Were it not for cigarettes and all the damage they can do to a human body, my mother might have been 100 years old today — emphasis on the word "might." So many things were wrong with her when she died at the age of 90 that the doctor who made out the death certificate told me he was trying to decide between about eight different causes he could put in the appropriate space. I suggested "Marlboros" and he gave a grim chuckle, told me that probably covered all eight…and then wrote down "Cardiopulmonary Arrest." Fine. Whatever.
My mother did not want to live to be a hundred; not in the condition she was in those final years. She was unable to walk without great effort, a walker and a constant fear of falling. She was unable to travel. She was unable to eat any of the foods she liked. She would half-jokingly ask me to bring her a platter of chili dogs because that was the way she wanted to go: Assisted Suicide by Chili Dog. I did not do this though I was aware she was at least a little bit serious about it.
And she could barely see. Couldn't read, couldn't see the TV screen no matter how close she sat to it. Six more months and she would have been totally unable to see, a prospect that horrified her. I genuinely think that if/when she realized she was minutes from death, she thought something like, "Good. I should have done this months ago."
She was all a person could ask for in a mother: Sweet, smart, good sense of humor, willing to do absolutely anything for her husband and kid. Like my father, who passed a little more than 21 years before her, she almost never scolded or raised her voice. I was the kind of son who never gave either a lot of reason to but they still didn't yell when another father or mother might have.
I have lots of stories on this blog about my mother but I don't believe I ever told this one…
The last two decades of her life, she spent a lot of time in hospitals and hospital emergency rooms. A lot. There was a lockbox on the back door with a house key in it and when paramedics (or usually, firemen) were summoned to her home, either I or the dispatcher would supply the combination via phone so her rescuers could get inside and take care of her. Eventually, if it was the fire department, we didn't need to tell them the combination. The lead fireman remembered it.
When he told me that, I said, "You must have written it down." He said no, they never did that — and it might have been some department policy. But they were there so often and they liked my mother so much that at least this one man remembered it.
But that's not the story I was going to tell here. One time in the middle of the night — maybe three or four in the morning — I was in the emergency room with my mother and she was in tremendous pain. The attending doctor gave her a shot that, he said, would put her to sleep but before it did, it might make her incoherent for a few minutes. "Don't be surprised if she starts babbling nonsense before the drug fully kicks in," he told me and then he left the room.
I was there with my mother…and she did indeed start babbling nonsense. Weird nonsense. Strange nonsense. It was like she'd been possessed by evil demons or something and it scared the heck outta me. I knew it was just the drug but I stepped out into the hall and stopped a passing nurse. Remember this is like 4 A.M. and I'd gone to bed at 2 and been summoned at 3. I was not at my sanest which, as followers of this blog know, is not that sane.
I told the nurse what the doctor had said about how she'd start babbling and I asked, "Could you just listen to a little of this and tell me if this is normal?" She said "Certainly" and stepped into the room, listened to twenty seconds of my mother's ravings and said, "Perfectly normal. She'll be asleep any second now."
The nurse left and my mother — still sounding like she was auditioning for a role in The Exorcist, said to me, "That's a very pretty nurse."
I said, "Yes, she is."
To which my mother replied — using a word I'd rarely heard from her and never in a sexual context — "Do you think you could fuck her?"
And then she fell fast asleep.
The next day, when I told her what she'd said, she had no memory of it…but she thought it was hilarious. In her own way, she always was…that and wonderful and perfect and gee, I was lucky. Oh so lucky.
Tomorrow on this blog, I'll be remembering someone else I was fortunate to have in my life.