I Will Not Have the Don Experience

My friend Don told me about how his mother passed into death. A tough Italian American, strict and scolding, she became pliable as she neared her end. She gentled and gave up all her fights. Don, her primary caregiver, was there when the death rattle came to her throat.

“You can go now,” he said several times, standing over her hospice bed and waving his hands upward over her body as if trying to scoop smoke toward the ceiling. She smiled, finally having permission, and let go of her body. Don felt the release of her spirit, and she was gone.

I’ve often asked Don to retell the story, wanting to experience vicariously a moment of intimacy I felt destined to never have with my mother. For Mary Ann Wingate, who died at ninety just over a year ago, anticipation of death was a way of life. I have to search deep into my New Jersey childhood to find a mother who wasn’t telling me she was going to die someday. By the time I hit my tall gangly puberty in Colorado at the cusp of the Reagan era, she had fallen into a perfect vortex of actual physical maladies (lupus, spinal stenosis that would eventually put her in a wheelchair) and hypochondria. Every symptom became evidence for a terminal condition the doctors were too obtuse to see. Thankfully, the internet wasn’t around to fuel her imagination yet.

I wanted to go to college as far away as I could but stayed in Colorado because she begged me not to abandon her. She swore she had a brain tumor—which she did, though it turned out to be benign. Correctly diagnosing herself only led her deeper into hypochondria, only raised the pitch and volume of her I’m going to die mantra.

At twenty I finally moved cross-country to get away from her death fixation, as well as the memory of her leather belt against the flesh of my ass. But I came back a decade later, even though we had lost—or maybe never developed—the warmth and easy rapport I saw other men sharing with the women who birthed them. By the 1990s my mother had become a fan of euthanasia activist Dr. Jack Kevorkian, loudly backing him during his trials in Michigan and regularly wishing that he could come end her misery.

“Paging Dr. Kevorkian!” I can still hear her say, the way women on commercials used to say “Calgon, take me away!” After Oregon passed its Death with Dignity Act in 1997, she declared that she wanted to move there.

“But you don’t have a terminal illness, Mom,” I told her. By then I’d been married and divorced, earned an MFA in film and failed in Hollywood, and started carving out a home in the gilded cage of academia. “They won’t help you die unless you’re already dying.”

“Well, maybe they’ll change the laws, like they did in Holland. Don’t tell me I can’t hope!”

The fact that the woman who gave me life wished so fervently for death exhausted me. Mary Ann found a platoon of doctors who gave her tests she hoped would prove she was dying, but they all gradually grew leery of her theories. I’m not sure she wanted to feel better—she just wanted the doctors to say the magic words: You were right. I left Colorado again, then (predictably) came back, then remarried. My mother got some new diagnoses—type 2 diabetes, celiac disease—and we moved her closer to us. She found new doctors who did new tests and grew leery of her in time. My wife, who first met Mary Ann in 1999, never knew her as a woman who wanted to be alive. Our sons, born in the subsequent decade, heard their grandmother say she wanted to die dozens of times before they reached age ten.

As my mother settled into her midseventies and her wheelchair, I threw myself into family life and settled back into the Catholicism we’d once shared. She’d long since abandoned any faith, and I now wonder if I returned to it seeking a counterbalance to her fixation with death. What better to outweigh a death wish than an eternal life wish? Over time faith became a dividing line between us because she had her own idea of how salvation would come: through death on her own terms. But when Dr. Kevorkian died in 2011, Mary Ann couldn’t page him anymore. Her pleas became barer, less specific.

“Why can’t I just die?” she’d say, or “Why is this taking so long?”

Ask God, I wanted to tell her, but any mention of religion backfired. My faith suggests that death offers us an opportunity to come to terms with the trajectory of our lives, but Mary Ann spurned that. I wanted God in the picture so my mother would stop seeing death as a simple relief from life’s pain and start seeing it as a final chance to transform herself. Mary Ann didn’t like the word God. “I have a deal with the Man Upstairs,” she’d say whenever I brought up the subject of religion, though she never detailed the specifics. In my mind, having The Don Experience as my mother died became my best chance to repair a relationship that couldn’t heal in life. I prayed for that reconciliation.

As my mother reached her eighties and her body’s end approached, she’d say things like “I’m ready for this to be over” or “No use buying that for me, I’m going to die soon anyway.” When I wasn’t around her, I could imagine her dying eyes exactly as I wanted: grateful that she’d lived and relinquishing all her fights the way Don’s mother had. But Mary Ann’s actual eyes told a different story: a stubborn, animal wish for darkness. I didn’t like looking into them because, afterward, hers were the only eyes I could see in my own mirror. Eyes that said Nothing after this. Eyes that refused to reconcile. Can a soul that won’t reconcile ever respond to a plea of You can go now and let go of life in peace?

I didn’t ask that question, not even in my prayers, because I didn’t want an answer. The closest I got to one was the look my mother gave me after she’d gone off her diabetes medication without telling me and ended up in the hospital on the verge of a coma. She lay on her gurney in intensive care, near-deranged from her blood sugar being high for so long, while I squatted by her bed, face-to-face with a catheter bag full of bloody urine.

“This might be it,” she’d said earlier that day when she called to tell us she needed an ambulance. She’d sounded scared, not so welcoming of death’s embrace now that it had an arm around her waist. And there in intensive care, she said it again.

“Should I get a priest?” I asked her.

She grabbed me with her nihilist eyes and said “DON’T TRY TO SAVE ME,” as firmly and absolutely as she’d ever told me anything in my life. And then she looked away.

The Don Experience, as I report it here, is a fabrication. I liked to imagine that the sublime death of Don’s mother was preceded by weeks of conversation about the soul, about loving this earthly life, about embracing what awaited her. In truth, she’d been miserable for months and unresponsive for days. The release of her spirit came as a surprise to Don, and it proceeded not from profound conversations but from long, impenetrable silence.

Until the very end, Don was simply a presence beside his mother, another human breath that would go on when hers ended. He couldn’t have deep spiritual conversations with her because she couldn’t talk. No big moment of conscious reconciliation settled over them, no love-life- and-let-it-go profundity of the kind I wanted with my mother. Yet my memory of Don’s story always added these elements because I wanted so desperately to believe they were possible. I wanted a mother I could pray with—wanted to drop to my knees on the nursing-home floor and ask God to soften our hearts to each other and heal our broken, underdeveloped bond. I’d start with my hands together, but soon reach up for Mary Ann’s as it dangled off the edge of her bed. Her knobby arthritic fingers would grasp mine, and we’d apologize for all the times we hurt each other. We’d be two adults, facing her death together.

But that would mean exposing her soul, which—if she even acknowledged one—was Mary Ann’s own damn business. Though she was raised Catholic and raised me Catholic, she retreated from any activities that asked her to acknowledge the possibility of spiritual life. She scoffed at the idea of confession and the Anointing of the Sick, scoffed at coming to church with us. She said No to religion so many times that I got gun-shy about bringing it up. I couldn’t change her mind about religion because dying was her religion.

Many times in Mary Ann’s final years I found myself at the verge of asking her to pray. I pictured myself bouncing into her nursing-home room uncharacteristically buoyant, so full of light and peace that she couldn’t stop herself from folding her hands together with me.

“Let’s pray, Mom,” this imaginary Steve might say, and Mary Ann might shoot him a smile.

“For what?” she was more likely to shoot back instead. What did she have to pray for other than death, the solution to all her problems? She rejected the possibility of an afterlife and believed she’d simply cease to exist.

Even now, after her bodily life has finished, the prayer scene that never happened replays itself in my imagination. I step into her room at the nursing home and kneel. We pray a simple Our Father and Hail Mary together, and it’s enough to lure her into prayer for keeps. She falls into it like a woman going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and she sees the light before she dies, and my efforts are pleasing in the eyes of God.

I save her and save myself. Two birds with one stone. A perfect plan, and an outrageous expectation.

My mother, my two brothers, and very occasionally my father used to go on Sunday mornings to Saint Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church in Lodi, New Jersey, where Mary Ann’s parents are buried. Back then some Masses were in Polish; now they’re in Spanish and Portuguese. After we moved a few towns over, we attended Saint Leo’s in Elmwood Park, though I did my religious education at Saint Anne in Fair Lawn. (I have little memory of these places and had to look them up online to get their proper names.) Mary Ann encouraged us boys to say our goodnight prayers alone, never as a family. For a while my brothers went to Catholic school, but I was spared that—for which I’m grateful, since few I know who went to Catholic school still practice as adults.

Throughout my childhood, my mother seemed as Catholic as could be. But when I was ten, my father died, and in the aftermath I suspect she got into a fight with Saint Leo’s, Saint Anne, or both. We stopped going to church, and the family broke apart; my brothers, whose biological mother had died before they turned five, stayed with my father’s family. Three years later, Mary Ann and I left New Jersey for Colorado in a dark-blue Chevy van, and she bought a house in a little town south of Colorado Springs called Security—so named because it was across the highway from the Army base at Fort Carson and the North American Air Defense Command.

On the way home from Security’s small downtown we’d drive past a Catholic church, Holy Family. One day I asked if we could check it out, hoping that being in Colorado might help my mother drop her animosities. (I wasn’t old enough to have seen how firmly she held grudges.) She drove me there, and when she parked at the curb, I thought she was getting out. But she only cut the engine and unrolled her window.

“Not coming in?” I asked. She shook her head. “You’re sure?”

“No.”

“No you’re not sure, or no you’re not going in?”

“I’m not going in,” she said.

I was an unconfident kid, not certain of what to say to whoever I saw inside, but I recognized the You’re on your own look on Mary Ann’s face and walked to the door. Holy Family was empty of people and unusually bare inside compared to the ornate Catholic churches of the East Coast—almost Protestant in the plainness of its pews.

Could this be my church? Not without my mother, who was as much a part of being Catholic to me as the Rosary. But my mother didn’t want a church, and I knew I wouldn’t have this one. I didn’t know anybody in Security, and I wasn’t going to show up unaccompanied at Holy Family like some teenage runaway. When I climbed back into the van, Mary Ann said nothing. No I’ll drive you down Sunday, no You can walk over on your own. I knew she’d never set foot in a Catholic church again, and she’d never support my interest either.

That moment marked the beginning of a chasm between me and my mother. After a phase of being too cool for Jesus, I started going back to Mass on my own at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Colorado Springs once I turned seventeen. When I mentioned this, my mother referenced her deal with the Man Upstairs, and that was it for religious discussion. I thought about my soul and what would happen to it once I died. Mary Ann talked about wanting to donate her corpse to science.

“Even if that means getting smashed up in car-crash tests?” I asked her. “Even if it means the military blows you up to test their bombs?”

“What do I care? I won’t be there to watch.”

Mary Ann’s references to the Man Upstairs dwindled, and I learned to stop bringing up religion with her. But decades later, as I squatted next to my mother’s bloody urine bag after her blood-sugar scare, I had to know where she stood with God. The more I think about it, the gladder I am that I only asked if she wanted to see a priest. What if I’d said “Let’s talk to the Man Upstairs” instead? In rejecting a priest, she might have been rejecting simply the pomp of Catholicism. Rejecting her Man Upstairs would sever any connection with the divine. I wonder now whether I unconsciously set up this hypothetical priest as a straw man, knowing she’d turn her back on him. Because if she turned her back on the Man Upstairs instead, I wouldn’t know who she was anymore.

The last time I flat out asked Mary Ann to pray was during a disastrous phase after we moved her up to an assisted-living facility in South Dakota to be near us. Within a month she insisted—at age eighty-four—on buying her own house. I knew she couldn’t handle living on her own, but I couldn’t legally stop her. No judge would declare her incompetent to handle her own affairs, so I grudgingly did the footwork for her move. She bought a place down the street from where her grandchildren would eventually go to middle school, and I hauled in her bags and boxes.

“Do you pray?” I casually asked, setting two trash bags of winter clothes in Mary Ann’s new living room.

“What?” she asked, in the voice she used when she pretended not to hear me.

“Do you ever pray?”

“I have my deal—”

“I know, Mom, your deal with the Man Upstairs. But do you pray? Because I pray, and I want to pray with you. Do you ever pray?”

“No,” she said curtly, and we moved on to some other logistical issue. Where to put her microwave, I think. Then we laughed, not quite nervously but with relief at the religion question having been raised and shot down with so little drama.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not trying to drag you to church.”

“Good.”

“Not after what you said when you were at death’s door.”

“When was I at death’s door?”

“In the hospital back in Longmont. I asked if you wanted to see a priest and you said ‘don’t try to save me,’ and I was going to ask if I could pray for you right there. Because I do pray for you.”

Mary Ann’s mouth, puckered small from not having her dentures in, gave her best Back off smile. I kept away from the subject of religion for a while before inviting her to our oldest son’s First Holy Communion. She declined, claiming she’d be too much of an inconvenience with her wheelchair.

“Are you worried you’ll burst into flames if you go into a church?” I asked her. She was from Jersey—she could handle the sarcasm.

“It’s the church that better worry,” she said.

By the time her younger grandson’s turn came, I didn’t use sarcasm. I invited her simply, and she said No equally simply. Every No battered my delusion that she might return to Catholicism at the end of her life. I didn’t care about the trappings of the church and the perfect observation of ritual. I cared about us being together before God and unafraid to admit it. Then I could say “You can go now” and Mary Ann could die in peace, with the last rites candles burning in her father’s wooden crucifix beside her and the glass rosary she got at the Vatican—back in 1960, when she still believed—clutched in her palm. I could wave my hands upward over her body as if trying to scoop smoke toward the ceiling. She’d smile, finally having permission, and let go of her body. I’d feel the release of her spirit, and she’d be gone.

She’d love life before she left it. Finally, and just for a moment, but that moment would be enough. This was the death I wanted for my mother, though I knew my dream was selfish. My quixotic belief that I could turn my mother’s face toward God stood in opposition to the death she wanted.

Which was, it became clearer as death inched closer, to die alone without fuss. Without her son standing over her, waving his arms like an idiot and trying to release a soul she didn’t believe in.

Following Christ means forgiving people, and I’ve always had a hard time forgiving Mary Ann for the physical pain and fear she inflicted on me and my brothers. I avoided admitting it until I had kids of my own, but she was an abuser. Her leather belt against our asses may not have been a daily phenomenon, but it was a constant and highly effective threat. My ex-boxer, ex-con father was the one to truly fear—I’ll tell your father was enough to make my bowels feel loose—but my mother was the punisher of our family.

She learned this role from her Polish immigrant mother, Anna Fugiel, who had come to Ellis Island around 1912 from Rzeszów in far eastern Poland near Ukraine. By Mary Ann’s account, her mother was a master of shoving, whacking, restraining, and berating who did everything she could to keep her youngest child subservient to her until she died. I never met the woman, but her legacy lived on in her daughter.

I want to say that my mother’s leather strap was old enough to have been handed down from Anna Fugiel, but I can’t be sure. It could have been my father’s belt, or she could have picked up whatever belt was nearby. The distinction is significant: A woman who grabs the nearest belt to strap her children is different from a woman who does it with a particular belt stored in a particular place. The strapper with one belt fetishizes and ritualizes her violence, only taking out her belt in situations where specific lines have been crossed. The strapper who grabs any old belt is less predictable in her violence, and those she punishes know they’ve crossed a line only once the punishing starts.

In retrospect, Mary Ann feels more like the second type. She wasn’t terribly consistent in her application of punishment, though my brothers always got it worse than I did. Mary Ann ritualized her violence, but only a little. Once she determined that a line had been crossed, she’d fold a belt (or was it the belt?) in half, forming it into a loose O with one end in each fist. Then she’d yank those fists apart and WHAP! The leather came together with a force we felt in the next room. None of us wanted to feel that WHAP! against our skin, and we shaped our behavior to avoid it, even though we sometimes couldn’t. I don’t think my mother could help herself; in such moments she was trapped in the abuse inflicted on her by Anna Fugiel of Rzeszów.

Did she ever stop just before strapping us and think No, this is wrong? She never apologized for it, which is what I have the hardest time forgiving her for. She simply accepted her abuse as the way one did things. I told my wife about Mary Ann’s belt—even demonstrating its threatening WHAP!—and received no objection when I proposed that our kids never be left alone with my mother.

Awful! What kind of son doesn’t trust his own mother with her grandchildren? A son who’s tasted her strap, that’s who.

My mother’s generation found nothing wrong with beating their kids. Plenty even used religion to justify their violence, quoting Spare the rod, spoil the child as they tried to teach kids respect. But the only thing abusive parents truly teach their children is fear—of the parent, of the world, of speaking the truth. Mary Ann lived in those fears for ninety years, and only in glimmers at the very end did she seem aware of how they had shaped her.

Usually I brought my whole family to visit the nursing home, as they kept me and Mary Ann on our best behavior. One day when I visited her alone, hoping to pull us closer together, she hinted that she might believe in something after death. Her blinds were pulled up, though she usually kept them down to block out the sunlight. The brightness of the room suggested revelation.

“I don’t want my mother to be the first one I see when I die,” Mary Ann told me.

“Why not?” It was strange to hear her talking so casually about the afterlife. Had she lived through a brush with death since I’d last stopped by?

“Would you want to die and see somebody who pushes you behind a door and beats you when you’re in your thirties? In your thirties?”

The afterlife conversation ended there, but it still felt like a breakthrough. Mary Ann’s fear of Anna Fugiel explained why she loudly proclaimed her desire for death but never let it come too close. When she had a brain tumor, she fought it. When she went off her diabetes meds and thought Thismightbeit, she called me and let me get her to the hospital. She didn’t have a simple death wish, but a more complex push/pull battle—one so essential to her being that it must have overtaken her body on a cellular level, leading to both her real and imagined illnesses.

Until that day, my mother had never told me any details of Anna Fugiel’s abuse. I only knew the generic legend, and for her to share even one specific incident had to mean something. That afternoon, with no more revelations from Mary Ann but a hope for more down the road, I talked with the nursing home’s chaplain to lay bare the history of my family’s maternal violence. I hadn’t spoken much with the chaplain, who had tried without success to get my mother talking about God. Now I sat in her small windowless office full of at-the-ready bereavement cards and “Our Sympathies” plaques.

“It’s hard to tell my mother I forgive you,” I said, “because I’m afraid she’ll say For what? What if she doesn’t see hitting me as something she needs to be forgiven for?”

“What if you ask her to forgive her mother?” suggested the chaplain.

It was a brilliant idea, because it brought the focus away from my personal resentment. Two days later, I asked my wife to come with me to the nursing home, just in case the situation went sour. My mother was awake, and I made small talk until I knew she was coherent enough for a real conversation. Then I took her by the hand and put my face as close to hers as the mechanical bed would allow.

“I want you to know that I love you, and I forgive you for hitting me when I was a kid.” It came out straight and calm. “And I hope you’ll try to forgive your mother too.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. I was incredibly relieved that she hadn’t said Forgive me for what? or defended her strapping habit. We talked about her mother hitting her, rather than her hitting me, and when I asked her again to try forgiving Anna Fugiel, she promised she would.

I hugged her longer than usual, and she clutched me in return. Wasn’t this progress? Weren’t we getting somewhere, finally?

I felt like a champ for a few days, marveling at how much less tension I had in my jaw now that I didn’t have to schlepp around my enormous resentment for the woman who birthed me. I saw a gentler self emerging who took time to listen, who didn’t jump at every sound, who accepted other people’s fear and sadness.

Then came reality: other aspects of my mother have also shaped my bitterness toward her. About a week after our hug-fest, as I still basked in the delusion that I’d forgiven her once and for all, she said, “I want to write a book about mixed families.” We were watching sports on TV—probably the Denver Broncos—so Black faces and voices must have turned her mind to race.

“What do you mean, mixed?” I knew exactly what she meant from past conversations: My mother strongly disliked interracial marriage and said so quite unpleasantly when I dated a Black woman in my late twenties. Pigs don’t mate with sheep, she’d say. Several times she’d told me how, in her childhood, Anna Fugiel had buried her daughter’s face in her skirt rather than let her look at an interracial couple.

“Part White and part Black,” Mary Ann said. “And how confused the children can be.”

“Shut up,” I snapped at her, the anger rumbling in my chest like a wood chipper. “That’s who your grandson’s two best friends are. I don’t want to hear it.”

“I’ll call it Idiota,” she said. Idiota is Polish, and it means exactly what it sounds like. She repeated it slowly: “I-di-o-ta.”

The whole family was there, including the grandson in question. I grunted, swore, and stepped into the hallway to escape the mother I’d thought I could forgive. My wife hustled us out of the nursing home soon after, and I was too shaken up to handle the seven-minute drive home.

“Did that really happen?” I asked her. She nodded and took my keys.

When I got home, I retreated to my office and put on my headphones, and I avoided my family for days. I held off on visiting my mother as often, but her behavior didn’t change. In fact, she doubled down. In the coming month she asked me four times whether my late brother Mike’s grandchildren were mixed or all-White. She also brought up her idea for the Idiota book again, this time suggesting that I write it for her.

I wasn’t particularly forgiving in that moment, because Mary Ann seemed more like Roseanne Barr than the kind of mother I wanted to pray with, or even pray for. There I was, on the road to forgiveness, and another roadblock had popped up—this one not just pain inflicted on me and my brothers, but free-floating animosity toward everybody who didn’t have skin like ours.

As she moved toward death, Mary Ann showed me exactly who she was and how she felt about the world. She made me understand that forgiveness demands more than letting go of the individual harms done to me. Forgiving my mother requires a long-term encounter with her dark side that will probably last my entire life.

The Idiota incident shifted the goalposts on the end-of-life reconciliation I sought with Mary Ann. It taught me that the only way I’d ever earn a chance at The Don Experience was by having the courage and humility to kneel by her deathbed and say You can go now, regardless of whether or not I liked her.

I continued to misread signs that I would never have The Don Experience. Two years before she died, Mary Ann fell twice on the day before we left for a long-planned family-vacation/tenure celebration in Mexico. She was a genius at making me feel guilty for not paying her enough attention, and this may have been one more I’m dying, don’t abandon me! cry.

But she was eighty-eight, and it felt reasonable to fear that the end might come while we were away. She’d talked about being left alone when her time came, like a dog that wanders off into the woods when it feels death approach. Dying without being surrounded by loved ones—without me—looked to be her new equivalent of Paging Dr. Kevorkian! But I still wanted The Don Experience, still wanted to be there to help my mother pass on peacefully.

“I can stay here just in case there’s trouble,” I told her, though I barely meant it. I really wanted this trip. “Jen and the kids can go.”

“You should go with them. You have to!”

“Okay. But I’ll come home if the nursing home says you’re starting to slip. I want to be here for you if you die.”

“No!” she protested. “It’s your vacation!”

“Is my vacation more important than my mother?”

“Why come back just to watch me die?”

“So I can say goodbye,” I told her. Then I took her hand. “So I can hold your hand while you’re dying.”

“If I’m going to die, I’m going to die. You don’t have to be here for it.” Did she pull back her hand? I’m not sure, but she definitely said “What good would that do either of us?”

The words fell like the WHAP! of her strap, which I hadn’t felt in

forty years. My childhood fear of her leaped back into my stomach as I kissed her goodbye and retreated from her room. The fact that she couldn’t see me as part of her death felt like a condemnation—as emphatic a rejection of my being as her strap had been.

Yet letting Mary Ann die alone might have saved me from a much harsher blow. What if she let me be with her, and I asked if she wanted to bring in a priest, and she said What good would that do either of us again? It would not only be the ultimate deathbed rejection of the faith she taught me, but a last-gasp rejection of me. I’d live the rest of my life feeling the failure of my selfish wish to usher my mother into death, when she just wanted to usher herself.

Now that she’s gone I can see things her way, can understand how inserting myself into her death would have ruined it for her. But on the day before we left for Mexico, I was certain that holding my mother’s hand while she died would give her one last chance to turn her eyes toward God—and toward the son who loved her despite the hard times. Ultimately, I had no right to impose my vision of death on my mother, and life never gave me that chance, anyway. Mary Ann died alone in her sleep two years later on the first day of December, leaving life the way she wanted to. She got her way, and I realized my error. When she died on her terms, she released me from the high wire of wanting what she would not give, where for my whole life with her I’d stood, exhausted and wavering.

Read more from Issue 18.1.