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My mother loves to talk. I mean the woman can t-a-l-k. For hours. Whole days. Weeks. Months. Years. Decades. Eons. Of course I’m exaggerating but not much. She should have become an actress, gotten involved in theatre. Drama is her forte. Drama in the form of verbal expression, of which we call language. Words. Speech. Monologuing.
Let me back up.
Britney—my fiancée—came down to stay with me at my mother’s house in Santa Barbara on Friday night (April 7th). The reason: My father is dying. Let me restate that: He’s been dying for the past 18 months, and really even before that, before we even knew about his cancer. He has stage four Melanoma.
My old man was doing okay, relatively speaking, until Tuesday, April 4th, when his oxygen dipped down to 78 (anything under 90 is bad news bears). Mom took him to the ER. They triaged him immediately and got him a room. He’s been bedridden in the hospital and on oxygen since then. He has, we discovered, a coterie of problems: Staph infection; aspiration-pneumonia; Sepsis; parainfluenza virus; and possibly more. (Doctors worried as well about MRSA and endocarditis, but these now seem mostly ruled out.)
The man is 77 and also has an incredibly fast-growing malignant tumor in his lung. Pneumonia is everywhere. Doctors are doing everything they can, but there’s just so much going on. My father has been fighting this thing for a year-and-a-half. He’s exhausted.
Anyway.
Britney came down, from Lompoc where we live together, an hour north of Santa Barbara. Since Tuesday, my mom and I’ve been spending most days on and off at the hospital, in my father’s room, wearing masks, gowns and purple latex gloves, reminding me of the early months of Covid in New York City. Dad doesn’t say much. We chat with him a little, amongst ourselves more. We play political podcasts for clips of ten minutes at a time. My dad kicks us out when he needs to go “number two.” He uses a commode. My sister has been more or less completely absent for all of this, but we finally convinced her to come up a couple days ago, with my brother-in-law and my almost 16-year-old nephew.
My mother and Britney get along very well. Britney—37—is a lifelong Lompoc native, with a 17-year-old son and most of her family located in the Lompoc/Santa Maria area. The two women—ironically and typically according to Freud—are very similar. I share many similarities with my mother, too, but in other areas we’re polar opposites. In many respects I am more similar to my father. My parents have been married just shy of half a century. Their dynamic has always made me think of the old dictum: Opposites attract. Britney and I share many of the same large goals and overriding values, but once you break down into the specifics we, too, are very different.
Friday night, when Britney arrived, and Saturday late afternoon, after Britney and my mom and I had all visited my father, the two women of my life and I sat around together in the small room next to my mother’s open kitchen at my parents’ house up in the Santa Barbara Riviera and talked. Or I should say: My mom talked. I talked some, but mostly it was my mother.
I’ve always known my mother as a mythmaker, a storyteller, a weaver of tales. Growing up, at Christmas my sister and I used to catch each other’s eyes when my mom held forth some epic story at the dinner table, rolling our eyes in humor. Half of what my mother said during those evenings was totally made up, if not more. My mom, like me, is a writer. A storyteller. Growing up she had an incredible library, which I picked from and read at random. At night she read the classics to me. One of my most constant memories from childhood is my mother interrupting my talking—even in unfamiliar company—to correct my spoken syntax or grammar.
Mom, when young, was briefly a copyeditor. Later, she wrote a nonfiction book and got an agent but never sold the project. She wrote for many years for a national magazine, being given her own column. Many of her stories and short humorous nonfiction pieces were published in magazines over the years. She eventually had her first book, an autobiographical novel called The Road at My Door, published with a small house in 2015. After that she ghostwrote three books about Africa which are all now published. So it was always there inside her. Inside me. Two cousins and my maternal uncle are writers as well.