So …
My mom died. I write this, not because I want to bring down the legions of people reading this, but because I need to write about it. Because it sucks, but it sucks in all sorts of weird ways. Some of it I can’t process yet, more than a week later, some of it I want to crate up and never hear from again, but some of it sucks actively, rightthissecond.
It’s a bitch to be outside. Ever since Saturday, when she finally, truly “lost” (as far as the rest of us are concerned), there’s been this overwhelming sense of otherness. Driving home I wanted to shout at people in other cars, send them back to their houses to grieve, to mourn. Instead they just went about some personal business that required over-sized, novelty, shit-eating grins. It’s a pain in the ass: to explain to neighbors where you were, to business contacts why you were out of reach, etc. All of it requires giving up a piece of knowledge that serves only to depress them and me to have to rehash.
I’m hoping it ends, feeling like an outsider. It’s not that crazy to be short a parent. I got four more years of my mom than she did of her own mother whom she loved dearly. But I keep thinking of a kid I went to school with who lost his mom in second grade. For the next six years we treated him with kid gloves, never picked on him, never teased him, not out of any goodness, but because he seemed fundamentaly broken and maybe we could catch that disease too.
I don’t write this because I want to or because I want anyone else to read it. I’m writing it to divest myself of it. I want my goddamn memories back. When I walked into the hospital room on Thursday, I couldn’t come up with any specific memories of she and I. It’s a stupid game to try to play because of course you wind up with a huge mental block right there. It’s like trying not to think of a blue-eyed polar bear. But I was ok with it, because those memories that I couldn’t recall in specific still coalesce into a warm fuzzy feeling in general. So I was ok on Thursday. After Saturday, I’m freaking out that all of those memories, all the warm fuzzy will be forever replaced by a series of very visceral, very recent, very ugly memories of what it looks like to die. Fuck me. It’s a damn fine test of religious faith and not much else. The cancer that had put her there, it feels like it sat and waited for me to get there. And then it started beating on her even better than ever before. It beat her until she couldn’t speak words anymore. It beat her until the sounds she was making turned into simple grunts. Then it beat those out of her too. It beat her badly enough every touch was pain to her. It set her on fire, it made her throw up a river of shit and then throw up a goddamn eel of coagulated black blood. I think my faith in anything went into one of those pink sick buckets with the eel.
When she was lucid I managed to choke out that it was the bravest thing I’d ever seen. She’d always told us, “No life support,” but that’s an easy thing to say in abstract conversation. To act on it, or for my dad to support her doing that, I can’t ever imagine being that strong. She said, “I’m a yellow-bellied coward. If there was something else I could do, I would.” We stood there, we sat there, we laid there, my dad, my aunt and I in a weird sort of sentry duty. There was no way to win, no way to protect her or save her, but there was no question one of would always be standing there when her eyes opened. It hurts now, but I’d be heart-broken forever if I thought she’d ever have woken up in that room alone. When the actual, for-reals end came, it was obvious. Her breathing, which had been a lurid imitation of respiration, ripping air into her body through her mouth (twisted into a sort of maw), changed into a different sound, like someone using a hand pump on a bike tire and getting tired of the job.We all stood up, a dozen or so of us, and stood around her in a semi-circle and watched the breathing end. It was fifteen minutes if it was a second and it was a mean joke: there had to be twenty or thirty breaths where everyone thought it was the last. No one spoke, but people gasped and shoulders shrugged, stomachs knotted and just when you wanted it to be over, it was and you realized you fucked up and should have wished for the opposite. Except that’s not really true. We were going to lose her no matter what and we were going to get hurt and oh well. All that really matters is she doesn’t hurt anymore.