The Last Days of My Mother by Sölvi Björn Sigurdsson Page B

was slipping further away from Mother with each passing day.
    The absoluteness of this fact hit me now and again like cold slush to the face. I suppose all journeys are melancholy because they encapsulate things that can never be repeated, but my trip with Mother was especially so: a rambling journey to the end of the line. When we weren’t strolling alongside the canals or relaxing slightly tipsy at the hotel—Mother on her balcony with her newly developed yoga program and me in my room, engulfed in the possibilities of the TV remote—I would often think about how lonely she must be, and how harsh it was to have to face Death and watch him rob you of all that never came to be.
    Deep down I was unsure that she would get better on Dr. Fred’s Ukrain. The reason was not only that medical science had given us other options, but also that the odds were against us. We hadn’t come all this way to ensure the progression of life, but death was just one of the many possibilities framing our journey, not a player in our revelry. Mother was here because she had no other choice and I was simply here to do the impossible: to make her happy for the last days of her life.
    I was haunted on a regular basis by self-doubt regarding the task. I suspected that however hard I tried, the adventure would never fully be realized while we spent our days aimlessly roaming the city. We drank our morning cup of coffee on the balcony and visited museums and galleries before returning to the hotel to continue our session of specials from the night before. Mother sang Nina Simone songs and told anecdotes of drives in the country and a lost bottle of booze in the woods. Stories from the past became stories of the near future.
    But no matter how well I performed I was never more than a stand-in for the guy who’s role this should have been. The obvious fact was that Mother needed a lover. Despite an operatic temperament and extraordinary physical strength, she had always been a vulnerable woman and longed to rest in the arms of someone stronger. This had always puzzled me, especially given her incredibly firm opinions on how I lived my own life. She had waited for the solution for years, something that would finally bring her to smooth sailing.
    Where this deep longing came from, I didn’t know. Through the years she had blossomed in various parallel dimensions, marriages to deans, socializing with royalty, and an intimate friendship withthe Danish TV characters, Nikolaj and Julie, whom she met every now and again according to this alternative reality in the restaurant Skindbuksen in Copenhagen along with her husband, Peter Toft Jensen. It was enough to see Mother at karaoke in her dancing shoes to realize that her dreams were a stark contrast to what really made her happy. But that had no effect on the conclusion: she wanted a man. I’d dreaded this from the beginning and hoped that the issue would be resolved without my help. That we’d meet some former headmaster at a gallery, preferably also suffering from some terminal disease and, after that, Mother would float along on her happy cloud while I’d try some hunting of my own in the bars, like a lion in the jungle of love. But that was not in the cards. Managing the drugs and their effects and nuances was child’s play compared to the impenetrable wall that I now faced, to help Mother fall in love for the last time. I finally decided to send in a personal ad to three respectable cultural publications: Opera Nieuws, Bibliotheek en Boekhandelaar , and an evening paper that allegedly no one but old socialists picked up. The ad read:
    Elegant woman in early sixties looking for gentleman of similar age for conversation, dining, museums, theater & concerts. Reply in English with photo and phone no. P.O. Box 3149 in main post office Radhuisstraat & Singel bf. June 1 st .
    I felt it was necessary to underline the word “photo” because Mother was vain when it