A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (28 page)

After I made my flight arrangements, Alane phoned again and told me that my mother wouldn’t leave the hospital; she and my brother were taking turns taking care of my mother. Dad was getting high doses of pain medication and radiation to relieve the extreme spinal pain.

A few hours later, Alane called a third time.

“I had a vision out of the blue,” she sobbed. “Mike Williamson just spoke to me and told me that they were all so excited about Dad coming. They were getting everything ready. The equipment was almost done being assembled and wired. Mike told me he was so happy he was one of the people that was chosen and given the honor to welcome Dad.”

“Who’s Mike Williamson?” I asked.

“Don’t you remember? When Dad had the store, Mike was the kid that Dad took under his wing and invited to come along on all his recording jobs,” she cried.

I vaguely remembered.

“Remember he was decapitated in a car accident? Dad was broken up for weeks. Don’t you remember?”

I remembered. “God, I haven’t thought about that guy for more than thirty years!”

“Neither have I,” said Alane.

I got chills all over my body. “Wow,” I said.

“‘Wow’ is right.”

“I don’t think Dad is going to make it, Alane.”

“I know.”

Alane picked me up at the airport and brought me directly to the hospital. My mother had been there for two days straight. Dad wanted me there and for everyone else to go home and get some rest. Lying on his back in the bed, he had an IV, a nasal cannula for oxygen, and EKG leads all over his chest. His belly was covered in shiny skin that looked ready to crack and explode from the ascites caused by his failing liver. After everyone left, they came in to take him to radiology for a spinal radiation treatment. He told the transporters that he wouldn’t go unless I could be with him the entire time. He was terrified.

On the way, the gurney hit every bump and banged into every door jamb it passed through. The transport people didn’t care, not even after I told them that he had a broken back. I wanted to kill them. It almost seemed they were doing it on purpose. In radiology, I held Dad’s hands as the tears rolled down his face from the pain of the trip. We waited in the cold, bustling hallway long after his IV pain medication ran out.

Back in his room afterwards, I wondered if the benefit of the radiation was worth the ordeal of getting there and back, being moved from the gurney onto the radiation table and back, handled roughly every step of the way.

When he was medicated and finally asleep, I went downstairs to get something to eat. When I returned, my mother was back, and my sister had brought my nephew. After they left, I could tell my dad was scared. I told him to relax and try to get some rest. I asked if I could read to him. I had brought my Bible and asked if he would like to hear the Psalms. He said he did. That seemed to do the trick. He finally fell asleep. While he slept he kept scratching his skin, and I noticed how long his nails were. My dad was a meticulous person. I went to his toiletry bags in the corner of the room. I was horrified to see baggies containing batteries of all sizes, a pocket knife, Band-Aids, radio cords, supplies for contingencies of every sort, bagged in a way that appeared obsessive. All of a sudden I realized that my father had a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder that had never been treated. Things about him started to make sense.

I never got a chance to trim his nails. He awoke in the predawn light having taken a turn for the worse. He was trying to take off the oxygen cannula and all the EKG leads. Nothing, it seemed, would calm him down. The alarms went off and nurses rushed in. They explained this behavior was due to the decreased oxygen to his brain. He kept picking at his skin.

“Can’t we sedate him more heavily?” I asked. They called the doctor, and eventually he got more medication.

The priest came. Dad was out of it. He was still fidgety and restless and seemed to be constantly trying to get up, to hurl his body forward.

“What are you doing, Dad?” I asked.

“I see it,” he said.

“What do you see, Dad?”

“I’m trying to get over the fence.”

He must be hallucinating, I thought, or maybe he wasn’t. He drifted in and out of consciousness.

Later in the day I realized that maybe the fence was the obstacle preventing him from letting go, to die. My mother returned. I told her what had developed.

“Ma, I really think you need to tell Dad it’s OK. You will be fine. He can let go.”

My mother looked at me, eyes filled with tears. But she did it.

For the rest of the afternoon, Dad held my hand on one side and Mom’s on the other, saying over and over, “OK, OK, let’s go. One, two, three … Go.”

It was like being in the delivery room and being told to push, except that Dad was trying get to someplace I couldn’t see. It was so hard. It was breaking my heart. In between attempts he would collapse in exhaustion but still keep trying to pull everything off. Nurses kept coming into the room, responding to the alarms. Finally I asked a nurse to come out to the hall.

“What are you doing?”

“He keeps setting off the alarms,” she said.

“Why can’t you just leave him alone to die in peace?”

“Well, we didn’t know that was the family’s wishes. We don’t have an order that says DNR or Do Not Resuscitate.”

After discussing this with my mother, sister and brother, we all agreed that the nonsense had to stop. I informed the nurse.

Quickly, the leads were removed, the oxygen was taken away, his morphine was increased, and plans were made to transfer him to the oncology floor. By now I had been up for over thirty-six hours. I was exhausted from trying to help Dad “jump.” I’d done all that I could do. I kissed him good-bye for what I knew would be the last time. Alane drove me back to her house, both of us in tears.

I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid, that I had allowed him to suffer so needlessly. I didn’t know. Then I plunged into despair when I realized that I was the one who made them pull the proverbial plug—I’d killed my father.

Eventually, I fell asleep, only to be awakened by the phone in the middle of the night. Dad had finally made it to the other side.

He died on my brother’s birthday, the day before my mother’s birthday, two days after their forty-eighth wedding anniversary.

It took me a long time to realize that I was exactly what my father needed at the time and that everything had happened just the way that was necessary for everyone to accept his dying. For me, being with my father during his last day on earth helped me to see that dying isn’t hard—he seemed to want to hurl himself there. He could see what was there. Dad’s life was over, but he had helped me to realize that my life wasn’t.

My mother came to California for a few weeks over the holidays later that year. This was the Christmas when, almost seven years since we got our first dog, I finally gave in and gave Doug the second papillon puppy he had wanted, an 8-week-old, one-and-a-half-pound female.

He cried in front of everyone, saying, “This is the best Christmas present I’ve ever received.”

Chapter 26

January 2005–October 2006

W
ith the remodel finally finished I could finally return to the land of the living. The first place I went was back to church. I rejoined the choir. While probably an alto, I felt more comfortable in the tenor section. I was the only female in a group of half a dozen men ranging in age from their forties to close to ninety. Learning the tenor part was hard as the harmony was almost always a fifth of an octave below the melody. I know I was barely heard except when I sang the wrong note, which was often.

My friend Lyn was the Bible study director and I’m pretty sure at this point was also the director of religious education, now working full time with her newly minted master’s degree in pastoral ministries, post–empty nest. One day she asked me if I would be willing to be a group leader for the Bible study. As with most commitments I had to think about, one breath later I said yes. I thought this would force me to do the homework. It wasn’t until much later that I realized I never questioned what was behind committing to an activity that forced me to do something I wasn’t inclined to do naturally. But at this point I still wasn’t deliberating before committing.

So every Wednesday morning I now had a reason to get dressed up, and I was at church yet again for the 9 a.m. leaders meeting. We prayed, discussed the business of Bible study, and then went over the entire lesson before we met with our groups. My group gathered in an ancillary building that was always cold, so we snuggled together on old sofas. Everyone there was on a quest—to learn more about the why of what we believed. We had great debates about the Baltimore Catechism, the elimination of limbo, plenary indulgences, the validity of purgatory, the abortion issue, and the latest priest sexual abuse scandal and concurrent cover-up, which seemed to occur weekly.

There were over a hundred women in the larger group. Many were mothers of sons who were in high school with Brad. It really was fun, and participating gave me a great sense of community. It was in the larger group that I learned the story about the chipped tea cup, the story of the starfish, the meaning of the four cardinal virtues (justice, fortitude, temperance and prudence), and the three theological virtues (faith, hope and charity). I learned of “The Lowly Road,” where to heal the mind you need to forget; to heal the heart, forgive; the body, forgo; and to heal the spirit you need to surrender to God and do everything for God. Maybe these choices were what “free will” was all about.

We studied the Gospel of Mark, did our next study on the personal relationship with God, and then the mysteries of the Rosary. The overall group was close to having completed the whole Bible and beginning to debate how to start over.

I asked, “Have we ever done the Book of Job?”

In a thwack of unison I was told no. Then I heard individual comments. “It’s too depressing.” “People will quit.” “No thanks, life is hard enough.”

Well, I thought, you can’t fight city hall—or the cry of the mob.

I finally used the gift certificate for painting classes that I had received from The Hidden Assets for my birthday a year before. Once a week for several weeks, I packed up my paints, brushes, and canvas and headed to class. I learned how to mix colors, set up a palette, and lay down paint.

I enjoyed the class but soon realized that painting was something that I would rather learn by doing and not in a class. So I set up my easel in the house and painted with a fury. My first painting was a fall landscape done in acrylic. The second painting was a copy of a New Yorker magazine cover of a man selling pumpkins. Upon completion, the picture turned out to be a portrait of my father. My first foray in oil painting was done on a four-by-three-foot canvas and depicted a scene in the Sea of Japan done mostly in shades of red. When I wasn’t in church or working on things for church, I was covered in paint. I realized that, while I was painting, I thought of nothing else, including the guilt of being away from a mother who was drinking heavily and grieving.

As the house started filling with drying canvases, I switched from listening to music while painting to books or courses. Among a score of books, I listened to Energetic Boundaries by Karla McLaren and learned I didn’t have healthy boundaries. I listened to Eckhart Tolle’s Realizing the Power of Now and learned about Tolle’s concept of the “pain-body” (accumulated emotional pain) and realized just how big mine was. I learned how my thoughts were reactive and that except for when I was singing, playing the guitar, or painting, I was never in the present moment, the “now.” I listened to Sacred Contracts by Carolyn Myss and learned about archetypes and her tools to figure out your divine purpose.

The list of books on CD went on and on, and what I realized was that there were plenty of perspectives on looking at life and spiritual matters. All of these ideas were categorized as “new age,” and the ideas presented were all on the order of heresy. The authors were probably classified as charlatans from a conservative Catholic-based perspective. Wasn’t that what St. Paul warned of in the Bible? Yet, I could now blame my lack of boundaries for allowing me to sin and my trickster archetype for leading me down the wrong path, the one away from the pearly gates.

The spring college-visit trip for Brad to the East Coast was preceded and followed by two trips to visit my mother. She was overwhelmed; I heard it in almost every one of our daily telephone calls. When I was there, she constantly lamented that she didn’t know what to do with all of Dad’s stuff. She had two boats and a house to sell, other stuff to get rid of. I never saw my mother so incapable of taking even the tiniest of baby steps. All of a sudden she was incompetent, immobilized. I had to wonder whether grief had done this to her or if it came from drowning her sorrow in wine. It was hard to be patient since she was still so prickly. She couldn’t make a decision but also wouldn’t let me make one for her.

I set up a few containers on the floor one day and we started going through all the boxes from the garage that were stuffed with papers from Dad’s high school days; Dad’s days at Grumman; Dad’s days of working on the lunar mission; his drawings, doodlings, blueprints; articles he found interesting; sheet music; magazines on jazz, boats, electronics; items from his father and mother. Everything smelled of mildew. In between sneezing and blowing my nose, I would present an item to my mother and we would negotiate whether it would go in Linda’s box, my sisters’ boxes, my brother’s, the trash, or the “for sale” box. There wasn’t a Mom box.

She didn’t know what most of the stuff was, and apparently didn’t share any interest in these parts of his life that he had cared enough about to save. She would begin to cry about how little she knew him after forty-eight years of marriage, then switch to raging anger about what a nerd he was, and then topple into despair, moaning about what a horrible wife she was. The process was exhausting, and I was heading toward a sinus infection.

Mom drank and drank and talked and talked and cried and cried, and I listened until I couldn’t stand another minute. After a couple of 3 a.m. drinking, talking, crying nights that revealed nothing new, I said, “Mom, do you think you might be depressed?”

“No, I’m great. I’m just so angry.”

“Mom, do you think it would help if we found a grief support group for you?”

“Why would I want to listen to anyone else’s problems? I have my own. I’m too young to be a widow. Why would I want to spend time with all those old people?”

I quickly did the math in my head; she was 71. She forgot I’d been a widow at 26. I learned during those weeks that, inside, my mother was still a teenager. She wanted to kick up her heels, find someone new to wait on her, and fill up the hole. Instead she was buried alive in boxes of my father’s stuff, a constant reminder of the real loss that she still denied.

I had already lived through this experience, and the thought of going into the deep with my mother was making me sick to my stomach. I tried encouragement.

“Mom, you will get through this, step by step, day by day. Maybe you can’t move forward because you aren’t ready to yet.”

“Let’s go out to look at houses.” And that’s what we did for the rest of the visit.

Brad was now a sophomore in high school, the time when someone typically receives the Sacrament of Confirmation, although only if they are ready. Funny, I was in fifth grade when I was confirmed, ready or not.

Brad asked all the right questions, including the one I couldn’t answer for him. “Why should I bother getting confirmed?”

Indeed, I thought, why does anyone get baptized, receive communion, or any other sacrament for that matter? I told him that we were Catholics and as such we believed in the sacraments and the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. It was a lame answer, I knew.

He enrolled but I’m sure he didn’t know why. I hardly modeled the virtue of “prudence,” or good judgment in making decisions, which was defined as right reason in action—gathering information and weighing the consequences.

In December, I was asked if I could teach a confirmation class that was already in session but short a teacher.

I said sure.

I thought that I could learn along with Brad and show commitment in action. Everybody thought it best that he wasn’t in my class.

I would have twenty or so 15- to 18-year-olds who would probably not be happy to be there, and certainly not on a Sunday night. I thought about how to approach the class in a way that would engage them, impart the teachings of the Catholic Church, and prepare them to be “sealed” in the faith. I had a topical syllabus that I’d need to cover but had full creative freedom on how to cover it.

The fill-in matching worksheet on the attributes of God worked well; the lecture part of the lesson didn’t. Working in groups was a success for the class on Jesus, but some of the kids almost wound up in a brawl during the class on morality. They loved the “Jeopardy” game I created on the books of the Bible, and disappeared from the church one by one as we walked the Stations of the Cross. They were heated up on the teachings of the Church on social justice, arguing sometimes with and sometimes without sound reason the concept of a just war. But then we were all happily surprised by all the good works done on behalf of humanity by the Church even in current times, since we normally weren’t really aware of what the Church did.

Brad didn’t like his class. They were using crayons, paper, glue, scissors, and stickers. I thought about having Brad join my class but knew it would make my job harder. I already had one problem kid: Carly, the 18-year-old who claimed she had to be confirmed or she would be kicked out of her house. She came in late, reeking of alcohol, and spent the class time texting, rolling her eyes, answering questions sarcastically. She was a beautiful girl, blonde, scantily clothed, and could have been a model. The boys in the class liked that she was there.

I didn’t know until the end of the year that before class she and her brother were out in the parking lot getting high. When I made an attempt to befriend her, I was horrified to hear about her troubled life. When she asked me, I agreed to be her sponsor. Yes, I could save her from hell and damnation. Oh, the ego! I learned over the remainder of the year when meeting her for a soda or speaking with her on the phone that she was a beautiful person who had lost her way. Not surprisingly, she didn’t make it to the mandatory weekend retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

When I would come home on Sunday nights after Brad helped me clean up my classroom, I would find the master bedroom lit with candles or with a bath already drawn, sometimes with rose petals floating in the water. Maybe Doug was missing me with all the nights out of the house at church activities, but then again maybe he was happy seeing me occupied and seemingly happy with what I was doing. We were still getting along great since the pancreatic cancer and the remodel—four years, maybe a record.

Romantic evenings ended with me watching EWTN—the Eternal Word Television Network (Catholic cable television)—until the wee hours of the morning. I especially loved Father John Corapi, a repentant sinner and latecomer to the priesthood. He had programs that I had recorded on the VCR called “How to Make a Good Confession,” “Immaculate Heart of Mary,” “Surrender Is Not an Option,” and a multipart series on the “Catechism of the Catholic Church.” I was rapt. Doug would ask me, half asleep, “Would you please turn Father Crappy off, for God’s sake!” I lowered the volume until I got my fill.

Early in the new year we helped my mother move into a newer home in a community with plenty of young couples with children and a few older homeowners. It was far away from civilization and, most important, big enough to fit all of her (and my father’s) stuff. She soon decorated it beautifully, and then took to the shovel.

Day after day, sunburned and bruised, managing tools with her rheumatoid, crippled hands, she created an incredible garden out of the hard North Carolina clay. The garage was filled with Dad’s stuff, which she had moved to a different house and still not dealt with. Soon she started complaining about the noise of all the little children in the neighborhood riding their bicycles and playing in the road, and about how she missed her old friends.

Shortly after returning home, my dentist found a cracked and abscessed tooth, in need of a root canal and crown. This was a warning—I was manifesting the stress in my life by grinding my teeth. I knew I wanted to live my life to the fullest, and that didn’t consist of taking care of my mother.

A few weeks later, I was slicing rolls for the lunch platter I was preparing for the day laborers Doug had hired to help in the yard, and I sliced right through the nerve of my index finger. I could sense the abrupt loss of feeling, was bleeding profusely, and was about to faint when Doug heard, finally, my screams for help. He didn’t think I needed to go to the hospital. I realized that if he pretended it wasn’t true, then for him it wasn’t. I could not even imagine how he prioritized. In the end, Brad wound up taking me to the emergency room, where I received temporary stitches. But then a few days later, as usual, Doug had to rearrange his schedule to accompany me while I had the surgical repair of the nerve.