Today is the three-year anniversary of the death of my sister Rhonda.  Today is also the 46th birthday of  her daughter Carma.

This is something I wrote about that night when Rhonda’s death and Carma’s birthday were twisted onto the same date…

 

I went back into the dim light of the room. It felt like we were underwater in some timeless place. I swore Rhonda looked even whiter than before. I lifted the end of her blanket and felt her only foot. It was ice. I moved my hand partially up her leg, following the cold waxiness to her knee. The flesh had mottled into a blotchy mess of white and purple. I checked her hands. They were the same. I tucked the blanket back around her and walked as fast as I could to the nurses’ station. 

I found the nurse that had stood in the doorway while the document had been signed, “I think she’s dying faster than we thought. Can you please come back and check?” She followed me, felt and looked at her leg, her hands and then looked at me, “Whoever wants to be here should get here now.” 

We moved out into the hall to talk. The nurse put her hand on my arm, “She’s going much faster than we thought. It’s a dramatic shift from when we washed her only a couple of hours ago.” 

I nodded and sent my texts to Carma and Sean, “They think she might die by tonight.” 

I spent the next few hours alone with Rhonda. Occasionally I would speak to her, tell her that it was almost done now, that she was going to be at peace, that her children were strong and doing fine, that it was wonderful that she’d provided them with an inheritance, that she was loved, that I would miss her. I marvelled to myself, and out loud to her, how in the end, it was all just about love.

In between my bits of conversation, I sat and watched as her face transformed to look exactly like Mom did in her last few hours. I never thought they looked that much alike, but certainly in death, they became twins. Watching Rhonda’s face was like I was back watching those last minutes with Mom. 

Our mother’s death was thirty years ago. I had to think hard about the numbers. Rhonda, at 62 years old, was only a year younger than Mom was when she died. 

Rhonda’s face continued to sink and settle, pushing her cheekbones forward and out of her face. Each minute that passed revealed more of her skull. I was glad the nurses had removed all her makeup. Yet without all her heavy eyeshadow, liner and lipstick, the look that Carma referred to as her Tammy Faye face, she looked even more ghostly.

Carma arrived straight from work. Leah, one of her oldest friends, was with her. Carma said, “Mom asked if Leah could be here at the end.”

Sean texted around 6:30 pm. “I’m on my way out there. Do you want anything? A snack-maybe a meal?”

I checked with Leah and Carma and then wrote back, “How about KFC?” 

I wondered if Sean would remember that we’d shared some KFC in the hall lounge when we’d been keeping vigil when my dad was dying at the Menno Home.

Carma put on her mask, gown and gloves and crawled into the narrow bed with her mother. She held her and wept, “Please be at peace now Mom. Please find peace.” Leah rubbed Carma’s back. I played Carole King again, hoping that it was true that the last sense to leave us is auditory. I wanted her to feel the comfort and love in those songs.

Sean arrived with a big bag of KFC. “Remember how we had KFC while Gramps was dying?” he said. I smiled my answer. He looked over at Carma and grinned, “It’s what we always eat when we’re doing a vigil.” 

And then we ate our greasy pieces of chicken. And sat. And cried. And sat. At various points Carma crawled into bed with Rhonda. We’d take turns walking out into the hall, each of us trying to find something different to sustain ourselves. More time passed. Rhonda’s hard work of leaving the world continued. 

Around 9:30, we all took a break in the hall together while the nurses checked on Rhonda. Carma said, “I don’t want you guys to think this is creepy but I really want her to die on my birthday. Do you think she’ll make it until midnight so it can be April 10th? I just feel like it would be a good thing…like a sign or something. She could be my one-legged guardian angel.” 

“That is one fucked up sign,” said Sean, “you’ll have the craziest guardian angel…ever.” 

“I don’t think that’s weird at all,” I said. “They say the last sense to go is auditory. We’ll have to tell her she can go. Dying is like labour. It’s hard work and we don’t want to make her work even harder.” 

It was getting close to 11 pm. Then it was 11:30. We took turns crying and moving around her bed. I didn’t know how long she could possibly keep breathing. We were almost to Carma’s birthday. Sean sat on a chair to his mother’s right. His cheeks still held the shiny tracks from his previous tears. Leah sat to Rhonda’s left, her hand resting on Carma’s back. Carma was in the bed, cradling Rhonda’s head. I stood at the foot. 

Rhonda’s breathing stopped. Carma’s head spun to look at me. I shook my head no, not yet. I could still feel her in the room. Rhonda took another hard breath. I wanted it to end. I wished for it to end. Her breathing stopped a few more times, each time Carma looked at me with the question in her eyes. 

And then. Nothing. This time it lasted longer. Carma looked at me. And longer. Sean looked at me. And longer. 

This time I didn’t shake my head no. Instead. I nodded yes. Yes. Your mother has died. 

The relief that I had wished for came fast, but was just as quickly swamped by grief. My heart felt too large, like it was pushing against the constraint of my ribs. My throat tightened, like a scream was trapped in my lungs.  I wanted to claw my way out of my body. 

My sister’s eyes continued to stare into the corner of the room. Death filled the room. How could her absence take up so much space? Carma tried, unsuccessfully, to close her mother’s eyes. They remained fixed and staring. 

Carma looked up at the clock on the wall. It was eleven minutes to midnight. 

“Hey Carma,” I said, “look.” I took the clock down, and pushing against the little ridges of the dial, I moved the hands to read just after midnight. 

“There ya go.” I said. 

“Nice,” said Sean. We laughed. It was like the sound of things breaking. 

We continued to hang out around her body as we tried to catch up to the fact of death. It filled the room, an absence that was a presence. Time passed as we cried, talked, and laughed at strange and crazy moments. 

We sat in silence. We told each other I love you. 

And then it felt like it was time. Sean said, “We’re done right?” We all nodded. “I’ll go tell them,” he said.  He came back with the nurse. She took her stethoscope and listened for a full minute before she pronounced Rhonda’s death as April 10^th at 12:20 a.m. 

I wasn’t sure why I felt compelled to make sure the nurse knew the truth. It felt like we were cheating somehow, “Just so you know…Rhonda actually died just before midnight, but we’ve been in here with her for at least half an hour.” 

“That doesn’t matter,” said the nurse, looking up from her clipboard, “the time of death is registered when I measure it.”

It felt like we’d accomplished something, though what it was, I wasn’t sure.  Maybe it was that we’d somehow managed to give Carma her wish for a birthday death; a strange linking that hopefully would remind Carma of her mother. And maybe Rhonda might prove to be better at being a guardian angel than she’d been at being a mother. I liked too, that we had done nothing deliberate to make it happen, that our time spent with Rhonda’s body had been natural and organic and the natural outcome was that the time of her death had been moved forward. 

A dark-haired man arrived from the funeral home. He looked somber.  But then, how else would he look? The nurse asked us to leave the room while they prepared Rhonda’s body. Earlier, that same nurse told us that hospice offered the option to cover her body with a colourful quilt. Created by volunteers, it was hand-stitched with countless butterflies as symbols of transformation. If we agreed, the quilt would be laid over Rhonda’s shrouded body, we would follow her down the hall in a small procession and once we reached the elevator, the quilt would be removed and her body taken away.   

It was a pretty quilt, in an old-lady nursing home kind of way, and though it seemed the idea of a short hallway procession felt a little hokey, I told myself that it at least offered some sort of ritual. Besides, it was a well-intentioned offer. We all agreed. But now it all felt a little silly to be making a one-in-the-morning procession down a dim hallway while all the other hospice people slept, unaware that death had taken another one of their own. 

We pushed the door to Rhonda’s room open just as the nurse was covering her face with the sheet. Part of my brain screamed that she couldn’t breathe if they did that, the larger part of me knew that was insane. They wheeled her into the hall and covered her with the quilt. 

It took my breath away. It was beautiful. Exquisitely and completely beautiful and so perfect. 

The man and the nurse guided the gurney down the hall with the butterfly-covered body of my sister. Carma and Sean held hands and followed their mother’s body. I followed with Leah but my legs kept buckling. It didn’t feel possible to make myself walk. The sadness felt too large. It pushed down on me like a presence. The hallway had grown into a long tunnel. It was an impossible distance. 

I staggered and stumbled. I cried, the kind of gulping cries that I remembered from my childhood, the kind where I could never get enough air. I willed myself to smarten up and walk properly, but my body refused to listen. I clung to Leah’s arm, knowing I’d fall if I didn’t. It was impossible to carry the dark weight of grief.  

Finally, we reached the nurses’ station. The nurse stopped. She clicked on the light in a  salt candle that sat near the desk, telling us it was turned on to mark each death. 

We moved closer to the the elevator doors. The nurse carefully removed and folded the blanket with its captive butterflies, leaving only Rhonda’s white-shrouded form on the gurney. Her body seemed to have shrunk even more since we left her room an eternity ago. She had diminished, like she was already starting to disappear. 

The doors whooshed open and the man with his dark beard pulled the stretcher toward him into the cavern of the elevator, and then, just as softly, the doors slipped shut. 

Carma and Sean’s mother was gone. My sister was no more. It was as if she no longer existed. 

It was as if she’d died.