Signs of Imminent Death

Suzanne Roberts

1. Long Pauses in Breath

Hospice uses the term “actively dying.” They have seen enough to know that to die is an active verb, not the euphemistic pass away, or perhaps the more-polite-but-even-worse gerund, passing. We often say how lucky it is that someone passed away in her sleep: at peace. The world wants its old to go out not with a bang but with a very quiet, or even silent, whimper. The stripped trunk of a tree, shining a beautiful shade of silver in the right light.

After my mother dies, I tell my husband, “We’re both going to have our own deaths,” as if this were new information. Until we are faced with caring for a dying loved one, we are too busy living our lives to deal with the complexities of aging and dying. Where I live in the United States, our elderly all too often meet their ends in homes for the old, where they are separated from their families, tended to by strangers. And now in the aftermath of a global pandemic, we have been faced with the facts: nursing homes are dangerous places where our old must live and die alone.

For the past two decades, I’ve lived in the mountains of California, near Lake Tahoe. It’s a beautiful place, as anyone who has visited knows, but now whole swaths of the forest have gone brown. A historic 129 million trees in California have died due to drought and bark beetles, and the firs in the Sierra have been the hardest hit. Warmer summers mean stressed trees that are more susceptible to parasitic fungus and bark beetles. Longer summers mean more reproductive cycles for bark beetles that feed on the phloem, or inner layer of bark, and the trees starve. This is what’s been happening in my own backyard.

Scientists have discovered that trees communicate with other trees in the forest. They send distress signals about drought, disease, or insect attacks through mycorrhizal networks, underground webs made up of fungi. Always connected, never alone.

I wonder what the trees in my backyard say to one another.

2. Incontinence

It’s important to fell the firs affected by parasitic plants such as the dwarf mistletoe, or else they will infect the healthy trees around, and they will all die. Whole communities, gone.

My in-laws were both dying at the same time—that was the hard thing no one wanted to say. My mother-in-law had cancer, and the chemotherapy didn’t touch it. She’d lost a lot of weight and grew into one of those old-woman faces, the kind that looks like shrunken apple heads. I am not saying this to be mean. She was a beautiful woman, but the skin on her face sagged and puckered in a way it never had before. The radiation, she had said, ruined her appetite. “And the diarrhea!” she would say, and then, “I can’t believe I’m talking about this. I never thought I would talk about something like this.”

We have all promised ourselves we would never say things like hot flashes or colonoscopy or incontinence. Until the fact of our failing bodies weighs so hard on us we can’t help but talk about it. That imaginary future is here before we know it. Confronted with mortality, some old people start living in the past, so every sentence begins with “back when I was….” We don’t think we’ll do this either, and maybe it’s better to live in the present tense, with all the aches and bowel issues. We didn’t really believe our own bodies would break down, at least not in the ways they do, so the shock of it causes us to speak up, say all those things we swore we would never talk about.

3. Hallucinations

My father-in-law was finally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. For years, Pa wasn’t able to remember which coat was his or to turn off the water after washing a dish. Once a diagnosis was made, Pa told me, “I’ll die from this. My mother died from this, and I just want them to find a cure. Not for me, but for my granddaughters.”

Then Pa started to mumble inaudibly, alone with his fragmented thoughts. His own private world he would eventually disappear into—hallucination or simply another reality?

But this was during that time when Pa came and went—disjointed words trailing into space and then something that made sense to the rest of us. Pa pointed at the spinach quiche and he asked me, “What’s that green thing? That looks good.”

“It’s quiche,” I said. “Would you like to try some?”

“Sure.”

He had just finished a piece, the remnants still on his plate. I picked up his plate, put another piece on it and said, “I’ll heat it up for you.”

He smiled. “I can remember your name,” he told me. “I’m glad of that. But I’m going to die of this. I’m frustrated, so frustrated. I have to accept it.”

I wanted to ask him why he had to accept it, but I didn’t. I just retrieved his plate from the microwave, set it in front of him, and watched him enjoy a second piece of spinach pie.

When I return home to my California town, I talk to the trees, as I often do. Sometimes I ask them for things. Most days, I don’t know what to ask for, but the act of talking and trusting are the reasons some people pray. When the wind blows and the gusts of air rustle through the branches, the trees talk back: not a hallucination but the sound of faith in my backyard.

4. Gurgling Breath

I taught that famous Dylan Thomas poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” for a long time and thought I understood it. After watching people die, I realize I hadn’t really gotten the poem. I knew Thomas had written it for his own dying father, and I thought that when he repeated the lines “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” Thomas was asking his father not to go. But also, Thomas writes, “old age should burn and rave at close of day.” I only understood that line in the abstract until I saw my own mother rant and rave in a fierce, dying body—ablaze with life until the very end. Very much not-dead before being dead. The repeating lines of the villanelle accumulate meaning, rising to a crescendo before the iambic ending.

During my mother’s dying, she called out for God. I wanted to say, “Mom, you don’t even believe in God,” and that thought meant I had to stifle a laugh. I didn’t laugh, of course, yet my body wanted to laugh. I know I’m not supposed to say that about laughing at my mother’s death bed, but I never laughed as hard with anyone else in the world as I did with my mother. We laughed until our stomachs hurt, until we both sprinted to the restroom so we wouldn’t wet our pants. I don’t think I was looking for one last laugh with her though. We laugh when we’re surprised, when we’re shocked by something. We laugh when we’re nervous or don’t know what else to do. Even though her death had been approaching for some months, it still seemed like a great surprise—here it was: a mix of shock, relief, loss and then, the greatest sadness I have ever known.

When it was over, well-intentioned people said, “I hope it was peaceful,” meaning her death. I did not tell people it wasn’t, though I suppose that’s what I’m doing now. I did not tell people that my mother cursed the God she had not before believed in, shouting to the ceiling: “God, why are you doing this to me?”

What I want to say now, more than anything, is that it’s okay that my mother’s death wasn’t peaceful, that the room was not quiet save her gurgling breath in the way the hospice leaflet had led me to believe. But why on earth would my mother have died contrary to the way she lived? Why would she follow the outlined stages of death when she never followed any other plan but her own?

I want to say that it’s okay to be angry. That sometimes rage is necessary. Some of us will go out, teeth and fangs bared. We will howl through the windowless hallway of our deaths; we will rage against the dying of the light.

My neighbor, with hopes of improving his view, paid to have healthy fir trees cut down in another neighbor’s adjoining yard. He offered to pay to cut down our backyard firs, and we shook our heads in disbelief.

The day they felled the neighboring trees, everything vibrated—the sawing and cracking and buckling. The crash and the giant plume of dust as the firs met the earth. And then the tremble the other trees felt along their underground channels. The chainsaw’s echo buzzing in my own ears. Our own firs are safe, I kept telling myself. I had worried they would succumb to disease, but they were still healthy.

My friend Camille once said, “Trees are people, too,” which makes perfect sense if you spend enough time among them.

5. Agitation

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some of my friends wanted to shield their kids from what they called “mask culture.” I think this means that they didn’t want their children to be scared by all the mask-wearing, by the fact that there’s an invisible disease that may do us harm. Disease is made even scarier when we keep it a secret. We are too far from death until we are too close. Then we have no way to talk about it.

I once gave a poetry reading at a nursing home. I called my friend Andy on the way there and said, “I have sex poems and death poems, which do I read?”

Andy said, “Read the sex poems. We tend to neuter our old people. Plus, I wouldn’t read the death poems.”

An old lady in the front of the nursing home cafeteria cradled a stuffed giraffe. Two middle-aged women sat on either side of her. I guessed they were her daughters. The daughters seemed to enjoy the poems, perhaps a distraction from the usual difficulties of visiting their mother.

Another old woman became so agitated by the poetry, she got up and started for the stage in her walker. It was a very old and slow version of rushing the stage. She was intercepted by a nurse who told her, “You’re getting too worked up. I’ll take you back to your room now.” I watched as the attendant escorted her away. I wanted to call her back, tell her that was the most excitement I’d ever generated at a poetry reading.

I had read the sex poems. But looking back, why wouldn’t I speak honestly about death and dying? A good poem tells the truth. The poet Galway Kinnell once told me that a poem should say the unsayable.

Sometimes the unsayable is unbearable yet necessary. When my friend Phyllis’s mother no longer recognized Phyllis and took pleasure only in Jell-O, she turned to Phyllis and said, “This isn’t so bad, you know?”

I wake up in the middle of the night, and I wonder if Phyllis’s mother meant the Jell-O or the dying. I worry that every last red and white fir will soon be gone.

In the morning, I walk outside to talk to the trees. I want to shout: “Please don’t die!”  

Instead, I ask my husband to set up a drip system to water the biggest firs—my trees, as I have to come to think of them, knowing that really, they belong to themselves. We water the trees four minutes each summer day, hoping to save them from the blight and the beetles.

The still-alive branches wave hello and goodbye in the wind.

6. A Drop in Blood Pressure

When Pa was told his wife had died, his face twisted into a grimace of pain and grief. A few minutes later, he moved onto something else, trying to eat potpourri chips from a basket on the table or singing an old song. Then someone else would mention his wife’s death again, and it was like he was hearing it for the very first time. A widower’s Groundhog Day, where he relived the moment of shock, again and again, finding out his wife of fifty years had just died.

I called my friend Ilyse, who was dying of cancer in her forties, and I told her about Pa. She said, “That’s the saddest thing I have ever heard.” I think about that a lot—her capacity for empathy, when at the time, I thought her illness was the saddest thing in the world. Once the losses accumulate, it’s hard to judge what’s the saddest of all, especially when everything happens at once—into the black hole went my mother and my mother-in-law, my father-in-law’s memory and then his body. And Ilyse. The reverberation of each death like the sound from a chainsaw’s blade.

Because of the pandemic, we watched Pa die over FaceTime. When you sit with the dying, it isn’t easy, but being in the room and sharing physical space feels like the last thing, the only thing we can do. A disembodied, one-way FaceTime or Zoom deathbed call feels like the worst kind of science fiction. When you’re in the room, you can look away, and your body is still there. When you’re watching the death struggle from afar, you feel like you can’t turn and look away, not even for a second. It felt like watching a character die on a daytime television drama.

In the days after Pa’s death, my husband and I wandered from room to room around the house because we couldn’t do the usual rituals that accompany a death: Pack a bag. Travel. Be with family. Plan a memorial. These usual post-death errands make you feel like you’re moving forward instead of what you’re really doing: slipping into that deep well of grief. We sat together in silence and in sadness. Then I went out for a long bike ride. My husband binge-watched a TV show on survival skills called Alone, which sounds as if I have made that up for the metaphor, but I didn’t.

Pa’s brain went to research. His body was cremated. For more than a year, there was no memorial. No funereal rites of passage. Did my husband sometimes pretend his father’s death wasn’t true? He would say no, but I think about the adage of a tree in the forest. If we’re not there to witness it, did it fall? Would watching it come down on the fuzzy screen of Facetime be enough?

The moment my own mother died, I wasn’t in the room. Because of her drop in blood pressure, the hospice nurses had taken her off her heart medication. I didn’t argue with the nurses. She was dying of cancer, so I stopped worrying about her heart. I did not know her ranting and shouting meant that she was dying, that a clot had likely traveled to her lungs or heart. The hospice nurses had assured me this wasn’t how her death would go, so I gave my mother a Xanax, and when she settled down a bit, I laced up my running shoes and headed for the door, trying only to keep my own body in perpetual motion. I said, “I’m going running, Mom.”

She said, “I know you are.”

I am both sure and not sure I told her I loved her.

I know I kissed her forehead. I know she nodded when I did so.

While I was out on my run, the caregiver I had hired to give me breaks called to say my mother had stopped breathing. I sprinted the last mile home and found that my mother had died, moments before. Her body, still warm. I sat next to her corpse for a long time and wrote in my journal. I felt badly just now, writing that word to describe my mother’s body: corpse. When I stop to think about why, it’s because it’s a word without euphemism.

I could not save my mother, but I am determined to save the trees. A record-breaking snow year this past winter, in addition to our drip system, means our firs are thriving, the light green needles growing at the tips.  I break off a bit of this soft new life, bring the needles to my mouth and eat them—the rimy taste of winters past, the zest of a Sierra summer yet to come.

The banded pigeon is back, building her nest in the tallest fir. Another fir holds a family of nesting chickadees, and still another, Steller’s jays.

I hold tight to the notion: these seventy-five-year-old trees will live on another seventy-five, outlasting me by decades. Avian descendants of these nesting birds will continue to return year after year.

7. Skin Mottling and Going Cold

My mother was my mother when I left to go running. When I returned forty-five minutes later, she was a corpse.

I sat there with her dead body, and I wrote in my journal because I wanted to record everything. I picked up her blue-mottled hand and let it drop to the bed. I did this more than once to make sure, to prove she really was gone. To prove the weight of my loss. Her hand in my hand, letting it go, watching as gravity claimed it—I needed that proof, the physical fact of it.

I needed to hold it and then let it go.

I did not know her death would be so very sudden after all those months of dying.

It’s always that way, isn’t it? The surprise of it. Cracking under the saw’s blade. And then falling all at once.

Any of us who have decorated a Christmas tree know the tree will continue to live four to five weeks after it’s cut. And the roots, left somewhere deep in the earth, continue to grow, trying to support the ghost tree.

In the coming days and months and years, I too would be felled by a howling grief.

After my mother’s terminal diagnosis, she said that if she didn’t laugh, she would never stop crying, and I wasn’t allowed to cry in front of her. She told me not to talk to her about death either. This inability to discuss the hardest things meant there were a great many things about living—about our life together as mother and daughter—I could never say.

I broke the rules once. My mother had finished her course of chemotherapy and felt well enough, so we took a short drive to go out for lunch, and were sitting on the patio of an Ojai winery. I asked, “Who will I talk to when you’re gone?”

We didn’t know she would be dead in a month, but we both knew what her metastatic cancer meant, what was coming, even if we never said so. My mother looked tiny there on the shady patio, holding the huge glass of chardonnay she would later throw up into a plastic baggie on the car ride home.

She looked at me and said, “If you want to talk to me, talk to me.” I must have given her a strange look, because she took a sip of wine and added, “Even after I’m gone, you can still to talk to me, you know?”

That’s what I’m doing here.

She also said this: “Listen carefully, and you will always hear my voice and know what I would say.”

Those times I go to pick up the phone to call her and relay a funny story, I talk to the empty room or walk outside and talk the trees instead. Sometimes I can still see my mother there in the forest of my peripheral vision, and she only disappears again when I turn to look at her straight on. Her words still rooted in my mind, just like she said they would be. Her voice in my head is either a fabrication by my own mind or she really is talking to me from the world behind the world. I don’t know which. Sometimes I hope it’s one; other times, I wish for the other.

I spent so many years wishing I wasn’t becoming my mother. Now that she’s gone, I walk alone in the forest, hoping I do—at least in some ways.

They are all gone now—Pa and Gammy, Mother and Daddy, Ilyse—gone until I bring them back to the page, and then they must die again and again like Pa’s Groundhog Day. I don’t know why I do this to them, to myself. I hear my mother saying, “If it makes you sad, don’t write about it.”

But there’s a part of me that fools herself into thinking that maybe this time the story will end differently, though it never does.

My friend Carolyn is in her seventies, and she told me once that she has more friends who are dead than those left living. “But they are still my friends, even if they’re gone,” she said.

I’ve been trying to imagine my own death, which is always easier among the trees—some small and sprouting, others old and wind sculpted, so many others, felled snags, their trunks and branches shining white like bones—these dead trees, essential to the ecosystem. The dead are important members of the forest and of our human communities, too.

Never in my wildest imaginings, could I have seen what was coming: that we would return home one day to find our six-story firs had been chopped down, an act of arboricide to add value to the neighbor’s now for-sale view.  

Not passing but dead, sap seeping to the ground like blood. The fledglings not yet ready to fly. We tell ourselves we should have seen the signs, guarded the trees more closely. We report the neighbor for illegally cutting trees down on our property, but no matter what we do, we can’t bring back the towering firs, our trees.

I whisper to the chewed-up stumps: I am so sorry, my friends.

To die is an active verb, and grief is the deepest wilderness.

Suzanne Roberts is the author of the lyrical essay collection Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay),​ the award-winning travel memoir-in-essays Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (2020), and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award), as well as four collections of poems. Named "The Next Great Travel Writer" by National Geographic's Traveler, Suzanne's work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women's Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, The Normal School, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and teaches in the low residency MFA program in creative writing at UNR-Lake Tahoe. For more information, check out her website https://www.suzanneroberts.net, follow her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/suzanneroberts28/?hl=en or sign up for her weekly newsletter: 52 Writing Prompts: https://suzanneroberts.substack.com.