Ma, One Year Later

 Ma, reading the New York Times on a Sunday a few weeks ago.  She's the cutest, yes?

I've been thinking about writing this post and steadily avoiding it for a few weeks now, mainly because I'm unsure what exactly it is I want to say.  It's a beautiful thing that my mother has lived this long, yet it also means we are quickly approaching 12 months of a 12-14 month timeline in terms of her diagnosis.  I am the first to believe that she is not typical and could easily outlive this statistical lifespan, but a piece of me cannot help but in some small way dread this anniversary.

These last few months it has been harder and harder to talk and write about my mom, mainly because nothing dramatic has really happened, other than she's slowly losing her short term memory and having a harder and harder time finding words and holding up her end of the conversation.  But the dramatics of the crisis are over, she is not, thank god, in the ICU, having seizures or in and out of the hospital.  She is simply living each day as best she can, and so are we.  I've been frustrated with my inability to put my feelings about all of it into words as of late, but I read an interview in Rolling Stone with Stephen Colbert over the weekend that somehow gave me words to what I'm feeling and will feel for quite sometime. He is the youngest of 11, and when he was a kid, his father and two siblings died in an airplane crash.  When the interviewer asked him about it, he said something to the effect of, "I've dealt with it, but still have a hard time talking about it.  It's too fresh."

I guess it doesn't get much fresher than being in the middle of this with my family and Ma, and I'm holding on to that line as some kind of comfort when I feel numb or unable to express myself, unable to write poignant and searing essays about what's happening, unable to scratch out some form of a novel in the middle of this. Shit, I can barely blog.  

There is a strange suspension of time that happens when someone you love dearly gets sick, especially if you are able to be with them everyday and watch the progression or cure happen, the highs and the lows, the tiny moments of understanding and love that come to mean everything.  This year has gone so fast, especially when I think about how much I and the rest of my family wanted to slow things down, to wring out every day and stretch each moment.  A friend told me recently that once her mother got Alzheimer's, it was impossible for her to remember her mother well until after her mother died, then the memories came flooding back. I'm experiencing the same thing, as I can't seem to remember a time when my mother wasn't sick - I have trouble  the way she looked, the way she walked, the things we used to talk about.  She has gotten so old so fast in this last year, and although still herself, I am stunned sometimes to glance at photos taken last May or June, at the beginning of all this, before the steroids and the radiation changed her face, although she is still essentially herself and strangely radiant at times, it's almost like she was someone else before, and is someone different now.

And while I love the times we have now, I want those memories back, and sometimes I have glimpses out the corner of my eye, of when she used to come visit me where ever I was living at least once a year.  It was Los Angeles most recently, and I would take her to whatever office I was working in, to my favorite restaurants, hiking in Laurel Canyon - I wanted her to know everything and she couldn't wait to know all of it, to meet my friends, to roll around in my life, to understand who I was that day, that month, that year.  I was always struggling, it seemed, with issues of career, money and men, and no one made me feel better about all of it than my mom. I wrote early on when her diagnosis came back as terminal that I couldn't sleep that first night at home, all I could hear or understand was the one sentence in my head, "I do not exist without my mother."

So much of me is her, so much of her is me.  We share the uncanny ability to blurt out the obvious, to instantly spill whatever we are eating on our shirts, to ruin anything white we come into contact with.  She watched me dribble coffee onto myself the other day and said, "Oh Abby, I love you.  No one else understands." And she's right, no one else does understand, simply because there is no way for them to.



And here we are at a year, which seems glorious and impossible at the same time.  I didn't think she would make it to January; few of us did. But then she stabilized and kept going, and she keeps going, and here we are, in the middle of the way we live now.  It doesn't seem possible that she could be gone by the end of summer, but a piece of me has to accept that she might be, and I want to scream and rant and tell the universe, I am not ready, there is so much more I want her to know about the person I am going to become; I want her to hold my children and laugh with my husband, come to visit California on the weekends, so I can take her to where ever it is I work, to my favorite restaurants, to the Santa Cruz coast where she spent so much time during her childhood.

It simply never occurred to me until last year that she wouldn't be here for all of these things in my life, and when her diagnosis came back, for awhile I just assumed we'd get another miracle, like we did with my sister. There are Hindu Gods and myths, and things that have happened to our family that cannot be explained, and then there is my mother, who means so much to so many, dying. This life doesn't seem possible without her. But it has to be.  I still haven't reconciled these two opposing forces, and I don't want to, won't until I'm forced. I won't let go of her until is the only way I can survive, and even then my fingers and my heart will never fully release her.

In the meantime, she is still here today, one year later.  She can still call me like she did this weekend and tell me that she's "lonely for my voice" and I can still make her laugh, a sound that gets me through the hardest of moments and propels me to the next.