Irreverent Quandary

Coming Home

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:02:00 +0000

I'm home for the first time after officially moving to Northern California in December, and it's both comfortable and alien at the same time. Or maybe it was only alien before I got here, before I remembered I would know what to do when I saw my mom, and how to take care of her. I spent the day or two before coming home incredibly anxious about it all, but not really able to understand why. I know my mom is dying, she's been dying for two and a half years, and I was there for almost every day of it, so it's not like I would be walking into something unfamiliar or unknown. But there have been changes for her since I've left, more changes than have happened in a short period of time up until now. Or so it seems. Being away from it, I've realized how hard it really is to gauge accurately what's happening - although being close to it may be just as hard, as it's difficult to realize what is changing, if the changes are permanent or if this or that change (from sleeping to eating to speaking) means that this is it, it's happening, she's really dying. Really, really, dying, which seems to me different from what she's been doing the last few years, which is more like a slow fading while living, not exactly dying. But of course, she's dying all the same.

However, it's hard to deny at this point that things really are changing; she's sleeping more, talking less and/or just not struggling as much to talk, more easily overwhelmed and a bit more exhausted by the small things, like getting dressed. My stepdad, Jim, has very diligently kept me in the loop, letting me know there has been a handful of rough days recently that aren't like the other rough days we've seen. This is especially poignant to me, given that Jim is a master of the gloss, as in glossing over a bad situation and making it seem like everything's fine. Best example? When he flunked at EKG so badly a few years ago that the cardiologist immediately stopped the test only a few minutes in. Just afterwards, Jim appeared at the door to his hospital room where we were all waiting, with a frozen smile that seemed to say everything was fine. Sometimes it is difficult to to discern exactly what smile he's wearing, given his psuedo Sam Elliot moustache, but the "everything is actually fucked" smile is one he holds for a longer period of time, and then it dawns on you that holding a smile for that long isn't quite natural. At any rate, he was admitted for surgery that night - his "widow maker," a major artery of the heart that someone in the medical field decided to give that lovely name, was 80% occluded and he could have had a massive heart attack at any time.

Now, I've been here for a few days, and I'm entirely comfortable being home and happy to give Jim some hours to himself everyday. I've been thinking about those days before I flew out, how my anxiety rode backseat until I was curbside at the airport and saw Ma and Jim drive up, Ma waving and half-smiling, adorable and sweet in a white poncho sweater. I think part of the anxiety was that in the last month, I'd acclimated to having my days alone (for the most part, although many mornings were just plain strange with no one to talk to but the cat) no one to take care of, and suddenly I was headed back into that world. Or as Matt put it, "Of course you have anxiety! You're going home to see your mom, who is dying. That's not exactly fun." I guess he has a point, although I love her so much that I assumed that would wash away any other issues I might have.

I know Jim and Ma have a had a nice month together in my absence, not to mention a small return to the privacy of their marriage and living in their house alone, together - but several caregivers have either been injured or on vacation, so Jim hasn't had a lot of help. As in, he hadn't really left the house for more than 20 minutes at a time since I'd been gone. They need to hire help, and so when the two of them picked me up from the airport, I didn't even ask how they were - or maybe I did, and then I launched into my caregiver campaign.

"Well, we've done fine. I'm fine," Jim said, smiling that frozen smile.

"I know," I said. "But you can't keep doing this for months on end."

He shrugged, and then I told him I was interviewing a potential caregiver and that he really needed 8-10 hours a week of help, and it wasn't really a suggestion. He shrugged again. That was all I needed to understand that he was giving in, because if he wasn't, he would have fought me tooth and nail and hammer and screw.

Sidebar: As my boyfriend, Matt, pointed out before I left, "I know Jim will miss you and your help, but you've got to know he is the tiniest bit relieved to not be bossed around anymore." Me? Bossy? Yes, it turns out, incredibly. Especially when it comes to Ma. Within minutes of arriving, I was right back into my caregiver/advocate role and trying to control and organize everything. Trust me, it's for their own good. (And, it's working, the new, lovely caregiver, Ray, started this week.)

While it's taken me two years to leave Ma, and many false starts and claims of, "In six more months I'm going, no really, I'm going" by finally leaving and spending an extended time away, there has been a feeling of relief and freedom. However, these feelings come with them more than a twinge of guilt; as in, shouldn't I miss my mother so much that I can't eat or sleep or think? What is wrong with me?!? Shouldn't I be worried all the time, and sobbing intermittently throughout the day instead of merely teary every once in awhile?

I know Ma would shake a finger at me for feeling guilty, and probably eek out an empathetic, "Please!" but I didn't expect to feel this way. I think part of why I do is because I have a gut-level knowledge that I made the right decision -- and it's what Ma and I agreed upon. Plus, we Skype several times a week, which helps with the angst quite a bit. Then there is the sort of giant fact that I'm finally with the love of my life after two and a half very long years. It's great, but let us remember the wise word of Maroon 5, "It's not all rainbows and butterflies, it's compromise that moves us along," and this is especially true given my crumb-bly habits and/or the fact that he feels I eat rice cakes like the Cookie Monster, and that I'm know to use a "grotesque" amount of toilet paper, but there have also been diamond earrings, a book tree, beautiful meals and many lovely, lazy days together as we both adjust. (His cat, Miles, is still adjusting, but for the record, she did curl up and sleep on my lap one night when Matt went to bed. This is nothing short of HUGE.} It is not easy when two almost 40-somethings move in together, but at moments, it's hilarious in it's utter absurdity, as anyone who's ever had to live with another person can understand.

So all of that helps in the wake of leaving Ma. Not to mention I have someone who almost every night tells me it's going to be ok, no matter what happens, and that I can go home whenever I want, for however long I need to. (This may, however, just be a rouse so that he can have his weekends back to watch football and not have to leave the house. Whatever the case may be, he is one of the only reasons I'm surviving any of this, and being with him every day is just the sort of balm I need.)

I think I struggle against or feel guilty for being relieved from my caregiving duties because I never felt oppressed during the time I took care of her -- I knew I was doing what I should have been. Not that I didn't get antsy or feel as if someone had pushed a pause button on my life; but that would be for an hour or an afternoon and then I'd have some moment with her that would remind me of why the pause was important, why the pause was the exact right thing.

I've grown so used to being with her that now, having my days to myself feels indulgent. I vaguely remember living this way several years ago, although I can't really recall then what I did with my time. Tried to write, I imagine, waited tables, daydreamed about finally meeting someone, worked out and was amused by my terror of a pug, Wally. My days are not so different now, except Wally's gone (RIP, buddy) and I no longer wait tables and I know I'm coming home to the person I've always wanted to be with. It is the only thing that would somehow make it ok to not be coming home to Ma. I lucked out.

This first trip back, I've stayed longer than I planned because Jim needed the help, and I'm glad I have. With all the changes happening, it occurred to me that maybe I should just stay, as it feels palpable to me (although I've said it before god knows) that her clock is winding down. But to stay is to go right back to where I was for two years, on permanent pause, exactly the place I know Ma doesn't want me to be. All the same, I had to ask her just to be sure. She's managed to communicate that she feels things are shifting, that she's changing, so I asked if she had any sense of the timing of when she might go, and if I should stick around.She said she didn't know for sure, but that this phase could go on for awhile too.

"But I feel guilty for leaving," I said.

"Whoah, whoah, whoah," she said. This has become her favorite phrase as of late and it can mean anything from joy to shock to excitement, but I took this one to mean, "Jesus Christ, you have to be kidding me."

"I do, though, you know?" I said.

"Really. Really," she countered. This is her second favorite phrase, and sort of means the same as the whoahs, and I also took this to mean, "Jesus Christ, you have to be kidding me."

"Ok, Ma, I'll go," I said. "I mean, I'm not going to miss it, you know? I'll be here when it happens."

"Really, really," she said, laughing.

So it's settled, and I'm going back Thursday. Back to my future, you might say. Back to where I'm supposed to be.

Ode to Waitressing Part 4: Wherein the Word Douchebag Enters My Lexicon Full-Time

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:30:00 +0000

Good God. I am so late with this final installment of the waitressing series, I don't even know what to say. So here goes. This is dedicated to all those who have asked me several times to complete this series. All 3 of you. You know who you are. Ok, so where were we?

So that happened. My sister got breast cancer at 28 and I moved to Bainbridge Island, Washington to help take care of her. It was terrifying, exhausting and all-encompassing, but there was a personal freedom in it that I had never experienced before: I no longer worried about what I was going to do with my life. What was the point? What mattered was making sure my sister didn't die, and is there any higher calling than taking care of someone you love? This is a dangerous game, however, as the problem becomes this: what in the hell will you do after? Whether they live or die, you still have to move forward. Our lives couldn't continue on the in the cocoon that had formed during her diagnosis and treatment once she was better, and that was a huge adjustment. Also, two weeks after we moved together to Portland after her treatment, she was in love. Two months later, she was engaged. It was a lot, to say the least. What was I doing in the meantime? I was back to waiting tables, this time in a man's shirt and tie, working one double after the next. A "double" is perhaps the most innocuous term for one of the most depraved thing that exists in the restaurant industry- that is, you work the lunch and the dinner shift with a break in-between that is too short to actually get anything done and long enough to be really fucking annoying. Then there was the shock of being on my own again with no life to go back to as my sister sprinted into a whole new one without me (remember, I had just left LA and moved home, all primed for my sabbatical at 32, and then my life became about saving hers) was almost more than I could take. To put it simply, the situation was complicated and as a result, I wrote a whole memoir about it, so I won't prattle on about it here.

I will say it was one of the darker times in my life, working doubles at Harrison, a new and fancy restaurant downtown, decorated with a smattering of avant-guarde art, blue velvet booths that needed constant crumbing and a seemingly endless supply of crystal glassware that I spent the better part of my days polishing. Then there was its completely insane manager, a man named Sam, who looked as if he never slept and although a diabetic, rarely ate. He lived in that restaurant and expected everyone else to do the same.

"I need you to work 9 shifts this week," he would say, and before you could answer, he would for you, intoning, "Please and thank you." He'd even clap his hands together, like everything was a done deal, maybe shake yours, and there you were, pouring ice tea for businessmen in the afternoon and wine for them at night, and none of the day or night was yours anymore.

If I'd actually had any free time, it remains vague what I would have done with it. I didn't really want to go home, as my sister and I were still living together and any time I came home to her and the boyfriend, they were doing something annoying, like giggling and making nachos. And then I just wanted to be alone, forever alone. I couldn't write to save my life. (Hell, I could barely get out of bed. Also, I had planned to write a memoir about the miracle of my sister's survival from a wicked cancer and the spiritual journey our whole family was involved in, the Hindu mysticism that guided us and they way my sister and I sort of fell in love with one another when she was sick. Now, however, none of it was exactly true. We sort of couldn't stand each other, and it was nearly impossible for either of us to see the others point of view. "You both certainly have your perspectives," Ma said, during a period where she refused to discuss any of it with either of us.)
What I remember most from those months were buckets of red wine and running. It was the running that saved me, runs through the neighborhood in the dark, in the pouring, sideways rain, blasting Liz Phair and Pete Yorn and The Garden State soundtrack and, embarrassingly, Maroon 5. That first album was pretty decent, right? Right?

Anyway, I recovered and gained some semblance of a life. I managed to get out of Harrison just before it closed and secured a sweet gig cocktailing at O! (The name has been changed to protect me from random internet searches, etc., but I think we all know what we are talking about here, at least anyone in Portland). The best thing about O! is that if you work in the bar, they let you run with more tables than anyone is allowed to outside of a third world country, and therefore, lots of money can be made.

I guess O! was where I was finally on the other side of that glass, inside the cocktail lounge, with all the beautiful people. But 18 years ago, there was no such thing as a Douchebag. Apparently, they are multiplying so quickly now, that they spring from the sidewalks in the Pearl if you pour enough Mojito down certain cracks. I'm sure you are all familiar with this species, born sometime after 9/11, right around the time our country rediscovered irony. Ours are the old school versions, (pre-Jersey Shore) with terrible designer jeans and huge pointy McShiny shoes, tight, air-brushed and bejeweled tees. They crammed themselves into the bar for years, hitting on that certain breed of girl who thinks a belt can double as a skirt and orders either a "skinny girl" margarita or a Mojito that's "not too sweet."* I can't say for sure when the Cougars officially marked out their territory all over God's green earth, but now, they and the DBs make O! into big, fat, hot mess.

Yep. That's about right.

I ask you: Do I need a woman who is only a few years older than me, in white jeans, a matching white vest with only a tank top underneath, orange skin and spider legs for eyelashes snapping her fingers at me because she simply must have her fundido right now? No, I do not. Ditto her "date" for the evening, the douche who, after 3 or 4 Grey Goose and sodas, informs me that what he is drinking is in no way Grey Goose, who, when I inform him that he is indeed drinking Grey Goose he refutes me? Is it any wonder when I take his drink away and bring him another, that I am forced myself to drink the one he has barely sipped? No, it is not. Once however, on what is termed First Thursday in Portland -- a spring break for Cougars disguised as a high-brow gallery walk -- I got to express my frustration to one Douche in particular. The above occurred and when he ordered his umpteenth drink, he made sure to tell me, "Hey, hey, Grey Goose and soda." I actually looked at him and said, "No shit, dude. No shit." It was immensely satisfying.

For five and a half long years I toiled in that bar, making more money than I would have thought possible without taking my clothes off, and despite so many more horrific customers and long terrible nights, I don't remember all that many specifics. It blends and blurs. I know, however, that there is a tiny bit of magic in a restaurant when you are slammed beyond belief, the whole place is, yet somehow, all the cogs in the wheel fit together perfectly and everything clicks and everyone survives it together - you have run your ass off, you have truly worked, you are worked, and you all come out the other side.

What I will remember and miss the most are the people who survived those five years with me, all the craziness, the late nights, the massive ups and downs, my mom getting sick and finally, meeting the love of my life. Here are some highlights and shout-outs to all of you.

Every 3 am night/morning at Touche, including: Lynsey constantly putting out my cigarettes, wasted on a half glass of wine, adorably oblivious to hot Russel's obsession with her, ditto Jeff's and every other dude at O!'s obsession with her, sweetly falling asleep on my couch with Wally curled up next to her. Katie making me stay for one more, just one more, I mean Mims, what do you really have to do in the morning, really, you don't have to do anything, and we will just stay for one, maybe two. But that's all. (Repeat this scenario at Fratelli's and Low Brow. Then repeat it again the next shift.) I drank more in my five years at O! than I ever had in my life, making up for the relative sobriety of my 20s and getting it all out of my system. This also includes bus boy and bartender crushes. And for that, everyone, I thank you.

Any shift worked with Lucas Bruckert. Could there be a man with a better attitude after working a year of doubles straight though? I literally would have killed a litter of puppies if I'd had to do the same. The kid was so innocent when he started at O!, he had no idea what he was in for. He had never worked in the industry and was the hardest working busser I've ever seen. And the funniest. (And later, the funniest waiter and manager.) No better audience for my jokes or sob stories in restaurant history. If I ever get this one-woman show together, Lucas had better be in the front row. I also adore him for latching onto the term, "Glorious!" and shouting it at inappropriate times during service. Ditto when he convinced Keith that a large party in the bar were actually a group of swingers who had come to O! several years in a row and that we'd caught a couple of them the year before doing in it the Havana bathroom. I will also never tire of his rendition of a certain monologue from A Few Good Men, which includes the phrase "faggoty white coat." For the record, this is exactly the kind of coat O!'s waiters wear.

The outrageous mouth and on-demand crying skills of Miss Katie Horley. She's an oxymoron, people, there's no doubt about that. She also forgets that I am *13* years older than her at any given time, so therefore she'll say things like, "That was so '06," which to her, is an epically long time ago. Or is a reference to college? I'm not sure, since I graduated in 1995. She has endeared herself to me completely, mainly by possessing a mouth bigger and more outrageous than my own, which is no easy feat. Crass, bitchy and incredibly sweet at the core, she is the only person I've ever known who claims to have been aroused by a bus boy's forearms. They were nice, however. I've gained a flower girl and surrogate little sister all in one.

The bartending skills and stupendous company of Chino Lee, not to mention Paul, Nitiya and the whole Fratelli gang. This was the place to go after a good shift, a bad shift or an in-between shift, where the bartender would never give you the stink eye if you sat for longer than was polite, reading a book or watching "Man vs. Food" on the flat screen above the bar, who let you have just a "scotche" (read: large splash) of wine and then another and another. Oh, and some Italian bread and olive oil and balsalmic. Or was that just me? Thanks to all the gang for putting up with the "Oba-dose" and for providing such a great place to hang. RIP Bar Due.

The kindness and general insanity of Jeff Colton** This is a man who, while wasted, went online one night and decided to change his name to Uncle Silky. Also a man I wanted to physically strangle at certain junctures in his O! career, but who's dedication to O! put the rest of us to shame. Not to mention his amazingly in-depth text messages about the cosmos and the books we should write and the (mostly) clinically insane women he dates. Amazing.

To my long-term fellow bar maid lovelies, Jenny, Kristin and Lynsey, I cannot thank any of you enough. (A shout-out here too, for less long-term lovelies Frank and Meghan.) For putting up with my once-a-month vacations to keep my long-distance relationship alive, for being there through the shitty-shit-shittiest moments with customers and management, the worst of the douchebags, the crazy, shit-show nights, for the talks over the bar and by the walk in, and for knowing that you always had my back. Hope you know I'll always have yours.

*Listen up, bitches. Enough. Mixed drinks are sweet and they all have a shitload of sugar in them. You sound like a jackass when you order them less sweet. Also? Booze will make you just as fat as sugar. So order a freaking vodka soda, pull that belt/skirt down over your ass, try not to fall as you teeter around the bar in your clear heels and just please, for the love of cocktailers and bartenders across the earth, shut the fuck up.

**Jeffrey, I'm sorry I was the worst "icing" victim ever. I mean ever. I'm not sure I've ever seen you and Katie's faces look more disgusted. And we all know that's saying a lot.

Grief, Briefly Interrupted (Redux)

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

Hey!

No, I haven't finished that last piece on my illustrious waitressing (I love that spell check doesn't consider "waitressing" a word) but I have posted another memoir piece on TNB!

Check it:

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/amims/2011/11/grief-briefly-interrupted/

Love in the Time of Glioblastoma

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:11:00 +0000

Peeps!

Check out my debut post on the fantastic literary website The Nervous Breakdown! You won't be sorry. At least, I don't think you will be.

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/amims/2011/10/love-in-the-time-of-glioblastoma/

An Ode To Waitressing Part 3: The Pony, Waiting on Monica Lewinsky, Graduate School

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:23:00 +0000

I know, I know. This post is late. I got sidetracked, kids, with life and whatnot. But I swear I will finish this little series in the next week or so......also, did you know you can subscribe to this blog now? No more pesky checking in to see if I've posted! In the right hand column on the main page at the top, just enter your email address and you'll get notification when I post. Amazing.

Ok, so where were we? 1999, I believe. I'd just survived my 4th (and last) corporate job experience and was back in familiar territory, waiting tables. I went to work at a sister restaurant of Cutter's in Seattle, The Palamino. Yes, it's a chain, yes, it's faux Italian food. Yes, we nicknamed it The Pony. Yes, we had no less than 17 pasta dishes on the menu at the height of the Atkins craze in LA. And I don't say "craze" lightly. Those bitches had us making cappuccinos with cream instead of milk because that meant less freakin' carbs. Our most popular dish, however, was a crab dip, made essentially of mayonnaise, some crab and some cheese, and nothing delighted me and my fellow waiters more than when some skinny "actress" would come in and say, "Well, I'm not very hungry. I'll just have the crab dip." And 3,000 calories.

I'm not going to lie, it was a long couple of years waiting on the people of Los Angeles. They tended towards just what you'd imagine - demanding, rude, often unable to make eye contact, incredibly fucking fond of creating their own unique dishes that did not appear anywhere on our menu. We were situated in Westwood, near UCLA, Brentwood and Beverly Hills adjacent, which equals a shitload of older, rich people in St. John sweater outfits. When I first got there, an insane man named James ran the front desk. James felt that The Pony was akin to Spago, and treated it as such. He knew all the names of these horrible people, researched the latest seasons of St. John's, Prada, Escada so as to compliment their outfits upon entry, commented on their "refreshed" faces and made no secret of his own cheek implants and propensity towards MAC powder. He kissed ass, gave away a Dim-Sum's brunch worth of crab dip on a Saturday night, was slipped more $20 bills than I'd ever seen and drove us waiters insane. He had no ability to say something simply or handle the seating of someone without 100% drama. Once, I heard a man ask him if we were closed, and he said this: "Why yes, sir, I do believe we have terminated service for the evening." Eventually, however, the pressures of The Pony's front desk became too much for poor James. His career ended one late night when he took off a shoe and hurled it at the head of the manager in charge. Rumors floated around that drugs and sexual favors were involved, but we will never know for sure.

Oh, and the celebs. Tyra Banks used to come in for lunch all the time, when she was a little chubby and had not yet lost her mind. She was very sweet. Warren Beatty nice, Lisa Bonet was picky and weird. John Cusack was also nice and although I didn't wait on him, I contemplated attaching myself to his ankles as he left the building. And then, one quiet night, I waited on Monica Lewinsky. And her dad. Both were polite and quiet, and my heart sort of broke for her. It was only a year or so after the scandal, and she was about my age. All I could think was all the mistakes I'd made with men along the way, men far less famous and charismatic than Clinton, and all the baggage that entailed - yet it was nothing compared to hers. She could never go on a first date without the images of cigars and soiled dresses dancing through her dates' heads. Never meet a potential mother-in-law who wouldn't assume she was a slut, which is sort of what I assumed, until she was a flesh and blood girl in front of me, young, insecure and wanting to be loved. I did my best to smile at her as much as I could and pretended she was just another customer. I like to imagine she was grateful and relieved.

In the meantime, I did my best to adjust to my new life. I, once again, had no idea what I was really doing, I just knew I was elated to no longer be trapped behind a desk. I took my first fiction class at UCLA, then continued on with Lisa's private workshops. I learned that waiting until the day before a story was due to write it didn't really work, and that overall, writing was very, very hard. But I loved it. It was unlike anything I'd tried to do before, this spinning of words into a story out of thin air. Most of my first stories were thinly veiled autobiographical pieces, mainly focused around all the crazy men I had dated. When I discovered I had a lot more material than just that, something in me knew I could do this for real, and I started researching MFA programs. I had been writing a year and thought I should wait another year before I applied, but Lisa said no, do it now, why wait? And so I did, and was accepted to UC Irvine. My future was back on track, and I was headed to a mecca of artistic ingrity and, I assumed, unadorned appreciation for my writing. (I blame Lisa for this naivete, as she would simply write "Brilliant" on the top of nearly everything I wrote.) I would get a stipend there to teach unwitting undergrads, so after 2 1/2 years at The Pony, I was all like, "See you later, bitches, I'm done with all this and off to write a brilliant bestseller!"

As with all the best laid plans, this theory quickly unraveled. I, like an asshole, volunteered to be up first for workshop, and in that excruciating 45 minutes, I knew several things: 1. I was a piece of shit writer. 2. Graduate school was a terrible idea. 3. No one here was ever going to say that my work was brilliant. 4. I had to smile while my guts were ripped out of my body and spread out on the table. 5. I had approximately 2 more years to go of this bullshit.

That first year, I nearly came undone. We were also expected to teach the youth of America with exactly one week of training, and on top of writing piles of shit, I wasn't doing that all that well either. The workshop is a bizarre place, full of egos and insecurities and projections and judgements and hatred and jealousy, and sometimes, love and respect. It's a long story, but aside from a few people there, I felt universally misunderstood in those rooms and entirely lost. My usual charisma failed, my charms thwarted or ignored. By my second year, I had more free time and was longing to go back to something I had some footing in, something I knew I was good at, a place where people appreciated who I was and what I had to offer. Also, I thought it might be a good idea to not have a ton of debt for something that amounted to pure torture. So? I went back to The Pony. Just three days a week, but I went back. Cocktailing instead of working in the dining room, but baby, I was back.

And ironically, I felt a lot better. I had this other world to escape into from graduate school all these people who didn't care about how much interiority my characters' had, if my characters' were really just whiny, self-pitying women underneath all that interiority or if I'd ever read T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." I had not, and I still have not. There was a guy in my class who could quote that fucking poem on demand, most likely tell you what page the line he was quoting was on. It was nauseating.

It was a horrifically long two years. I stayed for an extra year teaching to finish my thesis, a collection of (surprise!) thinly veiled autobiographical short stories. And suddenly, it was 2004. I had a master's degree and. . . I was waiting tables. I was also very, very tired of Los Angeles, and I missed my family. By then, I had been away from them for 15 years. I mentioned to Ma that I wanted to come home. Of course, she said. Take a sabbatical! she said. A sabbatical at 32. Only my mother would have championed this. And so I did. I packed my shit and left, with no clue as to what was going to come next. I would teach, I figured, write my novel. I knew, of course, that whatever happened, I was done waiting tables.

I moved home in July. Two months later, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer at 28. In an instant, my life was no longer my own, and whatever plans I had were erased: firmly and completely.

An Ode to Waitressing Part 2: My So-Called Corporate Life

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:06:00 +0000

I must preface my next stint in waitressing with an outline of my largely unsuccessful and highly traumatizing post-college time in the corporate world. Of course, I waited tables at a pub on Telegraph Avenue while at Berkeley, and the usual college nonsense ensued. We were also entertained on a regular basis by the crazy, homeless people who ran the city, including my favorite, a guy we called Rare. He would stick his head into various business and simply shout, "Rare!" on a regular basis. And then: graduation and a move to Seattle to be with my boyfriend at the time, Pat. What followed for the next several years was a series of horrific personal and work experiences unparalleled in my life. In other words, my 20s.

1. PONCHO. $21,000 a year, kids. My first real job out of college, at a time when you still sort of had to dress up for work. And wear hose if you were a lady. The only ones I liked were these Donna Karan "nude" ones that cost $18 a pop. I ran so many fucking pairs of those that it was a wonder I could afford to eat. PONCHO (the terrible acronym for Patrons of Northwest Civic, Cultural and Charitable Organizations) was a non-profit that raised money for the arts via two auctions a year, and I was supposed to do PR for these events. What I was allowed to do was change the date on the press releases and send them out exactly as they had been worded the year before. I was also allowed to transcribe lengthy, overblown letters of thanks to rich patrons, recorded by my aging boss, Judy, who often smelled of garlic and could not type. (I was so bored most of the day I think I slept with my eyes open for at least five hours of it.) When she retired, a woman named Carol took over. Carol dyed her white hair red and subsisted on three Triscuits and 1/2 a cup of cottage cheese a day. She was also having an affair with a married man, had no idea what she was doing in terms of running PONCHO and was kind of a total bitch.

I was, in a word, miserable, my misery only compounded by the fact that I'd broken up with Pat six weeks after arriving in Seattle. Why, you ask? Well, he didn't seem to notice I'd moved there to be with him and it was sort of getting on my nerves. Two months after our break-up, he was living with a stripper, buying her jewelry and paying her rent. This was extra depressing, as I hadn't been able to get the guy to buy me a beer. So what did I do in response? I dated a terrible jackass who ran a direct mail warehouse named (I shit you not) Treg Vandenberg and got my belly button pierced as if to say, "See? I'm totally living on the edge and super sexy." I took the stupid thing out a month later, because that shit caught on everything and never really healed. The only thing that saved me during this time was my co-worker Nina, who brought snark to a new level (she called Treg "Dregs", joked about pushing Carol's skinny ass out the office window and taught me the joys of prank calling the Pacific Northwest Ballet, just to hear the receptionist answer the phone in some kind of fake English accent, wherein the word "ballet" was accented and drawn out to the point of ridiculousness). Needless to say, I often caught myself contemplating the idea of Nina pushing me out of that fourth floor window instead of Carol. It was a very long year.Or nine months that felt like five years. I can't remember.

2. Bennington Capitol Management. In a panic, I sent out my resume and took the first job I was offered, anything to get me out of the hell of PONCHO. Enter the perfect match for my skill set, marketing at a mutual fund company! Me, who hated math, didn't understand finance and had zero interest in the stock market. I took over the job from a woman who wasn't quite human - she was unbelievably perky, worked 10 hour days, got up at 5:30 every morning to jog six miles and would then bake something for the office, make her husband breakfast and arrive at work before anyone else got there. You can imagine that hiring me was a bit of a letdown for my co-workers.

Not surprisingly, I was just as bored at this job as the last one, as my day consisted of pie charts and bar graphs, deciding which shade of cream-colored paper to print the quarterly reports on (and once chosen, my boss, who worked two days a week and was paid a hundred grand a year would veto it, and go with a different shade of cream) and mostly, talking to my new found friend in the legal department, Joe. He was just as cranky as I was. At the time, I was dating a silver salesman from LA, who would eventually ask me to have threesomes. I would decline, but the whole experience left a mark. (To my younger readers, keep in mind that this was way back in the early 90s, when you were probably eight or something, a quaint time when it wasn't trendy to be a total slut bag, i.e., Paris, Lindsay, Snooki, etc).

At any rate, I spent a lot of time in Joe's office, complaining or crying or trying to get him to approve some outrageous sales presentation the CEO had put together. Here is a little piece from a story I wrote about that time, and although it's fiction, it's pretty much the truth:

"Jones is at least 10 years older than me and a few inches shorter. We work together at a small investment firm that hawks financial advice. Jones is the head of the legal department, I am the marketing assistant. I was supposed to be a lot of things by now: an actress, an academic, a Vice President of Very Important Things, married. I have, as my mother says, been sidetracked.
Everything I do has to be approved by Jones. Often, our conversations go something like this:
"Do you like the color orange?"Jones will say.
"What?" I will say.
"Orange," he will say, shaking a sales presentation in my face, "because that will be the color of the jumpsuit they will issue you and me and Mr. CEO if anyone who has any fucking idea what they are talking about
sees this. We can't promise these kinds of returns!"

And so it went. For two very long years. My only saving grace aside from Joe was the view from my office. We were on the 30th floor in downtown Seattle, and had a 180 degree vista of the Puget Sound, the Cascades and the Olympics. However, the beauty of nature when you are trapped behind a desk and making pie charts, can only get you so far. After I broke up with Threesome Guy and Joe uttered perhaps the wisest thing I'd ever heard in terms of my dating life, "I don't think a flatware salesman from LA is your guy," I was so restless and bored that I got a job cocktailing part-time in Pike Place. A few months later while slinging drinks I met my perceived salvation, a man we shall call insane Phil, who offered me a job. Where else? Los Angeles.

When I quit Bennington to move to LA, Joe said this to me, "Congratulations, you've just survived your first
traumatic work experience."

Before I left, he also wrote me this little thingy that I loved so much I've kept it for all these years, thinking that I would use it somewhere, and that somewhere is now:

"It was a damned good market. It climbed like a singed mountain lion with steel it in its guts. it was lean and tough and graceful enough to make a bishop weep." --Raymond Chandler

"It was cocktail hour
The yield curve was inverted.
Bonds were falling up." --some long-dead Japanese dude

"We are not interested in the possibility of a market decline." --Queen Victoria

Domestic stocks went up for awhile and went down for awhile too. International stocks moved around in both directions, but didn't really go anyplace. Interest rates were about like the previous quarter although sometimes they moved up and sometimes they moved down. The economy continued to do what it had done before, only slightly differently vis-a-vis inflationary pressures. All in all, the forecast looks difficult to predict." --Alan Greenspan

"The market was still going, I think. But I really didn't give a shit; not so much." --Abby Mims

3. Entertainment Marketing Group. I wrote about this blessed experience a few years ago here, and I don't think I can top that post. So here it is: http://abbymims.blogspot.com/2007/09/getting-fired.html

4. Davie-Brown Entertainment. Remember my crazy roommate from Los Angeles with the giant bird and 58 house plants? (See above post). Well, her boyfriend got free stuff from Reebok, which led me to my next amazing job in product placement! What it really consisted of was giving free shit to rich people and/or getting Reebok's shitty product on equal shitty TV shows. Does any one else remember a time where the WB only aired shows staring black comedians? Ahem. So I shilled a lot of track suits their way and also a few to the Sopranos set. Sounds glamorous, no? It was not at all, for a couple of reasons. Often, I had to drive to the wonder that is The Valley, where it is usually at least 80 degrees on any given day and usually closer to 97 degrees and my '91 Integra did not have air-conditioning. You heard me. So I would arrive on these various sets to give Reebok catalogs to the wardrobe department sweating profusely, not that they noticed, because they could have given a shit about Reebok. You know why? Because no one wanted to wear their crap, even then. Did I have any Nike or Adidas or Puma? No, I only had shitty Reebok shit. Come to think of it, no one has wanted anything from Reebok since 1986, when white-velcroed high tops where all the rage. At any rate, when I wasn't being humiliated out in the world trying to give this shit away, I was being humiliated in the office, as the girl who had been made my assistant did not want to be my assistant and did nothing I asked her to. Eventually, she went on my computer after hours and printed out emails of mine (one of which was about her, where I had made a rude comment about her attitude and weight - not my best moment) and tried to get me fired. Not long afterwards, my boss stopped including me in meetings and was talking shit about me to the clients behind my back. All of which she denied to my face saying that she thought everything was going just great. She kept saying this when I gave her two weeks notice and said I was going back to waiting tables.

Can you blame me?

I had also just signed up for a fiction writing class through UCLA extension, the first I'd ever taken. That class, my teacher Lisa Glatt and quitting my day job would be what changed the course of my life forever - although this course change would inevitably involve many, many, many more years of waiting tables.

It's Still Happy Hour, Isn't It?: An Ode to Waitressing in Four Parts

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 23:37:00 +0000

Twenty years. I think about that number a lot, as in, "Where will I be in 20 years?" or "20 years ago, I was doing [insert whatever]" or "Why can't my mom have 20 more goddamn years?"

Lately it's been this zinger: "20 years - as in the number of years I have waited tables." Was that an audible gasp? Because that is what I usually get when I lay down that fact. There have been breaks, sure, a year here or there and my 4-year-stint in the corporate world, but essentially, it's been 20 freaking years. I retire in a short month's time from this world of restaurants, and felt it deserved some sort of homage before I leave it behind forever. So, I will regale you all with a four-part series of these lo 20 years, one post a week until right around October 15, which will be my final night serving mojitos to douchebags, and hopefully, the last time I will ever have to answer the question, "It's still happy hour, isn't it?"

First, let me take you back to the winter of '91, when I graduated early from high school and moved to Southern California. I lived with family friends for six months before finding a place of my own, but in the meantime, I had to find a job and I knew just what it would be: waiting tables. I had worked for the McCormick & Schmick's chain in high school as a hostess/cashier, and as I watched those servers in their terrible short white jackets and bow ties count all that cash at the end of the night, I knew what I had to do.

Enter The Wind and Sea in Dana Point, California. You know, near where those Hills kids hung out in Laguna Beach. (Unbenownst to me, this spot was also known in the 80s as The Whiff and Sin, for its reputation as a kind of cocaine massage parlor, and the fact that its waitresses had to wear corset-type things under their uniforms until a few years before I arrived. Business men from Tustin were heard to drive all the way from deep inland to the coast of Orange County for lunch. By the time I got there, things had mellowed quite a bit, and the waitresses wore tiny Hawaiian Island themed tank tops and wrap skirts, which could expose your entire ass if you passed over an air conditioning vent the wrong way. Or right way, I guess, if you were one of those Tustin businessmen).

The things that first struck me about the restaurant as I waited in the lobby to be interviewed was the endless view of the ocean it afforded and the beautiful women who worked there. It was full of them, stunning, grown-up women with caramel colored skin, most of them cocktailers. I was barely 18 and awkward with pale Northwest skin, but I got a job working lunches during the day and the patio at night. (You had to be 21 to sling drinks in the lounge). Have I mentioned I was barely 18 and awkward and had little to no idea what I was doing? I knew I wanted to go to school in California, and that I needed residency because my parents couldn't afford the out of state tuition. I also knew that I looked really good with a tan. That was about it. As for my parents, my dad knew I was going to fuck it all up, most likely by getting knocked up by some surfer dude and living out of said dude's Volkswagen van. My mom knew I was going to be ok. Thank god for Ma.

Turns out I was sort of a natural at it, this waiting tables thing, which if you've ever worked it a restaurant with someone who isn't you know what I mean. There is an inherent talent in being able to multi-task and not lose your shit when the steak is overcooked or someone doesn't like their drink. Somehow, I did it all pretty well, selling $1200 worth of $6.95 nachos on a busy weekend night, all while constantly being yelled at by a manager simply called "Coach" who sported a thick, nearly handlebar moustache and was never without a tall glass full of Cutty Sark and a bump of coke. He barked when he spoke, called everyone by their last name and was completely frightening. He liked me though, because I worked hard and hardly complained. The place was always packed, often running two-hour waits on the weekends. (All of us girls had a mantra on those 12-hour days, which was, "Whatever you do, don't look at the line. Don't look at the line!) I usually closed the patio on Saturday nights, fell into bed exhausted at 2 in the morning and got up at 8 to work Sunday brunch. I fucking bounded out of bed, which is very hard to imagine at this stage of the game.

Nights I didn't close the illustrious patio, I was making out with a surfer named Thad. I had met him in art history class at the junior college I was attending This "college" was in essence a very large high school with ashtrays, in the middle of Orange County. What I remember most about the place were the low, parched hills of Mission Viejo in the background and the copious amount of sweat I experienced on campus. My own, that is, as the temperature averaged about 87 degrees. Thad had me not at hello, but at the line, "Do you ever smile?" and the greatest make-out relationship ever was borne. We never saw each other in the daylight aside from class, and we never had sex, as Thad had a girlfriend. She was 17, and I had my own apartment. He usually knocked on my door around midnight, and the make-outs would last into the early morning, when Thad had to leave for his job in construction. His skin was caramel-colored like the cocktailers I revered, and he had a tattoo of a wolf on one shoulder, and the sun on the other. I would trace these tattoos with my fingertips in those rare moments where we talked to one another, Thad telling me I would find a nice guy someday or about his day job in construction and the way crystal meth felt when you snorted it, like a red hot poker through the nose and up into your eyes, he said, then a cooling, a melting moreover, when it hit your conciousness.

At the time, waiting tables was so glamorous to me, so grown up, that I couldn't get enough of it. I stayed to close if I could, took extra shifts. I met many, many slutty, squirrely busboys and arrogant bartenders and creepy managers and an ass-load of rude people. I learned that when you wait tables you are actually doing three jobs, that of a server, an actor and a psychologist. I experienced my first zero tip. I got an apartment. I talked to my high school friends who were settling into the dorms at U of O like normal 18-year-olds. I freaked out. After calling my mom and freaking out some more, crying and saying I had made a terrible mistake, but no, no way was I coming home, she sent me a "Pick-Me-Up Bouquet" that she has never lived down. I piled up the cash I made every night on my nightstand and felt proud. I made out with Thad. I did one too many shots of tequila at a bar in Newport Beach, dirty-danced with a guy named Rio and was so hung over the next day at work I almost lost my job. I fell hard and fast for a waiter ten years older than I was who never intended us to get past our first date; I stretched our relationship out to six months. I freaked out again. I watched people who had been consecutively enrolled at said junior college for four, five years in a row, who would eventually drop almost all their credits every semester. I watched the lifers drink too much and smoke too much, and do too much coke and sleep with the wrong people, the stress of restaurant life and nicotine permanently working its way into the lines in their faces and broken blood vessels in their eyes. I knew I had to get out, I knew this wasn't the way I wanted to live my life. Somehow, I stayed focused, I paid my bills, I applied to Berkeley. The older guy built me a mountain bike as a congratulations gift and told me that he had to let me go, it wouldn't be fair for him not to. Ma always told me he was right. It took me many, many years to believe her.

I was certain my life would be vastly different once I got to a real college and after I graduated, there would be no more waiting tables. It would be the Real World, everything I had wanted since I was 13 or 14. What exactly that was remained fuzzy in my early 20s mind - I was only sure that it involved sharp business suits and lots of money. (I majored in Mass Communications if that gives you any sense of my cluelessness). But those last nights before I left those endless rows of blue and white checkered tables, I would gaze into the dark wood of the bar, and watch those caramel-colored girls. There was only a thin wall of glass that separated me from them, but I never made the transformation. The closest I got was when they propped the doors open late night and the sounds of our resident lounge singer, Don Duncan, crooning "Sexual Healing" (for the third time that evening) wafted out across the patio. I would close my eyes and imagine I was one of them then, full of grace and power, men surrendering to them at every turn. I could almost see him if I let the song wash over me long enough, the one I was supposed to meet. I would set his drink down and he would gently touch my wrist. When our eyes met, there would be no doubt.

The Ultimate Surrender

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 19:19:00 +0000

My mom has been studying death, dying and spirituality for as long as I can remember, and I've been resisting it for about that long. My excuse for many years was that I didn't have time to think about God, life and death - I mean, Christ, let me get a boyfriend first -- I would tell her, some semblance of a purpose/career and then we could talk. She never pushed it on me, it was more something I grew up knowing was there, from her yoga and meditation practice, her talk of karma, past lives and reincarnation, to her work with shriveling old people in nursing homes, and those dying on hospice. What I did absorb was an understanding that it was important to think about the fact that we are all already dying, that we will all die, and that along the way there were systems of thought to help make sense of the world. Although I didn't study or practice any of her Buddhist, Zen or Hindu beliefs, let alone read her library full of books about dying, I've come to realize how much of her spiritual world I've taken in from her via a kind of osmosis, all the more intensely these last few years. I can't go along with everything, but in terms of the ideas of karma and service to others, and my intrinsic draw to yoga over the last decade, I plunk along pretty well on my own weird little spiritual path. As my stepfather said at the beginning of all this, "Now, I know you aren't all about the monkey gods and the old Indian guys, so how are you going to deal with what's happening?" Writing, I said. Reading. Seeing my friends. Loving Matt. Working out harder and harder to stave off the sadness. Drinking as a distraction, ditto bad TV shows. More yoga. Half-assed meditation. And this is pretty much what I have done, give or take a few glasses of wine. What I didn't realize was that so much of the process would be learning directly from her, separate from her beliefs, simply by witnessing how much of her life is guided by her grace, love and ultimately, her surrender.

I'm down with grace and love. It's the surrender I am constantly Indian leg wrestling with, and not the surrender to her illness or taking care of her, it's the surrender to the worst, hardest thing since learning her diagnosis was terminal: she's going to die, and it's going to happen relatively soon.

What floors me is that I think she surrenders to this fact almost every day, (albeit some days more than others), and what I am constantly blown away by is how she continues to read, listen and study death as if there is still a limitless amount for her to learn about it, even still. She has already surrended so gracefully to so many huge changes -- to cancer, to paralysis, to dependence, to statis, to boredom, to being at the mercy of whomever is in the room, to losing her ability to talk, and then, to the idea of her own death. She recently had me order her a CD collection of Ram Dass's early lectures, circa 1973 or so, after his first trip to India and meeting Maharjji. There are the words "love" and "devotion" in the title, but all I could focus on was the subtitle, "The Ultimate Surrender." It seemed to me ironic and borderline hysterical all at once, in terms of what she is doing, has been doing, for these past few years - I mean what else is it than "the ultimate surrender"? For the week or so after it arrived, I would tease her about how the uber surrendering was going. She would laugh and shake her head, say, "Hard," if she could get it out, or more likely, "Fuck," and then ask for me to put the next CD in for her. She still so actively wants to study, listen and learn about how to live with suffering and death in this lifetime, when it is so clear to me that no one I know has mastered all of these things as beautifully as she has. As I wrote in an earlier blog, "no further study necessary."

My study habits regarding this issue plainly suck, as despite how much I've grown accustomed to what is happening to her, and in turn to me, I can't say I've been surrendering to it. I mostly fight it, hold it at arm's length and take her to the movies instead. Sometimes I figure the surrender will come at the very end, when she actually dies, but that doesn't happen for everyone. Plenty of people hold on to their grief for the rest of their lives in a way that doesn't allow them to move forward. That doesn't sound so good to me. I do know that I am letting go of pieces of her all the time, and that I have clear moments of surrender, when the day is too fucking hard and there is nothing else to do but collapse and weep at the reality. What is interesting to me is that I always fight it when I feel it coming on, that edge of grief, that glimpse of barren landscape, the knowledge that she is shifting, going, fading. I fight it with distractions or work or TV or obsessing or the internet until there is no way around it, I have to go through it, look its sharp blackness in the face and -- fuck me -- surrender. Part of this fight is the constant sense that I should be doing so many other things with my days: writing, looking for freelance gigs, cleaning out my closets, grocery shopping, laundry. Tangible goals, lists of things I can check off so I have something to show for my time. Grieving and surrendering just never seem to make it on my "to-dos." Who has time for that shit?

I was talking to a dear friend today about how hard we are on ourselves, how much we feel we are "behind in our lives" and therefore there is even more daily pressure to get something done. We are almost 40, and there is not this, this or this. You know, this and that and the other thing that we haven't done, or experienced or checked off the list. "Real" jobs, husbands, children, PTA membership, houseplants that live. It is bullshit, yes, but the silent pressure is still there, if only inside ourselves. It is hard sometimes to feel as though I have sat still for more than two years in this process; I can only imagine how Ma must feel in terms of both her journey and mine. Yet when I can stop all the buzzing in my head, erase that stupid list of shit to do, I know this time with her might be the most important thing I'll ever do in my life. There is just nothing tangible to show for it; nothing to point to when people ask. There is no book or marriage or family.

Last year, I went to a writing expo thingy, and made the terrible mistake of forgetting that people go to these things to network, to get something done, to talk about writing. I was left mute at every turn, unable to choke much out when someone asked, "And are you a writer?" Yes, sort of? Maybe? I have no fucking idea. I was awkward, tongue-tied, exhausted. What I should have said was: "My world is eclipsed by the fact that my mom is dying, and so, that's all I know at the moment." But who would understand that? Hardly anyone, certainly not that guy over there with his self-published book filled with clever cat haikus. No one really gets it out there in the middle of the rest of the world. I came home that night somewhat demoralized and demolished and cried in the kitchen with Ma and my stepfather Jim, and said, "I'm doing important work here. Doesn't anybody get that?" And they did, of course. And so does Matt and a few of my closest, dearest friends. They are who I hold onto in the meantime, in between surrender and fight. And too, in the middle of all of it, the lesson I've had to keep learning my whole life returns to me again: patience. And with it, of course, surrender. And then there is Ma's voice in my head, gentle, loving and wise -- book, husband, family - there are none of those things -yet. But they are coming.

Lately, if I'm gone for five or six days, I can see the differences in her when I get back. The changes are most often small and difficult to explain to someone who has not been close to this journey with us, so I'm often at a loss when someone asks me how she is, how I am. (I am always grateful for the question, just a little stuck as to the answers). How do I explain that these last few months, she literally can't get a full sentence out anymore? That the words are stuck somewhere between her brain and her mouth, and just as quickly, they are erased and she is forced to let them go? I want to say this to them: "I can no longer talk for hours with my mom the way I have my entire life. I run out of things to say to her some days and this makes me sadder than anything; that our one-sided conversations are limited to what I can contribute, and lately, I struggle for the funny tidbit to tell her, a tiny slice of news from the outside world that might engage her. But then, if I do engage her, she wants to respond, and she simply can't. How do I surrender to that? Do you have any suggestions? That is how I am. That is how Ma is."

A few weeks ago, when her brain kept sticking on a loop of trying to say something and all that kept coming out was, "Um, um, um," she switched over to "Ram, Ram, Ram," the Hindu word for God. This calmed her down, allowed her to let go without the frustration that usually accompanies this stuck-ness, and she shrugged and smiled. I told her she should do this from now on when the words won't come, as it might reset the needle on the record of her brain. This trick isn't the sake of getting out what she has to say, but for the sake of skipping the aggravation. Ma has thanked me several times for this minuscule reprieve from what is happening in her brain, but really, it was all her idea, I just told her to keep doing it. I still hate that she can't get out what she wants to say, but there's not a lot I can do about it. When I told a friend of hers about this, she told me that "Ram, Ram, Ram," is what Gandhi was softly chanting when he died. Of course.

I have no doubt that Ma is my guru, as reluctant as I am sometimes to be on this path. I was/am so busy trying to figure out the next step in my life that spirituality, death and dying has always seemed to me something I *might* get to later. Much, much later. Right after I get "caught up with my life." Whatever that looks like. But given the current circumstances, faith has put me in something of a choke hold; the universe has given me no choice but to believe. How else to organize my thoughts or find solace in what is happening, what has happened? There is the theory that we reincarnate in pods of souls, grouped together for several lifetimes. Sometimes, when Ma is apologizing to me for what it is she needs in that moment, or for the way I've put my life on hold, I remind her that we chose this together, and no one soul is more responsible for this nutty shit than any other. This usually makes her feel better and it does me too. We are together in this now and if we are lucky, we will be together in a different pile of nutty shit again at some point.

But then there is the surrender. Where I'm at with it right now makes me think of the beautiful little girl Ma and I saw playing in a fountain downtown a few weeks ago. We were drinking coffee after the movies and this dark-haired, Asian cherub in a red polka-dotted bathing suit was running from one stream of water bubbling up from the cement to the next. She would stand and point for her mother to step on the stream on contain it, stop it from flowing for a few seconds. Each time this happened, she screamed with delight when her mother stepped the water out of existence. Then she would run to the next stream and demand the same performance. After several minutes, the little girl started doing it on her own with moderate to limited success. Sometimes the water would be cutoff halfway and squirt up suddenly into her face, as if someone had their thumb partway over a garden house. Shocked and at the brink of tears, she would step back and rub her eyes and look around for her mother. And she would be there, pointing at a jet of water a few feet away, telling her little girl, "Both feet, both feet!." And the little girl would try again. And again. Water in the eyes, up the diaper, spewing everywhere. But once or twice she got it, held that water down and laughed triumphantly, then released it and moved on to the next one, not noticing that the one she left behind had returned to normal.

That is what I feel like in terms of all of this -- there are so many leaks to contain, so many unexpected ways to feel this loss that I can't possibly contain them all, no matter how many hours I spend running in circles trying to catch up with my life or attempting to accept the fact that she really is dying. Just when I think I've got it managed, it hits me in the back of the throat and chokes me, it stings my eyes, it soaks my clothes. It is relentless and it pisses me off. Soon enough I will have no choice but to surrender to it, when there aren't enough sandbags in the world to stop the flood. In the meantime, I'll keep thinking about what it is to surrender, while still holding on fiercely to what is left.

Reunion

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:40:00 +0000

I braved my 20th high school reunion last week, and it was there I realized what a terrible small talker I have become. I've never been great at it, but since my mom got sick (and probably since my sister got cancer) I just don't have a ton of patience or ability to talk about nothing. Also, very simple questions from people you haven't seen in 20 years, such as "Where do you live?" opened up small mine fields for me to traverse. I guess I could have just said, "In Beaverton, with my parents," and left it at that, but did I mention this was my high school reunion? Yeah. There was no way I was letting people think I was living with my parents for no reason. Petty, yes, but honestly, what would you do? So then I would say it, "My mom's sick" or "I'm helping take care of my mom" or "My mom's dying. Brain cancer." Which, not surprisingly, tended to bring the conversation to a screeching halt. It was then I realized again that her sickness has so dominated my life these last few years that many days, I don't feel there are any other topics I can speak intelligently about. This makes it hard to talk to strangers, or even virtual strangers. (I am reminded of a conference I went to years ago, when the writer Pam Houston was discussing what topics people are drawn to write about, and she mentioned that for the writer Cynthia Ozick, the Holocaust was the only topic she wrote about; to her, there is nothing else. So at least I can take comfort in knowing I'm more fun to hang out with than Cynthia Ozick.)

But back to small talk and virtual strangers. This is what I was surrounded by the first hour or so of my reunion, in a hotel bar, and I felt like I was back in high school. Dark, awkward, not quite fitting in, and I thought, "Holy shit, this was a terrible, terrible mistake. Why I am I sitting in a hotel bar with virtual strangers from high school, with no established career to speak of, no husband and no children, when my mother is dying? (Although having a hot, sweet boyfriend helps. Thank you, hot, sweet boyfriend.) I must have been drunk when I agreed to come to this nightmare." (As a matter of fact, I was. Last fall, I saw two old friends, Bridget and April, and we got pretty drunk and swore we would all go this thing together. They were both otherwise occupied for that first hour, and I was cursing their names.)

Anyway, just as I was texting Matt that I'd made a terrible mistake, I saw April, along with two other old friends, Heather and Amber. I sprinted to them, spilling my martini, and not caring. "Thank fucking god," I said, and after a couple of warm hugs and smiles, and questions about my mom, I knew everything was gong to be ok. And it was, amazingly enough. For the next few hours, anyone I got a chance to talk to felt just like I had that first hour, like "What in the fuck am I doing here? I've had like a whole life since high school and now I have to talk to all these people I barely recognize?" And then we laughed and laughed, because the reunion experience is about the weirdest thing ever. Facebook does make it somewhat less painful, but still.

I stuck with my old friend Bridget most of the night, as we vowed to be each other's wingwomen, and I have to say, we did a damn fine job. (She recognized less people than I did. Let's just say we both graduated early from high school. I think people would expect me to write snarky things because of this, but I'll tell you something: everyone was so genuinely nice and exceptionally kind, I have nothing snarky to report.) What shocked me as the evening wore on was how many people came up to me and told me they read my blog and loved it and/or asked about my mom. People I hadn't seen in 20 years (or close to that); people I had no idea were reading. I was honestly totally blown away and touched beyond belief -- and gloriously, I didn't have to worry about the small talk.

At some point, I told Bridget about my awkward pre-reunion experience, and she hilariously said, "Jesus, Mims, you can't just open with 'my mom's dying'! I mean give people a couple of drinks at least." And she was right, so the next girl we talked to didn't know about my mom, so I didn't mention it, just talked casually instead about how I would be relocating soon to be with my boyfriend in California. As we walked away, I elbowed Brigit and said, "See? I didn't tell her my mom's dying." "Excellent job," she said, "just terrific." (We'd had a conversation earlier with a former classmate who was trying to work in the word "terrific" as much as he could that night, and we sort of took on the challenge as well, so she might have been overstating her position just a bit.)

At the end of the night, a small group of us walked to a bar for one last drink. Somehow, we got on the topic of the Rhythm B's, which was in my time, one of the coolest thing a girl could be at Beaverton High School (if you weren't a basketball or soccer star). Strange that a girl like me who, a person who rarely smiled from sophomore to senior year, would want to be on a drill team that involved fishnets and pom-poms, but there you have it. I tried out two fucking years in a row with no success, and it turns out Bridget had too - although neither remembered that the other had. Heather was with us, and she had made the squad, and as we talked I was reminded that she (secretly) helped me with the routines, all to no avail. (A shout out to McCrae on that one.)

And then Bridget said the most brilliant statement I've heard in a long time, something to the effect of, "God, can you imagine, just being able to do those routines, achieving that kind of precision and perfection? What that would have meant?" And I did know, as I remembered being so jealous of Heather for achieving this thing I longed for, which I thought would instantly turn my miserable high school existence into an amazing one.

It would have meant too, that we could have metaphorically mastered our messy lives. Of course, it wouldn't really have allowed us to master anything, but it seemed like it at the time. Thinking about it, I felt so immensely relieved that I no longer long for those kind of neat corners, that kind of control, something beyond myself to make everything ok. Sure, it would be nice if my life had happened in a little straighter line, but then again if it had, I wouldn't be me, and after wrestling with my limits and limitlessness for so many years, I wouldn't want to be any different. As a result, I will probably continue to suck at small talk, because the reality is simply this: My mother is dying, and it is incredibly messy, beyond imperfect, complicated, gorgeous, stunning and everything in-between. It's a part of who I am now, and there's nothing I can or want do about that.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, a pic of me and Ma that night:

Beginners

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 16:56:00 +0000

It's been a milestone sort of time around here the last few weeks, as they marked both Ma's 65th birthday and the resumption of our semi-traditional Movie Mondays. She hadn't initially wanted to do much in terms of her birthday but a few weeks ago, she decided she wanted a small group of us to go with her to Plainfield's, her favorite (and fanciest) Indian restaurant in town. It had been a hard few weeks leading up to the dinner, both emotionally and physically, and it was hard to tell if she'd shifted into the next phase of all this, and would have to start further limiting her activities and just the amount of general stimulation in a day.

Worried that dinner might be too much, those of us around her created a back up plan if the day came and she was overwhelmed; a dinner at home, picnic nearby, etc. I told Ma this in passing, not thinking much of it. The next morning, she managed to get out that I had upset her with this plan, which confused me, until she very clearly got out these sentences:

"I am still here." Pause. "I'm not dead yet." There were tears in her eyes as she said this, and I felt horrible of course, and trapped in that no man's land of care taking and caring for someone who is so changed in some ways, and so not in others. I realized I had underestimated her own estimation of herself and what she is capable of -- she went on to relay that because there is so little she can do for everyone else (and in general) it felt like she was being completely dismissed. I apologized, of course, and it shifted my view of her once again - this illness (any illness, I'm guessing) is such a moving target, and it seems once we get comfortable in one place, something changes and we adjust to the next and the next and the next; nothing is static or predictable. And I guess why should it be, as the same can be said for life, but somehow, with her illness, partially because of how long it's gone on, we've all gotten comfortable enough in this phase of remission (inside of a cancer where remission doesn't exist) to assume certain things and go about our day the same as the day before. I don't think I will get so comfortable again, or I will try not to, especially in terms of her feelings, as I've been reminded that no matter how much she has changed physically and capability wise, she is still, and always has been, right here. And don't worry, she has fully taken her power back - she announced as such - and has taken to flipping Jim and I off, first with many fingers, then with her index, and finally, triumphantly, with her middle. We did all go to a gorgeous Indian feast, Ma in a beautiful new turquoise sweater and white linen skirt, bought as a surprise by her friend Jan. She looked radiant, and honestly, death was no where in sight that night.

In our return to the movies, we saw "Beginners" which seemed to speak directly to our experience, especially as of late, and the conundrum that if we are paying attention, everyday sort of starts us at zero in terms of what we know about ourselves, the people we love, and the world. It's one of the most real and intimate movies I've seen in a long time, and essentially the plot is this (don't worry, this is all revealed in the first five minutes): A man who's wife has died after 45 years of marriage reveals that he's gay, he is then diagnosed with lung cancer, dying three years later. Grim as that sounds, it really isn't in this film, as it so so real and funny, told from the son's point of view with quirky indie features and characters that never cross over to precious an unbelievable. (This goes for the father's Jack Russel, who is afforded pithy subtitles exactly when you would want a dog to give his/her opinion in real life.) Of course, Ma and I could more than relate to the cancer plotline, as the son moves in and takes care of his father in his final months. Far from morbid, it is so much more about the way grief infiltrates a life, the confusing notion of really knowing anyone, the ways in which our parents hand down their shit to us, and how terrifying it is to really love someone, especially after you've faced or experienced true loss. Yet somehow, loving is the only way to live, the only way to move forward, even if you know you don't have much time left.

Leave it to Ma and me to love a movie about the death of a beloved parent, and it is this weird shared curiosity which perhaps binds us closest together. I know I got this trait from her, always wanting to understand the thing I'm in the middle of by reading and talking about it, immersing myself in it until I have a glimmer of understanding, stopping only when am just too exhausted to take in any more information on the topic. (Note: On Ma's nightstand right now is a book called, "Death Is Of Vital Importance" by Kubler-Ross. She was such a Kubler-Ross groupie at one point in time, the early 80s, I think, when hospice and AIDS first entered the national consciousness, that the book's front cover is cut up, Kubler-Ross's picture removed, Ma having taken it and put it in some long lost frame. She, of course, recommends I read when she's done.)

And here's the trailer for Beginners. See it.

No Further Study Necessary

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:53:00 +0000

I've been thinking about writing for a few weeks now, and even tried last week, but as happens sometimes, everything felt too big and heavy to write about. It's a strange feeling when this happens, given that this is how I sort things out, but some days, I just can't -- and find myself not wanting to wade around in everything that is happening, for fear of being taken under. It's been a hard couple of weeks, with Ma getting physically weaker (we had quite an experience at the top of the stairs the other day, where she sort of crumpled in slow motion and then I had to figure out how to get her back up off the floor, the answer being a slow, seated trip down the stairs --and here's a shout out to a well placed banister on that one!) and an emotional melt-down after the movies (mainly due to a maddening eye itch inside her eye, leftover from the shingles) that made me feel so helpless that for the first time, I wished her freedom from all of it. From the daily struggle, from a body she has little control over, and a mind that is being slowly squeezed into a smaller and smaller space. Shit.

At any rate, I've mainly been pondering how to write about an experience I shared with Ma last month, when we went to see her spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, on Skype at a Unitarian church downtown. I think what was most incredible about it was watching her watch him on the big screen, how bright her face got, how she didn't miss a word. He says much less than he used to, given his stroke several years ago, but I always take away something from what he says. Much of what he focuses on is going inward, staying connect with your true self (or God, or that inner voice or intuition) as much as you can, and trying not to get caught up in the distractions of the world. The idea or theory being, that what we really are is love, and by focusing in on that and radiating it out, we can remain centered and loving and pass that on to those around us. But it's not something that necessarily happens by visible action, and it's nothing that can be forced upon anyone else. (He gave the very funny example of protestors at a peace rally all angrily chanting "Peace, peace, peace!") So it's a simple concept, yet impossibly hard in the real world, as it involves not judging, not living in reaction or acting out on all the slaps and bruises inflicted on our fragile little egos.

In action, Ma always has been (and is still, of course) my best example of this, and it was brought home all the more that night. She simply radiates love. Yet, even now, she is still trying to learn how to live the best way she can. Someone in the audience had asked a question about how to stay centered in the midst of a crumbling world, natural disasters, corrupt governments, etc. Ram Dass essentially said that you can't learn how to live by watching the news, you have to go back to the holy texts and studying the ways those people overcame the same kind of chaos in their time He was also saying again to go inward, instead of directing all your energies outward into the chaos. Now, Ma insists on reading the NYTimes on Sundays and watching the PBS news hour every night, (the cast of which I've dubbed the "sad sacks" because each anchor or expert is more dour than the last and after ten minutes, I can't watch anymore), but she likes it, says it keeps her engaged, and I think it makes her feel that she's still a part of something bigger, given how small her world has been forced to become.

Anyway, among many other things she took away that night, she decided that she needed to study Maharajji's teachings (Ram Dass's guru, also Ma's, an Indian saint) instead of watching the news at night. (Note: My mother has more spiritual books than I've ever seen outside of a New Age bookstore. She has read and reread and read again everything there is about Maharajji, and probably about most of the great Eastern spiritual teachers.) I wasn't sure this was exactly what Ram Dass was advocating, but I went along. "So does that mean no more Sunday New York Times?" I asked her.
"Hmmm," she said. "No. Baby steps."
The first morning after her self-imposed abstinance from the sad sacks, I asked her what she did instead.
"Read about Maharajji."
"Was that more satisfying?"
"No," she said, and scowled.
"You know Ma," I said. "I think Ram Dass was talking about people who get so wrapped up in the news and these far flung events that they have no control over that they stop paying attention to their own lives, and the people they impact more immediately. So he was telling them to read the texts that might encourage centering and love, from where they are right now. Um, I don't think this is a problem you have."
"Oh!" she said, her face lighting up. "Really?"
"Really," I said. "I think spiritually, you are right on track. No further study necessary. Watch those sad sacks if you want, who cares?"
"Phew," she said, letting out a long breath. "Thank God."
And the next night, there was Gwen whats-her-name, along with a gaggle of grim Wall Street/political pundit types, forecasting what can only be described as just short of the end of days, their light and sound flickering out and filling Ma's bedroom. The look on her face was one of pure bliss.

Preparation

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Mon, 16 May 2011 17:37:00 +0000

I caught myself (again) last night, sort of studying what it will be like when Ma dies. It's a strange impulse, in a way, but one I got from her. To understand things I attack them head on, research them, read about them and then read about them again. And then I write about all of it, of course.

Right now, I'm reading The Long Goodbye, by Meghan O'Rourke, a gal I sort of hated from the get go, given her prowess in the literary world since she was 26, as an editor of Slate and an author of a well-reviewed book of poems. Plus, she beat me to the punch, with the story of the young-ish mother dying, leaving a devastated daughter in the wake. Crass as that may sound, one of the only ways I feel like I can survive her death is to figure out how to make it into something else with my writing, whether it be fiction or non, and sometimes it feels like each piece of the literary pie is being sliced thinner all the time, whether it be technology or someone getting there first.

At any rate, despite some really beautiful moments, at the onset, this book did not (as Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Ford and the New York Times promised me) make me weep due to both content and the beauty of the writing - the opposite really, as I found myself feeling really sorry for this woman who didn't really seem to be all that close to her mother in many ways, and I'm wondering if that is at the heart of the book, although the writer herself doesn't really go there. At any rate, the episodes and family moments described weren't all that gripping to me, and neither were the people (sorry Meghan!) - they just didn't really come to life to me on the page in the beginning, least of all, her mother. It was only after the mother was gone that the book began to pick up steam for me, interspersed as it was with strange dreams, hallucinations and Meghan's own desperate search to understand what grief was, exactly, and when exactly she would be able to be free of it, or at least given a reprieve. This, I related to - that sense if she could only understand and master it, it wouldn't continue to impact her anymore than it already had. From there on in, Meghan weaves scenes and vignettes in with her own research into grief that bring the family to life in a way her description of her mother's decline simply didn't.

I guess this is why the book has gotten such rave reviews, such a young mother, such a young writer willing to dive headfirst into grief and wrestle with it; (she's 32, dammit!) yet I was continually struck with the lack of honest dialogue that occurred between she and her mother, and was reminded again of how lucky I am to have the mother I do. I've never had to hide who I was from her, and vice versa, and sometimes the honesty was too much (from both sides) but in the end, we can sit here and talk about her dying, what makes us both sad about that specifically, but she can leave this world with both of us knowing that nothing is left unsaid.

I guess (in the literary world) it would be a better story if my mother had been a stranger to me before this, or at least distant and somewhat misunderstood, but there is no mystery for me to uncover. Honesty and transparency has always been her way of living life, and since she worked so hard trying to undo the dysfunction of her childhood by raising my sister and me in a wholly different way, we grew up highly aware of who she was and why she did the things she did. I have long understood the struggle it was for her to become the person she has, how difficult it was to find her true self underneath the projections of oppressive parents and a difficult first marriage. If anything, I have only seen her come more fully into that in the last two years, and am lucky that this fucking brain tumor hasn't taken away the essence of who she is in any way, shape or form.

I was about 150 pages into The Long Goodbye (a damn good title, something else that irked me) sort of observing Meghan's struggle from a distance, almost clinically, studying how she wrote about certain emotions, memories and feelings, taking lots of mental notes, when suddenly, I had to put the book down. I think it was after reading a line about the difference between her mother dying and her mother being dead that I remembered, Holy Shit, I am not going to get to skip any of this, and no matter what happens, I will be just as unhinged and confused, and fucked, really, when it happens. I tell myself differently all the time, that these two years have given us time to prepare, to anticipate, that her being paralyzed reminds us every day of what's happening, and that given everything, including living with my parents for the last 18 months, I will probably be the most prepared (and equipped, of course) person on the planet for her death. Meghan had two years of cancer with her mother too, and she indicates plainly that it did fuck all, if any, good in terms of preparation.

My point? I'm not sure, exactly. Only that I will probably pick up the book again, and finish it, because however futile, I want to understand what the inconceivable might look like. This too, I got from my mother - she has been studying death and dying her entire life, and has a room full of books to show for it. She was and is endlessly fascinated by death (even if she's not too keen on doing it right this second), it was her way of trying to understand losing a younger sister to SIDS at three days old, when my mother was 3. She wanted to know where her sister went, and for the last 40 years, has been trying to wrap her mind around what is essentially unknowable to any of us.

That might be the thing I will miss the most about her; how much she understands this strange urge in me to read, research and master what is happening, and moreover, that I want to write about it, that I am taking time away from her to mold this story into something understandable, a novel-ish kind of thing that I'm writing at the moment. This is not a wholly normal urge, I understand, but it's what a writer does, and right now it is giving me this tiny parallel universe to slide into, where I get to make the story my own. I can put words in people's mouths, make them behave better or worse than they actually have,and expand the small quietness of what my family has been living in the last few years into words spread wide across the page. The bitch of it, of course, is that the mother still dies in the story. It can't be any other way.

On Being Equipped

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:44:00 +0000

Ma was excruciatingly sad today. She was worried about everything, from bankruptcy (should she live several more years and need more and more paid care) to my stepfather's (albeit horrible) cold and cough, which had rendered him watery eyed and exhausted and on the couch for the last few days, to me, as I've had a few weeks that have taken me under in several different ways. She broke down about all of it, and in the midst of trying to explain why she was so upset, every sentence a struggle, most of what she managed to say was, "I just want out of here," and "I don't know what I did to deserve this." I've never heard her say anything like this in almost two years, and I can't adequately describe how the cells in my body feel changed by it. I went fuzzy for a few days after hearing her say that, picturing my mom in the prime of her life or in her 20s, that person who is gone now in so many ways, and thinking that there is no way to make sense of what is happening. Everyday I find myself trying to pry some bit of meaning out of it, and most days, I come up empty. I realize, at some level, that this is a fruitless venture, trying to eek the meaning on a big picture grand scale when you are in the middle of something so huge that one wrong step, one minute too long lingering in the reality and it will take you under.

I understand as best I can what she means when she has those moments - she is sick and tired of having to be taken care of all the time, above everything else. There is nothing more I would like to do than relieve her of this burden, to give her hours of time to herself, the freedom of taking care of herself and barring that, make her able to walk again. Moments like the ones we shared today make me feel guilty for worrying about how many times I've worked out this week or how much I weigh or how I'm going to get any time to myself that day, they make me stop and remember everything she is going through that she rarely gets stuck in, rarely expresses. These moments cause me to remember that she is entirely trapped and helpless in a way that is wholly different from us, the ones who take care of her. It humbles me, sometimes brings me to my proverbial knees.

Lately, it is so much her inability to talk that is driving her to an unimaginable level of frustration. There is no stopping the progression of this tumor, which we have all known, but we've been given such a reprieve from its marching orders that I imagined it coming not to a complete stop exactly, but to a slow slide, a nearly imperceptible kind of forward movement. That idea has faded these last few months, as words come to her only with extended effort and sometimes they never do, replaced by five or six sentences of gibberish that even I cannot begin to decipher.

Today, I felt like I will never be able to make sense about why this is happening, to her, to me, to everyone whose life she has touched. Then I was hit too, with the reality that she is going to lose everything before she dies and I will have to watch it happen. I think because she has defied the odds and done so well for so long, I refused to believe that she would change all that much more before the end - she would be herself and then she would be gone. And the magical thinking that the paralysis, the dependence, the loss of memory, the impending death - that was enough - that this disease would at least leave her speech, words, ideas, banter. It would simply be too much to take otherwise. And so now it is just that. Too fucking much.

She has bits of sentences and words here or there, but it is going, that voice I love, those ideas and thoughts I'm not sure I can live without. I felt spun back in time today, back to those first days of my sister's cancer diagnosis, when I knew no details of this disease, including the fact that there was no Stage Five, and given that my sister was deep into Stage Three, no awareness of how close she really was to death. I just knew that up until her diagnosis, the worst thing I had faced in life were a gaggle of bad boyfriends and graduate school. Our family had dinner one night in Seattle after a particularly horrific day full of test results and prognoses and talk of taking both my sister's breasts. I had been strong up until then, but as I tried to eat, the dinner and the restaurant faded away and it was just my mom and me. I looked at her and said, "I am not equipped." Without hesitation, she put her hand on my arm and said, "We are all equipped. It's just that none of us want to be."

It's one of the truest things anyone has ever said to me, and at 4 am, not sleeping, writing this, it's what came to me most clearly. And she was right, I had it in me to take care of my sister and hold her up when she couldn't do it herself. Not one fiber of my being was ready for it, but there it was, and I did it. In exactly the same way, I don't want to be equipped to watch my mother die, but despite everything, I take small comfort in knowing that somehow when it happens, I will be.

Planning

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:14:00 +0000

Ma's short term memory is something that has faded, if not altogether disappeared in the last two years, except when it hasn't. Sometimes she will pull something out from weeks ago that I would never have thought she would retain, but then she does. She asks about my friends often, and usually remembers a staggering amount about their lives, especially newer details that have happened in the last six months. Or that she wants to send someone a thank you note or she knows Matt is coming soon, just not exactly when. But ask her what she had for dinner last night or who came by over the weekend, and she's at a loss. In an effort to keep her abreast of all her activities (and the comings and goings of my aunt, Matt, etc) I've hung a calendar next to her chair in the living room, which I've come to understand is really just for me, as neither Ma or my step dad ever looks at the thing.

For instance, Ma or Jim will say, "Now when is Matt coming?"
And I'll respond with the dates and then say, "It's on the calendar."
"What calendar?" Jim will say, and I will point to the one that has been hanging next to Ma for the last 18 months. "Oh. I guess it just never occurs to me to look there."
Then Ma will look over at it, as if it has been hung there moments before and say, "Oh! Ok. Now what day is it? Oh. Now when does Matt get here?"

And so it goes. The other day her friend Pat was over, and Ma was coveting her new planner, which was a lovely shade of green, with a pretty bird on the front and many inspirational quotes from Rumi and the like inside. Here is where I must tell you that my mother has always been obsessed with organizing her life, and spent the better part of it in search of a planner that would meet her needs. No gadgets need apply, however, because Ma also loved to write. The action of writing most of all. She owned fountain pen after fountain pen to showcase her beautiful calligraphy-influenced penmanship, which I've always been a tiny bit jealous of. I've hijacked her Mont Blanc, and have vowed to have it tuned up and use it soon, to the best of my ability. She eventually settled on a Franklin Planner a few years ago, and used it with religious fervor until she lost the use of her right arm about a year and a half ago, thanks to that stupid fucking tumor that insists on growing directly onto the motor strip in her brain. Since then, she's been unable to write or organize anything, and until the other day, I didn't realize how much she missed it.

"I need an planner," she said. "Just like Pat's."
"Ok," I said. "When did you get that one, Pat?"
"December," she said.
When I tried to tell Ma that finding one just like Pat's would be slim to none, she just shook her head. "Nope," she said. "Just like Pat's."

So, being the fixer that I am, I embarked on a long and fruitless day of searching for a 2011 planner. It did not occur to me that it's April. I mean it did, I just didn't anticipate that there would be zero planners in every store. I sort of pictured bins of 1/2 priced planners everywhere, but everywhere apparently means February to the rest of the world.

My only option was a skinny, tablet sized calendar, on sale at Target for $3.83. I brought it home and gave Ma the news. "Listen," I said. "If you live until December, you can have your pick of planners. Right now, this is it." She picked it up and shrugged. She was right, it was not an exciting calendar in any way. But she could at least flip through the months if she needed to see what was happening next month, something she couldn't do with the one on the wall.

The next morning, I put a few major events on the new calendar and showed her.
"It would be nice to mark off the days," she said. "Then at least I could tell where I was." She paused. "I think yesterday when I was looking at Pat's planner, I sort of forgot I couldn't write." She found this vaguely hysterical. The forgetting of it, that is.
"I wondered what you were going to do with that planner," I said. "But I didn't want to point out the obvious, given your love of all things planner-oriented."
"You knew and you didn't say anything. That was nice of you."
At the end of the day, there was a shaky, off-center "X" over April 1st on the new calendar. "Ha!" she said.
"Nice work," I said.
"God that was fucking HARD, making that X."

Since I had just purchased a 5-pack of highlighters in various colors, I offered her one, under the guise that maybe just making a blob over the day would be easier. She chose green, and I'm happy to report, is moving right along through the month.

When she first lost the use of her arm, it was one of the only times I really saw her angry about what was happening to her, most of it directed at her guru. "Fucking Maharajji," she said. "I was so pissed. I couldn't even look at his picture when Clem when limp. (We call the arm Clem, Clem the Claw, actually, as the wiley limb has the habit of catching on everything, belt loops, sweaters, under Ma's thigh, etc.) "But after a week or two, it passed," she said, "and I accepted that it's all part of this process, because really, there's very little that I can do about it."

A few times in the last couple of days, she's tapped the calendar and nodded at me. I know her well enough to interpret that what she means to say is that this tiny, tiny bit of control is making her feel better, and she's again let go of the fact that she can't write - transcending a loss most of us can't begin to fathom with the rarest kind of grace.

Fear, Karma

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 17:09:00 +0000

I read an essay by David Rakoff this week called, "Another Shoe," about his second go-round with cancer at 49. The first time was lymphoma in his 20s, and this time it is a tumor in his shoulder, probably caused by the radiation he had the first time around. This cancer threatens to cause the removal of his entire left arm, which, as you can imagine, would be daunting for anyone but especially so for a writer. However, he manages to write about it all with a searing honesty and humor I'd not really seen before. At the end of it, he intimates that hasn't really learned anything from the whole ordeal per se, aside from extreme gratitude for not losing his arm, and deciding to live without letting the fear of death swallow him whole. He also observes that we all are dealt a fair amount of shit in life, so basically, we all need to suck it up and get back to the business of grocery shopping, getting our hair cut, paying parking tickets, etc., because life continues on, whether or not we are participating.

I wanted to steal everything about this essay, down to how he nails "the depressing, neutral almond color of all aids designed to help the infirm and disabled," to his wider insights about the whole process of dealing with cancer. I can especially relate to that depressing neutral almond color theory after spending an afternoon in a store designed exclusively to sell these apparatuses. Infirms and their caretakers hobbled around the place as I searched for a new arm sling for Ma. It was a horror show, plain and simple, blandly named The Beaverton Pharmacy. If you never know what a compression sock or a commode look like in your lifetime, then you are a lucky person. Ditto the large woman with bulging varicose veins who was probably shopping for a compression sock, who sat on said commode and threatened to use it, given that a clerk would not let her use the store bathroom. (You cater to the old and the weak and you don't have a public bathroom? Really?)

At its core, his essay made me think so much about my and my mom's journey through this, coupled with our mutual desire to understand it from a global perspective. The bitch of it is, no matter our mutual love of processing and dissecting and analyzing, not to mention how many years she has spent studying the dying process on a spiritual level and helping people die on a physical one, most days, we are left with no greater understanding as to why. "Karma," is what she usually comes up with and she means this not only for this lifetime, but for a plane of past lives in a realm of space and time none of us really understand. She also ascribes to the idea that for whatever myriad reasons, her soul chose this particular set of circumstances for this lifetime. It's all incredibly difficult for me to swallow on any plane but I try to as much as I can, given my respect for her beliefs and the ways in which they have so influenced my own.

Speaking of karma, I made a hugely false assumption about the whole theory after my sister survived a cancer she shouldn't have six years ago -- I took it for granted that now, my family would be safe. Ha! We had survived our brush with death and made it through. Now, our lives would be normal, easier. I can't say if I assumed this on a conscious level, but my naivete was quickly undone when her remission nearly equaled the destruction of our relationship; my skull was later practically crushed by the utter stupidity of this assumption when Ma was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

On a smaller scale, I did another sort of karma math recently, when I applied for the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. (An incredible long shot to be sure, 5 fiction and 5 poetry fellows picked out of a pool of 2,000 or so). There was a piece of me that thought, ok, I've put my life on hold twice in the last six years in order to help take care of my family, so, now, obviously, I will be given this huge gift of time and funding to really start writing again and as a bonus, I will instantly know what I am going to be doing for the next two years, and as an added side effect I will leave in the fall, which will eliminate the difficult decision of when to leave Ma and viola, life will be easier! Because why? Because I've earned it.

I didn't get the fellowship, informed as I was by a form email that read, "Dear Mims" and went on re: my contribution to an overwhelming talented writing pool, and please, do apply next year, as they delight in seeing the progress of their applicants. Oh, screw you, is what I mainly thought, and then, I'm screwed, because now I'm going to really face how to continue do this writing thing without the safety net of funding and a chunk of time, and without the safety net that has paid the bills lo these last 10 years: waiting tables. (I have decided that after 20 years on and off in the trade, when I move to Northern California, that will be the end of my illustrious serving career. Come hell or high water, I'm determined to use my brain and my two degrees to make a living from here on out.) Scary stuff, although now that I've had a few days to settle into that reality, I'm miraculously ok with it. Still scared, however, in terms of what the future holds for my career. When I am calm enough I can tell myself it's just the unknown, and in the last few years, I've had to plunge headlong into extreme versions of it, usually kicking and screaming. At least this time there will be some free will involved, and some choice about the next steps in my life.

I guess my main point here is that I have to choose every day to not let the fear of my uncertain future swallow me whole, especially in terms in how I will cope when Ma really does go. As Rakoff so eloquently points out, there's not really a whole hell of a lot else we can do. Sometimes, I don't know why I'm not living in terror of cancer, given that all my immediate family members have had some form of it; some days I think this gruesome statistic somehow implies that I won't get it, simply because they all have. I can honestly say that other than a few moments waiting for my mammogram results last fall, it's really never occurred to me. This is mainly because it would be such a massive waste of time for me to worry in that way, and I guess that theory comes all the way back around to karma. As Ma commented early on in all of this, her 40 years of yoga, 20 years of vegetarianism, and 30 years of not drinking or smoking was, "Bullshit, really." What happens is supposed to happen, that is the part of life we can't control. We can only control our response when "it" does happen, and watching her throughout her life, and up close these past (almost) two years, her response to this diagnosis has been to live, love and do her best to give up her own worry-wart tendencies. She is right here, right now, nearly all the time, and as a result, her moments of suffering are brief.

I'm striving to live that way, and the other day I was struck anew by how most people don't. I was grocery shopping, and the checker was laughing about how much kelp and iodine he'd sold that day.

"Why are people buying that?" I asked.

"To save them from radiation poisoning," he said. "From Japan. I mean, I was in New York for 9/11, and after people freaking out and duct-taping their windows, I'm just so over the panic."

"No shit," I said. "On 9/11 I was living in LA and my boyfriend at the time wanted to buy gas masks, and I said, 'Fine, but you know you'll be in spin class or something without your gas mask when the bomb hits.'"

I'm sure I said this much less cleverly at the time, but I did get a good laugh out of the retelling. But kelp and iodine? That's going to be the thing that saves you from this mess of a world? Not that anyone had even said we were at risk, 5,000 miles away from real life-threatening devastation. I guess all I know at this point is this: you cannot prepare for the earthquake, the tsunami, the terrorists, the diagnosis, the radioactive fallout or the loss. But if you somehow manage to survive it, you can continue to live.

Waiting, Seeing

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:03:00 +0000

I received a rare gift this week - the chance to see my boyfriend twice in one month, and with it, the opportunity to spend 3 whole days by myself, with no responsibilities and nothing to specifically do. The days were made all the more sweeter knowing that I would be seeing Matt at the end of the day (and maybe when he came home for lunch too), but it was the first time in the last year and a half where I was finally unfettered, with no one to check in with or check in on, and it has been both liberating and entirely strange.

Although it goes without saying that I cherish the time I've had with my mom, and I consider it an honor to take care of her, at times it feels endless and utterly exhausting. I think because I don't talk about it a ton, people assume there is a staff of hospice nurses, etc., that my step dad and I sort of coordinate to take care of my mom, and while there are those people, they are around four hours a week, and between that and the few days a week her good friends cover for us, the rest of the hours are left to my step dad and me. It is really all day, everyday, unless like today, I happen to be 1,000 miles away.

It is not only the general care taking that takes energy - meals, bathing, dressing, etc. it's that lately, I feel a lack of things to tell her, to update her with, as not much new and exciting is really happening in my life. All of us, including her, are stuck in this pattern of waiting and seeing, waiting to see if she will continue to decline slowly and/or searching for signs that the decline is now, because if it is, then we really have to get prepared, because what if the end comes more quickly than we've anticipated? Last fall, I imagined moving to California sometime this spring, but now that feels too soon - even as I sit here in a cafe, happy in my fantasy that I already live in this town, that I can look forward to seeing Matt every day, that we will find an apartment together, then I'll get a fabulous job writing and teaching or (please, please) miraculously secure a Stegner Fellowship and write full-time for the next two years. I think it's change I'm beginning to crave, but even that change is a fantasy, as coming here will either mean I will have to leave her and somehow reconcile that choice, or it will mean that she is gone, and so then, it will all be an entirely different experience.

Everyone has an opinion about this. My father says, "You've put in your time, when do you get to live your life?" My father really has no idea what's going on over here, and that has always been the case. He means well, but I sort of want to punch him when he says this. If I were speaking to my sister, I imagine she would say something like, "Yeah, it's time, man. You should go." Not that she's going to show up and help out when I do leave, for reasons too thick to go into here. Not exactly comforting. Friends, strangers and the like also have opinions, ranging from, "Well, if you leave, you'll never get that time back," to "You have done so much, and you deserve to move on and start your life."

Then there is what my mother says again and again, "I love you, and I can't thank you enough for the beautiful job you've done and continue to do." Then she peers down at me over her glasses. "And you can leave at any time."

On top of feeling a lack of things to say, becoming bored with myself, she is losing more and more speech as the weeks go by. If I have not said it before (and if I have, it's worth saying again) my mother is nothing short of brilliant, has read more books than I could ever hope to in my lifetime, and used to talk in the rapid-fire way that I still do. I miss the back and forth of our conversations, the speed and dimension of them. I have adjusted to her inability to get the words out, and have become an automatic sentence finisher for everyone as of late, as used to it as I am spending so many hours with her. I know she just wants my company, my presence, that she doesn't care all that much about what I have to say, just that I am there. And when I remember that, when we are reduced to a few sentences every few minutes, I know that's all I want from her, for her to still be here. But it's a fight these days, waiting, wanting, thinking, imagining and future dreaming. I don't think there's any way around it, other than to enjoy this day I have here, alone, unfettered. And then there will be tomorrow, home again with her.

Small Moments

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 23:09:00 +0000

When I'm posting about Ma, I always feel like I have to have a piece that has a clear beginning, middle and end. Not as much as the essays or stories I write, given that I have agonized over every line and word again and again; I've always used this forum to free myself of those perfectionist constraints. In reading from few different sources lately, I've been struck by the power of illuminating the smallest of moments in life and am going to try and post a bit more in that spirit. One source is the blog of a writer who is a friend of a friend, Emily Rapp, who recently had a baby diagnosed with Tay-Sach's disease, a condition that basically tears down a baby's brain and nervous system until there nothing is left. This, it goes without saying, I cannot imagine, despite watching it happen in some form with Ma. Emily started a blog, http://ourlittleseal.wordpress and has vowed not to edit herself or spend time rewriting, but simply to post what she's feeling and experiencing in the most raw and direct way possible, and in order to keep her mind from going to those places where her son begins to lose function, she tries to keep every post focused on the day she's writing it, her best attempt at staying present. She has only been posting for a month or so, but I'm always struck by her words and the immensity of what lies ahead for her and her family. She also wrote an amazing memoir about being born with a defect that required the amputation of most of her leg as a young girl, called Poster Child.

Reading Emily's thoughts has inspired me, along with a quirky book of vignettes by Bailey White, called Mama Makes Up Her Mind: And Other Dangers of Southern Living. An equally quirky woman gave it to me a month or so ago, and told me I needed to read it to Ma. Every week since then, she asks me if I have. "No," I've said. "But I will." In part I haven't because we are still wading through Freedom, and I feel guilty enough for not reading to her enough out of that, despite many long tedious passages and our mutual agreement that we don't actually care what happens to anyone in the book -- we just want to finish the damn thing. (Spoiler alert: we got so impatient yesterday with it all, that I skimmed the last 100 or so pages and gave her the highlights. Sorry, Franzen, but you wore us thin with all the endless myriad details!) There is also the fact that we get distracted during the day, as there are visitors and hospice visits and meals to make and laundry to do, and then Ma needs more tea. This happens about every 20 minutes, in the middle of whatever's going on: Ma needs more tea. But I'd read a few of the stories on my own, and liked them - they are usually about two pages long, but it's incredible what the writer does in two pages. (And perhaps it's also her living situation that's close to my heart - she's a self-proclaimed 30-something spinster who lives with her eccentric mother.) Saturday morning was a hard one for Ma, for various reasons, so I started reading to her about Bailey and her mother, and these precise, beautifully weird stories changed everything, at least for a few hours. Let's just say they live in a house in Georgia with a vintage Porsche and a bathtub are both installed on the front porch and her mother's favorite movie is Midnight Cowboy. I almost cried when I told my quirky friend how the book had made it so much easier to survive that shitty morning.

So, in the spirit of all of the above, of trying to live in the moments that we have right in front of us, good, bad, painful, etc. here are few random slices of our lives from the past year and a half, some recent, some old - all that I've not known exactly what to do with until now.

Ma is horizontal on the hospital bed that's been installed in our house since her grand mal seizure in October 2009. I have to reach across her to get to the button that will raise her up to sitting, so I say, "Ma, do you want to push the button?"
She lifts her head up off the pillow to look at me. "Why does everyone ask me that, 'Bobbie, do you want to push the button? No, I don't want to push the fucking button," she says, as she pushes the button. As she rises slowly, the mechanical squeak of the bed following her progress, she says, laughing, "Is it because it's the only thing I can do at this point? Push this motherfucking button?"

A year ago November, I moved in with my parents to help with my mom. In the previous six months, my mother had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, my beloved pug died suddenly and I had given up my apartment, my freedom and my privacy. However, for the first time in almost eight years, I had a boyfriend. A very handsome, smart, lovely boyfriend. After the weekend I moved in, after he'd spent his previous visit helping me schlep nearly everything I own to a storage unit, I called him. He had a been gone a day or two, was back in Northern California where he lives. This is what I said:

"Now what do I?" I really didn't know. I felt entirely lost.
"You hang out with you Mom. You love her. That's the only thing you need to worry about right now."
"Oh," I said, thinking to myself, but I'm in a relationship, I need to work out, I need to write, I need to produce things, I need to be productive, I need to show the world that I'm doing something.
"There are only two rules for getting through something like this: Don't lose your shit and have no regrets."
"That's it?" I said.
"That's it," he said.

I make the mistake of telling a girl I work with about what's happening with Ma. I would never expect her to understand, as she runs her own business as a telemarketer for hire. Anyone who could enjoy cold calling, my personal definition of hell, and like it enough to create an entire business around it is not going to know what to say when I tell her my mother is dying. But, I am trapped this particular Saturday night and a few glasses of wine in at the bar next door to our work, and L. stopped in, sat at my table. I knew no one else, and there was nowhere to go. When she asks what is going on in my life, out it comes. Her face doesn't change expression when I tell her, although there is a strange smile that creeps across it when she tells me some girl she didn't know very well in some event group she used to go to had a sister who died of brain cancer. "Hard stuff," she says. I sip my wine.
"You know," she continues, "I am really worried about my fish, Fluffy." I don't know L. well, but I know her well enough to understand that she has no sense of irony and that she is being entirely genuine and serious. I nod. "I mean the other day I went into the living room and well, he wasn't swimming like this," she says, and flutters her long white hand to indicate a horizontal position. "He was swimming like this." Her hand then flutters vertically.
"Huh," I say.
"I mean, I've had that fish for five years," she says, taking a short sip of wine. "I'm pretty attached to him."

Ma is waiting for the State of the Union address to come on TV, and she wants to watch it downstairs while she eats her dinner. This means Jim, my stepdad, has to bring the TV down, since I am making dinner. Ma likes to watch me cook, so she sits in the kitchen for a few minutes and watches, then cranes her neck towards the living room, where Jim is sitting on the couch, not getting the TV. In his defense, it doesn't start for almost 40 minutes.
"What's he doing?" she says. I shrug. She rolls her eyes, and scoots herself over to where he can see her. "Um, Jim?" she says.
"I'll get it," he says, and continues to sit on the couch.
She rolls back over to me and taps her good hand on her good leg. "Marriage," she says.
"It doesn't start for like 40 minutes," I tell her.
"Oh," she says, and is quiet for a moment. Then she leans forward and whispers, "I don't understand why he just won't go get it."
I shrug again. "Just think of all the karma you are burning by waiting so patiently."
"Bullshit," she says. She taps and taps and half-watches me. Then she starts laughing. "Doesn't anyone understand how much I'm suffering?!? I mean, I am really suffering here!"
We are still laughing when Jim bring the TV downstairs 37 minutes later. I tell Ma she's going to have to suffer a little louder from now on if she wants everyone to hear.

Ah, yes, the New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:03:00 +0000

I thought this January would be like all the rest of them, with me swearing I won't be like all the minions, i.e., taking stock of my life, making resolutions, etc. This year is a little different, however, seeing as how I didn't think Ma would still be here, and marveling most days at the strange wonder that she still very much is. I never do the resolution thing, having been a gym rat for years and having given up smoking in my early-ish 30s (ok, right around 35, you know when they really start to threaten you with blood clots and heart attacks if you are on birth control, and really, I was always a closet/social/smoke while drinking type, but still, that shit had to go), and I'm usually pushing myself to figure the next thing out in my life, so I've just never needed the new year to make me resolve to do anything. Such an impressive self-starter with amazing willpower I am!

Sort of. I am embarking this month on what is hiply known as "Sober January" around these parts, and perhaps everywhere else. It's mainly because my nautropath wouldn't give me any more thyroid pills to take off these annoying fivetoseven pounds that I've been trying to lose for six months, even when I asked nicely. She turned to me and said, "How much wine are you drinking?" To which I said, "Define "how much." And she laughed and said I was never going to lose those stubborn pounds unless I eased up on the sauce for a bit. Damn. And it's true, never have I enjoyed wine so much or so much of it as in the last oh, say 19 months. There's been a lot of, "Should I have another glass? Oh right, my mother is dying. Fuck yes I will."

Now, I come from a long and steady line of alcoholics, so there has always been sort of a red alert quality to drinking at all, mostly from Ma. I don't think she is wrong that it pays to be aware of the issue, given oh, genetics, etc., but as I have explained to her since my early 20s, booze has never really been my thing. That was my sister's thing, and she was much better at it than I. My thing was food, then boys, then men, then lots and lots of therapy. At any rate, welcome to Sober January, everybody! It's both easier and weirder than I expected it to be, mainly just to change the habit of going for a drink - either to meet up with friends or a post-work unwind or just because, say, my mother is still dying. I'm a little over week in, and I'm feeling like as time goes on, it's getting to be less of a thought or an issue, however, a big glass of red hasn't ceased to sound delicious. Not even a little bit.

When I first decided to do this, I wasn't going to tell Ma, for fear she would worry that I had a problem, but in chatting the other day it came out, and she seemed fully nonplussed by it. Very sweetly the next day, she asked me if I might want to meditate with her every day this month too, since I was doing this "cleanse." I agreed, half hoping she would forget, because as of late, the lady forgets everything, like what she had for lunch 20 minutes before.

The following day, I went about my business, and then she said, "So, are we going to meditate?"

"Shit," I said. "I thought you'd forget."

"Oh," she said. "No. It's about the only thing I can remember at this point."

And so we have been, almost every day since she suggested it. She asked me a few days in, "Do you like meditating?"

"I like meditating with you," I said, which is true. The world disappears when we sit together, never mind the fact that my brain barely stops long enough to catch its breath. I am usually making lists about the next five things I have to do or how much time I have to change my clothes and get to the gym or to work. But there are these pretty amazing crystalline nanoseconds that happen when I imagine that the two of us are out there together floating in whatever it is out there.

Sometimes, I think she sleeps through it. Sometimes I wonder if I do too. But when the alarm goes off, there she is, saying Namaste and putting her one good hand up to her forehead while she bows down to me, to her guru, to the universe. I don't know if I'll be able to keep it up on a daily basis when the month is over, but I take small solace in the fact that it will be something I can do when she's gone, when I'm missing her, and that maybe for a few minutes it will feel like she's still here. As for the red wine, well, all things in moderation, right?

Oh, Right, I Have a Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 01:15:00 +0000

It's been the strangest of times around here, or maybe just more of the same. I can't tell anymore, to be honest. Just trying to take it one day at a time, and be as present as I can for Ma. And myself - as I've written before, jumping ahead in time/desire/assumption has never served me, especially now. I think back when I started this blog, when I was single and snarky, when I amused myself (and hopefully you) by writing cutting things about the celebs, my dating life and douches who love mojitos. So much has changed since then, my focus taken in so many other directions, but I miss the freedom and frivolity of this forum the way I used to use it. But there doesn't seem to be a way to go back and write that way, too much is at stake anymore. I don't mean to say that I've turned humorless or that I still don't read The Superficial. Of course I do. It's more like these things that used to entertain me don't hold my attention the way they used to, but some days, I'm a little nostalgic for that kind of distraction.

Not that I would trade it for what I've learned and been given this past year and a half. I feel like lately, every time I try and write about it, I sort of fail miserably, at least in the big picture sense. This makes sense, since I'm still in the middle of it, and I have no idea what it's impact on the big picture will be, but I'm not a patient person. So I muse about it in bits, pulling back to write smaller vignettes about what is happening to me, as slices and angles of perspective are all I have.

I think back to the fact that it took me almost three years to write in any cohesive sense about my sister's cancer, and who knows how long this will take. In the meantime, I'm taking copious notes, which is what I did when she was sick. I play a game with myself some days, like last week, driving to buy new pillows and a potato ricer (which apparently is the secret to fluffy mashed potatoes) at TJ Maxx. I stared into the clouds ahead of me, a bit of sun poking through them and tried to imagine what they will look like when my mom is gone. Terrible, I thought. Awful. Like shopping at TJ Maxx will suddenly be impossible. At least for awhile. But I can't really feel it or know it one minute ahead of it happening. Sometimes I wish I could, that I could prep for this particular shitstorm. No such luck.

She's been more frail these past few weeks, given a bout with the shingles, a terribly bad reaction to the medication and the last few weeks, these nerve pain attacks that don't last all that long, but bring her to her knees. Or, given the wheelchair, they bring her up out of her seat. There is nothing we can do for her, except hold her hand and hope they pass. In short, it sucks. The next issue becomes too, now that she has been on steroids for so long (long term use is usually 6 months) and they suppress her immune system (hence the shingles) it might not be the tumor that kills her. It could be a bad cold that turns into pneumonia, or 1,000 other things. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about these possibilities, but they do change the playing field.

But then there was Thanksgiving. It was small this year, just me, Matt, Jim and Mom. She was glowing about it all week, all the more so when we started to cook. She can't get over that I actually do cook now (perfect mashed potatoes, sweet potato pudding with a ginger snap and pecan crust, creamed pearl onions) and while I was setting the table with her grandmother's silver, I could feel her watching.

"Some Martha Stewart flair," I said, folding the napkins that matched the tablecloth.
"I'm just marveling," she said, as I set down the ancient forks and knives. "Because this is how things are passed down." And no more than in that moment did my great-grandmother's silver or the holidays mean more.

And then there was the cackling we heard from the living room as we cooked. Ma was read the latest Amy Sedaris book, "Simple Times: Crafting for Poor People." What she found particularly funny? The section on crafting for the sick and infirm, since it's nice for them to craft, so that they don't feel like they are entirely wasting what little is left of their lives. Also, as Amy puts it, the crafts in this section, while incredibly simple (but not patronizing) look like they might have taken some skill, which raises a dying person's self-esteem. "Some people wouldn't get it," Ma said. "But I think it's fucking hysterical."

Ma, hiding behind the book, as I hadn't had time to fix her hair. This is the consistent thing she says to me nearly every morning, "But, most importantly, how's my hair?" Never a vain person, she blames this tick on not being able to control anything at this point, except perhaps the state of her hair.

New Forces of Geek!

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:35:00 +0000

All about my favorite live shows, Mortified and The Moth. Also featuring a Snooki pumpkin, which turns out to be an incredible likeness.

http://www.forcesofgeek.com/2010/10/props-to-spoken-word.html

One Year and a Few Miracles Later

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 23:28:00 +0000

We hit a milestone today with Ma - it's been a year to the day since her surgery, and well, as she says, she's still here. She decided a month or so ago that she wanted to visit her surgeon, Dr. Antezana, and get his read on how much time she might have left. She knew he couldn't really tell her anything specific without an MRI (which she didn't want, because she's on hospice) but she's been obsessed as of late by how long she's survived, mainly having to do with me. Since I moved in almost a year ago, she is anxious for me to get on with my life, to move to California and be with Matt, have babies with Matt, etc. Marrying him is of course in there somewhere, but mainly Ma has been focused on those babies. It's true, I'm almost 38, so in some senses the clock is ticking, but most of the time I can't think about all that, because where I am right now is with her.

Ma also wanted to see Dr. Antezana to thank him. We all did really, and it was a sweet reunion. I think he was surprised to see her doing so well, and when she asked him how much longer, he said, "I don't know. You've been blessed, and that's all I can say. I don't pretend to understand how it's all happened, except that it's you and your family, all the support you have around you." He went on to say that given the location of her tumor, etc., he would have guessed she might have lived six months after surgery, if that. So, although we kind of already knew it, we've been given a huge gift to have had her around this last year.. He told us too, that patients like Ma are what make his job worth it, given how hard it is to hand out terminal diagnoses day after day. He said that he would never forget her, and that he had as much to thank her for as vice versa. Needless to say, we were all a bit teary when we left, but Ma was positively glowing.

For a minute there last month, Ma was imagining getting as much time as she'd asked her guru for (seven years) and I liked to go along with it, whatever the impossibilities. But she suffered a setback a few weeks ago, in the form of a small seizure. Jim and Laurie were with with her, and Jim gave her a shot of ativan fast enough to calm things down quickly. It was sobering for all of us, as we'd gotten so comfortable and complacient as of late. She's been shifting for sure, but gradually enough that some days it's easy to think that maybe the tumor has slowed nearly to a stop. Not so much. It reset things a bit, at least in my mind, in terms of a little more vigilance and concern when it comes to being around her. It was an unsettling reminder of the reality of what's happening, but maybe one we needed in order to refocus. Who knows. All we can do is keep focusing on the day we have with her, the one right in front of us. When I am panicking, I remember that this is all there is to know.

I'm also thinking this: if that crazy, skeleton with a head, Rachel Zoe can manage to get pregnant here soon, I don't have anything to worry about.

Eeek! Mummy indeed. She may style people well, but Jesus does she need a sandwich. Or 12.

September Forces of Geek!

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:06:00 +0000

Hey! Here it is. And now I'll be posting twice a month. Good times!

http://www.forcesofgeek.com/2010/09/louie-louie.html

Keeper of the Heart

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:48:00 +0000

Well, apparently, I'm posting once a month these days, if I'm lucky. It's been a long few months, for reasons that I can't really go into here, but suffice it to say, it's more than kind of sucked. I've begun crawling out from all of it these last few weeks, and had a lovely visit to Northern Cal this weekend to visit Matt, who might be the sweetest man on earth. He's also become somewhat of an expert in keeping me relatively sane in the middle of all of this. It's been a good month with Ma, although some days I feel like she's shifting again, harder for her to find language and to track certain things, which I hate. Despite all that she's still sharp enough to follow what I'm saying, to make me laugh and to recommend books along the way.

She made me lose it the other day when she told me I should read, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship which chronicles the friendship of two writers in mid-life, Caroline Knapp and Gail Caldwell. I love Knapp's essays and the way she bonded with dogs better than people, and her memoir about her alcoholism Drinking: A Love Story, is one of the best I've ever read. Knapp died at 42 of lung cancer; Gail Caldwell wrote the book. Ma read about in the NYTimes, and on my way out the door last week, this was the conversation that transpired:

Ma: That book, you know, that one (she had already pointed out the review to me)....reminded me of us, the way they could talk and talk and talk.
Me: Already crying, unable to speak.
Ma : And she, this writer, she still, she still....
Me: Talks to her dead friend?
Ma: Yeah. So I want you to get it.
Me: More crying.
Ma: I didn't want to make you cry. But I wanted to remember to tell you.
Me: Still crying.

The thing is, my mother is the only person who would understand why I would want to read a memoir about death when my mother is in fact, dying. And this is because she wants to read it too. Somehow, for the two of us, it eases the pain and lessens the mystery when we can take in someone else's experience and/or watch them survive the thing they think they cannot. Not everyone is comfortable living this way, and my mother has always made me feel like I don't have to apologize for this macabre fascination with suffering, because it really is (unfortunately or fortunately) truly the stuff of life. If I've learned anything this year it's that there is no way to avoid it, the suffering, no matter what you do. You can plan and organize the shit out of everyday to try and maintain the illusion that this will somehow stop the unexpected and keep you safe. Some people spend there whole lives doing just that, polishing an illusion, and inevitably missing the glory of whatever shitstorm comes their way.

And I guess that's what I'm trying to do here, catch the glory of the shitstorm by re-telling these little moments with Ma. There are so many of them that there are too many to record, but I try to anyway, afraid as I am to miss or forget even one of them. She is still so powerfully here, no matter how she struggles with certain phrases or concepts. She is here to remind me of what we have and how lucky we are, and to remind me that all of that will still be here when she's gone. She is here to live out these days with me and fill them with meaning, and keep changing at some level the person I have been for years, even who I was a year ago. She tells me that everything that has happened these last 15 months has meaning, that nothing is an accident, every moment has its purpose and place, even if we don't understand exactly why for years, even if we never understand.

She passed Ted Kennedy in August, which I don't think can be called anything but a miracle. Sometimes she laments that it is all taking so long; not for her, but for those of us who take care of her. We, of course, despite our own impatience and frustration, wouldn't want it any other way. I don't think she would either. And plus, as she says, she asked her guru for more time. Whatever the outcome, there can be no doubt that we have been given that gift.

When Ma was first sick, she was given a pretty major dose of steroids to keep the swelling in her brain down, and what this did for a few weeks last June was to make her go completely manic. At the time, she believed it was "shakti" energy, an outpouring from the universe, but now, she admits it was probably just some really good drugs. She sent us all on a lot of errands to Target for pens, for note cards and mainly for scotch tape - she really had a thing for that scotch tape - and she had a lot of ideas about what she was going to do with the rest of her life. One idea was that she would volunteer at the hospice where she worked at a few times a week, create a meditation room there and serve as a sort of counselor for the nurses and social workers to keep them from getting burned out. What she wanted, she said, was to keep the heart in hospice.

Let's just say there was a lot of this kind of thing going on last summer.

Of course, that plan was interrupted by paralyzation, surgery and well, this fucking brain tumor. Yet what I realized the other day is that she is keeping love alive, the heart of life alive for everyone she comes into contact with. We joke that she is something like an Indian Ma now, in that people come to sit with her, the house her ashram, her title "The Keeper of the Heart." They come to meditate, laugh and get a little relief from the stresses of their own lives. I see it in the faces of her friends who come to visit or take care of her; they see it in me when we are all hanging out together. Put as simply as possible, it's just love, the purest and most sustained source of it I've ever been around in my life.

When Ma gets tired and can't find the right sentence to respond to those around her, I watch her struggle and get frustrated. Sometimes, she gives up, and always apologizes when this happens. Her friend Roni came the other day, and said although she missed the long walks they'd taken together over the years, talking about cranky husbands or worrying about their children, to sit with her was just the same, no matter the issue of language. And Roni said, "But you are right here with me, even if you can't talk. You are right here."

And she is. Right here, with all of us.

July Forces of Geek!

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:01:00 +0000

Rejoice, and dig it.

http://www.forcesofgeek.com/2010/07/what-would-jillian-do.html

Radio Silence (and Ma)

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine emailed me recently, worried, as she's noticed my radio silence as of late, no blogs, not a lot of chatting in general on Facebook and elsewhere. I guess that's been happening for the last few months, for numerous reasons, including that I seem to be both inspired and overwhelmed simultaneously these days, given my mom and everything that comes with the situation. I want to write about her everyday, and I mostly do, in a kind of journal or note form, and I've thought about trying to post more, but since I am, ahem, a writer, I want them to be polished, poignant and well, ~~nearly~~ perfect. I know this is half the battle, letting go of utter perfection, but I also worry about boring people, wearing them out or simply repeating myself to the point of distraction with all of this, mainly because most days I am on repeat in my head about all of it, wondering, forecasting, grieving, recording and surviving.

I've been trying to figure out how to write about what a gift and a weight it is to take care of someone you love more than life without sounding like an asshole, or worse, preachy. I'm still working all that out, hence all the radio silence. I wouldn't do anything differently this last year, and would have regretted it forever if I hadn't chosen to move in and help my stepfather take care of Ma (along with a long list of her amazing friends and my aunt who rotate in as caregivers) - my sister would have done it too, but as she said, "I've got a husband and three dogs - I think you've got a tad more flexibility than I do." It's more the stop time of this last year that's hard to describe. I can only compare it to the year I lived with my sister when she had cancer, but what she had that Ma doesn't is the hope of remission. The difference of living with hope and no hope cannot be overstated, although the moments of joy I shared/share with each of them are much the same.

This week Ma hits the 14-month mark of a 12-14 month diagnosis, the bell curve of which only 50% of people with glioblastomas manage to hit, even with radiation, chemo and surgery. Ted Kennedy got 15 months, and I have a feeling Ma is going to beat him, and if you beat a Kennedy at anything (aside from drinking or whoring) well, that's something. But with that, my family is living in a suspended time of sorts, not knowing how much of it is left and wanting more of it, while confusingly wanting to also know when we will have to really start letting go and then, eventually, moving on. Ma too, is caught in this, and the other day remarked that when she asked her guru, Maharajji, for more time, maybe that wasn't the smartest move, that maybe she should have been a little more specific - like more time not paralyzed and totally dependent, but, as she would say, you get what you get. Mostly, we sigh and try to laugh, shaking our heads at the lunacy of it all, like the moments where she struggles to find the words for what she needs and we all spend five minutes guessing, and she eventually says, "Fucking forget it," or when I'm getting her dressed in the morning or undressed at night and sometimes need to proclaim, "Don't look at my butt!" because this is what Ma said one day when my sister was in the room, and my sister said she wouldn't, but then confessed she had to, because, well, it was there.

One of the most amazing moments as of late was when my stepdad and I were talking about who would take what shift over the weekend while Ma listened, and as my ever-loving, ever patient and ever kind stepdad tried to figure out what he might do in his three hours of free time on a Saturday, and was completely at a loss, and started ruminating (very slowly, very, very slowly, as decision making is not his strong suit these days, especially when a wrench is thrown in his routine) my mother blurted out hilariously, "Just say it!" "What?" he said. "Just say it," she said again, "How fucking long can this go on?" I laughed until I cried at that one, and if you don't get it, well, you've never had to use gallows humor to survive a tragedy of epic proportions.

So that's part of where we are at, and part of why I struggle (ever since the seizures, the ER, the ICU and the hospitals in general have been a thing of a past) with what to say when people ask me, "How are you? How is your Mom?" This does not mean I'm not infinitely grateful when people do ask, because I am. So grateful. There is nothing stranger than the person who knows what's happening and says nothing. Ever. Although I understand the difficulty of broaching the topic as well, but trust me on this: It is better to say something than nothing at all. It's just so hard to put into words these days what is happening to Ma, as these last months have been a slow and often subtle decline of her energy, her memory and her brilliant brain. She is a whip-smart lady with a nearly photogenic memory (two things I am lucky enough to have inherited from her) not to mention a kick-ass sense of humor. She gave me that too.

I guess what I can say in terms of what is happening right now is that everything is happening as exactly nothing is happening. Part of what is so difficult for me to articulate is that I am watching my mother age at some kind of twisted warp speed, not to mention the fact that I'm caring for the person who has always cared for me. The other issue I struggle with is how to explain that taking care of someone who is actively dying colors every aspect of my life, everything I think, say and do.

To try and counter all this, among many other things, like seeing friends and working out, I take myself out at least once a week to happy hour somewhere and drink too many glasses of wine and try to pretend that I'm living this normal life, where people do things like go to happy hour. And whatever else it is that normal people do, like plan for the future and register for pretty towels and change their newborns and work 9-5 and move forward each day. That paradigm is so foreign to me at this point I sometimes feel like I'm living on a different planet, as I just have to be right here with my mom and family and my lovely boyfriend, because there is no planning for what's next right now, all that exists is her and the fact that today, she is still breathing. I'm suspended in this bizarro world of pain and beauty, and there are days where I almost can't talk to anyone outside of it, for fear I will either snap entirely or I will start talking and be unable to stop, and the bulk of what comes out of my mouth will make little to no sense.

There isn't much I've read that's been able to capture this world of caring for someone who is dying, someone who is everything to you, where love and grief are so huge and entangled they create a world that is entirely separate from the rest of reality. Then, a few weeks ago at Powell's, I bought The Best American Essays 2008, which included "The Constant Gardener" by Bernard Cooper. He is a brilliant writer, and if you haven't read his stuff, do it now. Now!. Anyway, in the essay, he is writing about the final months of his partner's life -- he and Brian have been together for 25 years, and Brian has been HIV positive for 17 of them, and very sick for the last four. Bernard writes at a time near the end, when he goes on supplemental nutrition to keep from simply wasting away, administered through an IV at night - he'll never eat solid food again. It's a turning point that makes Brain's death so close that Bernard can no longer deny it's happening.

"I grab Brian's jeans off the floor and begin to fold them, but my hands grow suddenly huge against the waistband, the pant legs. "Nordstrom," he says, seeing me bewildered. "I bought new pants in the boys' department." His remark keeps me awake for hours. In the time-lapse of my imagination, I picture him wasting away until he's little more than a strand of himself, as white and lifeless as a length of thread. This image visits me repeatedly while I lie beside him and try to read, scanning the same sentence, the same paragraph, over and over; regardless of how compelling the prose, its representation of the world beyond this room is never quite as urgent as the world within it, a world where the air is close and overheated, aglow with milky light, dense with emanations from our lungs and bowels and the acrid odor of his body striving, even in sleep to stay alive. The recurring image of Brian's diminishment is also, I'm ashamed to admit, a wish for his absence to be realized rather than impending, a wish for everything that has been protracted and incremental about his illness to be hastened, accomplished, over at last, the advent of his death transformed into something as ordinary as a loose thread, as easy for me to break free of. Then, as happens several times a night, I turn to him and listen, reassured by his breathing, firmly tethered to the last days of his life."

Ma and I are not exactly where Brian and Bernard are, but those threads he talks about are definitely in place. Just the other day, after a minor rearrangement of living room furniture, we sat together assessing the new room. She looked over at me mischeviously, leaning in with raised eyebrows and said, "We've never been closer," as she reached for my arm. In my family, I am famous for not really loving hugs or other kinds of cuddly behavior, and in the past, might have recoiled from such a gesture. I don't anymore, and put my hand over hers. We never have been closer, communicating in a shorthand created from a language all our own, despite the fact that every day, she is leaving me.