(1) Lynne Schmidt: Letting Babcia Go
I remember my mother telling me as a child is that I would have survived the holocaust, but my sisters would have died.
“Why?” I asked.
She would stroke my hair gently with a cigarette pressed between her lips. “Because you have the blond hair and blue eyes the Germans looked for,” she’d say. “Your sisters...they have dark hair. They would have been taken.”
The second thing I remember, is that my mother spoke Polish and English fluently but my sisters and I only spoke English.
And so, when at the age of thirty one, I’m standing in line at Starbucks waiting to place my order before heading to the mountain with my partner, Brandon, to go snowboarding, like we do almost every weekend, and my phone rings, I see it’s my mother calling. I answer and say, “Hey, can I call you right back?””
“No,” my mother says. “Babcia is dying.”
The person two people ahead of me places their order, pays, the line shifts slightly. “She’s been dying for years,” I say, rummaging through my wallet for my frequent buyer
card.
“This is different. She’s in a coma.”
My head jerks up fast enough that Brandon gives me a questioning look. “How long?” I ask.
My mother sighs on the other end. She is over a thousand miles away in Michigan.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “It won’t be long.”
After placing our orders and sitting at a table, I tell Brandon the news. “What do we do?” he asks.
I shrug. “Snowboard today, I guess? I can see if I can rearrange my schedule at work so we can go down at the end of the week.”
When I speak with my mother later that night, she says that Babcia hasn’t had any food or liquid in 48 hours. It’s been years since I obtained my medical biology degree, but I remember that a human body can only go 72 hours without liquid. If I wait for the end of the week, she will already be gone.
I contact my job and my internship, and the schedule is rearranged. We will drive the three and a half hours to Massachusetts as soon as Brandon is out of work in the morning.
* * *
Though I’ve had a lot of friends die and attended far too many funerals, I’ve never watched someone die – so other than the expectations that television shows have given me, I have no idea what to expect when I round the corner into Babcia’s room in the nursing home.
She has lived in various rooms here for easily the last ten years, maybe longer. During undergraduate, I took over her bedroom at my aunt’s house when I couldn’t travel back to Michigan for the holidays. Plus my dog, Baxter, stayed with my aunt and uncle during the four years it took to graduate.
Though the room had been completely changed after the nursing home placement, made more welcoming for me, each night I went to sleep, I always felt like I was a ghost haunting someone else’s territory.
After confirming her name on the placard, Brandon and I round the corner to her door, and first I see my aunt, sitting in a chair - it is the only way I know I’m in the correct room, because the woman in the bed looks nothing like my babcia. Her hair is more grayed. Her mouth is wide open and her dentures are not in place. There are no glasses resting on her skeletal face. I’ve sat beside her while she’s slept during various visits but it is clear upon arrival, this isn’t a visit.
This is goodbye.
The finality hits me at once and knocks the wind out of me.
Television shows tell me there should be monitors, maybe an IV drip, maybe something here, but it is just my babcia, small, pale, and fragile in bed. Nothing telling us she has a heartbeat, nothing telling us when it will be time to go.
My body freezes just long enough for my aunt to acknowledge our presence. She, assisted with a walker, which is also jarring, greets me quickly. My aunt and I have barely spoken since nearly eight years ago when I kidnapped Baxter shortly after Thanksgiving in the middle of the night and left an apology letter that said, “I promise I am not my mother, but he will be happier with me. I love you and I am sorry and please forgive me for this…someday.”
Baxter has been dead for a year and a half. The last time I saw my aunt was after she had had a stroke shortly after Baxy’s passing. The time before that was at my cousin’s funeral. I find myself trying to apologize to her face but when I try to say the words, it is as though there are knitting needles in my throat. It is easier to swallow down than spit out.
“I have to go see your uncle,” she says in a rush, or as much of a rush as a woman in a walker can. It takes me a second to register this fact as well. Though she’s had multiple surgeries on her body and been a chain smoker since I’ve known her, she’s walked slow but never needed assistance. Every time I see her it’s more obvious that I am running out of time to apologize, to make amends, to fix all these pieces I’ve broken.
The only experience I’ve had with people using a walker was my babcia when we would go outside to the garden during spring and summer visits. It is almost like the aging process has shifted from my babcia to my aunt and I am not ready for this. Any of this.
She makes eye contact with me. “I don’t want her to die alone.”
This isn’t a request, this is a command and my chest hardens, trying to stop the tears that threaten me. Her voice still carries the No Nonsense tone it always has, and it has always put me in my place. She is the parent I always wanted but never had.
I put my hand over my mouth and blink several times.
“When it happens, you let it happen,” she says. “You don’t do CPR, you don’t page for help. You let it happen, you let her go.”
I nod again, the needles swelling in my throat. “So what--?”
“You sit there,” she says. “Can you handle this?”
No, but offer another nod. I robotically move to a chair near babcia’s bedside and sit. “I won’t leave.”
She rushes out to see my uncle before saying something in Polish.
Brandon takes a seat beside me as I inspect the quilt my babcia is wrapped in, almost like a caterpillar in its chrysalis. In the movies, people always hold the loved one’s hand. But babcia has suffered from massive strokes throughout the last few years which curled her left hand into itself so viciously she had to wear a plastic divider so she didn’t cut herself with her own nails. She hasn’t been able to walk for years, transitioning from walking independently to a walker, to a wheelchair. Slowly, she lost the ability to speak English, too.
The words bubble inside me like a boiling pot waiting to pour over. “Can you go let the girls out?” I ask, an attempt to get him out of the room. The girls are my pit bulls that are in the car. “I just….I need a minute with her.”
“Text me if you need anything.”
I wait several minutes after he’s gone before I speak. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”
The last time I’d come, I was with my mother. Babcia’d screamed in Polish and wouldn’t stop screaming. I never came back, convincing myself that it was too hard. That the three to four hour drive was too far and I was too busy.
I should have come.
I cover my mouth again. “Remember how you used to sing?” I try to replicate the songs memory can hear her voice singing, but they’re in Polish and I never took the time to learn them. Without her leading, I am lost.
The social worker in me reminds me that it’s the effort that matters, that she can still hear me as she goes. This is okay, I’m doing the best I can.
I say the handful of phrases I did learn, “kocham Cię,” or, I love you. If she were still present, I’d know how to ask how she is, too. But right now, that’d just be filler. She’s dying.
I allow four tears to fall before I wipe them from my face, rub her shoulder, and listen to her ragged breaths.
Movies make you believe that dying is beautiful. Obituaries claim that loved ones passed peacefully in their sleep. And while, yes, Babcia is asleep, this is anything but beautiful and there are a million other places I would rather be.
But, as the last of my sisters to be remembered as dementia ate away her memories, I feel it’s my duty to bear witness today.
Lynne Schmidt is the author of Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow, 2019) , On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West Publishing, 2020) and a mental health activist who resides in Maine. She writes memoir, poetry, and young adult fiction. Her work has received the Maine Nonfiction Award, Editor's Choice Award, was a 2018 and 2019 PNWA finalist for memoir and poetry respectively, and a five-time 2019 Best of the Net Nominee. In 2012, she started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma surrounding abortion and mental health. When given the choice, Lynne prefers the company of her three dogs and one cat to humans.