Marrow (24 page)

This is how all of us can try to be with each other, every day—wherever we go and whatever disparities may exist between us. This is the lesson I will take from my friends at the Brain Trauma Center, and the gift I will bring back to Maggie. Like the residents at the center, Maggie has never wanted to be a burden, never wanted pity, and has barely wanted my help. She has just wanted my presence—my strength to her strength—and the sense that our being together is a gift for both of us.

ALL LIVES ARE DIFFERENT; THEREFORE,
all deaths are different—the way we die looks very much like the way we lived. I only know this because I have spent time with a few people as they died. Before doing so, I imagined that the process of dying would magically wipe clean neurotic tendencies and transform the mean people into nice ones, and the miserly ones into those who can finally communicate their love and impart their wisdom. But as it turns out, we are very much ourselves, breath by breath, right up to the last one. This is why spiritual traditions encourage us to work on polishing the lantern as we live, allowing the soul's essence to shine through, and purging our personalities of their less attractive traits, or else we'll drag them with us when we die.

That being said, magical things can happen in the final moments of the dying process, transforming the dying person and changing those who witness it. The first time I sat with a dying person I was in my twenties. One of my best friends had fought off leukemia for as long as she could, and despite the fact that she had a little boy and a great desire to live, the disease had other plans. Her death came quickly. One day she was well enough to have my son at her house for a playdate, and the very next day her body rejected the transfusions that were keeping her alive, and she fell into a light coma.

As fate would have it, I showed up at her house as she was dying. Her husband begged me to stay. For several hours I traveled with my friend up to the threshold of death. During that time I was surprised to find that she acted, well, just like herself. As she went in and out of consciousness, she was plucky and noble, and she was also angry and cutting. But the closer she approached death, the more peaceful she became, and as she took her last breaths, a warm breeze rose up from nowhere and circled the room, even though it was January, even though the cold winter sun was setting and we had neglected to load the woodstove. As the peculiar wind blew about, my friend suddenly sat up and opened her eyes. A thin trail of blood trickled from her mouth, but even so, she looked radiantly beautiful and happier than I had ever seen her. And then she died. Who can say what she washed clean in those moments before stepping off the edge? Who can say what she took with her to the other side?

Although my father was eighty-five, no one anticipated his death. I think we expected him to outlive us all. He was a health nut long before it was fashionable—he didn't drink, smoke, or allow stress to derail his passions. He was adventurous, imperious, and self-centered in life. Ditto in death. In the morning he had gone off cross-country skiing into the snowy hills. He stayed out all day. He often did this. All through my childhood, he'd just disappear and head into the woods without prior notification. We'd all be together, eating a meal or talking, and suddenly he'd be gone. This was how he died too. He came home from the woods, had dinner, and went to bed. In the last hours of night my mother awoke and heard my father speaking to someone. She called out, and told him he was talking in his sleep. He became quiet again. When my
mother got up in the morning, she found my father dead. He had snuck out at dawn, into the wilderness beyond.

My friend Peter died in the spring of 1996 from AIDS. Just one month later, the FDA approved the triple drug cocktail that saved many of Peter's friends. This was just like Peter. He was impatient and impulsive, and apparently it was time to move on. He died at the NYU Medical Center, where many other beautiful young men had been carried away by the flash flood of AIDS. A friend and I sat by his hospital bed for hours, trying to soothe him. He could no longer speak, but he would raise his hand and flutter his fingers. Finally we got the message. He was ready, and our worrywart behavior was holding him back. We left. He died shortly afterwards. I don't feel sad when I think of him. He just went first, to show us the way. I get the feeling he's preparing a fabulous party for us, his tribe of friends.

My mother also died how she lived—saying one thing but meaning the other, frowning on excessive displays of emotion, keeping secrets. I had always thought I would have that conversation with her before she died, the one that would reveal the secret held close since childhood, the one that would explain the sadness and anxiety at her core. But we never had that talk. She became more hush-hush about almost everything as she aged.

It should have come as no surprise, then, that my mother would keep the seriousness of an illness secret, even from her daughters. On top of her usual reticence to talk about herself, there was her Christian Science background, which views disease as a mental error rather than a physical disorder. When we were children, our mother told us that religion was the opiate of the masses, but she also quoted scripture about praying away the illusion of illness when we were sick. This made no sense to me as a child, especially
since the word “prayer” was synonymous with voodoo in our family's lexicon. It wasn't until years later, when I made a study of the Christian Science faith, that I understood why my mother called me a hypochondriac whether I had a common cold or a broken bone. When I was twenty, I had to drop out of a semester of college because I contracted hepatitis from tainted drinking water in Mexico. For several months, my skin was yellow and I could barely lift my head from the pillow, and still my mother scoffed and called me a hypochondriac.

After my father died, my mother marshaled her mercurial energies, sold the Vermont farm where they had lived for many years, bought a little house in town, and traveled far and wide with her friends. She continued her work as editor of her small town's newspaper; she hosted holidays for the family at her house; she remained a vital part of her community. All the while, we were to discover, her bowels were being eaten away by Crohn's disease, an autoimmune disorder that could have been treated but instead she ignored. She would complain of stomach problems from time to time, and dropped little hints that all was not well, but nothing prepared me for the scene I walked in on one day when I came to visit. I found my mother on the floor of her bedroom, writhing in pain.

“Marsh! What's the matter?” I cried. I had rarely seen my mother exhibit signs of normal human helplessness, and certainly not physical pain.

“It's nothing,” she assured me as she rolled around on the floor, tears in her eyes. “It happens most afternoons and then goes away.”

“What are you talking about? It's something, not nothing. You're in terrible pain!”

“I'm fine,” she moaned.

“I'm getting you help,” I said.

At the doctor's office the nurse took one look at my mother, called an ambulance, and sent us to the hospital. My sisters met us there, and we embarked on the journey that led to our mother's death. I know the word “journey” is overused, but this literally was a journey in that we spent the next three months traveling back and forth between our homes and our mother's, between the hospital and her home, never knowing what we might find from day to day, never knowing what direction to take, bushwhacking the route as we went along. I am sure this sounds familiar to anyone who has trekked the twisty path of a parent's demise.

At the hospital, the surgeon who examined my mother informed us that unless he operated immediately she would die from internal bleeding. When they brought the consent forms for my mother to sign, she refused. “You girls decide,” she said. “It's your decision.” What could we do? Of course we signed the forms; of course we chose for her to live. But now I know she was trying to tell us that she wanted to die. By bringing her to the hospital we had backed her into a corner where the only option was life. She must have known that the outcome of surgery would be an ostomy bag. And she had no intention of learning to live with a bag of excrement strapped to her waist.

After the surgery, our mother was told she was disease-free and could resume a normal life as soon as she learned the proper care of an ostomy bag. But she wouldn't learn. She wouldn't eat. And she wouldn't tell us what she wanted, except in that way of hers that drove us crazy our whole lives. That way of saying one thing but meaning another.

She said, “I don't want to go back to the hospital.”

We said, “If you don't, you'll die.”

“No, I won't. I'll just rest until I'm better.”

“You don't need to rest,” we said. “You need to eat. You need to drink.”

“No, I need to rest. ‘Rest is the great healer,'” she said, quoting one of her literary heroes, whose name I cannot remember now, but I'd like to, for her sake. When we were children, she had us memorize poetry, and parts of psalms, and Shakespeare's soliloquies. I can still remember whole poems I learned by heart when I was seven.

She would say one thing but mean another: She swore she was getting better, but she was winding her way to death. She stopped eating and drinking. She gathered us around her by telling us to stay away. We hovered like mother hens—her daughters who had never been clucked over. We touched her, talked to her, and loved her with a passion we had never before been allowed to express.

She stopped speaking one day before she died, but she continued to raise her eyebrows, the way she would when she said something but meant the other. During her last hour she mouthed words to an invisible presence in the corner of the room, but when we asked her who she was talking to, she looked the other way. And then, even though the life force had burned down to an ember, she changed course one last time and passed a rod of molten fire to Maggie.

For weeks afterwards, my sisters and I called each other every day. We were baffled by her death. “Why did she do it?” one of us would ask. The other would say, “The doctor said she was free of disease now, that she could live for many more years. Why did she want to die?” Every day we had the same discussion: Did she doubt she'd ever be well enough to resume an independent life? Had years of secret pain exacted too much of a toll? Was the ostomy bag a Christian Science game-changer?

And then Maggie would retell her deathbed vision of the golden
rod trailing soft green wisps, how it shot out of my mother's rib cage and entered Maggie's gut, and we would marvel at our mother's final gift. It was almost as if her heart ignited with love, and in that one burning moment, she overcame a lifetime of hiding. She dug into her marrow and from that depth threw a thunderbolt of light on the path for Maggie.

I remind Maggie of the thunderbolt the next time we are on the phone. She sends me her last field notes entry, and I read it as a vote of confidence in our recent conversations. She is digging deep; she is finding her way.

field notes
•
december 15

amazing. yellow fire. green kindness. that is what zinged out of our mother and into me. right into the center of myself. that's what it felt like—like a rod of strength. though tears flow right now, i am grateful for the immense strength i have to move along and welcome death when it comes. i wish all people had that. am i sad? yes, but today i studied the break in the clouds, and i had a momentary flash of letting it all go and felt this warm glow for a nanosecond. it felt sweet. it felt like love. perhaps that is what death is. total, complete letting go of control and thus walking into a never before experienced world. today i feel lucky to see how welcoming death will be. this is all a gift, don't you see? some of us are lucky. so thank you marsh for handing that fire stick with the green tail to me. passing to me your hidden strength that you poo-pooed in life. listen marsh, you raised 4 incredible women, you went back to school and taught little highschool brats and were the best teacher they ever had, you bought a house in vt with your money, you moved us all north, dealing with a domineering husband, dealing with wild teenage daughters, you started a newspaper, you were an integral part of your town, arguing at town board meetings, caring for your
grandchildren, growing and putting up food, cooking and knitting and reading and tutoring children, marching in peace rallies in nyc, working to help people get elected. you did all of that, but you had the curse of wanting everyone to like you. not knowing how to say no. you could never say no. remember how you would stay on the phone because you didn't want to offend the person on the other end of the line, even if you were tired or late or you had to go to the bathroom? how you shit in your pants once because you couldn't say, oh sorry! i have crohn's disease, i can't control my bowels, i have to go . . . you didn't have to hide, marsh. you could have said what you meant. you deserved it. it's taken me getting cancer to know that. i am sorry you died before you knew that.

IN EASTERN SPIRITUAL TRADITIONS PEOPLE
are said to have two bodies: a physical body and a subtle body. The physical one is made of earthly stuff, while the subtle one is made of energetic stuff. Don't quote me on that. The two bodies interact with each other—the openness of the flow between them affects the state of our physical health and psychological balance and spiritual intuition. That flow can be blocked in the chakras, the Sanskrit word for the seven energy centers of the subtle body.

Let's say you have been stuffing your opinions for years and years, never saying what you know is right, never asking for what you want. If you were presented with a chronic cough, an Eastern healer might tell you that your fifth chakra, your throat chakra, was blocked with choked anger, and by speaking the truth you could hasten the healing process. Each of the seven chakras is associated with different health challenges and opportunities for healing—body and spirit.

After my mother's death, I felt a great emptiness—as if she had gotten out of town as quickly as she could. This was different from my father, who, after death, became my constant companion, my guide. I felt him around me and with me, closer in death than he had ever been in life. It was only in his death that I realized we were perfectly matched in life. That he was the father I needed this time around.

But I could not feel my mother's presence at all after she died. I wanted to. A friend suggested I meet with a psychic, a medium who moves between the worlds of form and spirit—exactly the kind of person my mother would have found appalling. Bearing apologies to my mother, I visited the medium. And in true form, my mother never showed up. But my father did. The medium went into a trance, and within seconds he reported that two men were with us, one named Bob and the other, “Well, he says he's your father,” the medium said. “They are laughing and saying there's not enough snow. Does this make any sense to you?”

“Yes,” I told the medium. “Bob was my father's best friend. He died recently. They were in the ski troops in WW II together. They loved to ski, and they loved snow! They always wanted more of it.” I was astonished. How was this possible? How did the medium know this about my father, about Bob?

“Well, they are quite happy and even festive,” the medium continued. “They want you to know that they are taking care of all the girls. They want you to know that. Does this make sense?”

“Yes,” I answered, again stunned by how much sense it made. “Between the two of them there are six girls in our families—well, eight if you count our mothers. And speaking of our mothers,” I asked, “is my mother there?”

The medium remained silent. I watched his face. His eyes were closed, and he grimaced and cleared his throat several times. “There! I only caught a glimpse,” he said. “She came and went like a shooting star. That's all.”

During the rest of the session, other people who had passed over came into the room, or into the medium's awareness, or however one describes such a phenomenon. Some of the people were unidentifiable to me; others I knew. And then the doors closed, and
the medium opened his eyes, and there we were, two people made of earthly stuff.

“I have a question. Is that OK?” I asked the medium.

“Of course,” he said.

“What did that mean when you said my mother showed up like a shooting star?”

“I don't know,” the medium said. “I don't know your mother. What do you think it meant?”

So I told him about my mother's illness and her difficult death and Maggie's bedside vision—about the rod of molten ore that she saw leaving our mother's chest, and how it entered her own body.

“Where on her body?” the medium asked.

“Above her belly button and below her rib cage. Right in the middle here.” I said, pointing to the spot on my own belly.

“Oh, you mean her solar plexus. Of course. The Manipura chakra,” the medium said, as if mine had been the most commonplace description and his answer the only obvious response. “That would make sense,” he said, nodding his head.

“What would make sense?”

“That your mother would send a message from her Anahata chakra to your sister's Manipura chakra.”

“Why would that make sense?”

“Because I got the feeling from your mother's appearance that she wanted to say something, but she had trouble expressing it. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I said. “That certainly does make sense.”

“You see, your mother's Anahata chakra had probably been blocked her whole life. Anahata is the heart center, the love center,” the medium went on. “During the death process, the subtle body
takes over, and sometimes you get a last chance to make some changes, to make some amends. Did your sister need something more from her?”

“We all needed something more from her!”

“Well, it seems she sent love to the person in the room who needed it most. She sent your sister a message, subtle body to subtle body.”

“What do you think that message was?” I asked.

“Well, she sent the energy from her Anahata chakra to your sister's Manipura chakra,” the medium said. He closed his eyes, as if pondering a difficult math problem, and spoke softly and quickly to himself. “Let's see. She sent her most valuable resource—love—to your sister's Manipura chakra, the fire center. She sent love to fire. Love ignites fire. Fire is self-worth. Personal power.” He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Does your sister give her power away? Does she know how to protect her core from power vampires?”

“Power vampires?”

“Yes, there are people who will take and take and take unless you put up boundaries. Unless you protect your core self.”

“Wow,” I said. “You know all this about my sister just from that one story?”

“No,” the medium said. “I know it because people are the same all over the world. India, California, Vermont, it doesn't matter. Wherever I go, this is what human beings do. We get stuck. Some of us get stuck in one chakra, some in another. Then we try to get unstuck and to learn our lessons. Or we don't, and then the soul finds other places, other lives, other ways to learn and evolve.”

“So, do you think my sister will learn her lessons?” I asked,
unaware of what she would be up against within the year. Unaware that her marriage would fall apart and soon afterwards she'd get sick.

“Yes, I think she will,” the medium said. “I get the feeling she's had a lack of yellow energy and that can make you overly concerned with what other people think of you. It can cause inertia and confusion. But fire purifies the past and heats up spiritual progress. It pushes you to take risks. Your mother sent her a jolt of yellow energy.”

“Yellow energy?”

“Oh, yes, sorry,” the medium said. “Each of the chakras has a color. Manipura is yellow. I often speak in colors when I am talking about the chakras.”

“What's the color of the other center—the one my mother sent the energy from?”

“Anahata center. Heart center. Green. Green is the color of the heart. The color of love. Does that make sense?” the medium asked one last time.

And one last time I nodded at the medium. Yes, it made sense. It was as if he had been there when my mother died, and when Maggie gasped, and the yellow star whooshed into her solar plexus, like a meteor trailing a tail of green light. And that green light bathed her in the love she would need to make it through her days, all the way until the last one.