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They said that whoever got to my mom first was the one that kept her alive.

I guess that was a good thing, because that meant that the whole big family could come in and say their peace to her as she laid in the hospital bed with cotton balls taped over her fluttering eyelids. A stroke. A blood clot at the base of her brain. They had to keep the blood thin apparently, to keep more clots from forming, so they couldn’t operate. And they hoped it wouldn’t dislodge from where it lay and go to her brain.

I think.

Doesn’t really matter. That’s how I understood it as a 16-year old, anyway. ­­She was gone - but she was somewhat still there for people to come and say good-bye. And people liked to make me feel good about doing CPR, since whomever it was along the way that supposedly got to her first, made it possible for her to still be however alive she was for those days for people to come and sit vigil. It gave us time to prepare for her inevitable death, I suppose.

It was a powerful time in my life, but as I look back, I wonder how such important things can be treated with such ignorance. I wonder how we as a culture came to handle such big things as death, with such little preparation on how to live through that. Interacting with my mom’s body at the moments of her death, you’d think would take great consideration. But instead, I went back to school the following days as if nothing had happened. “Good girl!” people would say. “You’re handling this so well!”

I learned quickly that “good girl” was awarded when I ignored the feelings of hurt and pain, and the natural inclination to mourn and grieve. I was applauded by going back to school quickly and learned to not talk about my mom’s death, and that by handling things that way I was “doing so good.”

The quicker we all learned to not talk about it, the better we were doing, I guess.

So life went on.

At age 16 most girls aren’t getting along with their moms. Most are fighting with their moms. They’re yelling “I hate you” and slamming doors and hurling ugly insults. My mom and I hadn’t had that relationship, though ours had its own ugly side. Balanced with a saint-like acceptance for me and an almost smothering acknowledgment of her love for me, was my mom’s alcoholism. Now that I have teenagers of my own I understand why my mom drank, but I didn’t back then. It was embarrassing to me as a child. It was pathetic and it was an ugly secret that just a few of us carried. It was another of those things that I learned you should just ignore and pretend wasn’t there. Years later it made sense when I heard people describe family secrets as the elephant in living room.

People LOVED my mom. Everyone loved my mom. The community loved her, the church loved her. Old friends, new acquaintances, neighbors, relatives. She was intelligent and giving. She was stylish in her own crazy way. She was talented. Driven. She fought hard for what she believed deeply. She knew right from wrong and how to treat everyone with dignity and respect. She fought for the underdog and for peace and social justice. She volunteered to help the handicapped and sewed to help the underprivileged. And in her last years, she drank herself silly.

I’m guessing that most people didn’t know the extent of her drinking. Not even the older kids in our family. Being ninth of ten kids that survived (she gave birth to 14) there was a big gap in our rearing even though there had only been 17 years difference in the ages from the first to the last.
The older kids in our family were surprised and miffed years later, to have me make that accusation. They had no idea the extent of the discomfort and embarrassment it brought to the last few kids. It was our ugly secret. One of my sisters brought it up first. “Mom was an alcoholic,” she said, and the words sat ugly in my mind. I denied it in thought though it rang true in my heart. I struggled with the acknowledgement. I had lived it out firsthand, but because my mom had lived so sweetly and with so much love, it was like an awful betrayal to admit that she could have had a drinking problem - especially after she was gone.

So I let it roll around in my head for years, while I went on about life. I had learned to perfect that facade of perfect control with chaos fighting it out inside of me. I had learned how to carefully project a life of happiness and ease, while burying pain and secrets deep inside. I learned very quickly after my own mom’s death that alcohol was a great escape - and that drinking not only washed away the pain but that it made life so much more fun! I developed courage of steel and found that I was afraid of nothing.

So how then, did I come to this point?

My phone rang a bit ago. My 14-year old, asking me if I can pick him up tonight, from the ski hill about forty minutes away. “I don’t do winter driving,” I reminded him.

It’s cold and sunny today. 15 degrees and bright blue skies with an occasional snow flake. It could be perfectly clear tonight. I don’t know. The last time he went skiing, he was driven home in a viscious snowstorm by a mother who had lost her 17-year old daughter in a car crash exactly three months earlier, to the day.

I’m not sure where people get their strength, and I’m just working to understand where I got my fear and more importantly, how I can overcome it.

One of the hardest things is dealing with peoples’ stabbing comments of “get over it.” “Quit living in the past.” “Don’t blame your family.”

“Get over it?” Really? How come so many people feel that way? That used to make me crazy-mad, until I realized that anyone that could make such a comment had obviously never dealt with the realities I had. I could no more “get over it” than I could change my eye color from blue-green to purple. The worst part of hearing those kind of comments is that it actually put me years back in terms of healing. Not only had I experienced the pains I had, I was made to feel crazy about it, and on top of that - GUILTY! In some odd way I was being told that I had done everything wrong. I had twisted my experiences to somehow misshape them so I could blame my life for my discomfort when I’d grown up. When I finally started accepting some of the real truths it was not only good for my own healing, but it helped me become a really compassionate person. And you know what I think? We’re really too damn hard on each other.

My mom was right. Don’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins. (and speaking of sins - well there’s a whole other story.)

It’s all so deep. It’s all so complicated - this simple, flowing thing called life. It just keeps coming faster and faster. I reach out and grab at stars along the way hoping to learn some new truth to make it all seem better.

It’s getting there. I’m getting there. But then I have to wonder what comes next. What if when you figure it all out - it’s the end?

The Illusion of Control

I realized today that part of why I haven't written here is that the thoughts I have are either totally fleeting - and lost before I'd post them - or they're huge, rich, deep - and way too tangled to write about. But part of my goal for 2010 and beyond, is letting go. While I know that has to happen on many levels, as I go along I'm realizing the depths of some of the issues that keep me hanging on for dear life.

Life lessons. That's what I think we're here for. Mine are so twisted. . . and when I think I've figured something out it just seems to end up going deeper.

Things seem unsettled right now in an odd way that I can't exactly pinpoint. But then on the other hand, as I feel like I figure certain things out, things seem more settled than before. So as I work on letting go - and as my first instinct is to freak and grab onto life tighter - things seem to be getting more comfortable with the acceptance that control is totally an illusion. And I feel like a young child teetering on my two-wheeler for the first time without training wheels. Will I succeed and ride along forevermore? Too bad in reality the first time I had my bike out for a spin as a child, I took a bad spill. Left my bike around the corner from our house to run home for some nurturing, and my bike was ripped off. I have a hard time now realizing that life doesn't always turn out that way.

I want to hold on tight and pretend that as long as I hold all dear to me very close in my arms, all will be well.

This morning as I took my 14-year old to a friend's house to head out snowboarding, I had a thick, but kind of brief conversation with his friend. His sister died tragically at age 17, just three months ago. She was killed in a car crash when she skidded around a corner and rolled her car. I asked if it would be okay for me to ask a few questions, since her death is one that keeps creeping into my head. I wonder how it would be to be her parents. His parents. Maybe if I can write some of these things out, I can help myself figure some of these things out. I got stuck along the way and while I feel like I had let go years ago, I'm realizing that until I really fully do, I will be trapped forever by that illusion of control.

For me, the story starts with the crystal clear slice of a vision that will be forever trapped in my mind. My bedroom door flung open and my dad frantically yelling "Go do that emergency stuff to your mom!" He, standing there in his Jockey boxer shorts. Me, suddenly just half awake wondering what the hell he was talking about. "That stuff you learned in school!"

In a heartbeat I went from fast asleep to another world. I flew out of bed and ran into their bedroom where she lay on her bed. Quickly, I moved for the next however long, trapped in some kind of a time-warp that seems like both a matter of minutes balanced with a life-time.

My mom really should have been moved to the floor, to a hard surface, but he had been awakened when she rose from bed and fell to the floor, so he put her back on the bed. I didn't have the heart to tell him that CPR needed to be done on a hard surface. He had sweetly put her back on her bed, to comfort her obviously dead body.

As I heard him in the other room fumbling to call for an ambulance, I started to do what I had been taught the year before in health class. What was pretty routine on a plastic CPR dummy was another whole thing on a real person laying in their real bed in your real house. And especially when it's your mom.

The pre-cardial thump, I think they call it. You slug the person. But how hard? If you slug them too hard you can break their ribs. But if you slug them just right you can bring them right to life! Much easier on the dummy, it just didn't seem natural to slug your mother. My heart was racing and I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. The vision of my dad and his skinny legs in his boxers. . . the pain in his eyes. . . the way he called out "Momma! Come out of it!". . . all still haunt me.

As he spoke in the other room, I began. The thump. The clearing of the airways, my fingers in her mouth and throat. I pulled up on the back of her neck to open the passageway. Listened for breathing and heard nothing but an ugly gurgle which I pretended may be life. I checked for a pulse again and again not sure exactly what I should feel and thinking that I hopefully just wasn't doing something right, and then I began.

Alone, my scrawny legs in my red and white striped footie pajamas, knees knocking. I found the spot which I thought was below her sternum and started compressions. Again, on a dummy it was easy, but in real life found this surreal. Too hard, they had told us, and you puncture the lungs. Too soft and you do no good. I am not sure if I went through the actions or if anything I did was doing any good - but I went on for what seemed like eternity.

Time couldn't move any slower in that blur which was eventually broken up by the sound of the neighbor's dogs howling. My mom used to laugh about the fact that they'd hear sirens long before anyone else and I was grateful to hear their piercing howls. Seconds later, I think, there were paramedics by my side. I was happy to turn the work over to someone else, but was thinking suddenly that the house was a mess and was unhappy to be hosting them at that moment. They got her onto a stretcher and pulled out all sorts of things that I had seen on TV. Bottles and needles and hoses. They needed more light, so my dad grabbed a lamp and pulled it over for them. It all happened so fast. Within minutes she was outside and was being loaded into the back of the ambulance. My dad climbed in with her and off they went, lights flashing and sirens soon to follow, off into the dark of the night and into a deep, deep fog.

I was standing alone in the dark in the middle of 79th Street. And I stood there for a minute. Or forever. Wondering if that was all real. Knowing it was, but wondering how. And what to do next.