Thanks for being here.
Does anybody know the score?
It was 2-0, Michigan, when I left the restaurant.
This is not a story from the collection.
It's been characteristic of me that I'm not succinct enough
to write something that would fit in a spot like this.
So I chose a story.
When in doubt, I just believe in choosing the last story.
And this story is so much the last story
that nobody had read it at all or seen it
until about 20 minutes ago when my wife had a chance
to skim it before the reading.
So it's wide open and as raw as it might be.
It's told in chunks.
There's a lot of space breaks, and I'm
going to pause when we get to those space breaks.
It's a short story but it's still
told in chunks so it's subdivided in little pieces.
It is an utterly cheerless story.
So I'm glad you had a chance to enjoy the kind of feast
of sensual intellect that we've been getting from Barbara
Cully's poems because you're not going to have that much fun now.
I'm sorry, but it's the last story,
and so that's why I'm reading it.
The title is just about as cheerless as the story.
The title is, "About Death."
"My wife and I had planned a grand summer
tour of the relatives, hers in New York, mine in Canada.
There was our baby daughter to show off,
but the trip centered around my mother.
After years of strain between us,
the new family seemed to absorb our attentions
and we were comrades again.
Ava, my wife, had adopted her and there
was the adored grandchild.
The four of us would drive across the country as my mother
and I had in the old days, leisurely, shapeless
peregrinations with frequent stops and intuitive digressions.
Maybe we'd visit Bryce Canyon, which
I hadn't seen since my mother and I hiked it 28 years before.
A friend in Iowa had a farm.
My mother's people would put us up in Quebec and meet Ava.
Ava was apprehensive about the collision
between her brusque alcoholic parents
with their ethnic jokes and my mother.
"You'll divorce me," Ava told her.
Then a few weeks before departure, my mother
said she wouldn't be going.
Perhaps she found the trip overwhelming, we thought.
Though recently she traveled to Egypt and Kenya,
that despite emphysema, bouts of asthma
that had required hospitalization and a heart
attack.
The trip kept its epic proportions, though hollowly.
Still trying to share it with my mother,
Ava and I mailed postcards almost daily.
The replies were newsy, free of regret.
When we returned home in August, my mother
was thinner, carrying her upper body stiffly.
Her smile had the pained, hopeful intensity
of an abused child.
Increasingly, the past several weeks
she said a sore back had kept her
from inhaling properly and coughing was agony.
Her physician had pronounced the condition psychosomatic.
For fear of spoiling our vacation, she hadn't told us.
Still, she produced a monthly zoo newsletter
and socialized with her circles of friends,
other retired teachers, Unitarians from her church,
and young artists she'd met in ceramics classes.
She'd finished her best sculpture,
an armadillo stippled by the point of a nail.
Evenings out, she dressed with modest flash, batiks
or Guatemalan smocks with chunky folk jewelry
from the UNICEF shop.
Another doctor diagnosed her with compressed disk fractures.
Probably her bronchial medication
had contributed to the leaching of calcium
from the brittle bones.
Coughing had cracked them.
Because my mother no longer could
babysit her granddaughter, Caitlin, alone or physically
pick her up, Ava and I cut our work hours
and took shifts at home so the two still could be together.
Granny and Caitlin batted the inflatable Tweety Bird back
and forth for easy chuckles, but Granny particularly respected
a 13-month-old's busyness.
Caitlin would classify her plastic dinosaurs by color
or treat their illnesses with her doctor's kit.
When a few months old, she had set up a backgammon board
by accident, fiddling with the pieces
until they were arranged nearly correctly.
Only Granny could induce the child to nap.
A swing was needed.
So Granny had designed a canvas pouch silkscreen
with stars and moon.
At first when Granny pushed and sang,
Caitlin's head peered out with defiant alertness.
Gradually, it would loll against the side, her face hanging
over the lip, swelling out the canvas like a pelican's crop.
By mid-September, my mother complained that the back pain
didn't allow her to sleep.
She preferred to bed down on the couch,
avoiding the climb-up stairs.
Near the end of the month, she went in the hospital.
Except for the harsh breathing, she
seemed lifeless as driftwood.
Her eyes were closed, skin gray.
I knelt by the bed, crying with shock.
Clear tubes carried pure oxygen into her nostrils.
Oxygen saturation of the blood was dangerously low,
the doctor said.
In her presence, my emotions often felt rehearsed.
The more she demanded, coaxed my spontaneity,
the more I held back.
But when I said, "I don't want you to be this way,"
the words were pulled out of me like a stopper.
I caressed her hands, my head hidden in the mattress.
The grief was unchecked; only slightly
did my awareness of this return my self-consciousness.
Discharging her, the doctor prescribed a hospital bed
to replace the couch and an oxygen dispenser
with a portable dolly mounted tank.
She was to wear the tubes at all times.
An AARP volunteer was engaged to assist her mornings,
but my mother found the woman irksomely limited
and dismissed her.
That Tuesday she attended the symphony,
wheeling the tank in front of her.
Thursday, she called at 3:00 AM asking for help getting a drink
of water.
I went that night, Ava, the next.
Sunday, she couldn't sit at the table
for the dinner we'd cooked.
We served her in bed.
Caitlin called to her with desolated, outraged insistence,
then sobbed inconsolably even when
I took her outside to the swings.
She cried over an hour.
We held a council of war, Ava, my mother and I.
The only solution, I said, was to rent a place large enough
so my mother could live with us.
Ava, who considered a half day visit with her own mother
just about my limit, accepted this reinvention
of her daily life warmly without question.
By the end of our talk, she was circling classified ads.
That was our method: decisive conceptually,
I would shrink and panic from the implications
while Ava already had filled in the details.
Meanwhile, we convinced the medical powers
to assign a home nurse for at least a shift a day.
A great-hearted neighbor, herself a nurse,
took over afternoons.
The calls in the night continued.
I stayed over Tuesday, intending to sleep in the spare bedroom
upstairs.
The system was if my mother needed
help she'd ring a miniature cowbell,
a souvenir from the local minor league team.
The little clapper sounded six times that night
for water, the toilet, for me to read aloud
her favorite chapter in Joseph Wood Krutch's The Desert Year.
It concerned the spadefoot toad who lives buried in dried mud
for its entire life, emerging once a year to bellow joyously
during the summer monsoon.
"I can almost hear their croaking, raack,
surrounding that old house we had," she said.
"As if we lived way out in the country," I said,
thinking of the house I'd known only from visits during college.
Those hadn't been the better times for us,
not like Bryce Canyon or horseback
riding for entire afternoons when I'd make up stories for her
about the animals we spotted.
In my plots, the ground squirrel or coyote
formed lifelong correspondences with us
just as my mother did with tourists
we met at an Anasazi ruin or waiting in line at Disneyland.
I would write out and illustrate these tales, then bind them
in a cardboard dust jacket.
I gave them to her eagerly, as if transferring my entire person
into her hands.
We were still listening in our heads to the spadefoots.
Only afterward did the toad remind me
how much she depended on satisfaction and pride
and how little on pleasure.
When I was in my mid-20s, newly returned
to Tucson after a couple of years East,
I decided I couldn't be my mother's intimate anymore.
Burdened by her avidity for my happiness, I withdrew from her.
"Of course, all in all," she told me after one
of our infrequent dinners, "I would rather not have been
born."
I dismissed this as a punishment for my wounding her.
Meals on Wheels fed her.
Friends who had heard the symphony with her
the week before, brought flowers and left speechless in tears.
She wore only a long, comfortably baggy t-shirt.
What small conversational mutterings they could elicit
drifted in and out of sense.
She frowned strenuously into space.
Walked to the toilet supported under both arms,
she was a slippery, flopping thing.
I had to admit, Ava and I wouldn't
be capable of caring for her.
Next fallback, nursing home.
My mother pursed her mouth: "Waste of money."
"At least you have it," we said.
Holding doggedly to her shrinking piece of ground,
she read the Krutch books, propping the volumes on pillows
because she was too weak to hold them.
Her jaw clenched, terseness was beautifully clear.
Keeping control of what was left of herself
required all her concentration.
Speech was an extravagance.
Only once did she cry when she soiled herself.
That was Friday.
Late Friday night I sat up with her.
"I'm walking," she said.
"You were walking with me, Alex and Ava and Caitlin,
I'm walking over the world.
The stars are around us."
Her voice was even and strong.
We sat in peace.
I was moved to the heart hearing my wife's and daughter's names
with mine.
At that moment what was happening to
my mother began to fill me with awe.
She described where she was going,
a droll mountain range in China like the inside of an egg
carton, the blue of the oceans.
I went home near dawn.
Shortly after, my mother called us desperate
because she couldn't swallow, weeping.
The townhouse as we entered had a stuffy, perfumed smell
that would cling to every personal item, every article
of clothing from every drawer for years.
My mother pleaded, demanded that we would help her end her life.
Through the Unitarian Church she had contacted a couple members
of the Hemlock Society who were ready to provide the means.
We promised.
As we drove Caitlin home to a neighbor family who
would sit for us, the child thrashed in Ava's arms,
flinging her head backward into Ava's nose which
immediately swelled, crookedly.
Ava refused to bother with the clinic which days later would
determine the nose was broken.
On the car radio, the local University football team
played powerhouse UCLA to a standstill.
The game was the only feature of the day I recognized, a haven.
I visualized each play unfolding and collapsing
with meticulous clarity, a thin shanked receiver split wide,
the center of the line buckling and nodding.
I left Ava to keep my mother company.
The mad momentum of the near past, every day the ground
shifting beneath our feet had dropped us here.
Yet as I drove to the Hemlock people's home,
my mind ran backwards, uncomprehending.
A few days before we were all going to live together.
Go back a couple of weeks and my mother
was entertaining friends, three months and our itinerary
had spanned the continent.
I relived the scene forgotten for decades:
My mother and I following dry sticks of vine
along a sandy arroyo bed, knowing that eventually one
would lead to gourds, vibrant yellow and green.
We had talked incessantly.
She was always soliciting my opinions as if I were an adult.
"So what is Wilson Pickett with this Midnight Owl," she asked,
"is that slang for his car?"
"Hour," I corrected, "car music is over."
Beyond patience, our mood had been a lazy assurance
that the afternoon would not end, that there would be gourds
even if the sun had to be stopped in the sky
as the biblical Joshua had done.
The memory made me so hazy, I wanted to pull over and sleep.
Palo verde secluded the Hemlock Society house.
A short gnome-ish elderly couple, he with a white goatee,
welcomed me so ebulliently I suspected
I was their first customer.
They proffered literature and polemicized,
shepherding me into the pantry with gentle pats and squeezes.
There they scooped handfuls of Darvon into a plastic bag.
"She can barely swallow a cup of water," I said,
"how will she take them?"
"You'll have to help," the man replied with fraternal gusto,
nearly twinkling.
They refused payment.
I left them waving from the porch like Ma and Pa
down on the farm.
"So," I wondered in the car once more,
"we'd have to dissolve the contents in liquid which she
would sip for hours.
What if she passed out before the lethal dose?"
At the townhouse, my mother dressed
in casual slacks and blouse, a glass bead necklace,
held hands with Ava on the den couch.
They were smiling and relaxed.
The only jarring note, apart from Ava's bulging nose,
was the tubing leading from the oxygen canister.
A thick candle, the all-day variety
we would light on birthdays, burned on the windowsill.
NPR played on the radio.
"I want for us to listen to "Prairie Home Companion"
together first," my mother said, "I love Garrison Keillor."
"I've never heard "it, I chatted dumbly,
"we always went out on Saturdays,
and then with Caitlin--"
"It's delightful."
She said
[AUDIO OUT]
--graciously stepped aside.
If there was an autopsy, he said after hearing me out,
as was possible with a relatively sudden death,
we likely would be prosecuted for murder.
Driving I imagined scenarios in which
we fought and beat the rap, but by the time
I reached my mother's, I knew I hadn't the stomach for the test.
"I'm sorry, Sweetie," I said, hugging her,
"we can't do this for you.
We'll have to think of something else."
As she broke down again, in desperation,
I considered asphyxiation, untraceable poisons,
a collective trash heap of detective fiction.
My mother removed the tubes and laid them on the couch.
Ava helped her out of her clothing and into bed.
She kissed us goodbye with a finality that I couldn't share.
After all, less than two weeks before,
she'd breathed without any apparatus.
Yet within an hour, she was unconscious.
Ava called the sitters and asked them to take Caitlin overnight.
Spreading a blanket, we lay on the floor
beside the hospital bed, fully dressed, vigilant.
My mother's labored breathing continued.
Ava and I whispered bits of stories, like charms.
I remembered 30 years before when
our family had been refugees from a hurricane,
sleeping on the crowded floor of a public shelter.
There had been the same keenness of balancing
on the moment and the imminence of disaster.
Morning came and my mother still breathed hard,
her eyes closed and mouth drawn.
Ava had to go home to Caitlin.
I sat by the bed.
The sunlight was pale and bland.
People survive this way for years, I knew.
I didn't consider that my mother might wake up.
She had shed the sheet.
I hadn't expected to be alone with my naked, comatose mother.
I pulled up the sheet, but her hand freed herself.
The hand moved to her vagina and began tugging.
This distressed me awfully, saying, "please don't do that."
I attempted to move the hand, grasping it by the wrist,
but it clung tenaciously.
I tried the sheet again.
The hand flicked it off, she never showed expression.
Friends called asking to visit and I said later.
I brought photo albums to the chair beside the bed.
In them, all my mother's smiles intimated the overcoming
of secret hurt which used to drive me nuts.
Now.
It made me cry, which was more bearable than what else was
going on.
After a few hours, I thought to turn
on the radio for the American League Championship Series,
my team, the Red Sox, trailing the Angels.
I began to pace the house.
Upstairs, I examined old photos and letters and my mother's
little creations, a painting after Matisse,
a ceramic bas-relief plaque of swelling sea life.
I walked through the rooms, each permeated
with a sweet, stale scent, crying at the presence
of her hands and mind at work.
Mostly, I kept company with my mother
who, modest in life and sexually celibate for stretches of years,
vigorously and incessantly masturbated,
face blank but strained.
Only her hand showed its independent concentration.
I paced up the stairs, looked at objects and photos,
cried, paced downstairs, sat, listened to the game,
repeated the cycle.
I was bored.
It was difficult to imagine another kind of moment.
I would go on living within this particular distress.
The Red Sox center fielder who earlier
had made a magnificent catch homered
to send the game into extra innings.
I cheered.
Ava called and while we were talking, the breathing stopped.
"My God, I think she's gone," I said.
I waited until Ava arrived before calling the paramedics.
I kissed my mother before they took her.
Friends had gathered and stood by stricken.
Ava and I bought dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant
to celebrate my mother's release and her will in achieving it.
We toasted her with red wine, explaining garrulously
to our friend, the proprietor.
We were boxed in with relief as when night falls on a hard day.
But by the end of the meal, the death seemed no longer prolonged
and exhausting, but bewilderingly quick,
"like sliding down a hill," Ava said.
"She let go," I said.
"She didn't need to die," Ava said angrily as we drove home.
As my mother had requested, we had her cremated.
And a few days after her death we picked up the remains.
I'd chosen the site for scattering them,
a pocket of protected desert just
within the modest rugged mountain
range overlooking the city's west side.
A wash ran through it, cutting a ravine
through a lava and granite ridge,
and the saguaro were thick.
The wind swayed them and sang through their needles.
The remains were not ashes as I had expected,
but more like sand with bits of bone.
They were enclosed in a foil wrapped box which Ava and I had
stowed in the pickup camper.
Deliberately, we'd avoided making any mention
to Caitlin of her grandmother.
Tossing the handfuls of whitish grit would be a game.
Parking on the dirt shoulder beside the mountain path,
I pulled out the silvery box.
"Granny," Caitlin said immediately.
Ava and I stared at each other.
I came around to my wife's thinking.
My mother should not have died yet.
On some level, I believed she'd done us a favor
to save us trouble, expense.
"How could she leave Caitlin?"
Ava asked.
Even the second doctor, the better one said,
"I was thinking years."
His inquiries were gently suspicious
but he accepted our assurance the death had been natural.
At the first opportunity, I threw away
all the horrid medicines, devices,
instructions that had attempted to define my mother's last days.
By giving away her abrupt, unresolved death though,
I left myself only the absence.
For months, I couldn't settle down.
She had died October 12th.
In May, I dreamed I was to meet her at her home, a subdivision
unlike any place we'd actually lived.
When I arrived, the entrance was blocked by a mound of earth.
I recognized it as having closed off
a country road near the summer house I'd gone to as a child.
After circling the subdivision several times,
I found a way in and parked beside the manicured lawn.
My mother waited, arms outstretched.
As I embraced her, I felt that she was cold and dead.
I awoke distraught.
A shimmering filled the bedroom doorway.
It was like the reflection of light
from a mirror that wasn't there.
I broke a cold sweat.
My hair stood up.
My mother wouldn't hurt me, I reminded myself.
The silveryness remained, distinct and unchanging.
After nearly an hour, I told myself there
was nothing more to wait for and turned on the light.
Over the summer, a friend who lived on the reservation
told me that Indian people believe that such a visitation
was the spirit saying goodbye.
That made as much sense as anything else
we pretend to know about death and I was consoled.
As the years passed though, so does the mystery
I shared in my mother's dying.
The certainty, the uncanniness and wonder
lie beyond mortal life.
Instead, I remember weariness and practicality,
where headlong loving was called for, a reticence of the heart
that might be heartlessness."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]