Elephant Winter (19 page)

I had recorded elephant language much impaired by my own deafness. My tapes were sometimes long, sometimes brief. My notes were scribbled on scraps of paper covered with drawings, dates and hasty descriptions along the margins. They were cluttered with first impressions about Jo and my pregnancy and my mother and Alecto. My mother’s transcriptions were neatly folded under an elastic band around each tape box. Painstakingly she had charted the patterns she’d found in their chanting.

Now came the great discipline—not of love, which
demands will and desire to attend to another, but of work, which demands the other to wait. There was a tedium to it, comparing, deciphering and organizing. Whenever a recording seemed too shapeless, whenever I felt too distracted, I made myself submit, made myself accept that there are patterns that I did not yet understand.

I gave myself to the discipline, to listening without judgment. My heart and mind opened to the sounds. Elephant is not a language of one to another, question and answer, proposition and counter-argument. It is a language of chanting, communal sound looking for shifting communal sense. I sat beside my mother as she slipped away and I worked. I listened to the elephants’ low rumbling and, lulled by their incomprehensible songs, I sometimes felt as though I were seeing into the place where the light of dead stars is born.

The last afternoon, when I came in from the barn, she was calling out in a panicky voice, “Sophie, Sophie, I’m so glad you’re back.”

A new and very young day nurse was at the door, eager to leave. She reported tersely that my mother had had a difficult day. “She wouldn’t sit up,” she complained. “I got her up and she kept trying to lie down.”

“For God’s sake let her lie down then,” I snapped and sent her away. When I rounded the familiar corner into my
mother’s bedroom, Moore dove past my head. If I ever got my hands on him I’d flush him down the toilet. Everything was knocked off her table. Her pitcher lay cracked on the floor and water was spilled on the corner of the bed and soaked into the sheets. The room smelled of urine.

“Sophie, I’m so thirsty. That woman was awful, I sent her out.”

I saw her dry lips and went into the kitchen for ice chips and another pitcher. I put water and a straw in a clean glass, held her head up a little and touched the water to her lips.

She looked into my eyes and said, “Sophie, I’m sorry, I’m so glad you’re back . . .”

I rolled her gently to the side, each movement ragging at the pain in her body. I slipped off the sheets and the plastic bed sheet and with a warm cloth washed her body and put on the new sheets and a fresh gown, moving her as little as possible. I went into the kitchen and got a broom and dustpan and cleaned up the broken pitcher, lifting the smaller shards of glass out of the carpet with my fingers. I picked up the things from her table. As I was finished, her poor body exploded again and I began it all over, cleaning and changing the sheets, pulling at the edges, trying to get her comfortable. I washed her from behind as much as I could and she said, “There isn’t much dignity at the end, you give up on that.”

“It’s all right, I’m not looking.”

“The hell you’re not.”

I took all the laundry and stuffed it in the basement, and
by the time I was back upstairs she was moaning and wet with sweat. “Open the window, open the window, I need air.”

“Mom, what about the birds?”

“Please Sophie, I need air.”

I got most of them into the aviary by shaking the seed box. Moore stayed up high on her curtain rod and wouldn’t come down even for food. I struggled and banged at the window to get it open, just a crack, hoping Moore couldn’t squeeze through. When it finally jerked open, I could smell the turned-over spring earth of the vegetable fields. I gave her her night morphine pill and I sat next to her, waiting for it to soothe her, stroking her hands. After a while, eyelids heavy and drugged, she fell asleep.

I moved off the bed and went to my table, put on the headphones to listen to the elephant tapes and fell asleep folded forward. I woke up to her groaning in the middle of the night and I rolled heavily up, my neck stiff, the headphones falling off to the floor. Half asleep I stood beside her bed.

“Sophie, please,” she said. “Do something.”

I tried to put a cool, wet cloth to her lips but she writhed wildly side to side and cried, “Please, give me something.”

It was very early in the morning and there were hours until her next tablet. I looked at her eyes so desperate with the pain and I went into the bathroom to get some of the morphine in her medicine box. Carefully I uncapped a needle, snapped open the glass vial, put the needle tip into the vial. I pulled back the plunger, gently tipping the liquid
toward the end of the needle to keep the seal. Deft now, I could empty the tiny bottles completely. I held the needle up, tapped two bubbles to the top and nudged the plunger up until a drop of the precious stuff pushed through the hole. Then, squeezing a bit of flesh on the back of her arm, quickly I slid the needle in at an angle, pulled back the plunger to check for blood and pushed in the morphine. I could not bear the idea of hurting her any more. She seemed to settle a little. I watched as the morphine melted through her body. I leaned back in my chair beside her hoping for a moment’s respite, thinking this round was over, but in a few minutes she was awake again, her face twisted in panic. She held the oxygen tubes at her chin as if she didn’t know whether to rip them out or push them further in. “Sophie, I can’t breathe, you’ve got to do something.”

For the first time in all those months my stomach froze in fear. I thought this might be another, still worse part of the dying. I didn’t know how much pain she could bear or what more I could do. I fixed her oxygen tubes and held ice chips in a cloth for her to suck, and after she got back her breath, she stopped a moment and said, “I love you, Sophie.”

She rested back and the panic of suffocation subsided. She rasped shallowly into the room and I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She writhed and struggled to breathe. The awful gurgling air filled the silence and she rasped, “Do something, please, you’ve got to do something.”

I couldn’t do this alone, I didn’t know what this was. I
ran to the telephone to call for an ambulance, but I dropped the receiver because she was screaming, “Don’t leave!”

I ran to her box in the bathroom and took out the extra bottles of morphine and, shaking, prepared another injection. I pushed it through her bruises and she settled, but in minutes she was writhing again and I couldn’t bear her so far away from me wrapped up and carried away in pain. She wasn’t finished, there were things left to do. I broke another bottle of morphine and she groaned and thrashed. She couldn’t get any air. She was drowning in her own lungs. She lifted her head and dropped it horribly and I filled another needle and gave her more. I saw Moore fussing near the open window but my mother was calling wildly, and before I could do anything he squeezed himself out through the crack and was gone. I thought, “How can I tell her?” and was going to phone an ambulance again when she half screamed, “Enough, do something, Sophie!” but I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to give her more. There was only one more left. I could give her the next pill. How many injections had I given her?

Her body stopped thrashing but her eyes stilled and stared at mine. She breathed, gurgling and rasping, then stopped. I waited, holding my breath. I thought she was dead. I felt for her pulse and jumped when she heaved in another shuddering breath. She stopped again and then suddenly sucked in more air. I held her hand and she stopped breathing then suddenly sucked in another breath. She stopped breathing and with these awful wheezes she
breathed again, and each time I waited until finally she didn’t breathe in again, not ever again.

Elephant breath is a tonic. If you have a headache the best thing in the world is to stand quietly with an elephant, its trunk in your mouth. After they took away my mother’s body, I couldn’t bear to be alone and I left the house and walked across the field wondering what to do now, looking through the darkness at the peaceful white fences of the horse farms, the spirit shapes of snowdrifts in the fields.

There are moments we get stuck in, tell over and over until time softens them. That night I could not be alone. The death thrashing was over but I could not admit it. I walked around the outside of the barns, once, twice, three times, and when I decided to go through the door Kezia was awake and waiting for me. She raised her trunk in greeting, stood listening in the darkness and then gently lowered her trunk and blew lightly on my face. I stopped crying, petted her cheeks and delicately she slipped her trunk inside my mouth and we breathed together, her gentle finger rubbing lightly along the inside of my gums. Her trunk was large and damp and I opened my mouth wide. She stood breathing into me a long time that night. It felt like a kiss and a greeting, I did not know from where.

My mother had time to plan her memorial service. And since there was only me for family I suspect it was planned for me. Our last party, in a way. She wanted Arvo Pärt’s
Passio
played in full. She wanted the minister to commend her spirit to God. And that was it.

I sat alone in the front row of the crematorium listening for seventy minutes and fifty-two seconds to her favourite recording of the dark ebb and flow of Pärt’s interpretation of John’s Passion. The chorus and organ in a slow descent announced
Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem
and I settled in to listen. Pärt’s layered chorus unwound the story of the long walk to the cross. I was relieved to hear the familiar voices. In a little while all those people behind me would stand with me and walk out of the old stone building and then it would be over. With my large pregnant belly I would walk out with them and then I would go back to her house and she would not be there in her bed filling the place with her loud music and her conversation. But for this last moment, her music still filled me.

—You’re alone now.

— There are the elephants . . .

— She never felt alone either. She loved you to bits.

— To crumbs.

— To blades of grass.

— To grains of sand.

— More than everything.

The music pierced the numbness with aching; she had loved this music and she could not hear it. If something is
unbearable I set it down. This time I could not set down what I couldn’t bear. Listening to the music she so loved I was struck back into awful chaos by a thought I still think often: how she would have loved this.

I had always wondered why Pärt chose John’s telling of the crucifixion. I had said once to my mother, “He should have chosen one of the more dramatic gospels. It makes Christ so much more human to hear him cry out his doubt.”

“By that point he’s almost done with this world anyway.”

“But the torture made him doubt. I wonder why John left it out.”

“Perhaps he just assumed the doubt. Doubt is the centre, like the grit in the pearl. It doesn’t much matter if you cry it out or not. It’s the same with everything. Don’t you have that feeling with your elephants? Isn’t there always a kernel of doubt that the imagined life between you isn’t the same for them as for you? That you don’t fully understand? But you don’t cry out. You just keep working at it until you understand a little better.”