The Miracle of Chanukah, 2007?

We’ve been having power surges in the house for days. The lights keep flickering. When I plug in the blow dryer in the bathroom, the lights get brighter. The answering machine sputters on and off as if it has a lisp. Danny says we must have blown a circuit. He starts searching for a blown fuse. He gets the ladder and climbs up to the unused attic, where we never go, to inspect the wiring. I know he won’t find anything. I know it is the energy of my mother’s spirit, slowly draining from her body.

Spirits communicate through electricity. All of my bereaved clients tell me so. Natasha’s father used to blink the lights on the clock radio in response to her questions. Once for yes, twice for no. Albert‘s wife would communicate through the street lights that seemed to go off every time he left his house at night: as ornery in death as she was in life.

My mother has had cancer for 8 years. “Living with cancer,” the nurses at the hospice where I work explain. They say, “Cancer is now like a chronic disease.” I wish it could be one of those rare, unpronounceable ones—the ones that just make you tired. Not the one that makes you dead.

Now, it appears it is back. With a vengeance. Suddenly, my boisterous, vivacious mother is old. Really old. Her mind that was once like a steel trap, that could acrobatically figure out acrostics in the “New York Times Magazine,” that could argue abstruse political points all day long—for all her absorption of current events through the news magazines and McNeil/Lehrer—suddenly can’t remember words, can’t remember what day it is, can’t remember how I am related to her. Suddenly, she has become like one of the terminally ill we discuss at work in interdisciplinary team meetings. What is her care system like? (My father—too frail himself to be constantly lifting her out of her chair—clearly needs help.) Do they need to hire home health aides? Will they need to go into assisted living?

It’s Chanukah, but instead of lights miraculously lasting for eight days, our lights are going out. My mother’s light is diminishing. Maybe the miracle is that she lived through Chanukah. Will she live to enjoy another Passover seder? When does a life become measured by days, weeks, months—instead of years? It’s funny—at the beginning of life you count each day as precious. “She’s 6 weeks old!” As a newbie mother I remember marveling at how equally slowly (gentle days spent on the couch watching Sophie wiggle on the rug or in her bouncy seat, in between feedings) and quickly time passed in my daughter’s young lifecycle. At three months, she smiled. At four months, she sat up without support. She started solids foods. And now, at the end of my mother’s life, I am again acutely aware of each day that she’s still alive. Time is again so precious. If only I could remember that it always is.

My mother’s life flashes before my eyes—as if I am the one dying, but reviewing the wrong life. I am reviewing our life together. My life as a child. My mother’s death will symbolize the complete death of my childhood. The death of me as her child. We will never again live together in that house I grew up in on Morningside Drive. She won’t ever again go on a hike with me. She hasn’t been able to walk well for years. After her knee replacement surgery a couple of years ago, that got better. But now, even the surgery is for naught. My mother who’s been overweight for the past 40 years is excited that she’s losing weight, proud of herself that she’s not hungry, that her clothes aren’t fitting well. It’s so ironic. It’s so unfair.