SPRING 2020
I AM MORE UPSET ABOUT the possibility of losing Ed than I was after my parents died. I know that sounds terrible. I loved my parents. But my connection to Ed is different. The idea of never again being able to share a thought that only he would understand or ask him a question that only he would know the answer to or trade smiles across a room as we watch our son appear onstage in front of an audience that wants to see him just . . . well . . . that kind of loss scares me in a way that is indescribable.
When Van Halen was on tour in 2015, I believed Ed was going to beat cancer and be okay. He had battled the disease in various parts of his tongue and throat for a decade and a half. He had the best medical care available. Early on, of course, he could have helped himself by stopping smoking and drinking. You don’t spit at cancer. You don’t taunt the Big C. You don’t pretend you can outrun it.
But Ed eventually moved past denial and anger and got his shit together. He took care of himself, and it showed. He looked and felt good. Then he had the motorcycle accident and learned that the cancer had spread throughout his body like a greedy developer run amok. Still, we remained hopeful, trusted the treatments, and clung to promising checkups. Sober in every way, he was upbeat, loving, and appreciative.
He is that way even now. Hopeful.
We texted the other day. Like everyone else, he was looking for a new TV series, and he wanted to know if I had any recommendations. Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO—that’s all anyone seems to talk about these days.
This pandemic is making all of us shut-ins.
I never thought of my parents as getting old or sick until suddenly they were. Though my mother was slowed in her forties by rheumatoid arthritis, which got progressively worse over the years, both of my parents easily cruised past age sixty-five. After my dad retired—he spent thirty-two years at General Motors—they moved to Las Vegas. “No state income tax,” he explained. My dad was a Fox News devotee who made me more of a feminist than my mother or any book, TV show, movie, documentary, or person I heard speak could have done. I think he knew that and took pride in having a strong, independent daughter who could provide for herself.
But we generally avoided talking about politics and deeply personal stuff, preferring to keep conversations light and on the surface. There were too many booby traps. My dad was a responsible provider and loving father, but he was not a faithful husband, something that left scars on all of us. Football was a much safer topic when we gathered around the table. Growing up, all my brothers played, my dad assisted the coaches, and my mom and I turned into Sunday and Monday night die-hards who were as familiar with sweeps, draws, and sacks as we were with the latest Bloomingdale’s catalog. That never changed.
In 2004, my parents moved to Scottsdale, Arizona. My youngest brother, Patrick, who lived in Scottsdale with his wife, Stacy, saw that they were slowing down. Because he and Stacy were the ones checking on them most frequently, he said that it would be easier if my parents were closer to them. We helped my parents find a beautiful house and they spent about ten years enjoying the dry desert air before a series of small heart attacks and related health issues took the steam out of my dad.
Then one day he took my mom to a doctor’s appointment and the nurse at the front desk, who knew my parents well, became alarmed as soon as she saw him. He said that he felt tired. She hurried him into an examining room where it turned out that he was having a heart attack at that very moment. The nurse saved his life.
As he recovered, we were sad, scared, and realistic. This was the next unavoidable stage of adulthood, the one where you become the guardian of your own parents. My brothers and I talked and asked one another the questions that so many of our friends and people our age seemed to also be asking themselves: Can Mom and Dad take care of themselves? What do we do? How can we help?
* * *
It’s one of those things you never really think about. It’s not like when you are growing up and you spend a lot of time thinking about what it will be like to get your driver’s license, live in your own apartment, have sex, get married, and have a baby. Then your parents get sick or stumble or begin to forget, and suddenly their care is all you think about.
Patrick and Stacy took the lead and I provided whatever additional support was needed. My parents were fortunate to have the resources to provide themselves with good options. We found a cheerful one-bedroom apartment in a comfortable assisted-living facility. Going through their belongings, accumulated over sixty-one years of marriage, was predictably emotional since we had to decide what to keep, what to donate, and what to toss; and almost every item had some kind of story or personal attachment to it.
Furniture was easy. It either fit into their new apartment or it didn’t. If it didn’t fit, the four of us talked through who wanted it or what to do if there were no takers. Appliances, electronics, pictures, and so on were handled similarly. The task spurred thoughts not just of what gets collected over a lifetime and what is necessary to make a life and raise a family, but also how we children broke away from our parents and created our own lives. Was I really only eighteen when I bought my first house? And just on the cusp of twenty-one when I got married?
My dad was super organized and had everything in boxes that were clearly labeled. We found deeds and contracts for our old homes. School art projects and reports were in folders. There was an old baby book for my brother, Mark, including congratulatory cards from relatives and friends stuck in the front of the book, which, of course, ended abruptly and was, I assumed, put away until we found it again.
That wasn’t the only sensitive family subject we unearthed. While sifting through boxes and albums of photos and documents, we unearthed a handwritten letter from my dad’s half brother whom we had never heard about. We knew Nazzareno had traveled to America, met my grandmother, and had three children—my dad and his two sisters, Norma and Adeline—but we had no idea that he had deserted a whole other family in Italy. It was a genuine “holy shit” discovery.
“Dear Andrew,” the letter began. “It’s your brother Ernesto that is writing to you. I think you know our history. Our father went to America when I was 3 and left me in Italy. He wrote me and I know that you are my true brother. I have a great wish, that is to see you personally.”
We wondered whether they had ever met and ultimately concluded that they hadn’t. But who knew? We decided not to bring it up with Dad. What was the point other than to know—and now we knew. But I saw a similarity between Nazzareno and my dad. Both had secrets, including some that had impacted their families. The two of them were like old-fashioned Italian restaurants: white tablecloths; stiff cloth napkins; the smell of garlic wafting from the kitchen; a menu with classic antipasto, fried calamari, spaghetti marinara, fettucine alfredo; and a back room where stuff happened that nobody knew about.
I wasn’t suddenly ready to forgive my dad, but I understood him better. When it came to being a husband, he didn’t have the most virtuous teacher.
* * *
One of our prerequisites for the move was making sure that their cat, Beau, could go with them to the assisted-living center. They were very attached to him. At this point, my parents had only one of their two cats. Six months earlier, their other cat, Bubba, had gone missing. But as we were on our way to take one more look at the new apartment before signing the agreement, my cell phone rang. On the other end was a woman who asked if I had lost a cat.
“What do you mean?” I asked, thinking that Beau had escaped from the house because we had been going in and out so often.
“It’s a white cat with an orange tail and blue eyes,” the woman said. “But he looks like he’s been out on the streets for a while.”
Telling her to hold on for a second, I put the phone down and scratched my head. I had to think. Then it hit me.
“You didn’t just find Bubba, did you?” I asked.
“Um, I don’t know if it’s Bubba,” she said. “I found a cat that has clearly been abandoned.”
“Where did you find him?” I asked.
She told me. When I mentioned that this was less than a mile away from my mom and dad’s house, she got mad at me.
“This poor cat,” she said. “We thought someone abandoned him . . . because, you know, a lot of people do. Unfortunately, they just don’t want to take care of their cats anymore and they throw them into feral colonies.”
“No, no, no, you don’t understand,” I said, explaining that we were heartbroken when we couldn’t find Bubba and put up fliers everywhere.
It turned out that Bubba had been living behind the local grocery store, where the employees and the owner of the dry cleaner’s next door kept him fed but couldn’t grab him for six months. Once they got ahold of him, they had him scanned and called the number on file, which was my cell phone. Bubba was my dad’s cat, and he was ecstatic to have him back. So was Beau. The four of them moved into the assisted-living facility. When I visited them a few days later, my parents were in bed and Bubba and Beau were curled up on the bed with them, like they’d never been apart.
My parents liked their routine at the assisted-living facility. One day my dad was downstairs being Mr. Helpful, as was his way, and he saw a woman who looked like she was about to fall. He hurried over to her side and caught her just as she lost her balance. He broke her fall, but she fell on top of him and broke his hip. He went downhill from there and never recovered.
I can’t help but think of the old saying: It’s not going to kill you to be nice. Except it did in his case. On December 7, 2016, only six weeks after that accident, he was gone. I have a picture of Bubba sitting on the bed with my dad after he drew his final breath. Dad was ready to go. His feline friend, though looking forlorn, was still offering comfort.
* * *
I mourned and grieved with the rest of my family until gradually the routine of talking to my parents and checking in on them became solely focused on my mom. Sadness came in waves. Concern for my mom filled the space between those waves. She was crushed after my dad passed. Whatever his shortcomings as a husband had been in the past, she had made her peace with them long ago and he had done the same, turning into a devoted caregiver as her rheumatoid arthritis limited her activities and filled her days with pain.
I am not sure why cruelty and compassion often walk hand in hand, and yet they do far too often. Are they two sides of the same coin? It doesn’t make sense.
My mom had a tough life. A Jersey girl by birth, she was only nine years old when her mother died. Her stepmother was horrible, and I am pretty sure she was sexually abused as a teenager. She never explicitly said those words, but she dropped hints and made it clear she was eager to get out of her house. She met my dad one snowy winter night as she came out of a movie theater in Claymont, Delaware. As she waited for a bus, he pulled up in his car and offered her a ride home. She declined. He drove off but circled back and implored her to accept a ride rather than stand in the freezing weather.
Five months later, they were married. I wish that this had ended her hardships. Sadly, it didn’t. During the first few years of their marriage, my dad’s family treated her poorly because she wasn’t Italian or Catholic. Then my brother Mark died, and my dad’s family held that tragedy against her, too. Devastated, she coped by trying to be an even more attentive mother and wife. The gods were still not kind. My dad cheated on her. In her forties, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and endured pain for the remainder of her life. She never got a break. What was the point?
I have always asked myself the same question about Mark. What was the point of his or any life if it is going to end that soon?
My poor mom. When I was eight or nine years old, she had a hysterectomy. One day she took me with her to a doctor’s appointment. I suppose no one was able to watch me. I sat next to her in the front seat of the car. Every time she hit a bump in the road, she winced in pain, and then turned to me and apologized. For what? Why did she feel the need to say she was sorry when she was the one suffering? She did the same thing years later as her arthritis began crippling her. She did this even late in her life, as she began to fail. It made no sense.
I should have taken hold of her and apologized to her for all of the suffering she’d endured throughout her life and was continuing to deal with. I did tell her how wonderfully talented she was and how much I loved and appreciated her, and how I knew all the luck and largesse I enjoyed in my life would never have been possible if not for her giving birth to me, driving carpool, sitting on sets, putting her own desires and ambitions on hold to be a great mom.
But I wasn’t able to have a deeply personal heart-to-heart with her. Not about losing my brother Mark. Not about my dad’s cheating. Not about the arthritis. Not about the way the arthritis eventually forced her to quit painting. Not about the way it shrunk her life to weekly doctor’s appointments and constant medication, and ultimately led to her being bedridden. I never said I understood or was sorry for everything she endured. I never said I get it, and if you need to cry, go ahead and cry.
Only once, back when I was in my late twenties, did she come close. We were arguing about something and she walked right up to the edge of revealing her pain, whatever it was at that moment, before I stopped her.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t go there.”
She looked at me in a way that I have never forgotten, and said, “Why don’t you want to be close to me? Why can’t we be close?”
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be close or that we weren’t close in other ways. It was that I didn’t want to see her pain. I was scared of it, scared of what would happen if those wounds were opened. I didn’t see how much both of us would have benefited from being more open and honest with each other. We wouldn’t have had to carry around so much damn weight.
When I get bogged down by feelings and emotions, I isolate and shut down until I reach the point where I shrug and accept the negativity or pain as a part of me. “Well, that’s just me.” I was taught by the best.
This is the part I am attempting to change and let go of with the work I am doing now. I don’t have to hide what’s in my heart. I don’t have to punish myself for things that happened ages ago. I don’t have to suffer for behavior that was ingrained in me. And I don’t have to always feel like there is something about me that I need to fix.
I am fine.
I am good.
I am bad.
I am broken.
I am perfect the way I am.
I am human.
I can do something my mother wasn’t able to do. I can love myself. As I am. At this age. Right now.
It’s enough already.
* * *
After my dad died, my mother lived three more years. Given how much pain she was often in, I sometimes wondered why she survived instead of him. Her back was gone, she’d had two knee operations, and she was always searching for the right recipe of drugs that would give her relief. It was almost like God kept her around to continue punishing her. She wasn’t a Buddhist who believed life was about suffering. She was smart, beautiful, sensitive, funny, and very talented. Her situation left me completely bewildered. What was the point?
She seemed to relax after Dad was gone. When I visited her, I made sure Bubba and Beau were fed and clean and that their litter box was emptied, and we sat together and talked about the cats as if they were part of our family, which, of course, they were. We watched old movies. My mother loved the Katharine Hepburn movie Summertime. It took place in Venice, and we spoke about going back there even though she wasn’t strong enough to travel to California, let alone fly across the ocean.
If I visited on a Sunday, we watched football together. She wore her red number 11 Arizona Cardinals jersey in honor of her favorite player, the great wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald, and I arrived in my number 9 Saints jersey with BREES printed on the back. One year she organized a Super Bowl party at the assisted-living facility.
I usually surprised her with a big bag of Cheetos, which she loved. I did, too. They brought back memories for me. When I was in high school, I took a little bag of Cheetos, a sandwich, and a can of Pepsi every day for lunch. So my mom and I reminisced—two chicks who had spent most of their lives dieting the way Thelma and Louise ran from the law were eating Cheetos and licking their fingers without guilt or shame.
What I realized with even more clarity was the way food was our bridge to talking and connecting in a way we never did before. That’s the way I found out my dad’s family had been mean to her after my parents were first married and also how they eventually warmed up to her after she spent years standing alongside them in my Aunt Adeline’s basement kitchen, listening to them talk about the family and the old country while making pasta. Basically, she was an English-Irish girl who had to convert to Italian.
Though she bore the scars of those painful experiences, at least she was able to laugh at them sixty years later. She won. She outlived all of them. And that’s the ultimate prize. Waking up in the morning is the only way you get to see what happens next. It also gives you the last word if you want it. Only the living can write or rewrite history. But my mom didn’t care two wits about revising anything, and I came to realize that the three years she survived without my dad enabled her to shed the burdens, slights, hurt, and criticisms of the past and simply exhale. Like me, she was able to say, “Enough already.”
At least I hope so.
* * *
My mom passed away in her sleep on June 18, 2019, the day before what would have been her sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. She had fallen the year before and she had been mostly bedridden since January. Her body was slowly breaking and coming apart. Patrick and Stacy called to say that she was shutting down. I was confused, actually in denial of what I already knew was inevitable, and I asked how they knew. “You know,” Patrick said.
When I got the call that she was gone, I was about to get up and go to work on season seven of Kids Baking Championship. I was relieved that she was finally out of pain and that her suffering was over. In the end, she had been in tremendous pain. I still went to work, because you don’t not show up for work, and Ed reached me while I was in the makeup chair. Wolfie had told him about my mom, and we had a tearful talk.
Afterward, he texted me a picture of him with my mom. He has his arm around her. My mom is grinning at the camera and Ed is looking lovingly at her. He seemed more distraught than I was, and eventually I figured out why. Ed knew his cancer had spread, and he was processing the gravity of the diagnosis and the fight ahead of him. I still didn’t know about his situation at that point—and either he wasn’t ready to tell me or he had decided the timing wasn’t right.
But my mom’s passing hit both of us hard. It sent a message to both of us: Time does not wait for anyone. Don’t waste it.
I am reminded of this every time I walk into my sunroom—or, as I call it, the “catio.” There on the chair or in the cat tree are Bubba and Beau curled up together.