Image created with Google Gemini and Imagen 3
“It’s funny,” one of us kids would say.
“What’s funny?” she would ask. “Funny how? Funny ha-ha or funny strange?”
This time, Mom, it’s funny strange.
It’s funny strange how she’s gone but still so present. It’s funny strange how she’s been gone four years, three years, and seven days, and yet, it seems like no time has passed since she left. It’s funny strange how most days I seem to do just fine and other days the weight of her absence is so heavy I can hardly move. It’s funny strange how I can remember things she said but I can barely remember what her voice sounds like. It’s funny strange how I have to resort to a picture or a video to recall her face, her eyes, her smile. It’s funny strange how her departure affected me so much more than his did.
Actually, that last statement’s not so strange when I think about it. When he passed, a void opened up in her life and I instinctively stepped in to fill it. She needed a rock, someone she could depend on, lean on, rely on. He had been that person for so many years, but with him gone, she was lost. So, I stepped in, unconsciously subjugating my own pain and taking on hers, putting my own life, my desires, and even some of my dreams in a box and setting it on a shelf in the closet.
I didn’t even realize I’d done it until a frank, open conversation with Val, my best friend who “adopted” me 12 years ago. Only the length and depth of our friendship and the love Val had for her kept me on the phone as Val bluntly pointed out she intentionally asked me to do it, citing decades of unconscious conditioning that the eldest daughter was to look after her parents in their old age. Unsettled, I felt the need to defend her: “But I don’t think she meant it maliciously,” “I don’t think she did, either,” Val stated sympathetically, “but it was still intentional.”
It was intentional on my part, too. I chose to stay by her side. I chose to stay by her side when her stubbornness put her in the hospital with pancreatitis. I chose to stay by her side when her mobility became worse. I chose to stay by her side when her stroke happened. I chose to stay by her side when her heart acted in ways it shouldn’t. I chose to stay by her side when that pesky parathyroid needed removing because it had grown too big. I chose to stay by her side when a boil in an inconvenient place let in bacteria that ate at her body until the infection could be removed. I chose to stay by her side during the six months of rehab that followed that surgery.
Those choices propelled me into my Tahoe on a sunny Sunday in July 2020 after picking up a burrito at Chipotle. I fired off quick calls to my siblings that I was headed to Indianapolis and attempted to choke down said burrito while merging onto the interstate. The burrito fell apart and I abandoned it to the bottom of its bag as I set the cruise control. I focused my gaze west, barely noticing the summer traffic buzzing around me. Two days earlier, tests revealed her white blood cell count was elevated, and the hospital staff shipped her to her preferred healthcare facility in Indy. More tests confirmed what our local hospital had found. Saturday, July 4 – a national holiday – they ordered and ran a bone marrow test, sending it to their pathology department. On Sunday, she called me. “The oncologist was in this morning,” she said. “He said he would be back later today to talk to me. Will you come?”
I felt rather than heard the desperation and fear in her voice. It seeped into my very being and manifested in frustration when the interstate traffic speed dropped like a paratrooper who’d opened their parachute – 70 miles an hour, 55 miles an hour, 10 miles an hour – and stalled just a few miles short of my destination. Traffic stopped, and I conducted a quick Google search to find the cause: a semi fire. Grr. Didn’t they understand I was in a hurry? Why today of all days? It manifested into impatience when I reached the hospital and submitted to their COVID procedures. I settled my mask firmly over my nose and mouth and double-timed to the elevator, punching the button for her floor. A quick sign-in at the nurses’ station, and I stuffed my frustration and impatience down on the trek to the end of the hall, the clack of my hard-soled shoes echoing in the barren hallway. In this moment, in this time, in this situation, she needed me to be strong, calm, steady. She needed me to be her rock, just as I had been from the day Dad died.
The oncologist arrived later, delivering the news that he’d received the preliminary pathology report and that, even in a preliminary report, with leukemia, if it looked like a duck, walked like a duck, quacked like a duck, it was a duck. The official diagnosis: acute myeloid leukemia. He left, and she reeled, a house shaken off its foundation by the earthquake of her diagnosis. I stood by her bed as she wrapped her arms around me, the aftershocks threatening to topple her, and wept. I couldn’t cry. I was the rock. So, I held her until her tears dried up and the aftershocks ceased. Sucking in a deep breath, she faced me with determination. She was going to fight. “I’ve got babies to raise,” she stated resolutely, smiling, referring to her 11, 12, and 16-year-old grandchildren.
I called my siblings on my way home from the hospital that Sunday with a brief “We need a conference at the end of the hall,” Mom’s family’s codeword for an important and urgent conversation. Upon my arrival siblings and spouses met on my youngest brother Steve’s back deck. I stood just inside the shade from the tree at the south end of the deck, my voice virtually emotionless as I delivered the news: “Acute myeloid leukemia. Average prognosis: 2 years. She is determined to fight.” My 16-year-old nephew was graduating high school in two years, so she was determined to be there. We dispersed, and my research began. “Google, what is acute myeloid leukemia?” “Google, can I be compensated for being her primary caregiver and how?” My siblings and I made plans to convert my second living room into her bedroom for easier access when she came home the next week.
Phone calls between us in Richmond and her in Indianapolis became a nightly occurrence. “She always calls me during dinner,” Steve jokingly complained, adding that he always picked up her calls. She called Thursday night that week, and I could hear the exhaustion in her voice. She’d received her port and first chemo treatment the day before. “I’m so tired,” she said simply. “I couldn’t even eat my dinner, so they got me a Glucerna.” She sipped her drink, the suctioning sound of the straw echoing across the airwaves between us. “I’m so tired” became the mantra for the call. Finally, my voice steady, quiet, and empathetic, I asked, “Why don’t I let you get some rest and I’ll talk to you tomorrow?” She agreed, we said “I love you” and ended the call.
It’s funny strange that those were the last words I spoke to Mom in this life. It’s funny strange that early the next morning I woke up to go to the bathroom and as I slid back into bed, my phone emitted a ring. It’s funny strange that I registered the name of the hospital that popped up on my caller ID but couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. It’s funny strange that I held it together as the caller on the other end identified himself as the night shift nurse looking after her and said sympathetically, “I’m sorry but she’s gone.” It’s funny strange how calm I was thanking him for calling and ending the call. But it wasn’t funny strange that the moment I set the phone back down on my bedside table, I broke.
I didn’t recognize the person who wailed and screamed, “I’m not ready for this!” as she struggled for breath and tears streamed down her face. I don’t remember how I managed to call my siblings, two of whom were already – strangely enough – awake. I don’t remember calling Mom’s siblings but her sister Lorraine showed up at the hospital not long after Steve and I got there. I called Val from the hospital, choking out the message “Well, I’ve got something else that wasn’t on your 2020 disaster bingo card.” Just over an hour later, she, who regarded Mom as a second mom, sat next to me in Mom’s hospital room, chatting with Lorraine.
It’s funny strange how I sat and ate lunch calmly with Steve, Lorraine, and Val, the bustle of the hospital cafeteria barely registering, after planning the next steps with the hospital staff. It’s funny strange how I listened almost apathetically as Steve spoke with the funeral home director on our way home. It’s funny strange how I managed to get through a sibling meeting in my dining room at which we decided when we would meet the funeral home director and that Derek, my unmarried sibling, would move into my house. It’s funny strange that the heaviness of the day didn’t consume me until I was alone.
But consume me it did. I became a railcar slowly and steadily filled with grain, each speck adding to the weight as I settled onto the tracks. And just when I thought the railcar couldn’t take any more grain, I opened the box of the mushroom pizza I’d ordered for my dinner to find that somehow I hadn’t ordered a mushroom pizza but a black olive pizza. For the record, I hated black olives. Still do. The railcar’s sides split, the grain spilling onto the tracks as I sank into the corner of my couch and painstakingly pulled every damn black olive off that damn pizza as I wept. Through my tears, choking down my denuded pizza, I updated my Facebook status: “As if this day couldn’t get worse, I accidentally ordered a black olive pizza. I hate black olives. And yes, I picked all the olives off.” And the fog descended, obscuring the light.
Though a pea soup emotional fog descended, flashes of light pierced it. Sometimes the light was lightning, like my inability to breathe after hanging Mom and Dad’s Christmas stockings that year or making Mom’s meatballs by myself for the first time that Christmas. Sometimes it was sunlight – the warmth of the August day we buried her ashes, remembered her, and basked in the love of family, albeit after having to clean up my Tahoe because Kolton, Mom’s beloved German Shepherd mix, just couldn’t hold it anymore. The sunlight was a relative who just happened to have baby wipes and trash bags in his car and patiently stood by as my brother Derek painstakingly cleaned up Kolton’s mess. I hadn’t understood the fog that Mom described feeling after Dad died but after she died, I understood it more than I cared to. A year passed, most of it a blur,. before I realized it had slipped away from me. I went through the motions of living after such a large piece of myself had died.
Four years, three months, and, as of this writing, seven days since that phone call in the early hours of that Friday morning. Four years, three months, and seven days, and I still don’t know what to do with myself most days. Four years, three months, and seven days since the earthquake of Mom’s death reduced my identity as a rock – steady, calm, solid – to rubble. Four years, three months, and seven days since I lashed out at the universe, my voice choked by tears and shock, “Who do I be strong for now?” Four years, three months, and seven days later, I am just beginning to realize that I get to be strong for myself now, and the thought terrifies me. I feel frozen, paralyzed, unable to move forward and not wanting to move backward.
It’s funny strange how one event can shake my very foundations. It’s funny strange how the aftershocks of such an event can rock me weeks, months, years later. It’s funny strange how the littlest things – the bright pink t-shirt she wore when we visited Niagara Falls, the die-cut Nativity votive holder she bought at the Carmel Christkindlmarkt, the tarnished journey necklace Dad bought for her just before he died – can set off those aftershocks, gripping my body with wrenching sobs while I struggle to breathe. It’s funny strange how part of me wishes those little things wouldn’t set off those aftershocks and part of me wishes they would.
A year or so after her passing, on that same back deck where I’d delivered the news, my brother Steve and I discussed how quickly we had lost her – just five days from diagnosis to death. We had been closest to her, Steve with his personality that so closely matched Mom’s they often butted heads and me with the tolerance and patience for her quirks. He expressed gratitude that she hadn’t deteriorated and suffered. “It would have been painful to watch,” he remarked. I concurred but expressed relief at the speed of her death: “I’m afraid I would have grown to resent her.” I was afraid my patience would have grown thin and I would have said things I would regret. We concluded Dad spared us, appearing to Mom in the ambulance on her way to Indianapolis a week before she passed, telling her, “I’ve come to take you home.”
It’s not funny strange that I find comfort in the presence of her lovable, goofy, German Shepherd mix who I inherited. It’s not funny strange that I’m grateful she gave me her holiday staple Swedish meatball recipe. It’s not funny strange that I weep when I flip through the pictures and videos from our trip to the Northeast. It’s not funny strange that it took me over four years to box up and give away her craft supplies. It’s not funny strange that I’m still deciding what to do with things she left behind. It’s not funny strange that I can no longer access her phone’s call history.
Four years, three months, and three days after she left us, I finally managed to go through the paperwork the hospital sent home with me that Friday in July. Among the medication explanations and the hospital information brochures, I found a stack of photocopied sudoku puzzles, given to Mom to help ease her boredom. I started to throw them into the trash bag at my side when I noticed something on the back of one sheet. I turned it over, and my breath caught in my chest. In lettering reminiscent of a kindergartener learning to write, I found a message of hope and gratitude: “Thank you for another day, Lord! July 8th, I got another day. I got my port today and I had my first treatment of chemo.” Two days after she physically struggled to put this hope and gratitude into words on paper, Dad kept his promise and took her home.
“It’s funny,” one of us kids would say.
“What’s funny?” she would ask. “Funny how? Funny ha-ha or funny strange?”
Funny strange, Mom. Funny strange.