No Answer Key for This Test

“Is there anything you want to ask me?”

The question that will nip at my brain until my kids scatter my ashes in Torch Lake (many years into the future, I hope).

The question my mother posed to me in September 2020, as the pandemic raged on and we visited her in Daytona Beach.

The question that would have been better asked in person, but visits to assisted living were short and masked, and it was a discussion she didn’t want to have with my two sons present.

I gazed over the balcony railing of our efficiency hotel room at the long rollers curling onto the flat concrete-hard sand below. The boys were in the room behind me — one attending school virtually, the other teaching it virtually. The balcony was small, but it afforded me some privacy, and the cooling breeze off the Atlantic Ocean seven stories below was a welcome respite from the hotel room which — despite being spacious — felt cramped with three humans in it.

I considered Mom’s question, coming hard on the heels of the awkward conversation we’d just had.

“It dawned on me that the reason you haven’t wanted any of my furniture is that it makes you sad because you’re thinking about me dying and you don’t want my things before I die,” was how she had started our call.

“Yeah, that’s true,” I had said after a long pause. “I don’t want to think about you not being here.”

I wasn’t exactly lying. I wasn’t exactly telling the truth, either.

I didn’t want to think about her dying, even though I knew, accepted, and talked openly with her about the fact that her life was drawing to a close. The truer truth was that I didn’t share my mother’s love of fine things — antique furniture, designer clothes, expensive jewelry. I had no room in my Pennsylvania rancher for another stick of furniture, particularly the large, heavy, and dark pieces she’d purchased in the 1970s for our Wisconsin house. I’d rather drop $150 on a new pair of trail shoes than a high-end dress.?

I wasn’t ungrateful — not at all. I had accepted a few of her more expensive rings and earrings because they reminded me of her, and I figured at some point I’d have to dress up for work again. In fact, I treasured the ruby-and-diamond gold ring she’d given me when I graduated from nursing school. She had saved to buy the ring for herself, and I wore it every time I made a work presentation. It was just that she was so relentless about the furniture, and who wants to tell their dying mother they don’t love her taste in furniture?

Her comment, though, let me mostly off the hook, and I realized with relief that we had finally closed out this particular end-of-life conversation. But then she dropped that question into the silence that followed.

Is there anything you want to ask me?

The question felt like a non sequitur. But was it? We had already broached the hardest of topics: her death. Death was a constant shadow in 2020 — the pandemic and Mom’s myelodysplastic syndrome, for which she had declined all further treatment. Implicit at the end of her question were three words: before I die.

The answer, of course, was yes. The answer, of course, had many parts and was oh-so-fraught. What does any adult child want to ask a dying parent? What did I, the fourth of my mother’s five children, want to ask the woman who had married seven different men and had children with three of them??

I felt as if there might be a specific question she wanted me to ask, a question for which she had a ready-made answer. To be sure, it felt loaded. My mother had spent a lifetime tightly controlling the narratives around her and about her. As her children reached adulthood and began comparing notes about who knew what and when (uncovering, of course, a number of discrepancies), she lost that control. Each of us had felt the chill of her disapproval when we inquired too deeply into something she deemed off-limits, particularly her marital timeline.

I knew, in that moment, that my window of opportunity to get answers to the questions that had plagued me for years was closing.

I chickened out.

“Not really,” I said. “I feel as if you and I have talked about everything we need to.”

Another half-truth. If Mom had doubts, though, she didn’t express them. Our talk shifted to lighter things – what time the kids and I would arrive for our window visit tomorrow, snack foods she was hungry for that we might bring.

She never asked again. The next seven months were consumed by the uncertainties of the pandemic, managing my teenager’s sagging grades and coordinating Mom’s care with my four siblings as the fault lines in our fractured family deepened.

Then, in late April 2021, Mom lapsed into unconsciousness, thanks to the morphine drip that eased her labored breathing and air hunger. She lingered eight days, giving me far too much time to come up with oh so many questions I wanted to ask. I would lie awake in bed at night, awaiting that final awful phone call as questions bubbled to the top. It is a special kind of anticipatory grief – that dreadful regret that creeps in when your loved one’s heart is still beating, but they are beyond your reach.

My questions ranged from the practical to the deeply earnest.

In your recipe for ginger ale salad [yes, really; it’s a Midwest thing], how many ounces is a “regular” can of pineapple?

What years did you work at the GM plant in Flint?

Did you have a sense of how hard the pandemic has been on my teenager?

Why did you so often choose what was best for the men in your life, rather than what was best for us?

Are we good, you and I? Are you at peace with how we are leaving things?

Would she have answered those questions? I don’t know. Too late, I have realized that perhaps I simply should have asked: What would you like me to know?