Category: Mom

Impressions of Chicago (Part II)

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I was born and raised in Chicago.

How I thought of that city, which I left before I became an adult, was cloaked and colored under the family who brought me up there and who soaked their biases into my head.

That Chicago, more specifically Lincolnwood, became a suffocating, judgmental, intolerant and petty landscape of cruelty, snobbery, and competitiveness in which I, and my family, were on the receiving, and losing end.

In light of the present, where I know of the real atrocities around the world, the things that happened back then in Lincolnwood were small and fleeting and insignificant.

But they still stung me. And have stayed with me.

A few months ago, I did one of my Facebook searches for people I once knew in Lincolnwood.

One infamous and notorious name came up. To protect the guilty I will call him Arthur Knox.

A blue-eyed, athletic, deviously charming and good-looking kid, he was the child of a Highway Construction Foreman who washed his Black 1963 Fleetwood Cadillac on the driveway every Sunday.

Arthur ran faster than everyone. In his bedroom he hung posters and pennants of his favorite heroes from the Black Hawks to the Cubs. In school, he was the captain of any team in gym class.

By contrast, my own disinterest in sports grew as I was pushed into Little League. I hated standing in the hot, humid sun waiting in center field for someone to hit a ball out to me.

I also had not a single interest in any Chicago sports team: a fatal flaw in The Windy City.

Instead, I read from my 1960 World Book Encyclopedia while Arthur Knox and other boys set up ball games on the street and played football on nearby lawns.

Gradually, my lack of interest in sports worried and angered my mother. She may have perceived a dark funnel cloud of homosexuality on the horizon.

Arthur Knox bullied me on the bus. He called me “the world’s suckiest athlete.” I went home and told my mother about it. She replied, “I don’t even know what that word suck means. Forget about it!”

At the bus stop, Arthur taunted me and another girl with dog shit on a stick. On another day, he rode after me on his bike, with his pal Keating, tackling me near the Devon Avenue Bridge and beating me up in the dirt. Nothing had provoked it. He just felt like it.

Was I shot? No. Was I bloodied? No. The scale of violence was mild, but my rage was deep.  Arthur was terrifying. He had to be avoided but he ruled over the street.

40 years later, he was a “Life Coach” and a father, married, and had competed in a triathlon in which he apparently almost lost his life, later revived by paramedics. He went on to tell his resurrection story on a nationally broadcast program.

On Facebook, the accolades of praise for Arthur Knox poured in. “World’s Best Father”, “The Man who Taught Me What it Means to be a Man”, “The Greatest Friend Anyone Could Have.”  Arthur had posts against bullying, posts about gratitude, posts about love, family and life.

His life of conformity to alpha male values was vindicated. Competitive in sports and business, he basked in praise. Millions knew his outer accomplishments. Only I remembered his temper and violence.

And the popular kids, the ones who I used to call “The Snob Club”, they were all his friends on Facebook. And the virtual world of 2015 was as alive with sycophants as the real one of 1975.

Why bring up the story of Arthur Knox? He is nobody important. He just seemed important back then. And some think he’s important today.

On my recent trip to Chicago, one sunny late July afternoon, I went down to Montrose Harbor.

Everything was in primary colors.

The day was glorious and the setting magnificent: the blue sky and the white clouds, the enormous grassy lawn park, the yachts and the boats moored at their port, the skyline in the distance, the red lighthouse and white sailboats, the bleached rocks on the shore and turquoise tinted Lake Michigan.

A tall, tanned young man in board shorts was hoisting a sailboat off its trailer and attempting to attach it to a steel armed lift that he would use to crank and lower it into the lake. I asked him what he was doing. He asked me if I would help him.

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Alex Jan, Montrose Harbor, Chicago, IL 7/29/15

I jumped in and directed him as he steered the boat on wheels and hooked it onto the crane. We pushed, pulled, and guided the vessel into the water.

After we were done he told me he worked at Mariano’s in the western suburbs. “Dude, I’m a butcher!” And on his day off, he eagerly came down to work at the Chicago Corinthian Yacht Club at Montrose Harbor. Sun burned butcher on the dock on his day off….

He picked up a cold can of Colt 45 and drank it. He thanked me for helping him and asked me if I had to use a bathroom or anything. I said yes, and he let me go into the clubhouse facilities.

We said goodbye and I told him I would put his photo up on Instagram.

Something about that day seemed intrinsically Chicagoan: friendly, un-menacing, bonding, open- hearted, fun, casual, and unaffected.

Maybe there are people and moments like that in Los Angeles, but they are often colored by ulterior motives, either sexual or vocational.

Am I being too generous to Chicago? Is there anything truly odd or notable about that day on Montrose Harbor?

Is it logical to bestow attributes on someone just because of where they live?

 At lunch, Judy Mamet, lifelong Chicagoan for eight decades, said her city is often “judgmental.”

She was speaking to me, an Angelino, who often hears that everything is “cool”.  On the West Coast we hide our indifference by calling it toleration.

Maybe what I remember most about Chicago was its judgments.

I think of that stern Lutheran neighbor in the knee socks who walked her girls to church every Sunday. She came to say good-bye when were moving out and told my Mom that she was glad my retarded brother had been institutionalized because she pitied watching Jimmy and my mom played catch.  My mother later said she wanted to throw acid in her face.

I think of Mrs. Libman, my 6th Grade teacher who taught the subject I could never learn: math. I grew to dislike her.

One day, my friend and I rode our bikes in front of her house, yelling out “Mrs. Libman! Mrs. Libman!”  She came out of the side door and yelled at us. Later on my friend apologized to her. But I never did. Then my Mom and I bumped into Mrs. Libman at Marshall Field & Co. at Old Orchard. “Howard Kenneth apologized to me but your son never did,” she said. “I’m sorry Mrs. Libman,” I said.

Think about how un-criminal our behavior was. Yet it was scandalous. And that old Chicago standard of judgment still haunts my morality.

And those small lives predicated on big morality, they seem to still thrive in the Windy City, those people who have never left there, who exist in the mental and geographical landscape of the Middle West where you cut your lawn because your neighbors would look down on you if you didn’t. And you go to work everyday because if you didn’t you would not only starve but be banished out of the family of normality and acceptance.

Embarrassment and shame, the cabal of middle-aged moms and dads who enforce good behavior, the presumption that there is a right and a wrong, the correctness and goodness of the white race, the idea that life goes off the rails because of moral defects, these are deep in the DNA of Chicago and the Middle-West. Pope John Paul II and Mayor Rahm Emanuel have called Chicago “The Most American of Cities.”

They said it patriotically. I quote it ironically.

Proudly, Chicagoans will show off their lakefront, their new parks, their “architecture” and their feats of engineering and artistry. But what they are also saying is that their city is who they are. And that is why, when a Chicagoan is told that his city is racist, or a murder capitol or not as good as New York, he reacts with anger and hurt. You are hurting the Chicagoan to speak against Chicago.

And that is what makes it unlike any city in America. The city and the man in it are the same.

Sunday at the Marina

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Yesterday, I went down to photograph Darren, a friend in the Marina who just took a new apartment on Tahiti Way, one with water and boat views.

Sunday.

In the Marina.

I had been here many Sundays before.

When my Mom was alive, before cancer, still walking and living at 4337 Admiralty Way, I often pushed my visits to Sunday. I went down there, just as I did yesterday, and took her shopping, to get her car washed, into Target. We might stop at Ralph’s, pick up food, and I would broil pork chops, open a bottle of red wine, and watch “Mad Men” with her.

When it came time for me to leave, around 10, she would get up, stooped over, stand near the door and implore me to “please, please call me when you get home.”

And when I drove along the 90, up onto the 405, and passed those long stretches of green signs with fabled names; Washington, National, Santa Monica, Wilshire, Sunset; and descended, in speed or crawl, on that wide highway, back into the Valley, my goal was to always make it out of my car alive, without incident, to get back home and call up my mother and tell her I was home safe.

The winds were strong, the light was glittering, the cirrus clouds blew, the bent palms bowed.

Yesterday at 3, as I crossed Tahiti Way at Via Marina, I was back in melancholy, heavy-hearted, traversing the places I had spent the year last walking, pushing a wheelchair.

Three weeks before she died, I took her on a water taxi that navigated the man-made fingers of the harbor.

That day, her mouth hung open, oxygen starved. She was wrapped in blankets, her eyes were watery, she could hardly see.

The boat had turned up Basin B, along Tahiti Way.

This week is Thanksgiving, a day sacred and special, and the first where I have no mother or father.

I thought of that last night when I left the apartment on Tahiti Way and walked in the winds past places where flat screens and lights and laughter poured out of open sliding doors, a California night.

The Retraction From Life

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Weaker, yet still alive, still able to speak, Louise M. Hurvitz was in her wheelchair, in the sunshine near the glistening Marina boats, when she told me she wanted to eat a steak.

That was on Monday, August 18th. She ate a hamburger that night, and a slice of pizza on Tuesday night. She was 8 months into her Stage 4 lung and bone cancer.

Nurse Linda said she was looking great.

Then on Wednesday she began to call for her sister “Millie”. She was up all night, and then asleep all day by morphine and Lorazepam. In periods of wakefulness, her glazed eyes no longer looked at me, but out into nothing.

She was no longer able to speak. I went every other day to see her, knowing she was entering death.

A blue booklet left by hospice, Gone From My Sight, explained how the bedridden dying walked out of life. We noted her symptoms mirrored in the book.

The late afternoon sun was bright in her bedroom on Friday, August 22nd. She screamed that her head hurt, her back hurt, everything hurt. She wanted me to shut all the drapes. I abided and put the room in darkness. Foreshadowing.

She was in her last days. Nurse Bertha said if she ate she would stay alive. And then on Friday, August 29th, Labor Day weekend, hospice came and said, “no more food or water”. She was given 72 hours.

All weekend were the pleasures of Los Angeles, the beach and the beer, the walks along Abbot Kinney, the barbecues, I partook of some haunted by an upcoming phone call.

And then on Sunday, August 31st at 11:30 PM we were called and told she was breathing irregularly. We got in the car and rushed down to the apartment. My brother and sister-in-law were at her bedside. A nurse helplessly held the nasal end of the oxygen tube against her open mouth.

She was gray faced.

She was gasping for breath.

I replaced the nasal oxygen with a whole nose/mouth mask. Nurse Linda arrived. The hospice nurse came. It was about 2am and we did not know how long she would live. Exhausted we left. And an hour later I was in bed when my brother called.

“I hate to tell you this but Mom has passed.”

All the fighting for her life, all the medications, the food, the physical therapy, the chemotherapy, the consultations with UCLA medical doctors, the cat scans and the other radiology, the organic smoothies packed with nutrients; all the equipment, the oxygen, the ointments; everything done to keep her alive and going. Done.

Her body was pronounced dead by a doctor. The cremation company came to the apartment to wrap up and remove her.

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We held a home service for her, almost a week later, on Saturday, September 5th.

Andreas Samson, my friend who writes Up in the Valley, attended and wrote a touching description of the bittersweet “party”.

There was food and drink, old photos on the flat screen television, a Spotify soundtrack of her beloved music (Frank Sinatra, the Fifth Dimension, Herb Alpert). Relatives who had never seen her sick, showed up to pay their respects.

And her life was presented selectively, with an emphasis on the young, beautiful, vivacious, pranking, intelligent, subversive sorority girl and network executive.

She, who died at 80, mothered a retarded boy, took care of an epileptic and ill husband, worried and fretted over children, finances, nightly meals, laundry and cleaning, her daily travails were wiped away or spoken of in one sentence salutes at our remembrance.

For 52 years, I had grown up and grown old with her. I knew her love and her craziness, her exasperating circular questions, her sparkling memory for names, faces, and events.

She, who drank vodka and grapefruit juice, and later switched to red wine, was probably an alcoholic. She was full of shame over events she had no power over, castigating and punishing herself.

But she fought hard to protect and to nurture, and daring to venture out of Lincolnwood, IL, moving to suburban NJ where she set up a new life with her family at 47, exploring Manhattan, New England and the East Coast with the curiosity and passion of a young woman starting out life.

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She sold airplanes with a male friend, a pilot and airplane broker who lead a life outside of norms, a man who was later convicted of stealing money from his customers. He flew Louise and our family, often, to Albany, Boston, Martha’s Vineyard, Manahawkin Airport, Miami, East Hampton, Nantucket, Block Island, all around the Eastern Seaboard. American life was seen from 8,000 feet, little houses and little lives across the vast expanse.

She went into the city to see plays with my father, to walk neighborhoods, to buy groceries at Fairway, see exhibitions at the Metropolitan, attend concerts and events at Lincoln Center.

She read the NY Times and Bergen Record voraciously, keeping herself informed on culture and politics. The papers piled up in wet and musty mountains stacked in the garage.

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She loved her new home in the woods, a place where the windows were always open and the rooms smelled of rain and leaves and florid humidity. In the spring, summer and early fall, the back deck, suspended on the second story of the house, was her outdoor space, a place of reading, eating, entertaining and midnight conversations by candlelight.

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She lost my father after his long and agonizing brain disease, an illness that took 4 years to progress, rendering him an invalid.

But after he died, in her apartment in the Marina, she became a devoted grandmother and somehow earned the respect and awe of children who had once only seen sadness and burden in her exhausted eyes.

She was valiant onto the end; never giving into death, never acknowledging that life was less than the entirety. An iron dome of denial was her shield.

She was more than she ever admitted to being. She was magnificent in her life force, in her refusal to die, in her love for life.

 

 

 

 

Prayers and Pharmaceuticals.

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What day was it on the calendar?

I did not know.

I only know I was speaking with my mother, pushing her along in the wheelchair along the Marina path. The sky was bright, the boats were anchored along the dock, she said she was hungry and wanted a steak.

It was last Monday, August 18th and Linda brought her a burger from In N’ Out. My mother said it was delicious.

The next night she asked for pizza.

The steroids that she had gone back on seemed to be making her hungrier, putting food for life back into the body of a woman in Stage 4 cancer.

Linda came and said mother is looking better. Vital signs were good. Blood pressure 102/59, pulse 62, temperature 98.6.

 

 

I was back on Thursday, August 21st.

Caregiver Bertha, a Guatemalan woman who is a fireball of energy and love, cooking up soups, cleaning windows, massaging oil into my mother, rolling her out of bed into the wheelchair, said my mother had been up all night screaming, “Help! Help! Help!”

I blamed the steroids. They were keeping her up.

My mother told me she was dying. She said this was it.

Bertha laughed and said “Miss Lou you are not dying. Your face has color. This is not death!”

My mother said that Anisha was in the other room. I said Anisha is gone. She said she saw her. She said it over and over again. We were conversing, but the conversation was repetition. I was speaking to her, as I had for the last half century, but the words were going into a mind going into death.

My mother said I was sick. I told her I was not. “Why are you sick?” she asked. She said something about a concussion.

 

 

On Friday, my sister-in-law Pri visited and spoke with my mother. Later I came over and found my mother asleep. When she awoke, her eyes were watery, and she asked for her sister Millie. “Millie, Millie, Millie, Millie, Millie…” And I dialed the phone, 90-year-old Millie in Chicago answered, and on speaker she spoke to my mother, “Lou I love you. You are my favorite sister.”

The nurse from Skirball came, cheery, on her last call of the day, before she went off work for the weekend. As she had, all along, the hospice nurse offered empathy and most of all, pharmaceuticals. She had no explanation for my mother’s descent into half-life. She wanted to make sure my mother was “comfortable” in her “transition”, the words as soft and false and phony and amorphous as the hospice treatment, a kind of strange medicine offering prayers from amateur rabbis, talk therapy from retired therapists, and weekly visits from drug dispensing nurses pouring morphine and Lorazepam into the mouths of the dying.

My mother asked me to close the drapes in the room. She said the light was blinding her. She said her head hurt. She said she ached all over. I pulled the drapes shut, and we sat in the dark, which felt ominous, a portent of death, shutting out light.

 

On Saturday, August 23rd, I went down to the apartment to welcome a new caregiver, Marta, who would be there in the last days of my mother’s life. Bertha stayed, until 3 O’Clock, training the new woman.

A blonde, middle-aged female rabbi came to the apartment, ludicrously dressed, to my eyes, in a doily lace yarmulke, offering exuberant compliments about the 8th floor view. She sat down next to my mother and asked if she was ready to go. She said it was Ok to go. My mother was now dead to spirit, but alive, incoherent, the silly, improvised, bedside portable Judaism lite blew over her like the breeze.

The rabbi left, her utterances to the all-mighty were no match for the wonders and miracles of morphine. True peace and acceptance were swallowed every four hours.

“I give your mother La Morfina. She sleep well,” Bertha said.

 La Morfina.

The patron saint of cancer.

And I returned on Sunday, August 24, 2014 to her apartment. The front door was open and a wind blew through the living room, rustling the newspapers and sucking the drapes into the open sliding doors.

Danny and I sat next to her, one on each side of her bed.

“Do you know who I am?” Danny asked.

“Danny,” she said.

“Good!” he said.

She said my name and then fell back into her world. And whatever she said next had no meaning. They were only words, coming out, weakly.

“Clicker, clicker, clicker…” referring to the TV remote.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Denial.

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“She was screaming at night about her arm, her chest, her leg,” Anisha, a caregiver, said.

“She hardly slept.”

Anisha was speaking about my mother,now in Stage 4 cancer, confined to a bed for the last eight months.

Later on, when I went into her room, my mother said she had slept well the night before. “There is nothing wrong with me,” she said.

She was breathing on oxygen, then she told us to take it off. She has refused most pain medication, reluctantly asking only for sleeping pills.

 

I took her out on Sunday, in her wheelchair, and we ventured along the Marina. By chance, we happened to come to a dock where a water taxi was taking passengers. I wheeled her down and we rode around the harbor for a dollar.

A hospice nurse visited on Sunday night and found nothing “wrong”, only anxiety.

On Monday, another nurse came and told me later my mother’s feet were showing signs of “mottling” an impending indicator of death.

 

On Tuesday, I was back down at her apartment. A social worker was talking to my mother. Anisha told me that my mother had not slept the night before, and had talked of her future fear and past regret. “You should give her some hope for the afterlife,” Anisha said to me, an atheist.

When the social worker left, I went back into the bedroom. My mother was combative, annoyed. “You and your brother are driving me crazy with this system! How would you like to be under a microscope?”

I asked her if she had slept well. She said of course. She slept fine.

Again we went out to roam around the Marina. It got windy and she asked to go back inside. “I want a steak,” she said. She had not eaten more than liquids for at least a week. I corrected her and said she meant hamburger.

And then after I left the apartment, after I had two glasses of wine at a bar, I walked around Venice, shooting pictures along the canals, and then wandered back to my car.

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The phone rang as I drove east on Washington. It was Anisha. She wanted to assure me that my mother had slept well last night. When she had called out, it was only in a dream.

“I told him,” Anisha said to my mother before she hung up the phone.

The Whirlpool.

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Cancer, homecare, medicines, hospice, chemo, wheelchair, bone cancer, lung cancer, cough syrup, Oxycontin, Oxycodone, Remeron, Sinemet, Morphine, adult diapers, sponge baths, bowel movements, stool softeners, rehab, oncologist, nurse, radiation, constipation, oxygen, Stage Four, terminal, incurable, cremation.

For seven months I’ve swum in a whirlpool of ugly words.

Yesterday, again, I went down to see my mom at her apartment. One homecare worker was leaving, another arriving. I came in with four bags of groceries and went back to the bedroom.

She was in bed.

The TV was on. I think it was “The View”.

I sat down on the carpet in front of her bed, the only way she can see me, straight ahead.

Bertha came in with matzo ball soup. I ate two bowls. She fed my mom a few bites.

In the afternoon, I took my mom for a “walk” in her wheelchair.

I picked her up, limp and frail, and moved her from the horizontal position on the bed into her chair. Seated now, I put the pedals on, guiding her weak legs and purple feet into position over the pads.

I squeezed a pillow behind her curved back, and pulled her arms up into a zippered sweatshirt. I draped and folded a blue terry cloth blanket across her lap. Sunglasses went over her eyes, a hoodie atop her head.

I pushed the steel chair and the woman in it out of the bedroom, past the front door of the apartment, into the elevator riding down, through the dark parking garage. And out into the brilliant sun, out into the fresh and salty wind.

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A key opened the locked steel gate along the long dock where cruisers, sailboats and yachts were docked. Between the boats and the buildings, that’s where we went.

The hi-rise, swinging sixties apartments along the Marina, with their curved balconies, they were made for tanned stewardesses, white shirted pilots, Irish-American boat captains, cocktails on the sea, cigarettes and sex, lovemaking and laughter.

Architects and developers back then, like now, were drunk on youth, novelty and modernity.

Nobody was supposed to get old. Nobody was meant to come here disabled, wrapped in blankets, pushed along the harbor watching other people have fun. Wheels were the Red’68 Bonneville Convertible- not the walker and the wheelchair.

We walked past Killer Shrimp and crossed the asphalt to the other side where they were renting paddleboats and paddle boards. I pushed my mother to the end of a dock inside the lakelike Mother’s Beach.

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On the dock, my mother in her chair, me pushing her almost to the edge, a sinister thought entered my mind.

I thought of Technicolor Gene Tierney in “Leave Her to Heaven”(1944) where she let a crippled boy, her husband’s brother, drown in a cold lake.

If I had the evil gene of Gene I might act on hard and cruel impulse and push mom into the water, an act of mercy perhaps, saving her from the eventuality of dying in bed from fluid in her lungs or some other unforeseen killer.

Instead, I pulled back and fastened her brakes. I took out my phone and photographed my living mother motionless on the ocean dock.

 

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Hours later I was at the Whole Foods bar with Travis, drinking a Scotch Ale, listening to a ravishing real estate agent, talk about her teen son’s abusing father, and her fight to cure her child.

Pretty, like the actress Susan Lucci, she grew up in Venice and talked as if she had sold many millions of dollars of houses in the new rich bohemia.

My buddy, much younger, broader-shouldered, deeper-voiced and all man, listened to her as she massaged him with her eyes.

She showed us pin-up shots of her on the Samsung screen, sexy images that made me ask, intoxicated as I was, what exactly she was selling.

Around us in Whole Foods, was the whirlpool of beauty and freaks that swirls in the aisles among the organic fruits and vegetables: tall women, muscular men, old women in running shorts; beards, tattoos and pegged pants, rolled cuffs, razor cuts, canvas bags, kale and 90% cocoa chocolate bars.

Travis and the real estate agent left, going their separate ways, but I stayed longer, waiting for the beer to wear off. I amused myself by photographing the green-eyed young clerk Joey.

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I am not an alcoholic, but I now can see, with ease, the attraction of numbing pain, blocking sadness, loosening tension. I will willingly submit to its temporal benefits and consoling pleasures.

As I did last night for a few hours after dusk.

 

 

One day soon, I will come down here to Venice and Marina Del Ray.

And my mother will be gone.

And I will think of these months, the ones that came about in 2014, where sickness and impending death arrived without warning.

And I will remember the endless summer of insipid profundity, the strange and incongruous times of illness and fun, the months on watch seeing her decline in Marina Del Rey.

Who dares to die in a place where pleasure pushes along unimpeded on bike, in swimming pools, on jogging paths, on tennis courts, at volleyball games?