Death Stunts

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                                                                                    Marilyn Horan

Death Stunts

     Whenever my sister, brother or I asked our mother what she gifts she wanted for any major holiday or occasion, she always said the same thing:  “Oh, just a pair of white gloves.  Maybe a pair of stockings.”

     Upon further thought she said, “No, never mind.  Just knowing that I have such wonderful kids is enough of a present for me.  I want your presence,” she’d say enjoying one of her favorite phrases, witty and hollow, “not your presents.” 

     Yet one Mother’s Day in 1958, shortly after my seventh birthday, when neither her children nor her husband bought her anything as per her instructions, she wailed all morning, yelled and banged dishes around all afternoon as she prepared dinner, angrily lamented that she meant  “nothing to nobody.”  She was a fool for having gotten married, a “god-damned fool.”  

     “I was poked at and prodded by twenty doctors at a time so that I could have children,” she said bitterly referring to her five years of infertility treatments.  I had to lay on that table at the Methodist while whole classes of medical students, droves of men, came around to check me, look at me like a specimen--all to have children. And what did I get?  This!”  she spat, her hands outspread to include all of us miscreants.

     Her fury subsided into silent rage, then quiet tears, an occasional sob, and the rounded shoulders, heavy sighs, and mumblings that give the appearance of a broken heart.  We had to endure a week or so of her very public and terrible distress, leaving us anguished, frozen with humiliation, and rueful, wondering how none of us even remembered to get her a card, and vowing that the next holiday we would make it up to her.  None of us ever did forget a holiday or occasion important to my mother after this.  But, I do remember that from that miserable day on, whenever my mother said, “Please don’t get me anything for my birthday,” we knew she was lying, and knew there would be a prodigious price to pay for taking her at her word. 

     When, upon opening her presents, she exclaimed, “Oh! How beautiful! You shouldn’t have,” we breathed a sigh of relief, having propitiated the furious emotional beast who lay just below the surface with the power to destroy us all.  I know that she did regret her behavior on that Mother’s Day.  She apologized many times afterwards, and begged us to forget what had happened.   I believed her.  While she diminished everyone’s joy in gift-giving through her behavior, she also set herself up for a lifetime of discomfiture when receiving gifts, knowing that she had to go to extremes to ensure her presents, maybe to guarantee that she would feel loved.

     Lacking a provoking episode such as this, however, my mother could always rely on her one constant, never inappropriate, wellspring of pathos--her death--to create dramatic and mournful scenes.

       Ever since I can remember, my mother has talked about her own death, going on at length about the circumstances of her imminent demise.  Her favorite monologue concerned the type of coffin she would have.

      “A plain pine box,” is what she wanted because anything else would be “just throwing money away for nothing.”

     Once, having read an article about being buried in a burlap sack, she promptly declared that that was just the thing for her. 

     “That way they could just dump me in the ground,” was how she put it. 

     She made us, her three children, solemnly agree to her wishes for the humblest of burials.  And when we, innocent then and eager to please her, made the promise to do just that, she would pity herself for hours because she had such uncaring children.

      “Imagine--letting your own mother get rolled up in a piece of burlap and dumped.  This,” again dramatizing her words with hands outspread to encompass the entire miasma that was now her world, “this is what I gave up my life for.  I am thirty-eight years old and I have nothing, nothing but . . . this.”

     Not very fashionable in life, mother spent an inordinate amount of time debating the color and style of her burial gown, or burial dress, depending on whether her mood was high and elegant, or practical and no-nonsense. 

     “Not black,” she used to say deeply musing over colors.   “I want something bright, cheerful.  I want people to say, “Doesn’t she look good!”  

     Sometimes seeing a dress in a store window or in a magazine she would say, as if deciding on a china pattern, “Melanie, look at this dress.  That would be the perfect dress for me to be waked in.  What do you think?” 

     Other times she would exclaim, “Ugh!  Look at the wishy-washy color of this dress.  Make sure, Melanie, make sure you do not wake me in something like that!” 

     During particularly dejected phases she would instruct us, but mostly me, the youngest and most gullible, to just tell the funeral director to roll her up in the sheet she died on and put her in the coffin just like that, and lock it so no one would see her. 

     Other times she would opine loudly as to the pros and cons of a full casket versus a half casket. 

     “A full casket is a just a waste of good money.  A half casket will be fine.  Remember, Melanie, I don’t want anybody stuffing my feet into some ridiculous shoes.  My feet hurt all the time now as it is, I don’t want to spend eternity in agonizing pain.  Besides, they hike up the prices for shoes you buy from the funeral home.  You could buy those same shoes from National for four ninety-nine.  And then they’d tell you that they have to dye the shoes to match the dress and that would cost an arm and a leg.  Let’s leave it at a half-casket, okay?”

     “Okay,” I would answer, terrified and weak with sadness and worry that I would not remember all the details when the time came.  But the instructions continued.  A high Mass with full choir and incense and altar boys was sometimes her chosen last ritual, while at other times she proclaimed that she just wanted a few muttered prayers and a little holy water sprinkled about.

    “You don’t have to tell the whole neighborhood,” she would say humbly, seeming to enjoy the friendlessness and bleakness she had created for herself.  Looking at some far-off point, tears would well in her eyes and a small smile of nobility and pride formed on her lips.  Soon she would sigh powerfully and rise up to peel the potatoes that were a part of every evening meal.

    Often, when she had the appropriate audience--any combination of her husband, children, and two or three favored nieces or nephews--mother would enact one of her death stunts.  Sitting at the kitchen table, nonchalantly eating, or drinking a cup of coffee, my mother would suddenly bug her eyes out of her head, clutch her throat, gasp for breath, and utter strangled sounds.

      “Help! Help!” she would whisper desperately as she slumped to the floor where she would remain until we forced her out of it by poking her with our feet, tickling her, or dropping water on her head, into her nose if she was being particularly recalcitrant about getting up from her morbid posture.  The nieces and nephews found it funny, not having been subjected to it as often as we, her children, had been. 

    There was a time when I was very young that Mom’s scenes scared me and I would cry and try to detect signs of life--her breathing, her heart beating-- but I soon learned, as did my brother and sister before me, to say, “Get up, Ma.  You’re a fool,” and ignore her.  What would really get her up was if we uttered a curse such as, “Get the hell up,” because if there was one thing Mom couldn’t, wouldn’t stand, was disrespectful language.  Yet there was always a slight chance, I thought, that this time she really was having a heart attack and just because she cried wolf so often did not mean that this time she was not really in trouble.  At times Mom would lie there until she began to giggle, unable to maintain the death pose.  Other times she would wait until no one paid any more attention to her. 

   When she finally did arise from the floor, she would say, disgustedly brushing dust and crumbs off herself, “See!  No one would even help me.  What if I really was dead?  I hope you kids feel good someday when your own mother is dead and you stood around and watched her die.”

            Once Mom decided to use her skit prove a point to my cousin Geraldine.  My mother, upon hearing my brother Tom approach the house, lay on the kitchen floor, in front of the refrigerator.  Tom came in, greeted Geraldine, stepped over Mom’s body to get a soda from the refrigerator, and continued to chat with Geraldine.  He ignored the corpse for several minutes, sufficient time for my mother to display her only son’s utter disregard for his mother. 

    She arose triumphantly declaring:  “What did I tell you?  Didn’t I tell you he wouldn’t even notice me?  Huh?  Don’t have children, Geraldine.  They’re not worth it.  They are not worth it.”     

    Geraldine laughs incredulously every time she recounts this story, never settling on who was crazier, my mother or my brother. 

            As we got older, Mom stopped her death stunts, maybe finally realizing the futility of her behavior.

  Years later, I had more than enough opportunities to see my mother in real-life death scenes and they were only slightly like the fake ones.  Only my terror and dread remained the same.  There was the five a.m. phone call during which she told me in a whisper that she was having pains in her stomach that were so bad she could hardly breathe.  The colostomy that followed was a horrible solution to that torment.  There was the gruesome announcement by her doctor, a few weeks later, that the breast cancer she thought had been arrested with the sacrifice of her breast, had actually sought refuge in her bones and was eating away at them, causing her excruciating suffering.  Radiation treatment followed, focus points outlined in black felt-tip pen on her white, white skin.  Chemotherapy, palliative rather than curative, caused debilitating bouts of retching, followed by long periods of exhaustion and depression. 

    There was the sight of her face, waxy, serene almost, in the ambulance after a stroke, when she could not respond to me, except by looking mildly at me as the doors to the ambulance swung open, and there she was, yet again, almost dead, in the posture of death, yet alive, as always.

    I saw her skeleton, irradiated and glowing on the screens of doctors who scanned her dry old bones to determine the damage and prescribe treatment.  I recoiled in horror as her spine, thigh bones, ribs, and half of her head lit up like an electrified Halloween rattle-bones, and prayed to God to let her die, as much to relieve her suffering as to relieve mine.

   “This is the real thing,” I said to myself while looking at the glowing wicks of cancer, seeming to burn more brilliantly at each scan.  My mother avoided looking at the screen, sticking to her theory that what she didn’t see or know wouldn’t hurt her.

    “I’m gonna fight this damn thing,” my mother insisted.  “Doctor Snyder says people can live with this for years.  Some people are even cured completely,” she said full of hope, and nobody disputed her.

   I wondered if, while going through this mortal battle, my mother ever thought of the death stunts which she carried out so often as a young healthy woman.  In her last couple of years she never mentioned the word death.  All her comments about pine boxes, shoes, dresses, and ceremonies were gone.  She got plenty of attention at the end of her life--being driven to doctors, receiving daily calls from concerned friends and relatives, having food prepared for her, opening get-well cards and presents, and getting anguished looks from her middle-aged, and soon-to-be-orphaned children who were always warned that this time would come, threatened that this time would come, yet who never expected it to be so real, nor to take so long to be over.