Well, folks, I just returned home, to Lompoc, from five days—count em, five days—of staying with Mom (again) for her knee replacement surgery. Frankly, it was beyond exhausting. Mostly emotionally. Spiritually. My father died just 26 days ago. That was a two-year journey. And it was of course absolutely spiritually annihilating, though I was profoundly grateful to have the time with him. We grew much closer in those 23 months.
Mom had needed to get both knees replaced two years ago—she got them both replaced 18 years ago but they needed a “revision”—but then my dad got sick with terminal cancer. So she waited. The timing was, to say the least, bad. So here we are, less than a month after my father’s demise. It’s a lot of parental caretaking. Especially for someone like me, an ambitious, determined writer, living an hour north, engaged to be married, moving in a year, ad just having taken care of my dad for two years after leaving New York City to do so.
Anyway. I digress. The short version: I came down last Friday, took Mom to Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital, stayed the night alone with the dogs at the house (Mom had to stay one night in Goleta Valley), thought about my father a lot, then picked up Mom Saturday morning. All of this—going to the hospital, the wheelchair, the narrow sterile hallways, picking her up at the hospital entrance—reminded me of course of taking care of Dad the past two years, all the E.R. trips and Cottage Hospital stays, the two-week stint in physical rehab. The experience was shot-through with semi-sinister nostalgic déjà vu.
I stayed until this morning. The days consisted of feeding the dogs, getting my new Acer computer going, reading a lot of Saul Bellow’s nonfiction essay collection, There is Simply Too Much to Think About (absolutely stunning, gorgeous and brilliant), walking the dogs, getting Mom what she needed on an almost constant basis on and off (meds, ice-pack, new ice-pack, food, company, conversation, iPad, book, etc etc etc), feeding the dogs again in the evening, cooking dinner for the two of us, talking with Mom, and then climbing, exhausted, into the downstairs bed, reading Bellow for a while, Substacking a bit, and then passing out to wake up at 6am to do it all over again.
I felt an interesting mix of emotions. Positive and negative. Positive: I was glad to help Mom, especially after all she’d gone through the past two years. If I’d been there 85% of the time, she’d been there 100%. I was the son, she was the wife. Dad and I’d gone years speaking only briefly on the phone and for a few scattered conversations once a year at Christmas. Mom and Dad had been married nearly fifty years. They were a dyad; they did everything together; their lives were supremely tied to each other.
Positive: I felt like a good son, a good person, helping my mom with her knee replacement surgery and post-op recovery right after Dad’s death. And besides: I like Santa Barbara, and I love her beautiful house with the stupendous view.
The negative, however, was also strong. I didn’t want to be around my mother for a few reasons.
1. I’ve been trying to cope and process and grieve my father’s death. And I’ve done so. But part of what I’ve felt I clearly need is distance and space from the house and the situation, ergo from my mom. Whenever I see my mom I think of it, of him, of death. I’m not trying to avoid painful feelings, I just need some space to be alone/with my fiancée/on my own again. The past two years have felt like one giant question mark and duty. When will Dad get really sick? When will he die? How long will I have to stay down there this time? Etc. Now I desperately want to travel and feel free. (We are doing a cross-country road trip next month, Morocco in October.)
2. During my father’s two-year illness, Mom and I got into several—perhaps half a dozen—massive, nasty verbal fights. They were predictable for us: We’re simply too similar and also too different from each other. The fights covered substantial ground, from narcissism to alcoholism to lying to family trauma to how to care for Dad to my sister who was almost totally uninvolved the whole time, to my suicidal niece, to her control/domination issues to my writing, etc. (I told her I want to write a memoir about my dad’s illness and she isn’t happy about that. She isn’t happy about most of my autobiographical writing because I tell the unpleasant, stark truth.) These fights were never actually resolved: We had bigger fish to fry (Dad). The toxicity still lingers there for me.