Tag: Parent

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Art World

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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.