Approximately 3:15 pm. Fuck. The phone rang and roused her -- extended family, this time -- and now she's sitting up in her chair, that I was about to explain, with the vomit bucket in her lap. She swivels back and forth, and her face is etched with -- not pain exactly-- maybe discomfort. She's no longer keeping fluids down, and so she can't keep her medications down, including the vicodin for her back pain. She lights her cigarette and coughs, grimacing, the smoke curling around her head as she vomits blood and Diet Sundrop and stomach secretions and thick mucous.
My body aches in sympathy as I watch, and I want to do something -- anything -- to make it better. That she is completely coherent and lucid. This morning, she asked me how a certain husites 3rd date went last night.
Approximately 5:00 pm. Two hours pass. I get ready to write again, and my brother P stops by. I give up and decide to wait until everyone is gone and my mom is asleep.
Approximately 9:00 pm. This is real time, now, and my brother J and his wife are sitting across the room with their laptops. My mom is slumped in her chair, asleep. Because of the swelling in her abdomen and her bad back, she is incredibly uncomfortable in the bed. She can't breathe well when she lies down, and she gets more nauseous. So she sits in the executive office chair with the massage functions she's never used, often with her feet on the edge of the bed.
Now, her legs are crossed, and her head falls forward toward her chest. I offer her my travel neck pillow, but she declines. I've learned that she says no to almost everything I ask her. Some of the stuff I've just started doing -- rubbing lotion on her hands and feet and arms. Rubbing her back when she throws up. Bringing her a cool washcloth to wipe her face. I just do it, and she tells me it feels good -- but she would never ask because she doesn't want to be a bother, I presume.
She roused up a moment ago and I asked her how she was doing. "Doing good now," she said, almost surprised. As I started writing earlier, she's incredibly lucid. I was warned by her and by my uncle that she'll likely become irrational and that I should watch out for that. So far, she's asked me about cam's date, reminded me to take my dinner out of the freezer to thaw, and generally shown me that she's still competent. Her sense of humor is fading, but she still smiles at cute pet stories and LOLcats. She showed interest in the NFL playoffs, even. In some ways, the clarity seems like it would be worse -- she has full comprehension of everything that is happening to her. Still, she seems to be at peace.
Yesterday, my aunt L was here, and she warned me that $real_estate_tart was coming to have a paper signed regarding a piece of my grandfather's property. Aunt L told me that she really disliked $real_estate_tart, that she was a dingbat.
"I went to school with her," I said. "I didn't like her at all -- she wasn't very smart, and she always thought she was the center of the universe."
"Yeah, that sounds right," L said. "I'm going to tell you what she said to me on the phone yesterday, but don't tell your mother because it'll just upset her. My phone rang yesterday, and I didn't recognize the number. When I answered, she said, 'How's $tf-mom? Is she lucid? Is she conscious?'" L paused for a swig of coffee. "I said, 'Who is this?' She told me, and said that she just needed to get that contract signed. She could do it with just my signature, but it would be better to have $tf-mom's as well. Then she said, 'What's happening to her little dog? I want that little dog.' I was so offended," said L. "I couldn't believe that she said that. I told her that she had arranged for her daughter to take the dog."
I was shocked. Are people just that crass? Then, after hearing this story, and $real_estate_tart being an hour late, I hear from my brother that the bitch wants to say hello to me. I was in the process of helping my mom to and from the bathroom, so the tart had to wait. When I saw her, I realized just how much I'd changed. I'd remembered her being so much taller and larger and meaner than me. When I was in high school, she was a bully with auburn hair and and dark freckles and bangs almost large enough to have their own gravitational field. When I saw her now, her slightly frizzy hair was a badly dyed bottle blonde, and her make-up was about as subtle as spackling. "Oh my God!" she said when she saw me. "You haven't changed a bit!"
"I certainly hope I have," I said. And I bit my tongue, wanting to say it was pretty clear she hadn't changed from the bitch she was in high school.
Rusti, my mom's Jack Russell terrier, is becoming increasingly aggressive toward many people and dogs (not me or my brothers, though, thankfully) -- but only in my mom's room. She spends all of her time watching my mom, and tonight, when my mom was trying to rest, Rusti stood on the edge of the bed, staring at my mom, growling and woofing. She knows something is wrong with the most important person in her pack. She's doing her best to protect my mom and to comfort her.
Yesterday, aunt L vacuumed my mom's floor (at my mom's request) to get the dog-toy fuzz up. Rusti spent the entire time attacking and biting the vacuum cleaner. The closer it got to my mom, the more frantic she got. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or to cry. Outside of my mom's room, Rusti curls up in my lap and sleeps soundly, utterly relaxed. I have hope that she'll be less neurotic when her life is a bit more stable.
The first night I was here, my mom talked about her wishes for her funeral/memorial service. She dislikes the preacher at her church. She wants to be cremated. She wants to be buried in the space next to my grandmother (her mother) so that her children and grandchildren will have something concrete to see, and somewhere to go to remember her. Most importantly, she does not want an open-casket visitation. "I don't want people gawkin' at me," she's told me more than once. She didn't want it for either of my grandparents, either, but she got overruled by her sisters.
Aunt L asked me if my mom had this discussion with me, and I said yes, that I knew what she wanted for the final rites. I said something about no open-casket visitation and Linda said, "Well. The reason we overruled her when Mother died is because we knew there were all kinds of rumors."
Er. What?
She continued, "I heard more than one person say that they were surprised at how good she looked, that they thought the cancer would've just eaten her up. And we wanted to make sure we squashed any kind of rumors like that."
Er. What? If there are rumors like that going around, then people need to get lives. Well, they do anyway, but I'm not going to refuse to honor my mother's wishes because people might talk about what condition she was in when she died. It's nobody's business anyway, what the cancer has done to her. It's enough that it will, at that point, have killed her.
She woke up a few minutes ago, nauseated. She drinks a bit of Diet Sundrop and ice. Throws up. Swivels back and forth in her chair. Finally, she sits the bucket down and lights a cigarette. I read her the email from my co-worker, talking about how Rocky has settled in. My mom smiles when Rocky is described as "quite a character."
Then she grabs the bucket, and she vomits violently. I rinse out her washcloth and wipe her face. I pray for peace and mercy. Please, please, let her stop hurting. Please let her find peace. Please give me strength. Please.
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