Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (23 page)

“Just let me know if you need anything,” I said. “I’ll keep checking in.”

After hanging up I turned around and saw my beautiful Abyssinian cat staring at me. I couldn’t tell whether Dexter was questioning me or offering comfort. Those gold-green eyes of his were a mystery, but they were rich in thought and intense. And as was usually the case, they were trained on me. If Dexter wasn’t lounging in a sun-bathed corner of the house, he was following me. He lurked behind corners and tables, rarely letting me out of his sight.

The other day I ran to get the phone while holding an armload of laundry stacked halfway up my face. Only my eyes peered over the top. Then the phone rang. Thinking it could be my dad with news, I struggled to pick it up without dropping all the clothes. It turned out to be a phone solicitor, a woman who greeted me by asking, “Are you the homeowner?” I was about to unload a few weeks of pent-up frustration and concern on this woman when I felt Dexter rub against my legs. I calmed down.

“No, I’m not the homeowner,” I said. “We’re not interested and please take me off your list.”

With Dexter following me from room to room, I put away the laundry. When I was finished, I picked up Dexter and cradled him in my arms like a baby. He hated being picked up. I suppose I would hate it, too. Then again, there have been plenty of times I
had wished God would swoop down, lift me up, rub my tummy, and reassure me that everything was going to be okay. It doesn’t work that way, though. Like it or not, even with help from a therapist or, doctor, or inspiration from a sermon, we humans have to pick ourselves up.

A few days later I flew to Arizona. For some stupid reason, I thought back a couple of years to when Dexter had been sick. He’d needed two operations. The second one kept him in the hospital a long time. After a few days, I was able to visit him. The nurse brought him in and put him on the ground. He had a plastic cone around his neck. As soon as he saw me, though, he jumped into my arms. I had to set him back down so I didn’t accidentally tear his stitches. But he kept twirling around my legs. He couldn’t get close enough to me.

“I wish I knew what he was thinking,” I’d said to the nurse.

“He’s thinking that he likes seeing you, that he missed you, and he’s glad you’re here,” she said.

My mom was glad to see me when I visited her, though she wasn’t nearly as relieved as I was to see her. I tried to hide my emotions. My mom was not well. Maybe she was on the road to recovery, but I didn’t see it. If she was, it was a bumpy road. Pale and weak, she had a bunch of tubes in her, and she had to wear a vest to keep her chest tight and the drains in place. Despite the upsetting picture, though, there was good news. She wasn’t dying. I wasn’t going to lose my mom, as I’d feared deep down so many times during this ordeal.

I set down a little present I had brought and looked at my dad, my mother’s knight in shining armor since the start of this ordeal on the cruise ship. I was so proud of him that I forgave every single
one of his right-wing opinions. But I didn’t actually say that out loud. I wanted to reserve the right to get pissed off at him sometime in the future if I needed to.

Knowing they had been cooped up in this room for too long, I talked as if we hadn’t seen each other for years. I let information spill out of me. I wanted to inject some energy into their lives. I appreciated the life they had together, the fact they had been married more than fifty years and had arrived at their seventies with a zest for adventure that matched the practicality they had employed while raising their family. They’d done good, and I wanted that to continue.

The damnedest thing was, I had a better relationship with my mom now than at any time in the past. Maybe that wasn’t unusual as people age and mellow, though I don’t think either of us had mellowed. But we definitely had an easier and more enjoyable time with each other. I had learned to avoid the little things that led to fights and irritability, and she no doubt had learned a few tricks when dealing with me. We had grown into each other.

Despite our often differing opinions, the two of us agreed that we had learned to be kinder and more loving to each other because we were kinder and more loving to ourselves. We hadn’t simply lost weight running on the treadmill or pedaling the exercise bike, as my mom had done. We had also gotten rid of some of the crap from the past that had made conversations and time spent together needlessly tense. As a result, we were able to appreciate each other.

Thankfully we had arrived at that place before my mom got sick and didn’t have to confront any past issues while she was lying in bed at the after-care facility, which she hated. As good as the facility was, she was depressed from being there. I didn’t blame her. It was depressing to be around extremely sick people, many of
who, as she noted, would never leave. She couldn’t avoid thinking she was one of them.

At the same time, I reassured her that she wasn’t among the sickest and needed to keep up a positive attitude. My brother, Pat, and his wife, Stacy, did the same. We urged her to remember that her doctor had promised she would go home soon.

I admired the way my dad was holding up. He spent every night with my mom, sleeping on a chair that folded out into a bed. I came every afternoon for ten days. We talked about the news, looked at magazines, reminisced about car trips we had taken forty years earlier, and laughed. I wondered why the heck I had wasted time wishing my folks had behaved one way or another rather than appreciating the thousands of coincidences, miracles, and hours of worry and hard work that had needed to happen in their lives for them to produce five children, raise four, deal with the death of one, and survive another forty-eight years.

Did it really matter that our politics differed? No. Did it still matter that we’d had a tough time when I was a teenager? No. Despite all the misunderstandings and hurt feelings over the years, we had arrived at the present in fairly good working order, and we were continuing to improve. At various times each of us had done a sort of spring cleaning of unnecessary emotional crap and clutter. We had gotten rid of the gripes that no longer mattered. We had let go, and let love take over.

One day I walked into my mom’s room flustered and upset. I had been caught in a speed trap on one of the long straightaways outside of Phoenix. The speed limit was 65 mph. I had set my cruise control for 68. Suddenly a 55 mph sign appeared out of nowhere, I saw the flash of an automated camera taking my picture, which
meant a speeding ticket would soon show up in the mail. I was pissed.

My parents laughed as I cursed Phoenix Sheriff Joe Arpaio and swore I wasn’t going to pay the fine. Seeing them distracted by my temper tantrum, though, may have been worth the couple of hundred bucks the fine would cost me.

Another day I reminded my mom that I had committed to try to get into a bikini for a new Jenny Craig commercial. I emphasized the word “try.” She teased me for being typically noncommittal. I would have been ticked off by that comment a few years earlier. Now I knew she was right. She even made me laugh when she said, “If you don’t do it, maybe I will.”

“I’ll let them know,” I said.

As the days rolled by, we faced another family issue: what to do about Christmas. With my mom in the after-care facility, it was complicated. Tom’s children were spending the holiday with us in L.A., and I needed to get home to prepare. Pat and Stacy also had plans. But we were game to change everything and celebrate the holiday with my parents. Except that my mom vetoed such thoughts, declaring, “I’m not having Christmas in this godforsaken place. I’m not celebrating until I’m home.”

I argued briefly before realizing that my mom was using this as motivation to get her butt out of the after-care facility. I didn’t want to get in the way of anything that put her in a positive frame of mind. Nor did Pat and Stacy, who nonetheless filled her room with Christmas decorations, including a tree and lights, poinsettias, candies, and other fun goodies. They made it look like Santa’s workshop.

I returned to Los Angeles and a house full of kids. I felt rushed; everything was last minute. Plus Wolfie asked me to make this
Christmas “really cool” since it was his last one before turning eighteen.

“And then what happens?” I asked.

“I’ll be an adult,” he said.

“So.”

“I probably won’t believe in Santa.”

“That’s your problem,” I said.

“Ma! Can’t we just make it cool this year?”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s make it a really cool Christmas. The coolest ever.”

It may have been among the best. On Christmas Eve, we bought a tree and spent the night decorating it, playing games, and drinking hot chocolate. Around eleven, Tom and I tucked Dominic into bed, said goodnight to the girls, and told Wolfie and Tony not to play their music too loud lest they frighten Santa’s reindeer from landing on the roof.

I was exhausted when Tom and I finally got into bed. It was a good tired, though. I felt like I had done my best to make everyone happy and the holiday a good one. Only one thing was missing. Then, a few minutes later, Dexter jumped on the bed and fixed himself a comfy spot at my feet. Before I closed my eyes, I glanced at the clock. It was just after midnight. Merry Christmas.

On the day after Christmas, we packed up the car with kids and clothes and drove to Arizona. My poor dad was busier than ever dividing his time between my mom in the after-care facility and their home, which needed a certain amount of tending to even though neither of them was there. He half-jokingly reminded us that he had supervised the construction of automobile plants, so he was able to handle feeding the cat, bringing in the mail, and making sure the sprinklers went on.

His hardest task was dealing with my mom. She was sitting up in bed when I finally saw her again. The first thing I noticed was her voice. It was back to normal even if the rest of her wasn’t.

“Do you want a Starburst?” she asked, pointing to a large bag of the candy on her night table. “I don’t know why, but I have had the strongest craving for them.”

“I guess so,” I said, looking at the bag.

“Your dad went to the market and bought me a pile of them,” she said with a shrug.

I looked at the package.

“Geez, 20 calories in each piece?” I said.

She waved me off.

“Don’t be a spoilsport. I don’t have much else going for me here.”

“Hey, live it up,” I said, holding up my hands as if I was backing off.

Despite all the visits from her children, I could see that my mom was suffering from being at the after-care facility. It was taking a toll mentally and I worried that it was also affecting the speed with which she was healing physically. It was a difficult situation. She knew she was sick and needed special care, but she didn’t think like a sick person. She wanted to smell the crisp winter air and walk through her neighborhood, not the antiseptic corridors of the facility.

Even though she was supposedly getting better, she had a hard time believing she would actually leave. She complained that being cooped up in the facility was robbing her of her brain. Worse, it was eroding her spirit. She pointed out other patients and detailed their ailments as if she didn’t want to catch what they had.

“That woman there,” she said, gesturing to a spindle of a woman in a pale blue night gown. “She’s 101 years old.”

“Wow,” I said.

“She’s never leaving here. So what good is it being that old?”