Heroes

This is a story that is not a moment in time. It was just under a year of struggle and joy.

It was a sunny day late in June and I had been trying to reach my mother who lived in Michigan. After an hour of repeated busy signals, I knew something was wrong. My mother hated to talk on the phone.

I called her next door neighbors, Les and Eleanor for help. Les removed the window screen from one of the bedroom windows and was in the midst of climbing in when he heard my mother, Donna, say from another room, “It’s OK, I’m alright.”

Hearing this from Eleanor, I said, “Do you mean to tell me he didn’t go all the way in and actually see her?”

“No, he didn’t. She said she was alright.”

“If someone does not go into that house and personally see my mother soon I am going to call the police.”

“No, no! Please don’t call the police. My heart can’t take it.”

The police were eventually called. I called the emergency room and spoke to her sister, Joan, to see what her condition was. To see if she was even alive. Joan wouldn’t tell me anything but just kept repeating over and over how terrible it was that we, her kids, hadn’t made sure our mother had a housecoat. There she was taken out on a stretcher in her short nightgown and Joan had looked high and low for a housecoat, it’s ridiculous, what’s the matter with you kids.

“Joan, fuck the housecoat. Is my mother alive?”

Finally, she told tell me Mom was alive, that she had collapsed sometime the night before behind an easy chair and couldn’t get back up. To this day I wonder how long she sat there. The doctors had no idea what was going on yet. Mother was not in her right mind. She didn’t what year it was, who was president or where she was but her feistiness was intact. She kept telling everyone she was just fine.

I shook from head to foot. I couldn’t stop the tremors. The information would not penetrate my brain yet my body got it. I was terrified to a depth I had never experienced. A friend drove me to the airport and I was in Escanaba by nightfall. I repeated over and over in my head: Please don’t let her die before I get there; please don’t let her die before I get there; please, please, please, please, please.

She was alive and in intensive care. I sat with her as she slept for several hours then drove down to the lake (Michigan). I hadn’t seen it in some years due to my own illness. The winds came in strong and steady from the southeast. It brought large swells. The white of the wild wave caps crashing to the shore glowed against the dark night and the darker water. The power of the lake and the wind and the night was immense. So immense it seemed I should be wiped out of existence; yet there I stood. The lake felt like a dear, powerful friend and a part of my soul with which I was being reunited. I laid down on the sand and looked up at a sky of soft black velvet strewn with glittering diamonds. The planet had tilted and nothing looked or felt the same.

The heroism? I stayed with my mother. I stayed through radiation and chemo and dry heaves and vomiting. I stayed through seeming recovery and then metastasis to the brain. I stayed in order to give my sweet mom the care and dignity she deserved. I stayed through one sibling telling me I couldn’t stay (“we can’t have one handicapped person taking care of another handicapped person, Jodi.” [I walk with a cane.] Mind you, she didn’t want to stay with Mom – she just didn’t want me staying) and another accusing me of torturing our mother (“chemo is just a form of torture, everybody knows that, she does pretty much what you tell her to do;” I told him I did not care if she took chemo or not, that I told her before every appointment that we could just cancel and not go if she wanted. He simply didn’t believe me.).

Most of all, I stayed in spite of the fact that the job at which I’d worked eighteen years declined my request for a leave of absence. I stayed not knowing if I would lose my job and then my home. I have never once regretted it. My mother did not die alone or in a hospital but in her own home. It was a year of impossible difficulties but also of great joy and depth.