....LMB: "The Final Curtain"....

January 15, 2004

She’d been fighting cancer off and on for about ten years, but it was never as scary as this past March, when they told my mom that she had about six months to live. When my dad told me over the phone, I think I dropped it. I don’t remember dropping it, but I seem to remember picking it up from the floor with numb fingers. So I drove to my parents' home in San Diego to try to help out however I could. As always, my weird work-from-home style job came in handy.

Honestly, mom’s cancer was usually manageable. It would just be a few tiny spots on a lung or a vertebrae, but it was dangerous to let those go without treatment. It was the awful paradox at the center of her condition: she was sick yet felt fine; and to make her fine, they had to make her feel sick.

But this time was different. I still don’t like saying it. Cancer in her brain and spinal fluid.

We emailed my brother, who had barely begun his long-anticipated trip to Europe. He and his girlfriend were slated to spend six weeks traveling about. I hoped that he’d never stop at an internet café to read our message, because the longer he remained ignorant, the longer he could continue enjoying himself. Obviously, as soon as he received word, he made plans to head back to the States.

Mom’s condition got worse. Her headaches became severe. She was increasingly confused, and sometimes said things that made no sense. He balance got so bad that we had to settle her into a wheelchair and roll her into her doctor’s appointments. It was as though someone had replaced my mom’s 50 year old body with an 80 year old one.

The pain sometimes reached dizzying levels. There’s nothing that will make you feel more helpless than seeing a loved one scream and cry in pain, and there’s nothing you can do to make it any better. Nothing.

It was hard, emotionally wrenching just about every day. I tried to maintain both lives, the one of family, worry and doctor’s appointments in San Diego, and the one of work, friends and politics back home in Los Angeles. I would spend about half a week in each location, then drive back to the other. It was exhausting, and I frequently woke up in the middle of the night, with no idea where I was.

Miraculously, her conditions began to improve, thanks to a combination of radiation, drugs, and chemotherapy. Her pain receded, her balance started to return, the confusion was less frequent.

Then, the doctors apparently gave her an overdose of the chemotherapy, which put her into a state somewhere between autistic and catatonic. She laid there in the hospital bed, sleeping, and when she awoke, she wouldn’t speak, just looking up at us with bewilderment, like a newborn baby. We didn’t know what was wrong or how it had happened. Was it temporary or permanent? Would it get worse? These were the scariest two days of my life. She did come out of it by the end of the second day, but it was only something of a relief. This weirdness had come on so abruptly, so mysteriously. There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again, so I felt sick and scared all the time.

But mom’s healing resumed. In fact, after a few months, she seemed out of the woods, back to what we’d come to consider "normal". Unfortunately, "normal" for us meant mom receiving frequent doses of low-level chemo and making near-daily trips to the doctor, with the rest of the family taking turns to transport her there and back. But still, it seemed as though the doctors’ grim predictions had been wrong, and things were going to be okay. One nurse even tossed around the term "remission." We all began to relax and settle back into our old routines.

Until October.

Mom was having trouble on her feet again, and took a couple of bad falls. During the springtime illness, the doctors said that mom’s lack of balance was a side effect of some of the medication they had her on. This time, they said that it was due to the illness itself.

My brother called me a few days later, after my parents had returned from an important doctor’s appointment. "I think you should probably come down," he said quietly, "when they came into the house, mom was crying hysterically and they went straight into their bedroom, and they haven’t come out since."

Oh fuck.

I came home and dad laid the news on me. The doctors had essentially told her "You are getting worse. Our current chemo treatment doesn’t seem to be having an effect, and we don’t have any back-up treatments to replace it with… You should probably get your affairs in order."

Yet at the same time, the doctors had also said "but don’t give up hope, we’re going to keep on fighting this thing." Yeah.

My parents both resolved to maintain a hyper-positive attitude, that we were going to beat this thing, somehow. But this time I could not muster a shred of hope. Maybe that was wrong of me, maybe I should have tried harder. But this time it seemed that optimism was a pipe dream. Sure, I knew that it was possible that my mom would get better, but I didn’t really believe she would.

We spent the next three months watching my mother die in slow motion.

My father took his vacation time, then his sick days, and then just quit his job to stay home and take care of her. It wasn’t even an issue. He became her primary caretaker. My brother had moved in with my parents after his curtailed European vacation and stayed there, working part-time while making plans to attend law school this coming fall. And I came back, this time spending nearly all my days in San Diego, with just short weekly trips to L.A. to check my mail and make sure my apartment hadn’t burned down. Again, I felt fairly helpless, because there wasn’t much I could do. Dad took care of Mom, so I did what I could to take care of Dad. I suppose it was helpful for me to cook and shop and launder, but it sure didn’t feel like much.

We did have a bit of help from the State health department’s nurses, and later by nurses with the local hospice. I can’t thank these people enough for helping with my mom, and helping take some of the pressure off of dad.

My mom slowly degenerated, losing her strength and coherence. In early October she’d been almost fine, as functional and outwardly healthy as you or me. By mid-December she was confined to bed, sleeping most of the time, barely moving, barely able to speak. I could sometimes get her to say hello to me, and sometimes even get her to give me a one-word response to "how are you today?" And then even that went away. Sometimes I’d hear my dad talking to her, or reading to her, hoping that she’d hear or respond. It broke my heart a hundred times to hear that.

Mom went to sleep Christmas eve and didn’t wake again. We noticed Christmas night that her breathing had gotten very labored. It got worse, louder. We all sat by her side, terrified and sad, knowing that each single solitary breath she took might be her very last. Us watching, one breath, then another. Perhaps an hour later, she stopped breathing altogether.

I guess it was about as good as we could have hoped for. She died peacefully, with (hopefully) little pain, at home instead of a hospital, surrounded by the family she loved. I can be morose and say that she died late Christmas night. Or I can say with a tiny smile that she was strong enough to make it all the way through her favorite holiday before passing on.

So there’s some light shed on my slightly mysterious ways this past year. All the trips to see the family, the unexplained time in San Diego, all the doctor’s appointments, the weeks of infrequent and shoddy blog posts, the numerous missed radio shows, references to personal misery and dark days. It’s been a shitty year, and I only hope that as I round the corner into 2004, that things might start to get better. They certainly couldn’t get much worse. But I don’t know how long I have to walk before I feel the warmth of the light at the end of the tunnel.

So most of you are probably wondering how I’m doing. It varies from moment to moment. Overall it’s a sharp-edged muddle. It’s like a break-up, like a natural disaster, like a holiday, like every other day, like a reunion, like a sickness, like a fury, like betrayal, like forgotten songs, like happy reflections, like a defeat, like aging, like losing a limb, like numbness. Like there’s a knife party in your heart and everyone’s invited.

But feelings and perceptions shift. Sometimes a whole day passes as usual, work and play and laughs and routine. Sometimes I’m quite mood swingy. Some sights, words, memories rip right through me or crush like a cave-in. Most embarrassingly, you start being moved by idiotic things, finding deep emotion in the words of a stupid sitcom character, or the photo on a billboard.

And it was not easy sitting through Return of the King, with its constant themes of death, loss and friends gone forever. Great movie, but I probably had a lot more emotional investment in it than most.

All of this, my experiences and the fictions I’ve seen on TV and movies during this time, have led me to one conclusion that seems profound: the most deeply sad words in the English language are "but I don’t want you to go."

To the friends who’ve helped me through this (and continue to do so, of course), I love you like you’ll never know. Sorry you always have to deal with my stoic, stony exterior, but I need that covering to keep my fierce fires inside. If you ever doubt how much I care, just say the word and I’ll give you an embrace that will burn us both to ashes. Y’all are what make my life worthwhile, and I thank you for everything.

I’ll get through all this, I know I will. And so will my brother. But I do worry about my father. This has been hardest on him, as he’d made my mother the very center of his entire world. So I’ll continue spending most of my time in San Diego to try to help him out, if that’s at all possible.

I do have to return to normal, maybe slowly. Life does go on, moment by moment.

If you want to do something that would have made my mother happy, I’d say donate some money to the American Cancer Society. Or, this summer, she went on a minor crusade about a Congressional bill she’d heard about that would cut medicare funding for cancer patients. If someone wants to research that for me and let me know if the bill is still alive to oppose, I’d appreciate it (email me and I’ll give you the details).

If you want to do something for me, I’d say examine your life and if possible, find a way to cut out behaviors that expose you to carcinogens. The ACS is fine and all, but they are all about treating people once they’ve been diagnosed with cancer. I’d prefer that you avoid it altogether. I’ll do some research on this and post my findings, but you know the general threats: hormone additives; fatty meats; low exercise; smoking; toxic pollutants; large electromagnetic fields, etc.

The post below this one will be a eulogy for my mom, I’d appreciate it if you’d read that too. It’s not good enough yet, but I’ll probably spend some part of the rest of my days trying to make it just right.

No good way to end this one. Find someone you love, tell em how you feel about them, and don’t let them go till they know. Go ahead and blame it on me, if you have to.