Terra Infirma

A Beginning My mother died in the Church Home Hospice in Baltimore, at the age of 54. Her last words were "I love you." The radio was playing "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." The immediate cause was respiratory infection, a complication of prolonged medication for pain. My mother suffered cancer for seven years. At the end, a nurse stripped the neck brace, pressed her fingers against the carotid artery, and felt for the faintest sign of a pulse. The velcro made a sound like stitches ripping. I remember the moment of her death, and in the moments that followed, a kind of wonder at myself, in my own blind efficiency. My father sat stunned as though this weren't something we had anticipated all along. I called my two sisters, and my two brothers, and told them to come downtown and see our mother's body. I called the funeral home, Sol Levinson Brothers. I remember looking them up in the yellow pages, which seemed odd. Shouldn't there be a card, or something, in a hospice? I had all these thoughts. All these practical, cold, abstracted thoughts. Because my mother was dead, and someone had to do something, and I was there to do it. I felt very responsible for everything that happened. I felt responsible and guilty. I had needed to be there at the moment she died. I was calling the funeral home, and saying "My mother is dead" and saying "Her name is Miriam Kamenetz," and giving a date, an address and a time. All along my mother's body was lying on the bed in the dim lamplight. Her face was crumpled and had lost all its quality. It looked like a rubber mask tossed off on the pillow. For the next week, I simply rode along on my feeling of mission. The funeral, and the seven days of mourning, coming together with my family, comforting one another, and through all of it, I saw that my eyes were open, and I was observing very carefully, like a son of a bitch, like a writer. I was not cold. I was feeling everything. But back there, way back, I was pivoting around, and seeing, and noting, and remembering. I knew I had witnessed something extraordinary at the instant of her death. Her last gesture had moved right into me. It was staying with me all through the mourning, there in the place from which I am writing this down. But I could not put it on paper then. It seemed a violation. I could see her whole life gathering around her last moment. I felt that I could hold its pattern in my hand. But then the fabric would dissolve and I had the gesture of lifting a wave out of water. I thought I had to let her story go. But three dreams came in the months after she died. They came to disturb, but also to comfort. In the third, very elaborate vision, my mother appeared in a garden to give me a key to her story. I had to write about her then. Just as soon as I began, the dreams stopped. All the same, I was afraid it would be too sentimental. For what story is more sentimental than the death of a boy's mother--even though Edgar Poe, for one, called it the most "poetical" of subjects? Poe also promised immortality to the author who wrote a simple volume, "My Heart Laid Bare." As though a naive writer could triumph over all the artifices of a master, if only he were sufficiently earnest. But Poe added puckishly, "The title must be true to its subject." Here is such a volume. But I can be true to the subject only by straying from it. I have read a few books that have been more dutiful. They were all published by the vanity press. Like mine, they were haunted by the loss of a loved one. But their authors make no distinction between history and poetry, as Aristotle does. They tell every detail, in chronological order, as though the reader already acknowledged their significance. They do not see that, at best, history aggregates, only poetry unifies. I wish to lay my heart bare. But my model is complex, the essayKamenetz, Rodger is the author of 'Terra Infirma' with ISBN 9780805211108 and ISBN 0805211101.