On Not Being Too Low

Mom mutters through this tube that pumps fluid from her stomach. 

She muttered at me tonight, "Don't get too low.  I can't pull us both up."

It's a  very uneven dance that we do.  We all want to be honest.  At the same time, we're hunting for the way that our steps fit together.

Too much grief showing?  Not enough?

I feel defensive and angry at the cell phones (I turn mine off when I enter the hospital room), because I know mom, and I know her rhythms.  She likes to see people.  When there's a consultation of the doctors around her bed, I watch her, and she looks back at me and winks. 

She's in enormous pain.  I want her life to be filled with reading books, with the music that the family has recorded over the years, with something that is "real" in the way she means "real. 

But there is an urgency: every scrap of news has to be text-blasted out.  Spouses and family need a phone-call.  Somebody knows a world-renowned oncologist, and somebody takes the call.  Relatives in and out, ostensibly to give their love, but what they mean is, "To say goodbye."  Nurses in and out constantly.  Droves of doctors.  Constant chaos.  Computers on and researching the best medical texts and databases to find out what we want to know.

The only blessing is that the damned television hasn't been on at all.

Today there were a blessed thirty minutes or so that I had with her, and the room was still.  But the pain was bad, and her thumb flicked the morphine-release button all the time.

I read her Psalm 22:1-31.

She knows the rhythms of the psalms so well.  She was sleeping by the end.

So we're "not too low."  Good.

But here in this place, there's a tremendously thin line between "not too low" and "in the dust of death."

We are a paradox: we are not dead yet.  But death is our constant companion.