Looking back

When she told me her doctor was putting her in palliative care at Notre-Dame, I knew it was over. She acted like it was a temporary thing, just to get some strenght back. I never asked her if she really believed that. I could hardly deal with it myself. All it meant, all I heard was “I’m going to the 5th floor, to die”. Because that’s all it meant really. I had been looking at the cancer killing her for six years. Looking at death making it’s way, drying her skin, rotting her teeth, pulling her hair, eating her flesh, taking away her life so slowly I almost wanted to help her go sometimes. For some years she did good, but the last 9 months were a complete waste of life. For everyone. I mean, how many times can you say goodbye, how many times can you prepare for death, how many times can you go over the paperwork to make sure everything is in order? Six years is a long time. Nine months is an eternity.

Before she was sent to the fifth floor, she was at the long term care unit, with the crazies, homeless, kinless, lifeless. People strapped to their chairs, sitting in their shit all day. People screaming all night, not able to get sleep. We couldn’t have her at home, not with two small children. For us, but mostly for her. I could see she was going. She needed medical care everyday. So that day, when I came to see her, and she told me she was moving up, she seemed almost happy, relieved.

She sat in a wheelchair and a nurse brought us to the fifth floor. Exit the shit smell and the screams. The elevator door opens to carpeted floors and classical music coming out of nowhere, paintings hanging on the walls. A volunteer greeted us and took us to her room. Private, huge, filled with sunlight. He asked her if she wanted anything, she asked for a glass of juice. He brought it in a wine glass on a platter. And yet everything spelled death. I couldn’t even talk, it was surrounding me, hitting me, killing me. I helped her settle in her room, we visited the music room next door, the smoking room across the hall, the kitchen where she could keep her energy drinks and stuff. Then I left. The following day I came back and put some christmas decorations up in her room, it was the 9th of December. On the 10th I brought her home with me to have a small dinner and put up the christmas tree with the kids, we sang some carols and I took her back to the hospital. She threw up in the elevator, even though she barely ate at home. She was really weak. The following morning, the 11th, my birthday, the hospital called me at work.

“Your mother had an embolism last night. She’s a DNR, so we could only help her breath. Unfortunatelly she lost consciousness, and probably has only a few hours left.” I have no brothers or sisters, nor did she. No immediate family either. For the next 24 hours it was me and her in that room. Me and a body I could not touch at first. A face trapped in pain, invisible, silent. The nurses would give her morphine when we thought she was in pain. Slowly, I started to stroke her face, wash her mouth, massage her hands, I sang to her I think, told her secrets, stories. Told her I was there for her, that I loved her.

Around 2 o’clock on the 12th, I saw she was getting agitated. I was sitting next to the bed, a volunteer from the cancer support group standing next to me. In the music room next door a pianist was playing Suzanne, and I held her hand and told her it was ok, let go Mom, it’s ok, I’m here, I love you, but you have to let go now ok? it’s all right, her pain was pulsing, trying to rip through her, but I think that she was trying to talk, and I like to think that in her last few breaths I heard her say I love you. One last tiny breath, and she just stopped fighting.

And I held her hand for a while longer, talking nonsense to her stomach where I had lain my head, hearing the soft melody coming from the piano and then the slience. Only my breath against the blanket, my blood in my ears. And then nothing at all.

It’s looming lurking checking me out. Waiting for a weak moment, a distraction. Then it’s going to hit me, showing no mercy, not a fucking care in the world.

-Who decided you deserve a break? Just because I let you feel good for a few days doesn’t mean you’ll get a whole week without me!
-I just thought
-You shouldn’t think, it doesn’t do you any good. Don’t assume anything.
-Fuck you.

There I said it. No pill’s gonna cure my ill. I’ve got a bad case of “fuckoffimtiredofthisshitimactuallytiredofmyself”.

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I’m thinking about my mom again. She’s probably around, trying to tell me something, I don’t know. I have to write about when she died. I did, once, to a friend. I also realize that I’ve been ignoring my “father issue” since she’s been gone. It’s obvious why. The past may haunt me from time to time, but he’s still here. She’s not. I know I always loved him more than her, she knew it too, but there was nothing she could do about it. And since she died there was no reason to adress that, no one to notice, no one to bring it up, no one to blame me for that. It’s bothering me now. I don’t see that in my children, not the way it was for me. It might be in their hearts, I ‘ll never know. And don’t want to.

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Still working on a new template. Found a nice one, just tweakin’ now.

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Merci du lien victor 🙂 wow, je trouve jamais ça ces liens là moi.

Sometimes, not every time but often enough, when I go to a funeral home, I get vaguely aroused. I feel so alive, so vibrant, so liquid. If not right in there, then later. The room is so grey, the gloom so overbearing, the people so sad. There’s this part of me that wants to defy death, to say fuck you, you ain’t got nothin’ on me.

Death is on my mind this time of year, and this year of course was something extraordinary. I know now that when I cry I do so because of my loss, because of the presence that is not there anymore. The person is gone, nothing I can do about it. I cry over my own inability to deal with the void. But I also know that by thinking about the ones that are gone, I keep them alive, I keep them in my heart.

I say cry, but they’re silent tears. I say cry, but they rarely get out. Rarely roll down my cheeks. My lack of empathy, my lack of interest in others, my avoidance of situations where feelings might get out of hand. That’s a burden, and a blessing. So much shit I dealt with as a kid, so many times I closed my eyes on situations I should not have gone through as a child.

In our house: junkies, thieves, dealers, dancers (hookers most likely, didn’t really question this), used syringes, empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays, loud music at 4 in the morning, people sleeping or having sex in the living room at all hours of the day, no food in the fridge, mom’s weekly new boyfriends (and sometimes babysitters).

Me then: serving as DJ starting at 6 or 7 y.o., walking over bodies to get to the bathroom, having breakfast at the neighbour’s, stealing change in unconscious people’s pockets, spending weekends at my aunts’, grand mother’s (maternal and paternal) and sometimes at my dad’s (when he was not in jail), avoiding touchy-feely guests (surprising how many men are interested in prepubescent girls), waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of the unhooked phone, finding my “babysitter” stoned out of her mind, asleep, drooling, I couldn’t wake her up, I put down the phone and went back to bed (I was 5). I could go on, but it serves no purpose.

Me now: Cold sometimes, unaffected, indifferent. I don’t want to feel too much, don’t want things to get to me. A fucking wall, at which I’m clawing now. I’m not sure I want to tear it down, not sure how much I want to let in.

But I’ve felt so much in the last few months. I’ve felt. Hurt, loneliness, depression, hope, love, lust, friendship. I felt them each separately, individually, not in a mush of self absorption, not like usual, brushing it off as self pity. There is no such thing as too much awareness, I understand that now.

I’ve felt. I want to feel more. I can handle it, now.

This time of the year, not only am I reminded of my mom’s death, but also of my childhood friend. She shot herself in the head. On January 2nd 2000.

C. and I met in 6th grade. I was new to this small town up in the laurentians, coming from Montreal. My mom send me to live with my dad because she wanted to… well, I don’t know what she wanted but she ended up dancing topless and feeding her coke habit. Anyways. So I’m sent to live with my father and his girlfriend. It was really hard the first few weeks. I didn’t know anyone, and everybody knew each other. I started to hang out with a weird family that lived next to the school, smoking and stealing and stuff. Then one day one of the girls I was “friends” with confronted me with my friend to be. Saying I had badmouthed her. Which was true, but I wasn’t gonna admit to it. So C. jumped on me and started to beat the shit out of me. I had never been in a fight and had no clue what to do.

I was on my back, C. straddling me, punching me in the face when an old man got out of his car and started to yell at C. to get off me, leave me alone. So I did what I thought was the safest thing to do… I told the old guy to get the fuck back in his car, this was none of his business… And a friendship was born.

She was living with her mom, who was a sometimes dancer, mostly waitress and barmaid. Into drugs of course. I celebrated my 12th birthday smoking a joint with C., her mom and her mom’s boyfriend. We were best friends, I basically lived at her place.

Throughout the years, we took a lot of drugs, fucked a lot of boys and beat up a lot of people. But then I moved back to Montreal and it wasn’t the same anymore. We grew apart. She really went all out and also became a dancer… then dealer… then escort… then she had a kid… then she got AIDS… then she hooked up with a loser who beat her up… who left a fucking gun in the house… which she used to kill herself.

She was an accident waiting to happen. She was miserable. She loved her daughter to death. She was my friend.