Sandi Kahn Shelton

Let me just say at the outset that it is weird to be in somebody’s apartment, staying there, when that person is not there. Especially when it’s your mother. 

She and I haven’t lived together for many years, and in the interim, she has single-handedly kept the American silk flower industry afloat. And, oh yes, the basket manufacturers as well. Her apartment is filled with sentimental paintings of dogs and flowers, of glass vases of all colors and shapes, baskets tacked to the walls, and everywhere, on every surface, multiple arrangements of silk flowers.

Somehow it works, decoration-wise. You walk into this otherwise white condominium in Florida, and every wall is covered with bright-colored pictures, and every tabletop has glass ornaments and silk flowers, and the couches are pink and the furniture is white wicker…and somehow you feel you’ve stepped into a kind of Disneyland of an apartment. A bright, cheerful amusement park of a room with big pillows to sink into.

But my mother is not here.

Tonight she is five miles away, spending her first night in a “skilled nursing facility” after being discharged from the hospital. She is sleeping in a gray room with a beige tile floor, right next to the nurses’ station. She will be there for weeks while they try to get her stronger after her cancer surgery.

Here, in her apartment, I walk around and look at her photograph albums. In her closet hang caftans and muu muus and jeans with rhinestones on them, and bright pink shirts. In the refrigerator she has apple sauce and orange juice and dill pickles and mayonnaise and nothing else. Her silverware looks like bamboo. She wants me to take it home with me.

“It’s the prettiest thing I can leave you,” she says. “Take it, take it before someone else does.”

Sometimes she talks like that, as though she understands the cancer has spread throughout her body and that she can’t care for herself anymore and won’t be coming back here. It was she who called in the hospice people and signed the living will and the Do Not Resuscitate order. But then sometimes she looks at me and says, “I think I’m going to get a second dog. And I want to let my hair grow longer, and don’t you think I should get a second-hand car?”

I bring her the Intention to Vacate form from the place where she lives, and she signs it without a second thought, and then says, “It was such a nice place to live, wasn’t it?”

I say, “It’s very sad to leave,” and for a moment, we sit quietly together, both of us dry-eyed. I do not tell her that the place wants to charge her an $660 lease-breaking fee…just because she had signed the lease two weeks before she was diagnosed with cancer. When I asked the administrator if perhaps that charge could be waived if I presented a doctor’s note, the woman said it was impossible.

“But she has terminal cancer!” I said. “Sure they don’t intend for her to have to pay a penalty.”

“Well,” said the woman, “she should have gone to the doctor before she signed the lease, shouldn’t she?”

I’ve been in Florida for five days now…and for much of that time, I’ve had the sense of being on automatic pilot. It feels as though it’s someone else who is talking to the hospice people, making arrangements with social workers, skilled nursing facilities and nursing homes, who is talking on the phone to family members, ending leases and turning off telephones. It is someone else who spends at least ten hours a day in the hospital room. 

Every day there is a checklist, and every day this Person Who Is Not Really Me works her way through it, going through the necessary telephone calls and preparations. Although I am usually a person who cries easily and can keep up tears for quite some time, I find I don’t feel like crying at all. Here I am, being with my mother who has just learned she is DYING, and I am dry-eyed. What does this mean?

Maybe it just means that I am not in crying mode yet, that I am settling things that couldn’t be settled if I were in tears, and that later there will be the release that comes when everything else sinks in.

Or maybe it’s that, sitting here in this apartment every night after spending the long days with her in the hospital or in the skilled nursing facility, I just feel connected to her spirit somehow. I feel sustained, buoyed up in a way I don’t feel when she and I are talking. Here, amid the white wicker and the bright orange sheets and purple pillows on her bed, I feel her bravery and her unwillingness to have this be a time of complaining and sorrow.

Tomorrow I fly back to Connecticut, and saying goodbye to her is going to be very, very hard. But I will come back in a month and try to see her settled up near my cousin in Jacksonville, which is where she wants to go.

Well, I have been writing frantically lately–ten pages a day because that is what it is going to take to meet my deadline–and so I have been a little distracted.

Out of touch, you might say.

And so it was that a few days ago I looked up from my typing and thought, “Yikes! What is that horrible sensation in my mouth when I drink iced tea?” I wrote three more pages, and then it came to me. “Ohhh, yesss…it is That Tooth again.”

The dreaded tooth.

I have a molar, you see, that hates me. I have given it everything except a root canal–I have babied it throughout the years, protected it from hot and cold foods, spent thousands of dollars to have it lovingly restored, and yet it still hates me and every now and then throws tantrums.

Last summer, though, despite being scared of dentists and all of their sharp instruments and the way they work on a part of your body that is so close to your brains and which every now and then they stick with needles, I took this tooth to the dentist and I said to him, “Do whatever this tooth says to do, and send  me the bill.”

The good news is that the tooth did not seem to want a root canal, but it did want a crown. I mean, who doesn’t want a crown? So I suffered through two, possibly three, dental visits (I’m blocking them out) during which I sat with my mouth propped open, next to the plate glass window, during two thunderstorms that threatened to spawn life-destroying tornadoes, bargaining with God for my survival–and my tooth was crowned.

When we got to the final installment, the dentist said to me, “There’s just one little thing. I’m going to put temporary glue on this crown, just in case this tooth wants a root canal in the next three months. You’ll know if it does. But if the tooth feels fine, then come back and I’ll gladly put in the permanent glue, and all will be well.”

Dear reader, I did not go back. My tooth felt fine, and believe me, I am not stupid enough to want to wake up a sleeping tooth and mess with it.

But then the other day…tooth pain. Later that night: tooth pain. Next morning: that’s right. Tooth pain. In the days that have followed: pain sometimes, no pain other times. Enough to drive a dental phobic mad.

But then I was reading “O” magazine, an article written by life coach Martha Beck in which one of the five pieces of advice she gives is this: “A little pain never hurt anybody.” And I thought, Huh! What an interesting idea. Here, I have been avoiding pain my whole life, actually contemplating the most pain-free choices I could make–and then it turns out that it’s okay to be hurt. She actually told a story about going to the dentist and thinking how pain didn’t matter, and that when he jabbed the needle into her gum, it felt like a tiny little deep tissue massage.

I mean, I’m not totally buying that. But I did realize that this Totally Pain Free Existence I was seeking could be leading me astray. And so today, first thing this morning I called up my dentist and asked to speak to him.

He couldn’t come to the phone. So I bravely made an appointment with him for tomorrow morning. Tiny little deep tissue massage…tiny little deep tissue massage…not pain, not pain.

At 3 p.m., I called and canceled the appointment. As much as I am craving a chance to prove that I can handle a tiny little deep tissue massage, I am clearly too busy to go to the dentist! I have a deadline to meet! I will go to the dentist…another time. When I’m not so busy. Meanwhile, I shall embrace the pain I am now in.

At 5 p.m., the dentist called me. I had forgotten that I had left him a message. There he was. What, he wanted to know, was going on?

I took a deep breath and reminded him about the crown, the temporary glue, the doubt about a root canal, my failure to come back to get the permanent glue, (”How can one ever really, really be sure one is ready for the permanent anything?” I asked him, and he did not have an answer.) I babbled on for quite some time, and then when I ran down, he said:

“Sandi. The temporary glue breaks down after a few months. That is why your tooth is hurting because the crown is slipping. Why don’t you jsut come into the office, and we can either put MORE temporary glue on, or we can put the permanent glue on? That’s all. Why don’t you come tomorrow? I’ll put the secretary back on…”

“Wait!” I said. “Is it going to…hurt?”

Because I am totally ready if it does. I know that a little pain never hurt anybody.

He sighed and said, “No, it won’t hurt.”

But that’s what they always say.

Every year I order a fresh turkey from the turkey farm nearby, and go early on Wednesday morning and stand in a looooooong line with just about everybody in town and wait my turn to pick it up. We stand there in our fleece sweat pants and our flannel shirts and boots, stamping in the cold and blowing on our hands, and telling each other who’s coming for dinner at our various houses, what kind of pies we’re making, and who’s bringing what side dish. Somebody in line always has a recipe for cranberry relish memorized and is willing to share it.

It’s become one of the Small New England Town Rituals I love about this place–along with the singing of carols on the Green in December, and the Showing Off of the Prom Dresses on the Green in June, and then, of course, high school graduation (also on the Green) when all the bells in town hall and in the churches peal when the last graduate receives a diploma.

This year, I forgot to order my turkey in advance, and when I called today to beg for one, the guy laughed and said I’d have to take my chances on–get this–Wednesday afternoon, after all the turkeys have been claimed.

“There are always some unclaimed ones,” he said. “You’ll probably get one if you just come by at four.”

At four? And what if there is no unclaimed turkey this year? What if I get there and the guy says it’s the most amazing thing in the world, but not one turkey has been left behind. Stranger things have happened, you know.

The weird thing is, I was driving home late yesterday afternoon in the gathering dusk. It was just about time to turn the headlights on when I realized all the cars ahead of me were stopped for something. That something turned out to be a family of wild turkeys, making its way across the street, waddling hurriedly along, all gobbling away like they were encouraging each other to make it snappy.

Some people got out of their cars to watch them go. One man said, “These birds are sure either brave or stupid to go wandering around this time of year!” And we all chuckled.

But then something even more amazing happened. The turkeys got across the street finally and went up into somebody’s yard, just as though they’d planned this trek, been planning it all year. As we sat there watching, the lead turkey went right up to the front door and started pecking at the storm door, and soon the others came and started hitting it, too.

“Can you imagine,” a woman said, “what you’d think if you opened your door to find your Thanksgiving dinner just asking to come in?”

See, that is kind of what I might need to happen this year. I could use a traveling wild turkey,especially if he was willing to bring along the sweet potatoes, the apple pie–and to stop off at the turkey farm and see who in line has the recipe for the cranberry relish this year.