Familial. Humankind.
Is memory real; can it be flawless? Well, memory theory implies that events are “seen poorly;” Freud dismisses the past as beyond remembrance and if we add to the mix our own concepts, the odds are stacked quite high against flawless memory—nonetheless, experiences and memories come and with them, if the brain weaves more connections, the greater the accuracy of its recollections. Oh, for an excellent circuit system: consolidated, strengthened and never decaying. Now, in the midst of tragedy, how often does one reflect on it, re-reviews paperwork, etc? They say it’s a positive feedback— constant signals equals stronger connections (aka synapses) at the brain and memory level.
Oh, to increase and maintain that reality. Some scholars posit that when vision is absent, other senses are enhanced. “I’m blind so I can’t make eye contact and I could hear you over there” (par. 4). And, oh, for a backup system, kind of duplicating the “discoveries” through association, as Kuusisto did. So finding oneself engulfed in an ocean of suffering, one pairs it up with another epic. I see you as Homer, the legendary poet of Greece. (And that’s my association. I hope it’s okay to address you as “Homer”). He initiates it ‘medias res’ (par. 1), “I was shocked to find my mother”… just as Homer starts ‘in the middle of things’ in Odyssey.
We have your dear mom, Elizabeth Taylor, instead of Helen. (par. 2).
Not to forget the nurses, “everybody who has ever been in a hospital knows you need the nurses on your side” (par. 3) linked to the dead—with the qualifier that, in the underworld, “the dead stay around and help” (Lawrence), for “everyone knows that if you want to get home you need the dead on your side” (par. 11). As one hears the unifying background for all who feel odd at sea, “do not—under any circumstances—incur the wrath of the gods,” try and appease them instead: “Don’t yell at the nurses. Don’t spit in the soup” (par. 3).
Then, at the end of par. 4 and par. 5, the rhetorical … “questions asked over a 24 hour period”… unanswered—how epically tragic. And in par. 14, “I don’t know”…
Next, a hospitality code (aka xenia) for the 21st century serves “discoveries” to the guest with the Labrador, for “even the oldest hospital apparatchiks” can’t help but like it (par. 6).
Well, What’s in a name? Sometimes quite a bit, I would say. “My mother’s surgeon is called ‘the Italian Stallion’” (par. 6). So many questions. Why did this doctor leave New York’s fame and fortune for rural New Hampshire? Next, the word ‘Stallion’ comes with certain connotations. Could it be standing in for Odysseus, where, the more sexual conquests, the greater the hero? Or does it stand in for the epic’s double standard, where men are studs and women … well, not quite?
As to par. 7 and par. 8: Death is raw. Hollywood and Hallmark have nothing on it. I remember my uncle’s passing 20 years ago like it was today. My aunt could not bring herself to the point of going through his clothing or belongings. I took that task on. It was grueling psychologically, so much so that it affected me physically. But I was able to do it and be helpful to them. In par. 7 and par. 8 the landlord and funeral director rub salt into his wound with their acts of unspeakable insensibilities.
Everyone knows about medical histories and how one’s frailties ought not to be discovered while under the knife, as a matter of speaking. (Should not a renowned doctor know that or was he so high on pride that that crucial detail escaped him?)
Homer expounds on the torturous bed with details, down to its grinding sounds. “Memory is more indelible than ink” (A. Loos).
… he gathered in a bowl her blood and “… the shades of the dead came forward” (Odyssey) … she was “unloved, grieving, bloodless, thirsty, kept from the world of solid form by the two dimensional forces of Hades” (par.11) … “They’ve placed a sort of weighted pillow contraption over her breasts” (par. 6). I believe Homer “saw his mother” in the “shadows of early morning—Good bye … Good bye” (par. 15).
Meanwhile the masqueraders carry on their folly, spinning in rich regalia “while rising and falling atop” their narrowness; indeed, celebrating the dead (par. 15).
But for Homer is spring; Ithaca is spotted ahead. “Look” (par. 15).
(Cecilia M. B. Lemos 8/3/20)
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It took me longer than 8 years to write about my mother's death. This is powerfully moving. Bravo, Steve.
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Mothers just should never die. Mothers are all about giving life.
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