Tribute to Betty Lay

December 6, 1931 ~ August 22, 2009


In loving memory of Dear Betty - My Cousin, My Aunt


The Quilter

I sit, in the wee hours, by her bedside.

Well, it really isn’t her bedside, but it is. It is not her bed, but one on loan for her use, so to speak.

Pesky is bedded down on the loveseat hide a bed a few feet away.

I sit in a wooden chair at 3 am. My eyes now blinded by the brightness of the laptop screen. The light in the pink tiled shower stall is on, the bathroom door ajar, letting a small column of light splash across the wall at the end of her bed.

I struggle to see the erratic rise and fall of her chest, my eyes blinded by the whiteness of the screen. I dim the screen as far as it will go.

The steady rhythm of the oxygen machine punctuates the near quiet every 9 seconds with a second long vacuum release.

A snort, she moves, I close the laptop lid. Was it her, was it Pesky? She shifts in her bed, turns her face away from me and toward the hide a bed where Pesky lays sleeping a restless sleep.

She stirred from her uneasy place, appearing to be resting, but really I believe working very hard.

“Is that old Tom over there?” she said in a barely audible voice, her sunken eyes turned toward the hideabed.

“Yes”, I say, “he is getting some rest, he is worn out.”

“Ice” she says in the barely audible voice.

I reach for the Styrofoam cup. The one on the mobile tray. The one with the white plastic spoon in it. The tray is right next to me and right next to this bed she lays in.

She slowly and deliberately grasps the cup, pulls it to her chest. Spoonful of ice, deposited perfectly into her mouth. Spoon returned to cup, hands lowered, eyelids lowered. She drifts. I return the cup to her bedside table.

I stop typing, lean over my laptop. It is resting on my right thigh and the left calf, which is resting on my right knee. I struggle to see her chest rise and fall, my pupils too dilated to see it easily.

I squint; focus with all my concentration as I struggle against eyelids heavy upon my eyes, requesting sleep I will not afford them. I squint, she turns her head. I quickly close the lid of the laptop to stop the light from illuminating her bedside. I hold my breath, hoping she remains in this state of assumed slumber.

I presume it is slumber but do not know, cannot know, what might be taking place.

The Quilter’s chest rises and falls erratically, but with some semblance of regularity. I close the laptop lid.

Pesky has his hand over his face, and appears to be sleeping. I gently place the laptop on the bedside table and quietly exit the room. I walk steadily toward the other end of the hall. My white gym shoes placed deliberately with each step.

It is a nice hall. Laminate floors, still new, mimic a real hardwood floor, one with 4 inch dark wood planks polished shiny. I think to myself as I drink in the laminate floor, this is a metaphor. Imitation wood for imitation living?

The fluorescent lights illuminate the pale yellow walls covered with wallpaper. The walls are adorned with country style prints in thick walnut colored frames.

The print hanging right outside the Quilter’s room is a 2 story wood sided country house in the background. It has a tin roof, like the roof of my childhood home, the ole home place, as my mom calls it. Also in the background is an old wooden shed, unfinished wood and slightly tilting, but still sturdy. The middle ground is a fenced pasture, complete with aged wooden wagon. It has an aging split rail fence in the foreground.

Hanging across the rail of the fence is a quilt. Large red rectangles interspersed with blue and red squares and white patches making a box. This pattern, this style has a name and I am sure the Quilter would know it. I have no clue. It is pretty, but that is all I know. How apropos, this painting. Outside my cousin’s room. My cousin, the Quilter.

Two days ago as I sat by her bedside. I told her about the picture outside her room and described it as best I could. I thought she would enjoy knowing that she had a quilt picture outside the room. Then again, maybe these mundane details are the province of those who are not dying.

At her home, just months ago, she showed me her sewing room. She was weak with the cancer then, but things were different. Her time on earth was not measured in any tangible way. Remissions, chemo, radiation all factored in. Back then.

In that room, she showed my mother and I the fruit of her labors. Quilts. Quilts in all sizes, all patterns, in all stages of production. Maybe 50 quilts or more.

I walk the length of the hall, passing 6 hospice rooms. Pretty rooms with fashionable soothing wallpaper and beautiful valances atop the windows that face the river. If it were not for the wooden nurses station with the wheelchair next to it, the ladies in nursing garb and the storage room shining very bright with fluorescent light, you would think yourself in a nice hotel. There might be a swimming pool down on the 3rd floor, just outside the fitness center. Motor coaches full of tourists and college athletes and musicians could be in the parking lot, coming and going, to and fro, in the chaotic dance of life.

This is Hospice.

It is a nice place. Given the role it plays in modern day culture. That bridge between our highly medicalized lives, and the natural biological rhythm of life.

Once we did not have such a place. Once we were born in the company of our own kin, we lived surrounded by them, and died among them. Now, we are whisked away to sterile places with bright lights, strangers with, if all goes well, warm loving dispositions, willing to care for the stranger who is sick, who is dying, in exchange for money they can use to keep their own lives going.

No longer do we live with the hand nature and biology deals us. Now we try to defy the natural order, find a way to eek out more years amongst our concrete jungle. Struggling against the inevitable.

I arrive at the family room. Oversized soft sofas in a brown print, tasteful. A nice wooden desk with a pc on it. Nice entertainment center with large screen TV, complete with pay TV service and a small selection of DVD movies. Coffee table covered in magazines, remotes and a forgotten Styrofoam cup.

On the brown sofa, against a side wall, my mother lays on her back, under a white summer weight blanket. Her sleep is punctuated by jerking movements. I wonder what is happening in her subconscious. My mother endeavors to stay strong for her cousin-sister, the Quilter.

My mother, who has never known a world that the Quilter was not part of, is enduring a breaking heart. Her cousin, 3 years her senior in life. Her cousin, neigh, sister. They call each other sister. Who is this? They say, this is my sister. Close.

I worry about my mother. She is just now really standing solid in the wake of my dad’s passing. No other death, save one of her children, could affect her more intensely than this one, the passing of her sister, the Quilter.

I return down the hall and re-enter my cousin’s room. Her husband is still resting on the hide a bed, I am relieved. He is not much for sleeping, even under the best of circumstances. Now, his heart breaking, his mind reeling with the impending death of his wife of 57 years, he struggles, bloodshot eyes, shuffled movements. I struggle in these nights to create situations in which he will be compelled to lay down for a bit.

I sit down in that wooden chair again. I strain in the dim light to see her chest rise and fall. I wait, and finally am rewarded with the desired movement. There are pauses in her breath. One must be patient to confirm that she is still partially in this world.

Satisfied and relieved, I sit back in the chair, pull out the laptop and wait for it to come alive. I quickly dim the screen as much as it will go. I minimize my window to reduce the white glare in my face, dilating my pupils and lighting the room. I decide my seaside desktop image is too bright.

I find a black and white print of a leaf, really grey halftones, but what does it matter? The Quilter is busy with her work of dying. The mundane details of life pale in comparison to the drama being played out a foot from my hands.

I hear a rustling; I close the lid and strain to see clearly. Turned her head. I sit back. I hear a quite knock, it is the aide, she is here to do temp and BP. She does 2 BP’s, the first was low, and she wants to double check. 85 over 53. Low, very low.

My cousin’s journey toward her death continues at a slow relatively steady pace. The aide, a temp, is concerned by the BP. She goes to tell the nurse. I accompany her. I listen. The nurses are as loving, sensitive and patient as you could ever hope for.

Hospice.

The nurse smiles warmly at me in those wee hours. “It is a marker on the path.” I say to her. She smiles tenderly. She tells me there are many, and the road is varied. She says the Quilter may keep this BP or may roller coaster.

There are no absolutes in this process. Save the ending. Or the beginning.

The Quilter wanted to die at home. Or so it had been said.

Hospice.

It looks less and less likely that they will move her home. Her needs seem simple, bedpan, depends, oxygen and pain meds. She has a DNR. She signed it at the hospital, using my short black pen, just hours before being transported to hospice, that mid place, the on the way back home place.

Here we sit. Here she does her work. Here she is sewing her final quilt, making a pattern we will never be privy to. A private quilt. The quilt of her life, her time with us, and her path onward to whatever lays ahead.

I close the laptop lid, set it on the floor beside the practical bedside table. I sit up in that wooden chair. I train my eyes upon her face, upon her chest. I watch. I glance over to see how Pesky is fairing. Should he find the peace she is likely headed toward. His coming months full of pain and suffering.

I watch the Quilter as the dark night sky slowly gives way to day. As the hours pass I am keenly aware of the ebb and flow, keenly aware that while I have a beautiful quilt made by the Quilter’s own hands, and given to me upon my return to the place of my birth, the most beautiful quilt that she will make, and the one most cherished in my life, is this private quilt she now quilts, and the honor of attending the Quilter, as she quilts.

While I cannot name the patterns on the quilts in her sewing room, I can name the pattern of the one she now quilts.

That is the one that matters.



You are already missed, my dear.