Over thirty-four times my mother had checked in and out of hospitals, the first time when losing her leg under a train at 17; and the last, for hip surgery at 74. This most recent time, she did not want to undergo the operation, but the pain from the stenosis in her spine was unbearable. She had to. I met with her surgeon, explaining my mother’s anxiety about the operation and receiving the doctor’s promise that he would not put her under general anesthesia.

At 80, she was still strong and sharp – every night in her apartment answering correctly almost all the questions on Double Jeopardy.

At least one weekend a month, I would fly up from Los Angeles to San Francisco, take a room at the Pacific Heights Inn on Union Street and spend the weekend visiting with her. In the year since I had started coming up, my mother and I had talked a great deal – more than we ever had, calmly. The pain of our shared past ebbed away, leaving us in a clearing of the present where we could finally become friends.

After helping her check in at the hospital, I went back to her apartment to wait for the surgeon to call.

Four hours later the phone rang. “The operation was a success,” the doctor said, “but unexpected complications occurred and we had to put your mother to sleep,” he added, explaining that she would soon be coming out of the anesthesia in the recovery room.

I hurried to the hospital and into a waiting nightmare. The Xanax my mother had been taking for five years to battle her panic attacks had been stopped the night before the operation; and I found her disoriented, asking incoherently, “Do you see the train?”

“What train?” asked the surgeon, appearing next to me.

I shook my head, but I knew which train…the one that severed her leg at 17. It had never left her.

Within a few days, her condition worsened. The attending physician informed me that my mother’s body had “decompressed.”

A lifetime of strength acquired from her struggles as an amputee had been swept away. She was sinking away inside a hospital bed.

With the worsening of my mother’s condition, I found a substitute to teach my writing course at CalArts and came up to stay at her apartment on Broadway so I could visit her at California Pacific Medical Center.

Over the next few days, sitting by the bed and holding her hand, I kept urging her to keep fighting, the way she always had. But this time was different.

She even said so when the attendant turned to roll her up to her room prior to surgery, and she looked back at me, her face half Lillian Hellman-tough, half little girl-scared. “I don’t feel good about this one,” she muttered.

She was right.

On a rainy December afternoon, two weeks after she had been hospitalized, I bought a tape recorder and started walking across the city, stopping to tape a memory message at the 18 different addresses where we had lived before I enlisted in the Marine Corps. After that, I walked on to her favorite haunts, to remind her of all the good times she had as an advertising executive in the 1960s.

The journey took all day. By nightfall, I had it all on two sides of one tape, eighteen years of our time together as a family, all waiting inside the Play button for her to push.

But she was too weak to press the button down. I sat beside her, playing the tape for her then stopping it, adding details to my journey through the past, anything to rouse her, to bring her back to the unstoppable woman she had been.

“A legend,” an advertising man I met in Spec’s bar one night said, after I asked if he knew my mother, Frances Lindh. “You mean that tough-talking, onelegged, hard-drinking gal, that’s your mom?”

“Yep.”

“Hell of a woman.”

Leaving the bar and walking back through the Broadway Tunnel, I kept tearing back one level of meaning after another off the expression, trying to understand what “Hell of a woman” really meant.

Now I stared across the bed at the frail woman as pale as the sheet tucked under her chin. “Mom, can you hear me? It’s me. I’m here.”

Not a sound. I had to strain to hear her breathing.

When the nurse came in to check on her, I walked around the bed. “This isn’t like her. She’s not herself. What’s going on?”

The nurse shrugged and left.

I kissed my mother on the cheek. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Remember, Mom, just play the tape.”

But the next day, when I returned to visit her, the tape hadn’t moved from where I had stopped it.

Sitting down, I turned it on again and adjusted the volume, listening to myself speaking, “Mom, I’m standing here at 960 Bay Street. Remember, 32 this is the first place we lived when we came from Pennsylvania on the train. It was on the second floor.”

After playing the tape three times from the beginning, I rewound it and turned off the recorder.

I was exhausted listening to myself on the tape, all the while trying to get my mother to hear my voice, either one.

Not once did her eyes open, not once did she stir, not once did her hand move on the sheet. Not one sign did she make that she could hear the voice of her son on the tape or the voice of her son in the room.

I listened for the three of us.

That night, I felt my strength waning from urging the doctors to do everything to save her and from trying to rouse her from the morphine-induced haze where she grew frailer every day.

My energy plummeted. A sore throat. A cough. Soon the ominous rales in my lungs.

As I lay sweating and coughing in her apartment a few days before Christmas, I knew my nemesis from the Marine Corps had returned: I had pneumonia in both lower lobes. I sat up. In a flash of undiluted recognition and undeniable truth, I realized that I was letting myself die so that I wouldn’t have to experience my mother’s death, but then the irony slashed through me: she wouldn’t know anyway that I was dead.

I telephoned her physician’s answering service and left a message for her to call me back. It’s an emergency, I said to the man taking messages for Dr. Cline. She called hours later and listened to me describe my symptoms.

Saying how reluctant she was to prescribe medications for a person not her patient, she finally agreed to order antibiotics for me to pick up at the pharmacy my mother used.

About to thank her, I was racked by a spasm of coughing. When I caught my breath, the line was dead.

True to her word, my mother’s physician called in the prescription.

Before returning to Los Angeles to spend Christmas Day with my girlfriend, I decided to go and see my mother. Even though I had seen her the day before and would be returning the following week, I knew Christmas morning was an important time to visit her.

When I walked into the hospital room she shared with another woman, I couldn’t believe the change that had come over my mother in 24 hours. Only the day before, she had been awake; yes, in pain from a staph infection, but still able to do what she loved most: read.

But now her reading glass lay beside her opened mystery novel, and her head slumped against the pillow.

“Mother, mother, do you hear me?”

Her only response was a gurgling sound.

I found the resident reading a chart at the nurse’s
station. “What’s happening to my mother?” I asked.

He glanced up. “Oh, you’re the son?”

“Yes. What’s wrong with her? It’s like she going into
a coma.”

“No, it’s just the morphine.”

At that instant I heard something behind the doctor’s response – something unsaid, but clear to me.

“You’re letting her die, aren’t you?”

The doctor looked back at the chart.

“You’re letting her die because she is old,” I said, realizing my voice was growing louder and louder, “ but that woman answered every question on Double Jeopardy the night before she was admitted for what was supposed to be a simple operation. And I assure you, Doctor, my mother wants to live.”

The doctor slapped shut the metal chart. “What do you want me to do, transfer her to the ICU at our other building?”

“Exactly, and right now.”

The doctor weighed me in his gaze. Abruptly, he exhaled and picked up the phone.

Within an hour, my mother was wheeled down the hall on a gurney. All I had to do was get her personal belongings, take down the seascape by Marquez that I brought her for inspiration — and bring along her artificial leg.

Walking up California Street, I must have looked strange to passersby: a bearded, middle-aged man carrying a painting in one arm and a wooden leg in the other.

I could feel my anxiety mounting as the elevator rose to the ICU floor. Will I find her alive? I wondered.

Getting off the elevator, I started toward the nurse’s station at the end of the corridor. Half way down the hall, I heard a cry of pain from one of the rooms, and recognized my mother’s voice.

A young nurse writing behind the counter, looked up and saw me warily approaching with my incongruous baggage. With a slight tilt of my head, she grinned, “Now there’s a man who travels with his own art.”

The smile was for her, but the knowledge was mine alone. If only she knew my father’s name was Art.

When the phone woke me, I turned to the large dialed clock my mother kept by the bed. For a second, I merely stared at the two little hands held out on the dial: 3:40 a.m. wondering, who the hell’s calling my mother now? Then I lurched for the phone, knowing there could be only one caller – the hospital.

A nurse from intensive care told me my mother was fading and I should come as quickly as possible to see her. She didn’t need to say alive.

Even though the cab arrived within ten minutes and traffic was light all the way to the hospital, I was afraid I would arrive too late.

As I stepped off the elevator, I saw my mother’s doctor waiting in front of her room, with the door now closed.

“She’s gone, isn’t she?” I asked.

“Twenty minutes ago,” he replied. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lindh. We did all we could, but as I told you — that last antibiotic was all we had left to try and stop the staph infection.”

Momentarily, a nurse stepped from a room down the hall and motioned to the doctor. Motioning he was coming, the doctor turned back to me. “You don’t have to go in and see her.”

“Give me a minute to decide, will you?”

“Of course, just tell the nurse when you’ve made 34 your decision. All my condolences, Mr. Lindh. Your mother was a remarkable woman, one of the most courageous patients I have ever treated.”

“I know, Doctor. She raised me alone.”

Oh that door, I thought, pacing back and forth in front of it: on this side, nothing; on the other side, everything– that was. Now gone. To hell with “passing” and all the other euphemisms, my mother was dead, the one person in the world who accepted me unconditionally, no more.

It was more than a choice, whether I went inside to see her one last time, or fled, clutching the memory of the last time I had seen my mother alive.

It was a decision I would carry the rest of my life. I opened the door.

Squinting so as not to see her all at once, I entered the room, stopping at the foot of the bed to absorb it all — as slowly as I could take it in. Reaching out, I moved my hand over the sheet until feeling the outline of her body, then I opened my eyes, keeping my head down from seeing her all at once; and I took her hand, cold and motionless, in mine.

“Oh Mom,” I sobbed, forcing myself to look at her face:

Frances Lindh, my mother, the woman who brought me into the world, now gone from it.

“No, no, no,” I kept thinking. “It can’t be.”

The door behind me opened and a woman in a business suit stepped into the room. “Mr. Lindh, I’m with patient services. Is there a family member I can call for you?”

“No, there’s just me.”

She nodded and stepped back.

“Then I’ll be at the nurses’ station to hear what you want done.”

“Done?” I repeated, not sure what she meant.

“With her remains, where you wish for them to be taken.”

“I don’t know.”

“Did your mother leave instructions?”

“Yes, she wanted to have her ashes scattered beyond the Golden Gate.”

“Then I’ll call the Neptune Society to claim her remains. You’ll need to sign the release forms before you go.”

“All right, just give me a few minutes, will you?”

“Of course, take your time. “ She stepped into the hallway and started to close the door, then hesitated, “Anything else I can do for you, Mr. Lindh?”

I stared down at the living force of my life, now motionless forever. “Not for me, for my mother. Would you please put her leg back on? I want her to be whole.”

“Of course,” she replied, and closed the door behind her.

When I returned from Los Angeles with the money to pay for my mother’s cremation and the boat rental for scattering her ashes at sea, I telephoned the Neptune Society and asked to speak to the director.

“I’ve got some bad news for you,” the woman said, coming on the line.

“Lady, there is no more bad news. My mother’s dead.”

“I know, but there is more bad news. Her doctor used the wrong color ink to sign the death certificate.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s not legal.”

“What color did he use?”

“Black, but it has to be permanent ink, and he used washable.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The hospital won’t release the body to us.”

“Well, get the doctor to use the right color ink.”

“We can’t. He left for Taiwan on vacation.”

“Jesus, then get another doctor.”

”We did. But he also used the wrong kind of ink. And now he’s gone for the weekend.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“Ah, you’re mother’s still there.”

“Still where?”

“At the hospital.”

“You mean the morgue?”

She didn’t reply.

“Lady, all my life my woman’s been terrified of being abandoned. She lost her leg and her husband left her when I was three. You can’t leave her alone in there like that.” I closed my eyes, seeing her lying on a tray in the morgue. Anger replaced sadness. “Lady, get the hospital director, anybody, I don’t care who, but get my mother out of there to where she has to go.”

Sunday, the first clear day in weeks, with eight of my mother’s friends watching from inside the cabin, I leaned against a railing as the launch passed under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge and slowed in the swells before the open sea.

A crewmember came forward carrying a box no larger than the one in which my mother kept her inexpensive jewelry. He opened the lid, revealing a mound of gray powder. My mother reduced to that?

The launch came about out of the wind, and the captain motioned from the wheel house. It was time.

“Good-bye, Mom, I said, emptying the ashes into the sea and watching them drift across the curling blue surface. Maybe she could find her way to the man she should have married after her divorce, although Warren had started off before her.

To eternity, a few years wouldn’t matter.

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