Lindsay stopped by Hidden Valley Road to see her mother. Mimi never left her bed now. Today, she was having a horrible headache. Jeff, her caregiver, had tried Tylenol and a sedative called Lorazepam, but it was getting worse.
Lindsay felt it in her stomach. This was exactly how it had started the last time, with a bad headache.
“She’s having a stroke,” she said.
* * *
—
HER MOTHER WOULDN’T let Lindsay leave her side. Every time she tried to take a break and head upstairs, Mimi would cry out as best she could through her aphasia: “Mary? Where’s Mary?”
Over the phone, the hospice service told Lindsay to give Mimi more morphine than ever: 10 milligrams every hour. It took four or five hours for Mimi’s pain to subside. At about 4 p.m., Mimi had a full-blown seizure. Holding on to Lindsay, shaking and out of control, she managed to say, “I’m going now, I’m going now.” She lost consciousness.
Lindsay, Jeff, and Michael took turns sleeping and sitting with Mimi, administering morphine and Haldol. If they ever backed off the regimen, Mimi became highly agitated and uncomfortable. With it, her breathing was still loud but rhythmic. Through a baby monitor, they could hear Mimi’s breath filling the house like a bellows. Occasionally she would stop breathing for several seconds. Each time they were sure that it was the end. Then she’d start breathing again.
Three days passed. On Sunday, Lindsay drove to Pueblo to get Peter. He brought Mimi a big bouquet of pink roses and said a Rosary for her. She got Donald from Point of the Pines and Matt from his place in Colorado Springs, and they both also had their chance to say goodbye. Mark came, and so did Richard and Renée, who cooked for everyone. John was in Idaho, planning to come out in a week’s time. Margaret, on the phone from Crested Butte, said that she had made her peace with her mother already and would not make the three-hour drive to see her one more time.
* * *
—
IN THE EARLY hours of Monday, July 17, Lindsay administered a dose of painkillers to Mimi and went back upstairs to go to sleep. At 2 a.m., Michael heard the rhythm of Mimi’s breathing change on the monitor, and he got up to check on her. He stood over his mother, watching as she inhaled and exhaled deeply, about ten times.
Finally, there was silence.
Michael woke Lindsay. Neither of them could go back to sleep. Lindsay cried and they both stayed up for a few hours, lighting candles and incense, sitting on the back deck, listening to the rain. There was something comforting about the sound of weather all around them.
The next day, the rain was still falling. Lindsay opened the front door to the house. The sky was gray, but the sun was there somewhere, giving the rain clouds above a bluish hue. Lindsay walked out into the front yard. She stood out there for a long time, arms stretched out, gazing upward as the rain covered her.
She motioned toward Michael, and he joined her. Together, they got soaked, laughing in the rain. Giddy, she tried to get Michael to dance with her, only to learn that her brother barely knew a box step. “I’m a musician, I’m always sitting on the stage!” Michael said.
Lindsay laughed. And when he grabbed his sister’s hand, Michael froze. It looked just like his mother’s hand, the way he remembered it from long ago.
DONALD
JOHN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
MARK
MATTHEW
PETER
MARGARET
LINDSAY
CHAPTER 40
On the blazing July day before his mother’s funeral, Peter’s room at Riverwalk—a nursing home, a few blocks away from the state mental hospital in Pueblo—had a cheap boom box blaring classic rock and a big-screen TV going full blast, both of which Peter largely ignored.
“It’s wonderful,” Peter said, looking around, Lindsay standing next to him. “I got the Bible and