The Waiting Room

I don’t live near my mother. I’m a country away.
I hadn’t seen her in two years, the last get together before this one, to celebrate her eightieth birthday. She’s a very independent sort, born of stubborn Belgian stock. After my father died, she lived on her own, residing in the same apartment for over thirty years and surrounding herself with the familiarity of her own independence. There would be no nursing homes for her. She hated them even though she had worked in one for many years as a nurse’s aide. “Oh, it’s terrible, dose poor people dere,” she’d say. ”Day sit, day in and day out wit nutting to do. It’s so sad.”
I’d joke about putting her in one anyway if she ever started to slip and she’d retort with an “oh ya, you better not, you bum! Not me. No ‘omes or ‘ospitals. No. Never.” As long as she was healthy, she was happy to live out her time in quiet simple solitude, puttering around the apartment on her own schedule, entertaining only the people and things that were dear to her. She wanted control. She loved her independence. No one was going to tell her what to do. “You av’ to av’ a positave attitude,” she’d say. Her solution was simple. “You jus’ av’ to get over ‘tings you av’ no control of. Foe-cus your mind and it will be ok.”

Just getting over it may have been easy for her to say but when it came to her own ailments she was somewhat of a hypochondriac. At eighty-two, I guess that’s understandable. Her aches and pains seemed to come fast and hard. Every little pain magnified itself until it had grown, in her mind, into the plague. She imagined every affliction as something grander. Slight indigestion would erupt into stomach cancer; a burning toe would flare into foot cancer; a moment of dizziness; the beginning of brain cancer. “Oh, your poor mudder,” she’d say in her pronounced Belgian accent, something she had not been cured of over the years.
“It’s always some-ting.”
I’d agree with her and say these things were okay, that they were normal health issues and would eventually go away.
“I doan know what’s wrong wit me? I wus up all night pacing. It’s my bough-will you know. In and out of the batroom!
Oh Paul, you wouldn’t be-leeeev it!”
Oh I believed it, I just didn’t want to know about it.

She’d be off to her doctor at the very hint of a problem, dropping into his office to inform him of her latest tick and ask what medications were available for relief. But for all her positive approach and stubborn will to overcome her ailments, the final relief from what started as a relatively minor one would come from exactly where she hoped it never would.


In June, my sister called with an update on our mother’s recent visit to see her doctor. For the past couple of months, she’d been having problems with her feet, an incessant pain in her toes that seemed to jump from one foot to the other. The initial diagnosis suggested that it was gout, an inflammation of the joints that affects the hands and feet. The doctor put her on medication, told her to lay off the after-dinner gin for a while and remarkably, her toes did get better. On a follow-up visit, additional tests were done.
“Mom’s okay,” my sister said carefully, “and don’t worry about this but… she has cancer of the kidney.”
Cancer of the kidney? Were we not just talking about a minor foot problem, gout and gin?
Cancer of the kidney. It sounded benign, of royalty maybe, Cancer of the Exchequer or something like that. I envisioned the human body to pinpoint a kidney’s location and importance: two in the lower back about the size of pot stickers. From my recollection, our family history of diseases had not included cancer. Heart disease was the most prevalent, having taken my father.
“Is she ok?” I stumbled, not quite registering her words.
“She’s fine. She’s actually excited to know what’s wrong with her.”
“Oh. Okay. Both kidneys?” I asked.
“No, just the one. The tumor’s small. It’s operable and they think they might just take a part of it.”
“Can you live without a kidney?” I asked.
“Oh ya, you really only need one to filter your system but at mom’s age, it would have to work harder. She can recuperate at my place for as long as she needs.”
Surprisingly, my mother was very upbeat about the whole cancer thing. “Now dat I know whut it is, I can deal wit it,” she said, her positive attitude shining through. “You kids shouldn’t worry. If some-ting ‘appens, well I’ve ‘add a good long life.”

The crazy thing was; she wasn’t supposed to die. Not then. And she didn’t go the way she or we ever thought she would.
“You’d better come right away,” I heard a few days later. “She’s in emergency and it’s not looking good. The cancer has spread.”
I flew up to Canada and met up with my two brothers and sister. “She’s not coming out,” they told me. “The cancers spread to the lungs and part of the skull.”

Much of the rest is a blur. When I saw her, she was sitting up in a gurney in the hallway of the emergency ward, frightened and disoriented.
“Hi ma,” I said, trying to appear calm, “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
She looked past me, down the hall, craning her neck as if looking for someone. There were many patients lined up in the hallway, all awaiting beds. The hospital personnel milled about seemingly unconcerned. They scrutinized their charts and computer screens and did their best to avoid making eye contact.
“How long before she can get her own room?”
“Maybe tomorrow,” we were told.
My mother continued to scan the hallway, grimacing, twisting and turning as if trying to vacate her skin. Near the entrance, two policemen were bringing in another patient. “No,” my mother said, “You can’t fool me.” I never heard her speak again.


The toughest thing about dying is waiting for it to happen. We have a lifetime to contemplate our own death, which can be a long and painful process if you worry too much about it. Helplessly waiting for someone you love to die is excruciating.
The nurse has informed us our mother has “anywhere from a day or two to a week.” The doctor says “there’s nothing to be done except to make her comfortable. It’s in God’s hands.” I’ll accept the nurse’s version. There is time for denial. And hope. And questions like how can this be happening? Maybe there’s even time to stop this obscene joke because I know I’m really not going to like the punch line.

The room where our mother dies is on the sixth floor in the palliative care unit of a hospital. The staff there is dedicated to personal care and treatment of the terminally ill with RN’s on immediate call for the medications and they are wonderful. Every couple of hours, they arrive to administer unpronounceable drugs meant to calm and sedate her. Our mother struggles and turns and swats the air tube and mask from her face, then recedes back into her twitching comatose state. There is nothing we can do but wait.

We decide on a schedule that allows two of us to stay with her day and night. In the room, there are two beds separated by a peach-colored pull curtain. Our mother has a window side view, which looks out east onto a parking lot then straight out to the flat landscape of a tree-dotted horizon. A French Canadian woman in her early nineties occupies the other bed. Her stay is short term also but she will go home soon. I don’t know why she is on this floor. She is recovering from a minor foot problem. How ironic.
“What’s wrong with her?” the woman asks.
“She has cancer,” I reply.
The woman sports a toothless maw and softly pulls at her short gray hair. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, and then looks at me with pained, mothering eyes. “That’s not good. Can you help me find my comb?”
As we wait with our mother, we periodically assist the French woman, helping her to her bed or to a chair in the corner of the room. She has the orderlies hopping too, working the call button with concerned requests for lunch, medication and bathroom aid. She sits and waits by the door, calling out to every passing person she sees.
“I need to see the doctor please. These pills aren’t working.”
At one point, a priest comes in to administer Communion and she is excited to partake in the prayers that she recites in French. On the wall above her head, hangs an upside down crucifix seemingly mocking the scene. I wonder if someone did that purposely. I expect the walls to crack, the ceiling to crumble and an ungodly loud voice to announce- “Sorry, so sorry! There’s been an unfortunate mistake! We only deal with the feet here!”
Defeat. Yes, that much feels true.

The French woman’s son and daughter come to see her, alternating their visits every other day. They talk about a lake and a boat and some repairs they need to do at a cottage. There is a tension and impatience in the children’s voices as they spend their half-hour talking about everything and nothing. Sometimes I hear a spiritless sigh, a petty complaint, an impatient scolding. Sometimes there’s levity and mild laughter. With nothing left to say, there’s an awkward silence followed by a promise of a return visit tomorrow. I envy them.
“You remind me of my other son,” the French woman tells me. She looks into my face with recognition and a true happiness. “He’s coming in from Ontario to see me.”
“He must be a very handsome fellow,” I say. She laughs and says oh yes he is, quite so.
“He called earlier. Your father there answered the phone for me.” She nods in the direction of my older brother sitting next to our mother.
“Ah, well that was nice of him.”
I let the moment for correction pass.
The fleeting moments I spend with her feel awkward; they are moments I’m not spending with our mother who struggles for breath a few feet away. I know there is nothing we can do to change anything but we try anyway. We engage in one-way conversations hoping for a response. We imagine every tremor as an acknowledgement that says, “see, she knows we’re here.”

And we are all here, all of us, even our dad. On the day before our mother dies, my sister and I see a huge arching rainbow sitting on the horizon outside the window of our mother’s apartment. “Dad must be near,” my sister remembers. “Mom always says that when she sees a rainbow.”

At the end of the ward, there is a small break room with chairs and a TV. Wandering down, I glance into the rooms of other patients and petulantly play a game of ‘whose going home and whose not.’ There’s a woman wrapped like a mummy in sheeting laying on her back with her mouth wide open. Not a chance. There’s a man sitting by his bed with one leg wrapped in a white knee-high protection sock. Probably. In the TV room, there’s a nurse sitting with a woman who voices concern over her mother’s tendency to wander off in confusion. The mother sits silent beside them staring slyly at the TV. I believe we have a winner.
My older brother and I watch part of the British Open and talk about our golf games and try to pretend that things aren’t that different and that life does go on. We skirt the issue of our mother’s inevitable funeral, her arrangements, and her final wishes. Down the hall, she lays suspended in time and is unable to have a say in any of it. We wait and float in our own dream of denial, confusion and pain.

I wish I could say she passed away peacefully but she didn’t. Heavily sedated on morphine and other life ending drugs, the husk that was once our mother struggled to stay alive, stubbornly fighting to overcome the cancer that slowly overtook her. She clung to every breath, her heart beating strong, her body at times trying to will itself to get up as if waking from a bad dream. I wanted to believe she was smiling or listening at times. I don’t know; it may just have been the drugs that made her twitch and grimace. I wanted to believe in a lot of things; that she was not in pain from the spreading cancer, that she was not scared, that there was no omniscient being that would allow suffering to continue. I hoped she would die quickly and be free of this. I can say that now. In private moments, we all had our final say with her. I asked her to go. I cried for her to go. She continued to stay. Knowing mom, she probably wanted to make sure we were all okay with this and not worry too much.
She passed on July 20, there in the palliative care unit of the hospital just across the river from her apartment. I can’t believe she died this way. I expected her to die peacefully in her apartment in the comfort of her own bed some years from now.
“Oh Paul, you wouldn’t be-leeeev it!” she used to say. I don’t.

My parents live with me now. They have their own place in a room in my head. I wait for them to pop in every once in awhile and we talk about everything and nothing. I won’t say that I miss them. You can’t miss what you’ll always have.