What to Read to a Dying Mother?

My mother lies quietly in the hospital bed in her room at home.  Her intentional muscle control is now limited to her right arm and hand.  At times, she reaches comfortably into the air moving as if to grasp and to arrange or to rearrange what she has grasped.  Her eyes stare at the space where her arm moves.  She is silent.

In the next minute remaining at ease she lowers her arm and begins talking out loud to someone she sees in her mind, her eyes moving in the manner you would expect when in conversation.  From moment to moment she is inside dream-like scenarios, playing them out loud until she completes the scene.  Sometimes whatever is happening in her mind is very disturbing.  One time a Jane was at the door and she needed to answer the door to let Jane in, but she bumped into something which toppled an object onto the floor; she became very upset because her mother-my grandmother-an orderly and insistent person when my mother was a child, just couldn’t stand anything bumped or dropped on the floor, especially if the object broke.  So, my mother was frightened of being chastised for her clumsiness and for not answering the door in a timely fashion. 

There are many such disturbances.  I was at a loss to know how to comfort when they were upon her.  Then I decided to use what is called “guided imaging”.  I’ve used it as a relaxation exercise many times for myself and for students, especially in acting classes.  So, I conjured a number of images I thought would calm, bright sunny skies, our lovely beach on a summer’s day, sweeping placid meadows.  And what do you know, it works, but only when I am talking.  Once I stop, if there was a disturbance coming, it erupts and I can’t prevent it.

From this I wondered if it is solely my voice which calms or if, indeed, it is both my voice and the pleasant images.  I like to think it is the latter, which brings to mind a rather unsettling question:  Do I in my choice of readings contribute to her disturbing scenarios?

My wife and I decided to entertain my mother as she is at times consciously aware of being confined to bed without any real ability to help herself.  Being nearly blind and hearing poorly presents problems with most forms of entertainment with the exception of radio and being read to.  We have played the radio occasionally, but she seems bothered by it more often than not.  So, we decided to read to her.  But, what to read?  We thought since she loved detective and spy novels to start with one of our family’s favorite authors, David Baldacci.  Before becoming ill she had started Hell’s Corner and I thought she might like for me to continue it.  Like all of Baldacci’s Camel Club books, this one starts with a big bang; in fact a bomb blows up a few folks in Lafayette Park, the one just across the street from the White House.  The hero, John Carr, aka Oliver Stone, and his Club colleagues must plow through a whole mess of bullet ridden bodies and attempts on their own lives to uncover who was doing what.  Toward the end of the book I was getting a little nervous relating all the death and mayhem to someone who herself was dying.  Still, I finished the book.

Next on the list was an author my wife and I like, Jasper Fforde.  Shades of Grey was the story I thought might amuse my mother.  Fforde writes a genre-bending kind of thing.  This one is a fantasy, sci-fi romance cum socio-political commentary.  To give a flavor of the world he creates as the backdrop of his action I quote from the dust cover:  “It’s summer, it’s hot, it’s our world, but not as we know it.  Entire cities lie buried beneath overgrown fields and forests.  Technology from another time litters the landscape, and there is evidence of a great upheaval.  Welcome to Chromatacia, where for as long as anyone can remember society has been ruled by a Colortocracy.  From the underground feedpipes that keep the municipal park green, to the healing hues viewed to cure illness, to the social hierarchy based on one’s color perception, society is dominated by color.  In this world, you are what you can see.”  Well, the first real action centers on the narrator helping his father try to heal a person who is dying.  Unfortunately, they fail.  Again, as I read paragraph after paragraph on the way to this the poor man's death I feel none too queasy myself!  Well, I put that book down just after the pronouncement.

Still, I thought it was the genre-bending which was more inappropriate so I went to an author I knew my mother loved, Dick Francis, and a book I felt would do well, Silks.  However, it didn’t take long before the hero, barrister Geoffrey Mason, gets very nicely beaten-up by a former client he couldn’t get off, and a jockey the barrister knew murdered possibly by the trainer of the barrister’s racing horse.  I fine pickle and a great start to a mystery.  But, again I felt unsettled as I was reading the mayhem and murder.  So, I stopped and moved on.

Next I turned to poetry, taking in hand and in voice one of my father’s old books, 1000 Years of Irish Poetry:  The Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Poets from Pagan Times to the Present, which to the editor, Kathleen Hoagland, were the years between WWI and WWII.  Now, there is an old saying about the Irish, which I think horrid, “With the Irish all the wars a merry and all the songs are sad.”  War is never merry, but that is beside the point for now.  But, poem after poem were singing the blues, about lost loves, lost innocence, lost lives, lost nationhood, loss in general and in particular, to the point that I found the latter half of that statement quite accurate:  Indeed, all the songs are sad!  For a fourth time as I read I got the feeling what I was reading is not good for a person dying to hear!

A search of other material available uncovered what I thought would be just perfect, Celtic Meditations by Edward J. Farrell.  Well, after flowery discourses on the pleasures of the God given sun and of the God given earth, air, wind, spirit, I came to breath, that one source of God given life my mother at some moment, at any moment, will not be able to draw.  As I read, I saw distress in her, and frankly I was getting a little upset myself.  That booklet went back on the shelf forthwith.

With many tries, I’ve come to wonder, what can I read to a dying mother?  On Sundays, my wife reads the weekly church bulletin and the funnies from the New York Daily News.  And they seem to be okay.  But beyond that I am at a loss.  So, what does one read to a dying mother?