Its complicated, really.
It has been five years since I was able to say Happy Mother's Day to my Mom. I was fortunate, really, in that I spent the last one of her life with her. We spent most of the evening arguing about religion and about her decision to leave her fourth husband, move down the street (literally) from him, but not divorce him because she didn't want to live with the associated stigma.
Like I said, complicated.
Two months later, she was dead. She'd been sick for a long time, but no matter how well prepared she was for death, it still hit me hard. I remember everything very vividly after I got the call from my step-father, telling me she was in the hospital, but not why. Hell, he couldn't even tell me what hospital she was in. I drove home from a business dinner with two cell phones going, getting my wife working the phones to find my Mom, calling my Dad, calling my step-father, my wife finally finding her so I called her room, only to talk to her priest, chain smoking one Marlboro Light 100 after another as I drove as fast as I could, knowing, that there was nothing I could do except wait until the next day to get on the first plane we could find.
Mostly though I remember the moment I knew she was going to die. They had given her morphine, you see, for the pain. But she had a chronic liver disease called Primary Biliary Cirrhosis that meant she couldn't process toxins from her body at all, and that morphine was most certainly going to kill her. The look on my wife's face when I finally understood said it all; she'd put it together, but had let me process it for myself.
I remember seeing her in the ICU; fighting blindly against the restraints that held her, probably fighting to be able to die, to have them stop treating her, pumping her full of medicine, actually. But for a very brief moment I was able to get her to hear my voice. She opened one green eye and saw me, just for a moment. A few tears trickled down her cheek. Then she closed her eye again and continued to fight until her final breath left her body.
My Mom always wanted me to write the story of her life. She thought that I had the ability to do it, and she thought that it would make one hell of a story. She said this with a certain mixture of pride and of wistfulness, which I don't think I will ever fully understand. And what I think maybe she didn't get was that I'd tell it from my point of view, from my memories, which more often than not were very very different than hers.
My Mother was Codependent. I know this because when she gave me the wedding ring that my Dad had given her so that I could propose to my then girlfriend and then subsequently made my Dad and Stepfather Number 1 call me to tell me that she couldn't give it up and I had to give it back and I immediately cut off all ties to all of them she had a shrink send me a letter telling me of her diagnosis. If you don't know what codependency is, here's a brief synopsis. Codependent people have an unnatural and unhealthy need for external approval of others. They will do almost anything to obtain that approval and will do so without thought of the consequences to themselves. They are often involved in intense and unstable relationships. Exhibit A: my Mom, married four times.
I think back on it now, and I wish that I could have helped her more with her Codependency. The problem was that she was so forceful, so insistent, so damn stubborn and, hell, she was my Mother. All I could do was to try to fight back when she tried to drag me into her condition. After we reunited, largely because of her terminal condition, I could really only be around her for about 2 days before I needed to leave. My poor wife took up the slack a lot and kept us from killing one another during our visits.
The hell of it is that her codependency made me the love of her life, maybe more so than the "typical" love that a mother would have for her son. I was her best friend, her confidant. Her memories of me were almost exclusively joyous and adoring. And yet they all seemed to be of a time that I could not remember, for reasons I shant go into in this particular rumination, before I was five. And the memories that she had after five that I could remember just never really jived with my own.
One thing that I will never ever question is that my Mom loved me. And I loved her. She was my Mom. We just didn't get along all that well.
There was a childlike innocence to her that contrasted sharply with a dogged determination and stubbornness that I see in myself from time to time. There was a twinkle in her eye and a glow to her cheeks more often than not. She had so much happiness in a life that by all rights really should not have made her all that happy.
I used to be able to put the phone down, go and take a leak, stop in the kitchen, pop open a beer, grab a smoke and light it, then pick the phone back up to hear her talking away, completely oblivious to the fact that I'd been gone for 3-4 minutes. Sadly, I did this more than once. She talked a lot, what can I say?
And I will never hear her voice again. I would give anything to be able to, even if after 45 minutes I had to walk away for a few to gather myself. That's what I've taken away from this day, and from the time that I've taken to write this post.
Having started this, I think maybe I will try to write her story after all. But the reality is that it will be my story, with my Mom as the central character. I guess the best that I can do if I do write it is try to do it with her voice, a glint in my eye, and a damned stubbornness that'll keep me up all hours of the night to get it right.
Cause, really, its complicated.
