My Mom is dying

An ode to my mother … 

My mom is dying. It’s not the easiest thing to write. But it’s the truth.

Lung cancer. That’s what she’s had for many increasingly trying months, during which she went from living in her own peaceful and private house in Martinez, Calif., to walking her beloved, shaggy-haired dog, Jack, through the Muir woods and along the beach to a future that was far less certain.
Last Fall, her life took a sharp turn, a different kind of narrative, one dominated by hospital checkups and tests and diagnoses to, finally, being physically unable to get out of bed in her own home. She transitioned to a local Manor Care home.

She’d been in that home – they’d call her “Junior” because, only in her early 60s, she was the youngest around – for six months. It was to become her final resting place before her final resting place, until she was moved to a hospice facility in nearby Alamo this week.

Mom is no longer afraid. When I see her, I can sense the heavy amounts of medication humming through her body, keeping the crippling pain at arm’s length. It’s all that medication that she sought and needs because her greatest fear was no longer dying, it was living with pain.

As the days and weeks went on, I became increasingly impressed with her strength. She was never going to quit. Cancer, as a brand, is the same way. It was going to come to this, a battle of wills, and Mom would – despite the intense and steady medication requirements and rotating pain – lift her unique personality, her true spirit, above it all – against the kind of medical odds that didn’t seem possible.

This was pride and personal dignity and combativeness – we all know who her mother was – and it’s given her an extended lease on life to share with us.

It was surreal visiting her in a tiny room on the second floor of a generic place called Manor Care, where a curtain splits her portion of the room from that of her neighbor, a much older woman whom generally is lying asleep, under covers, when I’d visit.

On Sunday, Feb. 23, Mom was lying in her bed complaining of renewed and intense pain in her neck. But she also had her pride fully intact, acknowledging that she didn’t want to whine. “Oh, woe is me,” she said, sarcastically. “Woe is me – what a funny sentence.”

Mom. She was an original San Francisco 49er, born in the city in 1949, one of seven children in a Catholic family with strict values and habits. From her earliest days, she was the malicious one – the wide-eyed brunette who snuck all the candy and put the wrappers under her little brother’s pillow.

She had my sister and I young, a single woman who grew up as part of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, weary of The Man (the government) keeping us down – eagerly sucked into the kaleidoscopic wonder of the hippie movement and its migration into the fingers and forks of northern California, away from The Man, the law, the rules, the traffic, the screeching sounds of industry and the slippery quest for money.

Thus, in late summers, when the CAMP choppers would occasionally chug-chug-chug high above, searching for marijuana farms to obliterate, people would aim defiant middle fingers skyward, shouting in one voice to be left alone, to go spend Federal resources on bigger crimes against humanity.

Mom was wild-haired and wild at heart, loving and restless. We moved constantly as Mom drifted about without rules – part of a crowd of young parents, tie-dyed or bearded, drawn to Nature and the shadow of the Redwoods, scrambling nude into streams or tugging on cheap beers around outdoor camp fires.

It was a parallel universe, peaceful people lost in the woods, with kerosene lamps and wood-burning stoves, freedom to roam and explore and live. It reminded me of something Thoreau once wrote: “But I would say to my fellows, once for all, as long as possible live free and uncommitted.”

Free? Yes, Mom was free, everyone was free. I can still see her, wild hair flowing in all directions, barefoot, a big laugh that opened a window into her soul – dancing and swinging my skinny arms around in circles, the sound of Joplin or The Who drifting from someone’s old record player.

I can see her lying on her back, the sun pouring over her face and through her hair as she sat, fully engrossed, in a Stephen King paperback. She would read for hours. I can still feel her close to me when I was little, reading to me my favorite children’s book, “Mickey and the Night Kitchen,” whose wild story and distinctive Sendak art conjured up the most fantastical dreams.

We’d camp often, visit lakes – any lake—sometimes for weeks on end. From my earliest age, I have these intense memories of my little hands clutching my mom’s slippery shoulders as she waded through the chilly, blue-green waters. Reflections of the surrounding trees cast expressionistic shadows on the surface. I quietly wondered how she managed to keep us both afloat.

She loved animals, especially strays. Cats and dogs naturally gravitate to her. People do, too. She has a warm way of inviting everyone into her life – a level of honesty that pulls you in closer. Even now, nearly immobile on her hospice bed, she continues to give more than she’d ever expect in return.

Over the years, as I grew into a raw-boned preteen, I knew this life – the bohemian rhapsody, full of flowery promises that never quite led to personal stability, was never going to work for me. I was going to move out of our northern California adventure, deep in the bowels of Humboldt County, at some point.

On the long school bus ride, I’d look out the window and catch passing glimpses of tidy little American homes with neatly-manicured lawns and fresh paint and lamps illuminating warm living rooms and long for such organizational structure.

When I was 16, I moved to the Bay Area to live with my father, Patrick, a kind and dedicated electrician whose future was secured by his stellar work ethic and union membership. At the time, it was hard to tell who was leaving whom. My sister had, in fact, moved a year earlier. As it turned out, no one left anyone; our life paths had simply diverged as we sought new environments or different places from which to contemplate our futures.

Eventually, Mom migrated to the Bay Area herself – leaving her own past behind, like fog curling through the stately redwoods. My sister got married; I got married. We moved into our own homes, and each of us had a child of our own. Mom would, over time, find a level of spiritual redemption in our minds and perhaps hers as well – for her loving devotion to our own children.

She built strong bonds with each of them early on; I can still see her lying on her back at my first owned home, her knees up high, balancing my son, Caleb, a soft-faced, drooling little being wrapped in a onesie, both shrieking with unadulterated glee. And I still look at a photo in my house, in which Mom is holding Caleb, only a few months old, his oversized head leaning on her shoulder, as they both looked out his bedroom window – protected from a fierce rainstorm outside.

To this day, Caleb sees Mom often. And my sister, who always seems to dispense to Mom the right balance of unconditional love and tough love, developed the strongest bond yet. With Mom, even as she struggled in her lifetime, we never felt unloved – and that’s the quiet gift that gave us the most inner strength.

The cancer struck ferociously last year and continues its methodical work, unyielding and personally devastating. It shamelessly grinds on without emotion. It’s a thing to fight until the fight is gone.

So I think back to older days, when Mom was without a compass and blissful – healthy enough to see all the possibilities, to do as she chose without judgment.

It takes me back to small moments, a dusty Little League baseball field in tiny Redway, where, behind the chain-link backstop I can see Mom – an abstract shadow with curly hair.

At the time, I didn’t have enough money to wear proper baseball cleats so, as I wound into my stretch from the pitcher’s mound, my scuffed tan shoes would slide across the dry dirt of the of the hill as I released the ball.
When a batter swung and missed, Mom, the eternal wild child, would chant and whoop and shout, perhaps even bang on a bucket, her giant-hearted voice taking over a small part of space and time, raw and so full of life.