This month marks five years since my mother died. She had a long, healthy life, almost making 98 years old, and only went downhill in the last week.
Even when she started to have problems, I don’t think it really occurred to her that she was going to die. A few days before she passed away, my son and my cousin were visiting her. She was in bed, and suddenly she said, “Am I bad off?”
“Oh, no,” came the immediate answer.
“Well,” she said, “you wouldn’t tell me if I was. I certainly wouldn’t tell you!”
She got weaker and slept a lot. A day or so before she died, her nephew and her niece and their spouses came to visit. I arrived while they were there and was astonished to see her sitting up talking more animatedly than she had in days. After they left, she again got quiet and asked for the bed to be reclined.
I could sense the end was getting near. I had sat up with my father in his last night and recognized the signs. I was napping on the sofa near the hospital bed the hospice people had set up in his living room when I awoke with a start and realized the room was silent. Dad’s labored breathing (the so-called “death rattle”) had stopped and he was gone. Same with my beloved Aunt Marie, who lived upstairs from us had been like a second mother to me. Her son and I held her hands and listened as her breathing slowed…. and slowed…. and then stopped.
Mom started murmuring something, and I realized after listening carefully that she was singing. She had always been a singer; many of the songs I sing today I learned by listening to her as she did housework when I was little, or from the 78-rpm discs she played on our wind-up phonograph.
She was singing, over and over, “Oh, how I miss you tonight….Oh, how I miss you tonight…”
She wasn’t talking or responding by then so I couldn’t ask her anything. That night I went home and got onto YouTube and found that “Oh, How I Miss You Tonight” was a popular song from the 1920s that had been recorded by everyone from the original (I think) disc by Fred Douglas to jazz bands to (later) Nat King Cole, Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Kay Starr, Jim Reeves, and a bunch of others.
Was this a tune she had learned when it first came out and she was just 11 years old? Or did she dance to one of the many versions that were popular in the 1930s and ’40s? I had never heard her sing it when I was a child, and she sang a lot in those days. But I wanted to let her hear it again, if I could.
I phoned my son, he talked to his sister-in-law the computer whiz of the family and next day Gwillym showed up with his laptop, some earphones and the song on his hard drive. Mom was asleep or in a coma by then, and would die in the middle of that night with my wife and me at her bedside. But I’ve heard that the sense of hearing is the last thing to go, so we put the earphones on her and played the song a few times.
Did she hear it? Well, she didn’t sing along or smile, but I like to think she did.
I toyed with the idea of learning it and working it up with my band, but I’m afraid it might be difficult to sing without choking up. Merle Haggard’s “California Cottonfields” has been a favorite song of mine since Merle wrote it, but after my father died it took a couple of years before I could sing it through. The song approximates my Dad’s journey west from, in his case, Missouri. The first time I tried to sing it in performance I broke down in the middle of the song and had to stop.
So you can check it out on YouTube, but I’m afraid you won’t hear it from me.
