The most revolting thing
I can imagine is
My livid floppy corpse maybe bloated
Probably pale
Made up as if for Madame Tussaud’s
Embalmed
Resisting its return
In a metal and concrete cocoon
If you wanna visit, use your memory
Or don’t and just forget me
Please burn it or let it rot
The worms and weevils
are as deserving as anyone
None of us are sleeping well.
I’m near my mother’s bedside at a hospice in the south suburbs of Chicago. About two months ago I inserted myself into my mom’s care. My older sister had been her primary caregiver but had a health crisis of her own.
She has dementia, Alzheimer’s I assume though we never got a definitive diagnosis because about six weeks later we took her to the emergency room where she was diagnosed with colon cancer. The cancer is well advanced and has metastasized. She had two surgeries to repair her colon and suffered a stroke after the 2nd surgery. She is now in hospice with perhaps a few days or weeks to live.
Before we discovered the cancer I was anxiously trying to mange her care, sometimes with the help of my siblings and sometimes on my own. I was completely at sea. I found the Illinois Department of Aging website which referred me to Catholic Charities. After encountering busy signals and unattended voice mail boxes they promised to arrange an assessment but then never followed up. But the cancer made care for her dementia almost entirely moot.
Now we are waiting for her to die. There is no hope for recovery. The objective is a relatively painless death. And what is hard to admit is that we are eager for the end. The person we knew is gone, dementia has already taken her from us. Without morphine and Ativan she would be in agony. She can neither drink nor eat. Per her wishes, (expressed when she was competent) she is receiving “comfort care” which means only oxygen and lots of morphine.
The stroke has rendered her unable to talk so in her rare moments of consciousness she only moans and gestures with the one hand that still works
Still, she hangs on and I do too. I don’t know why I’m here. She probably doesn’t know I’m here but I keep coming back
Most of us only have one mother so we endure this just once each lifetime. My father died about 22 years ago, quite suddenly. I lived in California at the time and couldn’t be present when he passed from a heart attack in a hospital emergency room. That was comparably easier.
My in-laws died several years ago after agonizingly long illnesses (ALS, prostatic cancer, Parkinson’s). I loved them and helped as much I could with their care but they were not MY parents. This is different. Each day in this hospice I compare the birdlike emaciated woman in the bed with the mother who raised me. She was the manger of our household. She had a sense of humor. She was kind. She was not given to drama nor self-indulgence. She could be severe but was never cruel to us. She was my platonic form of strength and now, what remains of her is entirely weak. Of course I know that we will all decline and die unless we are taken by violence or accident but my childish mind is rebellious. It will take time to reconcile this.
I’m conscious of self-pity and feel ambivalent about indulging it. I don’t know why but I am at my weepiest when people show me sympathy. When I’m alone with my grief I can generally keep my eyes dry.
I really started grieving months ago when I faced her decline from dementia. Having learned that mom hadn’t seen her doctor in a few years I arranged an appointment. I drove her to the medical center to see the doctor, to the lab for blood and urine and finally to the hospital for X-rays of her arthritic hip. When we returned home we were both exhausted but she was also confused and frightened. She forgot why we were at the hospital. She told me she could feel her mind going, that it was like she was another person floating above the old person. My old mother was not given to figurative language. I went home dispirited and depressed. I wanted to help her but I felt that I’d accomplished nothing. Her appetite had been waning and we were finally alarmed enough to pester her doctor about it. He advised the trip to the ER where we learned of the cancer.
I want to think of this as a remarkable, singular experience but it’s quite common. Mom is 81 years old, that’s an almost perfectly average life span for a modern woman. No one is spared. My experience is unique I suppose but not special. I try to be careful not to become addicted to sympathy and attention. It’s a temptation.
She was an unpretentious woman. Call her Pat, not Patricia, better yet Mom. She was a mom. Even when dementia took most of her memory she never forgot that she had raised six children.
Why are we here? Does she know that we are here? I don’t know but the thought of her dying alone seems improper. We are here to soothe her on the rare occasions that she regains consciousness. I’m afraid that, because of the dementia, each time she wakes up this place seems strange. I’ve been here for a few hours today and she has not yet awoken. She has moaned in her sleep a few times and stirred briefly. Two of my sisters have been here with me and we don’t have much to say to each other. It’s not an awkward silence; it’s just that we’ve talked about mom constantly for the past few weeks and we are done now. We are tired and there is nothing more to talk about except traffic and weather and how we’re not sleeping well.
Waiting for my daughter to bathe and dress
I’m in the garden
It’s autumn and I’m harvesting and hacking
Taking peppers and tomatoes and eggplant
Then uprooting and tossing the foliage
We’ll never eat it all; we have to give it away
Two days ago Mom went from hospital to hospice
Last time I saw her she was unconscious
Her mouth open
Her right arm moved reflexively as if to tease us with feathery hope
The left is useless but remained warm and alive
I slept well for the first time in days
Did good work, the sweet peppers, eggplant and chiles are fully dispatched
put a dent in the tomato forest
Beanstalks will wait another day
She texts “I’m ready” we drive to a convention center
She is in cosplay regalia with earbuds implanted
I command the car to play Sinatra and I sing along
“Fly me to the moon…”
(If she is embarrassed it’s my right to embarrass but she probably can’t hear)
Admiring his technique but more so his brio
I drop her off
Still forgetful on the way home
I’ve switched to Tony Bennet
When I notice that I’m happy and how rare that is
Grief slips in for a moment, a shudder like a haunting or possession (if I believed in such things)
I don’t resent the grief because it has rough edges
I understand it.
It’s the most normal thing about me
My mother is sick and I can’t fix her
I worked hard at gardening today
It was too hot for my long chinos
but I wanted to avoid scratches and insect bites on my legs
I transplanted the echinacea and cleaned up weeds and dead flowers
I wanted to quit but the coneflowers had already been uprooted
So I pushed on and gave them a new home on the parkway.
Eventually I found my flow
I picked a few things, hatch peppers, bell peppers, tomatoes and beans
I’m not young. This wasn’t easy.
My medication makes me dizzy when I stand
Rising from the weeding I’d stagger and reel
Take a breath, close my eyes and continue
I ate scrambled eggs with bell peppers
Tomorrow I’ll call my mother’s doctor
12/24/17
It is cold enough that my hands gloved in gore-Tex are numb after 10 minutes. I push the looped handle of Mabel’s leash up to my wrist and shove my hands in my pockets. After 20 minutes she is still keen to nuzzle the ground searching I guess, for traces of excrement and I know for discarded fast food wrappers. I wonder if I should have made her wear boots and a coat but she is unfazed by the weather. Coats and boots for dogs are like seat belts and car-seats for toddlers, unheard of when I was a boy but now one runs the risk of reproach. Probably not but I reproach myself anyway.
The houses here are mostly small sturdy bungalows bearing improvised improvements like vinyl fencing and cast paving stones piled up without masonry to make planters and borders around trees. I hate the phoniness and uniformity of these non-bricks, non-stones. I prefer the less common random boulders that are not purchased from a corporate home improvement store but hauled in on a borrowed pickup truck from some bucolic exurb or boutique nursery.
We’re approaching the used car lot at Fullerton & Menard and the traffic noise intrudes on the NPR newscast in my headphones. She actually sits and waits for the light to change. The snow has started but sidewalks remain bare except for a random brown sack that skitters by, impelled by the wind. It’s Sunday but also Christmas Eve; for now the neighborhood feels static, resting and anticipating.
The aliens were assholes but they were good at solving problems. One of the first things they did was to improve the timing of traffic lights so the flow of cars was smoother and drivers spent less time at red lights. They claimed that the system was based on detailed census data and records hacked from the dmv. In fact it was a complex mind control device using pheromones and sound waves. Does it matter that they lied? Everyone got to work on time.
We turn up our collars or mop our brows ,
Seal up the windows, force air cool or hot
Our purses are thinned by nameless men
Who own the vast machines that drill the earth.
We are warned of a grim future askew
When the frozen is melted, up is down
But how can we who live for fleet delights
Sacrifice Now for unnamed grandchildren?
We turn up our dials but tune out the news
Seal away our minds against all doubts
We open our purses to repel the gloom
But we are spending more than paper notes
We can hope for children are rebellious
They’ll awaken to our abdication
Yes, I’ll admit my resolve is weakening or is already broken. I can’t summon the will to finish my little story.
Yesterday at a meeting at my daughter’s high school I chatted with her English teacher about a recent assignment requiring the students to write sonnets. Apparently they found it difficult to work within the technical requirements of an English Sonnet.
I’ve nearly always written free verse. My knowledge of the history of poetry goes only as far back as Whitman. I always found contemporary rhyming poems trite and amateurish. But lately I’ve decided to try my hand at sonnets, thinking perhaps that I should know the rules before I commit to breaking them. Following are two sonnets, written more or less strictly according to the Shakespearean convention. My objective in each case was simply to adhere to the formal structure.
Experimental Sonnet #1
Anger, cynicism, tempting and vile,
Drive me to starve and stab self in spite.
Convinced, proud and righteous but all the while,
Depriving self for ironic “right”.
Superior, stubborn I hold the ground,
Convinced I must teach the lesser.
Only much too late do I hear the sound,
And kneel to my mind’s confessor
How did I come to love the taste of gall,
When of milk I might have partaken?
Pride rushes mindless to embrace the pall,
The future, the self is forsaken.
The light of love, hush of serenity
Found within, a joyful solemnity
Marina
Her face can shine like a milky moonbeam
Or defiant of nature fall dark
Giggling with glee over a madcap meme
Or plotting to revenge some small mark
Her courtesy could be called boundless
But for remarkable exceptions
When her wrath, clear, cold and never soundless
Explodes with expletive eruptions
When she is good, no stranger to kindness
Protector of the weak and aggrieved
When she is angry, given to blindness
Reason’s calm plea she fails to believe
But without darkness we’d not love the light
Her darkest, fell moods give way to delight
Is there any point in commenting on the weather? I’ve always ridiculed Chicago’s media for treating snowstorms and heatwaves as hard news. In this city, lousy weather is not news. A perfect 70 degree day with sunshine and blooming daisies is far more newsworthy than the bitter cold or oppressive humidity for which I (of western European stock) was not evolved. But this most recent spell was at least instructive. I learned that when I abandon my routine I turn into a hirsute snarling beast. For a few weeks (an amalgam of holidays and and snow days) I ate a lot of bad food. I don’t mean tasty holiday delicacies like plum pudding and roast goose but processed food-like shit such as Oreos, cheddar flavored potato chips, soda and cheap waxy milk chocolate. I exercised sporadically and all but abandoned my meditation discipline. I didn’t leave the house on Monday, bought puppy pads for the dogs and wore pajamas all day. Yesterday, I took a shower and that felt like a victory. Before settling into my late evening orgy of TV and snack foods I checked my business email account. I quickly ripped into a client who I felt wasn’t taking me seriously enough. As I endured the next morning’s traffic I could feel anger and anxiety building as I replayed the previous night’s pique and carefully constructed and emended my justifications.
I arrived in my sanctuary of an office, meditated, exercised, meditated again. It will take days or weeks to get back to a reasonable level of serenity. Some people can afford to slip around and break rules but I’m like a convict on parole. I’m not some people. I have an addictive personality. The more deadly forms of abuse are in remission but the faulty hardware remains. I have a tendency toward anxiety and depression; these are my natural states and I have to work hard to prevent entropy. I suppose we are all evolved to be expert hunter-gatherers. Some of us have easily adapted to urban life and some must work harder. I so love a sofa, a plate of chicken wings and a reliable connection to Netflix. But here I go… so hum.
The Death of Plasticman
I ate nothing but brittle things:
Cold cereal no milk, stale Chips Ahoy, no beverages.
I turned off the humidifier
And collapsed like that old hotel,
The dynamite expertly placed.
My eyes rolled around.
Feet waddled aimless, shod, smokey and crispy.
My wife coughed
While the cat stood
And swept me up, brush and pan
(This poem was first published at http://sobs.org/poetry/the-death-of-plasticman.html The Site of Big Shoulders)
Ideas, Like Sugar and Caffeine 