There are more than one million things I could say about the last week, the death of my mother and the outcome of the recent local election.
I think what is most on my mind is the death of my mother and the endless amount of odd juxtapositions I’ve witnessed in the recent past.
I’ve decided to title this post “I am trying to break your heart” because that is how I feel about any efforts on my part to write openly about what has taken place.
I wanted to run for local office for two core reasons: one was to give voice to the issues going unaddressed in this city and the second was to prove to myself and others that I could run a positive campaign based on ideas and not on attacking my opponents. I get sick of that in politics.
Many of my family and friends were surprised that I would run for office given the wave of negativity attached to my name by the events of 2005 and 2007. Not to mention 1996.
But my message to them was that this was something I had to do to get it out of my system, to prove to myself that I could stand up to the scrutiny of the full public, to be weighed on the scale of public opinion and accept their judgment.
From the beginning, both of my parents and my extended family let me know they were proud of me for stepping out of my comfort zone. My mother in particular was very supportive.
The campaign went about as good as it could have gone. I steadied myself for public scrutiny and was prepared to answer the hard questions about my criminal record, my struggle with depression and any other kink in the armor folks wanted to ask me about.
Those questions never came in public. I consider that a blessing. One interested voter, a retired judge who lives in my neighborhood, did ask me directly and firmly about my criminal record, my personal demeanor and my rather conservative views on taxes and social programs. We had a good conversation standing on his porch and I was thankful for his time.
The campaign began on Aug. 21 and by Oct. 2 I felt that I had achieved what I set out to do. All I had to do was get through the weekend and finish strong on election day. I knew a win would be a long shot. I felt that anything besides last place would be a good showing. My birthday had passed earlier in the week and so on Friday afternoon my small family went out to eat. The weather was nice and I felt like relaxing so I bought some Sierra Nevada and took it home to enjoy on my patio.
The evening was uneventful until the phone rang about 10pm. It was a good friend from the local Republican Party, a man much older than me, whom I have studied under as I learned about the local party and local politics. In short, he said that an email smear had hit late Friday and that he was concerned about it.
I’ll not go into all the details of that conversation. But the email smear he said was related to a post I wrote on my old blog about my struggle with depression, my efforts to learn to deal with the cauldron of emotions that swell within me from time to time, and how difficult it is to move forward after failure. My friend was rather upset that I had written about these things and thought it would be most “damaging” to me on election day. He said “you are making it very hard for the people who are supporting you for this important office.”
That call ended with me asking him what he wanted me to do about it four days before an election? He had no answer for that other than to say it was very bad. The conversation ended with me feeling as if he were washing his hands of our friendship. I felt very alone and down and struggled to get to sleep a few hours later. I was still tossing and turning about 230 am when the phone began to ring in the other room. I figured it was a prank caller following up on the email smear and so I ignored the phone. About the fifth time it began to ring I got up and went to look at my cell phone and the display said “Mom cell”.
I sat down and steadied myself because I was certain it was my mom calling to tell me my grandmother had passed away. At 87 and having survived three strokes and breast cancer we have all been prepared for my grandmother’s passing, but hoping she would live to be 130.
I had been left two messages so I checked the first one and my heart broke in to little pieces. It was my sister calling in an hysterical voice saying my mom had a stroke and they were on the way to the hospital. I got her on the phone and she was just pulling into the ER behind the ambulance. I told her to call me back. My cousin called at 5am to tell my that my mom had a stroke and they were in ER.
At 9am I talked to my aunt, a veteran nurse for more than 40 years. She was in tears trying to explain the detail. They went something like this: my mom had a massive stroke in the right side of her brain. She was paralyzed in the left side and unconscious. My aunt said it was very bad and that I should be prepared. I began to cry. I’m trying not to cry now.
I got to Winston in the afternoon and got to the hospital just as the doctor was giving my brother, aunt and cousin their first update since mom moved to ICU. My sister had had to leave to take my nephew home because no one under 18 was allowed in the hospital.
I passed a room beside where the group was gathered and saw my mom hooked to the tubes and IVs. The left side of her face was slumped. I said “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
When I arrived, they were looking at a CT scan which I found very odd because all one could see was solid gray, as opposed to the multi colors and depth perception of a normal CT scan. The doctor, head of neurology at Forsyth, said that the gray was very bad because it was fluid from swelling as the brain tried to heal itself. She said the swelling was very aggressive for being less than a 24 hours from the stroke event. She said normally such swelling occurs 2-3 days after and is the critical phase of the survival/recovery question. She made it clear we were in the survival phase.
Being a direct person, I began to ask direct questions. Would my mother live? What chance did she have to overcome paralysis? How would we know if she began to slide away in the coming hours?
The doctor made these things clear: My mother’s survival was very much in doubt. If the brain swelling continued it would put pressure on the brain stem. If that happened, self-regulating functions such as breathing, swallowing and digestion would be compromised. Did my mother have a living will? If so, we needed to get it and bring it back. If my mother survived, the brain damage would be permanent and likely the most we could hope for would be a feeding tube, a colostomy sack and not much more than that.
I went in to look at my mother and speak to her. It was devastating. More so than anything I have ever experienced. All I could say was “I’m sorry mama.” I pulled the bed sheet down to cover her feet, which were sticking out in the cold of the ICU.
We left about 5pm with the plan of gathering back at 830pm when ICU visitation resumed. We planned to get my grandmother, my sister and my mother’s pastors.
I could not stop crying once we got to my mom’s place. I can’t tell you a lot about my family yet because most of them are still living. My family has the same dysfunctions as many families, poverty, alcoholism, depression, internecine animosity lingering from one generation to the next. My mom bore the brunt of all of that for most of her life. She supported a generation before her and two generations after her in the last 10 years. She worked and yet had nothing. She labored and yet lacked for many of the basics we take for granted. She lost herself in this world in the promise of love and eternity in the next. I had to sit outside while we waited for 830 to roll around. Every time I looked to the sky at the creeping darkness and the huge harvest moon rising above the industrial park across the field from the place my mom lived the last 10 years the tears fell heavy.
We gathered back at the hospital at 830. My grandmother is in the early stages of losing her lucidity. She did not understand or refused to understand what was happening. My cousin and I went in to see my mom to make sure my grandmother could handle it.
I will never forget what happened next.
I was pretty much speechless and my cousin said for me to talk to my mom. I began to talk but could not. My cousin began to talk to her and told her that “mema” was outside and wanted to see her. He told her who else was there and as he did my mom opened her eyes, which were spinning in 10 different directions.
She tried to move her head. She moaned in a loud voice and then lay back down with her eyes closed.
It was five seconds at most. But those five second ripped my heart out, eviscerated my thin belief in the eternal and reinforced my belief in personal responsibility. Her feet were sticking out again, and so I moved the sheet over her toes. He gown was disheveled now and her upper chest was exposed. I tried to fix her gown the best I could.
We brought my grandmother in to talk to mom. It was a difficult scene. My grandmother spoke to mom and asked her to get up. She told her she needed her. To help her. To go out to eat. (can you believe “Babe” by Styx is playing right now in the background as I try to write this?) She kept saying “Get up Mick” as she rubbed my mom’s face and her arm underneath the thin hospital gown. She could only stand for a few minutes and would fall back into her wheel chair.
After a few minutes the nurse made all but two of us leave. My grandmother and I stayed. A few minutes later I asked the pastor to come back in with the rest of the family and we prayed over my mother. We prayed for healing or mercy. We cried. The nurse told us again only two were allowed. We lingered and filtered out one by one until my grandmother and I were left. I knelt down beside my mom’s bed and prayed to God in thanks for these two women, the rocks of my life, the guides who carried me across trouble and were there to help me stand up after I fell time after time after time. I asked God to grant my mother peace, the peace and acceptance she had been looking for her entire life. I wiped the tears away, stood up and wheeled my grandmother out of the ICU.
My mom died 10 hours later and all I could say was “I’m sorry mama” as I kissed her cold forehead for the last time. When I was small she used to lean over me and kiss me goodnight in the warmth of my bed in our average brown house on a dead end road outside an average town that I used to think was paradise.
Nasty, brutish and short is the phrase that kept coming to my mind as I walked the long corridor from ICU to the front lobby. I’m very bitter and very sad.
My mother died a needlessly harsh death. She played a large role in that by the lifestyle choices she made. But there is one anecdote I think is appropriate. Not to cast blame, but as an example of the sickness that plagues our society.
My mom typed depositions off and on for more than 30 years. She also worked for years as a legal secretary for a major law firm. In the last 10 years she has typed the depositions full time. They have always paid her as an independent contractor on her invoices as she turned them in. In the last year the company changed their payment method so that the typists only got paid once the company got paid by the law firms. So if my mother did $2,000 worth of work in a month she might only get paid a few hundred dollars at the end of that month under the new system.
This caused my mother a great deal of stress. Stress that she talked openly about. A month or so ago, she only received $184 from the company despite the fact that they owed her more than $2,000. My mom told my sister during the week before she died that she “felt like she was falling off the edge of the earth” and didn’t know what she could do about it.
On Tuesday after my mom died, the company owner called my sister asking to come over and look at my mom’s computer and see what she might be working on. My sister called me and I called him back and told him he was not welcome at my mom’s place. I also told him that we did not appreciate the squeeze being put on the typists in recent months. He started to say something and I told him not to bother. His mother ran the company for many years and he took it over recently. My mom said often that things had changed for the worse and she was looking for a second job. She had recently found one. My mom had been friends with the former owner, we will call her Tammy.
Tammy called me and said she was sorry for my loss, that she had been a friend of my mom’s for many years. She said she was sorry about the pay squeeze, but that law firms had stopped paying them on time and they had to make the change in order to stay in business. She asked if she could come over and get my mom’s work from her computer. I said yes.
Tammy arrived at my mom’s small trailer driving a Mercedes Benz convertible. She looked like she came fresh from a Botox injection and had the biggest fake lips I have ever seen. She also brought me a check for the amount of money they owed my mother.
I found that real strange as I stood in the squalor of my mother’s poverty looking at this fake little person from Charlotte. My mom was probably in Charlotte at that same hour being cremated. I guess Tammy felt better after she handed me the check. My brother and I both wondered if mom would still be alive if they had paid her on time for the work she performed.
Talking about it