I spent a few hours with my dad last night. He was in bed, lying on his side. He wasn't able to talk but he did hold my hand with a grip as strong as his silence was loud. His hand, his fingers were so thin - but I remembered what they felt like when I was seven, when I held his too-large hand on the keyboard to try and teach him my first piano piece. His thumbs were wider than the keys and he didn't learn it but he laughed.
I don't know if he really recognized me last night, but I want to think he did, or at least I think he knew me as someone who loves him. I stuck a hearing aid in his available ear and we listened to music that I hoped he could hear, favorites of his that I remember from childhood: Vera Lynn, Phil Harris, Harry Lauder. (Oh, how my mother despised the Harry Lauder CD that we always brought out and blasted on my dad's birthday. For 100+ year old Scottish vaudeville music, it's not bad. And it still amuses me that we can tease my mom from beyond the grave - or ashes urn, whatever.)
I finished with Kenneth McKellar's "Songs of Ireland," which is what we used to listen to on tape in the GMC Jimmy on our way up to ski at Eaglecrest. My father had a beautiful baritone voice but couldn't carry a tune to save his life. I remember him singing to this album even though I know he probably never actually did, but there is a trueness to this false memory I will polish until it shines: the warbling of the tape, wet Juneau alpine snow, my father, the consummate gentleman skier cutting a dashing figure in his woolen ski sweater. I have saved all his ski sweaters.
When I left his bedside, his eyes were closed and his grip relaxed. He was sleeping, or slipping away. I was called back just a couple hours later. He died early this morning.
I think of the obituary that I will write, and how much of my father's narrative remains mythic in its grandiosity and mystery. Butcher, soldier, adventurer, laborer, scholar, drinker, geologist, skier, catskinner, union man, tennis player, reader - these are just some of his occupations and identities. When I was a kid, he seemed to know everyone in the state. He had built every road. He could walk into a restaurant and know ten tables full of politicians, academics, construction stiffs, miners, and artists. He was a part of the old pre-Pipeline Alaska that I'll never be able to describe. And now he's gone and I can never ask him about the abandoned Tamarack Inn, the DEW Line, how to get to Üllerhaven, or skiing in races with a wine skin strapped to his back. Or the time he foolishly risked his life by saving a shelf full of liquor bottles at some construction camp during the big earthquake (probably with a twinkling smile on his face because he was always smiling).
There was a fire at the Mendeltna Roadhouse near Glennallen a few days ago. It burned to the ground. I think of these historic roadhouses and my father - these pieces of old Alaska that are disappearing - by fire, by progress, by neglect, or old age. The old Alaska is slipping away one fire, one old man at a time. It's hard to remember the heyday when I'm looking at a picture of roadside charred timber. It's hard to remember the father and the man when my most recent memories of him are all skin, bone, and milky-eyed stare. But that hand, almost claw-like, was holding on so tightly. I think I'll remember his hands.
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
It's Going to Be Okay, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Entropy (This is a Lie I Tell Myself)
It is difficult for me to clean up after death.
Obviously, I'm not talking about the body. That was summarily handled by the caregivers at the assisted living home, and the cremation arranged by me in a brief visit to the funeral home the following day with Theo in tow (now there was a fun mother-son outing).
The conference room-cum-coffin display area was warmly lit like a mall jewelry store, with glossy and shiny mini-casket samples jutting out of the walls and gold-rimmed (and cheap-looking, I'm pretty sure my mom would agree) ceramic jars glittering on the shelves. "I like this one, Mama, the one with the American eagle!" Theo announced, surveying the atrocity of urns. I was giddy and tearful at the same time, and felt like a character actor reenacting outtakes from a morbid black comedy. I even laughed out loud and explained to the funeral home director how surreal everything seemed, just like on Six Feet Under. She told me deadpan she had never watched that show.
I both relished and cringed at the fact that I was selecting the cheapest option for my mother – cremation, per her wishes, and a cardboard box in the interim before we could commission a ceramic urn from one of our potter friends. "For the box, beach or cloud motif – which do you prefer?" I guess my mom would prefer clouds? The $60 cardboard box was ready the next day. I half expected to find the gold tooth crowns and the metal pieces from my mom's hip replacement inside the zip-tied bag of ashes. I didn't realize that they sift out stuff like that.
After I brought home my mom's ashes and placed her box on the piano, I discovered my Uncle Art's ashes (same box, different motif) had been unceremoniously stored on top of a grimy cabinet in the garage by my father. Fun fact: according to the sticker on Art's box (Times New Roman font; I imagine the routine office task of someone creating this Microsoft Word template to identify the eternal litany of cremains), Art and my mom were cremated on the same day, exactly seven years apart.
The real difficulty in clean-up is everything my mother left behind. Her quilting supplies, a decade untouched, are meticulously labeled and organized in her closet, ready for seamstress hands. She was supposed to teach me. Her makeup drawer is organized exactly as she had left it, in tidy square compartments of Merle Norman lipsticks, tweezers, and hair clips. There is even a small bag of her hair, that she had been collecting for a bizarre (to me) plan to have a "wiglet" made to cover up the sparse and thin hair on her scalp. I don't know what I'm going to do with this bag, but I'm not going to deal with that choice right now.
There is still food in the fridge that was here before she left the condo to live at Hope Haven. I've been good about getting rid of the gross kinds of leftovers, but those jars of pickles and olives that she once touched – it's hard not to imagine her fingerprints, her touch, still there. Her books are still arranged in the order in which she placed them, even though she hadn't read a novel, or picked up a magazine to more than glance through its photos, in over a year.
My mother's handwriting is everywhere: on post-it notes cluttering the kitchen counter, on boxes in the garage still left unpacked from the move to the condo nine years ago (the box labeled "Dad's Sconces" is in her handwriting from the move from Juneau c. 1991, and it tugs at my heart when I realize the Dad in question is my grandfather). It's on the application she left half-finished 20 years ago for admittance to the Pioneer Home. Her tidy and clear signature inscribes her ownership on every one of her music books. I look through these keepsakes and photos, hoping to find the letter to me that would explain it all, her last goodbye, but how could she write such a thing when she didn't even realize what was happening to her.
One of the perks of accumulated clutter is that I can excavate archeological treasures, even digital, in the layers of my laziness and inaction. Last week on a night when John was out and the kids were in bed, I reread two years' worth of text conversations between me and my mom. I can trace the first instances of her forgetfulness, the familiar names she misspelled, the planned morning outings with the kids she slept through, her questions repeated and repeated again. I see the record of my worry. I know the date when she stopped writing to me. I now see that the sudden onset of her normal pressure hydrocephaly only seemed sudden at the time. The clues were there, but camouflaged by her diabetes diagnosis and our blind trust that, with medication and proper diet, she was on the mend and things would return to normal.
It's only now after her death that I'm able to start grieving for the normal Mary Ann that she used to be. I miss her voice. I miss her playing the piano. Oh, how I despised her habitually wonky and rubato tempos and her heavy pedal when she accompanied me at the piano, but of course I crave them now. When she had been well, she asked us over to dinner at the condo almost every night. Seeing these invitations – and my frequent refusals – in the text record was heartbreaking.
Before the grandchildren, for the decade I lived in Seattle, we would talk on the phone almost every day. She would tell me about who they sat with at the Elks or on Friday night at the Big I, or what she was singing in chorus, or what she was making my father for dinner. I would rave or complain about all the small, swaggering victories or desperate tragedies of my young adult life. She was my soundboard, my coach, my eternal cheerleader.
When Theo was an older infant and toddler, she used to babysit for us every weekend – not at our request, but her pleasure. She would hand me a wad of cash on Friday or Saturday night ("Get a nice dinner out, just the two of you!") and I would hand over the baby. She would literally rock with him in the chair for hours until John and I returned, rejuvenated by her generosity. That was a golden year. When the girls arrived, her stamina was quickly depleted (and neither one of the twins was ever amenable to being gently rocked to sleep by a stationary Mormor), but sometimes her waiting arms were just what was needed.
Even in the last few months of her life, she would still ask me if she could help, if she could pick up groceries for dinner (though she didn't drive or go shopping anymore), if she could watch the kids for me (she stopped babysitting in 2015). "Isn't there anything I can do for you?" she would call to me from her place in the living room, nearly immobile in her chair, smiling hopefully as she watched me chop vegetables in the kitchen for her dinner. It was that hopeful eagerness that really got me.
In the last few months of her life, if I started to cry in front of her, out of sadness or frustration or worry, she would always say, "It's going to be okay." And her voice would sound like the normal Mary Ann again – the mother whose first impulse was always to comfort me, even if she was oblivious about her illness. It didn't matter that she didn't really understand what was going on – all she wanted was to protect me, to soothe me, to make things better, to do something for me. It's going to be okay, she promised me.
And it will be, someday. Clothes and shoes will go to Goodwill; to my own shelves will go the quilting fabric I am hopeful will someday see the business end of a sewing machine needle. I'll be able to bleach and mop the kitchen floor and not think of her footsteps, and dust the shelves without wondering if any of her DNA remains in the flecks of microscopic skin and hair fragments she's left behind. I'll excavate through the clutter of dying flower arrangements and opera CDs, medical paperwork and prescription bottles, old appointment calendars and loose photographs without thinking of each as sacred relics containing a memory magic of her touch. A lifetime's worth of accumulation will be pared down into something manageable for me, and for my dad, and if I'm realistic enough, manageable enough for my children to someday deal with.
But I haven't started cleaning yet.
Obviously, I'm not talking about the body. That was summarily handled by the caregivers at the assisted living home, and the cremation arranged by me in a brief visit to the funeral home the following day with Theo in tow (now there was a fun mother-son outing).
The conference room-cum-coffin display area was warmly lit like a mall jewelry store, with glossy and shiny mini-casket samples jutting out of the walls and gold-rimmed (and cheap-looking, I'm pretty sure my mom would agree) ceramic jars glittering on the shelves. "I like this one, Mama, the one with the American eagle!" Theo announced, surveying the atrocity of urns. I was giddy and tearful at the same time, and felt like a character actor reenacting outtakes from a morbid black comedy. I even laughed out loud and explained to the funeral home director how surreal everything seemed, just like on Six Feet Under. She told me deadpan she had never watched that show.
I both relished and cringed at the fact that I was selecting the cheapest option for my mother – cremation, per her wishes, and a cardboard box in the interim before we could commission a ceramic urn from one of our potter friends. "For the box, beach or cloud motif – which do you prefer?" I guess my mom would prefer clouds? The $60 cardboard box was ready the next day. I half expected to find the gold tooth crowns and the metal pieces from my mom's hip replacement inside the zip-tied bag of ashes. I didn't realize that they sift out stuff like that.
After I brought home my mom's ashes and placed her box on the piano, I discovered my Uncle Art's ashes (same box, different motif) had been unceremoniously stored on top of a grimy cabinet in the garage by my father. Fun fact: according to the sticker on Art's box (Times New Roman font; I imagine the routine office task of someone creating this Microsoft Word template to identify the eternal litany of cremains), Art and my mom were cremated on the same day, exactly seven years apart.
The real difficulty in clean-up is everything my mother left behind. Her quilting supplies, a decade untouched, are meticulously labeled and organized in her closet, ready for seamstress hands. She was supposed to teach me. Her makeup drawer is organized exactly as she had left it, in tidy square compartments of Merle Norman lipsticks, tweezers, and hair clips. There is even a small bag of her hair, that she had been collecting for a bizarre (to me) plan to have a "wiglet" made to cover up the sparse and thin hair on her scalp. I don't know what I'm going to do with this bag, but I'm not going to deal with that choice right now.
There is still food in the fridge that was here before she left the condo to live at Hope Haven. I've been good about getting rid of the gross kinds of leftovers, but those jars of pickles and olives that she once touched – it's hard not to imagine her fingerprints, her touch, still there. Her books are still arranged in the order in which she placed them, even though she hadn't read a novel, or picked up a magazine to more than glance through its photos, in over a year.
My mother's handwriting is everywhere: on post-it notes cluttering the kitchen counter, on boxes in the garage still left unpacked from the move to the condo nine years ago (the box labeled "Dad's Sconces" is in her handwriting from the move from Juneau c. 1991, and it tugs at my heart when I realize the Dad in question is my grandfather). It's on the application she left half-finished 20 years ago for admittance to the Pioneer Home. Her tidy and clear signature inscribes her ownership on every one of her music books. I look through these keepsakes and photos, hoping to find the letter to me that would explain it all, her last goodbye, but how could she write such a thing when she didn't even realize what was happening to her.
One of the perks of accumulated clutter is that I can excavate archeological treasures, even digital, in the layers of my laziness and inaction. Last week on a night when John was out and the kids were in bed, I reread two years' worth of text conversations between me and my mom. I can trace the first instances of her forgetfulness, the familiar names she misspelled, the planned morning outings with the kids she slept through, her questions repeated and repeated again. I see the record of my worry. I know the date when she stopped writing to me. I now see that the sudden onset of her normal pressure hydrocephaly only seemed sudden at the time. The clues were there, but camouflaged by her diabetes diagnosis and our blind trust that, with medication and proper diet, she was on the mend and things would return to normal.
Things weren't normal for the last year or more. Once occasional peccadilloes of late-rising, pajama-wearing, and fruit juice-bingeing became the norm, were then arrested by medical intervention, and then she somehow was always in her robe, sitting at the table waiting for a meal, squinting through her glasses through the patio door to the brightness outside, hands fidgeting. Her bedroom became a convalescent room: bedside grab-bar, incontinence pads.
The counters drowned under the rising tide of empty pharmacy bags, Medicare paperwork, and junk mail that she no longer went through and
discarded. One year, my mother still made applesauce for the kids, still sewed the hem of my dress, still played Satie at the piano; the next, everything was forgotten or abandoned: favorite recipes for kale potato soufflé, how to thread a needle, her own singing. One morning in January 2017, as I was helping her in the bathroom with her toileting and showering (a daily event that I resented at the time but had the prescience of mind to know I would someday miss), she started singing a melody and lyrics that sounded like something from post-war 1940s. "I dreamt of this song, and I can't stop singing it!" She smiled wistfully. She didn't know the name of the tune. That was the last time I heard my mother sing.
Before the grandchildren, for the decade I lived in Seattle, we would talk on the phone almost every day. She would tell me about who they sat with at the Elks or on Friday night at the Big I, or what she was singing in chorus, or what she was making my father for dinner. I would rave or complain about all the small, swaggering victories or desperate tragedies of my young adult life. She was my soundboard, my coach, my eternal cheerleader.
When Theo was an older infant and toddler, she used to babysit for us every weekend – not at our request, but her pleasure. She would hand me a wad of cash on Friday or Saturday night ("Get a nice dinner out, just the two of you!") and I would hand over the baby. She would literally rock with him in the chair for hours until John and I returned, rejuvenated by her generosity. That was a golden year. When the girls arrived, her stamina was quickly depleted (and neither one of the twins was ever amenable to being gently rocked to sleep by a stationary Mormor), but sometimes her waiting arms were just what was needed.
 |
| Summer 2011 |
Even in the last few months of her life, she would still ask me if she could help, if she could pick up groceries for dinner (though she didn't drive or go shopping anymore), if she could watch the kids for me (she stopped babysitting in 2015). "Isn't there anything I can do for you?" she would call to me from her place in the living room, nearly immobile in her chair, smiling hopefully as she watched me chop vegetables in the kitchen for her dinner. It was that hopeful eagerness that really got me.
In the last few months of her life, if I started to cry in front of her, out of sadness or frustration or worry, she would always say, "It's going to be okay." And her voice would sound like the normal Mary Ann again – the mother whose first impulse was always to comfort me, even if she was oblivious about her illness. It didn't matter that she didn't really understand what was going on – all she wanted was to protect me, to soothe me, to make things better, to do something for me. It's going to be okay, she promised me.
And it will be, someday. Clothes and shoes will go to Goodwill; to my own shelves will go the quilting fabric I am hopeful will someday see the business end of a sewing machine needle. I'll be able to bleach and mop the kitchen floor and not think of her footsteps, and dust the shelves without wondering if any of her DNA remains in the flecks of microscopic skin and hair fragments she's left behind. I'll excavate through the clutter of dying flower arrangements and opera CDs, medical paperwork and prescription bottles, old appointment calendars and loose photographs without thinking of each as sacred relics containing a memory magic of her touch. A lifetime's worth of accumulation will be pared down into something manageable for me, and for my dad, and if I'm realistic enough, manageable enough for my children to someday deal with.
But I haven't started cleaning yet.
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Anxiety
Anxiety has sunk in like a cold front. The stars are out tonight, but somehow malevolently bright against the blackness. Our thermometer reads -20F, but I worry that it's broken. I worry. I worry about my mother, lying down in her bed at her condo, with her swollen feet propped up, maybe asleep, maybe eyes open, unseeing in the dark. She asked me if Aunt Betty's son Neil had seen me today. Neil lives in Ohio and we've never met. This type of confusion is new. I worry about that. I worry about finding an assisted living situation for her - imminently. All I can really think about is the way she patted Bruce on the muzzle as he begged for food at the table. He made her smile. She is still kind to animals and chides them like a mother would her toddler.
I worry about the deep cold settling in, and how I'm getting to the airport tomorrow night, how I'm going to fall asleep tonight, still running on the frayed wire electricity of this afternoon's cold brew. I imagine the disaster scenario of an airplane crash in ten different ways, and the broken, empty rod of a screw sticking out of our nightstand resulting in tragedy. I am being ridiculous. I know this. I imagine asking around at the airport terminal for a xanax and then getting arrested by the TSA. The switch to the star light in our dining room has a short and will result in an electrical fire. The chickens are going to freeze to death. The neighbor's cat that we're cat sitting will run away and freeze to death. The Subaru will have engine failure and my children will freeze to death on the side of Goldstream Road. This is insanity.
I spent most of the day at my parents'. My mom's marked decline since we came back from Anchorage leaves me emotionally ragged, that frayed wire again, sparking in anger. The kids are their usual selves, but I don't respond with the usual attempt at patience. I feel like I just came out of a natural disaster - everything is an emergency. Cello practice for Theo and building a fire in the wood stove become monumental and stressful tasks instead of the happy routine they should be.
John put on Frankie Valli and made me dance with him in the kitchen tonight in my pajamas. It felt like a scene from a movie. The song faded out and I didn't know what to do (how does one end a dance routine when the music disappears on you?) so I went back to making the kids' sandwiches for their lunches tomorrow. But I felt better. Even though I worry about the burden of life's routines, and parents, and dangerous cold, and the kids and their incessant needs that I leave him with for the rest of the week. I worry.
I worry about the deep cold settling in, and how I'm getting to the airport tomorrow night, how I'm going to fall asleep tonight, still running on the frayed wire electricity of this afternoon's cold brew. I imagine the disaster scenario of an airplane crash in ten different ways, and the broken, empty rod of a screw sticking out of our nightstand resulting in tragedy. I am being ridiculous. I know this. I imagine asking around at the airport terminal for a xanax and then getting arrested by the TSA. The switch to the star light in our dining room has a short and will result in an electrical fire. The chickens are going to freeze to death. The neighbor's cat that we're cat sitting will run away and freeze to death. The Subaru will have engine failure and my children will freeze to death on the side of Goldstream Road. This is insanity.
I spent most of the day at my parents'. My mom's marked decline since we came back from Anchorage leaves me emotionally ragged, that frayed wire again, sparking in anger. The kids are their usual selves, but I don't respond with the usual attempt at patience. I feel like I just came out of a natural disaster - everything is an emergency. Cello practice for Theo and building a fire in the wood stove become monumental and stressful tasks instead of the happy routine they should be.
John put on Frankie Valli and made me dance with him in the kitchen tonight in my pajamas. It felt like a scene from a movie. The song faded out and I didn't know what to do (how does one end a dance routine when the music disappears on you?) so I went back to making the kids' sandwiches for their lunches tomorrow. But I felt better. Even though I worry about the burden of life's routines, and parents, and dangerous cold, and the kids and their incessant needs that I leave him with for the rest of the week. I worry.
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