Death and Chocolate: A Sampler for the Psyche

After my mother died, friends gave me chocolate -- fudge, fruits dipped in bittersweet, a box of cocoa-dusted truffles. The gifts brought pleasure and consolation: pleasure because they were delicious reminders of the kindness of friends; consolation because they let me think kindly of my mother, a difficult person to love. Her favorite flavor was chocolate, and during her last days she allowed my sister and me to spoon-feed her chocolate pudding and chocolate ice cream as she lay in the hospital with tubes up her nostrils and IVs in her bruised arms, smilingly blissfully as each spoonful slid down her throat.

At the end, my mother, all 78 pounds of her, suffering from dementia and wasted by cancer, emphysema and pneumonia, became the sweet and caring mommy of my dreams. She told me and my sister that we were beautiful and that she loved us; she apologized frequently for the anguish she had caused. "It wasn't easy to live with me, I know," she said. "I was so angry all the time."

We didn't disagree. Granted, as a divorced working mother, she was under great stress, but Mom was a screamer whose refrain was "I can't wait till you're 21 and out of the house!" We were three females without rapport, living parallel lives in a series of claustrophobic apartments. After I left -- at the foretold age of 21, to attend graduate school in another state -- there were years of estrangement. There were also years of psychotherapy. "This is the story of your mother," I recall one therapist telling me. "She gives with one hand and she takes away with the other."

For 30 years, unable to bear her hostility, I rarely saw my mother. But I returned after an absence of several years when my sister phoned from California and asked me, a New Englander, to go to the New York hospital where Mom had been taken after collapsing. The doctors thought it essential for family to be there, my sister said.

I walked into Mom's room wearing a paper gown over my clothes and latex gloves that made my hands look lifeless. She didn't know I had been summoned, but despite her failing memory, when she saw me, she began to cry. And then she said, "I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry."

"It's okay," I said, as tears rolled down my cheeks. "That part is over." I held her twiglike fingers in my rubberized hand.

Mom's eyes seemed huge in her emaciated face. "Now get me out of this place," I remember her commanding. "I'm being held against my will. Those people who look like doctors and nurses -- they're all actors."

I told her they weren't.

"How do you know?" she sneered, back to her familiar ways. "Have you seen their medical licenses? They look like medical people, but this is really a dinner theater."

During her weeks in the "dinner theater," Mom slipped in and out of lucidity. At one point she nearly died but, despite a "do not resuscitate" order, was revived. Then, heavily sedated, she was on a ventilator. A TV, recommended by doctors who thought she needed mental stimulation even if she appeared to be unconscious, blared in her curtained cubicle, sometimes advertising allergy pills "to help you breathe easier."

My sister arrived, and when we weren't at the hospital we tried to organize Mom's house -- a daunting task, as everything was chaotic, evidence of her long-term loss of memory. We found uncashed, expired checks mixed with ancient junk mail, overdue bills and collection notices; we found a frying pan in the newspaper recycling, potholders in the refrigerator, a plastic bag containing insurance policies, stock certificates, savings bonds and the deed to her house on the bedroom floor.

After her stint in the vent unit, Mom could sometimes recognize people and hold short conversations. Once, as we sat by her bed, she slowly awoke and with great effort said she had written us a letter.