Sandi Kahn Shelton

I was born in Florida–and so being back here is familiar to certain cells of mine, cells that agree that moss is supposed to hang from trees, and that grass blades are meant to be nearly one inch thick, and the air is supposed to be heavy with moisture.

In the same way that the air is familiar, it also feels familiar to be sitting beside my mother. I’ve lived away from her for years now, and it feels perfectly real and natural to be sitting on a chair, looking at the curve of her cheek and the way her blond hair lies in bangs across her forehead, and the way she purses her lips because she has false teeth that were installed in her when she was just 23 years old when an unscrupulous dentist pulled all her teeth out. 

It is one of the main stories of her life–along with the story of Marcus, the boy from her high school that she always thought she would marry, only he played with firecrackers and went blind and had his right arm blown off. And the story of how she then went on to meet my father, who had just gotten his first job away from his home in Charleston, and when he went to a boarding house to apply to live there, my mother was the tenant who opened the door–and she had coral-colored toenails, and he had never seen toenails like that, and so they got married two months later, and I was born eleven months after that.

These are just some of the stories that were cornerstones of my childhood, stories she told and acted out and dramatized and analyzed over and over again, and I never tired of hearing them, even though the lessons and morals of the stories changed. The firecracker story, for instance, went from being a story about why one should NEVER EVER go near fireworks to being a story about how you shouldn’t forsake your true love just because he lost his eyesight and his hand. And the story about meeting my father went from being a delightful mother-to-daughter story about How I Met Your Father to being a cautionary tale about how men who haven’t seen coral toenails before are probably too innocent to be let loose on the world, and how in fact, my father was still in love with his plain-colored toenails girlfriend back home, and even though he married my mother, he pined for someone else–and so their marriage ended in divorce 13 years later. (Lesson: pay attention if the guy keeps mentioning an old girlfriend before you invest in the wedding dress.)

But now there are no stories being told. I arrived in Florida on Tuesday, after having talked to my mother on the phone on Saturday…and was shocked to discover that she is, to use the technical, medical term, out of it. She is, in other words, in the end stages of cancer, all this one month after being diagnosed with colon and liver cancer.

Last week she asked me on the phone, “How is it going to happen that I’m going from being the lively person you now hear speaking to you to being a dead person? I do not know how that is going to happen!”

I didn’t either.

But now, seven days later, she cannot speak or see. She won’t eat or drink water. She mostly lies unresponsive, except that she squeezes my hand as I sit beside her. Every now and then a fleeting smile crosses her face, a smile that’s almost like a newborn’s.

I am stunned by this. How could we be here so soon? One day last week she dictated her obituary to me, told me how to spell the name of her high school, reminded me of what year she graduated, said she wanted to be cremated, and told me where the ashes were to be sprinkled. She had made arrangements for her dog, Bear, to live with her neighbors, and she told me to take her jewelry and her flatware and her Bose radio. The rest, she said, she didn’t care what happened to it. Sell it, give it away, burn it…whatever.

And then she went silent. 

When I came down here, I thought we were just having one of a series of visits before The End, that we would sit and talk and visit. I pictured driving her to the ocean, so she could once more see a sunset. I thought perhaps we would go out to lunch. Lobster bisque sounded good. Some ladies from her apartment complex wanted her to come and visit her old apartment.

Instead I find myself talking to hospice workers who say that according to their best estimates, she has about a day left. She shows all the signs, they say, of someone who is spending more time in the other world than in this one–and those fleeting smiles, the nurse told me–it’s as though she’s gone inward and is communicating with perhaps those who are waiting for her on the other side. I was as surprised to hear a nurse talk like that as I was to think of my mother going away.

If I call her name, if I get close to her and say, “Mom!” she opens her eyes but does not focus. She squeezes my hand but cannot answer a question. She clamps her lips shut if I try to give her water or food.

But this morning the hospice social worker said to me over my mother’s bedside, “Tell me about your mother. Let’s let her hear you talk about her..” and so I told a few edited, happy stories about my mother’s life–how she’d been a cheerleader, and about how one must never play with firecrackers and how a man who hasn’t seen colored toenails must be avoided at all costs, especially if he already had a girlfriend back home–and I looked over, and my mother, with her eyes closed, was smiling a big, wide grin.

And when I said, “I love you so much,” she squeezed my hand as hard as she could. 

And now I must get back to the hospital, because I don’t have much longer to see those fleeting smiles, that sweep of blond bangs, and to see if I can’t remember something else to tell her.

Seen on a bumper sticker today:

At least the war on the environment is going well.

Every day lately my life changes three or four times.

Ever since my mother was diagnosed with inoperable cancer three weeks ago, one of the very worst, worst parts has been that none of us seems to know what is supposed to happen next. We just can’t get a handle on it.

Here are the firm decisions that have been made and unmade in the last two weeks:

• She and the doctors agree that she is too ill to live alone anymore. I give the required 60-days notice at her apartment complex that she will not be returning.
• Then she decides that she wants to return to her apartment after all. (I do not un-give the notice, because…well, I am learning already that I must wait and see.)
• Then the hospital where she’s recovering calls to say she’s far too sick to live on her own, and in fact, she may be in the end stages already, since she’s refusing to eat. (Good thing I didn’t tell the apartment she is coming back.)
• But then she eats an entire plate of spaghetti, a hamburger, and drinks an entire Coke, and decides that she’d like to come and live in Connecticut, near me, but not in my house. She would like to live in a nursing home here, where she would have professional care but where I could visit her.
• Then–no! She wants to stay in Florida, so she will go and live near my cousin, in a nursing home there, down the street from my cousin.
• The cousin says this is fine, but says she can’t bring her dog with her because my cousin has two dogs and she can’t handle one more dog in her life.
• My mother’s neighbor, outraged by this, says she will take care of my mother, and my mother can stay in her own apartment and this neighbor (who is a retired nurse) will watch over her AND the dog.
• My mother says no, she’s too sick, and anyway, she should be with me, her family, at such a time. So she decides she wants to come to Connecticut, but not to live in a nursing home. She wants to live in our back bedroom.
• Then the social worker calls, says my mother is once again not eating and is refusing her physical therapy, and can’t stay there any longer if she refuses therapy one more day, and so perhaps I should come and get her immediately before she can’t travel anymore.
• Her doctor says, if she is not eating, she is probably within a month of dying and would be eligible for an inpatient hospice facility here. We are all shocked, stunned and horrified by this.
• My mother responds to this news by eating a plate of chicken, potato salad and green beans, goes back to physical therapy, says she DOESN’T want to come to Connecticut because it’s too cold here, and besides that, damn it, she’s a FLORIDIAN, and what the hell does she mean even THINKING of moving when she is sick and tired and has no energy? She loves me but NO NO NO to Connecticut. Exact words: “I will not get on the plane.”
• I call hospice in Florida to see if they will help her if she stays in her own house.
• They are having a meeting and letting me know tomorrow. (They were sure she was coming up here. Perhaps they had thrown her file away.)
• The neighbor, meanwhile, says she knows aides who can come by in the morning to help, and the neighbor herself will be glad to do all the nursing care, and she thinks Medicare will pay, and I can pay some, too, and so can my mother, out of her social security check–because, after all, what else is it going to be needed for now?

So that is my life. It is no wonder I can’t write a blog post. I hardly even remember where to find my computer. I have no idea what I am doing EVER again.

She says something tonight on the phone that almost makes me laugh. “I’m not afraid of the unknown,” she tells me. “I’m just afraid of not being in control of it.”

Yeah. Me, too.

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.