A Memoir by Lee Zacharias

For fifteen years my mother fell. Off curbs, out of chairs, standing up, sitting down, getting out of bed, getting back in. Sometimes she fell while doing nothing at all. She would not hear of assisted living or allow an aide to come in, would not wear a Life Alert, would not use the platform cane or walker I bought her. “People will think I’m old,” she said. If I tried to help her down a flight of stairs, it wasn’t because she wobbled, it was because I thought she was stupid. She didn’t need anyone’s help, no matter how often she lost her balance. Once she broke her foot. What else, I don’t know. I lived a thousand miles away, and not only did she lie, she always had some excuse: she never fell, something tripped her, something tangled, things got in her way. 

She fell for the last time six days before her ninety-eighth birthday, sometime during the night of April 2, 2016. I know the date because when I arrived Wednesday evening, April 6, the Sunday Northwest Indiana Times was still on her stoop, fliers spilling from the top of her mailbox. Even before I let myself in, the house gave off a smell of abandonment. Inside it was putrid. “Mom?” I called as I dropped my luggage. There was a chair overturned in the hallway, a stripe of light beneath her bedroom door. A heavy sewing table had toppled behind it, and I had to break in. I found her on the floor with her head near the foot of her bed, helplessly waving her arms, eyes darting, naked from the waist down, lying in her own feces, conscious but unable to speak as I bent to ask what had happened. Whether she recognized me or not I can’t say.

I called an ambulance, and she died in six days later, less than twenty-four hours into her Hospice stay, April 12, 3:25 a.m., perhaps the very same hour she had fallen. The hospice nurse had estimated it would be another seventy-two hours, and so after a long day—a series of long days in ER, ICU, and finally the wing of the hospital where she was sent to wait for a bed at the Hospice Residence Center to open—I had gone home to get some sleep, even though I suspected it would be her last night. During her first days in the hospital she had briefly regained some ability to speak (though not her coherence), but she was long past words now. Still I told her where she was and that her passing would be peaceful. “I kept my promise,” I said. “I didn’t send you to a nursing home.” I assured her that she would be with her beloved dog Lobo, that she would be with Roy, the boyfriend who had died years before, with her father, her brothers, and sisters again. Most of all I promised that she would finally have the chance to know her mother, who had died before my mother was old enough to remember her. I teared up as I read “The Rainbow Bridge,” wept through the Twenty-third Psalm, kissed her forehead, told her I loved her, and said goodbye.

When I returned at 4 a.m., the nurse let me sit with her for a while, then came in to tell me the remover had arrived. “You’ll want to step out of the room,” he said, but I shook my head. I hadn’t been there to hold my mother’s hand as she took her last breath, but I intended to see her off.  I watched as he loaded her onto the gurney, zipped her into the body bag, and wheeled her down the hall to the Cadillac SUV waiting in the garage. The aide pushed the button to raise the door, and as the vehicle pulled out, I waved and called, “That’s a mighty fancy ride you’ve got up to heaven, Mom.”

And then I came home, to her house that is, a house I had hated for the entire 61 years I spent living in it as a child or visiting as an adult. And yet in the near week it had taken my mother to die, I somehow felt more comfortable, more at home than I ever had before, for I realized I had something I’d never experienced there in all those decades, privacy. If I poured myself a glass of wine, no one asked what I was doing; if I went to the bathroom, no one demanded to know where I had gone. And now it was mine, mine and my brother’s, though the job of cleaning it out would fall to me, for he had been in the hospital himself, waiting on a new pacemaker, when my mother fell, and was still under orders not to drive. I went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep. There was work to do. My mother had come through the Depression, and like so many of her generation, she never threw anything away. Who knew when you might need a dozen pair of dry-rotted drapes still brandishing their hooks, six thousand margarine tubs, or that broken appliance? 

Some of the evil little things that get to you fresh in your grief: a nasty funeral director you’re dealing with by phone because at least fifty years before your mother prepaid her cremation through the Chicago Memorial Trust, and he is so angry that she lived and died in Indiana but is being cremated in Illinois, the first thing he says is not the perfunctory “I’m sorry,” but “You’re not going to be able to get death certificates.”  Or perhaps he’s angry to have to fire up his oven for so much less than the going rate. Whichever, he is snappish. Half an hour later his secretary calls to say that your credit card has been denied, not because you live in North Carolina, were in California the night your mother fell, and are now in the Midwest without having notified the bank, but because the funeral home entered the wrong security code. Or maybe it’s phoning the Lake County Board of Health for assistance with the death certificates only to be told that the funeral home has to take care of that and having the clerk ring off with a disheartening “Good luck.” Most of all it’s getting a jump on the cleaning out by beginning to haul away the junk you know no one will want, and when you reach the top of the basement steps with a hideous plastic floral arrangement in petrified green Styrofoam, the Styrofoam block explodes, showering you and everything around you with toxic green dust, and stupidly you sit on the kitchen floor and weep, because you are not crying over your mother’s death but the mess you have to clean up. Except it is your mother’s death, which keeps coming at you sideways.

And then this moment of grace. You have been posting on Facebook throughout your mother’s ordeal because you are alone, your husband is back home, taking care of your sick dog, and your phone is the only link you have to the outside world, though you’ve paid little attention to it, you have not wished anyone a happy birthday or scrolled down through your friends’ posts, because death is self-centered, it hears of nothing but itself, you have only glanced at the first to pop up when you open your page and not bothered to read it. But tonight that first post catches your eye. A former student is worried about a robin’s nest in her yard, wondering why the mother has abandoned her eggs. Probably it was touched by a human, her friends suggest, and instantly I remember that when I was a child I stole a robin’s nest. My kindergarten had been hatching chicks and I must have meant to tend the little blue eggs until they opened and then take care of my very own baby robins. My mother climbed the neighbor’s tree to replace it. I was too young to remember, or perhaps even notice, whether the mother robin ever came back, but suddenly on this day of her death I have my mother back. She is young and agile, her hair thick and dark. The pale gray hem of her dress sways as she balances the nest, moving higher and higher, but nothing tangles, nothing trips, nothing gets in her way. My mother is climbing a tree.

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Lee Zacharias is the author of four novels, a collection of short stories, and two collections of essays. Her most recent book is Remember Me (Unicorn Press, 2024). She has twice won the North Carolina Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction and silver medals from the Independent Press Awards in both literary fiction and nonfiction. Her third novel, Across the Great Lake, won the Phillip H. McMath Book Award and was named a 2019 Notable Michigan Book by the Library of Michigan. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her essays have been cited as notable numerous times by the annual Best American Essays, which reprinted her essay “Buzzards” in the 2008 edition.