By Raphael H. Kosek

Featured Art by Felicity Gunn

The House

The house, my mother’s house next door lay fallow over two years—the inner air still and musty, grass carpeting the gravel drive. What happens to a house where no people move about inside, breathe its air, circulate its dust? It exists as a museum of quarters suddenly vacated—blankets on the bed, water in the kettle, dishes left to be put away, mail to be opened. Two years ago my mother had a spinal implant for pain that went wrong. Her pain multiplied. She couldn’t walk at all, so she went from hospital to nursing home to assisted living. And the house languished. The carcasses of ladybugs littered the upstairs. Reluctantly I discontinued the phone, cancelled the cable TV. Her house, next door to mine, haunted me like a ghost.

The Russian

The sun shines hot on this last day of June, but a terrible, shattering thunderstorm tore through just a few hours earlier. Waiting outside the mall for my husband to drive around with the car, with a heavy boxed microwave at my feet, I watch a huge thundercloud gather over the Hudson River. Lightning flickers down like tongues of fire while the blue, air-filled balloon figure advertising Sears tools blows about wildly waving its arms until a worker comes out and turns it off. He packs the sagging figure neatly into the silenced machine while the storm roars. I make it into the car just in time. We sit in the car while several inches of water deluge the lot in a rain that blows sideways. The tortured dancing balloon figure still writhes in my head when we pick up Tatiana on the train from Brighton Beach.

Tatiana, the live-in aide from a geriatric care agency, feels like family: Russian, warm, kinetic, an energy rising from her. She will take on my mother, who is returning to her house, at ninety-one, tomorrow to die, though it is not spoken. We eat dinner together in my house today: rotisserie chicken, mac and cheese, salad and white corn. She is a woman of a certain age, dark but graying hair pulled back into an impromptu ponytail, rather buxom with a neat beige linen dress pulled tautly over a full body. Long ago in college I studied Russian, drank vodka, read and wept over Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago, and now I take in her rich Russian accent, green eyes and skin which I note is much firmer than mine. After supper we sit in the living room. She is pleasant and quirky, telling tales of psychic episodes, laughing easily. I relax. She feels like someone I already know.

The Dying

I sit on the couch in the living room where my mother lies hooked up to the oxygen, the electric tank beating out a percussive rhythm, a somnambulant snare drum measuring out the minutes with its heave-ho, one-two beat. The books I brought to read lie next to me unopened. Outside, summer is waging its green breakout, the lawn peopled with clover heads uncut by the delinquent mower. A green languor bursts with fecundity, pushing everything to its limit while insects drone appreciatively and I reflect on what is to come. She is quiet, sleeping, the new morphine that hospice ordered up too much for her, so she is out for three days. Sleeping Beauty, the hospice nurse calls her. This is the easy part, but I don’t know that yet.

The House

For two years, I avoided the house, putting the cleaning, sorting, plumbing that had to be done so far into the future that it might never happen. I had nightmares about the house, a house my father had built in 1957, a house they had never moved away from, a house that contained everything my mother never threw out. A child of the Depression, she was reluctant to part with anything. You never knew when you might need it. I had many excuses not to face it: I taught college classes, had lots of grading, had a bad hip, then a hip replacement. But I really just didn’t want to enter the closets, find all the unfinished sewing/rug-hooking/painting projects my mother had started, but somehow never finished. I didn’t want to meet my grandmother’s dresses my mother had saved, nor the scores of photos, and slides never put away properly or organized. And yes, dust lived here. And books. And magazines in stacks. While she lived here and I took care of her, I often suggested I help her go through some of the things. No, she said, I’ll do that when I feel better. I knew there would be no “better.”

The Russian

As my mother sleeps, Tatiana and I get to know one another. Sitting on the edge of her bed as she shows me all the amazing things she had managed to pack into her rolling wheeled suitcase, I notice that her blanket is safety-pinned to the sheet. She informs me she only uses one side of the double bed, as if taking up only a small space in the world earned her points. I note her near military precision in how the blanket is folded and pinned. Later I would marvel at how precisely she folded sheets into perfect rectangles while mine were blobs. Her suitcase disgorges multitudinous plastic bags, mostly Ziploc, containing everything from clothing to natural herbs with Russian names. She is prepared for any contingency. “I’m like squirrel,” she confesses. I confess to having difficulty sleeping and she pulls out a foil packet of little white pills that she assures me will help. “These are a natural herb,” she says, and proceeds to translate them on her phone for me. Valerian will help you sleep. Years of caregiving have clearly honed the art of living out of a suitcase. She has even managed to store plain pita bread, more of which I happily procure for her later. Everything has to be plain: plain bagels, plain pita—keep these supplied, and she is happy! When she pulls out another herb for stomach distress, I tell her I try to use natural herbs as well before succumbing to drugs. “Me, either!” she says with a glow. When I tell her that I think she means, “Me, too,” she declares her English needs work. Every time after that, she says, “Me, too,” but later we would both lovingly use, “Me, either” and burst into laughter.

The Dying / The House

The day my mother arrives in the ambulette to see her house transformed, the first thing she says is, “All this equipment is going to make me worse.” A commode and Hoyer Lift linger near her hospital bed. An electric oxygen tank lurks nearby. All the furniture but one couch has been removed to make room for these additions. My mother looks around with scorn. She is in denial and believes she will walk around in her house as she had done several years earlier, even though she has told me every night for the last year that she wishes she would die in her sleep. My mother has always been demanding and difficult, always contrary—and she would never own up to being wrong, so why should I expect this final act to be any different? Even in dying, she is a terrifying force to be reckoned with.

Tatiana and I valiantly lift her to get her on the commode, and all three of us nearly end up on the floor while trying to get her back on the bed. After three days, my back has a kink in it. On the fourth day, Tatiana announces she is going to use the lift, a swinging hammock which operates something like a forklift. My mother says, I’m not getting into that. We say, you are—we are putting our backs out and this is dangerous. Tatiana is a pro with the lift, netting my mother and swinging her with deft expertise from the bed to the recliner. The commode poses a problem. Even though she is wearing diapers, she refuses to go in them. There is a hole in the swing, but it takes great dexterity and skill to position everything just right, landing her like a crane. This works well until my mother lets go a bowel movement onto the floor next to the bed before reaching the commode. We laugh. No problem: Tatiana’s ingenuity places her over the bedpan on the bed in the swing. Problem solved. My mother says she is ashamed to be wearing diapers. There’s nothing to be ashamed about, I tell her. It’s okay. It’s okay. But yes, diapers—I get it.

The Dying

The second week my mother is home, the priest comes to the house. The night before I struggled to understand what she was saying. I finally made out her semi-coherent words from the 23rd psalm: “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” and she kept repeating that line until it was just, “Yea though I walk through the . . . Yea though I walk,” trailing off into wispy mumblings. I knew she had memorized this psalm in the one-room school she attended during the Depression, so I pulled out her Bible and read the psalm to her. But it disturbed me because on the one hand, she seemed not to recognize that she was dying, yet this clearly showed she was afraid—my mother who was a staunch believer and declared she didn’t fear death. Now, she seemed to fear it, and that troubled me. Does one talk about death to another who is dying? Does one pretend it’s not there? It is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room if there ever was one. The priest is friendly and chats with my mother, finally asking me to leave them alone, declaring at the end of his visit, “She had everything.” That means all the sacraments including Last Rites. This astonishes me as my mother seems to think she will be getting better and walking soon. Even while she is bed-bound, she insists we put on her pink slippers so she can “walk around.” She hasn’t walked in two years.

The House

My mother keeps telling me, I want to go home. I say, You are home. This is your house. You are in your living room. While cleaning before my mother came home, I left some envelopes of family photos to look at with her. I pull these out and show her that yes, this is indeed her living room with its bookshelves filled with her books, the clock on the mantel that still doesn’t work, and the paintings on the walls, one of a Dutch girl done by a dear friend, and a pastel of a lonesome road. We match the photos of family Christmases and gatherings to the present room, and she acknowledges that yes, indeed, this is her home, but she still tells me repeatedly that she wants to “go home.” And I reassure her repeatedly that she is home. I conclude that when you are dying, you just want to go home, and feel that you will never get there.

The Russian

One day when I appear in the kitchen, Tatiana is slicing a boiled potato onto the turkey and avocado sandwich I had remembered that my mother liked. “Why are you putting potatoes on her sandwich?” I query sharply. “Americans never put potatoes on sandwiches; you’ve already got bread!” She looks hurt and I feel like a tyrant, especially when the visiting hospice aide also joins in. We are suddenly a traitorous cabal and I ooze with guilt. But she loves her potatoes and eats them every day. I have a hard time being a boss. Feel uncomfortable in the role. But potatoes on bread, really? This is the only time I exercise authority over her, but I find she is still feeding my mother potatoes, sliced, mashed or otherwise, whenever she can. Does it even matter? I say no more. I don’t possess one iota of her skills in dealing with my mother, so self-righteous concerns about empty starches seem ridiculous.

The Dying

My son and daughter visit their grandmother whenever they can and strive valiantly to provide her with pleasant details from the past. One night they ask her if she remembers them catching fireflies in the June dusk when they were little. She declares that yes, she does, but adds, “I can’t remember how to die.”

The next night she implores me, “I hope they’re not going to take me all around tonight.” No, I reply, you will just be home right here. “Oh, good!” she answers. I have long stopped trying to explain anything to her. That entire week, each night she is in a different vehicle of transportation: a plane, a train, the local bus, and even a horse carriage. The hospice pamphlet informs me, People near the end of life will sometimes talk of travel, as though they are planning a journey. This freaks me out. She is a textbook hospice case, worrying about where the bus will stop and whether we have the bags packed and with us. This is not even a metaphor for a journey; it is literal. She is traveling somewhere and she knows it.

One of the most disturbing moments comes on a day my son, Jim, had visited her. As I sit beside her bed later the same evening, she keeps urging my son, who is no longer present, to give her a push. “Jimmy, just give me a push, Jim, come on, Jimmy, give me a push! Jimmy, please, just push me!” I presume “the push” is to get her over whatever barrier blocked her travel. “Mom,” I plead, “Jimmy is at work. You know he works evenings!” She ignores me and this escalates until Tatiana comes in and sharply orders, “Go home!” When I try to leave, my mother, whose fingers can no longer grasp a spoon, holds onto my hand so hard, I can barely extract it. Like a traitor and a coward, I leave, claiming it is late and I will see her in the morning. Allow and acknowledge whatever experience the person may be having, without trying to contradict or argue it away, I read in the hospice pamphlet too late.

The House

I can see the living room windows of my mother’s house from our bedroom upstairs, and I get into the habit of checking to see if the lights are on whenever I get up at night. If the lights are on, I feel I should go over, help to turn her, change a diaper, address a problem. But I never do. Have I outsourced my mother’s dying to Tatiana? I deliberately stay away. Why can’t my mother just die peacefully?

For years I tended to my mother and her issues—doctor appointments, dressing her, undressing her, mollifying her tragic and bitter opinions, pretending she will be better, have less pain, be more positive. Listening to her stories of a Depression-era childhood, the thwarted possible singing/painting/teaching careers. Made to feel she was a victim, a martyr who had given up all to care for others. How did one counter old age, disability, and bitterness? How did one engage and help another person for whom nothing was adequate? Measures were never enough. Gestures of help, grinding, mindless chores, and sacrifice went unrecognized. I was so weary, so demolished by her valid needs, her problems, her demands, her words that spilled over like crucifixions landing with all their pain. So why all this agitation now? Her bizarre and frightening laughter? What had she done? What had I not done? Who was she? I fear that dark forces are shaping this event. I cannot sleep and cannot sleep. I wish someone could turn me off like the tethered balloon figure dancing in the storm, and pack me safely away.

The Russian

When I arrive in the morning, Tatiana greets me, reporting that my mother has been washed, diapered, that she ate some oatmeal with blueberries and had all her meds. My mother sleeps, as becomes her routine after the morning ablutions. I am in awe of Tatiana’s skills and keenly aware that she is doing something that I couldn’t do, and don’t want to do. I am also keenly aware that she is physically trapped in my mother’s house. As my mother sleeps more and more during the day, I ask my husband to sit with her once in a while, and Tatiana and I escape to the local outlets where we both heartily engage in “retail therapy,” as the sales person in one store puts it, trying clothes on in front of each other and laughing. Tatiana finds a fleece vest for winter and a pair of shoes and when my membership card gets them for a bargain price, she gleefully grabs both my arms and giggles with a pure joy that comes from a childhood heart. She feels like the sister I never had, being an only child. Another day, we go out to the local ice cream stand and rush to eat soft-serve cones melting in the summer heat while learning more about each other. I knew her husband was dead and had worked for the KGB, and feel brave enough to ask, “Tatiana, how did he die?” Her answer could have been out of a spy novel: “He fell on the ice and hit his head badly. So much ice in Russia.” She reports this fact like an inconsequential detail. “I’m so sorry,” I tell her, refocusing on my ice cream.

The Dying

Toward the end, my mother keeps her eyes closed and answers Tatiana and me only with some facial movement or nearly imperceptible twitch which Tatiana always recognizes. When we both stand over her, helping with whatever is necessary at the moment, Tatiana commands her, “Open you eyes! Look on who’s here, your daughter is here!” The eyes open and she briefly surveys us. At this time, speech disappears, though just the week before while we were trying to get her to eat, she raged in a voice from The Exorcist, “I will bite everything!” and her laughter had nothing to do with fun. I asked the hospice nurse how her voice could go from a barely perceptible croak to one of such violent power and articulation? I didn’t get an answer.

The Russian

I feel guilty that Tatiana is having to go through my mother’s death because she told me that, just the year before, she had returned to Russia to be with her own mother as she died. She shares with me that her mother was very similar to mine—a strong-minded, domineering Slavic woman with whom you didn’t mess—and it had been very difficult for her. The hospice social worker who visits once a week asks Tatiana naively if they have the equivalent of hospice in Russia. There is no morphine for pain or breathing, Tatiana tells her, no hospital beds and nothing like hospice. Later, when she packs up the unused hospice meds, I don’t say anything.

The Dying

My mother had told me the story that when she was a little girl and found out her mother’s maiden name began with a Z, she began calling her mother, “Helen Z” because she was tickled by the letter Z. Well, now she reports to me that Helen Z is waiting for her. My mother sees all her dead relatives before she dies, another case right out of the hospice playbook: They may report seeing people or things that are not visible to others, and they may engage in conversation with others who are not visibly present. I don’t know what to say, but when I tell the social worker, she says to tell her that it is okay to go to Helen Z. I do so, but I am unprepared for my mother’s question: “Does that mean I’m dying?”

The House

Murphy, our plumber, shows up one day to collect his payment and visit my mother one last time. Then he comes back to my house to hold forth with my husband. I busy myself in the kitchen. Tremendously good-hearted and funny, he had worked for years on construction jobs with my late father, was a longtime family friend and a perfectionist plumber, but you had to be prepared to sit through his long stories because above all else, he loved schmoozing. With frayed nerves, I am content to overhear from afar and grateful to my husband who provides the necessary audience. Unfortunately, though, I am not prepared or inclined to hear him relating how he trapped a skunk that had shown up in his yard and “drowned the son-of-a-bitch in a barrel,” and then dispatched an equally unfortunate possum in similar fashion.

The Dying

Tatiana calls me at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning in August to say I’d better come now. She got up to check on my mother because she could hear her labored breathing and when she got there, Mom took one breath and then nothing more. My mother is newly gone. In pajamas, on autopilot, I kiss her and say a prayer over her still-warm body, then call hospice. I am doing what I am supposed to do but it doesn’t feel real—like someone handed me a formal role to play which I’m not very good at. Grief, guilt, and relief wash through me all in one bundle, inseparable. The hospice doctor comes to verify the death. I call the local funeral home that is run by a family. Two petite young women, sisters, show up to collect my mother. I don’t know how they can do it. How surprised my mother would have been! I can almost hear her astonishment.

Later that morning, Tatiana comes to our house where I am grateful for the normalcy of cooking us a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs. After breakfast, we take her to the train station, wearing the same linen suit she came in, and of course, her suitcase has been ready to roll since day one. We hug and cry and promise to keep in touch. It hurts a little that she can’t stay just one more day, but I know her job is done, executed with military precision and competence—and her Russian warmth.

The House

The following June I am going through the shelves and shelves of my mother’s dusty books as my son and daughter-in-law will move in later that summer. The books tell their stories. Books on tarot cards, Viking artifacts, the Tretyakov Art Gallery. Books on watercolor basics, how to make your own slipovers, curtains, Shaker furniture, the mysteries of history and countless novels, philosophic tomes and travelogues. Did she actually read these books? Might she have been a painter, a singer, a writer in a different life? Flipping through the pages rimmed with yellow stains of impossible age, I find my answer. Nearly every book contains her underlinings, comments, and sometimes funny or frowning faces in the margins. As I drown in the dust of the ages sometimes repulsed by sheer decrepitude, I am in awe of my mother, and also, I can now admit, afraid of her. There were so many people she could have been, but she was my mother.

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Raphael H. Kosek’s latest book of poetry, Harmless Encounters, won the 2021 Jesse Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest. American Mythology, a finalist at Brick Road Poetry Press, was released in 2019. She served as the 2019-2020 Dutchess County, NY Poet Laureate where she teaches at Dutchess Community College. Read more at raphaelkosek.com.