How Mom died Part 3 – Regret springs eternal

“Cancer isn’t a boogeyman,” I told Becky. (though I was really trying to tell that to myself.) “I mean, it’s something people live through all the time. It isn’t a death sentence. It’s serious and we need to look it at that way.”

Becky, I think, felt that way, too. We were doing our best to be helpful to Mom, caring and loving and that was what we could do.

After about a week and a half in the hospital, Mom was released. I picked her up in her car, which I’d been driving because mine was in for repairs. Grandma was with me and she was really nervous, edgy and more demanding than usual. I was trying to be calm and she frustrated easily. How mom would know we were there, ready to pick her up was a big concern for Grandma, even though I’d just told her that I had called Mom on the phone and she was on her way down.

It was windy and kind of cold that day. Grandma didn’t think I’d pulled the car close enough to the exit. She was in a wheelchair, so I felt it was all the same. Moving up would have been just another 15 or 20 feet and it was in the no parking zone, though I don’t really care about such minor legal business. I think I just wanted to say, “No, stop. I don’t need any more nagging or instruction from you.” Maybe I should have pulled up anyway. I don’t know.

They’d drained the fluid – six liters – from Mom’s abdomen. She felt better and could eat. I don’t know why that volume of fluid didn’t sound crazy to me at the time, evidence of something awful. I’m can be naive at times. I remember reading that babies spend much of their time in their interior world, in their imagination. Maybe most of their time. I kind of do that, too.

On the ride home we stopped at Burger King – Mom’s request and a hell of a bad choice as end of life meals go if you ask me – and picked up chicken sandwiches. That was the last time I’d eat with Mom. It’s funny how all these first and last times seem to take on some significance and importance that they’ve never really earned. Perhaps dramatists would be better off doing more flashbacks to scenes that really mean something, where something striking was learned or exchanged between the characters. Yet, as I sit here, your narrator, describing this and wanting to tell you of almost any meal other than this one, this last one, in a car with my Mom, the past is occluded nearly as well as the future. I feel that I’ve got to tell this before I tell the rest.

Anyway, not much happened. Basically, I dropped them off at her Mom’s house. I think I put in a new faucet for Mom while I was there. It was one among many projects around her house that I’d meant to work on for her but hadn’t gotten around to doing. A new phrase sprung to mind while she lay dying – that’s just more than a week away from where we are now in the story – “Regret springs eternal.”

Mom’s condition seemed to go downhill quickly. It was a day later that I witnessed her giving up her dogs to my Dad. It was quick. “I’ve got to say goodbye to my babies,” she said. It was a quick pat on the head and they were out the door.

She ordered all the gear she thought she needed to see this through and was prepared to battle the cancer. A hospital bed in the living room, a lift chair and a frame support for the toilet came that week. The back steps were measured for a ramp. This wasn’t all at once. Each modification to her home was in response to something that had happened.

One day she found she couldn’t stand up after sitting on the toilet. Grandma wasn’t strong enough to help her and two men from Mom’s church had to come in and lift her, using towels under her arms as supports. “Stephen, I’ve been completely humiliated today,” Mom said of this.

The makeshift, plywood ramp and the measurements for the proper ramp that would have been installed came because Mom couldn’t climb the back steps. She had assistance – people came over and actually lifted her legs with her so that she could get in the back door.

I visited several times that week, but the house was always busy with someone doing something new – it felt like a hospital, with caretakers and machines - or Mom was uncomfortable and exhausted. Visits were short. She could only take a few minutes she said, to talk with me. There was just so much that had to be done. She was digging in.

Grandma was driven and slept little. Mary, my Mom’s friend of more than fifty years, stayed overnight one evening to try and give Grandma a break. She didn’t want it. Grandma and I argued on at least one occasion that week in front of Mom, who pleaded with us to stop. She just couldn’t take it.

Mary Ellen stopped by with me on the night Mary was over. We had come with Mary Ellen’s boyfriend Ben to pick up a bookcase. Mom wanted unused furniture out of her house. It felt really important to her to get rid of it and Mary Ellen needed a bookcase, so there we were. They talked that night. I don’t know what about – probably just how Mom was doing – and I remember how compassionate Mary E. looked standing next to Mom’s hospital bed. I thought that, under better circumstances, they might have become friends.

“I don’t know, Steve,” Mary Ellen said on the way back. “Your Mom looks pretty rough.” Cancer, she advised, and chemotherapy takes a heavy toll on even young, healthy people. She wasn’t optimistic. It had been more than two weeks, maybe three, since Mom had even been able to shower.

“Is my Mom dying?” I asked Becky. “Surely not. That’s not what’s happening, is it?”

Neither of us knew.

Mom was back in the hospital on that Saturday. It was March 17, three days before she died. She’d fallen and couldn’t get up like in that terrible cliché line from that stupid commercial. Actually, she’d slumped. Mary described it to me this way: Mom was coming back from a doctor’s visit – one that seemed really unnecessary, as in they should have come to her – and she was trying to get up the back steps. She was able to lift one leg up one step and then she couldn’t go anymore. All she could do was stand there, supporting herself on the railing.

Grandma tried to help her and she couldn’t. She went and got something – a shawl or blanket to cover Mom – it was windy and still cold and then Mom’s legs just gave out. She slumped down and back and lay there, helpless. The toll of the cancer had reached a crescendo. She called 911 – she’d done so just a couple of days before for help with the same steps – this time she had them take her to the emergency room.

I visited with her that Saturday night. I brought my ipod to show her pictures of Uly and Jaesyn. She told me that she had sinned against her body and this was the result. This was her time in Purgatory. I told her I didn’t think dwelling on negativity was at all constructive. We felt differently about it.

I told her stories to make her laugh. “I’m worried about what’s going to happen to Grandma,” I said to Mom.

“Oh, Stephen, I am too,” she winced.

“It’s okay, though,” I said. Then I named a person neither of them could stand and said, “In have it all set, she’s going to move in with Grandma. “

“Oh, Stephen! Don’t you bring that woman in her house!”

And she laughed when I told her it was a joke. I got another smile out of her when I teased that an overly chatty friend would be staying the night with her.

It was after 11 p.m. and Mom noted the time, saying, “Stephen, go home. Becky and the baby need you.”

And that was the last visit we had together. It’s so thin, so paper thin. Not at all the feast a last memory should be.

How Mom died: Part two

It wasn’t long after that wintery visit that what had been normal began to thaw. How did it start? I’m not sure, exactly, but, as I half listened on the phone, consumed with work and Uly and daily business, she told me she had a blood clot.

Her doctor had found a clot in her leg, just behind her knee and, she said, she had promised him that she would go into the hospital.

“I haven’t had a stay into a hospital since you were born, Stephen,” she’d say with a wince.

She hated hospitals. I remember how she would cringe when she heard a siren call down the street. It reminded her of Grandpa – her father – being taken away by the life squad. There was all that time in the hospital ten years ago, when we had that car accident in Delhi. But that was different, she said. It wasn’t inpatient for testing. It wasn’t so open ended.

In 1998, shortly after I’d purchased that albatross of a mini-van, I was doing something with mom where we had to ride out to Delhi, just a few miles from her home. I remember coming to a hard stop and halting her body’s shift forward with the flat of my hand.

I’m going to leave part of this out. You can ask me about it later and I’ll tell you. Suffice to say it’s a small bit of family business that I don’t want to print, but will be glad to say. Maybe you’ll guess at it.

This foreshadowed the accident yet to come. A few minutes later, we were headed North on Greenwell towards Delhi Pike. A large car – a Buick or something? – cut in front of use to turn into a business. My van cut a groove down the side of the car. It looked a lot like what that iceberg did to the Titanic. I was fine, but Mom shifted forward, her hand splitting the glass in the windshield and her leg smashing underneath the dash.

The injuries looked bad, but not too bad. Pain and bruising, but no broken bones. Mom cried out and the ambulance came. Her leg was bruised badly and, worse, the impact thrust a staph infection into her skin. There were many hospital visits and reconstructive surgery ahead. The infection left a golf ball sized crater in her leg down to the bone. They almost had to amputate. That didn’t happen, but she would never walk the same again.

So she ended up staying more than a week in the hospital. Was it two weeks? They found kidney and liver issues, too. And then there was the six liters of fluid they drew out of her abdomen. Mary, Mom’s friend of 50 years, called this “tapping the keg.” Mom loved teasing and it made her smile.

“I’ve never been poked and prodded with so many needles in all my life,” she said.

I wanted to draw the blinds open whenever I visited. She should have some light in here, I thought, but Mom was concerned that people could see in the window. She wanted her privacy. I kicked back, sitting near her, but more off in the corner. It felt casual. She was irritated at having to be there, but not scared. She had some kidney and liver issues – that was age, and the blood clot, as long as she didn’t move around too much, they would dissolve it and she would be fine. It just seemed like something we had to work through. So, I was there, and visited her every couple of days, but, in my mind, I was sort of absent.

“How’s Uly doing? I wish you could sneak him in here in a backpack or something,” she said.

She missed him more than anyone else. Sneaking him in just wasn’t a good idea, I said. But we’d bring him to see her when she got home. Of course, she’d seen Uly for the last time already. We just didn’t know that yet.

Then came the news.

“I didn’t want to tell you this over the phone, “ she trailed off.

“Well, just tell me,” I said.

“I have cancer.”

And the next step was this weird bargaining down process.

I hope Mom doesn’t have to use all this equipment – the lift chair, the hospital bed and everything – too long.

I hope Mom doesn’t have to be in the nursing home too long.

I hope mom makes it to the nursing home.

I hope mom lives through the summer.

Bargaining down with God. The life stock is decreasing in value. Can we sell before there’s nothing left?

How mom died, part 1 - Skin like crepe paper

It wasn’t completely crazy or anything that mom was holed up in her house and couldn’t leave. I mean, this was the hardest snowfall of the winter.

It was mid-February and everything was covered in ice and a thick blanket of snow. The first fall was powdery on the ground and I was easily able to sweep it off of my walkway and sidewalk with a push broom. It kept coming down and covering my work, but I felt driven and pushed it back over and over.

The ice came next and covered every leaf and branch and was a second, glossy skin. I ran out and took photos with my friends Desiree and Mandy. There was this hang time where I was standing on the ice for a split moment before it broke down the middle, gave way and I sank six or eight inches into the soft cold below.

I’d spoken to mom on the phone. She told me she couldn’t get out and couldn’t imagine how I could, either. She said she had food, but it didn’t seem like she really did. She’s eaten toast and an egg. Just not enough.

It seems so far away now. It’s mid-spring, the best time of the year. I’m sorry that Mom missed it.

I decided I’d go over and chisel out her car, clean off her walk and maybe get her some food. I’ve wanted, for a long time, to be able to ditch my car permanently. Mom said to me of this, “What are you going to do, take a baby on the bus??” The idea was just to foreign to her. Outside of her experience and, like a lot of unfamiliar things, repugnant.

I felt this day, of the worst weather of the year was a good opportunity to prove my point and I dressed Uly, then six-months-old, in his snowsuit, which was made to be a pale blue bear costume. I put him, some baby food and a bag of Becky’s milk into the stroller, along with clean diapers and a change of clothes and we headed up the street to catch the bus.

This wasn’t the first time we’d taken the bus. It was just the first time we went to my Mom’s place. The other time, Sandy, Becky’s mom, watched Uly for us and I had loaded the stroller, Uly (of course) and my bicycle in Mary Ellen’s car. She dropped us off in Northside and I loaded first the bike on the front of the bus and then the baby and stroller inside and we rode an hour north on Winton to Sandy’s place. It was the last of several of Becky’s childhood homes. There, I delivered Uly to Sandy, hopped on my bike and bussed it back downtown to CityBeat. That was quite an ordeal, so the icy trip to Mom’s wasn’t too bad in comparison.

This time, Tracy gave us a lift downtown and dropped us off at a bus stop. The ride wasn’t long, and Uly’s bright smile made it fun. I remember a woman with a bit of a twang in her voice said something about how I could understand what women went through. I responded, a little defensively, that I take care of my son every day and that I know what it’s like for myself.

“I knew that wasn’t going to sound right,” she said.

We talked a bit more and she, like almost everyone, was enamored with Uly. I want to think that there was something about this woman, who seemed kind, but lonely, that foreshadowed what was coming, but it’s like in that Lou Reed poem, Romeo had Juliet – something flickered for a minute, then it vanished and was gone. The bus let us out at Overlook and Glenway. I covered the carriage with my hoodie to block the wind. I pushed him in the street – the sidewalks were too bumpy and hazardous from the ice - for a block or so until we came to Mom’s and the snow grounded out the wheels and we halted with a jerk.

Mom looked small when I came in the door with Uly. She was in her chair, in front of the television, angled 45 degrees towards the couch, just like she always was. The house’s air was thick with the stifling smell of her dogs, Halley and Gus. I don’t recall it offhand, but I’m sure Halley cried and howled as she always did when company came to Mom’s. I shooed them away and sat down, unwrapping Ul and changing his diaper.

Mom asked how we got there and was surprised, but unfazed by the answer. She was still and almost fetal, like someone who has a bad flu. I remember the skin on her hands looked semi-transparent and was crinkled like crepe paper. It looked just like Great Grandma’s hands, but she was in her 80’s when they looked that way. Why was Mom so pale and her skin this way? I dismissed the questions in favor of asking her about what she’d been eating. The answer was, not much, but she felt okay, just kind of constipated. She didn’t know why. I insisted that she needed to eat and, after talking with her about what I might get her at the grocery, we settled on me getting her a sandwich at Burger King, though she wasn’t too sure about how I’d get there.

I’d already started her car and had it running in the driveway with the heat on full blast. It wasn’t something she’d done when I was growing up. We always started the car cold and there were many uncomfortable drives where we could see our breath and the seats were freezing for the first 15 minutes or so. I went outside and swept her driveway and steps. The bag of salt I’d brought would do the rest. I felt pretty good about remembering to bring all this gear to get all this done. Going out into the world with a baby requires set up, a lot like camping.

I don’t think we talked about anything in particular. Maybe I lectured her on how she needed to exercise and the adult tricycle I found on Craigslist would be great for her. That’s it – yeah, she pursed her lips and listened silently and told me that yes, she would consider it, but I could tell that she really wouldn’t. Her bad knees, injured in that car accident in ’98 and from a fall ten years before that, in addition to her weight, limited her ability to walk. A tricycle was unbecoming and she wouldn’t do water aerobics because she refused to wear a bathing suit. She wouldn’t use the treadmill and elliptical that was in her basement, because it was in the basement and she wouldn’t move it upstairs because, “Stephen, I have to get rid of stuff! I’ve got too much in this front room as it is!”

Where do you go with a conversation like that? It aggravated her more when I pointed out that we had better figure out where we were going to put her dogs when the day came that she couldn’t care for them anymore. I was right and I was trying to make a point: You can’t defer your health. I was trying to argue this to myself, too. I’m often just as hardheaded.

I don’t know how I ended up leaving. I’m sure I said I love you and I’ll see you soon. I meant it and she did, too. Maybe Becky picked me up or maybe I borrowed Mom’s car. There’s a fog in my memory that I can’t get past to reach these particulars. I suppose they’re not important, but I keep reaching for them, for more, as if it would mean that I could spot something, even if I can change nothing, and then I could say, “Okay, there it is. There’s the reason she died.”

- Steve