by Diva Daims

 

A Promise Kept

 

 

Seven years ago this month. Seven. If I sit very still and stare ahead, I can erase those years, one by one, layer by layer, until I am back in that quiet hospital room with my Mother who is dying. She lies there as she has for ten days, eyes closed, breathing qui­etly, a tube in her nose, a bottle of fluid connected by a tube to her arm. I lean over her, close, and give her the latest news about the family and the friends who have asked about her and want to visit. I describe the hot sultry July weather outside the windows. For ten days she has been in a coma after her second stroke, and I have come to sit near her and read or hold her hand, to chat with her as though she can hear and might reply.

This day, by chance, I came to visit Ma earlier than I usually did. The hospital staff was still at work cleaning the halls and rooms of A Ward as I slipped by unnoticed. I had by this time be­come familiar to everyone so that I could go and come as I pleased.

Several minutes go by. I sit with her wrapped in my arms talk­ing to her softly. Her breathing is rhythmic; its sound comforts me. But then I sense something different about its rhythm, a slightly faster pace, a hesitation now and then, a skipped breath. As her breathing becomes more labored, I panic. I run to the door and shout for the nurse to come quickly. Something must be done! The nurse follows me into the room, examines my Mother, and then quietly reminds me that my sisters and I have agreed with the doctor that Ma is not to be resuscitated, that she will be al­lowed to die with as much dignity as one can have in a hospital room, that we will let her go in peace. I catch my breath. “Yes, I understand. But please take all the tubes out. I want her to be as she is, free, on her own.”

The nurse leaves. I draw the blinds around my Mother’s bed, making our space smaller, more private. The woman in the next bed has guessed what is happening or doesn’t want to know. The only sound in the room is my Mother’s quiet hesitant breathing. I sit on the edge of the bed and again gather her in my arms. I touch her face and hands. I spread her long hair over the pillow and run my fingers through it, stroke her arms and shoulders as I continue to talk to her. Who has told me the last sense to go is hearing? I tell her that I have always loved her though I gave her pain, that she is a devoted and hard-working mother, a good person. I plead with her softly to gather strength to come back, but I know her hands are already beginning to harden. I whisper, “Mama, Mama, sono qui.”

There is no sign of pain on her face, no movement in her body, only the sense of a slow letting go, a relinquishing of a hold on something, peaceful like, the breathing keeping pace. I hold back the powerful urge to run to the nurses to beg them to put the tubes back in. Have we made the wrong decision? I try to remember what the doctor said about her ninety-year-old body being past the point of taking on life again, too far gone in muscle tone and vein depletion, he said, for her to come back to a normal life.

There is no sense of time in that room. All hangs on the meas­ure of her breathing. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it stops, and I am too stunned to move. I do not cry. The sense of awe in the presence of my Mother who is dead is all I feel, and the sense of privilege that I was allowed to be present. More than that, that I was allowed to keep a promise I made years ago when Ma and I were reading Dante’s descriptions of the Inferno. I looked up from my reading to notice that she was crying. When I asked her why, she said she was petrified of going to Hell for her sins, petrified of dying. “But,” I objected, “what sins? Why would God punish you? You have had a hard life and you’ve been a good person. There is no God that condemns people to burn for eternity. There is only the end, and I shall be there when you die,” I promised boldly. And so I was. For a long time, I sat there looking into her face, so relaxed. She never made a sound or protest; there was no sign of fear.

 

*   *   *

 

Six months earlier, Ma’s first stroke came out of nowhere. No one knows all the circumstances, but my sister rushed Ma to the hospital after finding her lying on the bathroom floor of her small apartment where she lived on her own, a step around the corner so that she could visit with us but still have her quiet place and keep her plants. She had lived there all her widowed years, prefer­ring this arrangement because her three grandsons were too much for her in large doses. All those years, she had cured herself in Ep­som salt baths, eating little (a small chicken would last a week — one part each night) to her 90th year in her second floor apartment among people who spoke only English but with whom she man­aged quite well.

“Ma, what do you and Mrs. White talk about?” I ask, since she knows very little English. She answers me in Italian as she did all my life, re­fusing to answer any of my questions unless I addressed her in Italian. In no sense has she become an American. So much of her is still in Tuscany. “Questo e quello.” This and that, she explains: “Mrs. White talks, then I talk, not always about the same thing, but we smile, touch each other’s hands, embrace. It’s our own language. And sometimes we laugh out loud for no reason.”

In the emergency room, she recovered enough to talk to us when the doctor tested her sense of awareness. “Where do you think you are, Mrs. B—,” he shouted. “Tell him I am not deaf, and that I know very well I am in the house of death,” she explains to me in Italian. This was her only visit to a hospital emergency room except for the time when a strong wind knocked her down, and she bumped her nose on the sidewalk. I took her to the ER, and when the doctor asked her what caused her black eyes, she said straight-faced that she had been in a fight in a bar. When the doc­tor turned to me for some other explanation, I felt there was no reason not to accept her story so I simply shrugged my shoulders. But this time was to be her first stay in a hospital after years and years of active living, hard work, and self-cure programs. The doc­tor said she had had a massive brain hemorrhage that she most likely would not survive.

For two mornings after she was admitted, Ma refused to speak or to open her eyes no matter who pleaded with her or what ar­guments were used. “Apri gli occhi, Mama,” the family urged, but she lay propped up in bed stone-faced, determined to be closed off. Did she feel we had betrayed her by bringing her here to the house of death?

On the morning of the third day, a miracle! It was a Sunday morning, and we were all ten of us gathered around Ma’s bed, talking earnestly about what her doctor had said, what it meant, what we believed. Suddenly, in a lull in the conversation, Ma opened her eyes and in a clear and loud voice wished us all “Buon giorno.” She sat up in bed all rosy cheeked, and the festivities be­gan. She had come back from the dead! The doctors were all wrong. She had outwitted them and fate. “Un miracolo!” the fam­ily cried, “a miraculous rebirth.” There were no signs of paralysis. She could move all her limbs, speak clearly. Victoriously, she sat there in her bed, residing over us much like a queen holding court. The room filled with loud talking and laughter. All was well. After all what do doctors know anyway?

We could not have guessed then that weeks of struggle were ahead before we could take Ma home to her apartment to heal and to bring back memories. For the present it was impossible that she should stay in the tight corner that was her space — a third of the room in H Ward meant for a single bed. H Ward was the night­mare ward, the forgotten wing from the 19th Century of the oth­erwise modern St. P— hospital, reserved exclusively for elderly Medicaid patients. At all times of the day and into the night, its halls were lined with old people, some half asleep slipping out of their wheelchairs, talking to themselves, many of those in their rooms climbing out of their beds moaning or crying for help that never came. In Ma’s private room still in H Ward, we stuffed tow­els around the windows to keep out the wintry drafts, she was given one blanket to keep her warm in bed, and the walls were pealing and dirty. “She needs another blanket! The windows need weather-stripping!” I pleaded with the nurses and administrators. It was clear we needed to be there at all possible hours because the vision of Ma crying out to no one haunted us all.

On one of my visits, I found Ma tied in her bed because, the head nurse explained, she had tried to climb over the bed rails during the night and had wet the bed. But as Ma explained it, she had been trying to get to the bathroom, and the nurses took too long getting to her bedside. I demanded that the restraints be re­moved and that a commode be placed near her bed. The restraints came off, but it took three weeks for the commode to arrive during which time I learned by chance that my Mother was expected to urinate on demand. I arrived one evening in time to witness a hell­ish scene: two nurses forcing Ma into the bathroom, Ma struggling with all her might, speechless, and with that utterly terrified look of a child who has no idea why she is being punished. How many times must she have tried to explain what she felt, what she wanted and did not find the words? How many things were said to her that she never understood?

“Devi imparare inglese, Mama,” I say as she places meat on my din­ner plate. This is an occasion. She has roasted a pork loin with garlic cloves imbedded in it, seasoned with rosemary, pepper and salt, and the family is enjoying every bite. A bottle of Papa’s home-made red wine sits in the middle of the table, and we girls may have glasses of vinello — half water and half wine. She has more important things to do, she answers. I know she prefers to depend on me to be her interpreter when she moves outside the Italian community, which is her world. “Tell them we need shoes or eyeglasses or something,” she whispers to me when we go to the Welfare office, as I look around in fear that one of the kids from school might be there. Papa puts down his fork, leans back in his chair, and puts a toothpick in his mouth. He explains that the government will take the short-wave band out of the radio if there are non-citizens in the house, and Mama knows very well how long Papa sits each night, his ear to the radio, hoping to hear some broadcast, any broadcast from Italy, though he hears mostly static. And so, she finally agrees to have a tutor that the city provides who will come to the house twice a week, promising Papa that she will not be too generous in offering the tutor his red wine. We all drink to that!

The long days confined to her bed were altering the shape of Ma’s face and body. She had come to the hospital a strong woman, well used to walking several city blocks to the grocer and carrying packages of groceries up a flight of stairs, doing her own house­work and washing clothes by hand, never having lost the habits that living through the Depression fixed upon her. In that bed she was getting weaker, more bony, for her muscles were long out of use. “Isn’t it time my Mother had physical therapy,” I kept asking the nurses who were constantly on the run, too overworked for such unimportant questions. A brief conference with the head of the hospital, some firm demands, arguing that, yes, it was worth­while for a woman in Ma’s condition to have physical therapy, the family certainly had not given up on her even if the hospital authorities had. Soon we were visiting the exercise room twice a week — Ma stretched out on a cot, raising arms and legs to the count of music or throwing a big red ball in the air and catching it, tossing it back and forth to the therapist, or choosing on her own to bounce it over and over, turning to wink at me with that side­ways smile on her face, that vexed look that seemed to say this is all too absurd.

Eleven weeks went by and finally the trip home in the back of a van, Ma in a wheel-chair, looking stunned. In those weeks there were so many times we were close to getting her free, but some staff infection or slight fever or weight loss or poor response on her part meant yet another agonizing postponement. Her memory was now dim; she did not recognize me most of the time. The weeks had worn her down, and I will never know, I wrote to the head Sister of the hospital after Ma died, what killed my Mother — the strokes or the hideous weeks in H Ward.

 

*   *   *

 

In the months that followed, I lived with Ma in her studio apartment — one large living/bedroom, bath, kitchenette, and small porch. The family thought it best that she return to her own apartment where she had lived for 28 years and where it was most likely she would find her way back through memories. She could walk, eat, talk, dress herself — there were no physical impair­ments to her movements. She slept in her bed, and I on a foldaway cot, though I hoped she would let me share the bed eventually. Her sleep habit used to be to lie on one side of the bed without moving all night so that the sheets and blankets were barely dis­turbed by morning. But now I could not count on her to sleep through the night because she needed to use the bathroom. I tied a bell to the bed springs so that I would hear her move if she de­cided to leave her bed.

One night the bell wakes me from a deep sleep. It is 4 A M, and she is already out of bed, her sweater over her arm. “Devo andare a casa mia,” she says, putting her sweater over her shoulders. “But, Ma, it’s the mid­dle of the night and you are home, sweetheart. Look around you. This is your home.” She gives me the sad empty stare that so disheartens me and insists that she can stay here no longer. She moves toward the door, and I move toward her slowly and put my arm around her. “But, it’s raining very hard out there, Mama,” I insist, and I urge her to sit and talk about what she should do. It takes over two hours of gentle persuasion to get her back to bed. “Come sleep with me,” she says a few nights later. We are making progress.

Her memory came like waves hitting the shore. There were times we could not share our thoughts, desperate times for us both. “Ma, chi è questa donna?” We were sitting close on the sofa looking at an old photograph of Ma and another young woman standing all dressed up in black skirts, white blouses, gloves, and handbags, a photo taken on some special occasion. She looked at me puzzled and could not answer. But sometimes her mind and memory were right there, clear and sharp. “Where are your nee­dles, Ma?” I asked one day after looking everywhere for them. “In the cupboard, on the first shelf at the left in a small white box,” she answered without hesitation, smiling and winking at me. And there they were. At other times, she stared at me long and hard as though I were a stranger or called me by one of my sisters’ names. Often she would open the closet door, look in, and call out my name as though I were lost. So much forgotten. So much washed away.

“Non lo mango.” She pushes her plate away with disgust, without tasting the food. It has become necessary to have meals brought in, and Meals on Wheels has delivered food for the first time. “Taste it, Mama. See if you like it,” I say anxiously since so much depends on her tolerat­ing these meals. Slowly she picks up her fork like an obedient child, plays with this and that on her plate, eats a bit, takes another taste. I wait for the verdict. Another taste, and before long she gulps everything down without taking her eyes off the plate. I sit across from her in wonder be­cause she would never eat “American” food if she were well. All her life she ate Italian food prepared only at home. Even when the cupboard was bare during the Depression, she could put together a few ingredients to dress up anything and make it tasty, even hand-picked dandelions. “You take some olive oil, heat it slowly, some tomatoes without seeds, a bit of basil, a little bit of this and a bit of that.” Meals on Wheels! She would never eat such food if she could remember the taste of her own polpette, her tomato sauce. Is she doing this to please me? Did the brain hemor­rhage wash away her taste and memories of savory food?

“Mama, someone is coming to stay with you while I shop.” It also became necessary for me to get help since I could not leave Ma alone. She smiled to show she accepts the idea, and I decided it might be better not to tell her the agency is sending a black woman. Ma brought some of her prejudices with her in 1923 when she came to the U.S.; others she acquired here: the Southern Ital­ians carry knives between their teeth; they have no idea what the Italian language is; blacks are lazy; the Irish drink all the time; all Jews are rich. Ma is a proud, stubborn woman; perhaps poverty left her with little else to be proud of, so she set herself up as supe­rior. She was furious once when Pa mentioned that he exchanged sandwiches with a black fellow-worker. “Ma sei pozzo!” she screamed. My father’s answer was simple: his friend’s wife some­times made better sandwiches than the ones Ma made for him.

When the doorbell rang, Ma stood up as I opened the door to a large black woman. For several moments Ma stood there looking carefully at the woman, the woman looking back at her just as cu­riously. Then Ma smiled a wide smile, the innocent smile of a sur­prised child. The two walked toward each other and embraced. From that point Ma and Jessie liked each other very much. Ma loved to comb Jessie’s hair, to watch her move about the apart­ment, but for some inexplicable reason she insisted that Jessie was a young man, and nothing we said could convince her otherwise. It seemed she was perfectly content with things as she saw them. Is it possible that the stroke washed away her prejudices?

Ma had no memory of being angry with me for moving out into the country, il bosco, she called it. After 28 years of living in the city a few doors away, she did not want me to move away nor did she want to come with me. “Don’t you know people run out of water out there and their corpses aren’t found till years later?” For some time after the move, our visits went something like this:

“Permesso,” I call out. She allows me to come into her apartment by her silence. She is stretched out on the couch facing the porch so she can look out at the street. Most likely she saw me coming and prepared herself to be in that position. She does not greet me nor does she look my way. I sit close to her and start talking about anything I can think of. She stares ahead never looking my way. She asks me no questions. It is as though she has erased my presence in that room, the way she used to when I did something she didn’t approve of and gave me the silent treatment for several days, handing me my dinner plate with arm outstretched and looking away from me. An hour or so goes by, and I run out of things to say. The silence becomes unbearable, so I kiss her or try to as she turns her face away, and I leave. It takes six weeks of this ritual before she looks me in the eye and speaks to me.

But that anger too was washed away, and gradually her mind settled on two different and separate identities for me. I was the mother she wanted close in her bed, the one she tried to please when she ate all her meals, the one from whom she accepted di­rections and reprimands. The time she hit Jessie with her umbrella for no reason she frightened me so much that I was afraid I could not leave her alone with Jessie again. “She won’t come here any­more to help me take care of you, Ma, if you hit her,” I said, trying not to seem desperate. I had to make her understand, and she did. She timidly returned the umbrella to the closet. This kind of prob­lem never came up again.

“Uno, due, tre, uno, due, tre,” she responds perfectly to the physical therapy exercises she does three times a day. She prepares herself, slip­ping into the loose red underwear that serves as a signal to lie on the bed. “Uno, due, tre,” she repeats with me, raising one leg, then the other, stretching one arm first, then the other to the music from the radio. The look on her face suggests she thinks the whole ritual is ridiculous, but she wants to please me. She smiles and winks at me when I turn up the vol­ume.

She also took me to be her close friend — sometimes complain­ing to me about the things her “Mother” made her do — like tak­ing baths. “Do you know my middle daughter?” she asked one day out of the blue. “She gave me the most trouble from the time she was born weighing ten and one half pounds, but I can rely on her.” Did she raise me to be the one she could count on? She opened her heart to me — telling me how much she loved her daughters and how proud of them she was, feelings she must have had while we were growing up but never found time to ex­press, driven as she was by the need to help us survive. So much about her I never knew. She confessed to being lonely so far from her family in Italy that as it turned out, she never saw again. She had come to the U.S. reluctantly and never wanted to stay. For her it was the Depression, being on welfare, sewing dresses and base­balls at home for the local factories, keeping boarders, and trying to maintain her ties to Italy through sixty years of exchanging pas­sionate letters, photographs, and mementos of weddings, births, and deaths. One day, I remember, she was standing at the wash­board washing sheets, and I saw something terrible. Ma was cry­ing convulsively. “Perche piangi, Mama?” “Mia Mama è morta,” she answered softly. The letter with its sad message lay on the ta­ble along with a small mass card, on it a picture of her Mother.

A word or look from Ma often makes clear that I am to assume the identity of mother or friend or I am to be propelled back into the past to share some moment she is about to relive. I have to be ready at each mo­ment to leap upon any time wave she chooses. One day, she takes her place on the couch next to me and turns to look directly at me, her face suddenly taking on an alert and intense look. She is about to tell me a story, but for her it is the afternoon of her wedding day, and she is walk­ing up the side of a mountain with her new husband. He is taking her to visit an old hermit there, one who is well known in the province. But she is repulsed by him, especially when my father tells her that the hermit is known to drink his own urine. My father laughed and joked about her squeamishness, but she could not understand why he had taken her to see such a person on this her wedding day.

The phone rings, and I’m quick to answer. It may be a relative or friend of Ma’s calling though they call less frequently now. They are im­patient with Ma because her speech is hesitant, not to the point, but she needs to talk to people, lots of people who can help bring back all her memories. It’s Aunt Anna. “Come sta Mama?” she asks in her small voice and careful Italian. “Mama is fine, Aunt Mary. She’s right here eager to talk to you.” Ma takes the phone, listens wide-eyed for a while, looks at me and winks with a smile, and makes a few comments related to her sister-in-law’s past. She waits in silence for a few moments listening intently; then satisfied, she hangs up. Like the rest of Ma’s friends and some of our relatives, Maria does not call again.

 

*   *   *

 

My Mother died seven years ago, and I have a recurrent dream about her. In the dream, I am going about my daily life as usual when, like a sharp pain, I realize I have not seen my Mother for a very long time. This realization is incomprehensible to me. What could have kept me from her all this time? What must she think of my staying away so long? In the dream, I hurry to dress for the icy weather outside and begin to make my way to my Mother’s apartment. The walk in the deep snow is exhausting and seems endless, but at last I reach her door. Breathless, I open it wide and peer into the living room, but there is only a shadow in the dark­ness.