My husband and I are fumbling in the dark. For a few exasperating hours, early one June morning, on our giant grey settee in the living room. No earthly or heavenly pleasures here though. Tony is frantically flipping through the pages of a tough Trinidadian telephone tome and I am desperately trying to remain on this planet. I fail miserably so he is soon sonorous in a soliloquy. A long, lonely litany and as usual, he does not notice I have ascended to another galaxy. This is a man who knows the entire first folio and all the quartos of Shakespeare by heart so contemplating an existential question is child’s play. After all, the Bard and his entire entourage drop in regularly, unannounced for breakfast, lunch, dinner, any time of day and night actually. Today, Hamlet hustles in. I am in an extreme elevated state of higher cosmic consciousness.
Some time earlier – my minute mother-in-law looks like she is peacefully dozing, perchance dreaming, so we argue as usual and dither and dawdle by her bedside before checking that she is comfortable and warm. I peer at Mom, is this her idea of a joke, I wonder, I stare at her chest, and consider whether it is moving. Why, the woman has befuddled us so often in the past 20 years, I am rightfully suspicious. I have lost track of the number of times I have heard her say “Where Indranie?” only to emerge and find her flat, facedown on the floor. She has done it to me in at least three countries and I am no longer amused.
One memorable day in Belmopan, Belize, in 2009, I dashed out after her favourite question and was halfway across the room when she fell forward. She had just arrived on a long flight from Miami with suitcases crammed with goodies for her two grandchildren. Convinced by her that she was dying of stomach cancer, we rushed Mom to the nearest specialist, many miles away, on the coast in Belize City, for a battery of expensive, invasive tests, colonoscopy and endoscopy included.
I waited, and listened startled as she came out of the anaesthetic, muttering, to an imaginary nurse, her dastardly plans. “I don’t want to be any burden. I don’t want to suffer in pain, they don’t know and – don’t tell them – but I have something put away to end it all…” As it turned out she had not eaten for the entire day and night and had been partaking of Panadol, and dining on dinner mints and Coca Cola to prepare for her arduous journey from Trinidad to Central America.
Returning to Trinidad “to die” as she puts it, Mom eventually had a second heart attack many moons later in May after ditching her medication to further her life’s quixotic quest. She greets me each morning with the profound phrase, “Ah still here” big ‘steups’, “Like the Lord forget me!” Doctors take one look at the huge inoperable arterial blockage, restore her rigorous regimen of medication and send her home. Margaret/Maya is soon like new. But she is most unimpressed. The last of nine siblings, this twice bewildered Hindu child bride of 12 and 14, turned grand matriarch has since seen it all. Little wonder then that I think she is indestructible.
Tony has long concluded she has “shuffled off this mortal coil” but it does take a few other careful checks on my part. “To die, to sleep” suddenly takes on a new sinister meaning.
I am loathe to let her go, her only child scolds me, “Indranie she is 86 and she is DEAD, can’t you see?” I grumble, what does he know, I have been the one taking care of her, why she is due to be bathed in just a while. I unfold her characteristic crossed feet, remove her hand from the normal place across the breast, and caress the long fingers. I play with a few wispy strands of hair. I even tuck her in. She does not respond. I eventually and reluctantly concede. Mom has literally ended “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks, That flesh is heir to.” ‘Tis a consummation, Devoutly to be wish’d” has been her top song for months. Death “gives us pause,” and we “show respect” by racing out of the room, jostling in the doorway, making “calamity of so long life” and proving “conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
Hence our rare cuddle on the chair. We whisper and pretend to talk matter-of-factly as if there is no body in the back bedroom and, at last, the heavens be thanked, we agree on something – we are clueless how to proceed. It is still hours to sunrise but he tries to call his friends for advice, they rightfully refuse to be roused at such an ungodly time. We are stuck in “a sea of troubles” alright.
Ultimately, at dawn, after several hours of enriching Digicel, he reaches Omar, his younger doppelganger, who, I am convinced is his unacknowledged brother. Cops first, then District Medical Officer (DMO) but naturally no one has a number.
The Police have a hard time even agreeing which station is rightfully responsible for coming out to the house to check we have not done her in and of course they have no line for the DMO.
Tony seems in a bit of panic, I notice, frown and rapidly descend back to land. At his wits’ end he issues a SOS appeal on his Facebook (FB) account. I am useless having no contact with social media. In a minute, one of his FB friends, a doctor and a mere name among the 700-odd people, most of whom he has never even met, feels sorry for us and sends the elusive digits. Hubby calls it. He gets sternly warned that it is illegal and considered a criminal offence to contact the DM Office directly to report a personal death and that he should hang up immediately. Indeed, it is the Police’s job. I am summarily impressed.
Indranie Deolall (ID) is a former news editor of the Guyana Chronicle. Since her spouse sends his stuff free to the waterfall paper, she decided in the interest of balance to contact old rival Anand Persaud, who has kindly thrown her a vital lifeline to write for Stabroek News. This is her second piece and she will be paid for both.
