My Mother is Dying
This personal essay is not an uplifting, wrap your arms around happy theme. It is real. It is brutally honest. It is more common than you might expect.
My mother is dying. Not the antiseptic, movie of the week with an orchestra playing in the background, everyone holding hands around the bed, kind of dying. The ugly kind. I’m sure that she didn’t have any intention of passing in such a messy fashion, but life, with all of its vices, intrudes. Until my dad’s untimely death, her life was full. Gene and Skeeter..the fun loving, happy couple that everyone envied and admired. You never saw one without the other, and their feelings for each other were passionate and true. I knew, for as long as I could remember, that Mom loved Dad more than she loved my siblings and me, but it never occurred to me to think less of her for it.
Gene Edwin Rex and Emma Eileen Laughlin (nicknamed Skeeter by her father) married, still in their teens the November after high school graduation in 1948. Still teens themselves, they quickly had four children, worked hard, smoked and drank harder, and lived a happy and raucous life. Mom worked early in the marriage making milkshakes and running the town teletype at a hometown diner called The Falls News.. Early on, Dad was a hard working blue collar guy who dripped sweat in a steel mill on second shift and ran a car alignment shop from home during the day. Six foot, with a slight frame, he was the strongest man I knew. He had a killer wit and enjoyed the absurdity of life and humor in everything. I was envious of his natural talents in art and music...cartoons and caricatures littered our kitchen table and his mellow tenor voice was a constant..hence my love of 50's music and show tunes. Oh, and could he whistle! - Show tunes, scatting, new tunes on the radio... But then the whistling stopped.
Suddenly and without warning, he had a heart attack and died at sixty-four years old while on the road as a truck driver.
Immediately, mom’s deterioration began. Mom was nothing without Dad, and that was good with her. The Gloria Steinem years and bra burning were years into the future, and she would have none of it as a product of the 50's.. She didn’t embrace any women’s movement, or define herself as anything other than his wife.
The happy years, with an occasional plate throwing episode because dad was late for dinner, had reached closing time, like the bars they frequented with me, the oldest, in tow. I often slept on two chairs pushed together until the set was done. On many weekends, we were in a joint where dad would play and sing in a pickup band, enjoying fun company, local beers, dancing the jitterbug, and unfiltered Camel cigarettes. Their lives were full and an uncomplicated American dream. When I try to make sense of it all, she probably would have gone ugly anyway, but losing Dad, her sense of self and safety, threw the process into overdrive and into our faces. The adult children of the imperfectly perfect couple have all long gone our separate ways, with families and troubles of our own, thrown back together to care for the surviving, ailing and now, very demanding and cranky parent. It is a myth that the elderly are all sweet and lovely charmers with a twinkle in their eyes, imparting platitudes and wisdom. Deprived of the power that is independence and decision making, some are frustrated and angry, and lash out at the ones they love, and who love them.
The oldest son, living only 10 miles away, is detached, both physically and emotionally unavailable. It is his defense mechanism. The youngest of their brood is also male.. He has anger issues; yells and blames others when he’s frustrated and worried about Mom. The third child, a girl, has become the caregiver. She's a sentimental soul who cries at the drop of a hat.. I’m the oldest. If you put any credence to birth order, I’m the one who takes charge and barks orders.This does not always bode well with the rest of the gang, but someone’s got to step up to the plate and make the brutal calls.
Twisting the reigns from Mom’s arthritic and misshapen hands has been another matter. For someone who has always controlled and taken charge of her family, finances, what to have for supper, or the best color to paint the kitchen, it’s a hard knock to relinquish power and decision making to others. Just one more blow to her dignity. Mom has a pacemaker, COPD from 50 years of unfiltered cigarettes, osteoarthritis, GERD, frequent urinary tract infections (these episodes are particularly fun because in the elderly, they cause dementia-like symptoms - who knew?), brittle bones- several broken from falls, and early signs of cervical cancer. She takes a medical cocktail of 15-20 pills a day, depending on her pain threshold. There is a groaning oxygen concentrator the size of a small beer cooler always humming a funeral dirge in the background. With a snaking air hose, apparently possessing more energy than she, it slithers from bedroom to bathroom, trailing behind her walker to the stained and overstuffed chair that is her prison throne in the living room. Her pain is great and breathing labored. It doesn't help that she's a mouth breather and forgets to sniff frequently into the life giving mask. "Ma! Take a breath!", I remind her, while the COPD turns her lungs to stone.
My sister bathes and dresses her, fixes her meals and tends to her everyday needs. My job is bills, doctors' appointments, cutting fingernails and toenails - ick, plucking chin whiskers, keeping her updated on the latest obituary notices, family feuds, new babies and divorces, along with looking after her occasionally to give my sister a break. She's lonely and it's difficult to satisfy her emotional needs. The house is always busy with my sister and brother-in-law, and the visits from my brothers, but the everyday duties of running their own households frays nerves when Mom questions and challenges everything in her efforts to feel relevant. I understand this. When the four of us called a pow-pow to decide her future and care, my sister's home was the best choice. But, relinquishing her own home, knowing that she needed round the clock care, was a bitter pill for her.
Mom has never been one to read or challenge herself with games or crossword puzzles. Her crippling arthritis has ended any knitting she once did. She watches CNN 24/7 but is isolated from the drama and politics of the day and becomes confused. Because she can't or won't venture out, she's not interacting and socializing. Even though my sister is a constant presence, and I visit almost every day, Mom wants what we can't give her..companionship... the small talk that comes from similar age and life experiences. She misses old people
It’s a fight every day. She hurts, she’s mad, she thinks we’re not telling her everything she needs to know. Sometimes we don't. It's complicated. There's a bit of paranoia in all of it. She forgets that we’ve told her at least ten times, and worries about everything beyond her control until she’s breathing heavily and near tears. Her denial of her failing health and dependence upon her children seems to diminish her worth in her eyes. Because she is guilty of lies of omission, decisions for her care are a crapshoot. Mom compartmentalizes. She has many specialists and only tells them what she thinks they need to know, which makes us crazy. I attend her appointments to keep her on the straight and narrow, but get the stink eye for my vigilance. My sister and I compare many conversations to separate outward deception from semi-truths. If she becomes any more difficult to care for, a nursing home is a possibility. Though Mom is terrified of this because she perceives a move to nursing care as the end, my sister is wearing down both physically and emotionally.
“When did you start shaking so badly? How long has it been that it burns when you pee?" "You seem confused. Did you take too many pain pills?" And baths? Oh boy, howdy...until we figured out a system, it was a three person, choreographed event. She's so fragile and weak that stepping into a tub is frightening, painful and nearly impossible. Our first attempt was a comedy sketch worthy of Saturday Night Live. We learned and adapted for her needs. She is 5'8", having shrunk from 5'll" and weighs 97 pounds. This is a drop from a healthy and robust 170. We are forever encouraging more food intake and fluids, but she's a sipper. A glass of water will last her an entire day. Her meals don't hold a candle to even one of my midday snacks.
Ill fitting false teeth because of her dramatic weight loss makes chewing an effort and marathon with no joy. So, we nag her to eat and drink more, and she balks at what she views as insults and accusations that she is weak and frail. Trust me when I say, she thinks she's pretty darn spry and not a bother to anyone. This once healthy and strong woman who would chase me around the front yard and wrangle me back into the house to do my chores, becomes spent over the most basic efforts. A trip to the doctor's office will knock her out for the rest of the day.
A long time ago can mean yesterday or last month. If we limit her Percocet because she morphs into a drooling idiot, she cries in pain. Keeping track of her pain medication has become a fixation. Fearing that she'll run out, she calls the pharmacy many times a month to be reassured that the prescription is good to go. My eighty-three year old mother is a Fentanyl junky.
Honesty comes at a price. What I see in her rheumy eyes is fear, not the vibrant and spunky mother who fixed 20 friends bacon and eggs at 4:00 in the morning after a night on the town, or ate a dozen hamburgers on a bet when she was 18. She was a lifeguard at 17 in a scandalous two-piece leather bathing suit circa 1948, and taught me to dance a mean jitterbug, and couldn't tell a joke to save her life . All of what she was has become a bittersweet memory.
She always had flaws. She was never perfect. But she was perfectly flawed. And now, they are magnified. She was a control freak while we were growing up. I was the oldest, with a mother barely 18 years older. I adopted coping skills. Do what she wants. Shut her up. The other three kids challenged her more, but we all survived, and love her in our own way. It was a good life.
She has folded in on herself, like a child’s feeble attempt at a house of cards; precarious and rough on the edges, just balancing and clinging there.
Her denial about how dependent she is has become an inside joke between my sister and me. She is homebound, and other than shuffling from bed to bathroom to chair, she is totally dependent. We encourage visits from old friends, but she is embarrassed by her frailty and need for oxygen, so she cancels. It is too close to the bone of her own mortality.
I no longer know this woman. And yet her time remaining has me casting out decisions, while choosing others for her comfort and well-being. I know that if her cervical cancer roars to the forefront, she cannot survive a surgery, and I will refuse it. There is also a Do Not Resuscitate order. I do this for her, and my siblings, because they cannot. The decisions are no longer hers, for the many afflictions and ailments that have robbed her of her mental health, physical well-being, and dignity. My mother is dying. And I feel sadness and shame.