Tag: Son

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.

 

 

 

 

 

At Bedside.

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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.

 

2/19/14

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52 years ago, in Park Ridge, IL, a 28-year-old woman labored in Lutheran General Hospital for 20 hours and gave birth to me.

Yesterday, we were together again, at 8:30am, inside UCLA Medical in Santa Monica, CA to hear the news that her cancer had spread from lung to bone and most likely would kill her within months.

There were tears in the office, and treatment talked of but not promised, because there was not much that could be done to arrest and blockade a disfiguring and painful disease. Aggressive killing cells, moving fast, were taking over every bodily pathway and steering this woman, my mother, into death.

Back at the apartment, I called 90-year-old Aunt Millie, my mother’s sister in Chicago, to tell her a grave prognosis. Simultaneously, we burst out crying, she wailing that her little sister was not supposed to die before her.

Later on, in the sun, I sat with my mother in the open door of her apartment, by her knee, as she spoke of her disbelief. I told her I didn’t want to see her in any pain, that if she had to die, it should be quickly.

To wish your mother to die faster seems obscene, blasphemous, selfish.

But every choice pondered, in treatment or without, lead into the same dead end: 2 months, 4 months, 8 months…

A vulture phoned later, a cousin who traffics in crystals and angelic communications. He spoke, like an infomercial, of “amazing” cures down in Mexico, and “unbelievable” results.

Topped in yarmulke and baptized in mysticism, he droned on in monologue, flavoring his pitch with prestige (“Harvard” and “M.I.T”), cliche and promise (“Think outside the box” and “alternative treatment”). Gross and unrelenting in salesmanship and insanity, the voice of this bearded charlatan claimed godlike knowledge that might save a dying person.

But the huckster claiming the miracle cure has no power over us.

Our immediate family was inoculated in skepticism, disbelieving in the afterlife, doubtful of religious fervor, resigned to believe that death is death and without merit except in its extinction of pain.

Dreams of heaven were not on my mind, only the distant past.

I saw again the Super 8 movies taken by my father as my mother pushed a stroller around Indian Boundry Park in Chicago in early Spring, her black hair and skirt blowing in the March winds. I saw days spent with my younger mother in love, the warm breath of life, memory, kisses, spaghetti sauce cooking on the stove, the days spent on the porch watching the rain pour down on Birchwood Drive; I also recalled the explorations into old neighborhoods, the angry fights, the dramas and battles over bad report cards, the shame when I came out and my eventual acceptance and her grudging respect, the fierce warrior who always thought my best days were still to come; she with her inexhaustible conversations and inability to stay silent long, how can her voice go away! How can my mute words replace life itself, extinguished cruelly and helplessly by the biological necessity of dying?

2/19/14: a dark day, an unforgettable birthday. It ended, as many days in Los Angeles do, eating sushi. Me, my brother, my sister-in-law and my 7-year-old nephew went out to dinner, drank sake and split raw fish rolls. And I blew out a single candle on top of vanilla ice cream and fried bananas as the entire restaurant sang Happy Birthday.

My Father’s Wallet

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My father died April 13, 2009.
Since that day, I have kept his wallet inside a white ceramic vase on a square table next to my bed.

To hold another person’s wallet, without their consent, even when they are dead, seems a violation.

And what possession is more personal than a wallet?

Like the expired man, his wallet contains expired credit cards.

I read the business cards stuffed into the wallet pockets.

One card is The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ where I saw him on the morning of October 14, 2006 after I flew into Newark on a red eye from LA. He had suffered some sort of a small stroke. And I cried at his bedside.

A Department of Veterans Affairs ID, created only a few months before he died.

A card from a Speech Pathologist who would help him pronounce words at age 75 that he once could say without practice.

He was a painter and took art lessons at The Ridgewood Art Institute. A green paper card, frayed at the edges, was valid through August 31, 2007.

AARP, Medicare, Costco, American Express, AAA, Master Card and Visa: the cards of a modern living American male. Pieces of plastic to insure, to protect, to provide, to make credit for any activity on Earth.

In his last week of life, I remember he was breathing with difficulty as he sat on a bar stool bench, at the kitchen counter in his apartment, going over his taxes, which were due in mid-April.

He was fatally and incurably ill and knew he would die from this inexplicable illness called Multi-System Atrophy.

But he was no different than any of us in his belief that he would continue to live.

My father’s wallet still seems to belong to a living person. And no amount of time or loss can diminish it.

Dad and Me in Rustic Canyon.

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Dad and Me in Rustic Canyon., originally uploaded by hereinvannuys.

In the past few years, a degenerative illness has overtaken my father in his brain. It affects his speech and balance. Countless specialists from UCLA to NYU to Columbia have diagnosed it as either Ataxia, Multi-Symptom Atrophy, or OPCA. There is no general agreement on what it is, or how to cure it.

He now can only stand up and walk with a walker. He has to hang on to walls and door handles and when he takes a shower, there has to be another person in the room. Last year, the neurologist briefly prescribed a Parkinson’s drug to help his speech. It worked for two weeks until he started having uncontrollable shaking in his hands and seizures in his face. He went into the hospital and “recovered”.

He came home to the occupational, speech and home health care workers who gave him lessons, at age 74, on how to tie his shoes and ask for a glass of water clearly. Chronological maturation is a return to infancy on some levels, it seems.

Through it all, he has not complained. He still manages to smile and conduct his life with grace, honor, politeness, dignity and bravery. You wonder, how human beings, having lived and struggled their whole life, still manage to surmount the moral and physical strength to conduct one more battle on Earth.

He is leading his children in an example of how to live with illness, and still maintain a healthy outlook.