You know how someone is all, "My mom died _____ years ago, and I still pick up the phone to call her" and you're all "I'm so sorry, really" but deep down inside a little voice says, "Wow, cliche much? I mean, really. 'I still pick up the phone to call her' GOD." Well, I'm here to tell you, I still pick up the phone to call her, and it hurts like a motherfucker.
But therein lies the problem when your dad died of pancreatic cancer when you were 19 and your mom died of lung cancer. Did they smoke? Indeed. Drink? Well, duh. This shit has cliche written all over it. "I'm so very sorry for your loss. But please, PLEASE don't write about it. Parents. Dead. Cancer. I feel like I've read this story before. Was it published in the (name some low level preferably online journal)? No?"
I coach pre-med students on how to strengthen their personal statements for their applications for medical school. Let me tell you, they all have the same story. Did or didn't want to be a doctor as a child. Did or didn't change their mind based on some miraculous high school or college science teacher. Add quick point about tenacity despite grades not showing it, and oh, did I mention I FUCKING LOVE POOR PEOPLE. Done. "Everyone's story is pretty much the same," I tell them. "Where you'll win is in the details. Give them an image, something to remember."
So, I'll give you the images. My mom, no longer recognizable, I mean when the fuck did she get old and check the mirror, did it happen to me too? In the hospital bed we set up in my sister's bedroom, the clot on her leg (not what's killing her, or wait, is it?) giant and black. Bald. Gray. All of her, of course. My daughter, sleeping in a chair next to my mom's bed for three nights, throwing a blanket over her head when my mom wakes up screaming, "I'm dying! Jesus Christ, someone help me, I'm dying!" The time I almost punched those fucking doctors in the hospital. Don't give me your chin up, circle of life bullshit. Maybe you see people die everyday, but I'm telling you, none of them mattered before this one. The time my sister didn't almost bite my other sister days before my mom slipped away in the mid morning, surrounded by the hospice nurse, various family members, but not me. (Here's something you can't ever know-- when they came to tell me to come, that something was wrong with her breathing, I brushed my hair. Quickly. But I brushed it. Because I was in that last days place where I thought, well, I might not get another chance to brush my hair. At the time maybe I thought this was just another step toward the end. Not the end. Not THE END. By the time I got there she was gone.)
Oh, there's more. There's the way she touched my face and said, "You're the best." There's sitting in my sister's bedroom with my ma when she was asleep, holding her hand and being quiet with her. There's her phone call when she told me the cancer had spread and the doctors were saying six months. "We need to make sure we buy the baby some summer clothes!" knowing she would be gone by summer.
But there's also the way that when I tried to joke with her she was mean and said, "Not now, not now, OK?" I want to say, "NO, it's not OK. It's NOT OK AT ALL.You're fucking dying and now you're dead and I can't fucking BELIEVE you did this to me. The LEAST you could do is laugh at me when I joke with you because you are taking everything away from me. So fuck you and your stupid lung cancer and your chemo and your dying. I'm LEAVING."
But I can't, because when you're dying you're always leaving first and you always win the fight. Gah, anger. Denial. Cliche cliche cliche.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Moving to Paris
There is a reason why I'm no good at downtime. I think too much. We're in the early stages of home buying, which has caused me to deeply question the whole idea of home buying. I heard someone declare ecstatically the other day, "We're in Dublin schools, but with Columbus taxes!" and I died a little in my soul. I think the deal of growing up with nothing is both that it causes you not to be terribly concerned about having nothing, but also to question the whole process of going from nothing to something. I remember my mom working terrible jobs and delivering eight paper routes every morning just to own a beat up Pinto station wagon and rent a run down two bedroom apartment. Why bother? We have three young kids. We should have a house, a stable life, buy into a predictably good school system. Or, you know, move to Paris. Which ever.
When I called Larry to tell him about the Paris plan (which follows quickly on the heels of the Naples, Florida plan), he sounded both terrified and annoyed. "Why Paris now?" he asked. "Just kidding," I said. But I'm not. The only bad part about Paris is I don't speak French. And also that I have no real desire to live in Paris, having never been further outside the US than the Canada side of Niagara Falls. But my oldest daughter wants to go to Paris, has declared an obsession with all things Parisian (or faux-Parisian, as in the "France" section of Disney). Someone has to have the passion, and the twelve year old wins the day.
We'll never be rich. I have way too many degrees, and Larry too few. So, if we can't be rich, why are we playing at all? Better to back out of the whole deal, to my mind. Why buy a house anyway?
"Security," is Larry's answer. "Stability." But I've never had security, so I have no idea what he's talking about. I don't buy it.
I had a weird dream earlier today. I've reached the point in life (too early, I think, in my mid thirties) when all the people who stood before me in line are gone. My parents, my grandparents. The dream I had was me chasing my grandpa through the church he and my grandma attended in Mason City, Iowa. He was walking fast for an old guy, but my grandfather was always powerful. We got to a point in the church (not the real church, the dream church) where my grandfather was standing below me and I had to either jump or go down a slide. But the slide had a line of children, a line so long it seemed endless, so I jumped. And, as with any dream jump, you either wake before you hit the ground, or somehow air transforms and you float gently down. As I did. Then I turned around and saw my middle daughter standing on the platform I had just abandoned, looking down at me, waiting for me to tell her which way to go.
"How did she get down before?" I asked my grandpa.
"She jumped," he answered. But I knew if she jumped the dream rules would stop applying and she would come crashing into me, heavy and damaging. And, following unfair dream rules, just as I decided there was no other choice, she would have to jump, and I would just have to cushion the fall, I woke up.
I woke up with a fierce desire to write for the first time since my mom got sick with lung cancer in summer of 2010. Not write about the dream, but to finish the novel I had started writing right before my mom got sick. Suddenly the problem that had stymied me before was entirely solvable. I just (isn't it always the case), had to kill one the characters quicker. My mom just died. I throw that in in case anyone doubts that my mom just died is the whole point here. This reminds me of something Erin McGraw had once said to me about another story: "Oh, the death absolutely CANNOT be the point of this story. It just can't."
I'm supposed to be a writer. I'm not, of course. And, writing being one of the few professions you cannot claim without actively pursuing, I'm left with the question of the day: Paris or Naples?
When I called Larry to tell him about the Paris plan (which follows quickly on the heels of the Naples, Florida plan), he sounded both terrified and annoyed. "Why Paris now?" he asked. "Just kidding," I said. But I'm not. The only bad part about Paris is I don't speak French. And also that I have no real desire to live in Paris, having never been further outside the US than the Canada side of Niagara Falls. But my oldest daughter wants to go to Paris, has declared an obsession with all things Parisian (or faux-Parisian, as in the "France" section of Disney). Someone has to have the passion, and the twelve year old wins the day.
We'll never be rich. I have way too many degrees, and Larry too few. So, if we can't be rich, why are we playing at all? Better to back out of the whole deal, to my mind. Why buy a house anyway?
"Security," is Larry's answer. "Stability." But I've never had security, so I have no idea what he's talking about. I don't buy it.
I had a weird dream earlier today. I've reached the point in life (too early, I think, in my mid thirties) when all the people who stood before me in line are gone. My parents, my grandparents. The dream I had was me chasing my grandpa through the church he and my grandma attended in Mason City, Iowa. He was walking fast for an old guy, but my grandfather was always powerful. We got to a point in the church (not the real church, the dream church) where my grandfather was standing below me and I had to either jump or go down a slide. But the slide had a line of children, a line so long it seemed endless, so I jumped. And, as with any dream jump, you either wake before you hit the ground, or somehow air transforms and you float gently down. As I did. Then I turned around and saw my middle daughter standing on the platform I had just abandoned, looking down at me, waiting for me to tell her which way to go.
"How did she get down before?" I asked my grandpa.
"She jumped," he answered. But I knew if she jumped the dream rules would stop applying and she would come crashing into me, heavy and damaging. And, following unfair dream rules, just as I decided there was no other choice, she would have to jump, and I would just have to cushion the fall, I woke up.
I woke up with a fierce desire to write for the first time since my mom got sick with lung cancer in summer of 2010. Not write about the dream, but to finish the novel I had started writing right before my mom got sick. Suddenly the problem that had stymied me before was entirely solvable. I just (isn't it always the case), had to kill one the characters quicker. My mom just died. I throw that in in case anyone doubts that my mom just died is the whole point here. This reminds me of something Erin McGraw had once said to me about another story: "Oh, the death absolutely CANNOT be the point of this story. It just can't."
I'm supposed to be a writer. I'm not, of course. And, writing being one of the few professions you cannot claim without actively pursuing, I'm left with the question of the day: Paris or Naples?
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