Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Meanwhile, we need to restrain her, her doctor is telling me. We need to tie her arms down so she doesn’t rip out her breathing tube. Tell your mother, explain to her: If she rips out that tube, she will die. And they do, they tie her arms down while I watch and she cries, and I do, I explain to her very carefully, and she nods, nods, tells me she understands, and she does.

I’m so sorry, Mom, I tell her. Because that is what love means; you damn well tell the person you care about that you are sorry.

But a few days later, when I arrive in the morning, the tube is gone, her hands are free, and she is smiling. She is weak and exhausted, her breath rapid and shallow and her throat whisper-raw, but smiling, in victory and freedom and with exquisite pleasure in the applesauce I hurry to get her, the most exquisite applesauce she has ever eaten in her entire life. Somehow, sometime in the middle of the night, she had ripped out her tubes, and yet here she was: Smiling, eating applesauce, breathing (rapid and shallow), asking about her cat. For an hour we sit together and smile and marvel at the exquisite magnificence of the applesauce, and I marvel at her strength and steely, stubborn determination, and then her face goes into an abrupt and frozen twist, her eyes bulging and her mouth agape, and I go screaming for a doctor.

Million Dollar Baby ’s Maggie (Hilary Swank) is a thirtyish gal with steely, stubborn determination to box her way out of desperate, going-nowhere poverty with the help of grizzled trainer Frankie (Clint Eastwood). 83And she has done so, risen to the cheering acclaimed top of the boxing world until an opponent’s bad-blood blow breaks her spine, sentences her for life to a quadriplegic’s bed and permanent life-sustaining machines. Skin ulcers, a gangrenous leg, an amputation, while Frankie rages in unaccepting despair that he will fix this for her, he is on it. But he can’t, there is no fixing any of it, and so the thing she must ask of him is to do for her what her father had done, when she was a child, for the family pet: “I can’t be like this, Boss,” she tells him. She got what she needed in this life—“Don’t let ’em keep taking it away from me.” But he can’t do that, either. And so Maggie chews through her own tongue — twice, two times she bites and chews and bloodies herself in a desperate effort to choke to death, the one single thing she can do to make that happen, to die on her own terms, and twice they stitch her up and then finally sedate her so she doesn’t try it again. Frankie goes to a priest to see if maybe, maybe, he can help her as she wants, but the priest confirms, of course, that Frankie cannot do that; it is in God’s hands.

FRANKIE

But she’s not asking for God’s help. She’s asking for mine. . What if it’s a sin to keep her alive?

Your mother can’t do this on her own, the doctor tells me — an on-call doctor who has never met my mother before now — your mother’s body just can’t get enough oxygen on its own. I’m sorry. All I can do is put the breathing tube back in. But, she says, quietly and gently and meaningfully, If I put that tube back in, it is never coming out. It is your decision. It is up to you.

That Dr. Kevorkian is a saint of heaven, my mother would say, often and out of nowhere, my devout-atheist mother. Promise me you will not allow me to live on tubes in the end, she would ask me. Promise you’ll never let that happen. I had made that promise to her, too, and at this moment, now, there is the one single thing I can control, can orchestrate for her, can make happen and make better. Maude’s tablets, Sol’s blessed cocktail. I wish I could have done this for her earlier, charged ferociously into the hospital and somehow spared her these last ten brutal and pointless days; that applesauce wasn’t worth it. But now I am going to make sure it is as beautiful and fine as possible. I am going to make it a lovely and loving thing, this ending to our love story. I am not going to wait, wait her death.

We are done, I tell the doctor. Do not put that tube back in. And the doctor nods, gently and meaningfully. That is the right decision, she says, this most human and humane saint-of-heaven doctor. Don’t worry, I will make sure she is very, very comfortable.

And so Frankie creeps into Maggie’s room at night. “All right,” he tells her. “I’m going to disconnect your air machine. Then you’re going to go to sleep. I’ll give you a shot and you’ll stay asleep. My darling, my blood.” He kisses her; she smiles in gratitude. He does what she asked, what he promised her, and she dies.

My mother grows sleepy. Her breathing thins. I comb her hair. I hold her hand and hope I am sparing her from an absolute, isolating loneliness. I tell her I love her, that her cat is doing just fine. I had called family members, and they begin to arrive; we stand around her bed and say sweet things to her and to each other, but her eyes have fluttered closed and I can’t tell any longer what she is quite aware of or not. I cannot tell if she is flashbacking her life, or which subtle heartbeat or breath is her last. I whisper to her that I love her, and quietly, peacefully, it is finally the final end of the person that is Beverlee, who was my mother, and then the person that is my mother disappears forever.

“‘My darling. I’m waiting for you. How long is a day in the dark? A week? The fire is gone now and I’m horribly cold. . we die, we die’,” Hana (Juliette Binoche), the nurse in The English Patient , reads aloud. 84She has holed up in an abandoned Italian villa to devote herself to taking care of that mysterious, unnamed English Patient, a man with a hidden backstory of wartime love and betrayal and pain, now burned by fire to a leather husk. Hana has nursed him tirelessly, has been benevolent with the morphine needed to keep him from excruciating pain. But he is done; he is ready for his story to end. As Hana preps an injection — breaking open a glass ampul, readying the needle — he reaches out a raw, leathered finger, tips over the box of ampuls, pushes them toward her. She sees his face, the imploring, wordless request. She has been determined to keep him alive, but now he sees her purpose shift, her determination acceding to his. “Thank you,” he whispers. She nods, briefly, the tears coming as she loads the needle for the last time. After the injection he asks that she read him to sleep; she lies on the bed beside him, and reads aloud the letter written by his lover, Katharine, whom he had been forced to abandon to a lonely, solitary death in a desert cave:

HANA/KATHARINE

“We die, we die. We die rich with lovers and tribes. Tastes we have swallowed. Bodies we have entered and swum up like rivers. Fears we’ve hidden in, like this wretched cave. I want all this marked on my body. . The lamp’s gone out, and I’m writing in the darkness. . ”

I don’t know how I will die, of course. Stylishly, I hope. But, still: Will I meet death head held high, like a brave, misjudged queen or convict? A weeping martyr, or a murderer offering himself in expiation of a confessed guilt? Will I be an old, purple-wearing woman, well into autumn or a stark winter, ready to go home? Will I be pretty and cherry-lipped in a white lace nightie, protesting that I am young and strong and nothing can touch me , or a bald baby bird, my body wasted and riddled with pointless poison? Will it be the malfunctioning blood, or the tumor I cannot get away with a second time, the bullet I do not see coming, the proverbial, Tara-numbered bus offering a jump-cut exit, the peaceful slip into an angel-assisted sleep? Will I have the dignity of self-determination, or will I mess myself, be left to lie in my helpless body like a helpless infant? Who will be there with me, if anyone? Will anyone be there to hold my hand? Will I have a karmic reincarnation as higher consciousness or insect, will there be that heaven or that God after all, a reunion with those who have gone before me, my goldfish swimming eternally in a bright clear bowl, my little pet mouse happily running forever on that rickety wire wheel?