I keep thinking of things I need to write about, since the whole ‘mom’ episode has begun to settle into dust – pardon my pun.

About the process of planning burials (fire!), about how odd it must be to work in that industry. About reading a certificate that describes the end of a loved one’s life in stark black ink on paper that looks like money.

About what it’s like to walk into someone’s home, when they’re gone, truly gone.

It’s been difficult to find time. With typically brutal timing, my employer has decided that upcoming holidays means it’s time to kick into high gear, so I’m suddenly swamped with work again. And of course the logistics of death consumes so much time that it’s hard to actually just think about what it all means.

Last weekend, we (me, barb, my cousins sam and amy, kenny and sabine) gathered at my mother’s house to begin the process of dealing with the physical remnants of a life.

I’ve been lucky; my friend Kenny and I made a deal. He’s back from his tour, and needed a place to live, and I needed help dealing with mom’s house. So he and his lady Sabiné have moved in. They’ve done a lot of the cleaning I wasn’t ready to do, and more importantly, they make the house still feel like home. People I love still live there, and when I walk into mom’s little living room, it’s not grim, dusty and depressing, but instead warm, clean, and melancholy.

My mother wasn’t a pack rat. She was fiercely, obsessively organized. This makes my task very much easier than it might have been. Yet, in eighty years of life, one accumulates things. I’ve found a packet of confederate money, a WWI german iron cross, the official seal of the school we we helped build in the early seventies (Daybreak Institute). I found my father’s wedding ring, a strange assortment of my father’s key rings and pocket knives, a beautiful silver money clip. I found notebooks of my mother’s poetry and notebooks of my father’s sketches. I found sheet music to ‘the pink pather’, which I asked Kenny to learn for me so he can play it on his sax.

I found an entire photo album of my gramma Cookie’s that reads like an eighteen year old’s facebook page; there’s a short story to be found in it, as soon as I have time to read all the notes and copy all the pictures. My grandfather was a handsome, dashing womanizer, and it’s clear gramma had set her sights on him but not yet made him hers.

I found pictures of myself, my brother; my mother in a vietnam era army field jacket that was mine in 1972, then hers in the eighties, and and now my daughter Ruby’s.

I found pictures of my aunt Penny, and pictures of myself and Sam; we looked at pictures of our weird shared childhoods and both remembered being there, so many years ago. It’s been a long, long time since she and I have talked about being kids. I think we’d both forgotten; no one else really remembers, now. Her younger sister amy, maybe a bit, but amy’s an elemental sort who lives entirely in the now, and of course her mom and mine, my father and brother, are all gone.

The process is far from done. Yet it helps to internalize what’s happened. Seeing my mother’s bedroom empty, working through things about which she always told me “take care of this when I go”. Looking at belongings of my mother’s and father’s, here now in my home, my things. It helps. Yet I still think it every day, say it out loud to myself; “she’s gone.”

It has helped a great deal to share this with Sam. We met a few nights ago at a bar in los gatos; ostensibly because I wanted to give her my mother’s wedding ring, but I think more because both of us needed to keep taking about it all. Sam told Olivia stories about her mother, and about my mother and father. She told stories about me as a child that made my face go red. She described my parents through her mom’s eyes, as ‘beatnik poets and artists’.

It wasn’t a childhood like our children have. She grew up like a gypsy, never the same place for more than a year or so. My family were the anchors for hers; the place they could always come back to, when blood family wasn’t as close. My parents were the hard drinking, pot smoking intellectuals to her Penny’s wild child hippy, part parents, part siblings.

Seeing my daughter’s reaction to it, telling stories about a childhood that was far more unique than I tend to realize, helped me put it all in context. My relationship with my mother, with Sam’s mother, our entire family history helped me get my head around the loss of our final parent.

This weekend, I bring in a dumpster to get rid of some very old, very dusty furniture, and cart away the one or two items I’m keeping. But knowing Kenny’s there in the house, and knowing Sam and Amy remember what it was like growing up as we did, helps me not feel alone in this process. There’s continuity, from family to friends, and the house is very much a living place, with music and laughter. Someone’s reading my mother’s books, looking at my father’s paintings, and feeding the birds and squirrels that were mom’s best company the final three years of her life.

Loved ones who are still here are the most valuable thing I can think of; and I need to be sure I tell them this.

One week ago about this time, I was in a hospital room, slowly dialing up the morphine drip and watching my mother suck irregular, shallow breaths. Thee hours later I drove home and collapsed in sheer exhaustion.

Six am last sunday, I woke suddenly, worrying my phone was still in silent, that I might have missed a call. 45 minutes after that, my phone rang, with the news that my mother had slipped quietly away.

It feels like month away, already. And the prior monday, when I checked her into the hospital for what was supposed to be a few tests seems half a year gone.

How are you, is the question I keep getting asked. By co workers, relatives, by friends, by a drunk-dialing old friend who called me at one am last night.

And my answer is – I don’t know. Because most of the time, I feel fine. The sobs that hit me starting when I told the doctor ‘take the mask of’ came in waves the next two or three days, hitting me randomly and passing quickly. And then they stopped, suddenly.

It’s a hard thing to explain to those who hasn’t seen an elderly relative die. There’s no way to explain the absolute certainty that it’s time. My mother’s death was not a tragedy. It was a release, a natural ending to a life already artificially extended with medication and technology.

I’ve witnessed tragic death. Young people struck down by violence or cancer, or people still hale and hearty in old age likewise taken by disease, not the simple end of the body’s span. I was there after my brother’s suicide; a tradgendy not because of his death, but because of the tragic failure of his own mind, and the support system that should have prevented his end. But by the time he took action to end his life, that end was inevitable.

My mother’s death ended pain, fear and suffering. Her mind and body were failing, after a long life. Our bodies have a shelf-life; we can extend this with care, and with luck, or we can shorten it. My mother, like most of her generation, took up smoking when it was cool, and harmless, and she carried on that habit long after she knew what the surgeon general says. She threw the dice and said, if it kills me then, ok, but I’m enjoying it now.

But whatever we do sets the clock forward or back a decade, or two; damage done simply skews the numbers. When the expiration date comes – when the warranty expires – then the machine begins to fail.

My mother’s failure was gradual; she maintained the ability to care for herself until the last couple of months. When she hit the final cliff, it was steep, and short; and she knew she was there. She knew, and lacked only the physical strength and the mental resolve to take control of her own departure. But she made that clear, in writing and in earnest, gasping pleas for help – I can’t go on any more.

So when the doctor asked me what I wanted to do – carry on the fight, postpone the inevitable, or ease the departure, I was able to calmly issue the order. Mentally, I’d had the dialog with myself a dozen times, and know without question what both I and my mother wanted.

The tears I wept, later, after I’d left the hospital for a bit to eat and make necessary phone calls, were not over death. They were tears of release, knowing the terror I’d seen in my mother’s eyes the last six weeks was gone forever; that by the time I was back in the hospital, she would be flying on a morphine drip. Her pain, her fear, her anxiety, for the last time, would be completely gone. I wept because, finally, I know I could help her; I was no longer helpless.

After she was gone, I alternated between numb, sad, and feeling relief; the thought of her ongoing fear and misery had given me incredibly nightmares for weeks. Knowing what we’d saved her, and what we’d saved the living family ended those nightmares, and set me free in a way nothing has in years.

The following monday I went back to work; primarily because I needed something to do that didn’t have anything to do with life or death; tuesday I went to work because I found the backlog of tasks I had to be a crushing load on my co workers. So I worked the week, taking a bit of time as I needed, and sleeping any chance I got.

“I’m ok,” I kept saying; people think I’m pretending. They think I’m playing stoic tough-guy hero. But the truth is, when I say it, I feel it. I’m experiencing sadness, when I think about it, and at odd moments like today, thinking about needing to go buy mom groceries, or wanting to ask her a question about a locket of my grandmother’s with two old photos. Who are these people I wanted to ask; but no one who’d know is now left. I’ll never know who they are.

BUt the sadness, the last week, seems smaller each day.

But other things are bothering me.

I teared up today when I was listening to the school director speak at my daughter’s new school; I started thinking about my kids, and felt a wash of love and sadness and found tears in my eyes. And I’m finding I can’t seem to do anything; every single thing I did at work last week took twice as long as usual, and I know damn well I wasn’t doing it as well as I normally do.

And then there’s the fatigue. I can’t tell if it’s just left-overs; the incredible stress of the last six weeks, the flu I was still battling the day mom died. I can’t tell if it’s something new, some cold I picked up at the hospital, or teh lingering flu turning into a lingering infection.

The fatigue is absolutely crushing. And I can’t tell if it’s my body failing, or if it’s emotional. But it frustrates the hell out of me to fall asleep on the couch at three in the afternoon after doing nothing all day.

Certainly, I understand grief. It’s a bitch, grief, and I’ve counseled others through it, and gone through it myself. The universal truth about grief seems to be that the only cure is time, and that the time seems to have a normal, fairly predictable life span. INtellectually I know I’m nowhere near done with it; I’ve in fact just begun it.

But it frustrates me – things I can’t fix, things I can’t manage, things I can’t control. With the weight of my mother’s suffering lifted, with the physical responsibility for her care gone, I want to let myself feel free; I also feel an intense need to solve things left hanging. I can’t do either; I can’t quite let go on the one hand, and can’t summon the energy and mental clarity to take care of all the business and physical work that needs doing. INstead, I pass out of the couch and wake up two hours later with my face in a puddle of drool, wondering where the day went and why I still can’t get up off the couch.

When people ask me how I am, I say I’m ok; and I mean it. I just can’t tell, right now, exactly what ok means.

I had a long conversation today, with Sam (my surrogate cousin, my imaginary first love, the girl my brother and I used to fight over).

I had to tell her, in far too few words and in a conversation broken by lousy cell signals and interrupted by teenage children, about the looming loss of the last of our parents.

Sam and I are not related by blood; her mother Penny was my mother’s best friend. I have very little in the way of true blood family; we’re some odd California branch of a family tree with roots in North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. I had no idea what aunt or cousin meant growing up, because Penny and her daughters were closer, physically and emotionally, than any blood relation. They were my best friends, and meant as much to me as my own brother did.

We lost Penny to cancer fifteen years or so ago; I can’t recall the date because, for reasons too stupid and painful to address at the moment, I learned of her death and funeral months after she died.

Not so long after – twelve years ago, give or take – my father was taken down by a heart attack, and then my brother that same year, by his own hand.

My mother’s the last of our shared parents.

My mother’s decline has been steady. Born in the late twenties and a child of the era between the world wars, she took up smoking early, and kept that habit for nearly seventy years. Only a diagnosis of emphysema stopped her, and to her credit, she stubbed out that last cigarette and never looked back at it. But anxiety was really the trouble. Because anxiety masked a condition far worse than she’d admit to, and worsened her already severe shortness of breath.

I do not know when she was diagnosed with it; she never told me. I learned of it only when I had to drive her to a doctor’s appointment. My mother, typically, had been denying her condition, refusing treatment, hiding her inhalers from me. Prescribed oxygen 24×7, she was using it ‘as needed’, which means only when she felt like it. And of course, she’d been lying to her doctor as well.

My mother, from the time she was a child, has felt that she must ‘keep up appearances’, as her mother taught her. Which means always pretending to authority, always showing a brave, funny, capable face. Yet, the other side of her is a devout counter-culturist; authority is something to be resented, to be defied. She taught me to break the rules without getting caught, taught me to defy and flaunt. And so, of course, she would present a front to me and to her doctor; to me, she denied any significant medical issue, and to the doctor, she’s say yes I’m using my oxygen and yes I’m doing the exercises and yes, I’m feeling pretty good.

But she wasn’t fine. And she wasn’t following what the doctor said. And she wasn’t telling me any of it.

It wasn’t until her emphysema took a drastic turn, a couple of years ago, that she finally needed help. And only when speaking directly to the doctor did I find exactly how my mother had been denying the severity of her condition.

Of course, when I tried to talk to my mother’s doctor about it, about mom’s life-long mental health issues, about her denial, about her crushing anxiety and panic attacks, the doctor brushed it aside. Never mind my insights as her son, never mind my obsessive medical research (i read medical and psychological diagnostic and treatment texts for fun); I was a fucking layman and my opinions carried all the weight and interest of an expulsion of gas.

My family, what I know of it, has a history of mental illness and addiction. My brother suffered for many years from an almost entirely imaginary condition; my maternal grandmother was both a severe alcoholic, and bi-polar. Her mother had some other ailment, the details of which I’ve never heard. So it’s no great surprise that my mother suffers an impressive stew of conditions. She’s always spoken of agoraphobia, though I frankly think it’s more skin to a social anxiety disorder. She also frequently shows signs of obsessive-compulsive behavior, and when she was younger, and uncontrollably violent temper. Anxiety and panic have been part of her life so long she doesn’t ever recognize them.

Of course there’s no mention of any of this in her Kaiser charts; she’s never sought any significant treatment for it. It’s news to my mother’s doctors that she has any anxiety at all, let alone my assertion that she’s been largely crippled by these conditions.

After we saw her doctor together, my mother accepted, with very little fight, that she needed to keep her oxygen on all the time. However, she also decided this meant she could no longer leave the house.

Ever.

My mother managed to beat back her fears for most of her life. She worked, successfully, in libraries and book stores, eventually becoming a significantly respected children’s literature expert. She participated in running our school, went to rock concerts with us (because she loved the music, not because she felt we need any chaperoning). She was reasonable social and reasonably active most of her life. But when my brother’s demons slowly won their battle with his sanity, she seemed to give up, giving in to his, and to her own. When he became a shut-in, she first facilitated, and then validated is choices to hide from the world and resist psychiatric care. When my father died, se dedicated herself to the care and feeding of his madness, cutting the pair of them off from any help. She participated in his decline, and assisted in his suicide.

After my brother’s death, my mother gave up any significant relationship with the outside world. So when she put on the oxygen cannula, something that, to her, was some vast flashing beacon drawing the very attention she’d spent her life fearing, she closed and locked the the door between herself and the outside world.

For a time, I thought this was temporary. She’d been managing her life effectively, shopping, cooking, cleaning. It seemed reasonable to me that she would need a bit of time to adapt to living on oxygen, to carrying a tank to the market, to the logistics of an umbilical. I happily stepped into the role of care-giver, shopping for her, running errands, making sure her car stayed in working order. I worked with her on ways to rig her portable oxygen tank to minimize discomfort, explained why it worked differently than her home unit.

It would be temporary, I assumed. My mother, her entire life, has been fiercely independent. She has never asked for help; she’s never wanted care, never wanted attention when she felt ill. Like me, she wants to do it herself, and would rather be left alone than tended to. So of course i assumed she’d remain independent, not letting a trivial matter like a bottle and a tube daunt her.

Somehow, though, this one thing, this utterly insignificant thing, was her undoing. Every moment fearing she was being looked at, every imagined judgement, every side-long glance came together in a laser-focus on the clear tube up her nose. She would even take it off and hide it when I came over. It was as if the house of cards she felt she’d been building her entire life had suddenly crashed down. And she gave up, completely and permanently. Her life, the part outside that small, empty house, ended.

For several months, I’d come over weekly with groceries, each time suggesting that she come with me. After a time I figured I was enabling, figured she would get off her ass and do something when she needed milk. So I stopped coming weekly, and began to go less often, or come by late, saying I don’t have time to shop, but give me a list of anything urgent and I’ll bring that one thing back tomorrow. But she made no move to go, showed no willingness to move forward. I soon found she’d never even tried her portable oxygen; she refused it when I tried to get her to practice putting it on. She hated the sound it made (a demand valve, it makes a faint nose like a scuba regulator); she hated the way the case looked. She hated the strap, but refused a cart. She grew frantic at the un-balanced weight of it, even when lifting it.

It began to become clear she wasn’t going to go out. After a bit she asked me to get rid of her car because she didn’t want to worry about starting it any more.

On the other hand, she found ways, eventually, to be more self-sufficient. She ordered groceries on line, she shopped for things she needed by phone. Her pet store delivered cat food, her wild bird store delivered seed for the birds and squirrels she feeds obsessively.

This worked for a while. But she resisted any medical care of any kind, canceling any appointment she or I made, fighting with me over the mention, and panicing to the point of fainting the few times we went in. She would become combative with her doctors, insulting them and insulting me when I tried to help. And predictably, small things began to fail. She’s eighty years old; at that age, bolts start falling off the car.

Minor sores and wounds are non unusual with eighty year old skin. Aches and pains and difficulty sleeping are not a surprise. And my mother hates talking about these things. So we went along for months, me visiting every week or so, bringing fresh fruits, hot food, doing chores. And she’d complain about trivial things that hurt, and then change the subject when I said “let me look at that” or “let’s get to the doctor.” One of my great strengths is efficient, non-nonsense problem solving. But the flip side of this is that I don’t have very much sympathy for those who won’t take help, or who won’t take action to solve a problem. So if Mom bitched about her leg hurting, and then wouldn’t make or keep a doctor’s appointment, I shrugged and said, fine, then quit bitching if you won’t take action.

Trouble was, she was slowly sliding down hill. And I don’t have the patience, or the bandwidth, to monitor her condition if she wouldn’t admit it when I ask.

It wasn’t until the panic escalated that we got anywhere. And then, not very far, because, again, she would not follow a doctor’s instructions about care, and won’t keep a follow up appointment when its made. And so the condition has continued to grow worse, and my attempts to help have been rejected, or dismissed.

Mom’s pain, from sores on her legs, is now to the point of agony; her sleep has grown more disturbed. She became obsessed with the idea that she had diabetes (she doesn’t), and then that she had contagious infections (again, she doesn’t; the sores are from vascular disease caused by age, years of smoking, and general poor health). Her obsessive nature has gotten more and more focused on trivialities, her panic has grown worse, and her health, stable for some years, is now spiraling down.

I do not know if the decline in her mental state is the early phases of alzheimers, or if it’s simple age and prolonged lack of sleep. But her short term memory is nearly gone, and her confusion and anxiety seem worse each day. In the last three weeks, she’d begun to speak about ending things; though in truth I don’t think she’s serious. And if she is, I’m not sure she’s mentally or physically able; but her state of despair is profound.

And of course, Kaiser, her health care system – well, that story is saved for another time. To say they’re like a government agency does dis-service to government agencies. A profit-focused corporation, they make it painfully obvious that cost is the first and last thing considered in every medical choice, and that no medical order is carried out without business approval.

In short, though, this is the story I had to tell cousin today. Some of it’s old news; she’s helped as she can in caring for my mother (though she lives several hours away, and as a single mother of three, her bandwidth is limited). But she’s seen the decline over months. The story I told her today was tragic, and yet, both of us understood, the great tradgedy isn’t that my mother is old, and sick. The tragedies are that she has fought every step against help, and that the agency that gives lip service to care, cares only about cost, and not at all about the well-being and comfort of a confused, frightened, sick old woman.

Sam and I have both seen death. We’ve said goodbye to parents, and to a sibling (for she considered my brother to be nearly hers as well). She’s lost a mother to cancer. And when we talked today – the first conversation we’ve had in years – the un-spoken thought we shared was that we’re about to lose another one. And both of us know full well that all we want is to provide comfort and dignity, for the short time until that happens. Yet these things are in short supply, and we are powerless to provide either.

Sam and I have not kept in close enough touch these last few years. Our lives have gone off in parallel directions; careers, children, loves and losses and tragedies and joys. It’s been a long time since we shared a bed innocently as pre-teens, or hugged each other over some imagined adolescent misery, or played doctor, or slap and tickle in the swimming pool. Yet that was what I remembered after we talked today; the moments in my youth when she was, to me, the most beautiful girl i’d ever seen, the one woman I’d ever love. I remembered the sillieness of my crushes, and the rage when my brother would fight me for her attention. Those memories, good and bad, where of foolish youth and innocence. And what I wanted to was to go back, to before we had any reference for what pain or love or real life were and just play a game of killer or last touch, or to hike to the store up the hill from our cabin to buy ice-cube candies or peanut butter cups.

Hearing her voice, what I heard was childhood. And nothing ends childhood like becoming a parent to our own parents.

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the above was written in one burst and not edited at all. I’d originally intended to re-work it later. *shrug* I didn’t.