Gracias a la Vida (Thanks to Life)

For at least the last ten years of my mother’s life, every time I went home to Boston, I always wondered: “Will this be the last time?” My mother would greet me with a nervous kiss, her wrinkled hands reaching up in a too-brief hug, seemingly stretching a little higher every visit as she shrunk into a fraction of her former self. She would fret about my travels: why didn’t I just take a taxi from the airport? She would have paid, of course. But I was just being the stubborn, ecologically-minded, self-reliant, comfort-rejecting, bargain-hunting person she had raised me to be. Why pay $70 for a taxi when the train goes out this way? Even if it meant a mile walk from the station through snow-filled streets with a suitcase in tow.

The first thing on my mother’s mind was always, invariably, to feed me. She would press me to open a can of lentil soup, have a banana or apple or pear, eat something, always fretting that she didn’t have more to offer. I would eat something just to calm her, whether I wanted to or not.

After I had satisfied her need for me to eat, we would sit in her tiny living room, she in her gliding chair with her feet on the octogonal hassock my brother had made with eight distinct, exquisite, polished panels of wood: one for each of her children. I would sit across from her on the tattered threads of the couch she had insisted on taking from our childhood home. I would get out some embroidery, or my laptop, though the latter always made her nervous, and I wonder now why I couldn’t just let the outside world and all its responsibilities go for a few hours or days when I was there. Just be there with her without the barrier of that flat grey screen. Was work really all that pressing? What was it protecting me from?

My mother would make nervous conversation, filling up the air and time with reports on others’ lives, never saying much about her own, at least not its inner side. It always felt like a litany that she had to get through, without interruption, checking off things she had been saving to tell me for quite a while, but that she had surely recounted to others before me. I would try to participate by asking about people she hadn’t mentioned, knowing she was the link in the chain that kept a whole population alive for me that would be severed when she was gone.

Eventually she would run out of things to report on, and so we would sit with our respective books in hand: mine a grey computer notebook, filled with words of all kinds; hers of newsprinted word puzzles, penciled in. An extra-large, extra-bright lamp (another gift from another child) was a beacon over her shoulder as she squinted through eyes that were blinded from a lifetime of not fully seeing. She amassed a treasure trove of tricky words over the years: stacks and stacks of puzzle books that we offered to the recycling gods when she died.

Sometimes I shared my mother’s bed during my stays at her assisted living center, rather than rearrange her tiny apartment to make space for the thin saggy mattress of the pull-out sleep sofa. Her mattress was perhaps as old as the sofa, and she surely had bought it on special at Sears, but it was more comfortable than the coiled wires that poked through the sofa. She would curl on her side of the bed, facing away, and I would lie stiffly, as close to the edge as I could, lest I accidentally touch her in the night. How I longed to wrap my arms around her and snuggle as we slept or stroke her coarse white hair. But I didn’t. We didn’t do that sort of thing.

In February 2016 I had booked a ticket home to see my mother, a stopover in Boston because I’d be “in the neighborhood,” in Ohio, in March. I was taking every opportunity to spend some time with her, to help her stave off the loneliness that seemed to permeate her life, now that the hard work of raising eight children was long in her past, and we were all scattered around the world, or busy with our own lives.

About two weeks before my trip, one Saturday morning in late February, I got a call from my sister. “Not saying it’s anything, but thought I should let you know I drove mom to the hospital this morning.” “They’ll know more on Monday, when they do some tests.”

Somehow I believed that Monday would come and they’d test my mom and say “Oh, she’ll live to 100. She’s still going strong.” After all, it had been six years since she’d be diagnosed with what we had thought was an immediate death sentence: congestive heart failure. But her extreme diligence with diet and medication, stoicism and easy denial of pleasures most people find hard to give up had staved it off.

Still, I thought maybe she’d need help when she went home from the hospital that week. I wanted to be the good daughter that I had not been when I trekked far out to California thirty years before, so I purchased a new ticket to head east the next day. I spent the day making arrangements, clearing my schedule or re-arranging in-house meetings to on-line ones. I knew the local siblings would be with my mom that day, and I figured I would wait until the evening to call. Or maybe I wasn’t really thinking at all.

It was 7 pm in California when a little voice inside me finally woke me up and said, “Call your mom!” If I had thought about the fact that it was 10 pm in Boston I likely would have waited until the morning. But my mother’s body was being released from its circadian rhythms and like a child at Christmas, maybe she was too excited or nervous to close her eyes that night.

I asked my daughter to join me on the phone, half expecting her to protest that she was busy, that she’d call later, that she couldn’t take the time. But no, Elisa came down quickly, and we dialed – well, digitally compressed the keys on my cell phone – to connect us with the hospital line.

As usual, we began with small talk. “I’ve been better,” my mother admitted, when I asked her how she was. She brushed off any talk about herself. She didn’t mention that she had given instructions to my sister to eat the food in her fridge, return her Braille book reader, and be sure to pay her bills. She didn’t mention the letters she had left in her apartment, penned in her impeccable lettering on white lined paper, tucked into long white envelopes, one with each of our names.

Just like old times, we soon ran out of things to say. We had long ago learned to skirt around the really important things, and pretend that all we were thinking and feeling and wondering wasn’t really there. Death was right up there with all the other topics we had never named: Sex, Love, Sadness, or Feelings of any kind. [Though in fact my mother and I had exchanged a few words about death, when I found a poem that her mother had had on her own bureau when she died. The poem gave us a bridge to meet on without having to speak the words ourselves (not unlike the ways she found to mention love, by relying on Hallmark cards to do the work).]

Over the phone, I asked what I could do for her. “Maybe you could sing me a song,” she said: a sweet request from a woman who never asked much for herself.

Elisa and I looked across the kitchen table. With a nod and a smile and a look of utter confidence, Elisa began: “Tura lura lura…” My heart broke into a grin as I joined my voice in harmony with Elisa. This was the lullabye I had regularly sung to Elisa as a child, and that my mother had sung to me, on the rare times she managed to sit with me at nighttime, perhaps when I was sick, and she wasn’t too busy with her seven other children. I always found it a little surprising that it was Irish lullabye, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was more soothing than any German ditty I could imagine. I think that growing up among the Irish had a softening effect on my very stoic German mom, and it came through in these words: “Over in Killany, many years ago, me mother sang this song to me, in tones so sweet and low…”

“That was the perfect song,” my mother said.

Later I wondered, why didn’t Elisa and I stay on the phone singing far into the night? But really that would only have made my mother nervous. She didn’t want to be accompanied into that dark night. She wouldn’t have been able to die if her children were with her; she would have just fretted about the time she was taking from our busy lives.

And Elisa had known the perfect song to sing.

After hanging up the phone, I packed my bags for the trip I had booked for the next morning, thinking I was going out to be with her; not quite realizing that I had just said goodbye.

Elisa and I then joined the traffic flowing through the arteries of our city of the Queen of Angels to a gathering of musicians and poets on the other side of town: a peña in commemoration of the overthrow of the Chilean government in 1973, when Salvador Allende was killed along with students and activists and poets and musicians like Victor Jara. They say the military dictatorship cut off Victor’s hands, and dared him to play his guitar in a stadium filled with thousands of frightened people.

For three hours, Elisa and I sat together with our friends in an overflowing room, looking out onto railroad tracks under the panorama of the eastern mountain range, listening to poetry and singing songs like those sung in that arena a half century before.

At midnight we joined together in our final collective song: Gracias a la Vida.1 Thanks to life that has given me so much. We sang for each other, for our selves, for what we shared, and for what lay behind and above and beyond. We gave thanks for music, mountains, friendship, family, voices, love, songs. We sang for Salvador Allende, Victor Jara, for the countless nameless too-young victims of coups and war and genocide around the world, and for my mom. The sound waves rose over the mountains and traversed the vast expanse of land that lay between that East Los Angeles art gallery and the New England hospital bed where my mother lay taking her final breath.

The next day my sister told me the doctors had spoken with my mom sometime after midnight: “You know you could die in your sleep.”

“I know,” she said, as she closed her eyes: “I’ve had a good life.”

Simple words from a woman who never asked much for herself, but who knew she had been given so much.