Happy Birthday, Mom

It’s hard to believe that my little fierce German dynamo, all 5′4″ of her, has been gone from this earth for now just over 13 years.  I was 31 when she passed away and the Junior, just a little bitty thing of 3.  It’s hard for me to know that she doesn’t really remember much about Mother at all.  The big girls, thank goodness, still have some memories…most of which revolve around food of some sort…pork roast and ‘kraut…creamed asparagus and buttered potatoes…creamed cauliflower and buttered potatoes…creamed spinach and buttered potatoes.  These were staples of my childhood, and thus became staples of the girls’ childhood.  At least the little bit of childhood that they remember Grandma being alive. 

And while they aren’t ‘heart healthy’ dishes, they are what ties us to mother.

Mother was a wonderful cook and baker.  People came to mother so she could teach them how to make bread.  Unfortunately, Mother didn’t have a recipe for any one thing she made, ever.  I think she did that on purpose, though, so that no one could make plum cake as good as hers…so no one could make yeast rolls quite as delicious and heavy and buttery as hers. 

I’ve tried.  Came close.  Sometimes.  But basically, if I smell yeast rolls in the house, I’m close in my own mind of replicating Mother’s recipe for yeast rolls.

Anyway, April 15th was her birthday.  She always got a kick out of the fact that her birthday was on the day that no one ever forgets.  Tax day.  She would say there are two things that you never forget…tax day and my birthday.  And, I never once forgot her birthday.

And I didn’t today. 

Then, tonight on Boston Legal, a television show that I watch largely because it has James Spader, whom I have been in love with since Pretty in Pink, there was the episode about Shirley Schmidt’s Dad dying of Alzheimer disease and her fight to basically put him to sleep…for lack of better words.

And it reminded me of the darker days with Mother.  The happy times in the kitchen and the smells of all of the delicious food she made are easy to remember.  Coming home for lunch in elementary school and smelling stroganoff wafting through the screen door and the smell of baking bread…those are easy memories.  Coming home from church with Olene to a full spread of fried chicken and mashed potatoes and green beans is an easy memory. 

Remembering her first stroke and the terrifying call in the middle of the night, not so much so.  The subsequent diagnosis of her abdominal aortic aneurysm was also not a happy time, although the night before I took her to Houston for surgery, when we stayed up all night talking, is one of my favorite memories with Mother.  We were both nervous and scared, but we spent that night talking…we laughed and we cried that night and we smoked and had some beers, knowing that in the morning we would set off in the big red truck to the big city of Houston, Texas, armed only with a road map and instructions how to get to Linda’s house written on notebook paper. 

We stopped somewhere around Waco and had steak and baked potatoes at a steak house on the lake.  I didn’t fuss at her when she left her cigarette burning in the ashtray while she was eating. 

I knew to just shut the fuck up and let her enjoy a good meal with her cigarette burning, just in case she wanted to take a drag between bites.

At any rate, she lived through the aneurysm repair, even though she was a poor surgical candidate, to say the least.  It was one of those deals where the benefits outweighed the risks.  If she didn’t have the surgery, her artery was going to burst…if she did, she may die on the table.  It was a long, long 6 hours in the waiting room.  To no surprise of mine, the first time they let me in to see her in ICU, the woman sat bolt upright in the bed, despite the fact that she had been split wide open.  I remember watching that and being amazed, since I remembered my pathetic little C-section and not being able to move for shit for a day or two..and again I realized that this lady…my mom,  was one tough cookie, to be sure. 

But she made it.  That woman was a fighter, to say the least.  She hadn’t raised me singlehandedly on a babysitter’s wage without being a fighter.  However, after the surgery, she just never bounced back.  She wound up getting a nasty infection in her incision that required an extended hospital stay and a wedge taken out of her gut that left her belly buttonless.  And that woman never complained once.  I have a picture of her laying on my living room floor playing with the kids the DAY that we came home from the hospital.  We’d planned on her staying for a few weeks, but she was ready to go home to her apartment a few days later.  There was no stopping her. 

After she got back to her place, she never really ever bounced back.  She had another stroke…then another.  It came down to the place where she just couldn’t live by herself anymore…and the decision was made that she would come stay with us.  Her things were piled into our garage and we made her a space.  By that time, she was pretty much bedridden.  She could make it to a bedside toilet…and maybe sit in her recliner for a while each day, but it was evident that her quality of life was going downhill quickly. 

There was only so much quality that Days of our Lives and Maury Povich and Montel could bring to your life. 

Her health declined pretty quickly.  Her kidney failure, a side effect of years of uncontrolled high blood pressure, made her sleep a lot and itch.  She slept a lot…and I mean  A LOT.  It got to where i was terrified every. single. day. that I was going to wake up and she was not.  It got to where I was grateful to smell the acrid smell of her first light up in the morning…because it meant she was alive. 

The time inevitably came where whatever care I could give her was just not going to be enough.  I couldn’t be awake 24 hours a day and I couldn’t be with her all day every day, and the terrifying decision to put her in nursing home was made. 

She wasn’t happy with that decision and didn’t make it a secret that she wasn’t.  And as much as I tried to spin it that she would be better taken care of by real nurses 24/7, she was having none of it. 

It was exactly 33 days from the time she went into nursing care that she died. 

About two weeks in, she just stopped eating…not that she ate a whole lot anyway.  Hell, she had subsisted on Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and buttermilk for weeks before she went in.  Anyway, she just stopped eating…and talking…and pretty much just shut down.

Her doctor, one day, caught me in the hall and asked if I wanted to think about a PEG tube, so she would have to eat.  I looked straight at that man and said, “Dr. Carpenter, do YOU think she would want us to do that?” 

And he said, “Chris, I think that would piss her off to no end.”  He added, “I think that she has made her decision.”

And we both knew she had.  While I don’t think she really grasped the gravity of her physical condition, I think that she knew there was no coming out of it.  She had gone from this round, robust lady who baked and cooked to someone who couldn’t even get out of the bed by herself. 

When my mother died, she weighed 68 pounds. 

It horrified me to see her like that, though I did my best not to let it show.

But she knew.  And she willed herself to go. 

Medically, there was nothing that would help her.  Her kidneys were shot to shit, thanks to years of high blood pressure…and there was no fixing that.  And kidney failure was ultimately her “cause of death,” although Mother would have preferred:

“Patient was sick of this shit and chose to go on her own terms.”

There were friends of mine that worried that I didn’t seem to grieve ‘correctly’ after she died, but truth was I had been grieving since I had to put her in the nursing home.  I knew she would never choose to live like that.  And I grieved that I wasn’t able to provide her the care she needed at my home…and I knew that I didn’t have the money to provide 24/7 nursing care, and I knew that is what she needed. 

It was the most emotionally wretched decision I have ever made in my life to this point. 

I dream sometimes of her still.  Sometimes she is baking and sometimes she is making chicken and dumplings…and sometimes she is telling me how to bake yeast rolls. 

And I can smell it.  I can smell the rolls and i see her in my kitchen showing me how to knead the dough correctly. 

And I miss that woman with such intensity that it literally hurts me.  This many years later. 

So, all I can really say is Happy Birthday, Mom.  I wish I could have made it easier.  And I love you.