Watching Your Mother Cry is the Worst
Having a chat about your Father's failing health and her burden puts a lot of things into perspective
As the devastation of my recent past begins to subside, flowing outward into a chamber of compartmentalization, locked away for future lessons and less self doubt, I’m seeing things I had not really noticed before.
I’ve been carrying over the homebody isolation from my final four months of Vegas but I’m starting to get that itch for some social outings. I’m looking around Wichita and there are some things to do around here. Again, I can’t say how long I’ll be here let alone living in my parents’ home but the reality of how alone my mother has been for the past three years (and eleven if you’re counting how long my dad’s health has been in jeopardy).
Before I split from Nevada, my buddy Erik Lewin asked me to direct him in his one-man show Just Get Over It, a comedy piece about his long path from grieving the death of both his parents. For the record, it went exceptionally well and it gave me a taste of that thing I used to do so well back in the day. In the show, he speaks about the trials of being the sole caregiver for someone inching closer to death and I see those self-same issues my mom has been dealing with for a few years.
The laundry list of my pop’s health issues is extensive. His kidneys are pretty much gone so he’s been on dialysis three times a week for three years. His eyesight is shot; his hearing is almost non-existent. He can’t watch TV anymore because he can’t hear it no matter how loud he jacks up the volume and he can’t see to read subtitles. He’s had a cancer in his bones for eleven years that simply sits there like a grim specter, waiting to pounce but weakening everything else while it waits. His knees are shot so he can’t walk more than a few yards for more than a few minutes. He has a hard time sleeping because he is in physical pain all the time and he’s so old school, he resists weed to mitigate it. On top of that, his blood vessels are getting so thin, he keeps having them explode under his skin and bruising every part of him.
Like me, my mother tends to keep the surly details to herself and muscle through it (where do you think I learned it?) so living in her home and watching the almost comical relief on her face when she realizes she doesn’t have to take dad to dialysis at 5:00am and then pick him up four hours later starts to paint a very different picture I had while living in Chicago and Las Vegas. Simply put, she needed the help. She needs time to herself. She needs some sort of physical replacement for my father to do things like fertilize her yard, carry heavy shit from the basement, make a meal for the family once in a while.
A few mornings back, I had just dropped dad off at dialysis, headed to the gym for a couple of hours, and came home to shower before picking the old boot up again. Mom was sitting in her nook, drinking some coffee, and reading the news on her iPad. We started chatting it up and suddenly she burst into tears. She confessed that for the past three years she’s tried to get prepared for his death and then he rallies a bit. For the first time in years, she unburdened herself to someone about the struggles, mentally and physically, she’s had in the ensuing years. I held her and let her cry.
Watching your mom cry is a terrible thing. Being there to help her is a necessary thing.
We talked about the impending passing of my father. We both wondered why, as he is obviously miserable most days, he endures. We’re both thrilled he’s still here and horrified that this man, one of the sharpest, most self reliant humans either of us has ever known, finds himself forgetting things. About one in three days in the medieval torture chamber, getting his blood sucked out him and put back in, he comes out and you can see in his eyes that he isn’t quite all there. She mentions how cruel she sometimes feels in recognizing that her last dog wasn’t in nearly as much pain as my dad but she put the dog down out of compassion.
As is often the case, she and I turn to gallows humor. We talk about my grandpa’s death, then my grandma’s. There are funny moments (the time when she and her father were in the hospital, he hooked up to a heart monitor and it suddenly flatlines and they both freak out until she realizes the machine has become disconnected from him) and we laugh a lot. The tears are right there, underneath but she compartmentalizes (another trait I learned from her) and we move on.
Unlike the demolition of my third marriage which was highly unusual and almost unbelievable, this caregiving thing is only too common. My mom cries for the same reason she laughs—she has no control of the situation. Dad will die when he has decided he no longer wants to live and all we can do is make sure his days are relatively comfortable and he feels loved and cared for.
As for me, I keep playing a monologue from the Tom Hanks film Castaway over and over in my mind: