After nearly three years of helping my mom, my job had ended. I held Mom’s still-warm hand and mumbled stuff I would have mumbled hours earlier had I known the few drops of morphine and Haldol would have led her to shut down so quickly. I cried some more. I felt guilty for seemingly using the drugs to cut her life short by minutes or hours, even though it had been becoming clearer that the end was near.
Around 6:30 a.m. I called for a palliative care nurse. She made the official pronouncement—we estimated the time of death—and asked me for all remaining narcotics. Tired and delirious, I joked that I planned to sell them at the local college to help pay for Mom’s funeral. She did not think this was funny.
She poured out the meds into towels and left me with an empty box. Then she advised me to call the funeral home and left me in what had become an empty apartment.
I made the dreaded call to the undertaker, called two cousins who lived nearby and also our trusted aide, Lakita, to tell her she didn’t have to come in. Lakita burst into tears.
My cousins arrived before the undertaker, noted my mom sitting in her chair, and we had what seemed like a normal discussion only 10 feet away from her, as if she were taking a nap. My cousin’s teenage daughter sat on the couch next to Mom’s chair and read a book, occasionally peeking at her great aunt. It was all surreal.
Two big guys arrived from the funeral home and asked us all to leave the room. Sometimes, they said, removing the body could get, and sound, ugly. That seemed unlikely as Mom looked so small and peaceful, and they were out of the apartment in less than five minutes. The void left was far greater than Mom’s 90 pounds.
My last jobs as caregiver—there was no will, no estate—would be organizing the funeral and writing the eulogy. As we were at the height of the pandemic, the graveside service would be tiny, only the closest relatives, and there would be no post-service luncheon, no shiva. None of Mom’s friends would be able to eat Danish and gossip about her nearly 99 years. An Orthodox friend of mine led the brief service, because the rabbi who knew my mom couldn’t make it, and I wasn’t spending $600 on a rent-a-rabbi.
I’d saved $6,000 on a credit card to pay for the funeral, as Mom had no life insurance, but was taken aback when I was told this no-frills event would run over $9,000. I learned that you can’t pay for a funeral over time (ironic that there’s no layaway plan given the circumstances) because undertakers don’t trust people to pay once “the body is in the ground,” said the funeral director. I also learned that if you die two days before the first of the month, you don’t get your Social Security check. It may be the one place where the government is efficient.
I had been spending through my own savings as a caregiver, because Mom had run out of her own money and Social Security wasn’t covering her bills. I borrowed $3,000 for the funeral and gave it to the big guys driving the hearse. The service for 11 mourners went off without a hitch.
As I was leaving the burial plot, a deer came running by, leaping over the headstones. As I neared the George Washington Bridge, on my drive back to New York, another deer ran alongside my car. I had never seen deer in either of these locations. Was it Mom wishing me well or a weird coincidence? I’m not normally one to believe in that stuff, but now I’m not so sure.
Walking back into our apartment building brought the oddest coincidence. I bumped into Mom’s favorite visiting nurse, Nicole, and she stopped to chat. She said how much she enjoyed chatting with Mom and told me stories I’d never heard. One was that Mom had had a miscarriage before me, so my arrival was a happy surprise.
She also told me that Mom had assured her she was ready to go but was trying to hang on so I wouldn’t be alone. Though caregiving is meaningful and feeds the soul, even while it’s exhausting and frustrating, it was nice to hear that Mom was still worrying about me while I was worrying about her. And she was still doling out advice to her aide, who went back to school when her time with us was sadly done.
Over the last few years of her life, and especially the last few months, people in our apartment complex would often see me helping my mom and say, “You’re such a good son, the way you take care of your mother.”
No, I thought. I was a good son because of my mother.
Howard Gensler is a veteran journalist who has worked at the Philadelphia Daily News, TV Guide and the Philadelphia Inquirer and has freelanced for dozens of magazines and websites. Gensler wrote the story for the 2012 movie Hysteria, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy. In between jobs, he worked as a caregiver for his mom.
