THE FOUNTAIN, Casey Scieszka’s debut novel, blends the spectacular with the everyday in a tale about eternity and mortality that asks what it would mean to live forever. Casey’s mother developed an appreciation for the octopus after watching a documentary and reading Sy Montgomery’s bestseller about this surprisingly complex creature. Years later, another book about an octopus would take on an even greater and deeper meaning for Casey and her mother.
My mother is not an “animal person.” But at some point in her 60s, she watches a documentary about octopuses that leads her to pick up THE SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS by Sy Montgomery, which leads to a lifelong swearing off of ever eating octopus again.
She tells me about how good they are at camouflage and escaping, as well as their general intelligence, all three of their hearts and nine brains, and the tastebuds in their suckers. Now I am impressed by this creature but also baffled by my mother’s enthusiasm because it feels so out of character. After all, I’ve seen her pet a dog maybe 10 times in my whole life. But her love persists, and suddenly I cannot bring myself to eat octopus either, if only because it would feel like such a betrayal of her.
About a decade passes, and my mother is eventually, devastatingly --- after several years of mysterious symptoms and pain --- diagnosed with a rare and terminal brain disease. It will rob her of just about every physical and mental ability, and the previously slow, downward tilt of her quality of life is suddenly a shockingly rapid landslide of loss. She decides to participate in Oregon’s Medical Aid in Dying program for the terminally ill. So during an already excruciating time, my father and I uproot with her for what will be her final month.
We juggle hospice appointments and a staggering amount of bureaucratic details, pain medication, and so many different kinds of goodbyes. I have left my husband and two small children back home in the Catskill Mountains. So at night, my solace will be books. I usually read about two a week, so I have arrived with a stack. But I also make near daily pilgrimages to Powell’s Books and scour the titles for stories that will speak to me, hold me, and remind me that I am not alone in facing a moment like this. But maybe not too much, because if I’ve ever needed some literary escapism, it’s now.
However, I struggle with every single one of them in a way I never have before. They sit in stacks on my hotel nightstand, not even half-read.
Meanwhile, my mother can no longer move around easily on her own. So during the day, in between her various appointments, she is usually perched in a chair, on a couch, or even tucked into bed, depending on how bad her chronic headache is. It is, from the outside, the perfect opportunity to read, something she always has loved to do --- big names in fiction, dishy mysteries, anything and everything by Carl Hiaasen.
Except she can’t. And not because she, like me, is having a hard time finding her Goldilocks tale for this moment. It literally is too difficult for her to read a book; it’s too hard on her distressed eyes and pounding head. Even holding a book for a long period of time can prove difficult.
For a brief moment, I consider reading aloud to her the way she used to read to me when I was little --- bedside stories, chapter by chapter --- but I know instantly that I will not be able to trust my voice to hold for an entire book. The full cycle-ness of this --- her having cared for me these ways that I now care for her --- will at some points be too much for me to read through. Besides, I want her to enjoy a book on her own, when I’m off answering emails or sorting lunch or doing any of the other things she once could do for herself so easily.
The answer, of course, is obvious: audiobooks.
I ask friends and the internet for the best ones of the year. I play my mother samples of narrators’ voices, but none of them are to her particular taste. All the while, I try not to think too hard about the fact that this will be the last book she ever experiences. We are doing so many “lasts” right now.
And then, scrolling through a digital library, I spot it:
REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES by Shelby Van Pelt. The one with the beautiful, bright orange creature on the cover: an octopus.
A few days before her chosen death day, my mother and I sit in two big armchairs by a rain-streaked window and listen to it together. She leans back, eyes closed, face relaxed in a peaceful half-smile. She has been listening mostly on her own, so I have to make guesses at who certain characters are and what has happened so far, but I don’t care. I am not really listening anymore. I am only watching her, the same way I used to when I was small. Which is to say unabashedly, with a deep and personal curiosity and love, wondering what it’s like where she is ahead of me in this Timeline of Being a Woman. When I was young, it was adulthood, something I envied and craved but also feared a little. Now, it is the end of life.
She breathes slowly and evenly, but she’s rubbing her thumbs in small circles together so I know that while she might be drifting, she is still awake. Still with me for now. Still loving me and the remarkable octopus.
