Her eyes were luminescent
I saw straight into her soul
All else had been but stripped away
She was left to be simply whole
Her dying body housed a loving heart
And from that she shone and she was
I came to know that all that matters
Is our humanness – our goodness, and flaws
When my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2001 and was going in for surgery to have it removed, I immediately knew I wanted to fly down to be with her.
But I was 6 months newly sober, so it was daunting to fly across the country, leaving behind my support system. But more frightening than that was the fear that my mother would die while on the table, or that they would find more cancer than they could treat.
It was a challenging time.
I knew that I would be experiencing many emotions as I navigated her illness and surgery, and I really wanted to deal with them in healthy ways, not fall back into old coping behaviors.
Someone suggested to me that I take up knitting as something to occupy my hands and eat up some of the extra energy (aka anxiety) that I would be experiencing.
Thankfully, I took their advice, bought some knitting supplies and took them down with me. And as I waited for her to come through the surgery, I began to knit.
My mom had been the one to teach me how to knit in the first place, so it felt really right to sit and knit, waiting for those awful hours to hear how the surgery went. Anyone who has gone through it knows how difficult that waiting can be.
I only remembered one stitch, but that was enough. I had no pattern, so I just started knitting a row about the width of a muffler and took it from there.
Thankfully, my mother came through the surgery very well. I moved back into her hospital room, and the knitting came with me. In fact, it would continue to be my sober companion for the rest of her hospital stay and afterwards as she recovered at home, because I ended up staying longer than I had planned.
My mother had her surgery on September 10, 2001. We were both sleeping in her hospital room that next morning, when a friend of hers called my mother and told her to put on the news. We watched together as my adopted home city was terrorized.
In shock, I immediately did two things: I went to a meeting and then I went to donate blood.
Then, I went back to the hospital, where knitting became a lifeline again as my world was rocked from its axis a second time.
I was so desperate to get back to NYC, but could not leave until they allowed flights again. I knitted with fervor through those days following 9-11, as I helped my parents take my mom back home and settled her in.
And then finally, I was able to return home to NYC, and my knitting accompanied me on the plane and through the weeks as our city began to heal.
Eventually, I stopped knitting…though from time to time I will pick it up again when the proverbial sh*t hits the fan or I feel that I need it as a way to stay calm under duress. I guess that is just the nature of my relationship to it. I am grateful it is there for me when I need it.
I still have that piece of knitting from that time when my world was rocked to its core. It is a very, very long muffler-type knitted piece that is a bit misshapen and not at all suited for anything. But it stands as a reminder to me that there is always a way to show up and consciously move through even the hardest of times. That I can survive anything, be of service and even be creative even as my world is falling apart.
I never saw my mother as more beautiful then when she was dying. I know that’s strange to say, but it is the truth.
As a little kid, I thought she was gorgeous. I’d pore over old black and white photos of her and her twin sister in high school. She looked like a movie star to me.
She was always a pretty lady, though she herself could never own her own beauty. She’d brush off compliments like they were flies on the rim of her iced tea glass. (Remember sun tea?! She got on that bandwagon big time when that hit the ‘burbs.) But during my middle childhood, she stopped putting much time into her looks.
I learned from an early age that being a female in Houston meant a heavy investment in one’s appearance. I developed an intense concern over how I looked, especially my weight, and constantly compared myself to other girls. So I remember wondering why she didn’t seem to care much about how she looked. Now I realize she was probably just tired from taking care of three kids and a husband. (And maybe depressed, but that’s not for me to diagnose, right?)
Once I was out of the house and off to college (the last of her three children,) she started to give more attention to her self, treating herself to nice clothes and wearing makeup. It being the eighties, she especially loved shoulder pads (yikes, remember those?) I think she thought they made her hips seem smaller. She was always self-conscious about her weight.
Throughout my early adulthood, she thrived. She became very involved in a charity organization, eventually holding several offices. I loved seeing her stretch her wings. She was a smart lady and loved people, and they loved her. The Empty Nest was a terrific departure point for her life. She and my Dad had a great time after we were all grown and gone. Until she got sick, of course.
Cancer does something oddly beautiful to some people. It’s as if it strips away all excess of the ego’s physical manifestation down to the spirit-bone. What remains is pure essence. And her essence was simply beautiful.
She had dwindled down to a size that was next to nothing, which of course she teased that she’d have loved if only it didn’t come with the other consequences. Her hair had been lost to the chemo fight, so she had taken to wearing little soft cotton caps. Just in the last months of her life, her hair started to grow back, the lightest dusting of silver-white. Against her porcelain skin, and the bone structure that showed through in full force without any extra softness to shape her face, she was stunning. She had taken to wearing a navy kaftan-style robe of the softest cotton. To me, she again looked like a Hollywood movie star from the Golden Age. She was just missing a gold turban.
I still have one of those little caps she had taken to wearing at the end. I keep it along with one of the hundreds of Beanie Babies that she had collected. She was an avid collector of many things: antique cut glass, Brownware, Fiesta ware, to name but a few (and I do mean but a few.)
She loved decorating the house for all holidays, including Presidents Day and graduations. Much to my father’s chagrin, she had a whole room dedicated to these decorations as well as part of the attic: there were drawers filled with easter eggs and bunnies, a wardrobe filled with Santas, a closet filled with turkeys, ghosts, and black cats and such…you get the idea.
And the Beanie Babies. Oh, the multitudes of Beanie Babies. When my brother’s two beautiful children were born, she began collecting them with a fervor, planning to save them for the children that they would have one day. She became an E-bay specialist, hunting down the hard-to-find ones with the skills of an bounty hunter on the tail of a high-paying felon.
My father ended up donating all those Beanie Babies to the children’s hospital that my mother’s charity supported. But I chose one to keep as a sort of talisman – a little pony, that I keep along with her little turquoise hat.
For the first two years after she died, they traveled everywhere with me. On the tours, they were the first thing I unpacked in the hotel room. Once home again, they were on my bedside table, the first thing I would see when woke.
I needed them in a way that is beyond logic.
After my Mom died, it was as if a giant invisible hand had turned the kaleidoscope of my life, shifting the pieces so that they settled in a new pattern, one I didn’t recognize. I felt adrift, and it was a terrifying sensation.
That little Beanie Baby and her cap were touchstones as I found my way in the New World that held no Mother. Maybe they also helped me feel connected to her loss as the rest of the world around me continued on its way, as it must. Physical proof that she had existed, and that I loved her.
Today they sit on a shelf in my office, part of my small collection of muses, totems that bring me strength and support. They still carry the beautiful spirit that was my mother, and I am so grateful for them.
Pt. 5 to come.
9 years ago at almost exactly this time of year, I was in the next to last week of performances of my first out of town theatre gig. It had been an incredible experience, those three and a half months in Illinois. In-between the 1-1/2 day visits to Texas each week to spend time with my dying mother, the artist in me was thriving.
I love being in a show. Revolving my life around a production is my happiest, most organic way to function. I could write a whole other blog about that. But at this time of year, I am remembering the other part of that period of time in my life. The time I spent with my Mom at the end of her life.
That time with my Mom was many things. It was a time of healing for our relationship, first and foremost. We had some time to make up for. There had been some difficult years where I was scarcely home or in contact; years when it was tough between us. We both knew that this was our chance to right what we could. And we were both game.
It turned out to also be a time that would bring great healing to my soul. And a time of growing up.
(But I wouldn’t know that until much, much later.)
It was a deeply intimate time. My father was my mother’s primary caregiver. I was practically estranged from him at the time we were told that her cancer had come back as lung cancer, so it was uncomfortable being all together at first. We had been learning how to be around each other again through necessity, and on her behalf, since the diagnosis.
I cannot imagine any other circumstance that would have had me home again, under his roof, other than my mom’s illness. It is amazing how Life orchestrates Her lessons.
Both of my parents’ lives had narrowed down to one end: to sustain and prolong her life for as long as possible. My father was amazing in his capacity to be there and care for her. Watching how he loved her those months through the way he cared for her, and the heartbreak that he went through as he let go of the woman he had loved for 54 years, slowly began to change my long-ago-hardened perceptions of him.
Some people think love looks like what we see in romantic movies: someone bringing roses to your doorstep, a beautiful wedding, two people gazing into each others eyes saying the words “I love you.” While it can look like that, I learned what love really looks like: it was in the black three-ring binder my Dad kept on the center of the island in their kitchen, the room that had became our Ground Zero. It was a journal of my mom’s illness, filled with intricate, handwritten notes about her medications…times, dates, dosages. Hospital visits. Hospice caregiver notes. Bowel movements. Daily status updates written out by hand in great detail.
He had been a very successful businessman with a fierce will and iron determination, which he now turned to the most important job of his life, the job of Keeping Alive my mother.
(Some time after she died, as we were clearing away the things from her illness, I had a hard time letting go of That Binder. Page after page was a love letter to my Mom.)
On the days I was home, my father gave me a wide berth, allowing she and I time alone together. I am only now realizing how generous he was to give me that time with her. That’s love too.
Through the tension that lived between he and I, we found a way to work together those days I was visiting. It was a strange unspoken dance. We were an Odd Couple, but we were united on one thing: we both loved my mother desperately and were willing to do anything to help make her time better.
We’d try to come up with foods to go pick up or make that she might have some appetite for. Smoothies. Crackers with Pimiento Cheese Spread (a Southern thing that she had loved in her youth.) Did she have enough Sudoko books? (My mother’s greatest fear was that she’d get Alzheimer’s, as had her mother, and her mother’s mother. She did Sudoko’s like mad to try to stave off that Rapacious Host. Cancer beat Alzheimer’s to the punch. Maybe there was a blessing in there some where? Maybe.)
Somehow, I found out she’d never tried rhubarb. I am not sure why, but I became obsessed with the idea that she should not die without having tasted rhubarb. I didn’t say it out loud or anything. I just got it in me that I had to find some for her to taste.
While in Illinois, I found some locally made strawberry rhubarb jam (farm country!) and got a jar to bring to her. But when I got to Airport Security, they would not let me bring it through (Thanks 9-11.) I was devastated until I remembered that on the way from the Houston airport to my parents’ house, I would pass a House of Pies. As I made my way there, I I prayed that they’d have a rhubarb pie. They did.
I burst through the door, triumphant, bearing my prize for My Queen. But the pie would quickly be forgotten, shoved into the fridge with the many other containers of leftovers of food brought by many well-intended friends and neighbors. I would later throw it out, untouched.
Things had changed since the week before. My mom’s appetite had shifted again, and was not there for that weekend, nor for much of the time after that. Attention this particular weekend went to more important things, the main concern at hand – how to help her body to have a bowel movement again so that she could be out of the discomfort she was in.
I was devastated. Not that the pie was forgotten. But that somehow, I had missed the window. How could I be so stupid? There is a window — a window of time for a cancer patient when food is still a possible source of joy or appeal. I hadn’t realized that it would one day shut forever, sometimes quite suddenly. How could I not know that? I should have known. I had missed the portal into the alternate universe. The one where my Mom beat the odds and survived cancer. Getting her that rhubarb would have changed the trajectory of it all. Like in the movie Sliding Doors.
The mention of rhubarb to this day brings a burning flush of shame to my face and a failure pit in my gut.
The mind is an amazing thing. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is so spot on.
In my thinking, it was as if somehow, if only I had gotten the rhubarb to her before That Window had closed, it would have made some crucial difference. It would have made cancer slow down, or something. Anything.
As if rhubarb could have saved my mother.
Part 4 to come.
Beyond the Skinny Branches 