Farewell to My Mom

November 1, 2007
All Saints Day

Coming to Closure

My Mom was talking more this summer about wanting to go home, and I’d ask her, do you mean Emmaus Pennsylvania or do you mean Jesus? I don’t remember her ever answering.

“Lord have mercy,” is something she’d say all the time Sundays at the early service in the little log cabin Episcopal Church, Saint Matthew’s.

In fact, saying Lord have mercy was a sure prelude, a couple of years ago, to a kind of seizure or “event” which included shaking, falling down, losing consciousness, drooling, all the signs of something serious going on. It always happened after the sermon during the Nicene Creed. We called the ambulance the first time, as the service went on, and got her out, only to have her recover pretty much on her own.

The doctor and I decided it was about low blood pressure, being seated a long time, and standing up. So, no more standing up. It still happened. It followed all those “Lord have mercy’s” and “Please Lord take me’s” which she was whispering, a kind of prayer, while the preacher (a good one, by the way) was speaking his Good News.

A new strategy emerged. Keep her preoccupied, I brought a black attache with a clipboard and several circle-a-word puzzle books inside. Whenever there wasn’t something going on, like a reading she could follow, or the creed or Lords Prayer she could say, I would race her to see who could find the most words in the two or three puzzles we’d finish in a service.

I felt a little conflicted. I became more sure that she was really “talking to God” and asking him for what she wanted, and she was getting it – hence the “near death experiences” I was trying to protect her from. I just didn’t want her to die in the public venue of a church service, with me sitting there, if I could intervene with a puzzle game and save her.

She was actually better than I was at finding words, until this past August. When she just put down her pencil one morning and stopped. I felt sad. She was done. We stopped going to church.
I began to realize as the time drew near that I didn’t want Mom to get what she wanted, to die. I began to realize that maybe my utter faithfulness showing up every morning with Matteo, his tricycle, Esther’s rollator, and Patches the wonder dog in his kennel in Esther’s (I drove it up to Alaska in 04) ‘95 Subaru to roust her out of her lethargy (she was always sinking into this deep, fake leather chair in the corner of the room across from the TV which was always on with the morning game shows or afternoon soaps she never-ever watched, ever. Mom hated TV. Ironic that she was chained to it the final three years of her life.)

She usually enjoyed the change of venue, the car ride, the walk by the river, but there were times that she was in pain. “I hurt,” she would say, pretty much every 5 minutes the whole 30 minute, half mile walk. Or, the last summer, she was increasingly saying, “I’m tired.” That’s okay, I’d say, my heart sinking. I began to keep my little finger hooked around the leading edge frame of her rollator, so that she knew I was there, pulling for her, emotionally, and actually. Instead of walking breezily on ahead, like I used to, encouraging Matteo with learning to pedal, or rescuing Patches from Matteo’s leash-wrangler tricks.

It was time to stay close, stay “hooked up,” if only by a finger, this last summer, in blazing sunny days, glorious breezy days with high clouds, airplanes, and busy construction in downtown Fairbanks – Matteo’s passion, with all the big diggers and ‘dozers, beside the shimmering waters of the Chena River.

Then there were the days when she’d throw us the “I vish I could die” retort. Eeka. What to say? Luckily, if Esther said anything, it would come up again. And again. It gave you second chances, and forty-fifth chances to respond. We came up with a little routine early on with this one. “I vish da hell I could die.” She’d repeat.

“Vell den let’s chump in da rivver.” I’d reply, in a pretty good version of Mom’s Pennsylvania Dutch accent.

“Noo, I don’t vant ta chump in da rivver.”

“Vell, vhy not? Ya sait ya vanna die.”

“It’s too cold.”
“Vell den ya can keep yer clothes on and stay varm ven ya chump in.”

“No, I don’t vant to chump in da rivver.”

“But ya sait ya vanted to die.”

“I vant da Lort ta take me.”

“But den ya haf ta vait. It vill be ofer in a minnit if ve chump in da rivver.”

“Vell, but I can’t svim.”

“Mama, dat’s de whole point!”

“No, I don’t VANNA chump in the rivver.”

It was actually really amazing how much of a sense of humor she retained. And these playful conversations, if a little morbid, completely cleared the air. But pretty soon 2 ½ year old Matteo was telling Marin, when he reported to her on his day, about “chumping in da rivver.”

Leaving on a Journey

So Marin, Matteo and I were a little anxious about leaving Esther without visits for three weeks the third week of September. We had a camping trip with Marin’s family, a visit to Marin’s home office in Denver, and a visit with Jeff’s family at Orlando’s Disneyworld. At the end of a week on Santa Barbara’s Channel Islands, as we were sitting around our camp early in the afternoon, a ranger truck bucked toward us over the marginal footpath and I said, “Esther.” It was about her, in fact. My Mom had essentially gone into a deep sleep the day after we left town, and they had a hard time reviving her. A call on the Ranger’s cell phone revealed that Summer Shades (her assisted living home) had put her on supplemental oxygen and wanted to be sure that was okay with me. Yikes.

After that, our worrying went into high gear. I was hoping that she might be her feisty old self by the time we came back, but I was fearing that she may not make it at all.

She was alert when I came in to see her in mid October. but wasn’t really talking much anymore. She’d whisper stuff. And she wasn’t eating much. The second day I was there, Noori, one of her care givers, thrust a Yoplait yogurt (no calories no fat) and an Ensure (chockablock with calories and fat) on me, and, when I managed to get Mom to eat, Noori was amazed. So, after that, it became my task to cajole food into her. If Matteo was with me, when I was spooning away, he’d ask, “Taste, Papa?” He had a cold, so there were 2 spoons. Some days she stayed in bed. Though, usually on Noori’s days Esther would get out into her chair.

She was touch and go, and if she were in bed Patches would stay in the car and I’d drive him back home rather than dropping him to be with her, our usual practice. One day when Esther was seeming more listless than usual, Noori asked, “do you have Patches,” and I said, “should I get him,” and she nodded. We both watched amused as Patches bounded up on the bed, licked Esther up and down the face, pranced happily beside her, rubbed his face in her bedding, snorting in sheer puppy joy. Esther, who had been avoiding my eyes because I was pushing food on her, suddenly lit up. Age drained out of her, she was as delighted as she could be, considering the circumstances. Noori was really good at figuring out what was needed.

I discovered that Mom’s struggle with swallowing – she’d just forget that she had food in her mouth, or she’d get afraid because it wasn’t easy to swallow anymore – could be resolved by me simply touching her chin and helping her close her mouth as I said, “don’t forget to swallow,” and then she’d be done with it.

But that was the morning of the day when, teaching Colin, an eight-year-old guitar student, how to finger-pick Rufus Wainwright’s song “Hallelujah,” I got the call from Marin. It was 5 pm. “Esther died,” she said, amazed. It was so unexpected. It’s like carefully touching up a scratch on the wall of your house with a tiny brush, and seeing, in slow motion, the paint can go unbalanced, drop sidelong, and slam the floor, splashing a huge wave of color across the carpet. Nothing to do. This is no longer about you. Or what you were trying to do.

It had come to pass.

I met Marin and Matteo at Summer Shades. The owners, Janice and Thelma, were there, as well as the day’s caregiver, Noori. There were long hugs. We walked back to the room. Mom was there, still warm to touch, to kiss goodbye, it was hard not to talk to her, so I did.

I learned that Janice had discovered that her breathing had stopped about an hour earlier, and called Marin, leaving messages everywhere, as Marin and Matteo were out sledding in the late afternoon sunset-painted snow. We talked a little about cause, Thelma thought it was probably her heart, struggling under the strain of decreasing oxygen (Mom’s brown-lung emphysema), weight loss, exhaustion.

We helped Matteo to say bye-bye to Grandma. He was very patient with us, as we tried to come to grips with a room filled with Esther and empty of her. Years of our lives in our family drawing to a close, opening up into a new way of being together.

Traveling

Then there were days of arrangements. Mom wanted to be buried in Pennsylvania beside her husband, there was a firm resolve about that from early on. She died on a Tuesday night. I flew out on Saturday. A lot of the time in-between went into thinking, writing to people who knew her, realizing that for the last three years I had put myself on hold to keep up with her, and to take care of Matteo, and to wait for the Lutherans to decide I was too much of a legal risk to keep on the roster of the ordained. The years had rumbled by, like a subway local. The station was empty, damp, lonely.

And I imagine people asking, so, do you have any job prospects. I answer awkwardly, maybe UAF (the university), though probably not as a teacher, though I love to teach and I’m a good teacher, maybe I should teach High School, though I’m not great with kids, or maybe I’ll see about transferring my skills as a pastor into the Unitarian Universalist context, actually, I’m in touch with the national office in Boston, and have steps to take and papers to fill out... With Marin expecting, and with the prospect of no income while she takes maternal leave next spring, and my mom gone, and Tao starting day care, which also costs money...

Friday afternoon I should have been packing for the trip back to Pennsylvania, Esther’s body was in the air, but I was courting disasters. Mindlessly, I took Tao to get the mail, and tried to cash a check, and found a huge line at noon, and turned around. Overwhelmed, I decided to just go home. Then I rallied, because I wanted to surprise Marin with a garage door opener remote to put in her pickup, so Tao and I went to Sears, and dropped a big $50, and drove home, hoping that Matteo would fall asleep. Which didn’t happen. So I wasn’t going to get a couple hours to myself, after all, to pack my bags. I was coming to grips with this sad story, when I realized I had – NO REMOTE. That big black cave-in of the heart. Starting to fill up with black furious anger. I realized I put the bag on top of the Subaru when securing Tao in his seat, and drove off without putting it inside. So, I took a deep sigh, and got us back in the car, and drove the 10 miles back to Sears, looking for a fluttering bag on the side of the road, instead of a flattened bag in the middle of the road. I was grinding my teeth. Fifty bucks is a lot of money for us. I called Marin, entirely demoralized.

Later, when she came home from work, she placed the recovered bag and door opener in my hand. Someone must have found it somewhere between the parking lot and anywhere, and had returned it to Sears.

Later that night I stayed up late and printed up 20 photos of Mom and Patches and Matteo on our walks, for the funeral.

Saturday morning I got Marin to accompany me to Summer Shades to pick through Esther’s meager stuff. A photo of Ken and John, adult grandchildren, on either side of Goofy from Disneyland. Stuffed puppies, bears, and a little rabbit which made me remember how she’d introduce herself as “Esta Werna Haws Murkul...I vus a liddle rabbit.” Then I’d have to explain to people (she never would) that her maiden name, Haas, meant “rabbit” in Pennsylvania Dutch. The lifetime fitness award she got from the Fairbanks Mayor for walking all the time. The piece of wood shaped like Pennsylvania with “The Merkels” carved in it, for hanging up at state campsites. The green jumper dress she got for her birthday or Christmas. Strings of beads from her pal, the deaf/mute Native man, Sonny, who croaked out an unsettling wondrous prayer over her body the day she died. Photos and more photos of Patches, a half dozen books of circle-a-word puzzles and their clipboards, greeting cards. We left the jewelry and the clothes for other residents.

Later that day, the famous Alaska red-eye left at 7 pm instead of 1 am, because I was flying into the Twin Cities instead of Seattle. I didn’t sleep much. Marin, Matteo and I had eaten out, I drank enough draft Deschutes Porter to keep me alert way past bedtime, so, deep into the night, I began to think through something to share with others at her funeral. It started to shape up under the rubric: Testing, Talking, Traveling.

Home at Emmaus

My brother Ronnie, who lived across town from my Mom, had cleared Mom’s house out and renovated it, while living in it, during a difficult time in his life in 2004. So we didn’t have “effects” or possessions to worry us. Ronnie had a big plastic storage container of photographs from the 1890's through the 1950's. I was running on “fumes” Sunday night as we looked through more photos of Mom.

Pastor Wayne came over after 8, that night. I didn’t really recognize him. His son had gotten cited for drinking at Temple in Philly, and he had to run down there. Long Sunday for a preacher. He shared a beer. We talked memories, church parking lots, buildings, and stuff. Then the service. Hymns. Readings. He had two. He never asked what was going on at my church, though he remembered that old Mrs. Hoffman asked Saint Johns to pray for Fairbanks Lutheran when Hunter Silides was installed as my associate pastor, Fall 2002. Did I tell him I was kicked out? I don’t think so. But I did find out a little about his perspective on his parish, Saint Johns, and the church in general. Not sanguine. A dying institution, to hear it from him. It was odd for me to know so much about it, and to care about it, and to be banished from it.

Monday we drove up to my sister Judy’s grave at Jordan Lutheran, up on a hillside overlooking a beautiful, classic Pennsylvania Lutheran church from 1744. There was a SUV up in the cemetery blocking our way, and we discovered, to my delight, my nephews from California, John and Ken, Judy’s children, with other grandmother, Beulah, 85. We had been trying to figure out their schedule, somewhat unsuccessfully. So here they were, to see and hug.

After a run to pick up my niece’s kids at daycare, again, somewhat unsuccessfully, we arrived at the funeral home. Esther was laid out in the same model of coffin my dad Sterling was buried in on a beautiful May afternoon in 2000. She looked like herself. We got out our pictures of her, eighteen year old with one foot on the bumper of a Model A, 25-year-old with a daughter, thirty-year-old knockout brunette with a couple of kids, newspaper photos for stories about her riding a motorcycle as a 45-year-old, and walking her two Schnauzers around town as a 50-year-old. Then all my photos of the 88-year-old walking with her grandson, her puppy, her rollator, and the photo of her two sons flanking her, from Ronnie’s visit this past August.

The sun was slanting into our eyes as we sat at the restaurant eating wings, nachos, salads, burgers. Ron and Carol my brother and his wife, Tracy their daughter, and Mike, her husband, and their 6-year-old Mia, and toddler Cole, and Ken and John, my nephews who almost never see this side of the family anymore because of the troubling death of their mother. At one point on Tuesday Ken, John and I were talking about how different everything would have been if... And Ken spoke of his bewilderment as a pre-teenager, at finding himself in a new, blended family, eventually realizing how much he’d benefitted from being part of a new family which didn’t find fault (a Merkel/Haas perfectionist trademark), but supported one another. He found it strangely baffling at first, to be accepted unconditionally, then truly life-giving.

Ken and John came home with Ron, Carol and me, and we got out the plastic tub of photos. I wanted them to see all the photos of their mother as a little kid. I didn’t know if they’ve seen her in her innocence – that vulnerability, and struggle visible in their mother’s childhood eyes. It was a good deal more fun than I expected, Ken and John have a way of taking things lightly and finding things remarkable, funny, or touching. They stayed later than I would have expected. Ron was working behind his computer mostly, but they would jump up to show him or Carol a photo they’d found, if it needed to be shown, which was sweet.

What We Said

Tuesday was the funeral. By then I’d thought through my stories about my Mom, the surprises I received from her. We drove over pretty early, because Ron thought we were starting at 9:30 instead of at 10. “Why didn’t you tell me we were coming too early,” he asked Carol. “Because you’re a bear,” she said, laughing. The first person to arrive was Fay (Litzenberger), one of the twin daughters of the sexton of Jordan Lutheran Church, our home church, back in the 50's. She was a contemporary of Ken and John’s parents and knew my parents pretty well. A friend of mine from Summer Camp, Dave Veil, came by, but couldn’t stay. Folks from Holy Spirit, my parents’ final Lutheran church, were there, and were very warm. My cousin Richard Mertz, whom I haven’t seen in 40 years, was there too. What a sweet thing. At the end of the service, I saw that Wesley Sell, my High School Concert Choir teacher, had come as well. Five men from Ronnie’s work came, which was nice. And a cousin of Esther’s, Larry Haas and his wife and daughter, came as well. The daughter’s daughter, who was maybe 4, was learning Pennsylvania Dutch from her grandfather. The real thing, not just the accent!

The pastor began the service. Suddenly, I was on. I had finally decided to tell a very personal tale, while realizing that my Mom doesn’t belong to me. Yet, I had to tell what’s compelling for me, even if it wasn’t everyone’s story. Just like with writing poems and stories – the most personal is the most universal.

My three T’s from on the midnight flight from Fairbanks, had become five. Testing, talking, traveling, transitioning, and transforming. Five surprises. I began by saying how I was raised by my siblings, so was often surprised by my mother.

So there was the Testing surprise: when, as a 13-year-old, alone with my parents after Ronnie got married, I resisted vacuuming the house to Esther’s satisfaction, and when she got angry about it, I complained that a clean house doesn’t mean that much to me, so (this happening over dinner) she up and heaved her supper against the refrigerator and wept her way into the next room, and my father was looking at me, in utter frustration, as I realized that he had knowledge I had not.

The Talking surprise: when, coming back from my first semester of college, I discovered one evening Esther dividing the contents of a #10 can of tuna fish into margarine containers, to freeze. I told her I thought this couldn’t really be worth it. What did she want from her life. I was asking partly because I wanted her to stop working in her textile sweatshop, since I had a good scholarship to school and she didn’t need to work for my sake anymore. Once again, I was surprised by her answer, because she broke down while telling me how hard her life was growing up on the farm, under the rod of her emotionally distant father, her indifferent mother. I had no idea how to process with her the wound I opened. It totally amazed and baffled me. I never forgot that evening’s conversation.

The Traveling surprise was about my invitation to Mom and Dad to join me in a trip to Acadia National Park, in Maine, the June after my first year at college. I wanted them to see the world out there, because they were willing to camp and they were always riding motorcycles around the Pennsylvania countryside, but they never ventured into new places, new experiences. We drove up to Maine, we car-camped for several days, but what I wanted to do was to sleep out on a mountain, to eat our supper, to watch the sun set, to sack out and wake up on top of the world. And, to my astonishment, they were willing. We hauled our army surplus bags up Sargent Mountain, and had a nice meal, as the sun went down. But there wasn’t a flat surface anywhere up there. No worries. We slept on the trail, in the bushes, and didn’t sleep. I woke early in the morning to see the moon rising over the ocean and realized that I wasn’t the only one awake. One of the most spectacular moments of my life was shared by my mother, in silence, awake to the beauty of the enormous, varied world I was just beginning to discover.

My travels began to take me further and further afield. So there was the Transition surprise: a time when my mother and father were figuring out who they were on their own. A period for others to tell their surprises. Their stories of Esther’s life, when I was off in New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Holden Village, and Alaska.

But the final movement, the Transformation surprise. I told people about how, after her husband died, Esther focused more on walks with her dog. One dog died. A replacement, Patches, was discovered at the shelter. Then, when Esther broke her hip, she was destined for Alaska, where I had an empty parsonage I was living in, next to the church. She didn’t like being there at first, but I kept reminding her when she complained that it was the only way she could be with her puppy. She walked a route with her dog, a half-mile circuit she memorized, because she was slowly losing her memory. When her ubiquitous smile caught someone’s eye, stranger or acquaintance, she would reach out her hand, grab on, and begin, “I’m Esta Murkul from Emmaus Pennsylwania. I’m Cheffrey’s mother. If I vus in Pennsylwania, I’d be in a home, and my puppy vould be a dead puppy. So I’m glad I’m here.”

She broke another hip the week I lost my job in the church, which occasioned a summer of deadline packing and moving in with my wife of nine months, Marin, and of visiting Esther on a daily basis in the hospital and rehab center, and finally, since I no longer had a place for her to live, in Summer Shades, the assisted living facility which became her final home.

So, the transformation was about how, as her capacity for memory and language dwindled, there was a turn toward the grateful. People who knew her from St Matthews church loved her smile. Everyone remarked on her sparkling eyes and her flashing smile. They learned after a time, to shake her hand but not to let her hang on for the whole, repeated story, “Helloo, I’m Esta Murkul from Emmaus Pennsylwania...” Or at least not every week.

“Yer goot ta me,” she would now say, to anyone who smiled at her, or received her handshake, who helped her with her coat, or brought her a glass of water. “Yer goot ta me.” It caught people who didn’t know her better totally off guard.

Me it troubled. “Yer goot ta me, Cheffrey.” We Merkels aren’t accustomed to being thanked, we’re competent or we’re feeling guilty, but we aren’t often, in our family dynamic, thankful, or thanked. If we’re thanked, it’s because we have earned it. So, anyway, she was again surprising me. “Yer goot ta me, Cheffrey.”

One day I fell upon the appropriate response, and her reply was stunning. “No, mama, yer goot to ME.”

“I try da be.” she instantly replied, continuing, “dat’s vhy I’m happy.”

What an astonishing change in my Mom as she neared the end.

“Yer goot ta me, Cheffrey.”

“Yer goot ta ME, Mama.”

“I try da be. Dat’s vhy I’m happy.”

I sat down. Jane Fretz got up and told how she had mono the year after giving birth to her daughter, Meredith, and how friends from the church told her to ask Esther and Sterling to help out. And they did. Meredith called them Grandpa and Merkel. Sterling did handyman stuff, Esther cooked meals and they even stayed at the house when Jane and her husband were away.
Linda Gardner got up and told how she was in a car accident with a broken pelvis when her daughter Vicki was small, and called Esther. Mom apparently said she’d be able to help for three days only, and ended up walking the forest trails up South Mountain to their house for the next ten years to help out. Linda’s only concern was that Vicki would end up wanting to drive motorcycles. Oddly, Mom and Dad would take Linda’s youngest (Vicki?) with them on their daily jaunts to this place 20 miles away called Farmer Browns where country retired folk would gather for the free coffee and talk Pennsylvania Dutch. Linda said that it probably contributed to her daughter’s ability to be an observer, and eventually, a creative writer.

The children of both families found the surrogate grandparents odd and charming. Vicki couldn’t understand what Esther was referring to when she kept saying Wicki. “Who is Wicki,” she’d ask her mom.

Then Patti Bisbing talked, with whom Esther was very close, and then whom Esther held a grudge against after my parents had a catastrophic motorcycle accident which almost killed them in 1991, and left their brains a little rattled, and more vulnerable, perhaps, to the alzheimers or dementia which ultimately felled them. Patti, a little self-conscious with a foot cast hobbled to the podium, muttering how Esther would undoubtedly tell Patti to “just walk it off.” She told how Esther brought food to Jeff when I was sitting in protest (note: I was actually fasting) on the western edge of Emmaus’s main street, in a sprouting, spring-wheat field, resisting the McDonalds-ization of Emmaus. How, when they picked blueberries together in New Jersey, even though Patti had more than enough, since her husband and kids didn’t like blueberries, Patti wasn’t allowed to stop until Esther was ready to stop. Patti got us all to laugh. Esther was funny in a likeable way to others, when you got beyond the serious judgmental streak.

But it was that streak which led to Esther holding that grudge, which Patti explained to us. It was that Ronnie read Esther the riot act, because of how mean Esther was to Patti in the hospital, and Esther always remembered it as Patti reading her the riot act. Or Ron acting on behalf of Patti. Because she was more of a friend, that misunderstanding, and Mom’s refusal to change, hit Patti pretty hard.

Then Pastor Wayne took over. He read the lessons, from Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have run the race.” and from John, “In my father’s house are many rooms. And I go before you to prepare a way. And you know the way that I go.” To which Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know the way.” And Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Pastor Wayne talked about the good life Esther had had, and about the even greater life ahead of her, and of us, the life that will never end, eternal life.

Then, after the final “Abide with Me,” people went up to pay their respects. That’s when I noticed that Wesley Sell had come, too. He was my highschool concert choir director.
Three of Esther’s grandchildren, a grand-spouse, and two sons were the casket bearers.

We drove five miles to the cemetery. A tall steeple set on Zion Lutheran Church, Maxatawny. Not many people saw her buried. The Pastor declared the declarations and the benedictions. Flowers were taken from the large floral spray, and then placed back on the coffin.

And we were walking away, leaving her there, to live for the rest of eternity, while we walked out our time-short paths, until we too came to rest in the gracious, dark, holy earth.