What Else Can I Give You?

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, “What Else Can I Give You,” by Kasia Nikhamina. Kasia was born in Poland and came of age in New York City. She earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature at Columbia University. For ten years, she has run Redbeard Bikes, a bike fit studio and shop in Brooklyn, with her husband. She’s working on a collection of personal essays and a novella. Subscribe to her TinyLetter, “Extraordinary Time,” at www.kasianikhamina.com. This essay was edited by Meg Pillow.

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My mother did not like to say goodbye. It was hard to part with her. After dinner, tea; after tea, another. She had so many different teas, in a deep drawer in the kitchen. And two tea kettles. When she cooked dinner, using all four burners, she’d set the kettles on the floor. I’d rifle through all the teas, always coming back to Stash Earl Grey. It tasted good in a double-walled mug in her Queens house, its walls hung with her needlepoint reproductions of Virgin Mary portraits and Van Gogh paintings. 

She chided me for leaving the teabag in my cup while I drank. The sugar spoon, too. Habits I picked up from my husband, whom I met in the ninth grade and brought home in twelfth. It was only in my mid-thirties that she stopped calling attention to these habits, or referring to his Jewishness. That’s how I knew she had accepted him.

When I was putting on my coat and boots after a visit, my mother would look around her house, and inside her refrigerator. 

“What else can I give you?” she’d ask.

She gave me jars of homemade pickle soup, chicken cutlets — “flat meat.” Tiramisu, apple pie, chocolate walnut cake. Sicilian fried donuts from a former landlady’s recipe.

If I complimented something in my mother’s house, she might disappear into the office — the little room off the kitchen, once mine — and pull out another instance of that very thing. When she liked something, she bought multiples.

—

My mother fell sick on December 17, 2021. At first she insisted she’d just caught a little cold by taking out the trash in short sleeves— 

On December 26, she was admitted to NYU Langone with COVID-19. It was her third ER visit in the space of a week. The first two times, she didn’t meet the admission criteria and was sent home.

Late on January 16, 2022, she was transferred to the ICU.

On January 17 — my birthday — I texted her a photo of infant me in her arms. 

“We were like dolls then,” she replied.

When I left her on the night of January 30, she said: “Go home now, maybe I’ll doze a bit.” 

Early on February 1, her oxygen needs increased significantly, she was sedated and put on a ventilator. 

Her condition seemed stable, then it got worse. Every intervention required another, until all possible interventions had been exhausted.

On February 10, my mother’s heart stopped. 

—

As a kid, when I had to make a poster for school, my mother would clear the kitchen table. She’d set something heavy on three corners of the poster board. With a ruler and pencil, she’d draw guidelines, fine and straight. Then she’d write out the text I’d composed, copying from my notebook, without knowing the meaning of all the words. I’d trace her penciled letters with black magic marker. When the marker had dried, she’d erase her marks, the letters and the lines, and brush the eraser shavings off— 

The whispery feeling of her hand on the poster board. 

Her satisfaction. 

My shame. 

My relief in the sixth grade, when Mr. Grambo said any project done by a parent was an automatic F, and he could “always tell so don’t even think about it.”

The kitchen walls were hung with grammar posters my father had made to help my mother learn English. I protested that he’d included the future perfect tense. We didn’t even learn that in school. My father waved me off, saying the level of learning in America was abysmal. He was a purist — “A kid is a baby goat,” one of his refrains. Some nights, he recruited me to help him translate Pink Floyd lyrics into Polish. I’d lug the huge hardcover Webster to the kitchen table, look up words he called out, like “haggle,” from a song on “A Momentary Lapse of Reason,” the record with rows and rows of empty hospital beds on a beach.

—

For seven weeks this winter, my mother perched on the edge of life and death, while the doctors did everything in their power to pull her back.

Many times a day, they drew her blood and x-rayed her chest. 

I logged into MyChart every time it pinged and even when it didn’t. The homepage showed my mother’s face and the words: 

“You’re here for Acute hypoxemic respiratory failure due to COVID-19.” 

I read the reports, Googling every word until the sentences made sense, and re-read them until they didn’t.

“No significant change in severe diffuse bilateral mixed interstitial and airspace opacities compatible with multifocal pneumonia / edema / ARDS.”

“Moderate right apical pneumothorax slightly increased in size from prior.” 

“Possible small left pleural effusion with adjacent atelectasis.”

My mother could walk, and then she couldn’t. She was getting better, and then she wasn’t. Could sit up in bed, and then she couldn’t. She was texting me, and then she wasn’t. She was being weaned off oxygen, and then she needed more of it. She was eating, and then she wasn’t. She couldn’t swallow because the high flow nasal dried out her trachea, the pain of which could be felt in her esophagus. She sipped protein smoothies: ninety minutes to drink twelve ounces. I photographed the empty cups to show the doctors.  

She was on meds for heart rate, blood pressure. She had a puncture in her stiff scarred lungs, air was building up in her chest cavity, causing partial lung collapse. She had too much carbon dioxide in her blood. The ventilator was going to buy her time, do the work of breathing until she got stronger. 

Then she developed a secondary bacterial infection in her lungs, and the necessary antibiotic overwhelmed her kidneys. 

Her lungs sustained another puncture, so they had to dial back the ventilator—  

For seven weeks, I slept with my phone under my pillow, the ringtone set to maximum volume.  

At night, the MyChart background changed to a starry sky. 

—

As a kid, the homework I dreaded most was assigned the day before a field trip: “Bring souvenir money.”

“No homework today,” I’d lie at home.

In third grade, at the Aquarium in Coney Island, Mrs. Laveman bought me a shark keychain. I hid it in my closet. 

If my mother had known about this keychain, she’d have given me money to pay back Mrs. Laveman. Which would have been worse than being the only kid without souvenir money.

My father worked two or three jobs, doled out cash to my mother for food and other household expenses. I saw how my mother shopped with coupons, reviewed every receipt with an eagle eye, recorded every expense in a cheap spiral notebook. My sisters and I wore hand-me-downs from our landlady's grandkids—

For years I hid that shark.

—

I cannot stop thinking about the hospital-issue socks my mother wore for six weeks. Warm, yellow, no-slip socks. 

In week 7, on the ventilator, she wore compression boots to help with blood flow. The yellow socks — not discarded, but rather, tied to the bed frame near her feet, set aside for a bright future morning, when she’d come off the ventilator, out of the compression boots, and return into the socks. Return to us.

In her final hours, I sat at the foot of her bed and stared at these socks. The no-slip fact of them, a way of holding open the possibility that she would walk again. Breathe again.

I could not look at her face, drained of color. Her nose sharp, so, so sharp, as if sketched or sculpted. Her mouth propped open with the breathing tube. Pfft, pfft.

And the socks — a near match to the yellow in Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” which my mother spent seven pandemic months executing in needlepoint.

“We are split fifty-fifty,” the doctor told me in week 3 or 4, “on whether she will make it.”

I didn’t know what to do with that line then, so I memorized it, filed it away for later. 

—

I keep coming back to the hospital. 

To the helplessness of that room. 

To my mother’s phone, perpetually charging at the foot of her bed.

To my phone, with its many open Chrome tabs: how to cope when someone you love is in the ICU; how to cope when someone you love might be dying. 

To the undrunk Ensures, which the nurses stacked on every available surface.

To my cold Purell-chapped hands, that my mother pressed against her oxygen hose, to warm them. 

To the way my throat would close up when I cried in the bathroom, in the hallway, in the elevator — anywhere but in her room.

In her room I was brave. Bossy, even, cajoling her to eat, drink, rest, breathe. To not fight the breathing machine.  

On the bus, I cried. The accordion M15, that sashayed up First Avenue in the afternoon, and down Second at night. And in the Starbucks across from Kimmel — the secret one that wasn’t even on the Google map. 

My mother was here. Where is she now?

—

When night fell, my mother liked for everyone to be home. She’d wait up, knitting or crocheting, the television on low volume. Listening for my father’s car in the driveway. My sister’s keys in the door, her feet on the stairs.

In retrospect, it feels meditative, this waiting, but when it was happening, it was anything but. She’d get up constantly, pull aside the curtain to look outside. Go out on the stoop even, peer up the street. Dial my father, get his voicemail — 

“You have reached,” she’d mimic angrily, slamming down the phone. 

So I knew what it was like when I stayed out late. How she turned them over in her mind: my alibis. 

Most of my life I felt my mother didn’t quite see me, didn’t hear me ask for what I wanted or needed, didn’t hear me not ask, when it was too hard to ask—

At our last Thanksgiving, as I put on my coat, she cast her eyes about her house, saying, “What else can I give you?” 

She offered me super soft Kleenex, a dozen tealights. 

I demurred.

—

Emily Clara Rebecca — my mother liked it when the nurses wrote their names on the whiteboard in her room — Jin Navi Caroline Georgiana — and the date, too — December 26, 2021. January 17, 2022. February 1, 2022. 

The nurses wore fleeces over their scrubs: purple NYU logos embroidered over their hearts. They pulled on latex gloves without wincing.

“Talk to your mother,” they said, “as if she can hear you.”

As a teenager, I talked to fill the room. So there would be no time for questions.

“You broadcast like Radio Free Europe,” my mother would say, annoyed but maybe also relieved.

But when I wanted something, needed something — I was Ariel. My voice trapped in a seashell.

When my mother was sedated, it felt like she was asleep. It felt strange to sit with her while she slept, stranger still to project my voice over the HVAC, over the pfft of the ventilator — blue tube, white tube — over the space-agey sounds of the IVs — INFUSION COMPLETE.

“Remember when I drove you crazy, smudging the light switches with my newsprint fingers, and then I started turning on the lights with my nose?” I said.

In sixth grade, every week, we were supposed to find all twenty spelling words in the newspaper. Clip them, tape them into our notebooks. Our teacher said once we learned a word, we’d see it everywhere. 

Every Monday, my mother sat with me at the kitchen table, poring over the Sunday Newsday. Not reading — searching. The spelling list between us. The faces of Tony Danza and Liam Neeson missing from the Arts section. My cheeks and fingers ashen, where newsprint had mixed with tears. 

Why did she help me with this?

Was it because she could not help me with the other things?

“I’m sorry,” I said. 

My mother slept and I sat and the nurses came and went and the machine breathed and in my mother’s lungs — I hoped — the alveoli began to gossip, trading oxygen for carbon dioxide.

On the white board: Aniela, my mother’s name, and a blue heart. Drawn by my youngest sister. 

“For when she wakes up.”

—

The morning of my mother’s memorial service at St. Pancras in Glendale, Queens, I pulled down the 11x17 save-the-date posters my sisters had hung in the church lobby the week prior. The tape was vigorous, and the first poster tore. I slowed down, tugged more gingerly at the second poster. My mother’s face remained intact. I folded the paper in four, put it away in my oversize tote.

The photo is on my desk now, tucked behind the watercolor tulips a friend sent me. Tucked behind the string quartet cover of “Wrecking Ball” from Season 2 of Bridgerton, from the “last” dance between Kate and Anthony. Which I have now watched two dozen times.

“Will you ask me to dance.”

“Will you say yes.”

My mother did not live to see Season 2, but she watched Season 1 twice. I had a line about this in her eulogy, but I cut it, and a few others, while I was giving the eulogy, out of fear that I was saying too much.

Three-quarters of the way through, the church bells began to toll. Were they rushing me?

No. The bells merely marked our crossing from eleven into noon. 

Should I pause?

No. If I stopped, they might say, “Enough.” The three Polish priests behind me; behind them, the altar covered in scaffolding. Priests who’d said “only cops and celebrities get eulogies.” But I had insisted, and my sisters had, and the priests had relented, at the last possible moment, waving me up.

So I read over the bells, telling who my mother was, using only words I knew. 

I had written from love, but I had also written incompletely, and knew I would have to write again.

My mother’s face is tucked behind the tulips. If she were in full view, I would not be able to write these pages. I bring her to the foreground now and again, study her. Wonder what she liked about Bridgerton. Wish I’d asked her. 

But I was afraid we’d have to talk about how few minutes it takes to ruin a girl. When I didn’t even have the Polish words for “crush” or “date,” let alone the other things. My Catholic mother had tried to protect me all my life, from life itself—

—

Again and again in December, January, February, we signed in at NYU Langone’s Kimmel Pavilion, in the shadow of that giant unwavering Dalmatian, to visit our mother.

The last few times, they were very kind. Even the young timid receptionist I yelled at once. 

As if some memo had been circulated, a note in the computer.

These people are about to lose their mother, be kind to them.

Be kind to them.

Be kind to them.

—

My mother was a stubborn Old World woman. She refused the COVID vaccine, though the year prior she’d accepted radiation to treat her uterine cancer.

In my mind, I rehearse the steady, chaotic arc of her illness.

What if I’d pushed more aggressively for admission on her first or even second visit to the ER? Negotiated with the rotating cast of doctors with more authority and conviction? Imagined more fiercely her survival?

My sisters and I did not talk about the fact that our mother might die. Not with her, not with each other.

As kids, we believed a bug would be drawn to a representation of a bug. So we would not tolerate books with drawings of insects. One summer we sublet a house; in a nook on the stairwell landing, there was a bronze sculpture of a grasshopper. It was not ours to throw out, so we gave it wide berth.

—

I dream we are waiting for our mother. 

Our mother — who never got her license — pulls up in a sports car, the top down, her friends in the backseat. She is behind the wheel, smiling.

—

My father starts the kettle on the stove and goes out into the back garden. I do not know what he thinks about, out there. I know my mother used to cut fresh scallions form the garden whenever she scrambled eggs. She scrambled eggs for me when I got home from school on September 11th. I’d walked the long way, north from Chambers, over the 59th Street Bridge, through the neighborhoods. 

I wasn’t able to call home. I was at large. My mother was afraid.

Now it’s the other way around. 

A few blocks over, on Otto Road: a freight train decouples. An iron clanging sound.

—

Eleven years ago, in front of the Taj Mahal, a stranger asked me to hold her baby. For a photo, she said. 

Our guide assured me this was common there: a compliment on my blondness. 

But I was afraid the woman would run off and leave me with the baby. 

I agreed to the photo, but I would not hold the baby. 

Now I am thirty-seven and I have neither baby nor mother. 

I am a push pin not stuck in any map, any family tree, but rather dropped in the darkness. Rolling about on the dusty floor now, a danger. A kind of landmine.