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I’m finally back home in Lompoc. I’d gone home on Monday late morning, but then stayed the night last night with Mom in Santa Barbara because we took her dog Romey in to get looked at again about the growth (which has basically disappeared) in her back left paw. Turns out the mass does not have to be removed. We already knew there were no cancer cells due to the urgent care cytology we did. Thank the Lord. One more thing my mom doesn’t have to worry about. It’s the small things in life.
Dad has been gone six days. Still less than one full week. Insane. Mom’s best friend came after I left Monday morning and stayed until I came back late morning Wednesday. I chatted with her and my mom for ten minutes—she held a fat copy of Anna Karenina, which she was borrowing from my mom, and which I finally read during the Pandemic, while in New York in 2020—and then she left. It was back to me and Mom. We sat and chatted for a while and then, two hours later, after tea and flan and Keto chocolate bars and Mom crying a little on and off, we took Romey in.
Upon returning we sat back in the large white cushioned chairs facing the open deck and the ocean and city below, as always. A feeling I hadn’t expected rose up: I wanted to leave. I realized that when I’d left finally on Monday morning—and it was very emotional and painful to leave, after those final six days caring for Dad up to and including his death—I’d begun the slow inner journey of deep contemplation, post-death grief, and the movement, inch by inch, of a Post-Dad Life. Being back here, with Mom again, the person I’d shared this two-year-long struggle with, who I’d shared this incredibly vulnerable, intimate experience with, seemed to be pulling me back under water again, as if threatening to drown me. But I love Mom. And she needed it. One more night wouldn’t kill me.
Mom talked about the fear of the loneliness coming. Today is her first full day and night alone. No me. No best friend. No dad. Not that there’s any point in comparisons here, but, painful as this experience has been and is for me—and it truly is—I cannot even get close to imagining what it’s like for my mother. I have the benefit—if you want to call it that—of not having been close with my father in many ways for many years. We were close when I was very young, until about roughly 11 or 12, when the anger started bubbling up, and by the early teen years it was punk rock, alcohol and pot. That severed me from him. We came back together in a new form when I got sober in 2010, age 27, but only to a certain degree.
It wasn’t honestly until he got sick that, ironically, we grew close. He was always impressed that I left New York City to care for him; he didn’t think I’d do that, when the cards were all down. Truth be told: I hadn’t known I’d do it, either. Years ago—maybe around 2014, 2015—I’d told my folks if either of them ever got sick I’d care for them, but the truth was, deep down even I didn’t believe it. I was too selfish, had too much familial resentment, and was too invested in my own life, writing, editing and career. And I was living in Manhattan, my dream city. It’s easy to take our parents for granted. At least it was for me.
And yet: When the lines were drawn I stepped across the divide and did the deed. As much as I was loving (and hating) New York City, leaving and caring for Dad for those two years was clearly and obviously the wisest thing I’ve ever done. We got close. As Dad got sicker, our bond strengthened, our mutual pseudo-animosity softened, our political bickering and disagreements dissolved. All that was left was a throbbing father/son love. And we rode that wave all the way until he died on Friday, June 2nd at 4:00PM. For that I will be forever grateful. My dad was a hell of a human being. I said this before but I’ll say it again: He had more character, more integrity than I’ll ever hope to gain for myself. I am a good man, don’t get me wrong. But I am much more nuanced, complex and morally gray-area. That’s OK. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I’m just much more my mother than my father, at least when it comes to character.
My dad left me many good memories, some frustrating ones, some mysteries, some haunting images at the very end, and a love of politics, nature, solitude, dogs. My dad was truthfully the smartest man I know: He had two master’s degrees, from Cal Tech and one from U.C.S.B., the first in chemistry and the second in computer science. He also had a Bachelor’s degree from U.C. Berkeley. His father was Milt Mohr, multiple-time CEO who helped save Quotron and was a highly successful, very wealthy man. Dad’s brother had a PhD and worked for NASA. (He died when I was in high school.) Dad first taught chemistry and math at a couple community colleges in the Ventura, CA area and then at a private all-boys high school in Ojai. (I lived my first 8 years in Ventura and then, in 1991, we moved to Ojai, where I grew up.) Later Dad became a computer scientist and worked as a contractor fulltime for companies contracted with the U.S. Military; he worked designing ballistics missile systems.
Where Dad was always practical, rational, calm, lecture-y, up until about five years ago I’d been the opposite: Emotional, slightly edgy and angry, heart-sleeve-wearing, sensitive, rebellious, creative. We’d get into yelling matches about politics (he has always been a strong centrist Democrat.) But over the past half-decade I’ve grown up a lot. I went through a big breakup. Moved to NYC. Survived Covid on the East Coast. Left the city and cared for my father for 23 months. Life molds and changes us all. I am no different.
But being with my mom made me suddenly feel tired and anxious. I wanted to be alone, or more precisely alone and with Britney. But not with Mom. She reminded me of Dad pre-death, the miserable 48 hours surrounding his final breaths, and everything that happened afterward: The cessation of breath; the cold, pallid blueness of his features; the rigor mortis; saying goodbye to him before he died, right after he died, and again right before they took his body. The crying, the face which appears as a mask of total grief and pain and suffering. It brought those dark black colors all screaming back to me in a harsh way. It made me want to run.
In the end I settled down a bit and stayed. I’m glad I did. Mom wanted to watch a movie and I “tricked” her (sort of) into watching No Country for Old Men. A couple months ago I wrote an essay on the book by Cormac McCarthy; you can read that HERE.
This is one of the crucial ways Mom and I are starkly different (and frankly one of the ways in which I am different, I think, from most people): She wants to be distracted from suffering; I want to lean into it. When I’m going through something painful I want to read about or watch about other people’s suffering; strangely, perhaps, it greatly comforts me. I didn’t want to feel distracted about Dad’s death; I didn’t want to pretend it hadn’t happened. So why not watch the harrowing Dystopian flick? In the end we did watch all two hours and two minutes of it. Mom loathed it the whole time. I loved it. Violence galore. The gorgeous starkness of the Texas flatlands. The older generation not grasping the insanity of the new. The slow, deliberateness of the filming. The fact that there was no music in the whole film. Good. I don’t like feeling manipulated. But Mom took it all in stride and in good humor.
We did the dishes after it was done and said goodnight. I laid in bed downstairs, sprawled out naked, hot, feeling anxious. I kept thinking about Dad. It was so quiet: No concentrator, no barking dogs, no Mom stomping around the kitchen, no ice-chip making. Just dreaded, lovely silence. I wanted to read but couldn’t focus. I wanted to Substack and did that briefly. But my O.C.D. mind (the O.C.D. is definitely UP) kept revolving and circling the drain of my father: His face; his last hours; his last moments; the aid-in-dying drug he never took; his natural expiration; the whole last 23 months; his cold blue pallid face. All of it.
At last I did something I’d wanted to do for a few days, since listening to The Essential Sam Harris series with clips about death and the reference to this book: I downloaded and started listening to, on Audible, the 1973 Pulizer-Prize winning book The Denial of Death, a landmark book by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. Sam and one of the guys he interviewed discussed the book and it sounded fascinating to me. Listening to the Harris series on death comforted me. And when I started listening to The Denial of Death last night around 10PM it also comforted me. Again: For me, it’s all about leaning in, not looking away. And that’s one of the premises of the book: Our suffering ultimately stems from our resistance to the reality of death and our refusal to LOOK. We always think it’s going to “happen to someone else” or that we’ll “figure things out later.” But there is no later; the time for living is now.
This morning Mom and I sat in the big chairs and faced out the deck seeing the very clear islands and we sipped tea and coffee and Mom made us eggs and I moved a few things for her—including the little writing table I’d been using downstairs out on the patio of the room I’d slept in when my father died—and then we hugged and Mom cried and it hurt me deeply and I almost suggested I could stay one more night but then I thought, Rip off the band-aid. I knew she’d have to be alone eventually, one way or another. Why prolong it? And I felt my anxiety again as a poke in my solar plexus. I needed space. Time away. Distance. Maybe I needed a little distraction after all. A little distraction is healthy. Staying busy. But also leaning in. Certainly I can do both. Mom, too, can do both. I’ll be back to see her again next Wednesday. Six days from now. Six days apart, just like Dad lived another six days until his death last time down. Last time down…permanently.
It's just another day. Early June. Summer, 2023. Time heals all wounds.