Riding Fury Home (36 page)

Sometimes my mother would wake from her morphine dozing and say, “I'm being kept here against my will. I want to leave! Why won't they let me go?”

I would remind her, “You had surgery. You're in the hospital—a medical hospital—and you're not healed enough yet to go home. Just a few more days.”

“Oh,” she'd say, with a resigned sigh.

The weekend arrived. Not just any weekend, but the last weekend in June: Gay Pride. Lunchtime on Sunday, I left my mother's hospital room and stepped into the crowded elevator on my way to the cafeteria. I knew that across town, rainbow flags lined the Market Street parade route. By now, Dykes on Bikes would have led off the marchers, the roar of their motorcycles echoing off the skyscrapers.

In previous years, my mother, Dana, and I had gone to the Gay Pride March together, cheering and waving as the marchers went by. Now, at the hospital cafeteria, I gathered lunch for Dana and me on a tray and made my way back to my mother's room, aching with an ineffable sadness.

SIX DAYS AFTER MY mother's surgery, Dana and I brought her back to her apartment, helping her up the front stairs, pausing stair by stair, each holding an arm. “Made it!” Gloria said, smiling with triumph when we got to the front-porch landing. Although she was weak and fatigued, she'd regained some of her spunkiness.

“Once we get you inside and in bed, that's your big adventure for today,” I teased.

Until her wound healed more and she regained some strength, she was confined to her apartment. The aftercare coordinator had set up a nurse to come by every day to change her dressing. We could hear my mother's cat, Sean, meowing when we got inside her front hall. “Coming, Sean!” she called out. I was glad she had him for companionship, especially now.

Dana went off to buy groceries while I walked to the pharmacy, a block away, to fill my mother's prescriptions. When Dana returned, she told Gloria, “I'm going to make you a big pot of chicken soup. It's my grandmother's recipe. It'll heal you for sure.”

“How did I get such a daughter-in-law—and Jewish yet!” my mother joked. I could smell the aroma of the soup cooking while I arranged the pills on my mother's nightstand.

Gloria had been home a few days when I told her Dana and I were reconsidering going away over the Fourth of July weekend, plans we'd made before her diagnosis. “Go ahead,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, you could use a break.”

She was being generous, but I was torn. I felt guilty about leaving, but exhausted, and so in need of a break. In the end, we went, leaving my mother with a full refrigerator, daily visits from the nurse, and commitments from friends to drop by.

The morning of my return, I used my key to come into her apartment house, not wanting to make her get up. I noticed something as I approached her apartment door: One pane of its opaque glass had been replaced with a piece of plywood.
That's odd,
I thought.
It wasn't like that before we left town.
Worry gathered in my belly.

I found my mother in bed with the TV on. She clicked it off when I came in and gave me a broad smile. “Hi, darling.”

“Hi, what happened to your door?”

“Oh, that,” she said, still grinning. She waved her hand, as if waving away a fly. “Pfhhh, the police were here. They broke the glass to get in, but it's okay. The landlord sent someone to fix it.”

“Huh?” This cryptic answer was heightening the bad feeling I already had. There was something loopy in her smile, and her speech was slurry. Her eyes looked glassy. Alarms were going off in my head, echoes from childhood. I felt short of breath. I gulped, gathering air. “What do you
mean,
the police were here? What the hell happened? Are you okay?”

“Well, I fell out of bed.”

“You
what?
”

“I didn't get hurt, but I couldn't get back up, so I got hold of the phone next to the bed and dialed 911. They said they'd send help; then I changed my mind. I told them, ‘That's okay, there's a bunch of us in bed here, and they'll help me up.'”

I was staring at her, momentarily speechless. Something had clamped down in my brain, and it was hard to think—as if the air around me were congealed and thick. In mental slow motion, I was trying to sort out the insanity of her story—
people in bed with her?
Had she been hallucinating, or just made up some wacked-out tale? But I didn't have to prompt her to go on.

“But the next thing I knew, two policemen were here. They broke the damn door. Can you believe it? They were going to take me off to the hospital—the loony bin, that is! Jesus, just because I made a joke! But just then my neighbor Tricia came home. She saw the door open and came to check on me, and told the police I had cancer and was on pills, that she'd take care of me, so they left.”

The word “pills” rang in the air, reverberating to my bones.
Something's wrong here
. “You're not making any sense,” I said. “What pills are you taking?”

My mother clamped her mouth into a fierce line and glared at me.

I looked over at the bunch of prescription bottles gathered on the nightstand next to her bed. I picked up the bottle of Halcion, her sleep medication. I had filled it the week before: ninety pills, a month's supply. As it was, her nightly dose of three was more than was generally prescribed, but she had built up a tolerance over the years. I held up the bottle and stared at it. There were far too few in there.

“Jesus, I just filled this for you, and now you've used up more than half?” Rage flamed in me.
Not again, goddamn it! Not again with
the drugs.
Then I looked over at my mother. She'd put her hands over her face and was weeping.

I sat down on the bed, my own body heavy. I put my arms around my mother and pulled her to me. After a while, she whispered, “I'm just so scared. Day and night. So scared. So I take a pill.”

My body softened then. I hadn't let myself fully see the terror that lay underneath her optimism and bravado. I unwrapped my arms from around her back and moved apart enough so I could look into her face, resting my hands on her upper arms. “Of course, I understand this is incredibly scary,” I said. “But you just can't use the sleeping pills this way. We have to get you something for the daytime anxiety.”

I called Dvora, who called in a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. After I came back from the pharmacy, I brought my mother a glass of water and gave her one of the pills. “Here you go—Ativan,” I said. “This should help you relax.” Just then, the doorbell rang. It was the visiting nurse to change the bandage over the wound. That was a sight I couldn't bear to witness, so I said my goodbyes.

 

 

THREE DAYS LATER, my mother told me she was out of Halcion. She was staring at the TV as she said, “Call the pharmacy, would you, and get a refill?” She said this as casually as if she were requesting cold medicine.

I didn't have to do the math to know it was too soon. I got the feeling I was supposed to just go along and not notice. I was in a chair next to her bed. I leaned over, grabbed the remote resting on her lap, shut off the TV, and yelled into the silence, “Goddamn, Glor, you're still overdoing it, aren't you! That's why I got you the other pills for anxiety! I told you, you're only supposed to take Halcion at night.”

Her face in profile had gone dogged and stubborn. “That Ativan, I hate it; it just makes me more nervous!”

“Well, then, we need to get you something else. Dvora told me the Halcion could give you terrible side effects if you take too much. It can even make you psychotic.”

She turned her face to me. “Okay, okay, I'll stop taking extra, but
come on,
you know I can't sleep without the Halcion.”

She was begging. It made me ill, but I knew it was true; between her pain, terror, and chronic insomnia, she'd never sleep. My anger was mixed with an ache for her desperation, for the look on her stricken face.

I called the pharmacy, but they wouldn't refill. “Too soon,” the pharmacist said. So I called Dvora and we devised a plan: She would call in a new prescription for Halcion, and try a different anti-anxiety medication, but only if I or someone else held on to the pills.

When I asked the visiting nurse if she could dole out my mother's pills, she said no, so I resigned myself to the task.

That evening, my mother watched as I put the Halcion bottle back in my pocket, after counting out three. She said nothing, her face closed. A memory hovered between us:
Our next-door neighbor, small, blond Mrs. Jansen, walks across her lawn, through the fenceless border of pine trees between our houses, bringing over that day's pills. Mom has returned from two months in the mental hospital, after I found her almost dead, overdosed on sleeping pills. What shame and relief I feel, watching Mrs. Jansen count out Mom's pills.

“It has to be like this,” I said. “I'm going to hold on to the medications. On your own, you're gonna kill yourself with these. And I know how much you want to live.”

During the week, I saw my therapy clients in the afternoons and evenings, so I gave Gloria her pills before I went off to work. It went
okay for a couple of days, until my mother called me late one evening. “I dropped one of the sleeping pills behind the bed,” she stated. “There's no way I can get to it there. You have to give me another.”

My mind was in a tumult:
Oh my God, she's lying to me to get more pills. But can I accuse her of that?
Some part of me wanted to believe the truth of her tale. And, true or not, her desperation pulled on me; I just couldn't stand to deny her in the midst of such fear. Her suffering filled me with anguish. “Okay, I'll be right over,” I found myself saying.

A few days later, the scene repeated itself. Gloria called; this time she'd dropped the pill in the shag rug, couldn't find it for the life of her.
Please bring me another.
This time, it made me both sad and angry. Dana and I had talked about what to do if this happened again.

Now, on the phone with my mother, I looked across the living room at Dana. She could tell what was happening, and she shook her head. I gathered myself. “No,” I told my mother. “I'm sorry, but no, I don't believe you. You're going to have to get through the night without another pill.”

I hung up, a cannonball lodged in my chest. Dana came and put her arms around me.

The next day, Dana and I went to see Gloria. She'd become more mobile and was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. We sat down with her, but at first she just kept reading. Then she folded the paper and glared at me.

“I had a hellish night.”

“I'm sorry, Glor. But if you keep taking extra pills, your body's gonna to be in more of a mess. I can't let you do that. It's not safe.”

“Like hell,” she said. “You know what it really is? You're just doing this to get back at me for your childhood, aren't you!”

I sighed. I looked down at my hands resting on the table. Like this, with the drugs talking, there could be no real reasoning with her.

“No, Mom,” I said, shaking my head.

WHEN MY MOTHER began chemotherapy in August, a friend of hers, a cancer survivor who had been treated at the same hospital, offered to go with her. I had dreaded accompanying her and was relieved to be let off the hook. Besides, I had an excuse.

“I need to immerse myself in studying for my orals,” I told Gloria, “so I'm not going to be very available.” In truth, I was trying to create some distance now that we were in for the long haul. I was hoping the chemo would extend her life for several years, and I needed to reclaim my own.

“I understand,” she said. “Just study hard and pass.”

As Gloria healed enough from surgery to drive and resume a semiactive life, she rallied. Her drugs became less of a struggle between us. Once she was prevented from taking extra pills, she became lucid again and stopped asking for more. Her fear seemed to ebb now that she had a treatment focus with the chemotherapy. She once again proclaimed, “I'm going to lick this thing.”

One day, when we were hanging out in her living room, Sean purring in her lap, she said, “I've been thinking. You know what I'd like?”

“What?”

“To go to Hawaii with you. After your exam. Let's rent a place right on the beach, with its own lanai where we can sit out in lounge chairs and listen to the ocean. Just you and me.”

I imagined it: just my mother and me, no distractions, the Hawaiian air sweetly scented with plumeria blossoms, the bitter sweetness of what would most likely be a last time. “Yes, that would be wonderful. I'll look into it and find us something,” I promised.

 

 

IN EARLY OCTOBER—a few weeks before my exam—my mother called me. “I'm not sure, but I think the doctor said the cancer has spread to my liver.” Her voice was tight with worry.

“We have to sort this out,” I said, hoping my mother had somehow got it wrong.
Please, God, not so soon
. It had been only four months since that first day she had gone to the emergency room. A chill made my body tense. “I'm going to call her.” I'd noticed a change in my mother: a certain hesitancy when she spoke, as if she were confused. She seemed vague and forgetful.

I called the doctor's office and left a message. When Dr. Donner called back at 10:15 PM, for a minute I almost felt sorry for her, at the intensity of her workload. But it made me angry, too. Something was wrong with the system.