“I have no idea. She never gave it to him. She just said yes.”
We looked down at Judith, who let out a puddled sigh, and stopped breathing altogether.
Alanna went still. “Is that…is she…?”
I didn’t respond, because I needed to make sure it was a cessation of breathing, not just a moment of apnea. But after five minutes had passed without another breath sound, I told Alanna that Judith was gone.
She pressed her forehead to her mother’s hand, still clutched in her own. She was sobbing hard, and I did what I always did—rubbed her back, soothed, gave her a moment for her grief. I slipped out of the room to the front desk. “We need a nurse to come in and declare a death,” I said, and then went back to comfort Alanna.
After a little while, she sat up, wiping her eyes. “I have to call Peter.” Her husband. And probably a dozen other relatives. Her eyes were swollen and slightly wild.
“It can wait a minute,” I said. I wanted to give Alanna something to take away with her. “Judith told me many times how much it meant to her to have you here.”
Alanna touched her mother’s wrist. “Where do you think she is now?”
There are all kinds of answers to that question, and no one is more right or wrong than another. So I told her what I knew for certain. “I don’t know,” I said, and I gestured toward the body. “But she’s not in there.”
Just then, Judith’s jaw moved, and she drew in a deep, viscous breath.
Alanna’s gaze flew to mine. “I thought she was…”
“So did I.”
The nurse appeared, looked at the breathing patient, and raised a brow. “False alarm?”
I tell this story a lot at conferences and workshops: that the first person who died in front of me did it twice. It always gets a laugh, but it’s not funny, not at all. Imagine Alanna having to grieve her mother a second time. Imagine if the worst thing in the world happened to you, and then you had to experience it all over again.
—
MY POTENTIAL NEWclient has the same birthday as me. Not just the month and date, but the year, too. I have been the death doula to clients who are younger than I am, and in a few terribly sad cases, to children. In the past I have been philosophical about it: it’s not my time, it is theirs. But today, I look down at my intake form and it feels like a metaphor.
Winifred Morse lives in Newtonville, in a small duplex that backs up to the green run of the Boston College Law School campus. She is dying of Stage 4 ovarian cancer, and unlike most of my clients, she called me herself. Usually I get inquiries from concerned family members, who want me to come in to support a loved one without telling the client what I do, as if naming a death doula is what will trigger mortality itself. I don’t take those jobs, because it feels dishonest to me, which means that I often have to tell a caregiver to wait until the client herself is facing down the barrel of death and accepts that she needs support.
I drive to her home and stand outside for a moment, closing my eyes and taking a few deep breaths to release the tension in my shoulders and spine, pushing Brian to the far corners of my mind. Right now, the only problems I will let myself have are Winifred Morse’s problems. I can worry about myself on my own time.
Her husband, Felix, answers the door. He is at least six foot five, all hooks and angles, like a praying mantis. When I introduce myself, he smiles, but the joy stops short of the fill line. “Come in, come in,” he says, and I find myself in a foyer whose walls are covered with modern art. There are canvases where soft pink blots look like the curves of a woman, from a certain angle. There are some with angry black slash marks, like the claws of a beast trying to rip its way free from the frame behind. There is one that has the most painstaking gradients of blue from top to bottom, like all the moods of the sea. It makes me think of my mother.
I do not know much about modern art, except that it is supposed to evoke feeling, and I can’t drag my eyes away from that painted ocean. “I like that one, too,” Felix says, coming to stand beside me, his hands in his pockets and his elbows sharp. “Win painted it when she was pregnant with Arlo.”
I file that information away, wondering where her son is, and how he is processing her illness. “She’s an artist, then,” I say.
Felix’s mouth twists. “She was. She hasn’t painted, really, since she got sick.”
I touch his arm. “And how about you?”
“I’m no artist. I can’t even draw a stick figure. I teach driver’s ed.” He looks at me, sheepish. “I wanted to be a doctor, but my grades weren’t good enough. So I figured out another way I could save lives.”
I try to imagine Felix cramming his frame into the passenger seat of a car, patiently instructing someone to turn on their signal before pulling away from the curb. “I wasn’t talking about work,” I say. “I meant…how are you feeling? Are you eating? Sleeping?”
He looks at me curiously. “Shouldn’t you be asking Win that?”
I always pull the caregiver aside for a private conversation when I see a client. Sometimes, they notice things about a loved one that I would not—like a shaking hand when reaching for water, or restlessness at night. They’ll tell me if a client isn’t sleeping, if she’s moody, if she’s seeing people who aren’t there. Sometimes a client will put on a brave face and not admit to pain or fear when they’re with me, but a caregiver always tells the truth, because they think it will help me give them the answer to the question they can’t ask their loved one:when and how will it happen?
Anticipatory grief is real and devastating. It can run the gamut fromHow will I survive alone in the world?toWhat do I do when the Internet cuts out, because she’s always been in charge of calling the cable company?
“Iwillask her those questions,” I tell Felix, “but part of my job is making sure you’re okay, too.” I glance around the entryway, where—scattered among the artwork—are the trappings of illness: a walker, a pair of compression socks, a prescription packet on a side table. “Your whole life has been taken over by cancer, too.”
He is quiet for a beat. “My whole life,” Felix murmurs, “is her whole life.” He glances up at me. “You’ll see. I’ve never met anyone like her. When I think about her not being…here anymore, I can’t picture it. I can’t imagine anyone taking her place. There’s going to be this Win-shaped space when she’s gone, and I’m scared it’s going to be bottomless.” When he stops speaking, his eyes are damp, and he seems startled to find me there. “I’ll show you,” he says.
