What It Looks Like When the Other Shoe Drops
IT WAS OFFICIAL: I was an adult. At age thirty-four I went on my very first business trip. In the last week of March 1997, I flew business class to New York City to pitch documentary show ideas with Felicia and Bram to A&E, Lifetime, and the Discovery Channel. I felt so darn grown-up—at least on the outside. On the inside, though, it was still up for debate. Before I left for New York, I was in a panic. First, I hated flying—too many memories of cocaine-induced panic attacks on planes in the 1980s. And then, to make matters worse, I had to fly into JFK in a snowstorm. To reduce my anxiety, my look-at-me-aren’t-I-a-grown-up? solution was to pack a stuffed animal. My flying companion was Celery—a lime-green rabbit my mom had given me for Easter the year before. Because he was like all transitional objects that have been clutched, drooled on, and given godlike powers by toddlers since the beginning of time, I knew he’d make everything okay. And he did. We landed safely. When I got to my hotel room there were flowers waiting for me with a note that said, “I knew you’d make it. Love, Bob.” Either he was in on it with Celery, or I really did marry the right guy. He always knew how to ground me.
For three days I went to pitch meetings. Things went well for me mostly because I followed the advice my mom had given me a few years earlier: Fake it. She told me the secret to any job—pretend you know what you’re doing. Everyone else is. As I went from meeting to meeting, I thanked her silently for that advice, and for the suit that she’d bought for me only a week before the trip. I felt her support all around me. We had healed so much.
The flight home was much less anxiety-inducing thanks to Celery—and knowing that Bob would be at the airport to pick me up. As we waited for my luggage, I asked him how my mom was doing; she’d been in the hospital while I was away, readying to have some gallstones removed.
He told me, “They found some spots on her liver. They’re doing a biopsy.”
That was it. I knew immediately what they’d found. Mom was in her fourteenth year of remission from breast cancer, and here was the other shoe. It had finally dropped.
I hadn’t realized it, but I’d been holding my breath for fourteen years.
Although she’d been cancer-free for those fourteen years, she hadn’t been well. She’d been suffering from a multitude of chronic ailments: diabetes, hepatitis C, and fibromyalgia. All had their issues, but fibromyalgia was the great debilitator. She was in pain daily and fatigued constantly. There were days when I would look at her face and see the courage it took for her to just get up and go out and have lunch. She was always in far more distress than she ever let on to Dad or me. Although most days she’d rally, get dressed, and go out to run errands, or eat breakfast at the deli at the Brentwood Mart, in the last ten years she also spent a lot of time watching TV in bed. On days when I was down or confused or just couldn’t deal with the world, I’d still go over to her house, crawl into bed next to her, and we’d spend the day doing crossword puzzles and watching TV. Our favorite thing to watch? Bowling. We just sat and watched and thrived on each other’s company.
That night, after getting in from New York, I went right to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica to see my mom. I walked into her room and felt a wave of panic. She was yellow—her eyes, her skin, her everything. My mother was yellow. It had only been a week since I’d seen her, and already the cancer had begun to take her. I looked down at the side of her bed. There was a bag hanging off it full of urine the color of maple syrup. I knew. I knew she was going to die. People who are that yellow and have maple syrup urine and three big spots on their liver die. A surge of terror rushed into my body.
The oncologists, knowing that we were all in shock, took charge. Over the next few days there wasn’t a whole lot of debate or conversation about the course of action. The doctors told us, “The only option is chemotherapy. Without it there’s no chance. We need to get this thing into remission.”
The only other option would have been a transplant, but that was off the table since she’d had breast cancer, which deemed her ineligible, even though her liver cancer was not metastasized breast cancer. It was a brand-new cancer, most probably from the hepatitis C.
None of us heard what they were really saying, or thought to ask, What if we don’t do chemo? What if this doesn’t go into remission? No one said any of that. There was just a silent acceptance of inevitability between my mother, father, and me.
The next day Mom did say to me, “If I only have a few months, I want to know. I want to have time to say good-bye properly.”
I choked those words out to our family physician, Dr. Forde, in the hall outside her room. He said he’d tell us if that were the case.
And so we started chemo. It was ironic: Fourteen years before when my mother had breast cancer, she had refused the chemo because she knew her liver was too damaged from all the drugs and drinking to handle it. She thought it would kill her, and now she had to have it—there was nothing else that could save the very same damaged liver she so vehemently protected so long ago.
Once Mom left the hospital, an oncology nurse came to the house to help us out. The side effects of the cancer undermining Mom’s liver progressed quickly. She was weak, bloated, and in pain like she’d never been before. Because of the fibromyalgia, this woman knew pain. A machine was delivered to administer the morphine drip that would ease her pain. The first day the nurse took me aside.
“I’m going to teach you how to override the machine so you can allow your mom to have as much as she wants,” she said. I stiffened at her bluntness. I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to learn how to override the morphine machine. I didn’t want any machine in my house, attached to my mother. I wanted all this to go away. But I dutifully listened, and watched as she showed me which buttons to press, and in what order, because I certainly didn’t want my mom to be in pain. But really, I didn’t want to realize why the nurse was doing this—this nurse knew more than we did about how bad it really was. We still hoped this care would help to save her life. The nurse knew this care would only help to ease her death.
* * *
At the exact time all this was happening, my dad’s first book, Brain Droppings, was about to be released. It had been in the works for more than a year. This book was a huge thing for him and Mom. If it did well it would give them some financial breathing room for the first time in twenty years. But in order for it to do well, Dad needed to promote it. That meant he had to leave. It was an agonizing choice, but really he had no choice. Canceling the book tour and the concerts he had lined up that month would have meant financial ruin. There were endless contractual obligations, and Dad still had that tax bill hanging over him from decades ago. Every quarter, the IRS threatened to seize assets and take away the house. If this book was a success, all that would go away.
Mom, Dad, and I had a family meeting to figure out how to handle this. First we decided to cancel the sixtieth birthday party Mom was planning for Dad. His birthday was May 12, but we decided that we’d delay it till the fall, when Mom was feeling better. Then Mom and Dad agreed that he should keep his concert and book commitments, which meant I would take care of Mom. I decided to quit my job. How do people go to work when their loved ones are dying? I couldn’t imagine it. I could barely see straight. And so we all agreed that all this was the best plan we could come up with, given the circumstances, even though I could see in Mom’s eyes how scared she was and how sad she was that my dad had to leave. I went along with it all even though I was scared, too. I didn’t know how to take care of someone who was yellow and was on a morphine drip twenty-four hours a day.
And I was pissed. I couldn’t believe this was happening—Dad’s work was taking him away again. I wanted to ask him, What could possibly be more important than staying home with me, and taking care of Mom?
But I couldn’t say those words to my father. I didn’t know how.
As the next few days went by, no one talked about what we were feeling or what we all knew was going on. The only time we acknowledged it was that first weekend, when they had found the spots. Dad and I had talked on the phone.
“This doesn’t look good, does it?” I said, crying, as I sat on the floor of my bedroom as the shock of the news hit me.
“No, I’m afraid not,” Dad replied quietly. I could feel the weight in his voice. As if the news were too much to take in.
Other than that brief exchange, there were no frank discussions about death, or what we were all feeling, or even last-minute instructions from Mom about our future without her. It was just about getting through it. But for what? What comes after the getting through it? Life? Yes, ours, but not hers. Hers was soon to be irretrievably gone, and none of us had the courage to say anything about it.
It’s not like it is in the movies. There is nothing warm and fuzzy about this death shit. It is unreal. It is in slo-mo. It was a slippery slope, and I was falling down it. I had just enough strength to be there.
* * *
I quit my grown-up “executive” job. I tried to take care of Mom, but it was overwhelming. My main task was to monitor how much she was peeing versus how much she was drinking. Every day it got worse—she took in more than she was releasing. The liquid stopped going through her body, and instead it accumulated in her body, and she got a huge bloated belly. On top of this I had to try to control her blood sugar.
Mostly I felt that my job was to keep her occupied with movies and chitchat. We didn’t spend afternoons rehashing the past. She didn’t regale me with great stories about her childhood or family. We didn’t say much to each other. What I really wanted to say to her was, Mom, don’t—don’t go. Not now. I’m not ready. But we didn’t have conversations like that. We just sat in bed and watched the world go by on the TV. We no longer limited ourselves to watching bowling tournaments. We now watched anything. There was no sense of what was actually happening. The day was about getting her to drink four ounces of Ensure every few hours, wondering what time the night nurse would be there, and waiting for Dad to call and check in.
The first few weeks Dad would come home every few days, but then he’d have to leave again. Even though he was chartering planes to be home every available moment he could, I deeply resented him leaving me in charge of Mom. It felt all too familiar—Mom’s existence hanging by a thread, and me feeling ill equipped to handle it. I was eleven and we were all living on Tellem Drive again.
When he did make it home, it was always a huge relief. He was the most attentive I had ever seen. He checked in on the nurses to make sure Mom was getting the best care, and even got Mom to eat when she was supposed to. Most important, he got her to laugh. I didn’t think it was possible under the circumstances. She was so tired and in so much discomfort. But he did it. He really was the only one who could.
After being in and out of town for the first month after her diagnosis, he told me he had to leave again for the first two weeks of May for concerts and early book-tour promotions. When the oncology nurse heard about his plans, she said to me, “She won’t make it to his birthday.”
I didn’t want to believe her, so I made my dad call our family doctor to confirm that Mom would not deteriorate and die while he was gone. All the doctors assured us that Mom would be okay when he got home. It made me feel better, but I wasn’t so sure. I kept quiet, as did Mom, because by this time everyone had entered the Super Bowl of denial. I pretended that I wasn’t angry. Dad pretended he could work. The doctors pretended they were being honest, and so we all pretended that Mom wasn’t dying.
And I knew it killed Dad to leave. It killed me to watch the fear in Mom’s eyes. We were all dying.
On Friday, May 9, five weeks after her diagnosis, I drove my mom to chemotherapy number three. As the poison dripped into her veins, I worried that she didn’t have any interest in watching the Wallace & Gromit video I’d brought along to distract her. In the car on the way home, in the middle of a left turn from Wilshire Boulevard onto Twenty-Sixth Street, Mom said, “I’ll be really pissed off if I’m going to die soon. I’ve got too much left to do.” I could barely drive with tears now stinging my eyes. It was the first time she’d mentioned the topic. Choking back sobs, all I could manage to say was, “I’m not ready for you to go either, Mom.”
The heavy silence of reality hung between us, and nothing more was said about it as we made our way home.
When I was young, taking care of my mother was a traumatic and overwhelming burden. But on that day I felt connected to the natural order of things, and knew that easing my mother’s pain and simply being with her during this time was a profound privilege.
Death. How real, and yet, how unreal this visitor was. The experience forced me into two worlds at once. Nothing was conveniently black-and-white any longer. Normally the light of life was in the here and now, while the shadow of death was over there, somewhere far, far away. But now they had converged and life was gray. In this gray I fought to keep my mother alive for another day with chemotherapy and morphine. I volunteered to be my mother’s caretaker while I dreamed of running away to some nonexistent paradise where I could desert this wretched duty. In this gray I was the daughter and the mother of my mother.
The next day, Saturday, it was just the oncology nurse, Mom, and me in a very quiet house. Mom mostly slept. That’s all she’d been doing the last two days. I went into her home office to rummage around for magazines to cut up for a collage. Mom and I had a long tradition of collage making together, and I wanted to make her one for Mother’s Day, which was the next day. This gesture of love felt both essential and impotent; essential because my mom lay in the other room dying of liver cancer; impotent because my mother lay in the other room dying of liver cancer.
While in my mom’s office rummaging for collage supplies, I came across a yellow three-ring binder full of writings. They were my mother’s writings—some handwritten and others typed. I found a corner of the couch and began to read. I felt uncomfortable plunging into this private material, but with the strange visitor of death in the house, I felt all the rules had already been broken. I quickly realized that some of the writings I had seen, but others I had not. I found an essay called “My Race Against Time” in a separate portfolio. It was typed on that thin onionskin paper that I remembered so well from childhood. I began to read:
If we could live our lives to their fullest and never have to face any kind of crisis or tragedy, I know we all agree it would be a beautiful experience. Unfortunately, life isn’t meant to be that perfect, and at one time or another, we must all meet our own personal challenge. Two years ago I learned what it was like to grow up overnight, and I lived in a nightmare of conflicting emotions. At that time, I was twenty-three years old, and I felt I had already reached a level of maturity … until I was put to an extreme emotional test. Within a period of six weeks I had to face the death of my young mother and the birth of my first child!
My breath stopped. I felt like there was something else in the room with me, watching me, sitting with me. I began to cry. The words confirmed everything I’d been holding at arm’s length. I now knew without a doubt that my mother was going to die. All the pretending, all the busyness, and all the denial that kept that impossible reality from me vanished in a flash. And I knew that what I was reading was exactly what I needed in this moment. Not what I wanted, but what I needed. What I wanted was the fairy tale with the happy ending, not the part where you have to face the ogres and witches of the dark forests.
Here in my hand was a map, my mother’s emotional map of the territory of her own broken heart from her own mother’s death thirty-four years earlier. This map was the bread crumbs from her life that could safely usher me through the dark forest of death. I slowly took in all that it had to offer. I read and then reread her sentence, “Within a period of six weeks I had to face the death of my young mother,” and I realized that on this day in May it had been six weeks since my mother was diagnosed. As I read further, I took in how she’d had to cope with her grief while my dad was on the road, not able to physically support her during that time. And I took in that she, too, had felt a need to keep a show of “cheerfulness and hope for mother’s sake because that was what she wanted.” I sat with all the strange parallels and let the weight of their truth offer me a glimpse of the comfort and power I would need in the months to come. I knew that those words let me know that somehow I would survive this impossible ordeal.
After I finished reading her essay and creating her Mother’s Day collage, my mom woke up and needed to go to the bathroom. The chemo had so ravaged her body that she could no longer walk on her own. The nurse and I began to practically carry her to the bathroom, when her body went into a violent fit of convulsion—her legs shaking uncontrollably. Then every part of her convulsed, and she screamed out, “Help, help me, I can’t—I can’t stop it! Make it stop!” We almost lost our grip on her but managed to get her back to bed. She was ashamed. I was ashamed. There was no control.
The next day, Sunday, May 11, was Mother’s Day. I was exhausted, spent, and emotionally drained. Mom had sunk into some kind of childlike state that I couldn’t identify. She acted and spoke like she was a three-year-old child. I wondered—does anyone come back from a state like this? This panicked me, but all I could think about was that I had to get her to eat or drink something—anything. She hadn’t in two days. She couldn’t. The chemo had ravaged her far worse than the cancer on her liver.
Dad was somewhere else—New York City. He still thought he was there for their future. But there was no more future for Mom. There was only that moment—me sitting on the end of her bed begging her to just take a sip of the orange juice. Her blood sugar was dangerously low. Like a bratty child she shook her head and refused. I couldn’t blame her; she probably couldn’t taste anything anyway. I doubt she could even have kept it down.
But I begged anyway. “Please, Mom, please, just a sip.”
“No!” she cried, and clamped her mouth shut.
I acted strong. “Well, if you can’t drink your orange juice, I’m going to have to call the paramedics and take you to St. John’s. Is that okay?” After a moment she nodded her head yes.
That was the last thing I said to her. Well, probably the last thing she remembered me saying to her: “Drink your orange juice, or I’m calling the paramedics.” Not what I had wished as my last words to her. But that’s the thing with being in the middle of a crisis; there is no grand moment or time to reflect—it’s just do. Do now what needs to be done in this moment. And in this second I believed, or at least wanted to believe, that getting her to drink some orange juice would make it all okay.
The nurse called an ambulance. Mom rested with her eyes closed. I didn’t know if she was conscious or not. I cried as I called my dad to tell him that we were taking her to the hospital. Things were bad. I told him to take the next flight out.
I followed the ambulance to the hospital. Have you ever been to an emergency room on Mother’s Day? There are children. Many, many children. And that morning they have all been making Mommy breakfast, and they have all burned or cut or scalded or scraped themselves in the process. By the time the tired, overworked ER resident got to my mom, he was in way over his head, because she was going down, and going down fast. One minute we—Bob, our dear friend Theresa, and I—were all standing in the cubicle with Mom and she was alive, not conscious but alive. The next minute bells on machines were going off, alerting all that her blood pressure was dropping, heart rate was racing, and pulse rate was plummeting. They moved her quickly to a private area to get control of the situation. We waited outside the room.
“Code blue! Code blue!” came over the intercom. A rush of doctors came at us, shouting instructions at each other. “Code blue!” Nurses rushed by. I watched all this from about ten feet away. It was all in slow motion—nurses racing in with carts—more shouting, words, motions. I turned around, walked through the doors outside, and screamed,
“No, no, no!” I collapsed against a wall. I thought, This is not happening. This is happening to someone else. My mother is not dead. No, she is not dying. This is not how it’s supposed to happen. This happens much differently; it’s quiet, serene. We’re all holding hands, Enya is playing, peace, love.… No. Not this. Not now. Not today.
A nurse rushed out.
“They’ve revived her. She’s on life support. She’s alive,” she told me.
She was, kind of, but not really alive. It’s that place where bodies take on air and blood flows around their arteries, but the person is gone. She was gone.
I wanted to call my dad, but I couldn’t. He was already on the plane.
I spoke with the intensive care doctor and told him, “You must keep her alive for six more hours. You must. My dad has to say good-bye to her. It can’t end like this. It just can’t. He has to be with her. He’s been gone for so much, he can’t be gone for this.”
The doctor reassured me that he would do everything in his power. It was like a dream. I was not real; Mom was not real. This hospital was a figment of my imagination.
* * *
After a while they moved Mom into the ICU, and a crowd of friends gathered at the hospital. Mom had isolated herself these last five weeks from most of them, not telling many the extent of what was going on. She didn’t have the energy to deal with their emotional reaction to what was happening. Most of them were people she had nurtured and sponsored in AA. Some of them believed that they wouldn’t be alive without my mother. As word spread among her friends and the AA community, everyone’s face told the story of the reality of the moment. I thought, What are they going to do now?
What was I going to do now?
* * *
At five o’clock Bob and I took a limo to the airport to get my dad. When we got to the gate to wait for him, there were paparazzi. I found a security guy from the airline and told him my situation. He told us that Diana Ross was on the flight, and he’d usher her toward the cameras so that we could make a clean getaway with my dad. He did, and we did.
In the limo all was quiet. Then Dad spoke: “While I was on the plane I watched the moon and Venus rise together, and I knew that it was over. That this was good-bye.”
The ICU was not pleasant. Mom was hooked up to every possible device to keep her alive, and her eyes were open in a very disturbing way. She was not looking at anything. She was not conscious. But her eyes were open. Dad had not seen her in more than ten days, and she was very yellow, very bloated, and bald. He tenderly cradled her face in his hand, kissed her, and said, “Oh, Brenny. Oh, Brenny.” And then he wiped her eyes with a tissue. Two years later I would find this tissue in a box of mementos with a note in my father’s handwriting identifying it as the tissue he wiped her tears with on that last day. His love was huge. My love for him was, too. We spent about forty-five minutes with her. But we knew that Mom was no longer alive. We knew that these machines were the only things keeping some semblance of her physical presence with us. We knew it was time. We said our good-byes.
On May 11, 1997, Mother’s Day, at 10:38 P.M. they turned off the machines. We stood above her and cried. About three minutes later Brenda Florence Hosbrook Carlin was released.