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All About Joan, Epilogue

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 3 Comments

Nine years ago almost to the day, I finished the second show of our two-show Saturday, and headed home to the actors’ house. I was feeling really unsettled and irritable.

As I walked out to my car, I ran through my day and night, trying to find some logical reason for my mood. It had been a perfectly normal day. Another great show. Nothing to explain the deep dread I was feeling in my gut. The unsettled sense in my bones.

I found myself driving aimlessly through the fairly quiet streets of the city, crossing over the river bridges again and again. This city in Illinois was unique in that you can literally drive across a bridge and be in another city, and then drive over another and be not just in another city, but another state. Without intending to, I was going back and forth, back and forth, from one city to the next, over and over again.

Something about the way the dark water was moving under the bridges in the light of the cloudy-mooned sky seemed to reflect something dark moving through me. At a certain point, I was literally overcome with emotion and had to pull over on the roadside. I felt so utterly sad, so desperately powerless, so…lone.

When I finally hit exhaustion, I drove back to the actors’ house to try to sleep. Just one more show to do, tomorrow afternoon, then I could make the trip down to see my Mom.

The next week was our last week of the show. It was bittersweet. I was sad for the closing, but relieved, too. I was looking forward to being able to just visit Mom for a long visit before heading back to NYC. The traveling back and forth on my days off had built up an accumulated tiredness that lurked just under the surface of my passion for the play and for my mother. My emotional and physical resources were being stretched thin.

Back to the actors’ house. The new cast for the next show had just moved in. We’d been a cast of four, swimming in the abundant space of the big many-bedroomed, two-story house. The cast for the new show was huge, and the peaceful house was now filled to the brim with with people, pep and parties.

My room was right off the common room, and as I made my way through it to my room that night, I did not bother to interact with anyone. Normally, the people-pleaser in me would have mustered up an insincere smile as I passed. This night, not only did the lively chatter and the blaring TV not suit my mood, it grated on my nerves.

I tried to sleep but was restless. Around 1:30 AM, desperate for some escape into sleep, I stuck my head out the door, asking that they have some respect for the rest of the house and take the party elsewhere, upstairs, anywhere, so that I could get some sleep. I’m sure I seemed like the biggest wet blanket ever, but God, did I feel awful. I finally fell into a fitful sleep.

The next morning, I started awake to find a voicemail from my father. I knew when I saw the message that something was up. I will never forget that feeling in my gut, looking at my phone, seeing his name. And before I actually heard his voice saying the words, my body already knew what had happened. From somewhere deep inside, it gave a kind of primal groan – half silent, half aloud. I threw on clothes and grabbed my purse and keys.

I stumbled out into the common room and started lurching in a daze out towards my car. I passed some girl who had awoken early — I don’t know what she must have thought was going on – I am pretty sure I was white as a ghost, and I may have been crying. I waited until I was out on the street before calling my Dad back. It was if the house did not deserve to be the place where I would hear the words that she was gone.

He answered quickly, and we spoke as I wandered in the middle of the street. My father and I decided that since I already had a flight to go home the next day, I’d just keep it…no need to miss the show to get back that night. The funeral home would not be open…Monday morning made the most sense. I’d have a day and a half with him to sort things out, and then I’d fly back to Illinois to finish my contract out that week and drive my things back to NYC after the last show that next Saturday. Then I’d return to Texas.

I hung up with him, faced with getting through the rest of the day and night. I knew I would do the show that afternoon…that my mother would want me to…that I wanted to. That is what you do, as an artist, as an actor. You bring your life to the stage. Your truth. No matter what. But what to do with myself until I had to be at the theatre?

I knew one thing. I did not want to be around the actors’ house with those chatty, happy people who didn’t know me from Adam and had no reason to care about my loss.

While in Illinois, I had met a local woman, who, it turned out, was in town caring for her parents. She’d given me her number for some reason. Midwestern kindness. “If you need anything while you are here…” I barely knew her, but she was my next call.

That woman met me at Appleby’s and sat with me until it was call time. A total stranger, yet she sat with me and got me through those awful first six hours of shock. I hope to be there for someone some day in the way that she was for me. At a moment’s notice, she dropped her day’s plans to sit with a total stranger. I do not remember a thing we talked about, but what an Angel she was.

It’s funny. You can know someone is going to die, but it doesn’t prepare you for anything. The actual death still rocks your world. It’s just as shocking. I’ve since lived through sudden loss and additional prolonged deaths, and there isn’t much difference when you actually get the news in terms of the affect of the actual grief and the loss.

When it was finally time, I went and did the show, which was actually a grace. Having something in my life such as acting — it is an anchor, it grounds me to the world and to my core. It was a blessing to have a show that day. I figured I could either be heartbroken outside the world of the play or take my heartbreak and transform it within the world of the play. You bet I picked the latter. My cast mates and the production team were incredibly kind and supportive. I will never forget their loving kindness.

Afterwards, I quickly went to gather some things, and then I treated myself to a hotel out by the airport so that I could have some quiet and not be in that house! The next morning I boarded a plane and flew down to be with my father and begin to make all the necessary arrangements.

I later found out that my mother had begun to feel distressed that last Saturday evening just around the time I left the theatre. While I was driving across those bridges, over the river over and over, so distressed, she was experiencing great physical distress and fear. And that hour I was tossing and turning? That was around the time when my Mother actually died. It’s strange, but I believe that some part of me knew what was happening with her. They say energy can travel across time and space. I know it did that night.

I miss my beautiful mother every day. But I also feel her in my bones, hear her melodious voice in my mind. Her presence is strong in my heart. Her words come back to me as the years pass. All those talks we had at the end are stored in a bank in the back of my mind. She gave me so much to draw from. I see her in my reflection in the mirror more and more as I get older. And I do not mind at all.

Her death changed my life.

She was the heart of our family. All families have one. The person who is the love center. That was my mother. Our family has had to reconfigure. We’ve had to try to find a new balance. But the truth is, the heart center can never be replaced. You go on as a family, and love as before, of course. But you always feel the absence of that missing heart.

People came out of the woodwork to offer condolences. Baggers at the local supermarket sent flowers to our house. It turned out that she knew all their names, and their kids names, and their stories. Friends from my childhood that I had long since lost contact with came to her memorial because they had felt seen and heard by my mom. She had so many friends from high school and college and beyond…I’m talking real friends, not just acquaintances.

If I can live my life even one tenth of the way she lived hers, I will have lived a life of great value. I am so grateful for all she has given to me. For all she continues to give me.

My priorities shifted as a direct result of losing my mother. She left me with a legacy of living and loving better. Of having true curiosity about life and of others. I saw that all that remains when someone dies is how they made you feel. It made me wonder what I would leave people with when I die. It made me want to be more like her. To make people more at ease. To take more time to really see and be with others. To listen more. To make them feel seen and heard.

Her death made me see people, the world, differently. I grew up buying what was sold to me on TV — MTV was born in my youth, after all. I believed what I was surrounded by in all forms of pop culture: that celebrities and stars were the people of the greatest value. The beautiful people – the movie stars, the models and the rockstars – were the ones to admire and aspire to. It shaped my whole value system.

But after my mom died, that changed. I know now the beauty and honor in the quiet, ordinary heroes, the ones who live lives that maybe no one ever notices or reports on. The ones who love and listen and give for no acclaim. Who give their attention to others with no expectation or need to be adored back. Those people are the real rockstars of this world. I admire them and aspire to be more like them today.

More like my mom, who was one of those. A true star.

 

All About Joan, Pt 5

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 6 Comments

I remember well the last Mother’s Day with my mother. I had come home to Houston to be with her, as per usual, on my day off from the show I was doing in Illinois. It being Mother’s Day, I wanted to bring her a present.

It is odd when you are trying to pick a gift for someone who has been told that they are, in essence, dying. Certain gifts seem ridiculous, and some seem insensitive: a purse or some piece of clothing or jewelry. At this point, my mom didn’t leave the house, or have outside visitors, so such things seemed unimportant and unnecessary.

“Things” in general had long since become less important, unless they could somehow bring joy or add quality to my Mom’s life.

After wracking my brain, I settled for some kind of flowers or plant. I stopped off at a florist on the way to my parents’ house and picked a blue hydrangea plant in a blue and white ceramic bowl. She loved the color blue, I loved hydrangea, and I loved her, so it seemed the best fit under the circumstances. I figured it was at least something pretty to look at.

We had a particularly intense visit.

My mother had just reached the point where she and my father had to admit that they needed a nurse to come in: she could no longer get herself up out of a chair or sit up in bed unassisted. I had been noticing her failing body strength the last few visits.

But it had been a delicate subject to broach with them. As had other such conversations that had become necessary as her disease progressed.

First had been concern that the three steps up from their bedroom sitting area to the bed area had become a danger for her. I had become secretly terrified she’d fall and break her neck. So I very carefully brought it up to my parents, trying to seem casual so as not to belie the quiet hysteria I felt deep inside.

Such conversations with your parents are so surreal: to be both the child and the adult in the situation at once is strange.

They ended up moving the bed down into the bedroom sitting area, which was a great solution until even that was too much for her.

She eventually moved into Ground Zero – the open kitchen living room area. A hospital bed replaced the couch. She was in the center of things there.

Each new shift in her physical condition had required carefully approached conversations. I’d sense a hope in my parents that was a kind of invisible protective veneer surrounding them, one that colored their perspective of what was actually happening. It seemed to make them a beat or two behind in seeing the changes that were occurring.

Intuitively, I knew I had to take care not to puncture it. I had to ever-so-gently lead them to the realizations. They could not be forced upon them, or rushed.

This most recent concession that my mother’s physical freedom had become so altered was a particularly tough one for both of them. This Mother’s Day fell in the final few days of their time on their own in their home before a full-time hospice care person entered the picture.

As was true of our other weekly visits, we mainly spent our time together talking. Being together.

My mother talked of her life on those visits, and asked me about mine. There were times the conversation went to very serious subjects. Intimate information was exchanged. Old wounds were healed. Our relationship returned to what I can only describe as what I imagine to be the pure essential love between an infant and its mother.

And we laughed. A lot. And talked of lighter things. But throughout all of our talks, there was a subtle rhythm to them that I now realize she was orchestrating. Bits and pieces of those talks, that seemed so casual at times, come back to me as my life progresses. It turns out, she had been implanting motherly wisdoms all along. Mothering me until the very end.

And while I felt our beautiful closeness at this particular visit, I also felt a distance, too. She was moving through an internal process that was singular and private: it was something that neither my father nor I could be a part of.

When I left, I said what I had taken to saying every time: I love you. You know that, right? You hang in there and I’ll see you next week, OK? She hugged me and gave my cheek a little pat. I hated leaving her. It was always hard.

This particular time, for some reason I have never since been able to fathom, I wasn’t particularly afraid I wouldn’t see her again. I let my guard down for a moment. It wasn’t in the forefront of my mind that it might be my last time to see her.

I don’t know why I dropped that awareness. I’ve replayed that last goodbye over in my mind a hundred times. Berating myself for not having said more profound things. The truth was, we’d already said the truly crucial things we needed to say to each other, and for that I am truly grateful. I don’t know what it is I think I could have said at that last goodbye. I just know it still comes back to circle my mind at times. I guess it is all a part of the way the mind deals with grief, those senseless replays and circles.

The next time I visited my parents’ house, the hydrangea was still there. But my Mom was gone forever.

All About Joan, Pt 4

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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.

All About Joan, Pt 3

Rhubarb
Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 2 Comments

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.

All About Joan, Pt 2

Bird plane
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As Mother’s Day approaches, I cannot help but think back to this time 9 years ago. I was in Illinois, doing a musical, finally living my dream.

I was also living a nightmare.

My mother was dying.

I was flying back each week on my off days to Texas to spend precious hours with her. This was not an uncomplicated process. The city I was in was fairly small. Though it had what they called an “International” airport (Hah!), I had to fly to Atlanta to get a connecting flight that would take me to Houston.

I’d fly out on the earliest possible flight on Monday morning, get to Houston around 12:30 PM or so, grab my carry-on, race off the plane and out of the terminal, catch the shuttle to get to the rental car place, get a rental car and drive the 40 minutes across town to my parents’ house. I could usually be in front of my Mom by 3 PM. I’d leave the earliest flight possible the next morning and do the same in reverse to get back just in time to go to the theatre for our first show of the week on Tuesday night. It was a lot of travel, but God, was it worth it.

Though my spirit and body was being fueled by every possible ounce of hope my heart could drum up, I still knew on some level that I had a limited amount of time left with my Mom. After all, she had lung cancer (this after having survived colon cancer) and had been through two rounds of radiation and two rounds of chemo only to be told that there was nothing else to be done. (Such is the way with that bastard, cancer.)

So any delay or problem with either flight heading to Houston was an agonizing torment.

It.Was.My.Worst.Fear.

There were more than a few times there were issues on those crucial flights to Houston. I recall most particularly one flight where the Atlanta-Houston flight was delayed. Then, after finally boarding, we were told that there was some issue with the plane – we had to get off again and await another. Oh, the rage and the desperation I felt!

I marched off that plane, demanding answers from Customer Service, operating in my Survival Mode – a steely cold exterior that surrounds a high-level swirling hysterical interior:

I had to get to Houston ASAP. What was the issue? How could they do this? What were they going to do to solve the problem any faster? What was their f’ing problem?

I don’t remember the reason they gave. They were not especially receptive, and in retrospect I understand why. My Survival Mode comes off as bitchy hysteria. I get it now. But then, it felt as if the whole world was just simply cruel.

After walking away in a mix of shocked shame and guilt at having gone into bitch mode publicly (shame and guilt at such out loud behavior being the response genetically engineered by my “good girl” Southern and Protestant-ly tinged upbringing), I burst into silent, hot-red fury tears.

I did eventually get to Houston that day. But I still want back those two or so hours that Air Trans cheated my Mom and me out of.

If there were issues on either flight heading back to Illinois, that was a different kind of hell. When you are a recovering perfectionist such as I, and a Betty-By-The-Book type of personality, it is simply not an option to not do a show.

Just.Not.An.Option.

Once, leaving Houston, I got to the airport to find that the weather in Atlanta was totally screwed up. No flights in or out there. I ended up buying a ticket on Delta leaving out of another Houston airport. I cried in silent outrage in a taxi to the other airport, flew to Chicago, rented a car and drove at unlawful speeds the hour and half drive back to the city to get to the theatre by call. I made it, too.

Hell hath no fury like a daughter grieved.

 

Part 3 to come.