The Last Gift She Gave Me

On this day, October 16, exactly five years ago, my mother-in-law gave me the best gift ever. She allowed me to watch her die.

To be sure, Dorothy Walters was not big on physical gifts for the eighteen years I knew her.  For birthdays -- when she remembered them -- each child and child in law got $25.00.  For wedding anniversaries, each couple got $25.00. (We always wondered why it was that each of us only got $12.50 for the one day, but double that on the other. Alas, we never found out.)  Mother's and Father's Days were overlooked. ("You're not my mother or father," she explained.)

But she gave us other gifts that were immeasurable. Every summer, she and I sat on the screened-in porch, eating fresh fruit she'd cut, reading the New York Times, and discussing politics, race relations, and why some people just annoyed us all the time.  She let us use her in ground pool whenever we wanted.  She made beautiful holiday dinners and did all of the catering for my younger daughter's Baby Naming, which we held at her house.

Dorothy was the kind of person you dreamed of being. Even up until just a few months before her death, she was more energetic than I was, in my late thirties.  Every day she had something new to do -- she cooked for the homeless, was taking classes at her synagogue, was planning a trip to a strange country. (One time she decided to go to Malta on vacation.  When she went to the book store, she complained, there were no books on Malta. I explained that was because no one else was going there.) Her schedule was always booked with an outing or event.

She was incredibly smart. Born to immigrant parents, they did not believe girls should receive higher education, just boys. So her brother went to a top college and became an engineer. She helped her father run his successful clothing factory and then became a mother to four sons.  But she taught herself everything. She was a master gardener who started her own interior plant design business.  She read everything she could get her hands on. There was not a thing she desired to know that she didn't find out.

She was artistic.  She learned how to paper mache sculpture and made a big replica of a girl in a bathing suit -- the daughter, Wendy, she'd claimed she always wanted -- and leaned her against the pool.

So when cancer beat her down, she was the best at dying, too. In September of 2008, she was done with chemo, she said. It gave her no quality of life.  Why would she want to live if all she could do anymore was lie on the couch, sleeping? She called Hospice while she was still well enough to make the call herself.

She had been sick then about six months but she had been able to hold her own. After she stopped treatment, she went downhill very fast.  She was perfectly pragmatic about the hospital bed we set up in her bedroom, facing the large window to one of her gardens. She welcomed the twenty four  hour aide we hired who helped her shower.  She didn't blink an eye when she could no longer get to the bathroom.  Still, she welcomed visitors, exclaiming over them, accepting their candy, their well wishes, hosting everyone.  She followed the 2008 Presidential election with as much fervor as any other election, if not more. She wanted Barack Obama to win. (She never found out that he did.)

And then, on the evening of October 15, her aide called me to tell me she hadn't been well all day and was acting very strange. My husband and I drove the thirty minutes to her house and she was out of it. She asked us if our daughters were in school, though it was clearly nighttime.  And then she said something about milk bottles. Those were the last words I ever heard her say.

The next morning, October 16, I have no idea what the weather was like, because as soon as I dropped my younger daughter at school, I had only one mission: to get to my mother-in-law's house to see how she was doing. When I got there, I heard a strange sound.  It turned out my mother-in-law had gone into a coma, and was gurgling for breath.

All day long, I snuck in and out of her bedroom as she lay there. We'd given her enough medicine and oxygen so finally she was quiet, not moaning, but still, with her eyes closed, breathing.  I kept smelling her -- she had a distinct smell -- and then leaving the room to contact more people. This was it.

I went home to give my girls a very early dinner, and then went back to my mother-in-law's house. Her breathing was worse and her finger and toe nails had turned blue.  The hospice nurse explained that meant her body was rushing blood to her vital organs to help them, though it wouldn't matter. Earlier that day, the nurse had said that she was "actively dying." Trying to die. Like, I am so done. Don't attempt to stop me.

My husband, brother in law, sister in law, and I ate a quiet, take in dinner in the dining room while the aide stayed with Dorothy.  Afterwards we went back in to her room.  She was getting worse. I tried to memorize how she looked, still barely alive.  Her hair, her skin, everything. Because she was telling me I would never see her again.

An hour later, the aide called us in. Dot was taking breaths that indicated she was ready to go. We rushed back in and I held her hand.  I watch her chest rise and fall.  And then the aide said, a few minutes later, "I think that was it."

"No, I think she's still doing it," I said, watching her chest. I put my hand on it; it was warm. But nothing more happened. So the aide took the oxygen cannula out of nose -- "Sorry Dorothy," she said as she pulled the tubing a little too hard, as though she could still hear. And then I went into the hall, and my brother in law asked if I was okay, and I leaned against him, and cried.