Things to Say to a Dead Mom

           My mom is on my kitchen table, cremation no. 91739 (I accidentally spelled it “creamation”, but there’s nothing creamy about it) performed on February 2, 2012 by Long island Cremation Co., Inc. (another business I couldn’t imagine owning. I feel like it’s one of those operations passed down through generations, fathers grooming their sons to burn and box bodies. Lucky boys.)

            I put her next to my Aunt Olga for the night. I figured I’d give them a chance to catch up on things. Last time they saw each other it was Thanksgiving, about three years ago. Our dinner was like a scene in a black comedy. My mother was going on and on to my aunt, who was too polite to tell her that she had no idea who she was.

            Today we’re bringing Mom to the cemetery where her parents are. The cemetary people are going to insert her in the ground next to them. I think she’d like that. She adored her parents, particularly her dad.

            I’ve got her next to the computer right now. I just had a conversation with her (albeit one-sided.)

            Now, her soul isn’t in that box, I know, but still I felt compelled to say something to her remains while I had them.

            Writers are always looking for climatic moments.

            I put my left hand on her box, and my right hand on my aunt’s box for support, and I asked my mom if she loved me.

            There was no answer.

            But I know my mom did love me. It just wasn’t a traditional love. It was a love often smothered in her issues. You know how you can use a pillow for rest¸ or to kill someone? That was my mother.

            She had no idea of what she was doing. I told I knew that.

            I told my mom that I forgave her.

            I told her I love her, and I appreciate the things she did for me.

            I kissed my index finger and planted in on her box.

            There’s something about physical remains that are so, well...physical.

            You can talk to someone’s spirit anytime –I believe ­­–but there’s something extra poignant about having that box there to hone in on. A focal point, if nothing else.

            Another thing I look for as a writer is a focal point in a scene. It’s like an anchor.

            Life begets writing, and writing begets life.

            My aunt once told me, “Each man is the sum total of everything that has happened to him.”

            True. I might add: “Each man is also the sum total of all the relationships he’s had.”

            My relationship with my mom is (was?) complicated and sometimes dark, but in the end it comes down to this simple fact: we loved each other.

            It takes death to bring things down to the bone.

Grief: It's Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

             I've always been awkward with death.

            Not that anyone copes well –though maybe they do. Like Grandma Mazur in Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books. A wake is a social event for Gramdma – not to be missed. Of course that’s fiction, but I wonder, does anyone handle death with ease? (Morticians do, of course. How do they feel when someone close dies? And how to they manage to confront man’s mortality every day, and "pretty up" what remains? They are either the most well-adjusted people in the world, or the most f---ed up.)

            Faced with the passing of friends’ loved ones through the years, I’d been unable to deal with wakes (are they called wakes because they’re in the wake of lives?) and Shiva calls. I just couldn’t bear the sorrow – theirs, and mine.

            I’ve always felt a universal empathy, which either helps me be a writer or is the reason I’m a writer – or both. But when it comes to living, it’s a problem, because I feel everyone’s pain. I absolutely avoid the news for this reason.

            And death has been the worst. I do believe the end of a life is not the end of a soul, but it’s the pain of those left behind I can’t take.

            My neighbor Harriet died a few years ago. They sat Shiva right across the street from me. I couldn’t go. I just couldn’t. About a year later I summoned up to write a note to her husband and leave it on his door. I apologized for not paying a call. I explained that I didn’t handle death well. I told him I loved Harriet – and I did. I closed it with this: “Harriet tried her hardest to be a good person and help people, and you can’t ask for more than that.” It was the truth.

            My friend’s husband died suddenly at work, leaving her with two young children and another on the way. She was, understandably, consumed with grief. I told her, “You have to remember the love you shared, and you have to believe that he’s in a better place.”

            She stopped weeping for a moment, looked at me and said, “I don’t care about all that. I just want my husband back.”

            And I got that. And I didn’t know what to say.

            I still don’t.

            There is nothing to say when someone dies. I mean, there are lots of things to say, but none of them will do a thing to console those left behind. It's our friendship and love that comforts them, I realize now. It's what we don’t say. That’s another reason why it’s so hard for me to deal with death. I’m a writer. I rely on words. If words can’t be counted on, what then?

            But the grief has been the heart of my problem. The grief that surged up like a tidal wave, threatening to drown me.

            The grief is what held me at bay, unable to effectively be present during those times of loss.

            It’s a relief to know that I’m better at my own grieving than at comforting others. Perhaps because I write about my life, I’ve given great thought to the day I’d lose my mother.

            Still, it was a shock. Isn’t death always the last thing expected? Even if she was eighty-one, clearly suffering from the early stages of dementia (which I knew too well from my Aunt Olga.) Despite these factors, I never thought the police would have to break down my mother’s door to find her in bed (not expecting to die anytime soon, she hadn’t given me a key, and I’d never thought to ask for one.)

            And it was a sucker punch, this loss. Coming on the heels of losing my aunt.

            But I’m okay. Handling it much better than the previous deaths I’d been exposed to. I guess death has become more familiar. Maybe that’s the morticians’ secret. Familiarity.

            I have my mom’s cat. The poor thing looks to be about twenty years old, bowlegged and all spine. She yowls incessantly and follows me everywhere. She’s hideously mean to my other felines, who take up a Halloween "black cat" defensive stance which I'd never seen in person before. 

            I have my mom’s things. Her favorite scarf. The pictures she carried of my sons. The meticulous notes she took while watching Dr. Oz. The tutu I wore when I was six, which was hanging in her bedroom. Her many, many papers I’m sorting through.

            I have to deal with the things she left behind. Everything.

            I hear her voice, asking the questions she always posed. She had so many questions. I only hope she’s got some clarity now.

            I was raised without religion, but I know this is not the end.  It’s hard not knowing just what this is, and what we are in relation to our dead. I guess that’s where the faith comes in.

            The faith that was never instilled in me.

            Death is, among other things, a lesson in faith. Death and faith are both so vague;  both so muddied by our frenzied, fruitless attempts to explain and complicate them. Untampered with, they are simple.

            They are calm.

            I’m trying to follow their lead.

Tightrope Tuesday: A Week With Mom

I could be happy here...as long as laptops are allowed.

This Tightrope Tuesday is a bit different in that it focuses on the time I've spent parenting my mother.

How can a child parent a mother? You may ask.

The answer is, not well.

It seems to happen with the children of alcoholics. I remember identifying with David Hasselhoff’s daughter as she pleaded for him to get up off the floor and go to his acting job, which he would lose if he didn’t show up that day.

Sometimes children have to hold the world up, like Atlas.

My mother is not an alcoholic, but she is mentally ill. I don’t know exactly what she is¸ because she never went to therapy. But I’ve spent much couch time diagnosing her in absentia.

The consensus is: bipolar. Maybe medication would’ve helped. Maybe my childhood could’ve been rescued by a little pill. We’ll never know.

I’m not going to get into all that “David Copperfield” crap – as Holden Caulfield calls it. If you want to know about my lousy childhood, read my novel Saved by the Music. You’ll get the gist. There were newspapers. Lots of newspapers, everywhere. The New York Times gives me the chills.

Mom was (is) a hoarder. Now her stuff is not only piled – it’s decaying. The house stinks.

(I couldn't find a Google image as bad as her house interior looks.)

If you read my Facebook updates you’ll know that my mom arrived on my doorstep last Monday evening. That fateful morning, the electric company shut down her lights – the culmination to years of warnings that she needed to have her circuit box repaired.

Like a little girl she phoned me, “Selene, something terrible has happened. The house just went dark.”

She was at a neighbor’s, because she’d lost yet another cell phone a month ago, and had neglected to replace it. But frankly I think she likes asking for help. She gets attention from it. Oh, help me, help me. She's like Blanche DuBois: "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers."

Naturally I thought she hadn’t paid the bill (which has happened.) It took a while to ascertain the real problem.

I called an electrician and arranged for them to come. I thanked the neighbor. I told my mother to go home and leave the neighbor alone (she stayed there for three hours, and he'd never even met her before!) Then I hung up and went about my life – which means I sat down to write.

But the work on her house never got done that day. The electrician came, and my mother refused to let him do the work because she had to “think about it.”

That’s how she wound up here.

The week has been a series of unfortunate events. She’s lost her car keys twice (they are gone at the moment) and also the new cell phone she purchased on Wednesday. The lights are still not on, though the work was finally done and the electric company claims to have restored her service. She paid some handy man the hardware store clerk recommended $75 to come and flip her breaker switch because she didn’t think she was strong enough to do it herself, even though a neighbor had tried. (Her poor neighbors!)

Through this all I have been nice –mostly. Sometimes she pushes me too far. How many times can I answer the same questions? She asks how to use the microwave repeatedly (for years, she’s been asking how many minutes for tea, and what buttons to push.)

She sure knows what buttons of mine to push!

She forgets the things she asked me a moment ago¸ and when I answer again, she forgets again. You may call it dementia, but she’s always been demented. It’s just worse now.

People ask me, “Don’t you feel bad for her?”

I say, “No. I feel bad for me. I don’t want to be her parent anymore. She never learns.”

Last night I left her by her car waiting for AAA to come give her a jump¸ even though I knew they couldn’t do it without the real key (she found some skeleton emergency key, but she has a short circuit in her alarm that has to be clicked off.) I told her this, but she didn’t listen. I had to go home to my kids. So I called road service and I told her, “Good luck.”

About an hour later she called me from another neighbor’s. (At this point I think she must’ve hit every house on the block.) “Selene, they couldn’t jump the car without the regular key.”

“I know, Mom. I told you that would happen.”

“The driver was very nasty. I think he was drunk.”

“I doubt that.”

Earlier she’d called the pharmacist “a jerk” when he didn’t want to renew her prescriptions sooner than authorized. “I can’t help it if I lost my pills,” she’d grumbled.

“What should I do?” she asked now.

What else? “Take a cab here,” I told her.

“Oh, okay,” she said, sounding relieved.

The only people having a good week are the cab drivers. They are making a mint.

So my challenge this week has been not as a true parent, but as an unwilling surrogate to my mom.

Incidentally, I left out the parts where she turns into a raging lunatic. That’s her other persona. Her whole voice changes. It’s a scary tone, but I always preferred it because at least it was authoritative. No child wants to be responsible for their mother.

It’s been a helluva week. My son Michael says this is an endurance test. The thing that helps the most is that I’m not alone in this experience. My kids see that my mom is nuts. Before, no one believed me. She can put on a good short-term act, and she’s real good at playing the wounded victim in front of people.

Most of all, this week has been a lesson in appreciating the life I have.

I worried that I’d be like her. I’m not.

So there.