A photo of Dave Cieslewicz's mother and father from about 1949.
Dave Cieslewicz's father, John Martin Cieslewicz, and mother, Deloris Cieslewicz, circa 1949.
We stop counting half years at around age seven, I guess. Tell a 5-year old her age and she’ll correct you with some enthusiasm. “I’m 5-and-a-half!” In August I’ll be 64-and-a-half. I won’t make a big deal out of the fraction.
But towards the end of life each week is an accomplishment. So, when she died on Saturday evening, April 15, my mother was 93 years, eight months and two weeks old. Way to go, Mom.
I had been with her in Milwaukee that afternoon and she looked like she would make it even a few days more. Organs were starting to shut down one by one, the way lights are turned out at a theater, but her heart had always been strong, like that naked bulb that gets left on all night on the stage.
Dianne and I planned to return on Sunday. I wanted to be with her at the end, but then my brother called with the news. I was on my balcony finishing a gin and tonic and just starting to think about writing something about my mom. In preparation for that I just happened to be listening to “What Sarah Said” by Death Cab for Cutie.
And it came to me then
That every plan
Is a tiny prayer to father time
So much for my plans. Father time had other ideas.
As I stared at my shoes
In the ICU
That reeked of piss and 409
It wasn’t quite like that, but it wasn’t much better. My mom was in a rehab facility. For whatever reason the air conditioning wasn’t working and it was 80 degrees outside and not much cooler at her bedside. And it was a tiny room. My brothers and my sister and I, daughters-in-law, grandchildren and their spouses and great grandkids circulated in and out. That didn’t make things any cooler.
And I rationed my breaths
As I said to myself
That I had already taken too much today
When you watch someone die you tend to focus on each breath they take because it seems to be all they are focused on. Just one more breath. It seems like a decision for them to take another. And, at some point, they make a decision not to.
As each descending peak
On the LCD
Took you a little farther away from me
Away from me
There was no heart monitor in her room. But the hospice nurse monitored her vital signs. Late in the afternoon we noticed that her breathing was becoming more labored. I may have thought that the process would take longer, but I knew she was slipping away.
Amongst the vending machines
And year old magazines
In places where we only go to say goodbye
No vending machines, but a very good Mexican food truck parked on Lincoln Avenue, where we all went for lunch in shifts. The rehab facility is not necessarily where you go to say goodbye. The idea when my mother entered it a couple weeks ago was to get her back to her apartment. But she made her decision. She was done with all that. She was ready to go someplace else.
It sung like a violent wind
That our memories depend
On a faulty camera in our minds
When I would visit my mom we’d reminisce about different things and she’d often correct my memory or I’d correct hers. No more. It’s all in my own head now. My mother has lost any ability to control her own narrative. Her life is what her children say it was. Sorry, Mom.
And I knew you were truth
I would rather lose
Than never to have lain beside at all
I was the last of four kids, six years younger than my sister. So, I got to spend a lot of time alone with my mom when I was little and my siblings were in school. Every morning we’d watch Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room, we’d do five minutes of calisthenics with Jack LaLanne and at 9:30 a.m. we’d watch five minutes of news with Nancy Dickerson. I remember my mother saying the rosary as John Glenn sped off into space and I remember her crying while she cleaned the house on the November afternoon that John Kennedy was shot. Sometimes, after our morning TV shows, my mom would read a book to me. One of her, and my, favorites was The Littlest Angel, about a young child who dies and becomes an angel looking after his mom down on earth. (That’s not quite what the story is about, but that’s the way I heard it as a 4-year old.) A little kid loves a role reversal like that. We’d snuggle in bed as she read that story, me following along with the words in the book as best I could, and she’d always cry at the end, and I’d reassure her that I would look after her.
And I looked around
At all eyes on the ground
As the TV entertained itself
Before I left, my brother tuned in the Brewers game. “Mom likes the Brewers,” he said. She did. She watched most of the games. This game against the Padres played on the screen, the sound off, and all I could hear was her slow breathing and the pusshhhht of the oxygen machine. She would miss this one, but the Brewers lost anyway.
‘Cause there’s no comfort in the waiting room
Just nervous paces bracing for bad news
Then the nurse comes round
And everyone lifts their heads
The news didn’t come from a nurse. In fact, at my mom’s understaffed facility on a weekend, there were precious few staff anywhere to be found. My two older brothers were with our mom when she died. I wish I had been there, but there was no chance she would have been alone. My oldest brother had made it clear that someone would be with her every minute until the end.
And I’m thinking of what Sarah said
That love is watching someone die
My mother raised three successful children and a politician. She had eight successful grandchildren and a bunch of great-grandchildren, many of whom show promise to become productive members of society. We’ll see. In her own right, my mother could write and she encouraged my writing. Had she been born at another time she could have been more, maybe a journalist. She got into college and she had a scholarship, but it still wasn’t enough. Her family decided they couldn’t afford it. I don’t know what she felt on that day in 1947 when she passed on that opportunity. But for me to say that, “she could have been more,” is disrespectful of her life and her choices. For me and for my brothers and my sister and their kids and their kids’ kids she became more than enough.
We came in and out over the course of her last three days on this earth. If love is watching someone die, then Deloris Cieslewicz was loved.
Who’s going to watch you die?
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. Both his reporting and his opinion writing have been recognized by the Milwaukee Press Club. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
