What's Harder? Losing the Dead or Losing the Living?

A hat, a couple of bloody t-shirts, and a plastic hospital pan.

Mum's life in a hospital pan. A plastic freaking hospital pan. 

This is it. All I have in my possession from my 36 years of life living on this earth with my mother. My creative, driven, beautiful, yet tortured soul of a mother died in January 2012 from complications related to a rare stomach cancer brought on by her years of alcohol overindulgence. 


It's been three years since Mum's death. It is strange indeed, but life has moved on, as it does. All of her things, her furniture, her clothes, her shoes, her knic knacs, her photos, her jewelry, her keepsakes, have all been moved into a storage unit at my step-father's job--I was told recently it's all being kept there without the owner's consent and could be found and dumped at any time. So, naturally, I'm panicked. 

When I was young, before my step-father and sister entered the picture, Mum was an artist. She painted, sketched, played music, and for years worked as a David Bowie impersonator (which I despised at the time, but now of course realize how badass she truly was). She painted an incredible abstract depiction of Elton John that hung above our orange '70s sofa for years, and as a little girl I'd stare up at it and counted the shapes and colors. She created ceramic pieces that she placed throughout the home. I cannot imagine my childhood without picturing these pieces--pots, psychedelic cats, busts--giving texture and color to life's background. Her music album collection consisted of Queen, David Bowie, The Beatles, The Kinks, Adam and the Ants, Alvin and the Chipmunks. She'd place these albums on the record player and we'd clean house or play games or dance about like the crazy neighborhood freaks we were, and those memories are held dear to my brother Tony and I. 

My step-father and sister never knew this woman. Only Tony and I were lucky enough to embrace her before she abandoned her for another persona. 

Somewhere in taped up boxes in my step-father's work warehouse lie Mum's Kink's albums, her sketches, her ceramic creations, her Bowie costumes, her complicated yet intriguing history. Somewhere in those boxes (that can be gone forever at any time) lie my brother's and my baby pictures, our special newborn outfits, the blankets she made especially for us, and small keepsakes from our respective fathers. 

Bill and Kelli never knew these memories, these blankets, these fathers, these moments, this life. And yet, they refuse to let them go--to us, at least.

.....

I'm working on a video project for disadvantaged children, connecting them with grown, successful mentors of sorts via video interviews. Starting in August of last year I was attempting to gather any equipment I could, and being on a tight budget, remembered Mum had loads of video and camera equipment in storage that wasn't being used and had sat there gathering dust for the past three years. If Mum were alive, she'd want to help. So I called my sister to not only discuss borrowing Mum's equipment for a few months, but also to arrange a special birthday dinner for her in Los Angeles.

After discussing the dinner in high spirits, I brought up borrowing the video equipment. 

"I don't want to keep it, just would like to borrow it for a few months. I know Mum would want it to be used and especially for something positive."

"No! That stuff is all MINE now. I don't care. Not you, not Papa, not Tony, not me, NO one will touch any of those things. I'm locking them up in storage until I die!" she replied. 

"I'm not asking to keep . . ."

"I don't care. No." Click. 

That was the last time I spoke with my sister. And no, we didn't end up going to a special dinner for her birthday. 

Months went by and after discussing the situation with my brother Tony, we decided we should give Bill, our step-dad, a call. After all, legally, my Mum's possessions were his, as they were legally still married before she passed (even though she told me just after her surgery that they were about to divorce). At this point, all Tony and I were looking to have is our baby pictures, our baby clothes, and a few knic knacs that meant something to us that they would have no clue of the significance. It would kill us if they ended up in a landfill next to soiled diapers and yesterday's treasures being picked at and shat upon by seagulls. No, please, no. 

I wish she'd written a goddamned will. 

His bottom line was, "I'll have the stuff moved into a storage unit. When we do that, anything that has your name on it I'll put it outside and good luck getting it." 

Trouble is, it won't have my name on it. Nor Tony's. 

Before Bill gave me this incredibly generous offer, I had offered to help them move it. I offered to get dinner, pizza, and help sort through all of it. We could do it as a family. I told him I was in no personal rush to get it, but I wanted to be sure it didn't end up in the dumpster before Tony and I have a chance to go through it. 

"I don't ever want to see your brother again." He said. 

"Why not?" I asked. 

"Because I'm sick and tired of hearing about how bad I treated him."

I wondered where he was hearing these stories as Tony and I had forgiven him long ago for the abuse. Must be his conscience, I thought. 

So, family members die, and I have to wonder if the most pain comes from losing the dead or losing those who are still alive and well. At least when losing the dead, there is a reason: car accident, long-standing illness, suicide, or in Mum's case, cancer.

.....

The hat I have sitting on the hospital pan represents a mum I didn't grow up knowing. It was her newer persona, the persona Bill and Kelli knew well and embraced, the persona loved and adored by her paranormal society colleagues, by her newer friends. I know my little sister would love to have this hat, and I'd gladly give it to her because I know how much it would mean to her. 

But she won't talk to me.  

No reason.

What Causes This Type of Cancer?

Better days. 1978.

(Written February 17th, 2012, edited October 6, 2013) I can't help becoming selfishly annoyed when I read posts on social networking sites by well meaning friends in regard to my relationship with my recently deceased mum.  “Your mom was such a sweet woman.” “Her love for you really showed.” “You were so close.” Ugh. Do these people remember at all the many nights I cried because I couldn’t give my mum a call to say “hello” without her screaming at me, saying, “What do you want?!” or “Goddamnit, why do you always call me when I’m eating?! Can’t you call me at a better time?!”? I couldn’t have a conversation with her for more than ten minutes, as she’d turn something I said into a “judgment” coming from me, though judging was never my intention. She’d scream, not allow me to speak, then hang up, where I wouldn’t have the opportunity to right my supposed wrong, explain my intentions, nor apologize. I was always an annoyance to her, at least 80% of the time. An inconvenience. She had me at the very young age of twenty-one – I presume that could be quite inconvenient when you want to be a famous singer, or painter, or model, or . . .

I was always the “good girl” in my eyes. No drinking, no smoking, no drugs. Read, read, read. Save money, pay bills on time, have no outstanding debt. Eat healthy. I don’t know who I was trying to prove myself to as Mum would have much rather had me as a drinking buddy that could bitch about not having money, not being able to afford the bills, how my stomach hurt all the time, then grab a burger and fries at McDonald’s—to wallow in the mud together as unfortunate swine.  

In this very moment, I am missing her so much that I half wish I had spent some time with her in the manner, as she wished. However, I know in my heart and mind that these activities are what ultimately took her life.

As she was wheeled in to surgery on December 7th, 2011, my step-father Bill, my grandparents, younger sister Kelli, my husband Shyam and I walked her to her room. The nurses let us in to hug her and wish her the best of luck. We were told she’d be going in to have a hysterectomy as she had ovarian cancer – though they wouldn’t know until they went in at what stage her cancer was. As we were walking down the hall leaving her behind, trusting they would treat her well, she called out for my husband Shyam. She wanted to give him a hug. She always took a strong liking to him and it brought tears to my eyes that she had made that effort.

“She should be done in about four hours, so sit tight.”

Twenty minutes after she went under, Dr. Rodriguez entered the waiting room where we were anxiously awaiting the “good” news. Kelli had left for work, Shyam had left to run some errands, so it was just Bill, my grandfather, and I.

“We’ve discovered it is not ovarian cancer that Donn has, in fact her ovaries are fine. We’ve discovered stomach cancer. There is a large tumor in her abdomen and it has metastasized to other organs in her body, including her intestines. This does not look good."

After everyone began to hug, sob, and curse the heavens, I somehow gathered the brain power to ask, “What causes this type of cancer? Is it hereditary?”

“Well, there are mainly two causes. Either you’re of Asian descent, which your mom is not, as far as we know, or heavy drinking and smoking.”

All this time, I’d been the bad guy when asking my mom to please stop drinking and smoking. She hated me for that. Hated me. She wouldn’t talk to me for months on end because I even mentioned the word “drinking” over the phone. I distinctly recall standing in front of her when I was 12 years old after catching her snorting a powdery white substance, saying to her "If you don't stop, it will kill you one day." I was right, and now I was livid.

Untimely Expiration Dates

Today I’m re-organizing my home, cleaning and putting items on the ‘free to good home’ listings for my town. It feels good. Any clearance of clutter is healing. These once treasured items (or, perhaps, not so treasured) will go on and serve a higher purpose than taking up space in a storage closet. My older, smaller aluminum dog door will be giving a neighborhood pup a bit of freedom; my ceramic pots will be proudly displayed in someone’s garden; my random, strange Christmas basket-type thingy will be given as a gift, as it was given me, and will undoubtedly be placed on the free to good home list after December (that is if anyone ever picks it up from my front porch).

And then it happened. I came across an unmarked white envelope. Once I had it in my hands, I knew what it was, so I carried it with me to a comfortable seat on the sofa and opened it, knowing I’d not only be opening up the envelope itself, but also quite possibly the floodgate of tears behind my eyes.

Mum’s California driver license. 

In the photo, her head is slightly tilted to the left, with a slight smile and those tired, tired eyes. No matter what the past has held, all I could think of was, “What I wouldn’t do to see that face again.”

Shortly after wondering why her number started with an N and mine with an A and whether or not the DMV has some sort of secret code for ID numbers (“Give it an A. Better keep our eye on this one.”), I saw in red capital letters above her photo: EXPIRES 07-12-14.  

Her driver license hasn’t yet expired. It’s still active, but she’s not.

And when it does expire—that’s it. No further licenses will be issued. Ever.

On June 30th, 2009, the date this license was issued, she was still drinking more than seven beers per night. She was still working at an incredibly stressful job, consuming large amounts of processed foods, smoking cigarettes, and quite possibly enjoying the occasional bit of speed (she’d never admit it to me, though I’ve heard stories from others). She would have had no idea that her oldest daughter would be in possession of her driver license, sitting on her sofa in Ojai on June 9^th, 2013, crying tears of disbelief that her mother had expired before the DMV’s officially provided expiration date. She had no idea that the lifestyle she had chosen was giving her a rare form of stomach cancer and there would be no tests, no renewals.

What am I doing today? Will I be here tomorrow? How many more driver licenses will I carry before I expire?  Will I expire first or will it? I have no message to share here, other than to just say with tears in my eyes that we really have no idea how short life really is. And whether we have disabilities, aren’t able to relate to people, are in a strained relationship, working at a dead-end job, have no job prospects at all, are not able to have children, are worried about finances, stressed about retirement—it’s all going to end. When, we don’t know. And what’s important? What’s really important? I can’t tell you. We have to be able to admit to ourselves what is important and take it off of that false societal scale made for us when we were just wee children.

Maybe a long life wasn’t important for Mum. Perhaps alcohol and the feeling it gave her was. Who am I to judge? But I’ve hated it. I’ve hated that it took her away from me. I’ve hated, more than anything, that we were never able to form the mother-daughter relationship I had always dreamed of. But that was my dream, not hers. And what I’ve learned in recent times is not to attach dreams to people. People are utterly unpredictable emotionally, spiritually, and just like in the case of Mum leaving the planet at the young age of fifty-seven, physically. William Shakespeare said, “Expectation is the root of all heartache.” I totally get that one now, Bill.

So I will return to re-organizing and making my life what I want it—free and clear. Free to be me, and today, clear of clutter. I can dream and hope and pursue without having those dreams, hopes, and pursuits attached to a heart and lungs and brain—other than my own. I can miss Mum, and I will when I hear her laugh in my mind, and my heart will ache a little when I come across bits and pieces of her life in random boxes and envelopes—and I can know it’s because I want what isn’t. And I can be OK with that. 

And a note for my fellow pathetic fallacy friends: the sad, Christmas basket-type thingy has, indeed, found a good home.

*A Wrinkle in Time, or Thirty

After struggling with the decision, I find it’s important for me to include this chapter of the story, introducing my mother as an innocent little girl, because until I saw her as one, my heart was often cold toward her and I didn’t quite understand her at all. I always loved her with a hunger and deep aching in my chest and sought after a relationship, a friendship, a comforting mother-daughtership with her until the very end, though I was also a bit guarded and awkward, which always proved to be empty and unfulfilling.

We all begin as pure, irreproachable little children having vast hopes, big dreams, unbridled laughter, and intense inquisitiveness. We go about life and our feelings are hurt, others let us down, we fail, we succeed, we win, we lose, and every last one of those moments, those scars, whether treasure or trash, wind up displayed on our faces as we live and age, like a billboard for all to see, to cherish or to reject.

Expectation and sorrow walk hand-in-hand—you can’t have one without the other. And they shape us into who we become, if we let them.

Excerpt from chapter two | tiny dancer | Everything's Hunky Dory: A Memoir

*Healthy As An Ailing Horse

Just weeks before our big wedding day, Mother’s Day 2011 to be exact, Shyam and I took Mum to our favorite little Ojai diner, Bonnie Lu’s, for breakfast.

“I just can’t eat any more. It’s so good, but I’m stuffed,” Mum said, her face a bit pained.

“You’ve only taken a few bites. Do you have a stomach ache?”

“It’s more like acid reflux, I think. It burns, kind of like heartburn, but I also feel really full after only a few bites. It’s been like this for a while but the doctor said I’m healthy as a horse! I usually have antacids with me but I ran out yesterday.”

 I found the horsey doctor report hard to believe because Mum had clearly never taken good care of her body, to put it lightly. But who was I to question? I also couldn’t imagine a doctor using the phrase “healthy as a horse” for any patient, even if he was referring to Mr. Jack LaLanne himself. It sounded more like a Nana phrase than anything else and in the back of my mind I wondered if she was making that bit up because she didn’t want to worry us with a negative health report and she surely didn’t want us meddling with her seven plus beer per night habit. I knew after years of her heavy drinking, her liver could in no way be picture perfect and I worried it would one day fail her. I didn’t see how a damaged liver would cause her to feel full after eating three bites of scrambled eggs.

After breakfast, Mum and I headed to our local health food store and I purchased digestive enzymes and chewable probiotics for her, since they’ve been working wonders for me after my doctor prescribed them for my own digestion issues. Surely this would, if anything, briefly relieve her of some pain and discomfort.

If she’d only stop drinking, I thought.

A week later I called her to follow up.

“I’m still not able to take more than three or so bites.”

“Well, have you gone back to the doctor? Something is definitely wrong.”

“She said I’m healthy as a horse.”

There’s that phrase again.

Excerpt from chapter twenty-nine | feelin’ alright | Everything’s Hunky Dory: A Memoir

Paddle Ball With Mum

Why the paddle ball cover art?

“Our relationship became a game of paddle ball—I was the flat paddle, holding still, hoping to connect; she was the red bouncing ball avoiding contact with every sporadic movement, yet attached by an elastic string known as motherhood.”

The type (Zipper) is the same used on the album cover for David Bowie's Hunky Dory, appropriately.

Excerpt from chapter fifteen | changes | EVERYTHING'S HUNKY DORY: A MEMOIR

*Excerpt from Chapter One: Wild Horses

“Please don’t go . . .”

I had begun conjuring up everything I had ever read about crossing over, the light, and near death experiences. I only hoped Mum would be problem free for the first time. No more creditors calling her phone. No more deranged bosses demeaning her. No more hoping to win the lottery. No more hoping. No more disappointment in her choices. No more suffering. I hoped she would finally possess the peace I’d always wished for her, even if it weren’t in the gorgeous hillside community of Summerland, California with an easel and paintbrush in her hand (always my own Nancy Meyers directed personal dream for her, never her own). I more wished she’d snap out of this nightmare and, ironically, drink another one of her damned beers and put me down in some rude, familiar fashion. 

Excerpt from chapter one | wild horses | EVERYTHING'S HUNKY DORY: A MEMOIR

Everything's Hunky Dory

Oh dear. It’s been quite a while. "Why?" you ask. Well, let’s see. My mother passed away from cancer. I was her sole caretaker at the end. That, and, I decided to write a book about the experience, along with details of our dark, severely unbalanced, yet somewhat entertaining relationship.  And I mention throughout the journey what it was like to have Asperger’s in a world where one’s mother isn’t quite June Cleaver nor Clair Huxtable, but David Bowie (or rather an impersonator of) in all of his glorious eccentricities. 

Yes, this is my story. And there's much more to come, so please stay tuned. :0)

Hangover Mornings: Part I

My mother didn’t become an early riser until years after I had moved out of the house at eighteen. I recall as a youngin' her more than occasional late night drinking binges would knock her out until late mornings, early afternoons, which would open doors to a curious world of investigation for small children. It also created a sense of total self-reliance in me that I would never be able to shake, which would later annoy the hell out of friends and many a chivalrous fellow attempting to win my affection.

***

One morning, whilst living in beautiful, sunny San Diego, my mother and her sister, Chris (who was staying with us at the time while my father was away on active duty), had enjoyed a few too many Michelob beers the night before, causing them to snooze past the legal breakfast hour, Pacific Standard Time. I, in an effort to get started on a productive day, climbed out of my crib in a charming pink one-piece footsie pajama (of which was filled from the ankle up with unknowingly trapped, yet very hopeful absconding turd balls), then proceeded to take Aunt Chris’ favorite bottled fragrance, Charlie, out of the bathroom cabinet, out the front door, then on to brighten up the neighborhood by “making all da plants smell weal pweddy.”

A helpful, caring neighbor (who apparently wasn’t a fan of Revlon’s most popular scent) used the very tips of his right hand fingers to guide me back to the front door of our home, likely plugging his nose with his left hand in order to protect himself from ingesting the stench of a wandering, perfume-wielding fugitive.

***

My mother learned to keep valuable liquids out of the reach of children, to latch the door chain before going to bed at night, and to cut the feet off of all one-piece footsie pajamas in order to provide liberation for refugee turds and their accompanying odors.

Side Note: I wouldn't suggest ever plugging "pink footsie pajamas" into google's image search.