A Legacy Project

Down the road from the memory unit where my mother stays is a Jimmy John’s sub shop. We slip away at lunch time and go for a sandwich.

These are her last days, maybe her last hours. She’s 92 years old. She had a stroke a few days ago. She can’t eat or drink. The medical staff on site tell us she won’t regain consciousness. She breathes. For now. That’s all. They tell us it could be a few days, maybe even a week.

My dad has taken to Jimmy’s slogan. “It’s freaky fast,” he says with a smile. At the counter we dither–take out or eat in. We elect to eat in. 

“If you need to go to the office this afternoon,” he says to my brother, “you should go.”

“This is fine,” Tom says. 

“Lookit,” Dad says, “They’ve got a special sandwich for each of us. Big John for me, Turkey Tom, and”–he turns and smiles at me–“well, not for you, I guess.”

“I’ll have the Vito.”

I crossed over to the Italian side a long time ago. Not a betrayal of the family tradition. Just a turn he and my mother had not anticipated.

We quietly argue at the cash register who’s going to pay, give in to dad, and take our trays to a table. I poke a straw into my cup. The icy coke is sweet and delicious. I try to remember when I last had potato chips. I feel like I’m eating kid food. And I don’t mind. 

We said our goodbyes over the last weeks and months, as she disappeared into dementia. She became a tabula rasa. Everything written on that slate gradually erased. Going to visit, I would enter the code at the door to let myself in. She sat on a sofa in the front room, looking, but not seeing. “Mother,” I would say when I sat down beside her. It looked like she was listening. Not to me. To something a long time ago.

We give ourselves 15-20 minutes at Jimmy John’s.

“It’s more than I can eat,” dad says. He wraps it up for later.  These last months he’s pushed himself to the limit. He struggles to stand up, says he is okay.  

Back at the home we take seats in her room. Nothing has changed. Every few hours they squirt a couple drops of morphine under her tongue. They give us a little wand with a sponge on the end of it to dip in water and dampen her lips. We wait.

Later dad will take out his leftover sandwich and eat it. This is life. It goes by freaky fast.