The house. The house where my father disappeared from this world.
The house of my mother’s gaze.
It was comforting to be watched over, and then it was suffocatingly oppressive. Two sides of the same coin.
I knew at that moment I couldn’t stay the night there. I had to leave.
Later that day I found a small motel and checked in. I told the doctor that my mother wasn’t the sort of person to have prepared a will.
The doctor laid it out for me. “If your mother gave no instructions for her terminal care, and given that she was not religious, the choice falls to you. You are going to have to decide whether or not to continue her life-support treatment.”
I spent a day on the ward with my mother, staring at her face, quietly, agonizingly trying to work out the answer. What would Mom do? What would Mom want me to do?
That was when I asked if my mother was in pain, and the doctor explained that it was not so much a case of if she was in pain but whether she was still able to feel pain. Furthermore, the doctor explained, it wasn’t clear to him where the precise line was where we couldn’t continue referring to my mother as “her” or “she.”
How many of the cerebral cortex modules that determined a person’s personality and consciousness needed to remain intact for you to refer to them as the same person? What “she” would have wanted? We had no way of vicariously experiencing my mother’s current mental state. So the question “Is she in pain?” was inadequate on so many levels. Did “she” still remain “she” in a meaningful sense? Could the nerve receptors that remained alive in her brain receive pain stimulus? Did “she” experience that stimulus in the form of pain as we know it?
The doctor was up front with me: he didn’t have the answers to any of these questions.
“Isn’t there someone who can decide for me?” I asked. I’m sure I was sobbing.
I was afraid. I had no idea what this doctor was trying to do. How could I make such an important decision when it was such a gray area?
It wasn’t the doctor’s fault, of course. We were now in the realm of philosophy, not medicine. And yet, frustratingly, modern technological developments were all useless when it came to the realm of philosophy. Technology could analyze and dissect human beings so well, but philosophy just didn’t want to know.
And I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to decide. I realized this might have seemed selfish—hypocritical, even—given the number of people I’d sent to their deaths. But when it comes to someone close, someone you love, you lose your mind. No one tells you of the huge, ambiguous gulf between the lands of the living and the dead. I longed for the days when we had that simple, black-and-white phrase: “brain dead.”
I returned to the motel, where I cried some more. I cried for the world that had gone past the point of no return in creating this awful ambiguity between life and death. I cried in terror. I cried at the prospect of having to decide, on the sheer harshness and cruelty of my position. I cried so much I felt nauseated. I fell prostrate on the bed, crying until I needed to run to the bathroom to dry-heave my guts out, and all that emerged was saliva and more tears.
At the end of the night I had decided what to do.
However difficult the question, when it came down to it there were only two alternatives, and I had to pick one of them.
I barely even skimmed over the letter of consent to terminate treatment.
I gave my consent where consent was needed, and my mother’s life support was switched off. The doctor asked me how I felt and offered the services of a recommended counselor. Yep, sure enough, it was the counselors again. Marriage on the rocks? About to head into battle? Relative just died? Counseling was the panacea, it seemed.
“No thanks. But I appreciate the offer.”
Basically, I was worn out.
I realized this at the funeral service. I’d worn myself out thinking about all the details, and that was why I’d been able to make my decision. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I might have still been at the hospital, sitting with Mom and her life-support systems, still turning over the options in my head.
At the time I had convinced myself that I was thinking of Mom’s best interests when I pulled the plug. When I pressed my fingerprint down on the device to give my consent, I believed that Mom wouldn’t have wanted a grim half-existence, that she would have wanted to be either alive or dead, one way or another, and that if she had been alive she would have been in terrible pain.
But, as the doctor had said, there was no way for me to know whether she was in pain. After all, she was no more than a thin remnant of her former self, and it wasn’t even clear whether the new “she” could feel pain.
Then there was that atmosphere. The oppressive feeling of my mother’s gaze that was reignited inside me when I visited the house.
Had I really arrived at my decision by considering my mother’s best interests? I searched deep inside myself, and by the time the funeral service was over I could no longer convince myself that I had.
From that moment onward I’d been plagued by the subconscious belief that I killed my own mother.
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