Tag: Mother

Sunday at the Marina

Posted in MomTagged , , , 2 Comments

DSCF0269

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.

Denial.

Posted in MomTagged , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

“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.

DSCF1033 DSCF1028 DSCF1018 DSCF1016

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.

Posted in MomTagged , , , , 6 Comments

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.

IMG_3614

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.

DBRnR67M4qugf8lhvfmqhSLUo1_500.png

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.

 

IMG_3616

 

 

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.

Processed with VSCOcam with a2 preset

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Art World

Posted in MomTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

 

Image

6/4/14

Yesterday I went, as I have for almost six months, to visit my Mom, ill with cancer, now in hospice, at her apartment in the Marina.

She can’t walk now, so she is either in bed, or lifted onto a chair, wheeled over and pushed out, into the sun, or more often, up to the TV, where many hours of daytime talk shows play without end.

She asked me to sit down, next to her.

She said there was an explosion of news about cancer cures and people whose terminal illness had been cured through “miraculous” immunotherapies. Would I look into this she asked?

Told that she was Stage 4, incurable, sick with bone and lung cancer, she has accepted the news, but fought it through inquiry and denial. She told me she was coughing more because she had caught a cold.

Loretta, her live-in caregiver, brought my mother into the living room, to vacuum the bedroom. The bedside phone rang, and Loretta handed me a call from Direct TV.

I answered in the voice of old gruff Junior Soprano. I told the woman we were retired people, uninterested in her offer, and hung up. My mother laughed, hoarsely, and said that she loved that voice I used.

She is still fully there, her mental capacity undimmed, even as life seeps out and the monstrosity of dying cells takes over.

I made a lunch of grilled salmon and roasted garlic, rice, fruit salad, plain yogurt, and hot green tea. If healthy eating were enough to insure health this meal might defeat cancer.

After lunch, Loretta wrapped my Mom up. And I pushed Mom in the wheelchair down to vote in the Marina City Club, where more old people manned tables and passed over registration books, which my mother let me sign.

I stood next to her and fed the flimsy two-holed ballot into its plastic holder, and began to read the names of politicians to my mother, who only knew one, Governor Jerry Brown. We read each page: names of candidates and parties running for offices; all enigmas.

Is an ignorant voter more dangerous than an intelligent one who abstains from voting?

We turned the ballot back in, having punched only one hole and we were given stickers that read: “I have voted”.

I took her to the park across Admiralty Way, a running and biking path between the speeding cars and the tall buildings.

Behind the Ralph’s parking lot on Lincoln, there was a small opening in a fence, and I walked down to see if we could get through it. I judged that we could, and I pushed my mother in her chair over the asphalt onto the bark’s decline, through the fence hole and past the dumpster into the parking lot.

She hadn’t been inside a store in six months, and now, where she had once driven herself and walked in, she sat as she was pushed past edibles.

We picked up extra virgin olive oil, aluminum foil and wheeled back to the Marina City Club.

 

 

I seem not to cry much when I visit, acclimated am I to the new grimness.

I became, in the last six months, a high-ranking soldier: inspecting the medicines, giving orders to the homecare workers, pulling in supplies, taking over financial, legal and medical decisions, signing papers, managing staff and bringing drugs to the ill and dying, issuing directives for non-resuscitation and cremation.

I had no training, only a sense of duty, obligation and rightness.

 

When I left yesterday, in the late afternoon, I kissed my mother on the cheek and held her hand, and wandered out into the wind propelled in blank distraction.

From this time afterward I existed in a suspended and stoned state of mind, up on Abbot Kinney drinking wine, and later, intoxicated, walking up alleys and behind buildings camera in hand, anesthetized and numbed.

A woman sitting on the sidewalk, not homeless just sad, stopped me and asked me about my camera. Tina introduced herself. She told me her husband was divorcing her and taking custody of their two children. She asked if, one day, I might want to take photos of her and the children. She told me I should volunteer at Venice Arts and teach kids photography.

I was on wine so I was kind. I listened and gave her my card.

I think I will be like this for a while, even after my mother dies.

Peace will settle on me like a healed burn.

 

 

 

 

 

At Bedside.

Posted in MomTagged , , , , , , 5 Comments

On the day my mother was inducted into home hospice care, after the oxygen machine was delivered, and the table on wheels positioned over her bed, she asked me to sit down and go over a few things.

She said she woke up every morning, not thinking of death but gradually, as the day wore on, realized she was not going anywhere. Her cancer was in Stage #4.

Inoperable, untreatable, unceasing, spreading and unstoppable.

She asked me to hold her hand. And we spoke of what I would do with the apartment after she died. And I told her how I would keep the photo albums and place them in my house for posterity. She said that my brother and his wife might want her sofa. I knew they didn’t. But I kept silent and listened.

She wanted to know if the money was holding out, and she warned about overspending.

I broke down, as I do often, sometimes for much lesser reasons, and told her that I would write about her, and those sacrifices she made; the long, hard, uncompensated work of a woman who was a wife and mother for 54 years and often neglected her own pleasures waiting and tending to others.

Does it count for something if you remember your mother throwing a ball back and forth with your retarded brother? Running up and down the stairs carrying laundry? Screaming at me for crashing a car? Telling my dying father that she had so much to say to him.

She told me she did not want me to cry and she tried to steer the conversation back to where I was going that night, and what I might do on the way back to Van Nuys.

She spoke next of what she might wear when she was dead and laid out. A Bathing Suit is what she proposed. But then I reminded her that she would be cremated and there would be no casket and no outfit to consider.

Calmly and tearfully, eloquently and closely we tread on an event not far in the future, a dark and silent condition, irreversible.

That most feared moment, interrupting the pressing banalities and bills of life.

 The Young and the Restless tivoed.

Red grapes on sale at Ralph’s.

 Can you put another pillow behind my head?

 Can you get a glass of water for me?

 No I don’t want oxygen!

 When will the landlord be told that his tenant had died?

 Why should you care who visited your mother as she lay ill?

For now, the woman who gave birth to me still spoke.

 

Day of the Oncologist.

Posted in MomTagged , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

DSC_3862
On Tuesday, February 11, 2014, the Los Angeles sun rose at 6:41am and the sunset at 5:33pm. And I was driving east on Wilshire, through Beverly Hills, in the last hour of daylight, transfixed at the odd lull of creamy illumination, under gauzy skies, light that lasted long; accompanied by slight winds, cool and oceanic.

That day I had gone with my mother, a homecare worker, my brother and a nurse to visit two doctors, one an oncologist, the other GP.

The oncologist was down in El Segundo, a Japanese-American in slim gray khakis, and thin herringbone tie tucked under a natty Tattersall shirt. He spoke, quietly, unpromisingly, about six weeks of radiation and how cancer might be attacked in the lung, how its curative program might weaken the body. He advised two scans: a PET and an MRI to further determine if the malignancy had travelled to brain and bone or beyond.

But as much as he knew, he admitted he didn’t know everything. And what course my mother’s lung cancer might take, he could not say. His understated reverence for discreet diagnosis drowned out by his patient’s unceasing, hoarse, gurgling, sick cough.

The day was full of wheelchairs and waiting rooms, insurance cards and doctors smiling with closed lips.

Later on, I was trapped in my car, on the 405, sitting in a vast unmoving ribbon of automobiles stretching from Culver City to Bel Air, so I got off at Santa Monica Boulevard and drove east, just to move.

And it was in Beverly Hills, a place I despise, that I found solid peace under partly cloudy skies.

DSC_3883

On Linden and McCarty Streets, there are many old, lovely houses, well mannered, and discreetly elegant, some with small libraries behind bay windows, white siding and wood shake roofs, and old Spanish houses, not small, not grandiose, comfortably gracious and visually palliative.

I walked and looked, and found a few signs that said, “No Subway under BHHS”. Surprisingly none said “I Love Global Warming” or “Let’s Drive More SUVs and Promote Lung Cancer”.

This habit, of looking at nice houses, I inherited from my mother, an old hobby, learned in Chicago, driving past center-hall colonials she wished she lived in; then later on, in the 1980s, driving in her 1972 Delta 88 convertible down President Nixon’s street in Saddle River, New Jersey, not far from her new home in Woodcliff Lake, past that wooded estate where the 37th President lived.

Beverly Hills, CABuilt 1927

My walking tour of Beverly Hills ended near 220 S. Linden Drive, in front of an empty 1927 house, recently sold, where a cracked driveway, open garage and sagging second-floor window porch left evidence of past life. Silent, abandoned, a lot on the street.

Who owned it? Who valued it? Who furnished it? Who made love here? Who woke up and who went to bed here? Who drove up its driveway every night imagining that those nights coming home would go on forever?