My Mother’s Final Act Of Revenge Before She Died Was Maniacally Brilliant
My mother's final act of self-care before she passed on.
Rido | Canva "Paula Marie,” my mother said to me, her voice cracking from the medications and impending death, “I’ve decided I’d like you to let me live on in perpetuity.”
I paused. At that moment, I was preparing her impressive tray of medications. Some were meant to alleviate my mother’s pain. Some were meant to help her relax and perhaps sleep. None would allow her to live very long, much less in perpetuity.
I turned to face her. Her short pixie hairstyle was disheveled. I hadn’t yet had a chance to run a comb through it. It wasn’t on my list of things to do that morning.
Change diaper — check. Contact people to tell them Mom was dying — check. Administer palliative medications to keep her comfortable — check. Nothing about hair.
“Mother, I hear you, but I’m a little confused. You opted to stop all treatments and come home to die. Do you remember that? Have you changed your mind?”
She had made her decision so quickly that my head still spins when I think about it. I don’t blame her.
The options offered to her were bleak: Have her leg amputated above the blood clot and then finish chemo for her cancer after healing, if the cancer hasn’t already spread too much, or start chemo immediately and hope the blood clot hasn’t killed her by the time she can get her leg amputated. Given the cancer was already in her nodes, she didn’t have many choices.
Still, I wish my mother had paused just a little longer before announcing her desire to die.
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“Oh, no. I don’t want to live forever. I want to live in perpetuity. Or, at least, I want people to think I’ve lived in perpetuity.”
She was still alert and perky at this point, day 2 of 13 in-home hospice care. If it weren’t for the hospital bed occupying most of the space in her tiny living room, the two 10-inch open slices on either side of her calf — treatment for the blood clot — and her disheveled hair, nobody might even know she was sick. Minutes before this, she was cracking jokes.
“Hey, Mom, how’s your diaper?” I asked.
“Hey, Paula,” she responded with perfect timing, “How’s your bra?”
Hours later, she would ask for a burrito. This was not the sickness or dying talking. She was fully cognizant.
“Don’t bury me in the plot next to your father.” She caught herself and stammered a correction. “Victor. Don’t bury me next to Victor.”
Victor was my legal father, having adopted me shortly after he married my mother when I was five years old. But he was also the man who tortured me throughout my childhood with every manner of abuse and then forced an estrangement between my mother and me when he sensed we were a powerful force together.
He could not have us teaming up and overpowering him. I lost my mother for almost two-and-a-half decades because of that man; I cannot call him “father,” and my mother respected that.
My mother was bending forward, picking at the top of the bandages covering the gashes in her leg, trying to get a fingernail under it to scratch an itch. “Have me cremated, and then just keep my ashes somewhere nice. Maybe toss some of them in the ocean, but not at a beach where you have to pay for parking.”
She pulled her finger from the bandages and pointed it at me for effect. My mother thought it criminal to make someone pay money to experience the ocean.
“What about the tombstone?” I asked. “Don’t you want a tombstone?”
I hated this moment more than any of the previous ones surrounding her illness. More than when her chemo made her so sick she soaked the exam room in the hospital with feces. More than that the doctor pulled me aside and told me the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes. More than when she declared too quickly she wanted to go home and die.
I didn’t know then that in just 10 days, I would be praying she might die more quickly.
I would be unable to watch any more of her dissolve into a gossamer remnant of the woman who once came back from the atrocities inflicted on her by my biological father. Despite her having fallen almost immediately into the merciless arms of another husband, Victor, she’d once been strong enough to escape her marriage and get five children from Seattle to San Diego for 73 dollars while pregnant with twins.
She had a history of summoning strength against all odds. I didn’t know the fragile woman I was helping bathe on day 12 of hospice.
“It would be just a plaque, and no, I don’t want one. I want people to walk by and see Victor all alone. A hundred years from now, I want them to wonder why there is no death date on the plaque of his wife next to him.”
I handed her the small crystal tray of pills. I tried to make dying as classy as possible. My mother was a classy lady who wore a full face of makeup every single day. When I was a young child, I loved watching her put it all on, along with her wig.
We would sit at her dressing table in a small dressing room adjacent to her bathroom — identical faces in parallel, her eyes on her meticulous placement of smoky eyeliner or bright lipstick, and my eyes on her.
I stopped attending her morning make-up and wig application the day after Victor tried to shoot her in that same room. I could no longer stand the space or the smell of perfume that lingered there.
A few years before she became ill, my mother had gently ushered her abusive husband Victor to his death.
He’d beaten her throughout their whole marriage and destroyed her relationships with her children. He’d cheated on her and mishandled their money. But she still took care of him to the very end.
“How did you do it?” I’d asked her. We’d reunited shortly after he was gone, and I had questions.
“He never let me live my life with dignity,” she’d said. “But I let him die with dignity. In doing so, I think I won.”
I could see her eyes beginning to grow heavy. The medication was ruthless. Every time she took it, I felt like I was losing a bit more of her.
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“Please, Paula Marie. Please don’t let the world believe I wanted to be next to that man for eternity. Please let them think I lived on without him for more than just a few years. Let them think I lived in perpetuity.”
I picked up the comb and ran it through her hair. Better late than never.
“Okay, Mom. I promise. I’ll find the prettiest, most elegant urn I can afford and keep you somewhere safe and beautiful. I’ll let some of you float into the ocean at public beaches with free parking. I’ll make sure people always wonder what happened to Victor’s wife. This will be our revenge.”
My mother laughed a bit maniacally for a solid minute before she could no longer resist the pull of the medication. She was as bawdy as she was classy, an intoxicating combination during a childhood filled with uncertainty. I imagined she was feeling quite pleased with her rather unorthodox request.
When she awoke hours later, her eyes searched the room for me. “Paula Marie,” her voice continued to crack. “Remember what you promised me. Let me live on in perpetuity. Also…” She assumed a haughty British accent worthy of royalty, “I would like a burrito for dinner, and I believe I may have shat a skosh in my diaper.”
Standing over her empty grave a year later, missing the mother I knew she had wanted to be, I laughed a little maniacally myself.
There is space for her next to the man who tried to destroy us, and her name is on the plaque, but her date of death remains empty. It
It is our little secret, her final act of self-care and an absence of action that binds my mother and me together in perpetuity.
If you think you may be experiencing depression or anxiety as a result of ongoing emotional abuse, you are not alone. Domestic abuse can happen to anyone and is not a reflection of who you are or anything you've done wrong. If you feel as though you may be in danger, there is support available 24/7/365 through the National Domestic Violence Hotline by calling 1-800-799-7233. If you’re unable to speak safely, text LOVEIS to 1-866-331-9474.
Paula M. Fitzgibbons, a new contributor to YourTango, is a writer and former Lutheran pastor whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Scary Mommy, and New York Magazine. She is currently revising a memoir about breaking the cycles of abuse her mother could not escape.