Who is Hoda Kotb, and Why Is She Haunting My Dreams?

It’s 4 a.m., and I’m in Florence, South Carolina, on my way north to perform the second of Mom’s two funerals. I spent a surprisingly pleasant day with my brother Darryl, and found that we’re good traveling companions. We like similar music. We like the same car temperature. And we like the same balance of talking and quiet. We’ll have spent more time together in these five days than we had accumulated in the previous fifty-three years of my life.

I’ve been sleeping quite well since Mom died. No sleeping pills to convince my body to rest. No listening with one ear cocked toward the baby monitor to catch any moans in the night, or (God forbid) yet another fall out of bed. Just a few days before she died, I heard Mom make a series of strange noises. I rushed in to find her dead asleep but 180 degrees out of kilter: her feet touching her headboard, her head on the quilt at her feet, and her pillows placed carefully on top of her legs and torso to keep warm. I woke her, and she was completely lucid, but without any recollection whatsoever of having made this strenuous revolution.

I have a king bed at Red Roof Inn, which comes with free high-speed Internet access. Important, since this week I have several pressing work deadlines—a book to get off to the printer, a writing assignment for a marketing catalog, a newsletter to edit—but I have to say, the high-speed Internet access is decidedly mediocre-speed, and it feels as if the connection is being held together with rubber bands and chewing gum.

The room is clean and attractive, and a bargain at $49, but the bed is hard as a rock. I have some friends who would find that heavenly. Personally, I do not. I am up after four fitful hours, achy and cranky and wondering why I was dreaming of Hoda Kotb—though not so much dreaming of the NBC news anchor herself, but dreaming of her name. She’s of Egyptian descent, but she’s from Norman, Oklahoma. Her name means “guidance” in Arabic. Apparently the name “Hoda” is a very popular name among Arab women. The last name, which she pronounces KOT-bee, is also popular in Egypt, but there it is pronounced KU-tub. And although her name was originally spelled Choda Kotb on the Today show in 2000, producers decided to spell it Hoda. (Ah, the perils of show business. Start out in life as Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig El Abderahman El Mohammed Ahmed El Abdel Karim El Mahdi, become Siddig El Fadil when you get a job on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and three years later you become Alexander Siddig and go by “Sid.”)

It is forty-two degrees outside, decidedly chillier than the sixty-five degrees we were enjoying when we left Florida. The heat in the room was welcome, but it’s too warm for sleeping comfortably, at least for me. So now I’m hot and achy. And hearing Hoda Kotb’s name in my head. Or maybe just seeing it spelled in my head. In a dream. The only connection I can make was the catalog blurb I wrote just before bedtime for a book called The Wisdom of the Sufis. It’s by the Rt. Rev. Kenneth Cragg, an eminent Anglican priest and scholar who has commented widely on religious topics for over fifty years, most notably Muslim-Christian relations. Born in 1913 and educated at Oxford, he served parishes in England and in Beirut, Lebanon, before becoming Assistant Bishop of Jerusalem in 1970. Bishop Cragg is a careful translator, expositor, and analyst of the Qur’an and modern Islam. I love Sufi writings, but I wasn’t reading any of the book, just writing that blurb. Is that enough to justify hearing an American woman’s Arabic name in my head while I sleep?

Frankly, I blame the Bloomin’ Onion we had at dinner last night.

This is going to be an interesting trip.

A Decent Funeral

Lots of family and family-of-family; a couple of neighbors; a few very dear friends of mine; a few family friends of my brothers. Flowers were tasteful, but (in keeping with my mother’s wish, who always said, “If they didn’t care enough to send me flowers when I was alive, I sure as heck don’t want them after I’m dead and can’t appreciate them!”) not overabundant.

The embalmer did as good a job as humanly possible, but she still looked nothing like herself. Which was just fine: that simply wasn’t her, there in that casket. I put a few items into the casket that she wanted to be buried with — a stuffed polar bear, a photo, a birthday card my niece had already bought her — and brought her wedding ring, which she wanted to be buried with. I thought it would be no big deal getting the ring on, but her hands were nicely locked together, so it was as if she were being particularly obstreperous when I was struggling with them. Once the ring was on, her hands wouldn’t go back together properly — one arm kept flopping to her side after a few moments, which was both ghastly and hysterically funny. It was a Chuckles the Clown moment for those of us standing around the casket.

I wore a white Guayabera shirt and sandals, again in keeping with Mom’s wishes, though I was thrilled to not have to wear a coat and tie.

The service was simple. I shared how Mom had repeatedly told me to look in her important papers box after she died, and how I had found there a file folder containing three songs she had selected for her funeral, and some poetry, and a story about a mother’s journey through life. I printed the story on the back of the funeral program, and found the music on iTunes and put it on CD, which the funeral director was kind enough to play at the appropriate moments. I read her poem. We shared a few stories and remembrances.

And then my old friend Lesley Warrick, who (to my great shock and delight) had driven up from the Ft. Lauderdale area with her husband for the funeral, got up and shared these words:

Craig and I met in the 7th grade. [I interjected, “Back in the horse-and-buggy era!”] Our friendship started because of a mutual love of literature, and bloomed and matured through the discovery of shared sensibilities, shared experience and shared loves — love of laughter, of books, of the theatre, of intellectual curiosity — and always, always, love of his mother — whom I came to call “Mom Smith.” My own parents were academics, and their lessons to me were lessons of exploration and lessons of inquiry into what made the world tick and what might be. Mom Smith’s lessons to me were of a more pragmatic nature — her lessons were those about what IS. She was the one who taught me about cleaning stains up with soda water, and about the best way to find a good deal in the clothing store, I thought she was very glamorous and loved the way she did her hair and chose her clothes — she taught me that there was a different style, a different approach than that of my more fashion-conservative mother. As a young girl and later, as adult friends, she always welcomed me into her home — she always exuded love and warmth and she was faithfully, faithfully honest and pragmatic. She was funny and fun and would cut through the noise of my youthful angst with just a few words and a shared laugh. As the years rolled on, and I married and we all moved away from geographic proximity to one another, Craig and Mom remained part of my extended family. Their support, their love, their consistency was a safety net that I understood was always there and valued greatly. If we are lucky, each of us has that ‘someone’ who is part of our emotional background — someone whom you know will support you and honor your choices and share your burdens without judging or adding to them. Mom Smith did that for me. We had the luxury of strong ties without the complex dynamics of family relationships. We were able to enjoy one another at face value. And in a broader sense: I don’t know if she knew that she was my window into a different type of strength — her resilience in her own day-to-day struggles. After Ernie died she worked, she kept and paid for a lovely home, she brought up her children and, if I am any example, contributed greatly to the upbringing of the children of others. And more recently, she faced her latest struggles again with that same resilience. She had what so many women of my generation sought — power. She was powerful in her strength; powerful in her friendship; and powerful in her love. I honor her and I shall miss her.

After that, I gave a little eulogy, sharing a few words from the Book of Common Prayer, reading the blog post I wrote the day before she died, choking up as I read Lawrence’s “Shadows.” We listened to (and some even sang) the hymn she included in her file, and we ended with a good but happy cry.

This morning I stumbled across this E. E. Cummings poem (little-known fact: he always signed his name with capital letters, and both he and his wife hated the practice of lowercasing his name). The poem is sometimes read at weddings, sometimes just on a fine summer day, but I find it strangely appropriate as a funeral piece, as if these words were being proclaimed by Mom, newly alive and strong and free:

i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth day of life and love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any — lifted from the no of all nothing — human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Now I get to do it all over again in Maryland next Thursday!

Gone

Today was the most horrific day I have ever lived through. Mom was more alert, but also more solidly in the throes of cyanosis, the buildup of CO2 in her blood that many people with COPD get toward the end. It made her delirious, and in pain, and unable to tell me what hurt — unable to say more than “Help me” or “Water” or “I love you so much.”

This morning a sweet CNA gave her a little bath, which Mom loved. Soon thereafter, about eight hours ago now, she started thrashing around, moaning, crying, in great distress. We had someone come out to put her on a machine that would help her breathe better, but it used a mask over her mouth and nose, and the forced air was intolerable, and she started clawing at the mask to get it off. Even her nasal canula, which she had worn for years now, became too much for her. As her anxiety and incoherence grew — she was like a wild thing, trapped in this bed — she at one point said, “I’m so tired, I’m so very tired,” and “I’m sorry” — sorry to be leaving me. I told her it was OK, that she just needed to relax and let go, that I loved her and everything was going to be all right.

But these things are rarely swift and tidy. I finally called the hospice nurse and asked for advice, and she said many end-stage patients experience what is called “terminal agitation,” and just couldn’t be calmed down. She told me to give her a mild sedative (the pill she had taken at bedtime for years, very mild indeed), and after about a half hour she had calmed down enough to sleep a little. I heard a cough and looked over, and she looked comfortable, so I went back to work, sitting in the easy chair next to her bed. A few minutes later I looked over at her again and . . . she was gone.

I will probably have words in the days and weeks ahead about this remarkable woman. We’re going to have a funeral here, then send her up to Maryland to be buried with my father (there will be another service for our remaining family up there). Then I’ll be about the process of learning what it’s like to be completely on my own. The idea is both exhilarating and terrifying.

I wrote a friend a few days ago and said, “I am trying to be a shaman, to journey, to be a psychopomp. But all I am is a scared little boy.” She told me it was OK to be a shaman and a psychopomp and a sacred little boy all at the same time.

I just realized that I haven’t anything more than a couple of bananas today, and I’m suddenly very hungry. I think eating may be the most grounding thing I can do right now.

Goodbye, Mom. Let me know what you find on the other side. You can always reach me in the Dreamtime.