“Why are you crying?”
I wiped at a tear I hadn’t known was there. “It doesn’t take much these days.”
CHAPTER 15
One Day at a Time
Unlike my friend Danny, I was around to experience my mom’s angst as one by one, she lost the family with whom she’d grown up. I was thirteen when my grandfather died, eighteen when my grandmother died, twenty-one when the first of her brothers passed away, and twenty-eight when the last one slipped from this world to the next.
In each case, my mom bore the heaviest burden. All four were lingering deaths, with frequent trips to the hospital while poison was administered in the hopes of killing the cancer before it killed them. There was hair loss and nausea, weakness and memory loss. And pain. Always, there was too much pain. Toward the end, there were occasional days and nights spent in the ICU, with my relatives sometimes crying out in agony. My mom was there for all of it. Every night, after work, she would head to their homes or to hospital, and she would stay with them for hours. She would wipe their faces with damp cloths and feed them through straws; she came to know the doctors and nurses in three different hospitals on a first-name basis. When the time came, it was she who helped with funeral arrangements, and I always knew that despite our presence she felt very much alone.
In the weeks and months following that fourth funeral, I suppose that I thought she would rebound in the way she always had before. On the surface, she hadn’t changed – she still wore aprons and spent most of her time in the kitchen when Vivian and I visited – but she was quieter than I remembered and every once in a while, I would catch her staring out the window above the sink, isolated from the sounds of those of us nearby. I thought it had to do with the most recent loss; it was Vivian who finally suggested that my mom’s grief was cumulative, and her comment struck me as exactly right.
What would it be like to lose one’s family? I suppose it’s inevitable in everyone’s family – there is always a last survivor, after all – but, Vivian’s comment made me ache for my mom whenever I would see her. I felt as though her loss had become my loss, and I began swinging by more frequently. I’d drop by after work two or three times a week and spend time with my mom, and though we didn’t talk about what she – and I – was going through, it was always there with us, an all-encompassing sadness.
One night, a couple of months into my new routine, I dropped by the house and saw my dad trimming the hedges while my mom waited on the porch. My dad pretended not to have noticed my arrival and didn’t turn around.
“Let’s take a drive,” my mom announced. “And by that, I mean that you’re driving.”
She marched toward my car and after opening the passenger door, she took a seat and closed the door behind her.
“What’s going on, Dad?”
He stopped trimming but didn’t turn to face me. “Just get in the car. It’s important to your mom.”
I did as I was told and when I asked where we were going, my mom told me to head toward the fire station.
Still confused, I did as I was told and when we were getting close, she suddenly told me to turn right; two blocks later, she directed me to take a left. By then, even I knew where she wanted me to go, and we pulled to a stop next to a gate that was bordered on either side by wooded lots. Before us stood the water tower, and when my mom got out of the car, I followed her.
For a while, she said nothing to me.
“Why are we here, Mom?”
She tilted her head, her eyes seeming to follow the ladder that led to the landing near the top.
“I know what happened,” she said. “When Tracey and Marge broke up. I know she was brokenhearted and that you met her here. You were still a child, but somehow, you talked her down and brought her back to the dorms.”
I swallowed my denials, something easier said than done. Nothing I could say would matter; this was my mom’s show.
“Do you know what it’s like to think that my daughter might have died here? When she told me, I remember wondering to myself why she hadn’t called me or your dad. But I know the answer to that, too. You two share something wonderful, and I can’t tell you how proud that makes me. We may not have been the best parents, but at least we raised you both right.”
She continued to stare at the water tower. “You were in so much trouble, but you never said anything to us. About where you’d been that night. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
I saw a deep sadness in her expression as she turned toward me. “You have a gift,” she said. “You feel so deeply and you care so much. And that’s a wonderful thing. That’s why you knew exactly what to do with Marge. You took her pain and made it your own, and now you’re trying to do the same thing with me.”
Though she trailed off, I knew that more was coming.
“I know you think you’re helping, but no matter what you do, you can’t take my sadness away. But you are making yourself miserable. And that breaks my heart, and I don’t want you to do that. I’m getting through this one day at a time, but I don’t have the strength to have to worry about you, too.”
“I don’t know if I can stop worrying about you.”
She touched my cheek. “I know. But I want you to try. Just remember that I’ve made it through one hundred percent of the worst days of my life so far. Just like your dad, and Marge. And, of course, you have, too. And how we get through them is one day at a time.”