there's a tightening in my chest
i know that I'm drawn in
oh god let it not be - you
don't leave us
don't leave like this
don't leave me here again - Peter Gabriel, "No Way Out"
# # # #
This Tuesday is December 9th. It will mark the fifth anniversary of my mother's death in Phoenix, AZ, from multi-organ failure.
I offered to host "The Grieving Room" tonight, in honor of my mother Thelma, who was for so many years the light I sought to guide my life by. It wasn't because she made herself rich, or had many friends - she outlived most of them - or wielded either social or political clout. It was because she met her life with her chin up, her fists clenched, and her spine straight, whatever came her way.
Except for that last night.
Follow me over the Orange Scroll.
Mothers possess such a strong hold over us, such an invincible grip on our minds and hearts. There's a line from the movie "Silent Hill" that has stayed with me: Mother is God in the eyes of a child. For most of us, that's true, whether our mothers have been loving and fierce in their protection, or fiendishly cruel and hateful. Whatever bond is created from birth, it stays until the woman who carried us is either in the ground on or carried off on the wind.
Thelma, my mother. A little woman, barely 5' 2, born a redhead with hazel-green eyes and light olive skin - part of her heritage as the daughter of a Scots-descended Appalachian coal miner and his half-Indian wife. Her size meant nothing to my brothers and I, and certainly nothing to the Old Man. He tried to rule the roost like a "proper" Sicilian man should, according to his brother; Mom shot that idea down, almost literally (she threw a knife at his head and said that if he hadn't dodged, she'd have gotten him. It nicked his ear. He called the police; they looked at Mom, laughed, and told him to behave himself. He did.)
I could tell you stories . . . and if I did, I'd be sitting here for another week, and you'd all have given up and posted Teal Deer comments. She wasn't Superwoman. Hell, many times Mom made parenting mistakes that would cause most writers at Slate or Salon to nod their heads knowingly. I bring them up to my friends and they nod knowingly! So, no, she wasn't perfect. She used corporal punishment on my brothers and I, although I can still count the number of spankings I got from her on one hand and still have the thumb and pinky left over. She could be wildly overprotective, especially after the death of my youngest brother. And she had an obsession with teaching us music, certain the talents exhibited by her mother's brothers (who were able to teach themselves to play) would come out in us.
But, oh, the stories I could tell.
How she loved to see me read; how she would haunt bookstores and thrift stores, yard sales and flea markets, all to collect books to feed my mind. How she despaired of ever teaching me to cook and sew, this child she'd tried to sculpt into being a little society belle and who turned into a feminist bohemian. How she taught me, even as she desperately tried to keep me safe from everything, not to be afraid to get lost. How to wander. How to explore.
How to take a chance and jump, even if it meant losing everything.
# # # #
Five weeks before, Mom had been released from the hospital, where she'd been brought for an out-of-control UTI. I had finally found doctors who were willing to look harder at this 80-year-old woman with the bad eyes and bad heart and give me solid answers to work with. And the diagnosis was: congestive heart failure, combined with complications from stage six Alzheimer's Syndrome, osteoarthritis, and late-onset diabetes. She couldn't be left home alone anymore. She needed live-in, 24-hour care, which meant someone had to step in while my brother and I were at work. I'd already contacted agencies in Phoenix; one woman sneered at me for thinking I could possibly afford her company's services on my pay, while the other (hospital-based) agency regretfully informed me that I needed to have Mom referred to them first.
So I brought her home, frightened of what the future would hold. On the one hand, my research had given me numbers to work with; live-in care for 12 hours a day would cost me, per month, about $2000. That was about 2/3 of my take-home pay. But not finding a caretaker for Mom could be disastrous. So when my brother announced he'd met a woman who was willing to work with my financial situation, I arranged to meet her the day after I brought Mom home from the hospital.
She was sweet and excited that night, like a child on Christmas Eve. She'd hated the hospital with a passion, but the new medication - Risperidone - had evened out her mood swings. She didn't recognize the apartment we'd lived in for nearly a year, but told me how much she loved it. She kept hugging me and telling me how happy she was that I brought her home. When Mom went to sleep that night, she didn't wake up around 1 a.m. to search for mysterious intruders. I got up at 1 a.m., her usual prowling time; I found her in her bed and went back to mine, thinking that perhaps this would all work out.
At 6 a.m., I heard a thud from her room, and got up to find she'd rolled out of bed and broken her hip.
I called paramedics, who got her to the hospital; I followed, made sure everything was taken care of, and went to work, shaken. It was bad enough that my mother had just ended up back in the hospital from rolling out of her own bed. (To this day, I keep thinking that if I'd only made arrangements with Medicare to have an adjustable bed brought into the apartment, she might still be alive.) Things got worse when I got a call from her admitting physician. Mom's heart problem was a serious issue, the doctor told me. There was a 50% chance she could die in surgery. On the other hand, if Mom didn't have her hip replaced, she'd be bedridden, and her chances of survival would go swiftly downhill.
I told her I would call back, and informed my brothers. They told me they trusted me to make the right decision, as I was Mom's POA.
I would rather be faced with the choice of jumping off a cliff, with a chance of landing on bare soil or in a lava pit. I would take the cliff every time. It wasn't the first time Mom's life had been upended over mine. Doctors told her I was a mass of uterine tumors that was a threat to her health, and she needed to have a hysterectomy. After several months of bleeding and a bad case of walking pneumonia, Mom ended up in the hospital having that hysterectomy. Her heart stopped three times on the table. After she was revived the third time, Mom's doctor pulled what he thought was a lump out of her, until it moved. I was that lump.
Now here I was, holding her life in my hands. A 50% chance of dying in surgery also meant there was a 50% chance she'd survive. I'd seen what a hospital stay had done for her with the UTI. She'd turned mean, violent, and unreasonable, begging to come home in between threatening the nurses, screaming abuse at me and trying to punch and claw my sister-in-law. My mother would have lost her mind if she'd also lost her ability to move, and there'd be no question of losing her.
I called the admitting physician and said, "Do the replacement."
"Good decision," she praised me. "Many patients your mother's age don't survive the loss of mobility."
What she didn't tell me is that many patients who suffer fractured hips at the age of 80 and over usually don't survive that, either.
And Mom didn't.
# # # #
Five weeks after surgery, with Mom having developed phlebitis, the nursing staff at her rehab facility decided to give her a diuretic to ease the buildup of fluid. But you can't give a directed diuretic. Fluid's going to go from everywhere, not just swollen legs and feet. Mom became dehydrated; her potassium levels rose, and she was admitted to the hospital on December 8th. You'll forgive me for not going into further detail. Reliving that night isn't possible right now.
People tell you that grief eases, but what they don't tell you is that it's not an easing of the pain. The pain still feels as if someone's opened me with a blunt knife and then scraped me out. It brings bewilderment and guilt in its wake. I can't understand how I failed to figure out all the details of her failing health and make the connections that could have saved her. I can't believe I let my mother die.
They don't tell you that the guilt is lifelong, and the anger you feel towards people can consume you if you let it.
They don't tell you that losing your mother feels like losing the whole world. You walk, not on solid ground, but fragile glass, and one wrong step will shatter it all over again. You can never rebuild it. All you can do is piece together your own path, and gather what shards you find until, somehow, someday, you find you've made your own world - and there is one shining spot for the woman who used to surround you with her will and joy and presence.
But they also don't tell you that, in rebuilding your path, you learn that there's reclaiming that old self. The child, the adolescent, the young adult - they're gone. They're what used to be when She was still here. And so you don't create as much as you discover You, if that makes sense. You find what really matters to you, what you love and want and need - and you learn to build your world out of all of that. And it starts to grow. Soon you look around and see that where you once saw just a path, there's a neighborhood. It becomes a territory. And then, when you've been busy getting lost, roaming here and there, taking those leaps of faith that feel as much of a disaster as the last one, you find that your wold has risen to embrace you. And in that world are people who love you the way you saw other people love your mother - as friend, confidante, lover, family.
It's such an ordinary cliche, but life goes on, and it will carry you with it, one way or another.
# # # #
I'd hated Phoenix since I was fifteen, a little late since Mom and I had moved there when I was 9 years old. The heat made summer days hellish; Mom got congested whenever the AC ran over 85 degrees, so we kept it there - or, to avoid the triple-digit electric bills from Arizona Public Service, ran box fans even when it was over 115 degrees in July. We had black widows and wolf spiders everywhere, it seemed. My mother, over 50 and suffering nerve damage from an earlier job with a plating company, couldn't find work that paid more than minimum wage, which meant I took summer jobs to buy my school clothes and books, and she worked two jobs to keep the rent and bills paid as well as to put food on the table. I hated the attitude many people showed in response to our situation - that this was how things should be, that somehow my mother deserved to work herself half to death. I despised the rise of John Birch politics, the way supporters of Evan Mecham derided those of us who opposed his bigotry and ignorance as not being "good people," the intent of the GOP to make certain Arizona would always look backwards to "good old days" that were only good for wealthy landowners. Wealthy white landowners, for good measure.
When Mom died in 2009, I didn't plan to stay, but I had no idea where to go. I was adrift for six months. Work, come home, eat, sleep; rinse, repeat. That was my life. I had so much time on my hands, and no idea what to do with it. I had interests I could pursue, and no real drive to do it. Mostly, I wanted to either curl up and sleep, or go hiking and, hopefully, lose myself forever.
My brother suggested I visit friends in Washington state. I went in 2010, and I got lost. After years of living in the Southwest, I was gobsmacked at the sight of so many trees. I wanted to go hug every evergreen I saw. Birches, sycamores, dogwood, cottonwood, firs of almost every kind . . . I felt like a kid again, except that instead of just the Forest Preserves, Clark Beach, and the Navy Pier, I could just drive down any street in the Puget Sound region and go from city to wilderness within several miles.
I went home, made my plans, and moved in July 2011. I thought I'd have a job when I arrived, but because I was a transfer, I still had to interview for the position. I bombed. It took me two months to find a full-time job, and it was a low-paying contract position that ended when the company closed in five months. From then until recently, I followed a pattern all too familiar with too many members here: find a temp position, work, have contract terminated, find a new position. Worse still, I couldn't find anything within the financial field that I was qualified for. My jobs were in accounting, and as my ability was basic, my pay was accordingly low.
And I was in bad physical shape. In 2013 I was diagnosed with hypercalcemia, which is dangerous if left untreated. It was due to hyperparathyroidism, and that was caused by a node on my thyroid that put so much pressure on that gland that my parathyroids went haywire. I was on a temp assignment when I had to have my thyroid and parathyroids removed; my bosses cancelled my assignment because my recovery time would have taken too long - 3 weeks. I found a permanent job on my own, but it was another low-paying job. Put it this way: Kshanta Sawant got a salary for Sea-Tac that would have been my pay for that position, and that was considered middling for the workers at that company.
But things weren't all bad. I was introduced to a mutual friend of best friends, Stefan, and we . . . well, you know how "love at first sight" seems like such a cliche? It's not really love; it's a kind of recognition. You meet someone and realize that this is a person with whom you have a lot in common, someone who understands you and whom you understand, like, respect, admire . . . and the ball gets rolling from there. For many people, this is how they meet a best friend. For Stefan and I, this is how we came to exclaim, "Why the fuck didn't we meet 20 years ago?!" And we're working on making up for those 20 years.
As for work, I finally wised up to the fact that I was miserable and being used as cheap labor. I quit, flung myself into a job search for what I could do and what I was worth. The job I'm in is a six-month contract position - but it's utilizing my skills, helping me increase them, and paying me twice what I was earning before.
# # # #
Is it comforting to know this? Would it be better if I had given in to depression at some point, cut my wrists or shot myself, stepped out in front of a train some dark night near my house, jumped off any of the bridges nearby? I can tell you that I came close to all of those. There were days that I was convinced everyone who knew me would be better off if I'd just leave the world; I couldn't even take care of an old woman who loved me, so how could I do anything else right?
But it was seeing what I'd built, even if it was haphazard and pocked by many failures - being unable to find a job in my field, or even start a new career, after leaving Phoenix; my medical emergencies and the resulting debt they brought; being broke for three years and losing almost everything I had - that convinced me I had more to lose if I left. I fell in love. I don't have much in the way of possessions, but I'm finding they don't mean much to me - just let it work properly, and I'm fine with it. As for a career, I've discovered the difference between working in a field and working for a particular company - anything that sparks your interest is a good thing, but never put your faith in any company or corporation, for there lies madness and self-delusion.
I am slowly regaining my ability to write. When I received an email from DK that urged me to start participating again, I laughed. Really? Me? I'm no great thinker or political savant. I'm no Meteor Blades by any means, or Angry Mouse. I'm just who I am, a storyteller, and my stories are nothing significant. But I do have friends here. And it was Tip O'Neill who remarked, famously, "All politics is local." I'll have to find a way to contribute, even if my stories discuss the follies of Puget Sound as opposed to the follies of Phoenix.
Time flies, whether or not you're having fun. I can look back and wonder how it's only been five years. In one day, it will be the fifth anniversary of my mother's death. In two days, it will be the fifth anniversary of the day I wondered, "What do I do now?" and started moving forward.
Hello, Mom. Miss you. Love you. Hope you're doing okay on the other side, and I'm doing okay over here.
Your loving daughter,
AKA Gemina13.