Remembering the Fall

This is the only picture I have of my mother when she was "older" if 48 is "older".  This picture was taken a month before she died, October 1974, the last public event she attended, the wedding of the sister of my friend Ginny Rohan.

As I go through various of my writings, I have been appending some of them here. What follows I wrote probably 15 to 20 years ago, maybe I was seeking to send it somewhere--I don't remember. It was, ostensibly, about a fall my mother took a few months, probably before she died. My guess is that the cancer that was ravaging her had spread to her brain and caused the blackout. I think part of my motivation for these entries is that I am painfully aware I am the last in my family line--an only child without spouse or issue--and I am searching for a way and I see these writings as that way, to memorialize the immediate members of my family, and likely myself as well, on this earth.  It is both a pleasant experience and a bit of a sad one--preservation of a past that is theirs and mine, both.

_____________________

My mother was talking to me while she vacuumed the hallway outside of my bedroom.  She turned the vacuum on; she turned it off.  She teased me, the college kid on a day off still in bed.

"Ok, I'll get up in a little while" I promised.

She went back to her cleaning and then turned off the machine again.  I don't remember how long it was after the diagnosis of breast cancer or how soon before her death. It was though one of those moments in which she seemed truly fine physically and something added that seemed before her illness to elude her--a little bit of happiness.  I could have convinced myself that she wasn't sick at all as she pushed and pulled the machine energetically.

She was in a very good mood and at absolute ease, which was lovely, as generally she did not seem comfortable with her body.  Of course, when I knew her, except towards the end of her life when she became frighteningly thin, she was Rubenesque, a tendency I have inherited, along with much of her discomfort about my physical self.  She was dying, but she was in an ebullient frame of mind. It was some kind of paradox, but I wasn't analyzing it. Maybe it was because the doctors never told her she had cancer and she was dying. She was fighting.  She had some kind of implicit elusive hope.

Of course she was dying.  It was just a matter of how soon.  She had to know it.  After she died, a found a few Inquirer type articles about miracle cancer cures she kept in a little journal in which she recorded the medications she had been taking. Maybe as long as nobody spoke the dispositive words, she could hang on.  Whatever the reason at this moment, there was a respite.

Dad was at work.

Mom's vacuuming was concluded. She was turning around maybe to go to the kitchen to pour the tea she always drank from a large brown oval bottomed Russell Wright cup.  The kettle was on, barely whistling. She seemed to be making a deliberate movement, except it was not. She fell suddenly and hit the wall hard.  It was a split second. I jumped out of bed. Her head was next to the door frame of my parents' bedroom. There was a cut over her right eyebrow. She was gurgling. I ran to the phone. Called 911.  Called the family doctor. Called my father's office. I remember hanging up on somehow who needed more information in my panic.  There is no future or past in such moments.  And little detail. It is an indescribable suspension in which somehow movement still occurs.

I don't know what I did between the calls and the arrival of the paramedics.  I don't remember the time between.  The paramedics were simply there. And police officers, one, two, who knows, all crowded into a narrow hallway between my bedroom and my parents' with my mother mumbling as she lay on the floor.

She had not wanted to move into this apartment building near the Jerome Reservoir. It was still the Bronx. She wanted something more than the Bronx. She wanted a place with a doorman. My father was finally making enough money in 1970 for a nice apartment.  But a place with a doorman with the kind of inexhaustible and perfect space she wanted that she could mold to the designs she would get my father to implement, she had to know he did not make enough for that.

She also did not like the location of the closets.  My mother did not like visible closet doors. In our old place, their bedroom which became mine when they took to a Castro Convertible in the living room, had one smallish closet. She had my father cordon off the back of the room with drapes that hid shelves he built for her against the wall next to that closet.  She had him do the same thing to the kitchenette which simply lined the front of the living room.  When there was nobody around but us, the drapes were open revealing a refrigerator, sink, small gas stove that had to be lit with a match for every use, and a kind of counter in which the black and white television was inserted.  When visitors came the drapes were drawn and the room was recast into a Bronx nightclub.  The living room was all dark and light and browns and reds.  The bulbs were amber.  A library covered an entire wall with a built in mirror in n the center that covered the dumbwaiter no one used anymore.  A bar that my father built for my mother was in front of the drapes that hid the kitchen. Even the roaches, which infested the building, cooperated by absence during parties.  The international music was the final touch of magic. Rumbas, cha-chas, mambos, all danced in a room less than 25 feet long.  At about 4 or 5 a.m. during a family party, Uncle Frank evoked a toast in a series of oles.  I could not help even at a young age, be amazed at the force of will that could transform the place. 

Still, nothing in the late 1960s could hide the failings of the 175th Street adjacent building. The grass islands were replaced by concrete.  The ornate iron wrought fences were removed. The building became prone to mysterious fires. Someone said the landlord was trying to collect insurance money. Long time neighbors were moving away. My mother grudgingly conceded to our new apartment, two large bedrooms and a massive living room--as long as dad minimized those ugly closets with bookshelves.  The color of these walls were brighter than our last abode, but this place too was like a nightclub, more mirrored if that were possible, a more plush brown carpet, a custom made bar in the large corner near the door.

As my mother lay on the floor, she wasn't conscious, exactly.  The officers insisted though that she was. She was reaching her hand out. Long red nails pointed toward my parents' bed.  "Buddy" she said. "Where's Buddy?"  Buddy was the nickname for my father that she never used in public considering it too informal.  She preferred his given name, "Constantine" said with a long patrician "I" on the last syllable.
"He'll be at the hospital" I said as if she were really expecting an answer.

"We can't take her if she doesn't want to go" said the cops.  They seemed nearly bland. I convinced her to let them take her, somehow. She was in a wheelchair being carried to the ambulance.  People watched as we left the building. I saw only the inexorable motion. I had never been in an ambulance before, or since. Inside, she had some kind of major seizure. Arms. Legs. Body--all jerking in unison. She rattled.

"Is she dead, sir?" Sometimes when I get very excited and I am trying to control myself I get very formal.  He did not answer. The siren was muffled to someone inside an ambulance. It seemed we were going very slow and very far, although Montefiore was only a mile away. 

I was waiting there when dad came. He was angry. That she had been vacuuming. At not having control. At everything.  His anger made me angry.  I had never known what I was supposed to do.  Other than my father and myself, and her doctors, no one had been told she had cancer. People knew something serious was wrong, of course. She did not look well; after her diagnosis, she was jaundiced.  It was metastatic, so surgery was useless.  I understood that her doctor, Axelrod, told my father, and dad in turn told me not to tell anyone of my mother's condition, particularly her.  He felt that this was in her psychological best interest.  She took "the treatments" as she called them, and never asked or said what they were for.  I can remember one time being in the waiting room with her on one of her weekly day time outpatient visits. All the women, clearly sick, were wearing bandannas or wigs to hide the hair loss.  Not a word passed between my mother and me.

This is a part of our mutual experience that my father and I dispute.  He says that no one said she should not be told of her condition or that her family should not be told.  I remember and acted upon the mandate. I would not have had the independent idea to hide it..  I told only one person, the first boy to ask me out, because it was during the week she was in a coma before she died.  I was a sophomore in college, an incredibly late bloomer  Such memories cannot be false, can they?  My father and I are two peas in a pod in our need for absolute evidence of things.  I can't prove my memory.   He can't prove his.  All I know is that I had to keep her illness quiet.

I understood that I could never talk to my mother about what was happening to her.  I would like to say that I was a good daughter, that I took things well, that I wasn't selfish, but that would be untrue.  I did the best I could and it wasn't great.  My father let me know that, one time, cruelly, I always thought.  It is hard to give a parent room for his own distress even when you are a middle aged woman as I am today.  I had given my mother a rough time over something she wanted to do.  As my father and I were going down in our apartment elevator having observed my conduct, he said, "Don't worry, she'll be dead soon."  I knew then, and I know now, he did not mean it, but if I could not avoid my own anger, I would try to avoid his, at least.

My father disappears from memory after his arrival at the hospital.  Pretty much everything goes dark. She had some CAT scans to see what might have caused her to fall, as if there were any doubt--the cancer had spread to the brain.  She began taking anti-epileptics.

I have only one memory of my time at the hospital.  I don't know if it was she, or maybe a doctor who called me into one of those curtained cubicles.  She was still not fully conscious.  She did not say anything. But she did something that was surprising as was her call for my father-- as my mother was never overtly emotional.  She raised her hand for me to take it. I did. I squeezed it.  Maybe even comforted her. We never talked about that either.

I don't think she even remembered.