Learning to Let Go

Learning to Let Go

By Elizabeth Wray, Natural Solutions

“I will not see your father or the children,” my mother says, as she canes her way slowly up the long staircase. “Certainly no friends,” she continues. “I don’t want to process their pain.” Her oldest friends, optimism, high spirits, and denial, have abandoned her. Her old body, sinewy and strong until her 78th year, has failed. She’s weak and stooped after two years of tumors filling her belly, an operation that redirected her intestines to a plastic bag, and six months of infusing the bitter promises of Taxol.

It’s late August, and my mother is moving into the Zen Hospice Project rather than die at home in the San Francisco flat where she’s lived below me and my children for the past 15 years. She has been struggling with metastasized breast cancer and caring for my Alzheimer’s disease-baffled father for two years -and she’s had enough of both. She’s lucky she can choose where and how to live the end of her life. Half the people in this country still die in hospitals, many attached to life support systems. Choices are limited, too, for those shut away in nursing homes or for those who have no home or family to take them in. But my mother wants her independence. She’s always run the show and now, at the end of her life, she isn’t interested in becoming anyone’s invalid, least of all mine. Luckily, San Francisco has several hospices which might support her wishes.

I check out two of them. One is housed in an old nunnery. It has cozy touches but is too institutional. Also, I can hear televisions blasting from one room to the next. At the Zen hospice, in a stately old Victorian, I find a friendly communal kitchen; large, quiet rooms; and an atmosphere that respects privacy. It offers round-the-clock palliative care and home-cooked meals.

Later, when my mother grills the director about religion (”I don’t want to be fed any”) and he assures her no, that’s not part of the deal, I realize that the Zen spiritual practice of letting go of self is exactly the path my mother must take. “Can you guarantee me peace and quiet?” she asks. “Quiet, yes,” he says. “The peace is up to you.” She nods solemnly, and we take the one available room.

The last room
My mother has given me clear instructions: I am to bring nothing to personalize her new quarters. And yet upon entering the high-ceilinged, dimly lit room, she says, “Bring three lamps from home.” I’m momentarily hopeful; she’s always brightened her rooms with three points of light. “How about something to read?” I ask. “I’m not here to read,” she snaps.

For several days, she sits upright in a recliner next to the window, barely speaking to me or to the volunteers who bring her food and offer baths, acupuncture, and other services. “I hate that thing,” she tells me, referring to the German hydraulic bed that will tilt, buckle, and bend into various body-conforming shapes. “It tries to eat me. I intend to sleep in this chair.” She’s beginning to act like herself again; she has always hated beds, resisting sleep and preferring to nod off over a book in the family room at 3 a.m. To surrender to sleep is to suffer a little death each night, she once told me.

Dying in community
Jeanne Adams Wray spent a lifetime creating scenes, both on the stage and off. In Oklahoma, where I grew up, my mother transformed an abandoned movie house into a theater where oilmen and housewives listened to the cadences of Miller, Williams, and Wilde. At home, she filled rooms with walls of books, canvases she painted herself, Edith Piaf on the stereo, candlelight, wine, smoke, and plenty of quirky characters. Tall and lean, usually dressed in black sleeveless shells and pedal pushers with a red ribbon tied around her neck, she was the one in charge.

“Unplug the stereo,” my mother tells me, too weak to do it herself but still the one who sets the stage. “I’m done with all that noise.”I try not to go sentimental on her, recalling all the years of show tunes, Mozart, and Tristan und Isolde each March- her way of ushering in the spring. “I want only real sounds now,” she says. “Nothing that will lure me away from letting go.” Still, she requests notepads and pen, a dictionary, Emily Dickinson’s complete poems, and the last three New Yorkers.

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