or, THE LIONESS IN WINTER: “Whatever shall we do about Mother?”
I’ve spent the past week administering Suddenly Initiated Caregiving & Kinfolk /Maternally Affiliated Medical Assistance (SICK-MAMA). My mother is a hypochondriac on par with Ignatius Reilly and Fred Sanford but like most hypochondriacs she hates doctors because they’re so damned negative, insisting on the nonexistence of what she knows damned good and well is killing her. Consequently, she’s also somebody who when she calls to say “come home, I’m sick and I need you to take me to the doctor”, you grab a change of clothes and the dog and get in the car and go.
When I got in last week I honestly thought she was dying. She couldn’t breathe, she was in tremendous pain, her oxygen level was terribly low, she was weak and couldn’t hold food, etc… Let me here add that the old woman has more lives than any Calico who ever sprayed a davenport and for now at least she’s managed to pulled yet another recovery out of her sagging rump (due in part probably to my dear dead departed and in many ways deceased Daddy’s 24/7 lobbying of saints, pagan gods, prophets and anyone else in the Netherworld with healing powers to speed her recovery and give him a few more days without a reunion). She’s not “fine” or “well” and after a two day respite spent catching up on paperwork at my job I return first thing in the morning to play Pass the Mama with my sister (who’s been with her for the past two days). No idea how long I’ll be there.
Over the past week doctors have done everything short of sinking a gusher and claiming her for the Red Cross. She’s given 15 vials of blood, has had tests out and in the wazoo, has another round on Monday, but no results yet. I have a definite gut feeling that this could well be the end of Mama Sampiro. I hope that I’m wrong obviously- I’ve had definite gut feelings before that were- but I’m bracing. And I really don’t want to give the impression that I take this lightly- I don’t- but if I seem bitchy and self-centered and morbid it’s because that’s what I do because the alternatives being morose, answering in detail when a sales clerk asks “how’re you doing?” and ultimately walking through Wal-Mart at 3 a.m. dressed as Gilligan and Ginger and picking off people with what I think are aesthetically displeasing facial shapes.
So anyway, there were some wake-up call moments and I’d love to read your opinions on a couple of matters. Last week when I really felt she was sinking fast, seeing her in her bed with her hair messed up, her teeth out, her wrinkles all lit by moonlight, in pain, etc., she truly looked like she was 95 instead of 71. The next morning she woke up feeling much better, which made me more convinced she was dying because everybody I’ve ever known who died after an illness of a few days or a few months suddenly got better for a brief period (minutes, hours, a day at most) then sank fast and died. That’s when I went into the Dealing-With-Death (DWD) mode that I totally inherited from my mother and her Swiss ancestors I suppose, for she is the same.
Rather than crying and tearing clothes and comparison shopping for ashes and soot shampoo products I was (this may sound terrible) thinking, coldly and rationally and emotionlessly, "who do I know who could be pall bearers? Let’s see- there’s my friend S____, she likes him, my cousin the Trekkie Virgin but I don’t know if he could hoist his share, my cousin the pothead hypochondriac who’d probably decided he had a headache and drop his share halfway through… going through a mental rolodex of all her male friends just alerts me to the fact that neither of them are physically fit enough… there’s my ex-boyfriend who she once or twice or five times threatened to kill but he’s young and can lift… my sweet Lord but this poor woman’s going to be conveyed to Charon’s dinner cruise by friend S___ the straight hairdresser, one fag, two schizophrenics and a Mexican daylaborer picked up on the way to the cemetery- throw in two conjoined twin Little People throwing beads and you’ve officially got Mardi Gras in Hell”. And another thought at the same time: "Does she have a living will? I don’t know… I’ve asked and never gotten a straight answer unless it’s one that conflicts with the last straight answer. God knows how many times I’ve asked her to write one. I wrote one myself and assumed she would with the blank form I left on her computer, but nope… So this means her three children, not one of whom has her Power of Attorney, will be doing a Moe Larry & Curly out in the waiting room. My brother, who has “issues” with the woman (he’s the only one of her kids ever to really stand up to her and tell her where to get off when we were kids, but unfortunately he did it less due to self esteem and independence than the fact he’s obnoxious to everybody)- he’ll be in favor of pulling all plugs if she can’t remember whether she left the coffee pot on. I’m middle ground- no chance of surviving without machines or real expectation of improved quality of life ever, discontinue. My sister who believes in a God who literally once made blackberry juice magically appear on a grocery store shelf for the benefit of her mother-in-law would be in favor of keeping a severed head on life support as long as it looked natural when connected to a mannequin. Who wins?
And other thoughts… like, “Hey, this means I can write ALL the stories I want to put in the book and don’t have to filter the bathroom incident of ’81… STOP THAT! YOU’RE BEING A SELFISH COLD ASSHOLE! WE ARE NOT STOP TELLING US TO STOP IT PISSANT… WHO’S THERE? WE ARE LEGION… I’M NOT, I’M JUST KIND OF CRASHING HERE WHILE THE GUY I USUALLY POSSESS IS IN A BRIEF COMA…* THE REST OF US ARE LEGION….* HEY LEGION, I’M BARB, I’LL BE OUT AS SOON AS MY GUY WAKES UP…* WELL WE SAY THAT * STTTTTTTTTOP IT!
And then yet another thought occurs. I’m thinking of pallbearers, but then I remember that like me Mama finds the prospects of embalming and burial somewhere between barbarically repulsive and hysterically funny. A dead body preserved for no apparent reason in a multithousand dollar box under a multithousand dollar headstone and vault and slab of varnished granite nobody’s ever going to visit, basically a bacteria orgy in dark storage 6 feet under some long dead Indian’s rabbit hunting ground… nah ah. We’re not Egyptians and we’re not Fundamentalists, we don’t believe in literally physical resurrection of the bodies (can you imagine anything more horrifying than Judgment Day if that’s really true- The physical resurrection- 90 million incontinent old people with Alzheimers and no blood or vital organs stumbling around trying to find Jell-O and their noon meds and the doll they lost when they were seven while bitching to guys who died of gunshot wounds and malaria about the heat… yuk) and frankly if the Fundamentalist Demiurge really is in power and really can’t do anything for (or to) those whose bodies were disposed of then I think we’ve found a great loophole cause neither of us are going to do well under His rule. I know for a fact my mother wants anything usable in her body harvested (I can’t imagine that would be much except perhaps for education purposes) and the rest used as a cadaver, cremated, and the ashes poured into the Gulf of Mexico.
I’m thinking about the fact that my sister, who is a Fundamentalist and does believe in physical resurrection, is going to shit howler monkeys over my mother being carved up by sorority girls and then incinerated and tossed to the fishies in the deep blue sea. Should my loyalties then in the absence of written wishes go to my mother, who even if there is a Netherworld probably couldn’t care less what happens to the meatbag she once lived in, or do I honor my sister’s wishes because she’s here and now and I have to know her forever and it really does bother greatly that Mama doesn’t want a burial? Should I honor the dead or the living… hmmm.
Would it be okay if I concede “let her be buried, but only after she’s been used as a cadaver” and with the insistence that
1- she NOT be buried next to my father (she’s VERY clear on that) but either some plot in Montgomery or perhaps one of the hillbilly boneyards in the backwoods where her relatives are in turd
2- she be buried in the cheapest metal casket available (she’s always been very clear on that- she thinks that spending $10,000 on a (for no apparent reason lined and quilted) box is the ultimate in idiocy- she even felt this with her parents and her husband (though my father wanted the Cadillac of ossuaries so she honored his wishes])
or
3- Should I do what I know my mother wants done and let the chips and bits of gristle and bone fall where they may (the Gulf of Mexico) even though I know it will hurt Kathy? Again, I don’t know think this is written out, but even if it is and signed in blood Kathy will not want to honor it, of that I’m positive.
Let me here add at risk of protesting too damned much: I have very powerful and complex emotions about my mother. I really am not making light of her suffering, but this really is how I deal with impending death- detach and think of the practical and delay the breakdown til later, if ever. (Before my father’s body was removed from the house I had already located [in a home with no electricity during an ice storm just for melodramatic effect] his will, his insurance policy [which it turned out the old bastard had cashed in to buy, among other things, bull semen- but am I bitter? Absolutely] and removed the old slats from a broken antique bed and made kindling since we were out and the wood outside was frozen.])
But I decided the time was nigh that my sister and I, and to a lesser degree her husband and to a even lesser lesser degree our mother, convene a Family Wann See Conference and discuss the “Final Solution” to the Mama problem.
) and I don’t know that you’re going to get anything out of this other than grief and a whole passel of new stories.
