Dead Mom Week

Let's not beat around the bush.  It's not my style.  I've been getting crankier and crankier over the past several weeks and it's not hard to figure out why.  If I was too dense to figure it out, then mom is invading my dreams almost nightly just to make sure I get it. 

I get it.  For those you just joining us--Thursday is the day she stopped breathing (and could've gone peacefully in her sleep, but that's another rant).  Friday is the day we unplugged her and the doctor said, "It'll probably only be an hour or two once we turn off the fluids (that were keeping her blood pressure up)."  She didn't know my mom so she can't be blamed for giving us false information.  And today--well, that's when nature won out over sheer stubbornness and she slipped out on us.  But oh boy, not without a fight.

The check in calls and emails are starting to trickle in. Only one was direct.  Most are shy, unobtrusive, hesitant. Should I say something? Should I not say something?  That's up to you. I can tell you that the pain will be there either way and I'm a pretty direct girl.  Can't hurt, might help.  I probably won't answer the phone anyway. I'm just glad I didn't break down in writing class this week, that would be awkward.  It's not like someone wrote a story about their mom either.  It's just dead mom week.  It's supposed to suck.

On the good news front, her house (I continue to think of, and refer to it as 'mom's house' is FINALLY clean.  I got the dressersthatwouldn'tdie_(TM) out of there last weekend and the cleaners came on Tuesday.  They were supposed to come last Tuesday but A) they were 40 minutes late and B) there was no hot water because I forgot we had turned off the tank and in fact, the pilot light had gone out.  So they rescheduled me without a penalty charge (I would've had thrown a fit--how 'bout I charge them $35 for making me late to class?).  And we tried again this week.  This time they showed up at my house as I was leaving to meet them. Luckily they were running a little early this time and I was running a little late.  I had them follow me over and left them to it.  It took six hours, instead of the four they told me and I had to leave drawing class to go pay them, but it was done.  Clean. Smelled like a house someone might want to live in, instead of a sad museum.

I've been feeling better the last couple of days, oddly.  Could be the biking (and getting used to biking again, cause I've been exhausted for the past two weeks).  Could be the yoga, or the sun.  At any rate, there's plenty to keep me busy and I've decided I'm not just going to sit around all weekend thinkingaboutwhatIwasdoingthistimelastyear.  I got a call from an aunt who said she's spending the day celebrating--reading, reading to kids, dancing.  Sounds like the way to go.

If you call today, don't be surprised if I don't answer.  I'll be on my bike.

Body of sand

While I was at the campus bookstore last week, buying my books early like a good girl, I saw lots of textbooks that simply looked interesting. I succumbed to only one, "The Best American Magazine Writing." More on why later.

Last night I decided to delve into it, with the first article I flipped to, "The Recruit" about a boy's decision to join the military and the consequences of that decision. Somewhere between talking to Jess and starting to read, my eye grazed another title, "A Matter of Life and Death." by Marjorie Williams. The article was an account of her diagnosis with an incurable liver cancer at age 43 and her subsequent acceptance of her fate.

A few of the more resonant sentences for me:

Notice, though, that I don't include my husband among those to whom my death was an imminent fact...
It could make me crazy, lying awake...wanting to talk about death, while Tim lay awake...trying to figure out the next five moves he had to make to keep me alive, and then, beyond that, to find the magic bullet in which I did not believe....drifted into a tacit, provisional agreement to act as if... I were in some genuine suspense about the outcome.

Yet it made me furious anytime someone tried to cheer me up by reciting the happy tale of a sister-in-law's cousin who had liver cancer but now he's eighty and he hasn't been troubled by it in forty years...I was working so hard to accept my death: I felt abandoned, evaded, when someone insisted that I would live.

This is so akin to my experience with mom that it was both a shock and a relief. There I was, trying to prepare (you can't, but I had to try) for the inevitable, deal with the ugly practicalities and have some kind of meaningful closure. And it seemed as if just about everyone around me was entrenched behind their wall of denial with an unlimited supply of non-perishable foods and they weren't coming out until the bomb went off right in their shelter. It made me crazy. If I had hair, I would have pulled it out.

Well, it's no surprise where my dream from last night came from. I was dying and I had gone around to say goodbye to everyone that I could. And now I was laying in a bed, in a room, by myself, waiting for the end. I couldn't leave the bed anymore because my body was slowly turning to sand and if I tried to get up, I would literally fall apart. As time when on, I felt more and more tired. More tired than I thought was possible. Any time now, I thought, I'm going to go to sleep and not wake up. But then I decided I needed to have the last word. So, struggling against the tired, I sat up in bed, laptop perched on my sandy legs and composed my last blog.

I never did get to finish it.

Ride for a Fallen Comrade

Image from Jonathan Maus

Having no obligations today other than taking Chuck to the airport this morning, I came home and indulged in taped episodes of Heroes and Battlestar Galactica. By the time I was done with that, I was well on my way to wasting what could be the last sunny day until May.

That combined with the news of yet another cyclist getting picked off by a right hook from a truck yesterday spurred me into action. I threw on my team kit, pumped up the roadie tires and headed out on a one woman memorial ride. I went where I always go when I need to pedal out some pain--Rocky Butte. It doesn't take much hill to leave me panting and Rocky Butte always does the trick.

On the way I thought about the latest crash victim, Brett Jarolimek. He worked at the Bike Gallery and was well known in the racing community and the bike comunity at large. He competed in the cross race we went to watch on Sunday. I didn't know him and never met him but I'm all too aware whenever I throw a leg over my saddle, I could very well be him. I ride down Interstate all the time. I know how crappily the lights are timed and how narrow the bike lane gets just when your speed going down the hill is the greatest. I have felt the WHOOSH of semis passing me less than two feet away and you can bet I am watching to see if they need to turn. I do not want my memorial to be some ghost bike on a corner.

Still, there's only so much you can do and then you have to let go and live life. Which is the point of going on a ride. I attacked the Rocky Butte climb harder than I ever have, not fading after the tunnel like I usually do. I just kept pushing and pushing all the way to the top. I felt my lungs, bursting, legs burning, heart pounding between my ears and was grateful to be alive and healthy and pedaling. I sent some thoughts out to Brett and all the people mourning him right now.

I started out with a notion to time-trial the whole ride, but I had to stop at the top and take in the views of Mt Hood & Mt Saint Helens, cause working so hard and not enjoying the view seemed so pointless. Then I took my sweet reward, braking only a little on the backside and hitting 41.5 mph on the way down. I didn't get any bugs in my teeth, but it wasn't because I wasn't smiling...

The rest of the ride, I spun at a comfortable pace and kept an eagle eye out to make sure I made it home safe, taking the lane at most of the lights to avoid the suicide slot.

My friend Greg wrote a heartfelt guest post on BikePortland today urging people to turn sadness into action. Inspired by that message, I went to tonight's town hall meeting on the Safe and Sound Streets proposal that could actually put some money into making our streets safer for all road users. I'm glad I live in a place where our city leaders are willing to ask hard questions and tackle overwhelming issues like the 422 million dollars in deferred maintenance liability that has built up over the years. $72 per year in energy fees and gas taxes seems like a bargain for better signal timing, more sidewalks and hundreds of new miles in bike Blvds. Especially if it'll keep more of us on the road and out of the cemetery.

Bad News

My (paternal) grandmother died. More later.

UPDATE:

Moms passed away sometime near midnight last night. We got back from the beach early on Wednesday and went to the hospital to check on everyone. At the time they were starting dialysis to try to clear the toxins from her body, but she was too far gone to be saved.

Not thinking, I went into the room to see her and instantly regretted it. Sudden toxic shock to the body does not look pretty. She looked worse than mom ever had and I thought that was bad. Very dumb move on my part, resulting in instant trauma and flashbacks.

It's all too tragic for me to even wrap my head around at this point. Just the irony itself is mind boggling. A colonoscopy 10 years ago would have surely saved mom's life--and now a colonoscopy has taken my grandmother.

I think I'll just go bang my head against a wall until that makes sense...

Irony and Anger

When Jess and I went to the beach last month, we visited the little bookstore on Nye beach. While I was cruising the self help section, I found a book called, "Death Without Denial, Grief Without Apology."

"Well, isn't that 6 months too late," I said. It sat there on the shelf, mocking me, so I bought it.

It's a really good book, written by the former Governer of Oregon Barbara Roberts, about the things she learned during the illness and death from cancer of her husband Frank. It's basically a primer of everything we could have done, but didn't, thanks to something we like to call "The Bubble."

Here's a few relevant quotes:

We are so afraid of death in this culture, so geared toward "medical miracles," we seem to have lost all sense of perspective. There is nothing wrong wiht a patient wanting a medical miracle. owever we have come to a place where families are demanding miracles when death is imminent and doctors often play the Wizard of Oz trying to orchestrate false hope and deny reality.

Traditionally, doctors are trained to sustain life, not plan for death. However, if the doctor would say "dying" to a patient, the pretense of recovery would be gone. If a spouse of life partner says, "dying" to a loved one they are then free to plan, share, and say goodbye over days or weeks or months. The dying person could then speak the truth to old friends, thank parents, prepare children. Conversations could be real. Expectations would be expressed. Fears could be shared. Memories could be made that would sustain and comfort those left to grieve once death arrives.

What a dying person needs is comfort, closeness, dignity, and in some cases, pain control.

Accepting that he was dying gave Frank more space for creating good times.

Kindess is helping dying patients accept the diagnosis and then give them support and services to live the rest of their lives with as much dignity, as many choices, and as little physical pain as possible.

Denial is not your friend. Truth offers you more freedom and broader options. Denial is also costly. It uses up financial resources your family may need when you're gone. Denial uses up chances to share your feelngs with your closest loved ones. Denial wastes the life ingredient you can least afford to squander--time.

The bubble pretty much robbed us of any of the positive aspects that might have come from our situation. I have a great deal of anger towards specific people who perpetuated the bubble. Everyone who insisted that we just had to "think positively," everyone who convinced mom that pain medicine was the enemy, everyone who said all she needed was more milk thistle, more blueberries, more vitamin c, more oxygen... The list goes on and on, and the crazy making power of the bubble is inexplicable in mere words.

The result of all this is that our (mine and Traci's) time was stolen and we can NEVER. GET. IT. BACK. We can't ask about the gumbo recipe, Traci's future wedding, what to do if ______ happens, reminisce about long drives up and down the I-5 corridor...NOTHING. All because we were forced to pretend that we had the next 20 years to do all these things because no one, including mom, could just deal with reality.

And did I mention the suffering? She was miserable for the last month or more of her life because "pain medicine was too hard on her liver" (it's failing anyway, why not be comfortable?) or "pain medicine causes constipation" (we have ways to deal with that, but you won't follow them).

"Mom, what's your pain at now?"

"Two," she'd say, while the grimace on her face said, "eight" every time she moved. It took a full day to convince her that adjusting pillows every 10 minutes wasn't going to help her, before she finally agreed to one drop of morphine.

Most days I'm able to function with this anger. Some days I go to my old house and chop wood. And other times, when I can't get the horrors of the (totally unneccesary!) trip to the emergency room out of my head, I just wail and scream and wish I could yell at everyone responsible. She was finally sleeping, peacefully, and she just stopped breathing. If only they had let her go, it could have ended like that. I would've been sad that I wasn't there, but it would've been better than the two days of hell that followed. All so that other people could get here, other people could see her, other people could say goodbye. Nobody seemed able to forget about themselves long enough to care about her suffering. We're kinder to animals.