Twenty-Three Years Ago Today

 

On this day, twenty-three years ago, my mother died of lung cancer. She was 64, the same age as I am right now. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around that--mostly, I feel pretty young still. And aside from some minor ailments, I feel pretty healthy, too. Certainly, I’m nowhere near ready to say goodbye. I know Mother wasn’t ready either.

At the end, once she got on hospice, I moved in with them. She had had a convulsion caused by radiation to her brain after the cancer moved there. She passed out on their hard tile floor, and cracked her head open, took 17 stitches to close the wound. Daddy pulled a hernia lifting her off the floor. So when he had his hernia surgery, I closed-up my house a hundred miles away, and moved in for the duration.

I miss Mother, but I am a clear-eyed realist and will never re-write history. She was complicated, and often difficult. Warm and fuzzy did not come naturally to her, but she did have her moments. She loved babies. With each of mine, she was a big help when they were born. They loved her but as they grew up they also recognized that she could be frosty and judgmental.

Her bugaboo was expectations. She wanted everyone around her to conform to her expectations. Friends, husband, children, grandchildren were all supposed to behave a certain way and when they didn’t, or couldn’t, she felt their failure as a personal affront. Everything with Mother was tit-for-tat. As example, at Christmas when she sent out cards, she made a list of all the people she mailed cards to and as their reciprocal cards came in the mail, she would put a check-mark by their name. At the end of the season, all those without a check-mark were purged from her Christmas card list for the next year. She was quick to notice a slight and it took her a long time to forgive. She often said she could forgive but she never forgot.

Truth is, this was a chink in her armor, a product of her longing to be loved. But it wasn’t enough to simply love her, you also had to cherish her and make her feel it. This was probably partly due to her being the product of her mother’s first failed marriage. The man who raised her from infancy was not her biological father but her stepfather, a fact she didn't learn until she was well grown. For some reason, this diminished her in her own mind. She always felt her mom and dad loved her less than they did the children they shared together.

But she did have a lighthearted side, too. She loved parties, and she adored playing games. It became a holiday tradition around our house to play games, a tradition that lives on to this day. She was a career woman before there were many career women, and fiercely independent. A civil servant, she rose so high and had so many outstanding performance citations and pay-grade increases that when she retired the Navy put on a grand ceremony for her, with a flag presentation and speeches. It made the local newspaper. She would have been honored by how many of her co-workers and supervisors came to pay respects at her funeral.

We are all complex. But for some reason, we sometimes forget our parents are just as complex as the rest of us. There’s so much history and emotional baggage attached. My relationship with Mother was often tempestuous. We had many times we went months without speaking. Too high of expectations on both sides, I suppose. But there were also times when we sought out each other’s company to shop for something special, or to go to a girlie movie together with banana splits afterwards. Mother loved a banana split. I once took her to a runway style show with high-fashion models and thought she would faint from excitement. For weeks she talked about it and  told everybody, bragged, I’m sure. It was one time I exceeded her expectations.

The last four weeks I spent with her were some of the sweetest. I have little memories of things we said, conversations we had before she became incoherent. I wanted the end to be peaceful for her but I cannot say that it was. She struggled and fought just like she did all her life. Her fight ended at 4:30 a.m. on February 2, 1995. I still have things I would like to tell her about, and things from her I want to know. I believe she would love Wayne,  and my grandson Jake. But she would not approve of this old house I’m living in. She never understood my affinity for old things. She was all about new, new, new. As time goes by memories begin to fade, but I still dream about her now and then, and I can still remember the way she sounded when she said my name a certain way.

Onward....

The Fear of Dying

I have been thinking about fear of death lately. Watching my cat slowly die from lymphoma has convinced me that this fear is not exclusive to only human beings. When the cat's health goes downhill after his treatments, he acts very fearful. He even will rush about a bit, as if he thinks he can outrun the bad feelings he's experiencing. He wants to be held, and does not want to be left alone. It's different from when he just feels puny. It's more like he senses that death is near and he needs to escape it.

My mother died in 1995 of lung cancer. It was the quick-acting kind of cancer. Even after some pretty aggressive chemo-therapy and radiation treatments, she still only lived 7 months from her diagnosis. About 5 weeks before she died, I moved in with her and Daddy. He needed help. She was on hospice, by they only come twice a week, at least that was the case back in 1995. Those first weeks after I was there, before she became semi-comatose, she seemed afraid to sleep. She sat up through the early morning hours, staring at the television. She watched endless movies that she had taped on her VCR. After it became too difficult for her to get up and put in a new tape, she watched straight television, whatever channel her finger happened to scroll to. Late night commercials then could get a little bit lurid, sexy, half-dressed babes extolling the watcher to call them for phone sex, or psychics with fake Jamaican accents, wanting to run up you credit card. Mother stared at all of this stuff, unceasingly, falling asleep by default sometimes, sitting up in her hospital bed. She seemed to feel more secure in her aliveness with the noise of the television blaring.

It's something that we all take for granted somehow, that we are alive, that we will have tomorrow, that our hearts will beat and our lungs will expand and contract silently. As we get older we start thinking in a fleeting way about the fact that most of our life is probably behind us. And then we KNOW the longer half IS behind us. And once we get to my dad's age, or beyond, it must be something we think about in a clandestine way every single day.

I went house-hunting with my aunt this week. She's in her early 70s but is vibrant and in excellent health. She walks regularly, fishes, and until just a couple of years ago, still went mountain climbing. And yet, she kept eliminating certain houses because the stairs were too steep and in a few years she wouldn't be able to maneuver them, or mentally checking off the places that already had bars in the baths or railings along outdoor paths. She's thinking about her death, but indirectly, the way we all do during our lives.

There's probably no cure for the death fear. I've felt it most of my life, tried to imagine the world without me in it. Since I'm a pragmatist, not given to faith in an afterlife, it sometimes frightens me to my core to think about dying. Will I know, consciously, when the end is at hand. I hope for it to be fast and sudden, without unyielding pain. There's a very good book about the end of life. I recommend it to everyone who wants to know the science of dying. The title is How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter by Sherwin Nuland.

Onward ....