My mother has been in rehab off and on for the last three months regaining her ability to walk after a series of falls. The nursing center sent her to the hospital on Monday because her white blood cell count had risen so high. There, an MRI revealed a cancerous mass on her liver. It is terminal.
The ensuing week has been filled with hours of conferences with doctors and case managers and nurses and my somewhat befuddled and disbelieving mother. By Friday, I had moved her to an assisted living home minutes from my house where she is now on hospice care.
I'm not looking for a pity party. I know I'm not going through anything different from the experiences endured by everyone else in the world who survives his or her parents. Besides, my father and younger sister died of cancer, so I've been to the hospice rodeo before. I have, however, had some not-necessarily-connected thoughts I felt the need to express.
I am not usually the expressing type, which is why my relationship with my mother has been so problematic, much like the relationship between oil and water. My mother is loving, emotional, dramatic, given to high highs and low lows, quick to anger and quick to forget anger, unbridled of both tongue and appetite, impatient, and warm. I am guarded, stingy with both affection and emotion, standoffish, logical, slow to anger and slow to forgive, knee-jerkishly rebellious, and cold. As I write this, however, I feel safe in the cloak of my pseudonym, and the fact that only a handful of people will read it.
I am not a great caregiver. My parenting style would have been characterized by Daniel Moynihan as benign neglect. Unfortunately for me, illness has exacerbated my mother's character. She is more herself, for better and for worse, than ever, as if the cancer has eaten away the thin disguise required by etiquette. Her life force is burning brightly despite the deterioration of her body and her mind. Her incessant and sometimes irrational demands grate on my exhausted nerves. Every twinge of anger I feel is immediately followed by the overwhelming guilt that is the last remnant of my Catholic upbringing.
Yesterday, I left the assisted living home after my mother went to sleep. I went to Trader Joe's in search of comfort food, and yet another bottle of the vodka I had been pouring down my throat after coming home from the hospital every night this week. I was as tender as if all of my skin had been removed. I walked slowly through the store picking up Hollandaise sauce and chocolate cupcakes, feeling like I had a low-grade fever. I came home and lit a cigarette (genetically programmed for cancer as I am, I intend to give the Great Crab that is my birth sign a variety of choices for attack). I thought about my childhood - my mother raging at the librarians in my conservative town for refusing to allow me to check out Ship of Fools because some of the characters fuck, my mother writing a two page, single-spaced response to my junior high's inane dress code, my mother giving me book catalogues and telling me to check off what I wanted, my mother sewing clothes for me into my teens, my mother starting the special education department in my school district, and my mother swearing me to secrecy in 1968 because the local paper published that two people in my town voted for the Peace and Freedom party in the presidential election (Benjamin Spock and Eldridge Cleaver if I recall correctly) and she didn't want anyone to know that she was one of them.
My mother has always been afraid of death. It would be a cruel irony that one so fearful would have to confront her own mortality, but her mental confusion creates a soothing filter for the truth, not unlike those used on old movie cameras to blur the faces of aging movie stars. I hope that filter grows thicker in the coming days, and that those days contain only the yellow sunshine of spring and the warm winds coming in through the window screens. I hope that I can imitate a sweet person long enough to get her through this period as peacefully and painlessly as possible. I hope that my mother laughs again before she dies because she's got the greatest laugh in the world. I hope that I can stop bursting into tears at the slightest provocation because it will be very embarrassing at the office. I hope that the Medicare that is covering the costs of my mother's hospice care (as it covered her rehabilitation and her hospital stays) is not destroyed. And I hope that the few of you who have read this will forgive this disjointed yawp of a diary.