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| Charles & Rosanne in 1993 at the time of their wedding |
On the 24th of July my sister Rosanne breathed her last. She
was 68. In her final hours each breath was a great labor. Her husband, Charles,
and two of her four children were at her bedside when she exhaled that final
time. I was a few feet away. Quite soon all four children were in the house
along with grandchildren and cousins plus other members of our complex family in
which bonds of DNA are not the decisive ingredient. The next morning Charles
washed Rosanne and then all the family oiled her from forehead to toes before
placing rose petals on her body.
Rosanne was startlingly emaciated. On the day she died, it
had been three weeks since she last accepted food. When I arrived, she was
taking very little water. She seemed unable to swallow.
For seven years Rosanne had been struggling with Alzheimer’s
disease. The onset had been very slow -- an increasing degree of
absent-mindedness that finally reached the point of her having to give up her
work as an occupational therapist. In that period Charles and other family
members looked for dietary changes that might help stop the damage to her brain
or even reverse it. During the last few years she was gradually stripped of her
active vocabulary until words were few and rare. She was sometimes confused
about where she was. A wheel chair was needed. Going out became a challenge.
She became utterly dependent on the care of others, Charles most of all.
Thank God I was able to take part in the last nine days of
Rosanne’s life — part of a community of family members and friends who were not
only camping out on the edge of her deathbed but on the border of the mystery
of death.
The hours when I was at her side were mainly times of
silence but also of a quiet one-sided conversation and reading aloud. I urged
her, for example, to ignore the advice of Dylan Thomas about not going gently
into that good night; better, I proposed, to embrace, embrace the dying of the
light. Using the Bible I have on my e-reader, I picked out psalms, or parts of
psalms, that seemed appropriate. I slowly read her the story of Lazarus being
called out of his tomb, accounts of the resurrection of Jesus, the Beatitudes,
the Book of Jonah, parts of the Song of Songs, the canticle of praise sung by
the three young men consigned to the furnace in Babylon — texts that have to do
with death not having the last word, the grave not being the end of the journey,
life not being a bad joke. I told Rosanne that no one knows much about what
happens after death but that we get occasional joyful glimpses of heaven in
day-to-day life.
Though she couldn’t speak, apart from an occasional yes or
no or groan of distress as her body was turned, I think she recognized each of
us who took part in the vigil and heard what we had to say. She communicated by
intense attention to the face of the person sitting at her side, sometimes with
a puzzled look, at other times with a gaze of recognition, or so it seemed to
me. And there was communication by hand-holding. She held hands with each of us
with a remarkable firmness, each massaging the thumb of the other.
The kitchen and dining room near the bedroom in which
Rosanne was dying served as a gathering place. Charles did a lot of cooking and
family members brought still more food. Cooking and eating became a way of
coping. Over meals lots of stories about Rosanne were told. One that especially
rang bells for me came from our step-sister Tamara, who recalled a post-high
school trans-Atlantic crossing by ship taken by Rosanne, Marianne and herself
in 1962. Along the way there was a major storm that sent furniture sliding from
port to starboard and back again plus water splashing through portholes. After
the storm, the question was raised: “What if the ship were sinking? What would
our last words or actions have been?” Answer: Marianne would write a poem,
Tamara would say, “Just a minute!” and
Rosanne would say, “Oh! Really?”
From childhood until her death, Rosanne had an “Oh! Really?”
quality. It was in her steady, wide-eyed gaze. It lay behind her kindness not
only in good times but in trying circumstances. It reflected her passionate
curiosity about the world, a permanent "tell me more” setting.
Jim
Photos taken during the days I was with the family in Santa
Cruz are in this folder:
