MAMAPHONIC

Posturing
by Maia Rossini

As far as I'm concerned my mother-in-law died while searching for the ketchup in a bag of take-out. She drove the car off the road and into a tree, she shattered her skull, she stopped breathing, her heart quit beating, there was no brain activity. I would call that dead. But Bobby, my husband, insists that she wasn't really dead until we pulled the plug in the hospital a week later. I mean, sure, the paramedics did get her heart beating again, but Trudy was more than gone at that point. I'm sure she was already looking down at us from some sort of diner paradise where there's always plenty of ketchup and the fries are hot and crisp and double salted.

"I know Trudy," I said to my husband. "She'd stay where the food is."

My husband stared at me slack-faced.

"If you were dead, would you come back from heaven to lay around in a paper gown and have tubes stuck up your nose?" I said. "Would you want Tony the intern looking at your bare ass?"

My husband shook his head. "You just... just be quiet," he said softly.

I was only trying to be comforting. I didn't want him to think that his mother felt any pain or knew what was happening at the hospital. I figured it was easier to let go if you thought she was already gone. But my husband just wasn't ready to accept the idea that his mom could die as a result of something as cheap as fast food.

"Oh yeah, the paramedics say they see it all the time," said a nurse. "She still had her hand in the bag."

My husband wanted more dignity. "It's so white trash," I heard him muttering more than once. I honestly began to think that he wouldn't let her go because he just wanted to tell people that she had passed away at Sacred Heart with a nice doctor, her family and the hospital pastor at her side, instead of in a '76 Nova outside of Stuckey's with a fist full of french fries.

"Oh, she looks just like an angel," said more than one visitor over her intubated body, which was totally ridiculous because she didn't look like an angel, she looked like a God-damned pumpkin. This thing I was looking at in the hospital bed wasn't the Trudy I had known at all. Her face was swollen to about twice its normal size and she wasn't a small woman to begin with. She had a black eye and a broken nose and both lips were split. Her front teeth were jagged. They had shaved half her head and the remaining hair was pink-gray from the blood, poking out in shocks from under the stained bandage. They hadn't bathed her for two days and clotted black liquid oozed from her ears and nose. She was retaining enough fluid to make me think she might pop every time they put a needle to her arm. I wouldn't have known her from Eve if she hadn't been wearing that plastic bracelet with all her pertinent info. When the nurse pulled up her eyelids to check for response, one iris was almost all black her pupil was so blown, and the other pupil was barely there; a tiny black dot swimming in blue. Those eyes weren't seeing anything. She wasn't there. But Bobby wanted to believe otherwise.

He shook me awake on the third day. I was sleeping on the cot in the corner of the room. We had been taking turns sitting with her, but I don't think Bobby ever slept, even when he was lying down.

"She's moving, Mary!" he said excitedly. "She squeezed my hand!"

I rubbed my eyes and looked. Trudy was rolling her shoulders and splaying out her hands in a spastic shimmy. Bobby ran and got the nurse. The nurse tried to look cheerful when she saw Trudy's dance.

"Well," she said as she crisply adjusted a tube full of stomach bile, "that there is what you would call posturing. It just means, uh," she smacked her lips and looked at the beeping monitor above the bed, "it just means that there is probably some pretty serious brain damage. Look here." She ran her thumbnail deep into the sole of Trudy's foot. Trudy arched her toes out. "That's another bad sign. These things, these - " she did a perfect imitation of Trudy's shoulder roll, "these are not natural reactions. They mean that even her most basic reflexes are pretty much shot." She looked at Bobby. "I'm sorry, Honey. Give me a call if you need anything else." She walked out of the room.

"She squeezed my hand," said Bobby. "She did. That woman can't tell me otherwise."

I felt sick watching him hunched over his mother's body, treating each spasm or twitch like it was a miracle from heaven. The truth was, I was relieved by what the nurse said. The truth was, I wanted Trudy to die. Every time one of those machines started beeping or her blood pressure dropped down below normal, I got this tight little ball of excitement in my chest, hoping that this time she would just go. When I saw Trudy moving, my heart dropped thinking that there might be one more reason for my husband to hang on. I was tired of waiting. Three days of watching machines pump false breath into her lungs. Three straight days of watching my husband cry and pray. They should have never resuscitated her. She was gone, anyone could see that. She was a vegetable. I overheard one of the nurses saying that she was a corpse on morphine. All that was left was for Bobby to make up his mind to take her off life support. Don't misunderstand, I wouldn't have ever wished her dead before. I liked my mother-in-law just fine. But this wasn't my mother-in-law anymore. We were looking at her empty shell. And I was tired of looking.

"Bobby, " I said, "you heard her. This isn't your mother. This is a brain stem. I don't think she has any control at all over what her body does."

Bobby turned on me and stuck his face into mine, nose to nose. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word like I was deaf or stupid. "She squeezed my hand. She's trying to communicate with me. She's my mother. I have to listen."

"Bobby-" I began.

The nurse popped her head back in. "There's a lady here to see you. She says she's your great aunt.

"Annie Mo," said Bobby.

I rolled my eyes.

"Tell her to come in."

"Hello, Son." Annie Mo was wearing a bright red straw hat and matching pumps. She was carrying a bouquet of fake daisies.

"They won't let you bring the real thing into this place," she said handing me the flowers. I took them and she slowly walked up to Trudy and stared down into her face. "Oh, Trudy, honey," she said. "Sweet Jesus."

She turned and looked at Bobby. She clasped his hand between hers. "I'm so sorry, Dear. This is horrible. Just horrible."

He squeezed her hands and nodded in return. She paused for a moment, looking intently into his face, and then finally took a deep and shaky breath. "Now Son, I know what these doctors have probably been telling you, but you've got to listen to me. I'm going to be plain about this: if you take this woman off life-support it would be committing murder, pure and simple." Her hands shook into his. "You just need to wait this kind of thing through to its natural end. There's never any good reason to do the Lord's work. Didn't you hear about that policeman in Florida who was in a coma for seven years and then came out of it good as new? That could be your mama, Son."

Bobby bit his thumbnail. "That's true," he whispered through his hand.

"Natural end?" I said. "She already came to her natural end! What's so natural about all these machines?"

Annie Mo didn't even look at me. She continued to stare at Bobby. "That's just what the doctors want you to think," she said. "Don't you let them pressure you. You know what they really want don't you?"

"What?" said Bobby.

She lowered her voice. "They want to sell her organs. They'll tell you just about anything to get to her heart."

"That is not true," I said, "that is simply not true. Annie Mo, Trudy is irreversibly brain damaged, even if she came out of her coma she'd never be able to walk or talk or even go to the bathroom by herself. Bobby, you heard them talking. She wouldn't feel a lit match if you stuck her in the eye with it!"

Annie Mo dropped Bobby's hand and grabbed my arm. She dug her nails into my skin. I could feel her trembling. "Don't talk that way," she whispered. "Trudy can hear you. People in comas can hear everything you say."

"Annie Mo," I said, "we appreciate your concern. We really do. But Trudy is missing almost half of her skull. Her head was so smashed they had to pick the bone out with tweezers. She can't hear anything. She's not there."

Annie Mo pulled away from me. Her voice rose. "Don't you say that! That's my sister's daughter! I've known that little girl since she was born! How can you talk about her that way!" She abruptly sat down on the corner of Trudy's bed, breathing in short gasps. She covered her face in her hands. "She could-" she wheezed, "she could live to be a hundred and three. You don't know God's work. You don't know what miracles could happen."

I looked at Bobby who was nodding his head frantically in rhythm with Annie Mo's wheezing. "I have to go outside," I said.

Don't think I'm cold hearted. I prayed through all of this. I hated watching my husband suffer. I hated seeing this woman that I had known, this woman I had argued with four days earlier over the proper way to fry a chicken (I believed in frying in a little butter and then baking; Trudy was all for a vat of melted lard) lying in a hard hospital bed and breathing through a machine. I didn't like this any more than anyone else did. But I was being realistic. And when I prayed, I wasn't praying for the little stuff. I wasn't going to settle for her just opening her eyes and grunting, or for her blood pressure to stay steady. I wanted it all - a full recovery. I wanted her to sit up, stand up, and walk out of Intensive Care or I didn't want anything. I prayed for her to be the Trudy I knew from before the accident, and if I couldn't have that, then I prayed for her to die. And I'm not ashamed to admit that. My husband and I didn't have a lot of money. We both worked. Trudy's insurance from her job as a secretary was barely going to cover the hospital expenses. We couldn't pay for the kind of care she might need. And I knew my husband. I knew he would swear up, down, sideways and backwards that he would take care of his mother. But we were still arguing about having kids based on the fact that he refused to change a diaper. Was a man like that going to keep his mother from getting bed sores? No. And I loved my husband and maybe I even loved Trudy a little bit, but not enough to give up my best years giving her sponge baths and wiping her ass. Full recovery, independent living, or nothing. That's what I prayed for.

My own mother came to visit the hospital on the fifth day. She brought blackberry cobbler. Mom understands Bobby's love/hate relationship with her; namely that he loves her cooking and hates her. She walked in silently. It was during one of those never-ending moments when all there was to listen to was the sound of the ventilator hissing the air in and out of Trudy's lungs and the occasional throat clearing from Bobby. Mom put the cobbler on a side table and tentatively put a hand on the back of Bobby's chair. Bobby looked at her and then shocked us all by bursting into tears and burying his face in her breasts. "You might be the only mother I have left, Clarice."

Mom looked at me over Bobby's head, her mouth twisted in surprise, and then looked down at him and smoothed some little patty-pats on his shoulder with the tips of her fingers. "There, there, Bob." She always insisted on calling him Bob because she knew he hated it. "You'll be just fine." Bobby clung to her tighter, shaking her body with his sobs. She looked over at Trudy and then at me and shrugged her shoulders. "I'm sure your Mama will be just fine, Bob." She continued to cautiously pat his back for a little while and then politely disengaged herself. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

My mom leaned over Trudy and squinted. The bruising had lightened into yellow and green instead of dark purple and black, but she still looked like shit.

"TRUDY!" My mother suddenly yelled. "TRUDY, IF YOU CAN HEAR ME, YOU BETTER COME BACK NOW! TRUDY! LITTLE BOB NEEDS HIS MOTHER!"

"What the -" I said.

My mother waved me quiet. She took a deep breath and leaned in even closer towards Trudy's face. Her nose almost touched Trudy's nose. "TRUDY, HONEY, I MEAN IT! YOU BETTER COME BACK!"

Bobby looked at his comatose mother eagerly. He looked at her like she might wake up and scramble him an egg. Shouting her back to life, it seemed, had never occurred to him.

My mother tried one last time. "TRUDY! YOU'RE MAKING LITTLE BOB CRY, NOW. I'M SURE YOU DON'T WANT TO DO THAT! YOU BETTER COME BACK!" She waited a moment.

Trudy lay there like a body on a slab.

My mother sighed in frustration and stood up straight. "I read somewhere that sometimes all it takes is a little shouting. She adjusted the cuffs on her sleeves. She looked at me and shrugged. "Well, fuck. It couldn't hurt to try."

Later on when my mom and I went out for a cigarette she said the main problem was that Trudy wasn't a fighter. That she was a big, soft woman who simply couldn't hold her own. "You can bet that I wouldn't be lying there like that," said my mother. "I would have reached out and pulled my own plug by now."

I looked at my mother. She sucked so greedily on her cigarette that her cheeks crumpled in. "I don't doubt that," I said.

My mother exhaled. "You can bet the farm on it, Darlin'."

Later that night I lay in the cot and watched Bobby absently trace the same path down his mother's arm over and over. "Bobby," I said, "why don't you come and lay down for a little bit? Let me rub your shoulders."

He shook his head. "I don't want to leave her," he said hoarsely. "You try and get some sleep, Mary."

I shrugged and closed my eyes but I couldn't sleep. Instead, I played back the moment when the hospital first called. I was just walking out the door of the restaurant where I worked. I heard the phone ring and Jules, the cook, say "Mary the waitress or Mary the manager?" and I paused to see if it was for me. "Hang on. Mary! Mary Manager! Phone! They say it's an emergency."

As I walked back to the kitchen my first thought was something like, It's Bobby! and then I thought -- and I'm a little surprised by how the mind works at such a time -- well, at least I won't have to take the late shift tomorrow.

They wouldn't tell me much. An accident. Who it involved. That it was serious. That I needed to come right away. And that they'd already notified Bobby. He was on his way to the hospital. But I got there first.

I cried when I saw her. I mean, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to. But almost right away, I also saw that she just wasn't there, that Trudy was simply gone.

The first thing the attending nurse said to me was, "You're going to have to make some tough decisions."

And I said, "Looks like the decision's already been made."

She seemed grimly pleased by my response. "I'm afraid there isn't much we're going to be able to do for her," she said. She shook her head. "Sometimes I think resuscitation is more of a curse than a blessing."

She may have been a little cold, but she was right to make me face up to it like that. I just wish Bobby could have swallowed it as fast as I did. When he finally got there I told him what the nurse had told me. I told him that I didn't think Trudy would want to hang around this way. I tried to hit him as hard as that nurse had hit me. I tried to make him see it like I had seen it. But he just cried and cried and clutched at his mother's hand until he jarred her pulse monitor loose and the nurse had to come in to re-attach it to her finger.

On the seventh day Bobby wanted to do another CAT scan. He wanted to see if there was any improvement. I could just look at her and tell him. The swelling had gone down a little and her old face was starting to become recognizable, but her skin looked hard and waxy and the sound of her breathing, even through the ventilator, was garbled with fluid.

"Brain cells don't just grow back," I said to my mother from the waiting room phone. "The scan is going to cost another $5,000 and I don't know if her insurance will cover it."

"It's hopeless," my mother agreed. "I wouldn't risk the extra expense."

"Well, you know, Bobby wants to feel like he's tried everything." I sighed. "We're getting a second opinion this afternoon. Maybe that'll do it."

"Well, I hope so, " she said. "It's good for a boy to love his mother, but there's a limit."

"Let's hope we reach it soon," I said before I hung up the phone.

The second opinion was Doctor Jefferson. He was an asshole but he told me what I wanted to hear.

"I'd like to conduct the examination. Please step outside," he said even before he introduced himself.

"I'll stay with her, if you don't mind," said Bobby. "I've watched her examinations before."

"I'd rather you didn't," said Doctor Jefferson. "Please step outside."

Bobby was too tired to argue. We stepped outside and the doctor quickly pulled the curtain.

"Nurse," we heard him say, "we'll need a couple of more hands to turn her. She's a big one."

Bobby rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. "She would hate this."

Doctor Jefferson told us that in his opinion there was no hope of recovery. He told us that even if she managed to pull herself out of the coma, and that was highly unlikely, she would never live a life without round-the-clock care. She would never talk. She would never walk. She wouldn't know hot from cold. He recommended that we take her off life support as soon as possible but he didn't guarantee that she would die right away.

That stopped me cold. I had been thinking this whole time that we would take her off life support, she would stop breathing, and five minutes later it would be over. I didn't even consider the idea that it might take time.

"Possibly," said Doctor Jefferson. "She could possibly go right away. But ironically enough, she was wearing her seat belt when the accident occurred. It was a one injury accident. Just her head. Her heart is in good shape. Her lungs are healthy. She's conceivably got enough of her brain stem reflexes to hang on for hours or days or even weeks. I can't guarantee a time."

Bobby was staring at the floor. I looked at him and imagined another day, another week of this waiting. I took it into months of crowding over her death bed. Watching my husband sob and mumble desperate prayers, seeing him getting thinner and thinner, paler and paler. I couldn't stand it. I felt sick with anger over the time we had wasted keeping her on the respirator. "If we had known this information sooner we might have taken her off right away," I said.

The doctor raised his eyebrows. "That would have been my choice." He pulled open the curtain. "Now, if you don't have any more questions, I'm running a little behind."

"I have to talk to my mom," Bobby said. He took her hand. "Mary, give us some time alone, please. I have to talk to her."

Bobby said that his mom told him it was time to let go. That she told him she was ready and that she was going to a better place. I wondered exactly how Trudy had been telling him all this. I wanted to tell Bobby I had been telling him all that all along, but I was just so relieved that he'd finally come to a decision that I kept myself to myself. That was probably the wise choice.

The nurse pumped up the morphine and took Trudy off the respirator at four o'clock that afternoon. Trudy gasped and convulsed and kept breathing. She sounded like she was sucking at the last dregs of her Coke. She flailed her arms. She opened and shut her swollen lips. Bobby held onto his mother with one hand and the hospital chaplain's hand with the other, and they prayed together. At five thirty Trudy's eyes flew open. Her pupils were still mismatched and the blue was glazed and muddy looking. The nurse hurried to close Trudy's eyelids with the palm of her hand. But they cracked back open so that we could see the white. At about quarter to six Trudy's breathing started getting shallower and shallower and she stopped moving her arms. "It's okay, Mom," said Bobby. "You can go." He said this over and over.

You'd think you'd know the exact moment when someone dies. I thought I would. I had been watching her face, watching her chest, waiting for her time, but it happened so gradually that I didn't know anything until Bobby laughed and squeezed my hand and said, "Did you feel that?"

Bobby swears he felt her leave. He said that she moved right through him like a warm wind and it felt so good that he just had to laugh out loud. I suppose I want to believe that. But I was there and I didn't feel a thing.

The undertaker was a big strapping blond boy named Harper with rosy cheeks and a tasteful pin-striped suit. He stood quietly outside the room while we gathered up our things in the dim light. I saw the streetlights turn on all at once outside the window. It was raining a little and the puddles in the parking lot gleamed with reflected light.

I put my hand on Trudy's hand and it was already cold. I moved my fingers up her arm and then up her shoulder to the base of her neck and I caught that last bit of warmth as it leached out of her body. The blood was beginning to pool in purple splotches at the bottom of her legs. Bobby made a motion to go and I surprised myself by saying that I thought I would stay until they took her away.

Bobby shrugged. "She's gone," he said. "But you can do what you want." He kissed my cheek. He held the curtain open and told Harper he could go in now. He didn't even turn to look back at his mother.

Harper pushed his gurney in and up against the bed. He was followed by a nurse. He asked me politely if I wanted to stay and when I said yes, if that was okay, he quickly told me that it would be fine.

"We have to roll her on her side first," said Harper, "so we can slip this sheet under her body."

"Do you think we'll need help?" asked the nurse. "She's kind of big."

Harper looked at her sternly. "That won't be necessary," he said. "Just roll her from the calves and I'll push from her shoulders."

They did this and he swiftly pulled the sheet under Trudy without opening her gown or exposing any skin.

"Now I'm going to cover her," he said. And he draped the sheet around Trudy's body and over her face. It settled and formed to her features: eyes, nose, slightly parted mouth, still swollen cheeks. I found myself reaching for her hand underneath the sheet.

Harper stepped away and waited. "Take all the time you need," he said.

I let go of her hand.

"Okay?" he said to me.

I nodded.

"Now we're going to slide her onto the gurney and into the bag," he said.

The body bag was dark purple and made of what looked like velvet. I reached to finger a corner of the cloth as they slid her over and in and zipped it up the front. Actually, the bag was heavier than velvet. A type of corduroy, I think.

"That's it," said Harper. "I'll take her out now, if you're ready."

I nodded. He pulled open the curtain and quickly wheeled out his gurney. The lobby lights were bright and as Harper took her round the corner I wondered which door he used, where he parked his hearse. Surely they wouldn't allow him to be seen at the front entrance, not where all those expectant mothers-to-be and worried family members came rushing through.

I looked into the room next to ours. A skinny old man sat up in bed. He was wearing the same kind of gown that Trudy had been wearing, white with blue flowers. He had tubes up his nose and he was busy cracking his knuckles one by one. I started to walk past but not before he looked up at me and smiled. He was missing his front teeth. He waved at me. I lifted my hand and waved back. Then I sighed, and dropped my hand and slowly walked away.