On Her Own Terms

She’ll walk into the sea.  Just like that.  In an older version, she takes a boat, rows herself out a ways, and then lowers herself in.  Paf, the end.

My mother has imagined for some time how she wants to die.  In her later years, which, really, are upon her now, she wants a cottage near the ocean with a Mercedes Benz sitting in the driveway.  Not necessarily to drive it, though.

“Just to look at it from my bedroom window,” she’d say.

She’s never owned a Mercedes, to my knowledge.  It had been one of those status symbols for which she vied but never attained.  Over the last five or six years, since the cancer came and went, and the cysts came and went, and the complications from the surgery to remove the cysts came and went, she’s dropped the fantasy about the Mercedes in the driveway.  She still does look at real estate inMaine.  Choosing her battles, I guess.

I visit her and my father for her 65^th birthday.  And his 68^th, a month late.

“If it weren’t for this wedding, you wouldn’t have made the trip,” she says.  She’s alluding to my friend’s wedding an hour from where they live.  She’s right, but I don’t tell her as much.

On this visit, there’s no cancer, there’s no cyst, but she’s finally admitting that she might have Alzheimer’s.

“I just can’t keep track of anything anymore,” she says.  She’s been saying it for years.  She’s right, and I tell her as much.

Her mother died from Alzheimer’s.  Forgot who the President was, forgot that her friends had long since passed away.  Forgot it was Thanksgiving.  Forgot who I was.  Forgot how to talk.  Forgot to breathe.  Forgot to stop dying.  So now my mother is thinking that that might be how she goes.

The prospect doesn’t excite her.  By her own admittance, she hasn’t done the whole aging thing with any amount of grace.

“This getting old stuff is for the birds,” she tends to say.

When she got cancer, she opted out of chemotherapy.  She was aware of the risks, of what would happen if the cancer came back, how she’d essentially be fucked if it did.  She knew.  And she opted out anyway.  Despite our objections, the objections of the oncologist.

“I’m just not doing it,” she said.  “That stuff’s just too yucky.”

So we watched as she didn’t do it.  Fingers crossed, since none of us pray anymore.

We knew she wasn’t one for compromise – she never had been.

“Only child,” we’d say.

It manifested itself in many ways, mostly to our embarrassment: sending food back, returning faulty or imperfect products, demanding to speak to a manager and entrenching herself until the situation was resolved (i.e. until she got her way).

But with her health, we were all a little surprised when she remained as obstinate as she did.  When she returned to the hospital after complications from the surgery where the cysts were removed, I spoke to a very drugged, very cranky, somewhat paranoid version of her.  They were keeping her there against her will, the food was awful, she just wanted to go home.  She had to go to work.  I felt bad giggling.

“I need to get out of here, Jeff,” she slurred.  “There’s no way I’m staying here another twenty four hours.  I just can’t take it.”  This, after they had told her she needed to stay the weekend.  She, like her mother, did not do well in hospitals.  Her mother would sneak out of her room, fold towels and sheets, and then deliver them to unsuspecting patients on other floors or halls.  She had no idea where she was.

Again, though, on this visit, no hospital horror stories, no scary lumps, no x-rays with bad news.  So instead, we ruminate on the possibility of a degrading brain.  We don’t invoke her mother, not that we need to.

It was a long death.  One that started with rheumatoid arthritis; in an earlier chronicle of her passing, I wrote that the arthritis slowed her down enough for the Alzheimer’s to catch her, to sink its teeth into her gray matter.  Which it did, slowly, fucking painfully so.

When she took a cognitive baseline test at some point in the early 2000s, one of the questions was Who is the current President?  She said Gerald Ford.  Which was not correct.

It was before I went to college that we began to see it.  Then in college, when I was living abroad and called home, she did not know that it was Thanksgiving, nor that dinner had been served already.

“We have to go eat now!” she said, as she hung up the phone.

When I last saw her, she was in a home, having forgotten how to dress herself, how to walk, how to form sentences.  She could sit; she could move her eyes.  For the half hour that we were there, my mother implored her to do the exercises the nurse had been doing with her: it was little more than raising her arms above her head.

“Do you remember your grandson Jeff?” she asked her mother.  My grandmother looked at my mother and smiled.  I waved, said hi, that it was good to see her.

“K, mom, we’re going to leave now,” my mother said eventually.  “Do we get to hear you say good-bye?”

“Good-bye,” my grandmother said – the only words from her that day, the last I’d hear from her.

So now, we think, it might be my mother’s turn.  For purely selfish reasons, I hope to shit it doesn’t get her.  Looking at what a toll it took on her, the exhaustion, the frustration, the laughing at the fucken tragedy of it all – I can’t imagine my sister and I putting up with the shit that she did, being as good an advocate as she was, being as stubborn as she was to make sure her mother got good care, doing homework on the prescribed medications.  I mean, she bought The Arthritis Bible; we mocked her for it, if only because we never saw her read it.  But she bought the fucken thing, and that’s more than I’d do.  I’d type a query into Google, see what it yielded, and if it took more than five minutes, I’d tell her I didn’t know how to help.  Maybe my sister will be better about it.  Maybe I’m underestimating my ability to care for her.  Who knows – maybe we’ll rise to the task.  Or maybe she’ll make us.  She does understand the motivating power of guilt, and hasn’t hesitated to use it.

But we’re not there yet.  We just don’t know what’s going to happen to her brain, what it will look like after the autopsy (we learned during my grandmother’s experience that a brain that dies from dementia looks different from a brain that dies from Alzheimer’s).  We can’t even really say that my mother’s dying more than anyone else.  We’re just sitting at the kitchen counter, her leafing through the paper or a flyer, me trying to edit a chapter for a book that I’m working on.  I don’t even know how it comes up, but it does.  Since no one else is dying, it might as well be her.  My father’s parents are dead.  Hers are both gone now, too; her stepfather hung on to the tether of his oxygen tank until he died on the toilet the next town over.

So it’s someone’s turn.  My father’s genes are too good, and we all acknowledge this.  We assume that Susan and I have a while, although our medical histories aren’t yet known (adoption).  So maybe it’s right to assume that she’s next.  Our extended family, well, sure, there are probably others in line before her, but in the immediate sphere, the cards are stacked against her.

“I’m not going to do it,” she says, referring vaguely to a slow, protracted death.  “One day, I’m just going to walk out into the sea and keep going.”

I don’t look at her.  I just nod.  She knows she’s told me before.  I don’t tell her I like the idea, that it sounds peaceful, that I’ve heard that drowning, after the panic dissipates, is actually a soothing way to die.  I don’t tell her that a former colleague of mine who did search and rescue talked about how we often return to the water to greet our death.  How in the winter inNew England, the water is warmer than the air.  I just nod.  Because what else can I do?

Because honestly, what the fuck is a son supposed to say to his mother who’s just told him how she wants to die?

I wonder if it’s a bluff, like her threats that she’s going to divorce my father.  She’s been telling that story almost as long as she’s been telling me about the Mercedes that she’s now given up on, the boat trip that’s now just a casual walk in over her head.

I think to myself:  I haven’t seen her in a body of water since I was in high school.  I can’t even be certain that she’s taken a bath.

I wonder if this simple plan of hers will face as many obstacles as every other simple plan in her life.  Every product she buys has a problem, every customer service experience she has requires long periods of being put on hold, escalation, fights with a manager, letters of complaint, a resolution that leaves a bitter taste (Four hours on the phone, Jeff, four hours).  She does have terrible luck, and I can see her attempted suicide going horribly wrong:  the Coast Guard doing some practice drill the day that she chooses to meander into death off the coast ofMaine.  A dolphin or whale nudging her back to shore, where she’ll spit up seawater, look around, and then trudge back to her car which now won’t start because she left the lights on.  Some improbable event would get in the way.  And the thing is, I think she’s stubborn enough to try again just to prove her point.  That she gets what she wants, that as with everything else in life, she is going to die on her own goddamned terms.

I continue typing, looking at the chapter that I’m editing, letting her commentary hang in the air.  I finally look at her, and say:  “Okay, then.”

“Don’t worry.  I’ll make sure it looks like an accident,” she says.

“You better,” I tell her.  “Otherwise, I won’t be able to collect on the insurance.”

The Quiet Manifestations of Masculine Sadness – Part 4

IV:  A Hug and a Handshake

My parents and sister flew with me to Paris in August of 2003.  Though I did not know it at the time, that week together would be the last time that I would see them for eleven months, which I think was longer than any of us had anticipated.  It was my junior year in college;  it would be spent mostly in this city, with short spates in Barcelona ,Lyon and Chalon-sur-Saône.

As the plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport, the French sky was gray and my stomach was sinking.  What the hell was I thinking, I asked myself as we taxied to the terminal.  I had only taken one year of French in high school and two semesters of it in college.  And here I was, about to be excreted intoParis, stuck here for a year.

At first, I was annoyed to have my family fly over with me; I was at that age.  I was so hell bent on becoming a slut (or at least trying to) that any delay in achieving that goal was intolerable.  In the end, though, I was glad for it.  They did help me brave the perilous tasks of setting up a bank account and signing up for a cell phone plan, although this did result in me being an unprepared interpreter at times, groping certain wrinkles in my brain for words that I remembered studying but not speaking (account, ATM card, rollover minutes, subscription, early termination fee).

For the first few days inParis, we all stayed in a hotel room together in the seventh arrondissement; it was close to where I would be going to school.  One evening, we hauled one of my suitcases to my host mother’s apartment inNorthern Paris, who had invited us all over for dinner.  I would retrieve the second suitcase the night before my parents and sister returned to theUnited States, which was a small number of days away.

On that final evening of their time inFrance, we consolidated my remaining belongings into the remaining suitcase in the hotel room where they were staying.  We had had the concierge page a taxi for us (taxis were strangely difficult to come by inParis, a common complaint).  When we received the phone call in the room indicating that one had arrived, my mother hugged me and made me hug my sister.  My father walked me down to the street.

The taxi driver took my suitcase and asked for the address, which he indicated he knew how to get to.  I petitioned for a moment.

“Well, see you in July,” I said.

“We’ll call you every so often,” he said.

We continued to stand there.

The taxi driver reminded us of his existence, either through a grunt or a throaty “Ready?”

To each other my father and I said something along the lines of “Okay,” or “Take care,” and ended up in something that was halfway between a hug and a handshake.

I climbed into the taxi and my father turned around, walking through the automatic doors, which swallowed him back up.

In the short drive to the eighteenth arrondissement, my eyes, a bit blurry with the prelude of tears, remained fixed on the rearview mirror, so that I could stifle my sniffles every time the driver looked back.

The Quiet Manifestations of Masculine Sadness – Part 2

II:  Missing Ingredients

I was surprised when Topher and I started fooling around again during our freshman year of high school.  We had joked in the interceding years of middle school about our younger experimentations with one another, but hockey, puberty, science fiction, and more than a little bit of fear at being accused of being gay saw us drift apart a little bit in the sixth through eighth grades.

My surprise was compounded by the fact that Topher was dating a girl, somewhat attractive, large-breasted, and had a last name that rhymed with schlong, which most boys were quick to point out.

That as high-schoolers we were now able to orgasm seemed not just to revive the thrill, but also to increase it.  It began by us talking over the phone, masturbating to blurry pornography on channels sixty-nine, seventy-one and seventy-three.

We then started, or rather resumed, going to one another’s houses.  He was the kid my age that lived the closest to me; proximity, I think, provided the original foundation for our friendship back in grade school.  Our parents, to our knowledge, did not suspect anything; I think they were just happy that we were motivating one another to study, our stated reason for spending as much time together as we did.  It was not an entirely false premise:  we usually did start those afternoons after school by doing homework in his bed or mine before we took off our clothes.

It was rare that we slept over, but one night in high school, he spent the night at my place.  We, per usual, performed oral sex, but I declined his suggestion when he asked to penetrate me.  The reasons were the things we lacked:  condoms, lubricant, and experience.  While he could not offer solutions to the last item, he did suggest saran wrap or plastic bags and spit to address the lack of the former two, which I found insufficient.

So we brought each other off in the way that we had grown used to.  We had done more with one another than we had with women at that point, a fact that I think we both acknowledged and probably kept bringing us together.

We were both awake on the early side, before my parents roused.  I told him that he didn’t have to leave so early, that he could stay for breakfast.  It might have come off as pleading; I felt like I was pleading.  He said that it was fine, that he wanted to leave before they woke up.

“Just in case,” he said.

We were silent after that.  I heard the zipper of his pants and perhaps the snap of a button.  I watched him leave the family room, and listened to the side door open and close, the clicks, the whoosh, the clicks, the harsh clap of wood on wood.

His back to me as he walked down our driveway, he zipped up his yellow and black jacket, baggy in the style of the day.  I wanted to run after him, to apologize, to tell him I’ll let you in if you promise to stay.

The Quiet Manifestations of Masculine Sadness — Part 1

I:  Don’t Smoke, Jeffrey

I knew her late in her young life.  She lived in the part of town known as Secret Lake.  The Lake was rumored to have leeches.  Her husband’s name was Regis, and he is still alive.  She was my father’s cousin, somehow, although I don’t think I understood how the branches of the family tree all connected at that age.

Nor did I really know how close they had been as children.  Nor did I have any distinct memory of her before age eight or nine.  I did think, in the small number of times that I met her, that my father smiled an awful lot around her.

“You know why your Dad’s left-handed, Jeffrey?” she asked me once when I was over her house.  I told her that I did not.

“It’s because your cousin Theresa bent his right hand all the way back and broke it one day!” she exclaimed, demonstrating by attempting to bend her fingers to her forearm.  She watched me watch her, making sure that it registered.

My father nodded and smiled.  Theresa laughed.  So I smiled.

I would find out later that this was a joke, although I continued to believe the story, continued to tell my friends.

There was a lot of brown to the house; it felt dark in the kitchen.  Theresa’s bedroom was much lighter, although I think there was some brown in there, too.

Cancer was one of those words that had little meaning for a fourth grader or fifth grader.  It was a vague concept, much like the death it caused.  It was bad; people cried on TV when they talked about it.  To cure it you had to get a special x-ray and take medication that made you lose your hair.

I recalled my mother mentioning how her favorite actor Michael Landon died of cancer.  I learned the word vain when discussing his death, since he apparently opted out of chemotherapy because of his beautiful hair; such was her understanding of his decision to die.  She would sit on a seat in the family room and cry when news of his death became official, public.

It remained an abstract concept until we received the news, or rather, that I received the news from my father, that Theresa had this thing called cancer, and that it was in or on her lungs.  And that that was very bad, that it was hard to treat.

My father and I visited her when I was in fifth grade, in the spring.  I looked out atSecretLakeon our drive over, the unused beach and irrelevant dock visible through the pine trees.  We parked the family minivan in the driveway.  Regis greeted us in the kitchen.  We exchanged pleasantries.  My father made Regis grab my calf muscle, to show him how strong I’d become since I started playing hockey.  It made me a little uncomfortable, a little bit proud.

Regis told us that Theresa was in the bedroom.  Upon hearing her name, she called out in a voice that was high pitched, but not quite shrill.

Regis did not come with us.  I was first to the doorframe.  The room was narrow.  The bed was on the left side of the room.  Against the far wall, there was a dresser.  On the dresser sat a Styrofoam head with a brown wig on top of it.  I cannot recall what was on the right side of the room, if there was anything.  Was there a second bed?  Was there a closet?  The walls reveal themselves to me in a color that is sometimes white, sometimes off-white, sometimes light yellow.  I think there was a trim that ran along them, but I can’t be sure.

She looked at me from her bed.  She was lying on her back.  She was not able to lift her head, which had no hair or almost no hair.  The last time that I had seen her, she had hair.  Her legs were puffy relative to the rest of her body.

“Come in Jeffrey!” she said.  So I did.

My father remained in the doorframe, staring, unable to shake himself out of it.

I can’t remember if she asked me to hug her or if I did it on my own.  Either way, I put my arms around her motionless body, her eyes and mouth the only things that could move, that could convince me that there was any life left in her.

She smiled, at me as I got close to her.  I wondered why she was so happy.

I think she beckoned my father in, who eventually entered; I am not sure if she was able to register his shock.  I can’t remember if I smelled anything; I think I had expected to.

“This is why you don’t smoke, Jeffrey,” she said to me.

As we left, she assured us that all was well.

“Don’t you worry, Al,” she chirped to my father.  “I’ve got this.  I’m going to beat it!”

I don’t recall believing her.

My father and I sat in the van after the visit.  He just sat there for a minute, staring straight ahead, at nothing in particular.  I looked at him, waiting for him to say something, for some kind of explanation as to what we just witnessed, what he was feeling.

Instead, he sighed, said, “Okay,” to anyone who wanted to listen, and started the car.