Over 16,526,161 people are on fubar.
What are you waiting for?
My mother is dying. It’s not pretty. It’s not patient. It’s not silent nor unseen. It’s disturbing and unsettling. It’s rambling and shaking and repetition. And it’s happening quickly. My mother’s birthday is March 13, every so often Friday, March 13th; an omen, a gentle warning of nothing more than a day of celebration of my mother’s birth. This year my mom’s birthday fell on the Thursday and that’s okay too. I took her to dinner. She held my hand as she got out of the car. She held my arm as she walked and she clutched me with both hands as she climbed the wooden stairs. When I was a child, I used to jump stairs. I used to scale stairs. To get to dinner, I used to leap stairs. She fed my face, she wiped my mouth, she washed my hands. That night, with my mom, we climbed stairs. Much harder than before. “It’s okay,” I’d repeat after each step, “Almost done.” She held my attention as we talked over bread. I didn’t pay so much attention to her words as I did her. Her frailty. Her liveliness. Her storytelling. My mom loved to tell stories. Normally, I hated to listen. Normally, I hated her (hatred being defined as anger toward those we love). For years I hated my mother for sitting by, looking on, while my father beat me. I couldn’t forgive her and I couldn’t forget. I wanted her to feel the hurt that I felt as a child. The loneliness. The helplessness. The terror. I wanted her to know she hurt me. I wanted her to apologize. She never did. That was not tonight. Tonight was her birthday. And I enjoyed her company. I suggested the salmon, she gasped at the price saying soup was much better. I told her the dinner was on the house to make up for the less than delicious Thanksgiving Meal two years before. She smiled. Crusted Salmon with Sun Dried Tomatoes it was. Over dinner she continued to tell stories and I smiled and admired her. Her warmth. Her tenderness. Her supreme innocence. [My mother was abused, frightfully, at first as a child by her alcoholic father, then by her husband (my father) and finally by me. We all took our turns taking our frustration out on her. Her father would shoot at her with a shotgun as she would go running from the house screaming into the night. He always missed. Probably too drunk to see straight. Too drunk to stand. He was a fall down drunk. A dispicable drunk. A real Mr. Hyde and no Dr. Jekyll kind of a drunk. He was my kind of a drunk or my drunk was of his kind. Either way, we were related and I never met the man. His liver gave out when my mother a was child. My life gave out much later.] I indulged her generous appetite and her quiet satisfaction. We celebrated her birthday. I celebrated her smile. She wore it often. I tipped the waiter and thanked the manager by hand. Not for the food, but for the experience. I knew it was one I’d remember. I recorded some of it on my cell phone. As it turns out, she remembered it too. She raved about the salmon for weeks. Three months have followed and my mom’s health has dramatically declined. I visit her often. She is in the living process of dying. I read her stories, “Grandfather Stories, Grandfather Stories, Grandfather Stories,” she said last week. And “Chicken Soup For The Woman’s Soul” (she doesn’t repeat that). She can’t feed herself. She can’t clean herself. She can’t dress herself. She can’t carry on conversations. She rambles and repeats herself. Her quivering lip became a trembling hand became a shaking arm. I feed her face. I wipe her mouth. I wash her hands. “I should have done better for you. I should have done better,” she said today. That is the most coherent my mother has been in two weeks. I wept in her lap. And in all this there is goodness. My hatred for my mom has disappeared. When she “went”, it went too. My mother is dying.
