Southern Legitimacy Statement: My Papaw came up in the Great Smokey Mountains, near Farner, Tennessee and Cherokee, North Carolina. When he was nine, he lost track of the time one summer evening, squirrel hunting up on the mountain, and he avoided a sound late-for-dinner whoopin’ by running away with the circus. To some folks, it don’t get more suthrun.
Her Heroic Final Role in the Fading Persona of So and So
The week my mother died there was another old woman in hospice who had the use of a manual wheelchair, and she rolled about the wing at night closing open doors. I first noticed her when the door to my mother’s room slammed shut behind me during my sister’s recitation of a poem by Emily Dickinson, startling me enough for me to spill my drink; we were all gathered around the bed where my mother lay in a state of near paralysis with her jaw locked open, and where she had lain for days now eating nothing and drinking only what water we could squeeze onto her lips from a little sponge.
“That’s just the little old lady from down the hall,” my sister said. “She closes doors. It’s her thing.”
“It’s.. do what, now?”
“It’s her thing; it’s what she does. She closes doors.”
When it came my turn to spell our father on death watch, I set up a little palette on the floor next to my mother’s bed, and before I lay down for a nap that night I sponged her some water and hugged her and gave her a kiss and told her how sorry I was to have been such a terrible screw up. I said I didn’t blame her. I told her I forgave her for anything she had ever done wrong to me, and that I hoped she forgave me, too. We had already said those things in the months before her dementia got worse, but I said them all again because there was nothing else to say except that I loved her and that I hoped she could let go. She just lay there in that merciless state of paralysis with her mouth locked open, almost as if she were already dead.
I fell asleep on the floor watching reruns of MASH and All in the Family on TV, and sometime after midnight the nurses came in to change my mother’s bed and asked me to wait for them to finish in the cafeteria just down the hall. I found a side door to prop open so that I could sneak outside for a cigarette without tripping any alarms, and then I waited on one of those molded resin middle school chairs in the glow of the snack machines in the cafeteria for the nurses to finish. From where I sat I had a view of the empty hallway, and the only sound I could hear was the muffled sound of the television still playing low in my mother’s room.
I stared into that empty hallway for five or six minutes before my eyes adjusted well enough for me to differentiate forms in the darkness, and then for another minute or two before I saw the chair move, or thought that I did. It didn’t move far, just three inches or so backwards. I focused hard on the dark chair shape, having already half convinced myself that I was seeing things, when I saw it roll forward again about the same distance, then back again, then forward again; and then it stopped. Just at that moment, I glimpsed a translucent, cotton-candy plume of bouffant hairdo sticking up above the top of the back panel of the wheelchair as it turned slightly, catching the light just so, barely preceding the unmistakable sound of a door latch closing shut with the heaviness of a big door shutting behind it… Kuh-lack!
I held my breath and sat perfectly still. It seemed like she was waiting to make sure the coast was clear before she started rolling forward again down the dark empty hallway, slowly at first, then a little faster, her tiny fragile hands quietly urging those big chrome wheels across the checkerboard linoleum a few inches at a time toward yet another open door. Once she reached it, she performed the same basic procedure, effecting a supernaturally gradual six-point turn to position the chair for both greater leverage and ease of egress. She made it look easy. She made it look fun.
I watched her work from my dark vantage in the cafeteria, suspended vicariously in the tension of her process… Kuh-lack! Off she rolled toward the next one, intrepid in her clandestine midnight mission, her hair as unnaturally static and perfectly round as a safety helmet sticking up above the back of the chair rest. I watched her close two more doors before she made a hard left turn out of sight, ostensibly to finish closing all of the other open doors in the adjoining wing. I hoped so. Silently, I cheered her on with all my heart.
Once upon a time, she had been so and so, and she had a rich exciting happy life full of people who loved her; she was a daughter and a mother and a wife and a friend and a sister and a mentor and a teacher; she had been a person on earth for a lifetime of days, and for someone out there, or for some group of someones, she was the lode-bearing pillar under the center of the universe, the mainstay of the family and the wellspring of its meaning, the giver of food and the healer of wounds, the defender of the brood and the guardian and keeper of tribal stories and traditions. Now her thing was closing all the open doors in the hospice wing at night after everyone else was asleep. It was her final act of service, her heroic final role in the fading persona of so and so.
“Rage,” I said in a whisper, “rage against the dying of the light.”
I said it in prayer into the empty hallway and into the humming electric darkness of the little late night cafeteria, quoting from the only poem I know of that has ever made sense to me on the topic of death. I sat for a while later after the nurses were finished on the off chance that I might see the old woman’s chair creeping back by the end of the hallway a few inches at a time, but I never saw her again. In the morning my sister arrived to take over on death watch, and my mother died in the middle of the following day. It was my father’s birthday, and she had waited until he was there by her side, taking her last breath only five minutes later. His last ever birthday gift from her was her finally letting go.
