Mama

It feels like it’s time to write about her.  It’s been one year, seven months and 23 days.  Good grief, who writes a blog anymore?  I guess I do.  I’m fairly certain no one will read it.  A whole story requires more than 4.5 seconds of attention, and that’s a rare commodity in 2024.  Yesterday, I watched a little kid ask his mother how much longer the speeding train would fly past him at 350 mph, because “it’s taking too long, and I’m bored.”

In June, something was wrong.  I’d made a lemon pound cake, and, instead of giving me the devilish “I shouldn’t, but I am definitely going to” look I knew so well, my mother pushed away the plate and said,  “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.”  I hadn’t heard that stupid expression since the 1980’s – since the era of Price Family Dieting.  My dad came home with a book called “The Beverly Hills Diet,” and decided we should all go on it.  After all, it made perfect nutritional sense:  eat 20 pineapples one day, then 10 pounds of grapes the next, and 12 pounds of apples the day after that.  We would all – the obese, the chubby, the eating disordered and even the scrawny 10-year-old me and my pipsqueak 9-year-old  little brother –  we would all lose weight and feel better.  Was that the beginning of my body dysmorphia?  Maybe.  I don’t know.  Back then, it felt like a game.

Since dementia had started to wrap its tentacles around my mother’s brain, her inner shame monologue – the ugly creature that prohibited her from ever accepting a compliment and forever whispered poison into her ear  – started to disappear.  In an incredible cosmic barter, she traded self-loathing for short-term memory loss.  Her shame around her body fell away.  and I watched her enthusiastically order a full stack of pancakes with lots of syrup and butter.  She would literally ask , “Do your pancakes come with lots of syrup and butter?”  She’d shoot that one arched eyebrow up, flash a wicked smile, and servers would hustle to bring extra everything to the fun old lady in the ash-blonde, Eva Gabor wig.  

So, yeah, that moment in June was weird.  Why the sudden refusal of baked goods?  It was unfathomable for my mother to reject something made by hand by one of her kids, especially me.  “You have always been the best cook!  You should be a chef!  People would pay through the nose to eat your food!”  Her mission in this life was to make other people feel good about themselves – the irony stuns me even now.  Physician, heal thyself, I still want to cry.  

Something was wrong.  But we didn’t know.

In October, the call came.  The doctors say there’s a mass in her abdomen.  Aggressive lymphoma.  We can do all kinds of treatments and prednisone and . . .  I called my neighbor, the oncologist.  No Prednisone.  Go be with her.  Now.  There is so little time.

I flew on Tuesday and spent most of the night in the hospital with her, holding her hand and telling her we were gonna get her out of there in the morning.  Later, on my way out of the building around 2:00 am, the hospital was deserted.  It was cold and empty.  The chaplain walked toward me and asked if I was lost.  Yes.  I am.  

The next day, we enlisted hospice to help move her out, back to a familiar spot, near a bright, sunny window, surrounded by photos of our family.  There would be no more oxygen tubes, no more interventions.  They gave me a list of all the medications she no longer needed to take.  I’m not sure why, but that hit me harder than anything.  Metropolol, Furosemide, Eliquis, Citalopram.  Don’t Bother.  Abandon all hope, ye who enter hospice.

She settled into her bed and started the dance between Here and There.  I knew which side she was on by the tone in her voice and the expression on her face.  Staying on this side took effort, I could see.  I have to say, though, she bore it strongly, the old girl, even managing to raise that one eyebrow and dare me to shock the Mormon nurses by slipping some whiskey into her contraband Diet Coke.  That other side, however, seemed like a much better place to be.  She’d close her eyes, fade out a bit, and then suddenly she sounded younger.  Delighted.  She spoke to my Dad, and it sounded like they were planning an adventure.

And then she was gone.  She went to sleep.  Nothing dramatic – just the end of the world as we know it.  

Walking through this life without my mother is, without a doubt, the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  When I compare it to my other life’s struggles, it only compounds the pain, because, through all of it, she was always there.  For everything.  She was there for all of my heartbreaks and self-destruction and emergency this and emergency that.  She was my call in the middle of the night,  and she was always the destination for my panicked last-minute flights to Oklahoma.  If I could just get into her arms, I would be ok. 

A month before she died, I called her on FaceTime to see her little bewigged head, sitting in her recliner.  I can’t remember which chapter of my Book of Sorrows was open and bleeding that day – my lonely marriage, my teenager’s teenaging or the usual wear & tear of life – but I needed to see her face.  When she popped onto my screen, I instantly started crying.  That was not my plan, but the relief of seeing her there, right in front of me, sent me weeping.  I tried to catch my breath and to apologize for the avalanche of emotion, but she stopped me in the most loving voice, “Oh, honey.  Oh, honey bunny.”  She knew me, and by that, I mean she recognized me, but she was confused about what to do with my crying.  She wasn’t able to track a whole lot at that point, but, even so, she knew she wanted to help her kid.  She told me to call my sisters or my brother.  She told me to ask them for help, because “they’re all just so good at this kind of thing.”  Of course, she was right.  My siblings and I are all so good at this kind of thing – helping each other and friends and family and strangers when they are hurting or in need.  We reach out, even when it’s uncomfortable.  We speak up and tell people we love them.  We offer a hand, our hearts, an ear.  Of course we do.  We learned it all — empathy and sympathy and passionate generosity – we learned it all from her.