She . . . Is Sky

Each cure has its limits. Five months of chemotherapy has done all it can, diminishing my mother's cancer cells by 80 percent—at the cost of saturating every system in her body with poison.She tells me to be sure and let people know, don't ever take full chemo. The new treatments give half dose with a sugar tracer to direct the injection right to the cancer. The rest of the body stays protected.“Now—I have to grin and bear the damage. That's what our ancestors said. Try it. Just move your muscles in your face. It makes a difference. It shifts something. See, they knew.”The first morning when the nerve pain set in, my mother called me to her bedroom, which she never does, in a kind of panic, which she never shows.She frisked her fingers over the bedspread, like she was blind looking for something precious that was lost.“Squeeze my feet, please come over and squeeze my feet. Pain, pain—what's the antidote? Pleasure . . . put a croissant in the oven, put all of them in the oven, I'm going to eat them all, with sour cream and cherry preserves. Oh, give me a whole bowl of cherry preserves.”Neuropathy had taken over like a forest fire.“Mom, what is this pain like?”“Pins and needles on an electric current,” she said. “Like I'm being shocked all over my body—nonstop.”She forced herself to walk, pacing back and forth from her bedroom to the kitchen, trying to chase it out, trying to get away from the foreboding realization that she has now been taken over by a new, irreversible affliction.Good and evil—bound together in a continuum like an ascending spiral. It's a gradual connection like a color spectrum. Large and slow at the bottom. Tiny and intense at the top.There is no decisive moment where one turns into the other. It depends on where you are within yourself, and the moment in which you decide when the change happens. My mother walks leaning forward now, guided by her hands stretched out ahead. She begins each day swimming through the air into the kitchen.“It's like I'm drunk,” she says and laughs. “That's my morning gait. It's like I am walking on two hollow sticks. I barely have contact with my legs.”The needling tingle in her feet has taken over her limbs.She doesn't want more drugs, nor a cane—nor anything else a cane represents.Her eyes circumscribe the space around her. She stabilizes with her gaze focused on the ground. She listens to her walking, like she is walking through her listening.Sometimes by losing external balance, we gain more internal balance. It's in that tension between where we are and where we want to be, as if these two states were two distinct eyes, coming to focus on one thing.I look into my mother's deep, clear hazel eyes. They have so much energy—sometimes I feel I need to turn away. The center point is so strong.Twenty years ago, an iridologist told my mother to watch her left ovary. He noticed something off center in the map of her eye.Who knows how long this disease has been present. Was it in her body from birth as a kind of program embedded in her original design? Or was it caused by some experience from the outside passing through like one of those life stresses, or environmental poisons, or a sickness—even a virus?Can we rewind to the beginning so we can get to the end?We are inside a circle that is inside us.The most important symbol in my mother's life is the circle. For her it is the whole universe with our sun at the center. It is everything in movement focused on one point radiating out in balanced parts to the periphery—and back.Like an echo.If things go off-center, they can get chaotic—like the way cancer cells grow:centers making copies and dividingbecoming two, becoming four, becoming eightlosing center, losing pattern—growing without sense.My mother finds new centers.The circle is the magical boundary of our lives. The mage knows how to trace a circle; that's what gives her power. To manifest something, you need a center to unify everything so there is an uninterrupted connection, a harmony between all parts.The still center point keeps the circle organized.The eye is a dot within a circle within a sphere.The top of the mountain is the center of a circle.Without a solar center, the stars would fall. My mother's surgery is in the morning.We are getting close to the longest night of the year.A possum has walked to the kitchen window four nights in a row. I have never seen a possum come this way before. And here I am, at the sink each time. Maybe it's a messenger.It follows its quivering nose, tracing scent with quick scans to the right, to the left—never in a straight line.The possum is known for “playing dead.” This is a life defense mechanism, but she does so involuntarily. Her stress level will put her into a coma where she looks dead, letting her tongue fall out of her open mouth. She defecates a foul odor to keep prey away. And at the right time, she will wake from the coma to resume her parenting responsibilities . . . My mother sits up in her hospital bed and looks right at me. “It ends here, today. No matter what happens, it's never going to get me.”Covered in an aluminum quilt pumped with hot air, in a few moments she will go under anesthesia. She will separate off from her body like the ancient ones who went into deep isolation and sensory deprivation to expand for a short time into the eternal.They would go deep into inner space carrying a question—their very own question, and had to reach it in the right way, or else the answer would be nothing.What mattered was how the response in darkness affected them—if it changed them or left them as it found them. The answer itself was of no concern. What was most important was whether the communication kindled and released their own powers within. It's a chilly October night—unusual for this time of year in Florida.Everyone gathers outside. My mother is surrounded by her family that drove across the country from St. Louis.We tiptoe around the heavy specter of this expanding, sneaky pandemic. This is a time when we need to hug more, but instead we don't touch at all. We have accepted spatial distance, but not social distance. We stick together.The suspicion that anyone could be a carrier without knowing troubles me more than the actual risk itself.The night is gently lit by candle flames shimmering under glass hurricane lanterns. We each take to our own little corner on the terrace. The damp cold soaks into our summer spines. We cocoon ourselves under wool blankets and sit in a crescent moon facing my friend, the musician . . . because tonight we are going to celebrate life together with a house concert in our backyard.The microphone and amp are now in place and the music begins. We soften into my friend's warm voice. My mother swings her feet in rhythm. She takes in the old folk songs from the sixties right into her breath, humming to the words that most of us have forgotten.And music does its thing, igniting our nostalgia. We slip beyond the dawning of that Aquarian Age through the tunnel of generations lived before us, looking for a glimpse of ourselves.New versions of old family legends are spun. We seek new threads, knowing this will probably be my mother's last contribution to our heritage loom. Bloodline is a psychic thread.We are formed in miniscule time capsules—three generations compressed into one body, like Russian nesting dolls. The female fetus at four months completes her life supply of all eggs within her ovaries. We begin our existence as an egg for five months inside our grandmother's body.As the night ends, my mother gets very cold right into the bones. We soak her feet. She's quiet. She's dropped eight more pounds this week.She tucks her chin in and says, “The disease is on a ravage . . . I read through my cousin's last emails just before she passed away. She said her big body was getting so cold and fatigued.”That was in the height of summer. They were in communication for a few months, sharing the irony that both had cancer in their abdomen.My mother thinks it's possible to heal seven generations of damaged genetic code in our body. “Mom, what does your cancer feel like?”“Five times more swelling than when you eat Thanksgiving dinner. It wakes me up at night—I can't get away from it.”It's been one and a half years since my mother's diagnosis.She started a new drug last night. Another move to try and stop the cancer. It made her so sick today; it brought her to the edge of tears.We realized together—without talking—that the end is coming, and it will be physically devastating. She vomits up her food now. She can only sip water.But she scoffs at the mention of palliative care. She wants no intervention . . . at least as of this hour. My mother is not so impressed by “death.” She keeps saying, “There is no separation.” She thinks the rituals and accoutrements of death are ridiculous—the somber memorial, the dark clothes, the illusion of emptiness, the gloom, the whole tier of services and fees. Dying can be very expensive!She doesn't have much strength left to speak, but she agrees it's time for hospice. It's been a week since she's held down any food. Quiet people come in and out of the house like little mice bringing things in, taking things out. Watching. Calculating. Waiting.We have to lobby for an IV to give her brain hydration. Hospice tells me they give it to help her die—not to help her live.Then, suddenly, in the middle of the night, with the IV bag still half full, my mother tells me to unplug the tube. Then she tells me to turn on all the lights in the house, every single one—in every room.So, OK, it's going to happen now, she's going out with the light. I do what I am told, but I have no idea what on Earth I'm doing. She tells me she wants a MacDonald's fish burger and fries and a coke.I look at her incredulously, this will be such a hard vomit. But she insists. She is so hungry.She sits up with this new spunky surge. Maybe this is that infamous last hurrah, filled with the fullness of life before the final retreat.I line my car up in the long drive-through queue under that great plastic yellow arch, waiting interminably in the company of my own ambivalence. Will she be alive by the time I get back? Will I have missed the moment of mystery because my back-to-earth mother wants to eat junk for her last supper?She unfolds the paper wrapping to carefully reveal this precious holy host like it's her last intercourse with the ground of her existence.And eats . . . very . . . slowly.And everything . . . stays down. A month later, my mother is still here. Hospice has left because my mother isn't dying on measurable time.Her Gemini personality is at play. Who are you now?She code switches between her twin sides, she is the vibrant risk taker, she is the solemn introvert mystic.My mother plays solitaire card games at the kitchen table. She says she does it to free up her thinking and get answers. She plays a game called “13” where you lay the cards down in a triangle, and then eliminate them by pairs that add up to 13. She has a way of understanding numbers like a language. She reads the number combinations fast as she is thinking about things, and the number pairs give her answers.Deep reality is a system of relationships—life is intelligent that way, how it writes itself by way of connection.She tells me, three weeks earlier she woke up from a strong dream. She does that, keeps things to herself and waits a long time before sharing. She was in the presence of a tall, slim man dressed in white with white hair and a beard. She says it was Melchizedek. She says he was an utterly beautiful, luminous being standing quietly with a gentle smile emanating a sense of calm and a deep love—not sentimental, more like the kind one uses to heal. She says he touched every cell in her being and lit it up with a divine emanation.“It was the calm that was most remarkable.” She says, “If he walked all over the earth, there would be no war.”She thinks he may have been preparing her way to the other side. He was as close as her own breath. She says a huge energy came over her like a wave. Her skin tone is getting closer to ash gray. My brother and I carry her to bed, because she can no longer move, she is so limp from malnutrition.“My God, now we've come to this,” she says.Her body is like a tired fish on the bank . . . yielding and waiting.She does not like to be bathed or touched at all.She says, “You are moving me away from my way.”The days seem to have less time to tell us who we are together. They are just waves now, coming in and out. We are not winter; the Olympics do not matter.The sun turns around a succession of pains.The soul incubates like a caterpillar, dissolving itself entirely to become something else. Day 44 of no eating. Hospice is back. They are waiting for her to die. They say they have never seen someone hang on like this before. Four hospice care workers have asked me if they can bring a chaplain to the house. Maybe mom needs to confess something, let the last bit of darkness go before becoming pure light.But she scoffs. She does not need a chaplain, nor a psychologist. She is her own counsel. She has always been her own counsel.She can manage her own thoughts and feelings, but sometimes she can't bear the hunger. I give her a few spoonfuls. She chews it like a sacred mantra, then spits it out, and then the retching comes . . . My mother curls tighter and tighter into the fetal position;this is how we prepare to go through the canal at birth—and death.She dreams of the canal now, she sees the tunnel, she goes in and out. She says she is not sure if it is the beginning or the end. Maybe they are the same.She says, “To see forward, I need to look back to understand how I have constructed my thinking, so I can resolve the thing that got stuck in my body. The future is not in front, it's behind.”I go to light the long vigil candle. There is soot on the glass from the night before. My mother wants me to wipe away the soot before I strike the flame.She is mostly in a dormant state now, turning into a 1000-year-old olive tree . . . the kind that are the last to cling to their native rocky land . . . Hospice says dying is like labor. The timing depends on the person. For most people it takes long, hard work to make the passage. People do a lot of processing in their stillness before making that great leap.We have to protect this phase so my mother can complete herself.I can't look at these text messages anymore that pray for her to recover.Who has the courage here to let her big self . . . dissolve?Who can sustain the depth of parting? All three of us sleep together in mom's room: my brother stretched out on the old upholstered chair and ottoman, and mom and I in her bed. We are like lazy dogs now, hanging out in dreams together . . . somewhere.Mom says she's going crazy.She talks about moving back to Hawaii. She is in love with the aloha spirit. She used to talk about this man she would see on Nimitz beach on the west side of Oahu near the military base.I was contemplating the water and felt the presence of someone behind me. He was a tall handsome Hawaiian with his baby, consecrating him upward to the sun and dipping him into the water. It was all time, he was standing on the and the water for the right moment to a big He and in five big Four other had been there all and he each one a fish and one for He had the within. man have been a are things she she take back to with her. She me when we have to move out of this house. She wants to who will move in we She says she is going to on Oahu and She says she wants and a big is so can't through the squeeze water through a into her to help her is now. she has been dying for a long is Day of Day a full My brother at a of my mother's bed. He talks about on full It was a family He talks about the on and how long it takes to up to those we rest . . . My mother on her is the first time in all these months that we don't her. My brother and her eyes into reality where we do not I gently her mouth. We away the from her We off her night We carefully her up a . . . and . . . we look at her . . . quietly . . . as her put my hands on her my brother his on her I to my mother for the last time, are with your you are going back into the stars . . . for that moment of mystery that we will change each can be one long in the it doesn't come my brother his and his the of her go to where all the things we do not have their being . . . in an open space around the light possible . . . and then the mother's to the away from the at with all the inside her . . . is the deep that into stillness that is her own is to my lived this experience together for two of the here were with her for There were some things about this disease that she felt to be known to the is on a The by in this is from in the am to my family and who brought and and to my brother with his and to the whole of hospice care that brought their and into our in of all the who have from and of their who have the way before