Matthew Vollmer
I couldn't watch more than a few seconds of the video my father texted me from his phone; its subject was my mother, who appeared—finally—to be dying. The scene unfolded like a clip from an amateur horror film. My mother's pale, sweaty face—brow furrowed, the clasps of a dental napkin holder clutching a towel beneath her chin—was backlit against a dark background, casting her in a ghastly light. She looks like a haint, I thought. It was a word she might've used to describe herself, had she the wherewithal to make assessments about her physical appearance, which she had once meticulously but reasonably maintained. In the movie, her eyes were pinched shut. She unleashed a wet, wretched cough—fluid had been pooling in her lungs—and then struggled to breathe. I tapped the screen. The image froze. My father had sent a second video; its pitch-black icon suggested a worsening. But I'd seen enough. I knew that a semi-retired doctor—and one of my father's dental patients—had recently visited my parents' house, listened to my mother's lungs with a stethoscope, and diagnosed her with pneumonia. "It could be two days or two months," she'd said. This is it, I thought. The end was finally happening. We—my wife, son, and I, having decided to make the five-hour trip to western North Carolina—began to pack our respective bags. My wife canceled our Friday night plans. I called my friend Evan to see if he could, in our absence, meet a repairman—the drum of our washing machine was full of undrained water—and feed our cat. He agreed. We were on the road by four. My son fell almost instantly asleep. My wife and I didn't talk, except when she instructed me to slow down. Had we turned on the radio, we might've heard about the young man who'd been arrested at a Walmart in Springfield Missouri, wearing body armor and pushing a cartload of guns, or the ICE officers who, on the first day of school, had arrested 680 undocumented workers in Mississippi. In Bristol, we stopped at a Chik-Fil-A, where, in the parking lot, I stuffed four chicken fingers plus a serving of waffle fries into my face. Evan texted to say the washing machine, which had once belonged to my mother, had been fixed; the repairman said to tell us that we should never get rid of it, because this particular model, despite its age, would never die. We re-entered traffic on I-81. The August sun bore down upon us. I tried to adjust my sunglasses so that their arms or whatever were angled toward the top of my head rather than toward my ears, as the flesh on the left side of my head was tender to the touch; the night before, while sitting with two colleagues on an outside patio, where we had met to drink whiskey and discuss the respective projects we'd been working on during the summer, a bee or wasp or hornet had bounced off my head, but not before it'd jabbed me with its stinger—an event that happened so quickly that neither of my friends had witnessed it, and therefore found it difficult, at least at first, to believe. As I fingered the sore spot, I couldn't help but remember how, as a child, I'd once sat down on a yellowjacket nest, and once the things began to sting me, I simply began to writhe, screaming, on the ground; my father, who'd been cutting brush nearby, had heard me yelling, scooped me into his arms, and rushed me to a nearby creek, to dunk me in water and swat the wasps away. "I saved your life," he often said, whenever the memory of this event surfaced, and I couldn't disagree. I tried to imagine what it would be like for my father to live—once my mother passed—by himself, and if he'd continue to do the kinds of things that he'd taught himself to do that my mother no longer could—baking bread, canning applesauce, making tomato and cabbage stew—in the enormous house he'd shared with her for almost 30 years, and how heartbreakingly lonely he'd likely be at the end of that long, winding gravel road, on property whose back end bordered a national forest that was half a million acres in size. Imagining him all alone up there, at night, slipping out of bed in his tighty-whiteys to retrieve a flashlight and a gun whenever he happened to hear a noise he couldn't identify as normal, made me recall the "ghost story" he'd told my sister and me the time we'd camped at the bottom of the hill where the house now stands, long before it was built, and how that particular tale had centered on a strange sound he'd heard one night when he was alone—my mother had been out of town to visit her parents—and before my sister and I had been born; the recurring thud that had worried him turned out not to be an agent of menace but merely a dog's tail whapping against the wood of the front porch. I realized I couldn't remember if my father had introduced this story as an actual ghost story, or simply a scary one, only that he told it before a campfire and that, either way, it would've made sense that no actual ghosts appeared in the story, since nobody in my family believed in ghosts, because the bible said, in the book of Ecclesiastes, that the dead know not anything, and so we believed, as we had been taught, that when you died you didn't go to heaven or hell or wander the earth dragging phantasmagoric chains but instead went to sleep and then rose from the ground when Jesus returned in a cloud of angels. I considered, then, the few graves in our family cemetery in the woods behind my parents' house, and I remembered the movie that my brother-in-law made of my grandmother—my father's mother, whose house was just down the road from his—sleeping on the day of her death in the big recliner where she used to watch Oprah and Matlock and Perry Mason at ear-splitting levels. I returned, too, to the image of my cousins and uncle and father carrying my grandmother's homemade coffin through the spring snow, through a rhododendron brake and into the clearing, where they lowered it into a freshly dug grave. I knew that my father had commissioned one of his friends to build two coffins, each made of pine, for himself and my mother, because he'd texted me, several years ago, a picture of my then-smiling mother posing beside them. I couldn't help but wonder now if I'd have a hand in the digging of her grave. I turned the phrase I dug my mother's grave over in my head, thinking that maybe it would be the first sentence of something I'd later write. I supposed digging a grave would be a difficult, if not arduous task. I could smell the earthen banks, wet and dank, clotted with arterial roots, worms oozing from the walls. My mother's face—the version I'd seen in the film my father had taken—kept appearing in my mind: her mouth dark and sunken, cave-like. She didn't know she'd been videoed. Soon, she would be gone. I would then live for the first time in a world in which I had no mother. It didn't strike me as tragic, exactly—after all, there were plenty of people in the world who'd spent most of their lives without mothers; my own wife, whose mother had died when she was 14, had already lived 30 years without hers. And, in some ways, my mother was already gone. It was difficult to think of the person she had once been—painter; gardener; photographer; sewer of clothes; baker of bread; maker of strawberry jam; player of piano; faithful correspondent to family and friends; lover of flowers and birds and all things bright and beautiful—as having anything to do with the person she had become: a zombified body who could no longer speak in whole sentences or recognize the faces of people she used to love. "The left lane is for passing," my wife reminded me. "You can't just sit there forever." I couldn't help but disagree. After all, we were making such good time, despite the other bozos on the road! Tractor trailers shuddered as we passed. A young woman in a Chevy Chevelle from the '80s was texting as she drove. Old men in trucks swerved in front of us without using their blinkers. We passed Asheville—the city of my birth—and then the road to Mt. Pisgah, the boarding school where, over 50 years ago, my parents first began to "go steady"—and then the Nantahala River, where, as a teenager, I'd served, albeit poorly, as a whitewater raft guide. We arrived at my parents' house at sundown, and were greeted by my sister and her children, who wore solemn expressions. "Your firstborn has arrived," my father said cheerily, as I entered the sun porch, which my parents had converted into their bedroom. My mother moved her eyes—but not so much her head—to look at me. Her expression—one that suggested she might be mildly irritated—remained unchanged. She coughed. The phrase death rattle appeared in my head. I squeezed her hand and said, "Hi Mama" but because I didn't know what else to say, nothing more. She didn't respond, and when my father and sister tried to lift her out of bed and onto a portable toilet, I left the room. In the kitchen, there was a stack of pizza boxes. Bags of chips. Boxes of cinnamon rolls. Comfort foods, for people who weren't my mother, who'd been having trouble swallowing, hadn't eaten anything since the previous day, and had drunk only a few ounces of water, squirted into her mouth by syringe. We might've taken her to a hospital, had her hooked up to an IV. "But why prolong the inevitable?" my father said. I agreed. People began passing around the Mary-Englebreit-brand journal that my mother had given my sister on the occasion of her 18th birthday, a book that directed its writer, using a series of prompts, to provide descriptions of members of both sides of our family tree. The entries had all been handwritten by my mother, and each one reflected her lifelong attempt to wed cursive and print. Even so, she had not, over the course of 50 or so pages of writing, made a single error: no strikeouts, no Wite-Outs, no re-dos. My mother, back when she was fully herself, had not often made mistakes. The book reminded me that my father's maternal grandparents, when first wedded, rode together in a motorcycle and side car. And that my paternal grandfather had a horse named Buddy, that he could ride while standing barefoot on its back, and that once, riding in this manner, he'd hit his head on a tree branch and fallen off; when he came to, the horse was standing over him. And that my maternal grandmother had been so poor as a child that she'd lived with her family in a tent. And that my paternal grandmother was once run over a car while she was sledding, and that though her sled had been broken into a million pieces, my grandmother was completely unharmed. And that my paternal grandfather's own mother had died when he was only 14. Concerning this event, my mother had only written: "His world fell apart." Nobody talked about the obvious irony: that my mother, whose dying had robbed her of the ability to remember, had served for 40 years as the chief curator of the ways in which our family attempted, however feebly, to return to the past. The evidence of this was everywhere: the photograph albums in my parents' study, the diaries she'd kept—one for my sister, one for me—that detailed the events of our childhoods, the daybooks in which she recorded which birds had visited her feeders. On my parents' refrigerator, dozens of magnetic sleeves preserved photographs of family and friends, and the fact that my mother had been the person who had taken the majority of the pictures announced itself in a way that made her seem both present and absent in every one. "Just today," my father said, "for the very first time, I imagined what it would be like to live in this house alone." His eyes teared up but he didn't cry. "I keep thinking about all the things she'll probably never do again, like ride in a car," he said. The phone rang and rang. Kids and adults stared zombielike into their phones, flicking thumbs across their surfaces, tapping their screens madly. My wife and I retired to the bedroom that used to be my sister's and had been used most recently by a 43-year-old woman named Tina, who served, during the week, as my mother's caretaker, and who had arranged, in a childlike manner, a collection of rocks on top of a dresser. We opened windows and turned off the lights; the moon cast shadows and crickets roared outside: great inchoate rhythms whose repeated cycling I found soothing. The next morning, nobody went to church, even though it was Saturday—my family's day of rest and worship. Using some kind of digital finger clip thingy, my sister—a physician's assistant—determined that my mother's oxygen levels had improved. My nephew and I accompanied my father to his dental office to retrieve a stethoscope so that her breathing could be better monitored, but failed to remember—and thus look for—the chickens that had showed up recently and begun to roost in the bushes outside the building; perhaps they had been devoured by a dog or coyote. On Main Street, we passed a makeshift yard sale in a vacant lot, presided over by a man with a big white beard, and because his tables were draped with a series of Confederate flags, I asked my father to turn around, so I could take a picture, which I posted to Instagram with the hashtags #speechless and #hometown and #stereotypes. Later in the day, I opened the front door of my parents' house to greet my aunt and uncle and cousin and my cousin's husband and their kids, who'd driven from Greenville, South Carolina to visit my mother, and was astonished to see my 100-year-old grandmother, who lived at what I liked to describe as the world's most luxurious nursing home, sitting in the front seat of their black Audi Quattro. "Can you believe it?" my aunt exclaimed, as if she too were flabbergasted. I supposed, but did not confirm, that she had assumed it might be my mother's and grandmother's last chances to see each other; even so, after my grandmother was wheeled to the bed where my mother lay, and obeyed my aunt's instruction to hold her daughter's hand, it wasn't clear that either woman recognized the other. "That's your daughter," my aunt said, loudly. "Talk to her!" And so, my grandmother, ever acquiescent, gently reminded my mother to be "a good girl," and that she should "try to find something nice to do," and to read "something from the bible." Then she touched the fabric of my mother's pants—navy blue dotted with bright speckles—and said how much she liked them. Though this interaction felt too sacred to record with anything but my mind, I used my phone to video it. My wife, I noticed, fanned her fingers in front of her eyes, as if attempting to cast a spell over her face that would make her stop crying. My uncle, who'd bought 48 sandwiches from a place called Duke's, which had been in the sandwich-making business since World War I—peanut butter and jelly; egg salad; chicken salad; pimento cheese; and cream cheese, pecan, and pineapple, each individually wrapped and made with white bread, and transported via a series of coolers—wondered if anybody was hungry. "What did you say your name was?" my grandmother asked, as I wheeled her into the dining room. "Matthew," I replied. "Oh!" she exclaimed, "Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John!" "That's right," I said. I parked her in front of the dining room table, then went to retrieve a piece of chocolate cake, which I set before her, marveling, as I watched her eat, that she could use a fork better than my mother, who was 27 years her junior. In the kitchen, my wife, who'd decided that now was as good as any to make enchiladas, ripped meat from the bones of a rotisserie chicken. The house was now teeming with people who had come to say goodbye to a person they weren't actually saying goodbye to, and who wasn't saying goodbye to them. My mom's best friend from high school, who had driven up from Stone Mountain, asked me, as she always did, if I remembered the weekend, over 30 years before, when she'd babysat my sister and me, and how we'd gone on a bike ride together, and how, had she not screamed my name, I might've ridden my bike through an intersection without looking, and therefore I should be thankful to her for her having saved, at such a young age, my life. Meanwhile, in the living room, her husband articulated a conspiracy theory concerning the future of American currency, which he concluded by saying that we were surely living in the last days. My friend Todd, who I met years ago in an Algebra class at the boarding school we both attended, texted me a black and white photo of his mother in the bed of the nursing home where she lived; even though she looked healthy to me, she'd been battling a UTI, the side effects of which caused her to throw water bottles at the staff and to claim that her son had poisoned her food and murdered his family. This was the world in which we were now living: a world that was coming to an end for our mothers. To escape the chaos, a few of us took a walk down the road, which ran alongside a roaring stream, and ripped off rhododendron branches to wave away storms of gnats, and gossiped about the woman who was living a quarter mile down the road, in my dead grandmother's house; in the late 1970s, this woman had been selected to engage in a wrestling match with Andy Kaufman on Saturday Night Live, and by doing so had won the respect of Kaufman, subsequently becoming, for a short while, the man's girlfriend. According to my father, this same woman, despite owning an extensive collection of high-end jewelry and priceless artwork, hadn't paid rent for months. Back at my parents' house, I stripped down to my underwear and jumped into the pond that lived at the bottom of the hill; the water was so cold that it was hard at first to catch my breath, but I kept moving, wondering about the location of the snapping turtle my father had recently tried to shoot with a rifle from the kitchen window 50 yards away. My son joined me, and I admired, as I often do, his chiseled physique, noting, once again, that he was the only one of my mother's three grandchildren who could be said to remember with any clarity what she was like before her memory began to dissolve, back when she cut up photographs and used stickers and yarn and sheets of colored construction paper to make him little books and cards that she sent through the mail, back when she could still make chocolate chip cookies and sweet rolls and her famous vegetarian meatloaf. I wondered what his 16-year-old brain was thinking. School would begin for him in a few days, and because my wife no longer drives on the highway—the very idea causes her panic meter to flutter—I would need to drive them home to Virginia, possibly turning around the next day to make a return trip to North Carolina. When I finally said goodbye to my mother, I kissed her on the lips, which I couldn't remember ever having done before; her mouth smelled, I thought, like death. And when I told her goodbye—thinking this might likely be the last time I would see her alive—and tried to give her a hug, tears flooded my eyes. Though she moved her head and frowned, as if irritated, she brightened when my six foot teenager bent down to say, "It's me, grandma, your first grandchild." On the drive back, my wife and I fought several times about my driving; I followed each of her complaints with the same defiant outburst, as if I could prove, by simply raising my voice, that I hadn't done anything wrong. "You need to read some articles about the psychological fear of driving," she said, once we finally reached our house. A better man than I—but not one who could love my wife any more than I did—might've done so right then. Instead, I took a shower, poured myself a vodka tonic, and sat down to write my mother's eulogy. Halfway through, I Googled "men's suits," and ordered, for the first time in nearly two decades, a pair of pants and jacket, both black. Later, my sister sent me a photo of my mother smiling next to one of my cousins, who'd decided at the last minute to drive up to visit her. "Mom was so alert," my sister texted. "WTF," I typed. My sister replied with a "haha." My mother, it seemed, while not exactly on the mend, was no longer coughing. The death rattle had disappeared. The next day, Tina, the caretaker, reported that she'd fed my mother, who hadn't eaten anything in three days, the entirety of an open-faced tomato sandwich. "What is going on?" I asked my sister. She didn't know. The doctor—the one who'd supplied the initial diagnosis—hadn't been back to visit, and so couldn't revise her verdict. The end, apparently, was not as close as we'd imagined. I couldn't help but feel disappointed. I wanted my mother's suffering to end. I'd prepared myself to greet the world without the person who'd brought me into it, but her body had other plans, as bodies often do. I thought about how my father's own father, who'd lived in the fall of 1987 for 17 days without food or water before he died. A few days later, a cardboard box appeared outside my door. I took it into the bedroom and opened it. Inside: the suit I'd ordered, the one I'd planned to wear to my mother's funeral. I tried it on. It fit, more or less. The jacket was a bit snug—a reminder, maybe, that I could stand to lose a few. And maybe I would, before all was said and done. For now though, there was nothing more to do than to remove the suit, hang it on a hanger that its maker had provided, and set the hook on a rung inside the bedroom closet, close the door, and turn out the light.