I’m a big fan of
book reviews. We publish them in each issue of BYU Studies Quarterly, and I read them in Dialogue and Journal of
Mormon History. I like book reviews for three reasons. First, I love books.
I want to know what’s being published, especially in the area of Mormon
studies, where I work. Second, book reviews most often tell me enough about a
book that I decide not to buy it and read it. Third, every now and then a
review convinces me that I do want to read the book being evaluated. This is
often how I narrow my reading list. Recently, I read a review that convinced me
to buy the book. It is Moth and Rust: Mormon
Encounters with Death, published by Signature Books and edited by Sunstone editor Stephen Carter.
Carter recruited
forty-six different authors (including himself) to write about their encounters
with death. This may sound morbid, but the stories, essays, and poetry in the
book present fascinating views of a topic we all face up close and personal at
times but usually avoid. Some of the authors raise provocative questions. I
have not finished the book yet, but I’m far enough in to be hooked. This is a
thought-provoking collection of reminiscences and ruminations. Carter has
divided the book into five sections: Passages
(thoughts on a loved one’s death), Piercing
the Veil (ideas on the condition of the soul after death), Fleeting (on the death of children), A Wider View (death in other contexts),
and A Single Soul (how death has affected
the author personally). My purpose here is not to review the book. My purpose is
to tell you about my mother, because Moth
and Rust has made me think more deeply about the only person I have ever
seen pass from mortality to the great beyond.
When I was a
teenager, Mom told me she wouldn’t make it to sixty. She suffered from
fibromyalgia and felt so awful that she couldn’t imagine living to old age. This
was before anyone knew what fibromyalgia was. Her doctor couldn’t find a cause
for her pain, so he told her it was all in her head. That was helpful. But she
knew it wasn’t in her head. It was in her chest and arms. I also knew it wasn’t
in her head. My bedroom was across the hall from my parents’ bedroom, and I
remember hearing her crying in the night because she hurt so much. She never
knew I was listening until I was older and mentioned it to her. She also had a
damaged mitral valve in her heart from the rheumatic fever she contracted when
I was eighteen months old. Her health issues were not life-threatening, but
they were life-hampering and made her miserable. In her fifties, she added
peripheral neuropathy to her list of ailments. This made her feet ache and limited
her mobility. I know something about this one, because I inherited it from her.
Later, after she had passed the sixty-year mark she thought she’d never reach,
she was diagnosed with hypoglycemia, which eventually morphed into diabetes.
She took so many medications (some to counter the side-effects of other
medications) that we joked with her that when she died the EPA would have to
dispose of her body.
In Mom’s late
seventies, she needed bypass surgery, but she didn’t seem to recover as we
expected. She seemed to tire easily and huff and puff with minor physical
exertion. After a couple of years, just after she turned eighty, she was
diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension (high blood pressure in the
pulmonary artery). Finally, after all the merely annoying health issues, this
one was fatal.
She dealt with it
like she had everything else to this point. You need to understand one thing
about my mom. She was an angel. She wasn’t perfect, but she came awfully close.
She was served faithfully in the Church, loved her family in quiet but
impressive ways, and even worked consistently on her genealogy. She made a
decision early on that no matter how awful she felt, she would try to be
pleasant. This wasn’t something that just came naturally, and I’m sure it was
tremendously difficult, but she succeeded marvelously. This was a conscious
decision, and she wrote about it in her personal history. No matter how much
she hurt, when you talked with her on the phone or even in person, you would
never know anything was wrong. The only time I remember her complaining was
when she broke her ankle and had to be confined to a wheelchair for a few
weeks. All she said was “This is so hard.” This was near the end, and her
oxygen needs were significant, so the broken ankle was a difficult complication
in an already unraveling life.
She lasted almost
four years from the fatal diagnosis. We watched as her oxygen setting went from
two liters to four to six to eight to ten and finally to twelve. Since the
oxygen concentrator could produce only ten liters, they combined two machines
and ran them together. She also took a medication that cost $15,000 a month.
Yes, that’s not a misprint. Fortunately, her insurance and a charity paid for
almost all of it. And my dad took such good care of her. It almost killed him
near the end. He was exhausted from not sleeping. He’s a worrier, and he would
lie awake listening to her breathe, wondering at each breath if it would be her
last.
But her last
breath came in the hospital, and it will trouble me till the day when I take my
last breath. At the end, her oxygen concentrators could not satisfy the needs
of her ossifying lungs. She needed fifteen liters, and even the combined
concentrators could not supply enough oxygen. In the hospital, she had a
stroke, which rendered her unable to speak. But she held on long enough for her
family to gather. She did not have a big family. She was able to have only two
children, and my sister’s only child died of cancer at age eight. But finally,
after my daughter and her two-year-old son—my mom’s only great-grandchild at
the time—had arrived from Houston, Mom agreed to have the oxygen mask removed.
The pulmonologist
told us they would give her morphine to make her comfortable and Ativan to relax
her. Then they would take away her supplemental oxygen. They assured us that
she would go to sleep and peacefully slip away. It didn’t happen that way. It
was a difficult struggle. My dad and I held her hands and tried to calm her as
she fought for breath. The stroke took from her the control of her facial
muscles, and the pain distorted her face into a mask of agony that we had never
seen before. After she was gone, my dad looked at her and said, “That’s not
what I married.” I understood. She had always managed to be pleasant, to deal
with the pain without letting anyone know how much discomfort she felt. But even
the morticians were unable to restore the peaceful countenance we had always
known, and I still feel bad about that.
My mom’s death
will haunt me with questions until somewhere on the other side of the veil
someone can give me answers that are unavailable here in mortality. I didn’t
cry when she died. She did, after all, live almost twenty-four years longer
than she told me she would, so I considered all those extra years an unexpected
and blessed bonus. But the manner of her death was also very disturbing. If
anyone deserved to slip away peacefully, it was my mom. The way she died was so
incompatible with the way she lived. A revelation given to Joseph Smith states,
“Those that die in me shall not taste of death, for it shall be sweet unto them”
(D&C 42:46). Since my mother’s death, I have had to consider this statement
a platitude rather than a blanket truth. And since this is the only death I
have ever witnessed, it definitely colors my view of the transition from
mortality to whatever awaits us. I can only hope that the place Mom has gone to
is worth the price she paid to be admitted.
