As My Mother Lay Dying
Watching movies with loved ones can be its own kind of communication.
As my mother lay dying in the hospital, her eyes tired and her breathing labored, she told me that she had loved watching movies with my brother and me.
She said, in the days before her death from cancer at 79 in September 2023, other things to me, too, but not as many as one might expect. She was the most loving of mothers, but she sometimes struggled to express her feelings plainly. To do so at the 11th hour would not only have represented a reversal of a lifetime of her habits but, for her, a grim confirmation of what we both then knew but refused to say: Her departure from this vale of tears was imminent.
I had gone along with my mother’s preference for inference and indirection at other times, including during another horrible moment in our lives as an increasingly small family. Thirteen years earlier, when my father was in the hospital and was, in fact, soon to leave us, I had told her, reassuringly, “The worst possible thing has not yet happened” — meaning that he had not yet died. I was sure that she knew what I meant when I said “the worst thing.” Looking back on this conversation now, I am not sure that using euphemisms to talk about death is all that healthy, but I am sure that being gentle with a fragile family member is the right choice. And my mother, in many ways, was very fragile.
Years later, facing her own death, it took a certain amount of courage for my mother to even tell me that she had loved watching movies with my brother and me. For her, this counted as a remarkably open expression of feeling. I remember noting that she phrased her statement in such a way to imply that she knew the movie-watching was over: She had loved doing this thing but was tacitly admitting that she could do so no more. There was gallantry in her admitting, even in a roundabout way, that this was likely so.
That she chose to speak about her death by referring to the movies would only surprise those who did not know her well. Given her guardedness and reticence, she had probably long used the movies themselves as a means by which to keep in contact with certain emotions. I cannot say that I remember hearing my mother ever telling my father that she loved him, though of course I knew she did more than anything, but even if I had not been sure, I would have known by the way she responded to her favorite screen love stories: An Affair to Remember, South Pacific, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Two for the Road. This is why it was so much fun to watch movies with her. If I wanted to know how she felt about a scene or a character, I simply glanced in her direction: Her expression would tell me all I needed to know.
Yet the movies had been taken from my mother in the season before her death. Although she did not learn of her cancer until August, about five weeks before she died, its presence had begun to upset her routine several months earlier. At some point in the late spring, my mother had started to find it unbearable to sit for prolonged periods of time. Even 30 minutes was sometimes too much, which ruled out watching too many movies.
A lifelong ritual — a cherished tradition for her and her two sons — was fading.
Each summer since I was a teenager, my mother, brother, and I went to an old movie palace, since converted into a performing-arts venue, to see classic movies: North by Northwest and Charade and Singin’ in the Rain and Brigadoon and on and on. This tradition persisted well into my own young adulthood, but in the last summer of my mother’s life, it finally went the way of all things. That summer, she was weak and in pain, and we managed to see only a handful of the movies we had marked on the schedule. This was itself a huge shock, but I now see that her effort to go to even a few movies with us was the greatest expression of love imaginable: Although it took every ounce of her strength for her to make her way out of the car, into the lobby, down the aisle, and into a seat, she did not want to disappoint me.
The last movie we saw together at the movie series that summer was To Kill a Mockingbird. I have always felt that the most salient aspect of the movie is the fact that Atticus Finch is a widower. His children Scout and Jem regard him with reverence not only because he is such an admirable figure but because, with their mother gone, they realize they can scarcely afford to lose him. As Atticus tells Jem, by way of explaining his disinclination to play a game of football: “After all, I’m the only father you have.” That line had a great impact on me when we had seen the movie, at the same movie series, not long after my father had died. I knew it had an impact on my mother, too. We did not discuss it, but as I so often did, I looked her way and saw the emotions on her face. We shared our grief through Atticus Finch.
That my mother would never again enter a movie theater was not just a lifestyle change but the end of one way we had talked to each other. She knew the loss would be great, and so it has been.
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