Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey (2 page)

Chapter Two

Take as Needed for Pain

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I was anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone—and to this day I don’t know why I was so jealous of sharing with anyone the peculiar blackness of that experience.”

JOSEPH CONRAD,

Heart of Darkness

T
he voice message I had received from my father months before had a mixed tone of urgency, concern, and confusion, which struck me as a bit off, since my father had never shown any of those emotions around family. When I called him back, he got straight to the point, letting me know that my mother was sick, really sick, and that he was going to need to take her to the hospital. They were heading to Mount Eden Hospital in Castro Valley.

At this point in my life, I don’t live very far from where I grew up, a fairly quick BART ride from San Francisco. When I arrived at the hospital, my father and sister, who had flown up from Orange County, were with my mother, who was in tremendous pain, screaming and crying as though her limbs were being pulled away from her. I got there just in time to witness this horrific scene, as the nurses whisked her into a room to inject her with morphine. I watched the nurse administer the medication, my eye following the bottle, following the nurse’s hand, curious where they’d set it. I found myself wondering whether they could write it off as a loss, which reminded me that I have some serious mental problems.

As the pain went away, a beautiful smile spread across my mother’s face, which made me also smile. My mother was now on drugs, which was a strange thing to witness. I thought back to each time she had accused me of being on drugs, when I hadn’t been. I thought back to each of those other times that I was in fact high as a kite, but she hadn’t suspected a thing as I quickly walked past her through the kitchen on my way up to my room.

My sister was also there. “Why are you smiling, Mom?” she asked.

My mother smiled beautifully. “The baby,” she said.

“What are you talking about, Mom?” my sister asked. “What baby?”

My mother pointed to the corner of the room. “Cute baby,” she said. And with that same smile, she said, “Colby’s baby.”

My mom’s on drugs, and in more ways than one she was now seeing things.

Later the next day, while waiting in the hospital’s main lobby—which, a few hours in, began to aggravate me, as I couldn’t understand why a hospital would ever furnish its lobby with such an uncomfortable sofa since no one really spends a long period of time in a hospital lobby for any reason other than something traumatic—a doctor wearing a crisp white coat appeared. He matter-of-factly informed us all—my Korean aunts had joined us at this point—that my mother, who was somewhere in one of the top-floor hospital rooms above, had cancer, and that, worse yet, it was terminal cancer. On average, people with this same type of cancer generally had about six months to live. Once delivering this bit of information, he did an about-face and stiffly walked away.

My father, always stoic, broke down in tears. I needed a smoke.

My sister followed me. As she stepped outside, tears mixed with mascara running down her face, she asked me, “What are we going to do?”

I exhaled, telling her that I didn’t know. Furrowing my brow, I wondered why I wasn’t crying.

It was late evening now. As I stared up at the cold concrete hospital in front of us, many of the rooms lit, I thought about how my mother was inside one of those rooms, dying. Listening to the low hum of automobiles passing on the nearby freeway, I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do now. I needed to move back home to be with my mother as much as possible. For once in my life, I would try to be the son that I never had been. Once she passed away, I would hit the road permanently, just wander. Fuck it. What’s the point now, you know? There is none. A bit dramatic and over-the-top, but these were the thoughts running through my mind as I stood there with my sister, through smoke and tears.

H
aving returned from D.C., I went to my parents’ house. My parents still lived in the home I’d more or less grown up in, a beige stucco two-story, in a style characteristic of many California homes built in the early 1980s, complete with three-car garage. My father had worked hard to save money for a house in a low-crime suburb with good schools, white pickups showing up weekly to keep the lawns manicured; the ideal location to raise a family.

When I arrived, I saw that all of my mother’s hair had now disappeared completely as she lay asleep on a hospital bed in the living room where we’d spent so many years living, covers pulled up to keep her warm.

Even in sleep she appeared to be in pain. My father did too, though a different kind of pain, an emotional pain; you could tell that this was also taking a heavy toll on him physically. He was going through hell, and he looked the part. He walked with a slight limp, had enormous bags under his bloodshot eyes, and commented that the last time he was this sleep-deprived was back in Vietnam.

He had always been a strong man, and his spirit was not entirely broken; he still clung to the hope that my mother would somehow pull through all of this. That, I think, kept him going.

I never said a word about it, but I was somewhat more skeptical. I didn’t like what I was seeing one bit, and by now, a part of me wished my mother dead. I wished her dead because, well, she’s my mother. The lady who’d walked me to school every morning, holding my hand. You only get one biological mother, and for many, including myself, nobody will ever love you as unconditionally. I no longer wanted to see her suffering the way that she was—a slow, torturous death leaving her in severe, unrelenting pain. I wanted it all to end.

Absolutely exhausted, my father explained to me my job for that evening. After that, he slowly walked upstairs to the room he had once shared with my mother. I pulled a chair up to my mother’s bed and sat there. Waiting, listening to my mother’s lungs expand and contract silently and slowly after every breath while she slept.

For some reason, the cancer, or maybe the chemo, was now making my mother feel that she always had to urinate. Whenever she needed to go to the bathroom, my job would be to lift her out of bed, place her onto her wheelchair, cover her with a blanket, roll her to the bathroom down the hall, lock the wheels, lift her out of the wheelchair in a bear hug, place her in front of the toilet, and, while holding her with one arm, use my free hand to pull down her sweatpants, and then seat her on the toilet. From there, I’d take a seat on the wheelchair outside the bathroom, waiting for her to finish; sometimes it was a couple minutes, sometimes nearly an hour. When she was finished, I’d have to wipe her off, and if she needed new adult diapers, I’d change them for her. Then we’d run through the same motions in reverse, get her back on the bed, straighten her out, and pull the covers up to keep her warm.

My father had been doing this for the past several nights, and it was now my turn for the next several days.

Every time I had to wipe off my mother after taking her to the bathroom, I couldn’t help but think that this was not the way it’s supposed to be. I vaguely remember being a toddler, yelling for her whenever I was finished taking a shit on the potty, and she would arrive to wipe my ass. It vexed me to have it all turned around now. Seemed wrong. Here I was, years later, wiping her ass.

For the pain, I gave my mother two generic Vicodin every forty-five minutes. Two for her, one for me. Why they didn’t give her something stronger than Vicodin, I’ll never know. Vicodin hardly did anything for me anymore, even when I mixed it with alcohol, as I have unfortunately often done.

At night, while my mother was passed out, I’d watch television. They had cable, but I was surprised to find that there’s hardly anything to really watch late at night except paid infomercials, all promising a quick fix with little to no effort, solving every imaginable major problem afflicting your average American. If they can regrow hair, enlarge a penis, provide senior citizens with all-day erections, use bands of rubber to whittle away a tummy, pills to dissolve fat, first, what the fuck is wrong with these people and more importantly, why can’t they come up with a cure for cancer?

I’d buy that.

T
he morning sun began to peek in through the windows, creeping across the white carpet my parents had installed after all of us kids moved out. I decided to leave the television on, turning it to one of those channels playing nothing but music, having found one playing only big-band music.

No idea what happened to it, but when I was growing up, there was always a radio in the living room. Whenever my mother was folding clothes, or in the kitchen, she’d always have it on Magic 61, an AM radio station playing nothing but oldies, and a lot of big-band tunes. It was always set to that station, and as I got older, she’d get pissed off whenever I changed it to Live 105, the alternative rock station, angrily making me change it back. It’s funny because I now love the music made during those early eras, the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. If somebody was to change my radio presets over to an alternative rock station, I’d react exactly as my mother had—pissed.

An old Glenn Miller song was playing, I forget which one, but it was one of his more somber numbers. Sitting by her bed, I could see my mother slowly coming to, not in pain, eyes opening. She asked what I was watching.

It was a near miracle to see her waking up calmly, as she often woke up in horror, head swiveling, frantically looking for my father, asking “Where is he?! I want to see him before I die!”

That morning, she didn’t do that. She seemed to be just as relaxed as the melodies coming from the television, and for the first time in a long while, able to talk. I wanted to jump all over this opportunity, so I told her how I remembered that she used to listen to the big-band station on the radio all the time when I was a kid. She seemed surprised I could recall all this.

“You remember?” I told her I remembered a lot of things. She smiled, then sourly commented that today’s music was “garbage,” that she liked older music “much better.”

I nodded in agreement, and the two of us, there in the living room, stopped talking, listening to that wonderful song together in silence.

Then out of nowhere she said, “I’m hungry.”

She said it as the song ended, and another one came on, maybe Tommy Dorsey. I don’t remember, since I was more stunned than anything by my mother’s statement—she hardly ever ate. Lately she had only been able to stomach protein shakes, which we purchased in bulk at Costco, force-feeding her through a straw. So I got up quickly, heart rate going, and asked her what she wanted. She thought about it for a second, and then she said, “Miso soup.” Okay, miso soup it is. Frantically, I wondered how in the hell to do this. I didn’t know how to make miso soup; did we even have miso soup?

She told me to go over to the fridge, and that there I would find a jar labeled “Miso.” From the bed, she gave me instructions on preparing it: Get a pot, fill it up with water, boil it. Dump a teaspoon of miso into the water. Easy enough. She then told me that she wanted tofu with it, so I quickly grabbed a pack of that from the fridge, chopped it up, and dumped it into the soup. While that was getting ready, I asked her whether she wanted anything else. She paused, and then requested a Korean pear. Again, from the bed, she instructed me to cut one into thin slices. While cutting into it, still in shock that all this was going on, I accidentally cut my finger. Drawing blood, I cursed. My mother asked what happened. While grabbing a napkin to wrap around my finger, I told her, “Nothing.”

Blood seeping through the napkin, I brought the pear over to my mother, who sternly gave me some constructive criticism on how I needed to concentrate more when doing things instead of moving too quickly. She ate her pear feverishly, asking for her soup. I brought it over, and while waiting for it to cool down, she asked me if I loved the girl I was with, who, I surprisingly discovered just days after the news that my mother had cancer, was now pregnant, several months along in carrying my son.

I said yes, with plans to remarry. My mother then told me that she knew she didn’t have much time left, and that when she was gone, she wanted me to take care of the mother of my child, and my son, ensuring that he had everything that he needed, always, and to spend as much time with him as possible.

“Your father, he keeps everything inside—no good. You do same thing—no good, too.” She then, again, stressed the importance of family and that nothing else really matters.

“Look at me, say I have no family. Then nobody care and help me. Who help me? No one. Family important.”

While we talked, my father came downstairs to go to work. As he stepped into the living room to check in on us, he lit up, shocked at what he was seeing. My mother was talking! And eating! He couldn’t believe it, and I was still having a hard time believing it myself. I knew he was thinking the same thing I was, that maybe she was on her way to a full recovery. Before leaving for work, he said something to me about how I should continue to talk to my mother, and do so more often, something I’ve been historically bad at doing. He threw in something about how it “seemed to work.”

Before leaving, my father leaned over to kiss my mother good-bye. The garage door shut as my father was on his way to work, and it was once again just the two of us, my mother closing her eyes to rest.

A
s I felt my eyelids getting heavy and began to doze off, all hell broke loose. My mother started moaning in pain again, each moan more and more intense, every minute more turbulent. I was shoving Vicodin in her mouth, but could see that they weren’t doing a damn thing. After popping a couple myself, I called my father and told him he should come home, it was time.

We moved her, crying in pain, into the car and left for the hospital. As we pulled out of the driveway, I stared at the house and remembered the first time we’d pulled up to it when we were moving in. My father, driving, called my Korean aunts, relaying the grim situation. He didn’t go into much detail, though the severity of it was implied by his directness.