Your worst 1,325 days are behind you
Day 1
We’re in a frosty cabin on a lake in the northwest when the phone rings. It’s my dad. After we talk, I drive 19 miles for a cigarette.
The dread is palpable on the flight home. I drive to the suburbs and wander the florescent hospital maze and there’s the body that looks like my mother used to look, but full of tubes and beeping, and I hug my dad and I sleep there.
Nurses are many and doctors are few. Everything they say is very important and sometimes they’re Jewish too and they make important decisions for a thousand bodies who are bleeping and blooping along.
Day 10
My mom’s conscious. She recognizes Shelby, and me, and she’s smiling, and she’s back from the dead. My relief feels enormous. She stays like this for an hour.
The doctors are sorry. The doctors don’t know why she isn’t recovering. The doctors drill into her skull and cut out a cheese-sample sized cube of her brain. Then Stanford’s head neurologist takes me to a small room and explains palliative care.
Day 40
There are 3 beds to a room now and my mother is using the arm and leg that still move to tear her clothes off in a continuous panic, showing me everything I’ve spent 3 decades avoiding.
This is the day I learn “delirious” isn’t just a comedy special. It’s a medical term for people who are being really fucking annoying.
In the next bed there’s Janice, whose line is, “the eggs are a boilin’.” Then she looks right at me and tells me I’m disgusting.
At the end of four hours, twice a week, I don’t give a shit if the jello is jigglin’. I need to smoke seven cigarettes and get the fuck out of there.
Day 100
Make sure you move her flaccid limbs around like the physical therapist showed you. It matters. Roll her down to the rose garden. Show her photos, tell her stories. She likes it, she doesn’t react, maybe she’s in there somewhere.
I put my head on her shoulder and we watch Joey and Chandler make homophobic jokes on her fuzzy little TV.
Suddenly she looks at me with love behind her big brown eyes and I can’t take it.
Day 414
It’s a different place now and my mother doesn’t talk anymore. Sure, she wasn’t making much sense, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And we could hear her voice.
Day 582
I walk in and it smells like it sometimes smells. Nobody talks about how poop plays more than a cameo role when you’re a caretaker. It was naive to think I wouldn’t have to return the favor one day.
Day 1,290
My mother is yellow. No one knows why, but they do have free valet parking.
Her head looks shrunken, and the pain looks awful. Chemicals leak into her from hanging plastic bags and sometimes she sleeps a little.
They give me a little printout of confusing medical words and the bathroom has a special shelf so I don’t accidentally piss on that wisdom.
Day 1,325
The phone rings. It’s my dad.
I call my sister. I can hear her 4-year-old son ask why she’s crying.
I meet my dad at a shitty office building where used car salesmen work their lunch hour slinging coffins. Nobody cares about anything and they wear godawful suits and make copies of things.
Next day I give my first eulogy. We sprinkle some dirt on a box and four laborers lower it into the earth.
I treat everyone to a Persian buffet where I negotiate for free dessert.
© Annabelle Strand 2019
