I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (15 page)

My parents are completely flummoxed by small details. How do we get the gas turned off? How will we get electricity turned on when we find a new place? How do we get new phone numbers and how will our Social Security checks find us when we get to wherever it is that we’re going? It frightens me to think of them continuing to live on their own. If they don’t know these things,
how have they been managing their day-to-day affairs and what else are they unsure of that I don’t know about?

While I’m there, we learn that a condo located nearby has become available for a short-term rental. Even though we still don’t know what they can actually afford as none of their finances are in order, they must vacate the house, so my sister and I advise them to take it. My parents react as though we’re shipping them off to a senior internment camp. Mom suggests it might be easier if we just leave them on the side of a mountaintop.

My mother would prefer to be working. She was forcibly retired at seventy-four from a job she’d gotten ten years prior, despite stellar job reviews, to make way for younger employees. You’re living longer, so you want to work longer, but that just edges out younger people from the workforce, so the only thing that makes sense is that we need to extend childhood. I suck at math, but if you take all the metrics into account, my son should still be in diapers.
*

Each day I make phone calls to utility companies, but if I leave the house for even an hour, I return to find my parents have undone the work I’ve just completed. It’s impossible to convince my parents that they can retain their email addresses. “Dad, your email address has nothing to do with your modem,” I tell him. Even my father, who has always been an early adopter, is stumped. “Email comes in through the computer, which is connected to the modem, which farms it out to your phone.”

“How can it possibly work that way? What if you’re not near the modem when you get your emails? What about people who don’t own a computer and only have smartphones?” But it’s no use. I arrange new phone numbers for them as well, but by the time I arrive back in Los Angeles I learn they’ve jettisoned them even though I’d already distributed the new ones to our family members and all of their medical providers. And these are the same people some politicians claim would benefit from privatized retirement accounts and a health-care voucher system. If I wasn’t convinced of this already, I know these things are all code for “more things my sister and I will need to do for our parents.”

I can only hope that my son, who already programs my iPod, will have more patience when he has to do something similar for me. “Mom, the chip embedded in your thumb doesn’t need to be reprogrammed when you move!” Where will I be headed when that day comes? With my lackluster savings, it will probably be an elder hostel in Costa Rica.

It’s only as I am packing to leave Miami that I fully take in that this is the last time I’ll be in my childhood home. I too had relished this fancy address, and the feeling in the pit of my stomach has turned to anguish. I frantically call the real estate agent to ask if I can keep the brass knocker on the front door. This fixture, a realistically carved, delicate woman’s hand whose nails I once painted black, had always been vaguely disturbing to me in the way that a disembodied limb can seem to a child, but now I want to hold that hand. Alas, I am told the new owners find the knocker endearingly kitsch, and so I shake that hand good-bye forever. I’ve got my dirty ashtray in my purse as I roll my overnight bag
over the pale coral stone walkway and I can still make out the red wax candle drippings from my
Rocky Horror Picture Show
party that even repeated steam cleanings couldn’t erase. But there’s no time to mourn because my son’s heading toward his first day of his last year in middle school and I’ve got back-to-school shopping to do.

My list of back-to-school supplies includes wipe boards and corkboards. These “organizational tools” continue to pile up and go unused in our house, but every year I convince myself that this new chart of chores, fresh calendars hung in every room, and homework or musical instrument practice check-off sheets will finally make our household run smoothly. No matter what kind of new system I try to implement, my son makes last-minute plans and mixes up important dates, but I can’t resist, and so I’m loading bigger corkboards and brighter dry-erase markers into a shopping cart, as if a reminder in lime green of
Write down dates of upcoming tests!
will make a deeper impression than the ones I’ve previously written in black, when the phone rings. It’s my older sister with news. This is how the communication chain works. Even though I’m nearing fifty, I’m still the younger sibling. She gets the important news from our parents and is called upon to break it to me.

There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that my mother has breast cancer again. The (relatively) good news is that she’s so old the cells aren’t growing quickly and her oncologist is confident that a radical mastectomy should take care of it.

The news about her breast cancer shouldn’t be shocking. In the last hundred years, we’ve doubled our life span as Americans,
but our “lengthening morbidity,” as it’s been called, is both enervating and expensive, with many of us outliving the money it costs to treat these diseases.
*
She’s had breast cancer once already and made it through with only a short course of radiation, but she’s had thyroid cancer and had her thyroid removed as well. She had a benign brain tumor removed with no lasting repercussions other than her sticking with the Rod Stewart circa 1982 haircut she adopted in preparation for that surgery. We’ve nicknamed my mother the Energizer Bunny because she just keeps going and going, but how long can she last?

I volunteer to go back down for the surgery and spend the night in the hospital with my mother, like I did when she had the brain tumor. Ever since the birth of my son with a congenital birth defect necessitating years of surgical repair—all successful, I am happy to report—I am the go-to person in the family when it comes to health care. My executive-decision-making older sister handles financial, legal and much of their emotional support—she’s a rock—but health crisis management has become my domain.
*
I really have no expertise, but I have learned a few simple tricks. Write down everything your doctor says. Write down every medication you are already taking, every medication you will need during your recovery and every question you can think of. Keep an extra pen on you; yours will run out of ink when you need it the most. And whenever possible, find someone to stay with you overnight. Anyone will do. Pay someone if necessary.
You won’t regret it. The night shift is hard, nurses are overworked and often the medications and orders are confusing, so be nice to them. And BYO pillow, bathrobe, socks and blanket for both patient and caregiver.

My mother finds it comforting that her oncologist is someone I went to high school with, whom I may or may not have dated. I actually can’t remember. Since her retirement, her life has compressed to the point that her relationships with her doctors are primary and deeply personal. She’s sounding more and more like my grandmother Rebecca, who sent cards to her doctors on their birthdays and regularly hand-delivered homemade banana bread and stuffed cabbage to their offices. This must be another milestone that lies ahead for me: the day when you speak to and of your doctors more frequently than your friends. All of this is made even more surreal by the fact that the person my mother now wants to send pastries to (store-bought, but still) is someone my age.

As her surgery looms closer, I find myself feeling sentimentally attached to my mom’s breast. It makes no sense. Like many people my age, I wasn’t breast-fed, nor have I been particularly close with my mother for most of my life, but I am mourning the loss of this body part, maybe more than she. She is approaching the surgery with a very practical attitude. “I’m not using it anymore,” she tells me. Bit by bit, I am losing parts of my mother, and I am tempted to call her doctor and ask if I can preserve her breast, like a relic, in one of the pricey BPA-free glass containers I’ve invested in so my son won’t have plastic leaching into his body.

When she announces she doesn’t want to have an implant, my sister and I phone her together to make sure she’s thought through her decision thoroughly. We’re concerned it might affect her self-esteem, but she’s worried about the safety and the longevity of implants.

“You’re seventy-seven,” I remind her. “You probably only need it to last for ten years at the most. If you’re worried about leakage, I’ve got these inserts shaped like chicken cutlets; I used to put them in my bra for auditions that call for cleavage.” I have no idea what they’re made of, but they’re very durable. I’ve had the same set for fifteen years. “We could ask your doctor if we can just stick those in there.” That’s when she reminds us that she will need only one.

We’re stumped. None of us know if there are implants on the market that will mirror my mother’s remaining seventy-seven-year-old breast. I suggest she ask her surgeon for a marsupial pouch in which she could carry her phone, mints or that grandma standby—balled-up, slightly used tissues.

“I’ve got a few old cashmere sweaters,” I offer. “They’re so soft and probably the right consistency; they used to make them with such tight weave. What about a chunk of my Tempur-Pedic pillow? It really does mold to any shape you want.”

I remind her that having only one breast can cause an imbalance in equilibrium. Walking down the street with my mother is already dangerous. She tends to veer slightly and has a lot of pent-up frustration. I worry she might steer my father, who has begun to shuffle ever so slightly, into oncoming traffic either on purpose or by accident. But she’s having none of it.

I arrive the night before the surgery. It will be the first time I will visit them since they’ve left our old home. I pull up to the condo and see that the building is situated right on the beach, convenient for healthful, invigorating walks. I’d hoped that wherever they landed, they’d meet new people. As I head inside I discover that each wing of the building has its own elevator, a luxury feature that is intended to make the building seem exclusive, but it has the opposite effect of what I was hoping for them. The elevator opens right at their front door. They share this elevator with only a small number of tenants, who live on floors directly above and below them. During my stay, I see no one else in the building except the staff and learn that my parents haven’t been strolling along the water either. They’ve arranged the furniture in an identical configuration as it was in their home and, because they feel the place gets too much light, they keep the curtains closed. They’ve completely re-created their old home, right up to the lack of a view.

I get no sleep the night before the surgery because I’m still on Los Angeles time and my husband and I need to coordinate a new carpool, music lesson and sports practice schedule. This process is made slower because my parents can’t figure out how to access their new Internet service. They tell me their password is the address of the old house, but they can’t remember what they’ve named their wireless connection. I try dozens of combinations of passwords and network names and they pull out service manuals they’ve taken to their new residence where they think they’ve written down the codes, but none of them are correct. In addition,
the service manuals are for electronics they no longer own: a Betamax, an answering machine and a slide projector. I can’t get online and am slowly texting times and dates until it’s time we take my mother to the hospital for her early morning pre-op intake process.

Everyone who greets us at the hospital, from the surgeon to the administrative staff, is extremely courteous and helpful. “Say something funny,” Juan, the young orderly, says when he hears I work in comedy, as he wheels my mother into the pre-op room. My mom is chattering on and on about relatives who are no longer alive, relatives she is no longer in touch with and relatives who are no longer in their right minds. She’s nervous. Juan looks at me expectantly. “My mom’s brain surgery was easier to deal with—she was sedated longer,” I say. The hallway at Mount Sinai Hospital is a tough room.

While my mother is in surgery I stop into the cafeteria for my Cuban sandwich and a café con leche and run into the wife of the homecoming king of my high school class. We’ve kept loosely in touch through social media, but we’re not close enough for me to have known that our former monarch is in the hospital, too. When she tells me this news, there’s the briefest pause in our conversation. She doesn’t tell me what he’s doing there, and I don’t ask. I know this is how it will be from now on: if someone doesn’t offer, you don’t ask.

It’s startling how quickly the surgery is over and Mom is assigned a room. Waiting for her to rouse, I see that she’s got a bay view; in fact, we can see Sunset Island II just across the water.
We’re less than two miles from our old house. I know I must be really tired, because I’m entertaining the notion that this whole surgery was just an attempt to get closer to the island. But as soon as she wakes up it’s clear that she’s headed for a quick recovery, because she’s already complaining about how slow the nurses are.

Before we’re allowed to leave the hospital, a nurse instructs me on how to manage the drainage tubes that collect the bloody discharge from the incision, a process technically referred to as “milking.”
*
I’m so glad I’m the mother of a teenager. I’ve taken my son to see enough vampire flicks that the sight of blood doesn’t faze me a bit, thank you, Stephenie Meyer. You squeeze the blood down through the tubes, inch by inch, until it collects into a bulbous container, and then you empty the liquid from the bulb. Repeat every few hours. Each time I do this, my mother gazes at me with the wide-eyed expectancy of a toddler on the first snow day of the year. Socks, underpants, long underwear, sweater, snow bib, parka, boots, mittens, scarf, earmuffs. “Now let’s put your hood on. Good girl!” It’s a lugubrious process made even slower by the antediluvian equipment. The nurse asks us if we’ve got any safety pins. “No.” She shakes her head as if everyone carries safety pins with them at all times. “No one said anything about safety pins,” I say, my practiced hospital patience beginning to wane. It takes three different nurses to locate two safety pins. Once we’ve been sufficiently chastised, our nurse shows us
how we’ll be pinning these bloody bulbs inside my mother’s blouses while she heals. How is it possible that we can collect energy from the sun through photovoltaic panels, but we can’t collect blood except with a jerry-rigged contraption that includes safety pins?