The Day Doña Irma Died
by Kathryn Runco
It was hot and there were too many people and the unexpected had happened. Doña Irma was not dead and didn't seem to be in any hurry to die. In fact, she seemed determined to the last shred of her diminished strength to keep on living despite the agony she must have been enduring. It wasn't going to be a pretty or peaceful death. She was DYING. In pain, in confusion, suffering. And fighting to hold on.
The woman was there because her husband had phoned her office days before. "She's dying" he had said. And "Find Zack, get him some clothes for his grandmother's funeral and get on a plane." She had done those things. She had closed her office. Packed a black dress. Found her stepson and sent him to buy a blazer and some khakis. Reserved plane tickets, held a rental car at the Tampa airport and made hotel reservations. Because she was a Southern woman she knew that death required food and liquor and coffee. Along with the black dress, she packed her cookbook so that she could glaze a ham or bake a cake--the ritual preparation of food required of all adult Southern women when there is a funeral to throw.
There is comfort in ritual, for those performing the ritual, at any rate. Doing the familiar acts of cooking and serving food, making coffee, pouring a drink served to reassure her that nothing has really changed and that grief and heartbreak and untied ends were not at the doorstep. And because her husband's family was huge and noisy, a retreat to the kitchen could provide some time alone, down time from the hysteria that she expected to accompany Doña Irma's death.
But that is not what happened, at least not immediately. "You should see her. She looks like a skeleton." Her husband's eyes were wide and scared and he looked like a little boy. He had been there for days on the death watch. He had seen enough of the suffering and was ready, maybe even panicked, for it to end. But it wasn't going to end that day. Or the next. Or for many more days. So she saw her mother-in-law and her husband had been right. All that was left of the fat little lady was a skeleton and that skeleton was not at anything even approaching rest.
Doña Irma was in pain. She was dehydrated because her throat and stomach could not accept food or fluid. She was hot and her skin was mottled. She did not breathe easily and she choked on bile so black and vile that her daughters and daughters in law and grand daughters had to hold tissues soaked with bay rum to their faces sometimes. But she could talk a little and she could hang on to the life force.
The woman joined her sisters-in-law and, together, they watched and helped and provided awkward nursing. None of them were trained in caring for a woman so ill, but they did what they could. Ice chips. Tiny sips of sweet, thick Puerto Rican coffee. Sponges soaked in drops of morphine. They tried to ease her. They encouraged her to let go, to allow herself to stop suffering. They all secretly wondered if that was the right advice. They were (mostly) her daughters-in-law. Did the women married to her children really have the right to tell her to die? Whether or not, they told her....begged her. She was suffering and they were suffering and the children and the grandchildren couldn't have held out for much more of it, so they asked her to give up and go to God.
She did her best not to accommodate them or God in that request. The woman probably knew Doña Irma least of all of the woman attending her. She was the most newly married into the family. The woman knew some family history and some she did not know. She had never lived in the same city nor visited with the old lady much. But the two women shared some things beyond the matriarch's oldest son and youngest grandson. They shared a hardness of spirit and a huge streak of stubbornness. They were tough broads, both of them, and neither were inclined to give an inch.
Through the woman's pregnancy of that youngest grandchild, they had worked out an arrangement. The woman would not speak her broken Spanish to Doña Irma and the old lady would not speak her broken English to her daughter-in-law. So they spoke in different languages, understood each other perfectly and maintained their respective high grounds. A stand off. A pyrrhic victory for them both. Maybe if there had not been so much high ground the younger could have explained to the elder what she had seen of her husband's wounds and the elder could have understood just how deep those wounds ran. Maybe the elder woman could have explained some of the mystery of her life and warned against wanting too much and about the dangers of being mistaken and stubborn at the same time. But those things never happened.
Doña Irma won the battle. She never spoke a word of English to the woman during all of those terrible days of the death watch. The woman spoke deathbed Spanish to her mother-in-law. "Abre su boca" when it was time for the morphine sponges and " Quiere agua, Doña?" She spoke soothing words learned from the other women when the old lady choked. The old lady would respond sometimes with a "Si" or "Cafe, por favor". And one hot bright afternoon when the woman thought she would scream from the heat and the crowd of in-laws and from being a witness to such prolonged agony, "Kathryn es muy bonita, muy bonita". Doña Irma had never told the woman before that she thought her pretty. It kept the woman from screaming and it made her cry.
The woman's intimacy with her husband was routine and "regular". The normal exchanges of confidences and secret pain, revelations of anguish shared between spouses were a part of their marriage. The knowledge of the other person that was the product of living together; which buttons to push and which to avoid was a part of their bond. The intimacy of another person's family was not so familiar to the woman. Discovering the scars which transcended the individual and marred the entire group was not unknown to her but she was not prepared to experience such an intimate and enormous group revelation. Seeing the levels of fear and anger and loathing and love that happens only in an immediate family and the knowledge that these emotions were bared to her only as happenstance of time and place was harrowing.
These people were suffering and hurting each other, themselves, their children, and she could not tell them what she saw happening because she was not one of them. Only a daughter-in-law. And so she did what she could to comfort her husband and his family. She cooked gringo food for the family because she couldn't cook for their palates. She held Doña Irma's hand and chipped ice and wiped the dying old lady with cold clothes. She would have changed the diapers but Doña Irma was so dehydrated that there was seldom a change needed. She prayed for an end to the agony and for the old lady to reach enough peace that she would finally let go. But she could not tell the old lady's children to lay off each other and to stop looking back. It wasn't her place; it wasn't her family; they weren't her scars; Doña Irma wasn't her mother.
The woman, one of the sons and his wife were there when the old lady died. There had been some scares in the preceding days when the old lady choked horribly and had to be turned over, the daughters-in-law raking out the bile that clogged her throat. There were times when it did not seem that Doña Irma could possibly wake and speak again because no one, even she, could breathe so little and be in so much pain and keep living. But in the end, she drew a slow breathe, exhaled it, and her chest did not rise again. After a few moments the son felt for the pulse in her throat and when he did not find the rhythm, the woman walked out of the bedroom and into the kitchen to tell the other sons, drinking at the table, that the struggle had ended.
She wondered at their shock. "What have they expected all this time?" she thought as the sons rushed to the back of the house and as she poured herself a glass of the bourbon left sitting on the table. The brothers and sisters, spouses, grandchildren poured into the stifling bedroom to be with the old body, to kiss her goodbye. The woman took her bourbon to the patio and sat by the pool, wanting to be away from the grief and the crying grandchildren and the noise brought on by the death. She wanted to sit in the hot, damp night and be alone but because the old lady's spirit was so strong, because she was so stubborn and so afraid to die, it would not be that easy.
The old lady's soul took with her the electricity in the house abruptly, leaving the hot house without air conditioning and light and scaring the shit out of her family. In the hot dark hysteria, the woman found her husband and they laughed because they were tired and spooked and because the grief was escalating all around them. Their laughter was not understood by the others but the family had spent the last weeks not understanding each other and not trying very hard to make sense of all of their shared scars and pains and love and hopes. It was not to be expected that the woman's laughter with her husband would be understood nor did it matter.
What happened next was also routine, "regular". A funeral was planned. Flowers were ordered. Aunts and uncles and cousins were called. The children of Doña Irma buried her and with her they buried the hope of reconciling the mystery and pain of the life they had spent with their mother. They lost with her much of their collective hope of understanding their mother and her life and they wounded each other deeply in the process. In the end, they couldn't even agree on the pronunciation of their last name, some preferring the Spanish inflection, others the English. The woman did not stay for the funeral because she would not willingly witness any more grief and would not watch the brothers and sisters strike out at each other.
She left the family a few years later, with regret. They were loving people who had been good to her. They had beautiful names and their mothers' eyes and they had shared with her their culture, one of their men, and the intimacy of the death of their matriarch. She would be forever bound to them through emotion and through the blood of her son and she would always wish that she could have told them, on the day that Doña Irma died, to lay off each other and to stop looking back.
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