by Brenda Miller

Two weeks before she dies, my mother watches hummingbirds from her perch on the recliner, her world narrowed to the glass pane of her patio door. Look, her finger points, and there’s the male ruby-throated hummingbird drinking deep, flash of red visible at just the right angle of light.

My mother spends almost all her time in that chair now, legs up to relieve the constant pain from a wound that will not heal. I’ve put the hummingbird feeder in her line of sight, as well as a small, handheld feeder I’ve promised her we’ll try out when the weather gets warmer. We think this guy is the same bird visiting his perch, but we can’t really know. Sometimes two at a time jostle for position, but never what one could call a flock, never a crowd.

*

One night my mother let a stranger into her apartment. I got a call from the front desk early the next morning telling me that my mother had been awakened at 2 a.m. by a persistent knock on her bedroom window. Befuddled by painkillers and Ativan, my mother thought it was me – thought I had run the few blocks in the middle of the night and needed to be let in. She hurried to her living room, slid open her patio door to find a barefoot woman in distress, crying that she needed to use the bathroom. My mother, kind as ever, let her in, and the woman barricaded herself in the bathroom, started the shower and began vomiting, until my mother finally called the night managers, who promptly got rid of the intruder, cleaned up her bathroom, sprayed it down with disinfectant.

 By the time I get there, her place looks back to normal, save for a clump of used towels and bathmats loaded into her laundry cart. I hold my mother’s hand while she cries, once she realises it was not a dream. She perseverates on the details, still trying to clear her night vision enough to understand why she had done what she had done. I thought it was you, she says, putting her palm on my cheek. I thought it was you.

*

It was not me, though more and more often now, I find myself jumping in the car and arriving a few minutes later at her apartment before I know what I’m doing. We are tendrilled, like the sticky vine of clematis that twines up a lattice outside her door, but so far has never bloomed. I take three deep breaths at the stop sign before the main entrance, readying myself. I never know what I will find. I key in through the hallway door now, since the staff have asked me not to use the patio to get her out of the habit of allowing people in from the outside. Every time, for her, it’s a surprise, her face lights up when she sees me.

We’ve taken to watching Jeopardy! every night while eating ice cream.

She can no longer make it to the dining room, so she has her meal delivered, often calling the front desk several times because she can’t remember if she ordered. And I know she’ll forget to eat unless I’m there to nag, encourage a few bites. I flutter and hover, my voice cheerful but stern as a nanny’s.

But ice cream is always a winner; we can count on ice cream, usually Moose Tracks, with its surprises of fudge and peanut butter. My mother eats ice cream in slow motion. The spoon held on her tongue a few moments while she hums, then dips back down, tapping and scooping the tiniest bit to hold between her lips. To watch her eat ice cream is to be mesmerised by this full attention to detail.

I sit in the desk chair beside her recliner and gobble my ice cream while shouting answers with my mouth full. Well, actually, shouting questions: What is Laurel Canyon? Who is Heidi Klum? My mom murmurs you’re so good after each correct response, pulling the spoon through her lips. I know that ninety per cent of the apartments in this senior living complex are tuned to Jeopardy! right now, most of them elderly women who have watched this show for decades. They hurry from the dining room, a procession of walkers clotting by the elevators.

I remember watching with my parents in our shag-carpeted living room, my mother on the couch, my father in his recliner, my brothers on the floor with me, all of us shouting. My parents smoked their after-dinner cigarettes; I ate mint-chip ice cream. We watched Art Fleming steer the show to its Final Jeopardy conclusion, the so familiar melody heightening our pretend anxiety.

As I watch with my mother now, we are just mother and daughter again, with nothing to do but attempt the right questions for the random answers we’ve been given.

*

Inside her apartment, hummingbirds surround my mother: a carved wooden hummingbird alighting on a branch; a decorative hummingbird plate; a glass hummingbird hanging from an invisible string, hummingbird earrings in her earlobes, a paint-by-number of South American hummingbirds I did myself and hung in her kitchen. The hospice chaplain asked my mother what she loved about hummingbirds. Their persistence, she replied without hesitation, her mind suddenly clear, their ability to make a home out of nothing.

I bought hummingbird notecards to entice my mother to write letters, to send notes to her grandchildren, who adore her. She’ll start, but then the pen stills and droops, her eyes slide closed, and when she wakes she can’t remember to whom she was writing or why. I tell her again, nudge the hummingbird cards toward her hand. Where did these come from? she asks with both wonder and delight. I turn and watch the hummingbirds, flashes that appear out of nowhere and just as quickly disappear.

*

It takes five passes of my carpet shampooer even to begin to get the blood out of my mother’s carpet. There’s something soothing about it, though: the constant roar of the machine blocking out everything else; cleaning solution foaming on the darkest spots; extractor sucking up crimson liquid into the clear receptacle. I empty it seven times, averting my gaze as the blood whirlpools down the drain.

   My mother sits quietly in her recliner while I do this, making jokes about my tenacity. But I’m in it now, a challenge, and I can’t stop – though I know when the carpet dries, blood will still leach up from underneath, ghostly presence never fully eradicated.

My mother bleeds spontaneously from varicose veins haemorrhaging in her leg – the walls stretched thin and pressurised – and it always comes as a shock. This last time it happened in her bedroom late at night, as my mother got ready for bed. She’s on blood thinners for her faulty heart, so blood fountains out of her and doesn’t stop until someone can arrive to put on pressure, call an ambulance. Now I can trace her passage through the apartment as if tracking a wounded animal.

I’ve begged them to stop the blood thinners. I’ve now watched my mother bleed in her apartment, on the sidewalk in front of the doctor’s office, on her patio, in the shower. Each time blood pools beneath her, we lock eyes as I apply pressure, trying to keep my mother contained in this porous body.

*

Just wanting to see a hummingbird is not enough. You have to prepare. Plant the right plants that will unfurl their lures. Buy the right feeder, make the food according to directions. My mother did it right, boiling sugar in water, keeping tabs on the level of nectar in each bowl. You have to be present; you can’t always be checking your phone, doing the crossword, thinking about what you did wrong yesterday and the day before that. They’re elusive, hummingbirds. It’s what they’re known for. That, and the way they can metabolise sucrose to keep themselves from freezing. The way they can migrate hundreds of miles without stopping. The way their bright colours are not inherent to their feathers but depend on refractions of light. They’re survivors, with sturdy, impossibly small, hearts.

*

Our hospice nurse, Tracy, is six feet tall and no-nonsense. When she enters my mother’s small apartment, she fills it with competence and control. She carries on one shoulder a box of bandages, numbing ointments, tape – all those items designed to contain chaos. We now have so many of these supplies – all of them in large plastic bags I shove into corners. I know Tracy is clocking information in just a few seconds, devising a plan of attack, even while making chit-chat with my mother.

My mother grows compliant in Tracy’s presence, a childlike smile radiating from her face. Hello, hello, she says and always offers the nurse a cold or hot beverage, though Tracy, in her N-95 mask and goggles, always politely refuses, sits at her feet, gazes at my mother’s right shin where the wound has been struggling to heal for six months. Sometimes it seems to start closing, then opens wide again, gets infected, spreads. We have to give my mom Vicodin to get her through the dressing changes, but still she warbles with pain when they peel the old bandage away. What is that? she sobs, What have I done now?

*

Sometimes when I arrive in the morning, I see that my mom has removed the bandage in the night and tried to fix it herself, an awkward mess of gauze and scotch tape, like a child who knows she’s misbehaved. Even though I’ve written on the dressing in sharpie Don’t Touch! with a heart and a smiley face. It turns out she often can’t remember why the bandage is there and can’t stop herself from investigating.

When I was nine or ten, I’d felt myself drawn to a book of matches, in a trance of disobedience, and set fire to my mother’s to-do list just to see the pattern of scorch. I put it out quickly, and my mother found me at the kitchen table, carefully trying to duplicate the list in her meticulous handwriting, as if I could cover up my crime so easily. I told her, face averted, that I was practising my cursive. My mother held the remnants of her list in hand, pointed at the matchbook and ashes, and said, slowly, measuring her words, I don’t want to disbelieve you, but here is the evidence. I say those same words to her now all the time. Here is the evidence.

My mother simply shakes her head, says It wasn’t me.

*

Why? she asks, and I begin to explain again the mechanics of poor circulation, defective heart, but she shakes her head, wants to know the bigger why, tells me she whimpered help, help in the bathroom late at night, but no one heard her, everyone – even God – is deaf in this town. I put on her jacket, her shoes, pack a little overnight bag with a sweatshirt, a nighty, a book she’s been reading for a year.

   We sit and wait for the ambulance to come, to take her to Hospice House, just for a few days, she said to a friend on the phone, just to get this meshuga leg under control, but that is a lie I’ve told her to ease her transition. She sits on her walker’s seat, gazes at her old coffee table – the one she’s had for over fifty years – asks where it came from, is it mine? She says she feels as though we are in a hotel, place of transit, world falling away, and we wait together in a room already not her room, not anything but bits and pieces come together, random constellation of a life full of stars dimming into dust.

*

My mother’s body, at the end, is so battered – unrecognisable. Torn, friable, bruised. Not only the wound on her shin, but deep sores at the edges of her armpits where she scratches a constant itch. One day I heard her crying in the shower and knocked on the door, asked what’s happening. She tried to wave me off. Don’t look, she sobbed, it’s so awful, so awful.

Now, I walk into her room at Hospice House, and two nurses flank her, handling this body so gently, ministering up one side and then the other. I turn away as they clean the catheter. Help me, they said she moaned in the night. Her arms reach toward something and try to hold on.

Often that something is me. When she cries in pain, she reaches out and palms my face, sobs my daughter, my sweet girl, as if I am the one that needs comfort. Last night I dreamt we lay in bed together, our faces touching, and talked about going to Costa Rica, a place full of wild hummingbirds in every colour imaginable.

*

Think of it as an hourglass – this body, curved now under the patchwork quilt. This is so nice, she said, when we settled her into the hospice bed, fingering the pinks, the blues, the maroon edging. Every one of them handmade, she marvelled at such kindness, such unexpected joy. Birdfeeders hang outside every window. Hummingbirds zip by without stopping. A fountain burbles in the near distance.

*

My mother loved her pruning shears. Though she had so little to edit, every day in the summer she’d go out to her small container garden and snip off dead or dying blooms on her roses, her lavender, her geraniums. Whenever we went to the Garden Spot, she wanted to get something unusual, something that would start a conversation as other residents walked by her fenced patio. A midnight-blue viola. A coral rose. But still, the pansy patch was her favourite, clusters of red, pink, yellow, purple overflowing their rims. She’d bend precariously at the waist to pinch off anything that might hold back the rest of summer’s flowering. Her pansies lasted longer than anyone’s.

The hummingbirds visited her feeders constantly, buzzing like moths.

A couple of mornings before she died, I drove past Joe’s Garden, which had just opened for the season, their tables overflowing with bright pansies. I stopped and bought her a purple bloom with black stripes; we always said they looked like little faces. I brought it to her room, held it up to her eyes, but she couldn’t really see anymore. Still, maybe she knew I had brought her something she might love. A sign of planting season on the way.

*

A few minutes before she dies, I tell my mother she’s doing a good job, murmur love you bye as I leave the room, a phrase we’ve said for years, the words elided into a single phrase. Though her breathing has already taken on the cadence of death, I believe we have more time. Five minutes later, I’m at Starbucks ordering egg bites when my phone rings, the caller id showing hospice, but I can’t connect, silence on the end of the line. When I hurriedly return, the nurse heads me off in the hallway, tells me my mother has gone – she left, as if she’d packed her bags, taken up her terrible purse and embarked to parts unknown.

The nurse holds my arm and leads me to my mother’s room as if I were an invalid. The pansy droops on the table. My mother’s skin has smoothed into porcelain, worry lines erased. I stroke her cool forehead. Just the two of us, as it has been for years, until some friends arrive, and we hold hands, hover over my mother, sing and cry and laugh, watching that face shift and change even in death.

My dawter, she used to say, drawing the word out in her exaggerated New York accent, patting my hand, you’re my dawter, and I patted her hand back, said I know.

*

On my back deck, I’ve put up her hummingbird feeders, filled them with nectar just the way she did, but no one comes. Not one. Not two. Even the feeder full of seed sways in the maple, untouched. I don’t know why my backyard seems bird-less, though I hear them, unnamed birds twittering away in the beech and cedar.

*

A few weeks after my mother dies, my brothers, their families, and I visit the cemetery. It’s a cold April day, the first time I’ve seen the grave since my mother’s funeral. My brothers couldn’t attend the ceremony, so it was just me and many of my friends, plus staff from the dining room at The Willows, a group of teenage girls huddled together and crying. The rabbi spoke of how she cared for others more than for herself. I stepped forward to shovel the first clump of dirt; it landed with a loud hollow thump on the pine casket.

Now we stand at her grave, my brothers and I gazing down at the common headstone she shares with my father, who died five years ago. My own future gravesite lies just alongside theirs, beneath an ornamental flowering cherry that shows no sign yet of blooming. I hear murmuring from my sisters-in-law and my nieces behind us, but I don’t turn around.

Only later, as we’re driving away, does my sister-in-law say, Did you see the hummingbird?

No, I did not see the hummingbird. I want to see the hummingbird. I’m angry I didn’t see the hummingbird. She says it came right over and chirped at us from the branches – Didn’t you hear it? – then the moth-hum of wings as she flew away.