Inventory – a personal essay by Carolyn Alessio

Inventory

“How will I know?” my mother asked in a thin voice over the phone. If we’d been joking around—something she still relished with advanced cancer—I might have replied, “It’s like what the Supreme Court said about pornography; you’ll know it when you see it.”

But that night my elderly mother was pensive, her words unusually clear despite the heavy pain medication. “Nobody can tell me the signs,” she said. “How will I know when it’s close?”

I glanced at the rosary on my night table, tangled with a phone-charger and wrapper for a collagen face mask. “There’s signs,” I said, my throat thickening. Sleeping most of the day while drinking and eating less were huge clues, I suspected. My mother could check off both.       

“Want me to call hospice?” I said. “Or ask Brenda?” My cousin was an oncologist.      

My mother paused, and I could hear her drawing in air. “It’s hard to pray right now,” she said. “I’ve read it can be like that.”

In the past, I had suggested meditative exercises that I learned from the Examen of St. Ignatius. A former soldier, Ignatius had secluded himself in a cave and composed a frank self-inventory. But TBH, as my high school students would say, now I wasn’t praying much either. 

“Mom,” I said. “How are you on medicine? Paperwork?”

U.S. Insurance plans tend to cover grief counseling for 13 months, purposely extending four weeks past the anniversary of one’s loss. Three years after my mother’s death, I still wonder if her skill at comforting others may have inadvertently stunted my own ability to calm myself, like a baby who never learned to “self soothe.”

During her final months, I sometimes slipped into the small school chapel at work. For weeks, I tried to offer specific intentions for my mother, but my mind balked. Remaining in the pew felt wrong, like an insomniac lingering fruitlessly in bed.       

“My mom had the most frightened look on her face when she died,” my mother told me one day. “Not like those people who see a light.”

I sat up on her carpet where I was deflating my air-mattress. “You sure, Mom?” I said. “Maybe she was squinting?”  

My mother shook her head. “It was the most awful thing, seeing the look in her eyes.”

The mattress sagged as I tried unsuccessfully to recall my Grandma Curtin’s pale blue eyes from visits to her hospital bed, some 30 years before. 

“The soul does what it needs to,” our second hospice nurse told me shortly afterwards, when we moved my mother into a unit, and I had sheepishly asked if she knew how long my mother might have left.  

I tried visiting the school chapel again, two weeks before my mother died. Looking over at the altar for the Virgin of Guadalupe, I stared at her starry green cape and remembered something. More than a decade before, when one of my promising teen students had died violently, our stunned school held a memorial service. But at the time, I felt too filled with shock and anger to even think about praying. I remembered telling my mother that I felt like a teen myself, blaming God for everything bad.      

My mother listened and said, “Try praying to Enrique.”   

Praying to a bright and sarcastic teen didn’t strike me as the best solution, but a quick and awkward attempt showed it might create more opportunities for honesty. The thick tightness in my chest had loosened just a little. Now, as I sat back the pew years later, I tried my mother’s method again.    

Grandmother, mother, daughter: we all helped carry each other’s anxiety, part of the genetic twisting that marked us kin. Shortly after my mother moved to hospice, my family and I spent the afternoon with her. We updated her like normal, about my daughter’s college science classes and part-time job selling doughnuts, my son’s new clarinet lessons, and even the plot of the film “Gattaca.” Despite heavy sedation, my mother’s pale face had flickered with recognition at our banter. When we left that day, we had crowded around my mother’s bed and said her favorite prayer, from St. Francis of Assisi. 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is error, the truth;
where there is doubt, the faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

A few hours later, my brother called to say that my mother had passed away while he and his family sat with her.  

“Was she scared?” I asked in a trembling voice. 

“No,” my brother said. “The nurse told us that after you guys left, it was like she was ready.”

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Carolyn Alessio lives and works on Chicago’s Southwest Side. Her writing has appeared in The Pushcart Prize anthology, Chicago Tribune and Sweet. Two of her essays were named Notable for Best American Essays.