Well I’m back, folks. Back at my mom’s house again in Santa Barbara, with the lovely deck with the gorgeous ocean views. This time it isn’t my father’s cancer, of course; as most of you fine readers know my dad died over three weeks ago, at 4:00PM June 2nd, 2023.
This time, it’s my mom. Nothing scary. Just good ole fashioned knee replacement. Her right. Both need to be replaced, but she’s doing one at a time, which is generally the M.O. This is actually her second replacement; the first was roughly 20 years ago when she was a young lass in her mid-fifties.
Now she’s almost 73.
It’s weird, folks. (Not to sound like Obama.) Being here again. I arrived here Friday morning, took her to the hospital, stayed with her until she felt safe and comfortable in Pre-Op. Half an hour after I left she was on the surgery table. I bought some groceries for Mom, picked up her plethora of medications at CVS (déjà vu, Dad), then came home. I spent the rest of the day alone at the house, reading, Substacking, thinking, recalling my father.
I woke from a deep slumber (late afternoon nap) to my phone ringing. I answered it. The surgeon. All had gone well. We chatted for a minute. He asked if I had any questions. I said no. We hung up. I gathered my wits, yawned, and trudged upstairs making myself some Irish Breakfast tea. The dogs had joined me downstairs while I napped, lying loyally next to my bed; now they followed me upstairs.
At 5PM I drove back to the hospital in Goleta. Mom was in room #220 down the end of the hall on the second floor. I couldn’t help remembering all the hospital visits to see my father over the two years of his sickness, including that final three-week stay in Cottage when he had Pneumonia, Sepsis, Staph, and the aggressively expanding tumor in his lungs. I’d read him my Substack essay about our lives together as father and son, and about his impending death. He cried. It was one of the only times I’d seen him do so. (Later, the last two weeks of his life, he cried multiple times.) I remember him saying, lying in his hospital bed, after I read the piece, “I have a lot more faith that I’ll live longer than you think I will.” He wasn’t angry. He was just positing his position. He was referring to my essay’s assertion that Dad was then very close to death. “I’m thinking and hoping I have a year left,” he said.
Dad died six weeks later.
*
Mom looked good. She smiled when she saw me. She said she was experiencing a great deal of pain. I nodded. I grabbed a chair and sat near her bed. It was a small, claustrophobic room with a small window. This hospital was not nearly as nice as Cottage in Santa Barbara. She filled me in on the surgery, what the doctor had said, her pain levels, the meds she was on. She had a catheter going. She was joyful about the fact that she could drink as much water as she wanted and just let it go.
We chatted for a while, discussing the bizarre, uncanny déjà vu of Dad’s Cottage stays and Mom being here now, only 21 days after Dad’s death. How strange life is sometimes. The sights and sounds and smells in the hospital: It was all despairingly familiar. It seemed almost that a small part of me even expected it. Earlier I’d had some irrational O.C.D. thoughts: What if something went wrong on the operating table and Mom died? I’d be parentless. But I knew this was almost impossible. P.T.S.D. Fear. Grief.
Two nurses came in and talked with us. They gave Mom more pain meds. The more vociferous of the two was a short, skinny, dark-haired affable Asian man. He liked to sing. He sang random fragments of pop songs. He thought he was funny—and he kind of was—but he also irritated the shit out of me. Mom, too. I caught her rolling her eyes once, briefly, when his back was turned to her. The nurse reminded me of the eccentric French wedding planner in Father of the Bride with Steve Martin. Finally the two nurses helped Mom walk a very brief ways, using a walker with wheels. Just hours after the surgery! That was amazing. I couldn’t believe it. Mom was happy but in pain.
I left the hospital driving the long, windy backway home. Patterson to Cathedral Parkway to good ole familiar Highway 192. I passed my old street, Willowglen, the studio apartment I’d lived in when I first got an apartment after officially leaving Manhattan in October, 2021. Dad had been sick only three months at that point. We still had much hope. Little did we know the journey ahead would be daunting.
Home, I fed the dogs—they have an extremely detailed, complex, layered meal—and then made myself the cooked chicken curry over rice Mom had prepared for me. I sat outside at the table on the deck eating the chicken and looking at the deep blue, pristine ocean, seeing the little dots that were cars rushing north and south along Highway 101, seeing the thin silvery outline of Santa Cruz Island, and thinking deeply—and a little obsessively—about Dad’s final hours.
Those images haven’t left me yet, though they’re a little less intense: His cold skin, his pale, sunken cheeks, his wide-open mouth, his dead marble eyes, the strange LSD-like sensation of being out-of-body, his plastic, mannequin-like corpse. And I thought of the 23 months caretaking for him: The genuine love and tenderness between he and I, getting closer than I ever had with him, learning to let go of the past, seeing him as an imperfect, flawed man who was nevertheless an incredibly good human being. They were good thoughts, but a surge of painful adrenaline rushed through my vascular system. He was gone. Dad was gone.
*
This morning I read The Denial of Death and a little of Breakfast with Buddha. I drank my tea. Fed the dogs. Called Mom. She hadn’t slept well and was in pain but was ready, psychologically at least, to come home. But not yet physically.
Maria, my mother’s friendly, intelligent and interesting cleaning lady, came to the house a little after 9AM. She brought flowers. She and I chatted and hugged. She gave me condolences for my father. I thanked her. When she walked into the kitchen she was shocked to see the whole middle island filled to the brim with weeks of flowers and cards. These make my mom beam with happiness.
Maria started cleaning. I took a shower and changed my clothes and around 10AM Mom texted and said to come. I got there around 10:30. They were doing construction in the main entrance so I had to go through the ER entrance. I told the lady I was there for my mom. She called the nurses. Told me they’d bring her down in 10-15 minutes. I sat, lazily half-watching CNN on the TV discussing the Russian rebellion. They showed Putin speaking. A video of the carnage with a hyper dramatic British male voice describing it all. I smiled. Theatre. American news media is pure theatre. If it bleeds it leads, as they say. Very sexy, all that blood and guts and gore and that sexy British voice. I hadn’t watched news in probably three years. I listened to favored political podcasts. I read some stuff. But no cable news.
I heard the elevator open and then suddenly there was Mom, being wheeled in her chair by a nice-looking man with a Buddha-like grin on his face. Mom clutched a pot of yellow flowers. She looked ready to leave. I said hi and asked how she was (“in pain”) and got the car from the lot and parked in front of the ER entrance. The guy and I got her in the Leaf. We headed out.
Twenty minutes later—I took the back way again—we were home. Mom slowly, carefully got out and walked to the brown iron gate. It was my father coming home from Cottage all over again after one of his many stays. Again: Déjà vu. I pictured his black walking cane. His mangled voice after he got the Myasthenia Gravis. How he said their dog’s name (Romey) and it sounded garbled, like “Mo-mee.” His voice was soft and timid, and it made me think of all the times he asked Mom or I to get him ice chips, almost until the very end, to wet his dry lips.
I went up the stairs and let the dogs out so they could come down and see/smell Mom first; that way they’d be less likely to knock her over. Especially Luke, the almost 100-pound Yellow Lab. Then Mom started the very slow, sluggish trek up the steep stone stairs, just like Dad used to do, one foot at a time. It took her maybe 8-10 minutes. Not too bad.
Inside, Mom said hi to Maria and they hugged and Mom sat down in the room looking out at the deck, by the kitchen, and we unwrapped her knee bandages and put ice on it and got her leg up on a pillow. We looked at her plethora of meds and Googled each one to make sure we grasped what the hell it was. She took some Oxycodone. Then I set up the new deck table umbrella she’d bought. She ordered me around and I felt irritated. Mom does this sometimes, even when in perfect health: She loves nothing more than telling me to do this or do that, while I’m doing it in real-time. The woman has control issues. Always has.
Around 1:30 I said I was going to take a nap. I went downstairs into the lovely quiet darkness and laid down on the bed. I Substacked for a while, considered reading, decided against it, flipped through some typical O.C.D. thoughts/rabbit-holes for a while, and then passed out. When I woke it was 3PM. Maria was leaving. The dogs were running around upstairs; I heard their toenails clicking loudly against the hardwood floor. I got up. Stretched. Yawned. Went upstairs. Checked on Mom. She was fine, lying in her bed, her knee still iced. We chatted for a few minutes. I replaced her ice bag and helped her walk to the bathroom.
I’d walked down the street earlier and grabbed a toilet seat extender from a Swedish neighbor friend who’d previously loaned us his wheelchair, which we carried my father up the steep stone stairs in when he returned from his final hospital stay in mid-April. The toilet seat wouldn’t stay fixed so I found an old dog leash and rigged the handles to the back of the toilet to make it stay in place.
My mom walked back and got into bed again. I said I was going to write. Then I came out here and did so.