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It went like this: Madness from the start.
Luke, my mom’s precious 11.5-year-old English yellow lab, was on his last legs…quite literally. Poor guy. He had some pain in his knee joint which we’d assumed was from a previous tear. But it turned out—when my mom finally went in—that it was cancer.
Cancer. Again. After Romey, her first dog, died of cancer four months ago. And after her husband of 47 years and my father died of cancer after two years of caretaking less than two years ago in early June, 2023.
Too much cancer. Too much suffering. In too little time.
And Britney and I are moving to Spain in less than three weeks.
I had resisted flying to Santa Barbara, where Mom lives. She was actually supposed to fly up here, to Portland, in mid-March. But now, due to Luke, that was off. I had to go down there. Not with Britney but alone. Over the past six months I’ve been inundated with people. Humans. Forced into social interaction.
My mom has come up here twice. Britney’s mom twice…or three times? Britney’s son three times. Her dad and her step-brother once. All but my mom stayed at the house with us. Add into the mix Britney’s cousin who lives up here, plus my close friend who guided us through the purchase of our multi-unit up here, and it’s a lot of social activity.
And I, may I remind you, am not a particularly social person. One might call me an “extroverted” introvert, and the “extroverted” side only comes out here and there. I love people. I need people. I understand that people are crucial for emotional and psychological survival (life is simply too hard without them), but nevertheless, people exhaust me.
Especially my mom.
My mom and I are very close but we share a long and complex history. A lot of emotional baggage there. My mom’s childhood was destroyed by a sociopath-narcissist mother who had an affair with a Catholic priest and fled her marriage and family. My mom was 15. She ended up in the psych ward for two years, became an emancipated minor, and watched from inside as her family literally dissolved. Growing up I dealt with the emotional and psychological fallout of my mother’s instability and childhood trauma, though I was a very privileged kid externally.
My teen years were wild and angry: Punk rock, alcoholism, violence, fast living. I barely escaped high school. By 19 I was working full time and living on my own, having severed myself emotionally from my mother probably as early as 12 or 13. Privileged as I was, it turned out to be in many ways a brief childhood.
It's a long story. My twenties were even crazier than my teens. I followed Kerouac’s ghost, hitchhiking around and across America. My dad was distant and emotionally aloof; my mom was needy, desperate, controlling and lost. We became estranged for years on and off. I was constantly drunk, angry, confused and on the road, figuratively and often literally.
At 27—2010—I got sober, and everything slowly changed. I went back to college, finally got my degree. I’d moved to the Bay Area. My mom and I got closer but there was always an awkward tension there between us. (Still is.) Some part of me never fully trusted her, never felt like she fully understood me or even knew, spiritually, who I was. There’d been too much emotional instability from her growing up, too much strictness, too much of her own unresolved emotional trauma projected onto me. I felt her great massive neediness and desperation even as a kid. And it never fully went away.
But there’d always been my father there to give her solace, to be her bridge to sanity and some semblance of emotional safety.
But then in 2023 my father died.
After Dad’s death my mother’s neediness brimmed over in many ways, and I was the only one available to hold it. We were closest amongst our small, fractured family. My maternal uncle lives in LA and is selfish, not very mobile, and an eternal whining victim. Once my hero as a young man, he’d morphed into a bitter, angry man I couldn’t stand. Mom had half a dozen close (married, as she always added) friends. But she needed, she felt, me. I became, then, the full object of her need. Calling Dr. Freud. I took, symbolically, my father’s place.
The two of us have always been close but yet at the same time distant. This need from her felt awkward and, frankly, often oppressive. It was too much for me to handle. We both generally disliked and distrusted people, even when we constantly pushed back on that dislike/distrust. For two years we both took care of my father, my mom fulltime and me part- and fulltime on and off. (I’d left New York City, my dream town, after just over two years to care for Dad.) For my mom this had bonded us deeply. For me it had done that as well, to a degree, but it had also opened up ancient and unresolved wounds, made me feel resentful, and pushed me away from her.
My mother has never been one, however, to honor my needs and wants. I once asked for her to respect a boundary and she remarked that it “hurt her feelings” that I felt I needed boundaries with her.
This is the best reason for having boundaries in the first place.
~
Mom picked me up on Tuesday March 11th at Santa Barbara Airport. I saw her sitting in her polished white Porsche as I got off the plane. (Another snag between us since time immemorial: I am a man of substance, inner life, rich interior drives and needs; my mom is a woman of social propriety, social performance, wealth and perception-management.) In some ways my mom and I are so similar it makes me laugh with self-disgust. In other ways we’re so different it’s as if we’re not genetically related. Of course it’s partially because we are so similar that we clash. I look at my mom and I see the most intense side of myself staring back. She is an intense woman, always “on.” (I share her intensity but know how to lower it. Mom does not. The main thing I have which she fundamentally lacks is self-awareness.)
I slid into her fancy car. (She loves letting other people know she has money.) Her hazel-green eyes were stormy. That need of hers hung there like a weapon. I was it. All on me. My older half-sister, only an hour south, was useless. Thirteen years my senior, she wasn’t able to help our mother with my Dad, a man who’d helped raise my sister since she was a child. No, the younger brother living in Manhattan, across the fucking country, had to leave everything and come. In 2015 I had to text my sister to go comfort our mom and see our grandfather before he died; my sister sent me a long, whiny text explaining why she was too busy…but then did go. And now, here, again, it was me with her last dog, Luke. Four months prior, her best friend had come to be with her when the previous dog died.
Mom drove us south along Highway 101, the road I’d been driving all my life. We pulled up to the house—up in the hills with a gorgeous view—and walked together up the stairs. All the memories of caring for my sick father rose up, especially the evening he died, carrying his body down those stairs to the waiting van bound for the mortuary. I remembered Dad’s final weeks, days, hours.
~
I’ll more or less sprint through this part. Luke was struggling. Still doing a brief walk or two per day, he carried one leg, had a limp, and was clearly uncomfortable and in pain. Mom had him on the max level of pain meds. She knew his time was close, if not late at this point. He still had a basic, low-level but still reasonable quality of life. The meds calmed him. He walked. He could get up and move around. He was still eating all his meals. But he was clearly struggling more and more each day, if not each hour. He tossed and turned in his big round bed. He couldn’t get fully comfortable. He looked at us with his large brown eyes. He’s a beautiful English yellow lab with a thick coat. Overweight a little. (Maybe more than a little, something my mom was in denial about. She had been in denial about my dad for a year prior to his diagnosis, even though, when I saw him after 18 months straight in NYC, he looked borderline skeletal. Mom said it was “allergies” just weeks prior to the diagnosis. And this from a former nurse. Both my parents were experts in “selective seeing.”)
Mom cried a lot. I did, too. It wasn’t just the end of Luke; it was the end of her family. The end of two dogs and her husband of nearly a half-century. All those old emotions came back up for both of us. All the way to the root: My father’s sickness and death. I remembered Dad’s skeletal body, his faded blue eyes, the morphine and fentanyl patches, the surreal out-of-body experience after he took his last breath.
We called the vet. I assured Mom she was doing the right thing. Luke was ready. My wife and I had put down our beloved border collie just six months prior, literally the day before we had been supposed to move to Portland. It had been wrenching; brutal; nearly unbearable. So I knew what it felt like.
The vet came to us. Up the winding road into the Santa Barbara hills. Up the steep wooden stairs. Into the house. She gave us plenty of time. Mom said all the words to Luke that she needed to. Her good friend was also there. The vet and her assistant. Mom and I cried and petted him a lot. She said her words for several long, excruciating minutes, and then gave the OK to the vet. She’d already given him several doses of sedation. She now pushed the medicine in through the needle into his arm. Within a few minutes she checked. Not quite. Another two minutes. Removing her stethoscope, she said, “He’s gone.”
My mom wept loudly, her best friend holding her, me facing her across the small room. Her sea green/hazel eyes were a mess of chaos, tears running like oceans down her red, carved cheeks. Mom is 74, 32 years older than me. I am 42. I felt such pain and suffering from my mother. She was beside herself.
The vet and her assistant walked away giving us time. We took maybe 45 minutes, staring at Luke’s body, crying, reminiscing. Then I helped the assistant carry the body down in a stretcher. Just like with my father a year and eight months prior.
~
After the vet and her assistant and the body and her best friend were gone it was once again just me and Mom. I wanted to be free of her—of this—and go read or write alone downstairs. But Mom wanted to talk, reflect, get into it. It felt oppressive and exhausting. I more than understood why she wanted to talk. I got it. It made perfect sense to me. I kept telling myself, Imagine if it were Lucius, my cat who I refer to as “my son.” Be of service, the AA-soaked part of myself said internally. Be a good son.
But another part of me was totally exhausted, wrecked, needing of boundaries and knowing that The G-Word (Guilt) was my main motivator. Guilt has always been a feature of my relationship to Mom. I truly love her and I am truly grateful for all the vast privileges I grew up with (courtesy of my father’s work and family wealth). My mom is a genuinely good person and she was in many ways a good mother. She certainly did the very best she could. Parenting improves slowly through the generations. I opted to not have kids. My sister did have kids and one got very close to ending her life in a suicide mission in 2021. (This required the hospital for three months, rebuilding her pelvis after her on-purpose suicidal car crash.)
But more than love (of which there was plenty), more than family (an unsteady object for me), more than honor or tradition, with my mother and what I “owed” her there’d always been fat chunks of guilt. If I didn’t take care of my mom who would? Not my sister. Not my uncle. Dad was dead. Even her dogs were now gone. Her friends? They were married and had kids, grandkids, etc. Mom was alone in the world. I’d always been happy alone, in solitude, but not my mom. She’d always been with someone; my dad for 47 years, her first husband before that, the psych ward counselors before that, family before that. I’d always felt utterly alone. Until my wife.
~
The days blurred by. My mom and I drove out to the beach one day and walked for a while. We watched three movies. (Including the brilliant 2024 Norman Mailer documentary, How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer.) We talked for endless hours, about life and death, my wife and my upcoming move to Spain. Dogs and whether to get new ones. (I said wait a while, she argued for literally that day.) Books, literature, politics, art, etc. On this level—the intellectual—we’d always connected and been equals. She is an author herself. I grew up reading from her vast, deep library of classics. We’d both had traumatic childhoods; she’d been pushed to go a certain way in life as a result, and me a very different path. But on this basic level we understood each other.
I felt conflicted. Never had my emotions been more torn. I wanted to help my mom as much as I could. I also wanted to be free from her, free from her anxiety and depression and neediness. Her great, intense need made me feel trapped and under water. She needed more than I could actually offer. Her need brimmed over the cup of who she was like water overflowing a dam.
All I could do was sit and listen, and that’s mostly what I did. She took and took and took from me, emotionally, and I let her, because I knew she needed it. I would have needed it were the roles reversed. All my life—yes, in her own strange way—she’d been there for me when I needed her: Through breakups and failures and depressions and apartment moves and legal troubles and wrecked cars and alcoholism. Always she’d been there, a rock, even if a challenging rock full of doubt, criticism, depression and denial.
We cried more on and off, lamenting the reality of death, the cessation of life, of consciousness, of our brief crack of light that is our meagre existence, as Nabokov once quipped. One day my mom, too, would die. Lucius would die. I would die. We all would. All former humans have. We come and we go; we’re born, we live, and we die; from dust to dust. This is the way of things. This is the nature of being alive. Being conscious. Being human, with our self-reflective brains. Here we are. Here it is.
~
On Saturday March 15th, after four-plus days with my grieving mother, I boarded an Amtrak train in Santa Barbara bound for Portland, a 27-hour ride straight through. Mom hugged me voraciously and gazed into my eyes with tears once more saying she felt, a la Spain, that she wouldn’t see me again for a decade. I knew this was untrue. She was emotional. How could she not be?
Guilt spread through my body, warm like cancer. We hugged again. She held onto me as if I were a life vest in the middle of a vast stormy sea. We floated there, the two of us, myself with my wife and our cats and our ex-pat future staring us down and my mom with her empty loneliness, silence everywhere in her life as far as she could see. She could note only the mountains in the distance of other people’s lives rising up against the horizon. But she was in a broken-down car on the highway miles and miles from those cherished snow-capped peaks.
We said our final goodbyes, my mom wiping her cheeks, and I walked off, getting onto the train.