She’s Dead!

It began in 2014 when my mother-in-law, Adrienne, received the diagnosis of a terminal illness called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Idiopathic, meaning “disease of its own” from the Greek; pulmonary, having to do with the lungs (that one’s Latin); and fibrosis, meaning stiffening or scarring (Latin, again). To put it bluntly, she was slowly suffocating, and no one knew the cause.

With predictable, Princetonian determination, I threw myself into the role of primary caretaker, learning the medical vocabulary and mastering the pharmacological options with such confidence that many doctors asked me if I were a nurse. (No, I’m an actress, but I played one on stage once. How am I doing?)

I did so well that Adrienne often felt over-managed, I’m sure. We had an internist, a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, a neurologist, an ophthalmologist, a dermatologist, and an oncologist, whom we saw in a continual merry-go-round of appointments. I would drive to Canterbury Court, her beautiful senior living community, take her to the appointment across town, and return her home afterwards – a four-to-five-hour commitment several times a week that I performed with dedication as the wife of her only child. It was my privilege to walk with his mother through her final days. (Besides which, it was an opportunity for me to be awesome!)

In the beginning, each doctor predicted death within two to three years with such gentle confidence that I decided to pro-rate my energy to last that amount of time. I was bright and cheerful, loving and unflagging in my attentions. If she were ordained to die so soon, she would know that she was loved. I would love her till death. (Or would it be “to death”?)

But when she outlived these predictions, my carefully rationed energy threatened to peter out. Not one to renege on the job, however, I renewed my dedication, expecting her death any day (the doctors had said so) – while beginning to realize that she could potentially live on and on and on in this danse macabre.

After four years of decline – in which she lost seventy pounds and could no longer leave her apartment by herself – we asked her to move in with us. This arrangement would have been unthinkable previously for many reasons (for example, say, personality conflicts), but here at the end, we wanted her to know we loved her and thought our children could bring joy to her final moments. She moved in with us in 2019, providentially right before Covid shut down the world.

As the weeks passed, however, my husband and I soon found ourselves in the awkward position of doing the virtuous thing while assuming we wouldn’t have to do it for long. With dramatic irony, my mother-in-law’s flickering life revived in the presence of her grandchildren, halting her decline and giving her doctors hope that she might last another ten years. What a miraculous prognosis!

But in the privacy of our locked bedroom, we whispered: What have we done? It was too late to back out. I knew I couldn’t possibly maintain my cheerfulness over sixteen waking hours, seven days a week, for another decade. We were shocked – but why? Hadn’t we been praying for her healing? Did we think God incapable? (Had we not meant it?) To this day, I feel that God tricked me – but the story of Kate Becoming a Better Person from those years in the crucible are for other essays. Today, we will skip to the end.

Like the performer I am, I often practiced the ending in my mind. I imagined I would sit by her bedside for hours as she slipped away, singing her favorite hymns for her, lifting a straw to her lips for water, warming blankets in the oven for her. When she could no longer speak, she would press my hand in a final farewell and slip away. The moment it happened, I would calmly rise from the chair and walk to the other end of the house where my husband worked from home. (Even if he paused his work frequently to see her, in this vision, it would be I who starred in this drama.) With a sympathetic and tearful expression, I would relay the news of his mother’s passing. He might cry at such an appropriate moment, and I would comfort him. And then he would go to his mother and take care of everything.

That was how it should have happened. The true story differed in every particular.

Each morning she lived with us, I awakened with an internal scream that I couldn’t do this anymore. Every morning started with a prayer that God would extend the end of the rope that I had reached. Without maligning the dead – after all, she could have listed many complaints about me – I will say that my mother-in-law was difficult. I think she would have admitted to that. Her failing breath did not prevent her from sharing her opinions, passive-aggressively phrased, making conversation like quicksand. I never knew when the misstep of a poorly expressed thought or an opinion that differed from hers would cause a sinking into oblique criticisms that I often wouldn’t understand until much later when it was too late to respond. Mostly, she was quite lovely and encouraging; it was the unexpectedness of the undermining suggestions that made me cautious and anxious.

Our morning interactions could affect my whole day. Every morning, I would take her a plate of whatever breakfast I had prepared. If she still slept, I would leave the plate near her bed and rush the kids to school on time. She would have preferred for us to awaken her every day so she could sit down for breakfast with the children, but we didn’t have time in the mornings for the slow-motion donning of the robe, the twenty-minute toilette, the infinitesimal shuffle to the kitchen that was so slow, I would almost lose my balance walking next to her.

Deidre Scherer, Eva’s Dream, fabric on thread, 1987. Used by permission. dscherer.com.

On the mornings she had already awakened, I faced the conversational anxiety. What would she say today that would require my improvisational acting skills to counter? I would attempt to set the tone by greeting her brightly, giving her a hug and a kiss, asking her how she was feeling – and then get caught in conversation until someone came to find me. It felt rude to cut her off when every moment might be her last.

On the day she died, I could not wade through the conversational morass before taking the children to school, so I sent my daughter to her room with a plate of breakfast. My daughter reported that Adrienne was still asleep, and I decided to assuage my guilt for avoiding her by sharing a pot of tea and a chat later. When I returned home, I still wasn’t ready to face her and took a shower. Then, at about ten o’clock, I brewed the tea, poured two mugs – mixed with just the right amount of milk she liked (because I’m nothing if not thoughtful!) – and walked back to her room.

Adrienne lived in the master suite of our house since it was on the first floor and provided her with ample room for visitors and privacy. As she became more feeble, and as each step required more oxygen than her lungs could deliver, she decided on the brilliant if bizarre course of moving her bed into the enormous master bathroom (bigger than our guest bedroom). That way, she wouldn’t have to walk more than a few steps to the water closet and the shower. She could have a small refrigerator and her own hot pot for tea. The adjacent master bedroom would be refurnished as a living room in which she could sit and receive guests. It was strange, but it worked.

As I entered the master bathroom where her bed stood in a bay window, I saw instantly that she was dead.

I froze in the doorway staring at her and wondered how I knew. She often slept in a haphazard way, but there was something about her face – her skin was the color of wax, and her “nose was as sharp as a pen,” as Shakespeare said of Falstaff in his Henry V death scene.

The plate of breakfast my daughter had delivered sat untouched and congealed on the vanity. Her oxygen lanyard lay on the floor by the bed where it must have fallen off in the night. I hoped this meant she had died in her sleep without suffering.

Despite the fact that she was already dead, I thought, shouldn’t I check her pulse or something? My body would not obey that instinct, and I continued to stand riveted in place. A horror at her absence prevented me from touching her. I whispered her name, then said it, then yelled it in the hopes of awakening her. What was I doing? Clearly, she was gone. I then realized that I still held the steaming mugs of tea and wondered that I hadn’t dropped them in cinematic fashion.

Carefully setting them on the counter, I recognized that this was the moment in which I would behave with majestic tranquility as I lovingly broke the news to my husband and comforted him.

It started badly. My socks slipped on the hardwood floor of the bedroom as I scrambled like the Road Runner escaping Wile E. Coyote. I shot down the hall, across the kitchen, and up the stairs to the room above the garage where Kirk worked from home, screaming “Kirk!!! Kirk!!!! KIRK!!!!!”

I burst into the room, crying hysterically by that time and hyperventilating while shrieking, “She’s DEAD!! She’s DEAD!!!”

In a humiliating reversal of roles, Kirk rose calmly from his chair and held me while I sobbed into his shirt and then led me back down the stairs, through the kitchen, and down the hall to her bed, where I stood in the corner as far as I could get from the body that was no longer Adrienne. Kirk confirmed my report and gave me instructions: call the ambulance while he dressed.

I decided to make the call to 911 at a safe distance back in the bedroom. My conversation with the dispatcher was a comedy of errors.

“911. What’s your emergency?”

“My mother-in-law. She’s … she’s dead. I guess it’s not an emergency – because she’s already dead. But I think I’m supposed to call you…?”

“Are you with your mother-in-law now?”

“She’s in the next room.”

“Please go into the room with her.”

“Oh. Really? OK. Why?”

“Are you in the room with her now?”

“Yes.” (Standing as far away as possible in the corner.)

“Is she on the floor?”

“No, she’s in the bed.”

“Lay her flat on the floor.”

“Excuse me?”

“Pull your mother-in-law off the bed and lay her flat on the floor. I’m going to guide you through performing CPR.”

“Wha – No! She’s – she’s DEAD.”

“You may be able to revive her if you perform CPR.”

(My throat constricted, forcing out a strange squeak.) “I can’t do that. I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. I’ll guide you through it.”

“No no no no no! You don’t get it! She’s been dead for a while!”

“How can you tell that?”

“I’m LOOKING at her! She’s waxy and not breathing and stiff and … SHE’S DEAD!!”

“Oh.” (Turning a page in her manual.) “All right. I’ll send an ambulance and the police.”

“THANK YOU!”

Kirk returned in time to welcome the EMTs who confirmed the obvious, and then they sat with us in the living room while we waited for the police. They were polite twenty-somethings, and we maintained pleasantly low-toned conversation in keeping with the occasion. Where were they from…? How had they decided to enter the medical profession…? Would they like a Coke while we waited…? Entertaining these young people while a dead body lay on the other side of the wall felt like we were rehearsing an absurdist Ionesco play. What was taking the police so long, and why did they even need to come? We had told the dispatcher she was dead, the dispatcher had told the EMT she was dead, we told the EMT she was dead, the EMT told us she was dead. Did we need the police to tell us she was dead?

Or were the police just the absent authority figures with no authority in our dark comedy? After an hour of conversation and two Cokes later, waiting for the police felt like Waiting for Godot, a bleak reality in which death had already arrived – but they would never come. The EMT finally made a call, and it turned out that the 911 dispatcher had accidentally canceled the request for the police. Perhaps she knew they were not necessary to the plot. When she resubmitted the request, they arrived in less than ten minutes.

From the moment I opened the front door for the uniformed officer, I felt like Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial. Not entirely sure what I had done wrong, I nevertheless knew I was guilty, and fought an almost irresistible urge to confess to something.

Kirk and I led him into the master bathroom where Adrienne’s body lay, and I immediately realized how strange it looked to have her bedroom in the bathroom. Would he think I had imprisoned her back there, as far away from the family as possible? (Had I actually done that?) He did not ask those questions, but he looked very suspicious, I thought.

“She wanted her bedroom to be back here because it’s closer to the toilet and the shower,” I explained.

“Mmmmm.” Did he believe me? He wrote something down in his little notepad. “Has anything been touched here since she was found?”

“No, nothing.” Not true. “Well, actually we turned off the oxygen machine. Didn’t want it pumping … It’s flammable …”

“Who found her?”

“I did.” Wasn’t the first person to discover the body usually the suspect?

“Tell me what happened from the beginning.”

I told him about breakfast and pointed at the plate and described pouring the two mugs of tea and pointed at the (unspilt) mugs and narrated going to get my husband.

He made more notes in his notepad.

This was not at all how it happened when my grandmother died in her assisted living facility. The funeral home people simply arrived and took her away. Why was he asking all these questions? Why did this officer seem to doubt me?

I forced myself to look again at Adrienne’s body, wasted by the disease, and thought it looked like we had starved her. Would he think I hadn’t fed her enough?

“Was this oxygen lanyard on the floor when you found her?” he asked.

“YES,” I said too loudly. “It sometimes fell off in the night, but she’d never … died from it before …” (Oh, really?)

“I’m going to have to call her doctor to confirm that this death was expected. Please give me the name and number.”

Expected? She outlived her prognosis by more than three years! Of course it was expected! (No, it wasn’t expected! I took such excellent care of her that the doctors thought she would live much longer now that she was in our home.) Expected? She had a terminal disease! What do you think? (No, it wasn’t expected! I had done everything in my power to prevent her death – she seemed to be chugging along just fine.) Expected? Was he suggesting I had hastened her death? Did he know how hard I’d worked to keep her alive?

“What do you mean ‘expected’?” I became shrill, and my husband placed his hand on my arm.

“If her death was expected, why didn’t she have hospice?” the officer said, cocking his head at me.

And there it was: months of haggling with my mother-in-law over hospice came down to this moment. I had insisted that hospice helped you feel more comfortable; she had insisted that “hospice” was code for “kill you faster.” Now, her refusal to have hospice made me the primary suspect in a suspicious death inquiry.

“The name and number of the doctor, please?”

I gave him the internist’s information, and he left to place the call in private. I sat with my husband on my mother-in-law’s striped sofa, wondering what the doctor would say. Adrienne’s passion for living had made her rebel against her illness in an unexpected way: in doctors’ offices, emergency rooms, and hospital beds around the city, she had rhapsodized about how well she was doing. “If it weren’t for the side effects of these strong medications I’m on, I would be even better.” No, she would be dead.

She was so afraid of dying that she would not report the symptoms of her decline to the doctors – to do so would confirm what she could not confront. Over the past year, Adrienne had insisted before every medical encounter that I “stop making her sound sicker than she was” (read: “stop telling the truth about her condition”) and let her do the talking. We had seen her internist just a couple of weeks earlier in the office for her annual, and Adrienne had put on the dog-and-pony show of how well she was doing while I bit my tongue.

It was such an odd charade – pretending to be well while still seeking medical attention. I would watch her in these performances, giving her the evil eye for the blatant omissions in her narrative. (Is she going to tell him how nauseous she’s been this week? Apparently not. Is she going to tell him that her oxygen dipped into the seventies this week? No, she’s not. Why are we even here?)

Each white-walled, sterile examining room became a synecdoche for the entire six years of her decline. She seemed like one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s characters in No Exit, a soul stuck in a cosmic waiting room, unable to proceed to the promised relief of heaven or go back to the way things were before this death sentence. She hung onto her thread of life – and onto the illusion that she wouldn’t die – so tenaciously, partly because she didn’t want to leave her grandchildren, and partly because of something else.

That something else revealed itself during a pivotal conversation two weeks before she died. It showed us the exit from the waiting room – and we approached it together.

Step by step, our steps together, lean your aged body on my loving arm.
—Antigone in Oedipus at Colonus, by Sophocles (441 BC)

My husband Kirk had been furious with her at the dinner table one night for a few critical comments she’d made about my rigid parenting (she was such a softy) and my un-nutritious cooking (wholly lacking in greens that evening). He defended me at the table in front of the children, and though I took him to task for disrespecting his mother – I didn’t want my children thinking they could talk to me that way! – it turned out that the reckoning had a purpose we didn’t yet see.

She cried the rest of the evening and was quiet, threatening never to speak again. (There’s a missed opportunity for a joke here, but now that she’s actually gone and I miss her, I don’t feel like making it.) The next morning, I sat with her on the bed as usual, holding her pill box as she forced down the series of tablets and capsules that kept her alive. She struggled bitterly with the side effects and complained about each one at length, as if we hadn’t discussed this every morning for the past six years.

Usually, I said, “You have to take them, Adrienne – they’re keeping your lungs clear so you can breathe!” But that morning felt different. I was tired of this and said, “Well, you don’t have to take them if you prefer the alternative.”

She gave me a quelling look and said, “I’m not ready to die yet” – not in her stubborn way, but in a tremulous, fearful tone that was unlike her.

It seemed that she had more to say, so I put my hand on hers. That was a risk – she was a bony, angular person in her old age and did not invite caress – but when she didn’t stiffen, I held her hand in both of mine and asked, “Are you afraid, Adrienne?”

She bit back a sob and tried to gain control while I wondered how my mother-in-law’s faith was aiding her in this moment. Here’s where the rubber hits the road – did she believe everything she’d taught in Sunday school for fifty years?

Finally, she said, “I’m not ready to stand before God because I have nothing to offer him.”

It took me a moment to process that statement.

“You’re not supposed to offer him anything – it’s what he has done for you that matters.”

“I’ve worked so hard at being good. I’ve never smoked a cigarette – not once! – and have lived a good life …”

“Yes, you have lived a good life. You’ve been a foster mother and have helped so many people pay for school and basic needs. You’ve loved the unwanted. You are so generous and have done amazing things!”

“But I feel like it’s not enough! I’m afraid it doesn’t outweigh the things I’ve done wrong or the unforgiveness I have for people or the bad things I think and say …” Her wheezing voice cracked with emotion.

I paused and heard the clock tick a dozen times as I weighed my response. I wondered if I could say this to a dying person – and then realized that six years of waiting had led to this moment.

“You’re right,” I said, “it’s not enough.”

She looked at me startled. She had expected reassurance that she was fine.

“We can never be good enough,” I said.

She stared in front of her in despair, shaking her head.

“But Adrienne,” I said. “You remember the Good News, right? That God loves you more than you love him? You don’t have to be good enough – Jesus was good enough. When you stand before God, he’s going to see his son’s perfect record and ignore yours. You don’t have to be afraid of anything.”

She remembered what she knew in silence for a while, blinking. The oxygen machine pumped and hissed. I handed her another pill.

For the next two weeks until she died, she continued to be relatively quiet. During that time, Kirk spent every evening after dinner visiting with her and reminiscing about what a good mom she’d been. In spite of the explosion at dinner – perhaps because of it – they loved each other well to the end.

But had I? My patience had run out so long ago that I’d relied completely on acting skills to smooth every interaction with her. I had acted like the world’s sweetest daughter-in-law, but I knew better. I was exhausted and wanted to travel again – how self-absorbed was that? Now, I sat with my guilt and my husband on my mother-in-law’s sofa, waiting for the police officer to return and read me my rights.

What was the doctor going to say about me? Did he believe Adrienne’s stories about how well she was doing? Would he be surprised she’d died when everything had been going so well, according to her? Even worse, would he suggest there had been foul play? What would he tell the police? My pretense of goodness was about to be exposed when the doctor revealed that I had apparently starved her to death, kept her in a cold marble bathroom, and hadn’t cared enough to check on her before rigor mortis had set in.

The officer came back, still taking notes in his little book. “His nurse had trouble finding him, but she finally reached him on the golf course.”

“Oh? What did he say?” My body flashed hot and cold.

The officer looked at me with eyebrows raised and said, “The doctor laughed and said, ‘Finally!’”

Finally. He actually said that. I felt absolved by the doctor’s reaction (though he was a bit insensitive, I thought from the moral high ground I had regained).

Things moved quickly after that. Folks from the funeral home arrived and removed Adrienne’s body while I went to the other room with Kirk and began making phone calls to family and friends. We had to tell the children that their beloved grandmother was gone. There was a memorial service to plan, the burial in Tennessee next to her husband to arrange, her estate to manage, and her bequests to attend to.

It was at the funeral home in Tennessee, standing before her dead body again – still unable to touch it – that I grappled with my aversion. Here lay the body of a woman I had loved and cleaned and nourished and held – and I could not reach out to touch her hand in a final farewell. I would not do it. How could I be so fastidious? The same thought had occurred to me in front of my grandmother and grandfather’s coffins: why can’t undertakers get the mouths right? She didn’t look like herself with her lips like that, melting wide across her face.

Then I thought how, in the past, it has often been a woman’s job to prepare the dead for burial. I shuddered with gratitude that we live in an age where we’ve handed that ritual over to professionals. I thought of Mary Magdalene rushing to the tomb early Easter morning to put spices on Jesus’ crucified body. That would have been done before burial but for the Sabbath starting, inconveniently, just as they removed him from the cross. I wondered how she thought she was going to get into that sealed tomb. Did she really grasp how horrifying a job she was about to tackle with Jesus’ body already on its third day of death?

But instead of a closed tomb, instead of remains, she found the tomb empty and Jesus alive, standing in the garden – inexplicably, impossibly alive – and fell at his feet, clinging to him in thunderstruck worship.

The Resurrection changed everything for Mary. From then on, whenever she prepared the body of a fellow believer for burial, she surely had hope. She had personally seen Jesus die – even saw a Roman soldier stab his body just to make sure – and saw it sealed into a tomb. But then she saw him alive again two days later. Not in a revivified, Frankenstein’s monster sort of way (as if the body had sat up from a coffin with its mouth all wrong), but refreshed, renewed, whole, and enduring. He had defeated Death – and Mary knew that for everyone who believed that, Death could not defeat them. Finally, we have life.

One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
— “Death, be not proud” from Holy Sonnets by John Donne (1609)

I looked at Adrienne’s wasted body in the coffin we had selected. She would have been furious that we had an open casket, but there was only her family present, with no one cluck-clucking over her appearance (except me). I had given the undertakers her best suit, her favorite gold earrings, and a particular scarf she liked. But I found that having her dressed with her hair and makeup done like she was taking a nap before a political fundraiser was ridiculous. When would she ever have been sleeping fully dressed in a St. John suit?

The fakery of it all echoed her fakeness in the doctors’ offices as she avoided this eventuality – and mirrored my own fakeness in the last two years as I pretended to be patient, like lipstick on a corpse. But as I focused on the grotesque difference between the reality and the ideal, I remembered that the good news of the Resurrection is for me, too – here and now. I hadn’t loved Adrienne perfectly – I had merely loved her and often failed – and the difference between my exhaustion and my loving behavior can’t really be credited to my acting skills. I’m not that good. I realized, finally, that my deficit was filled to overflowing by Jesus being good enough for me.

He promised he wouldn’t leave us in this broken in-between-time – when the pain of failure and death still grates on us – though we have hope that it’s ending. Thankfully, I know the Second Coming is, well, coming. When we’re alive again – and Death has died – I’ll be able to touch and hug her (and she’ll forgive me for this essay). Her strong opinions will be full of grace and truth, and her smile will be beautiful again because Jesus will get her mouth right.

When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”
—1 Corinthians 15:54–56

[Adrienne Lynne Kirk Susong, November 23, 1936–October 6, 2020]