My mom never much cared for things like Iron Maiden. Being a suburban mom and housewife in the 1980’s, she was very much informed by daytime television and had an ingrained suspicion of anything it branded Satanic – which was most things. Geraldo Rivera’s famous exposé of Satanism had moms all across America snooping through their teenagers’ closets while they were at school. Much tell-tale contraband, such as candles, black clothing, and heavy metal records were thrown in the garbage.

My older brother tells the story of a favorite record he once had – Hits of the 70’s, or something similar. One day, he decided to serenade my mom with a rendition of Steve Miller’s “Jet Airliner,” and she must have winced when he sang, “…you got to go through Hell before you get to Heaven,” because, after that, the record was never seen nor heard again.

My first Maiden album was Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. I bought it secretly when I wandered away from one of my brother’s little league games and into a small record shop nearby. I was mesmerized by the mysterious cover and I still remember the smell when I removed the plastic, like the gum in a new pack of trading cards. But, for all my excitement, it must have been years before I listened to the thing all the way through; I was too scared and I didn’t want to tempt Satan.

My tastes drifted harmlessly in the direction of They Might Be Giants and the Beetlejuice soundtrack, and Seventh Son wandered into my brother’s collection and was forgotten there. It was not unearthed until twenty-some years later when I was rooting around the basement of his home in Michigan.

I had just returned east after living in Los Angeles for seven years, where, among other things, I had cultivated a mature appreciation for Iron Maiden. Nothing besides my mom’s slowly depreciating health made me decide to return when I did. It just suddenly felt important to be closer to her, and I had made it back just in time for a long overdue family Thanksgiving. The quality time that I spent with my mom on that trip has since become one of my most valuable memories, because, the following week, as I was cheerfully cruising around the South Hills of Pittsburgh, I got the call telling me that my mom had suffered another serious stroke. Her previous one had changed everything and it took me half a decade to properly react. Now it was happening again.

It is difficult to describe how I felt sitting there in a borrowed, blue Saturn on the side of the road, but everything seemed significant somehow, from the uncanny timing of events to the cassette in the tape deck.

I hadn’t effectively demystified Maiden in my mind until the fall of this year. I was watching Live After Death, a live performance filmed at Long Beach Arena in 1985. In his introduction to Number of the Beast, Bruce Dickinson declared to an army of slavering heshers that Maiden was not Satanic and it was stupid to think otherwise. It was not the first time he had said it, but it was the first that I had heard it, not that I was at all surprised. If my mom were still alive today, I don’t think I’d have much difficulty selling Dickinson as a role model. He’s hugely successful, well read and articulate, physically fit well into his fifties, and if heavy metal is still not your thing, he’s also a commercial airline pilot. That’s enough to make any mother proud.

I learned of this special place only recently, but, for a time, I heard about it often. It was one of a handful of memories my mom was clinging to as her memory began to fail her.

She must have shared them with a lot of other people too, because they got around the nursing home. She certainly had plenty of time to make friends.  And making friends is maybe the thing my mom does best. People fall in love with her almost as a rule.

This weekend, when we were trying to calm her for her trip to the hospice house, it was no surprise to hear a nurse tell her, ”Go to your waterfall,” even though she had only just met my mom earlier that day. I figured another nurse had told her; at this point my mom had not spoken sensibly for several days. 

As I write this, it is only a couple of hours since I got the call.  The news was less drastic than what I was prepared for. My mom has not yet died but her death is considered by the doctors to be imminent.

In a few hours, my girlfriend and I will be at my mom’s bedside with my dad. My brother and his family will join us tomorrow. 

In a few days, many of my mom’s dearest loved ones will also be there on the site that was once my mom’s childhood home. It is now a memorial garden. At some point, I will likely be overwhelmed by grief and I will wander away and I will follow the sound of water coming down off the mountain.

In the windowed conference room a few doors away from my mom’s room in the oncology unit, the doctor delivers my mom’s prognosis against a background of a coming lightning storm. My brother and I both regard the weather to be suitably gothic for the occasion but refrain from mentioning for the moment. Our dad is conspicuously absent.

My brother is slouched forward in his chair. He runs his fingers through his short hair and the tears come. For now, I am the rock, the firm foundation from which he draws support- a role I am not well-suited for.  I am uncertain how to comfort him, so I cross over to him and give him a plaintive karate chop to his shoulder. I linger for a moment under the silent scrutiny of the doctor and his entourage and then slink back to my chair and wait for the discussion to continue.

The doctor, a geriatrician this time, admits that he’s famously bad at guessing how long his patients have and I try not to hold that against him. It’s out of his hands. It’s out of everyone’s hands, except maybe God’s. But, it’s the first time I’ve heard my mom’s prognosis presented as quantifiable figure and it’s hard not to take seriously.

That was three weeks ago. Since then, different evaluations from different doctors suggest a timeline measured in weeks, even days. To see my mom in her present condition leaves little room for denial. Even my obstinate dad, who has long been holding out for divine intervention, has been shaken. My mom is conscious only a small part of the time, but most of that time she is reeling from fright. The only things I know that give her comfort are my voice and my touch. 

However, it’s not until my next visit that my dad gives me the really bad news.

Over a pitcher of Bud Lite and a Veggie Lover’s Pizza he announces that the star Wormwood of Biblical prophecy has been sighted by a real scientist and author and not at all by some crackpot with bushy eyebrows and the apocalypse will soon follow. His source was a popular AM radio talk show that has made a reputation for itself by talking about UFOs, conspiracy, and the end of the world. He acknowledges that sometimes you have to take things like that with a grain of salt, but this time it is no joke.

Despite the burden of this terrible knowledge, my dad is remarkably complacent. His attitude is that my mom will be spared from the horror because she will already be in heaven. As for my dad, he has never been too concerned for his own well-being. Unless he reinvents himself, once my mom is gone, so too will be my dad’s most significant reason to live.

It’s the rest of us that should be worried.

My dad sits in my mom’s wheelchair, inches from the screen watching a gospel program; tele-evangelism in IMAX. I’m seated in the only actual chair in the room.

My dad has propped Mom up to enjoy her expensive gift. Her eyes are closed. Dad digs the remote out of a drawer and attempts to uncover its mysterious purpose. I joke that the remote, by itself, is larger than my TV at home, but the TV is so loud and my dad so hard of hearing that only my mom snickers.

Dad holds the remote up for me to see.

“What button is this?”

I look. “Menu,” I say.

Mom realizes that the TV was not exactly for her benefit. It was just a quick way for my dad to blow a chunk of money so that my mom could qualify for Medicaid and thus stay in the nursing home. If you were to ask her, she would probably say that she would have preferred if he hadn’t bothered.

Dad holds up the remote again. “What’s this button?”

It’s the same button. “Menu,” I say. “Where are your glasses?”

His glasses are in the same drawer as the remote. I saw them earlier.

He says, “There’s a good idea.”

My mom is losing considerable weight. She doesn’t have much of an appetite anymore. I was in the room earlier when the nurse took her lunch tray away nearly untouched. She was always such a sturdy woman, and now to see her comparatively emaciated does not bode well.

I give the TV a similar prognosis. I expect it to be broken inside of a year, either by my dad’s famous bad temper or by general clumsiness, for which he is also famous.

He asks again, “What’s this button?”

He has found the button below the menu button but he still hasn’t put on his glasses.

“Mute,” I say.

Next to the television is a brand new DVD and Blu-Ray player. The only DVDs in the room are a documentary about the liberal conspiracy to undermine whatever, and a special edition copy of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers which I brought as a gift for my dad.

Last winter I had bought him a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, and as far as I know, he never figured out how to use the DVD player he has at home to get any kind of use out of it. Still, he wants the whole set, and I’ve been slowly doling them out to him.

He puts in the first disk for The Two Towers and as the camera flies over the mountains of Moria at the beginning of the film I admit that it is impressive. My mom winces from the noise of Gandalf doing battle with the Balrog but she does not open her eyes. In the following scene, Sam and Frodo reach the bottom of a  treacherous cliff and engage in conversation. My dad asks Mom to open her eyes and tell him what color Frodo’s eyes are, only he pronounces his name, ”Fraud-0.”

She opens her eyes for barely a moment and says, “Blue.”

I have to squint to tell that she is right.

((the title of this entry comes from what my dad says when he means to say high-definition and Blu-ray.))

In a recent demonstration of this, my special lady and I were returning home from the motion picture show when I checked my voice-mail. Since I am a courteous cinema goer, the phone had been turned off and when I turned it back on it was late in the evening, too late for routine social calls from my brother.

I knew from his tone that I was about to get bad news and I grabbed my girly’s hand in nervous anticipation.

The short of the message was that the nursing home staff had finally made good on previous threats and kicked my dad out for good. To the professionals at the home, his well-intentioned care for my bed-ridden mother looks a lot like abuse- citing my mom’s cries of pain and actual accusations of abuse.

I take it on faith that my dad doesn’t torture my mom on purpose, and I’m willing to go on the record to say that he doesn’t.

I was moderately relieved that the message was about my dad’s wily antics and not about something immediately disastrous. No sudden strokes or seizures today; no pleas for me to come down as soon as possible because this might be the last time; in other words, no repeat of the excitement of a few weeks ago.

My mom’s symptoms since her last bout of seizures have actually improved, though her prognosis is no better. She’s on a new medication to relieve the pressure her tumors cause her brain and she can actually see much better and make much more sense conversationally; a welcome relief to all involved.

The voice message didn’t really offer anything new in the way of information but only reminded me of how chaos has become routine for my family. But it did produce in me a feeling of emotional exhaustion and it triggered a collapse.

For several days I’d been neglecting to inform my girl-friend that my mom’s roommate had died. We had met her during our last visit. I didn’t know much about her besides the fact that she was old, she watched her tv too loudly and she was obviously very sick.  At one point she had mistaken my girl-friend for a nurse’s aid and asked for help feeding herself. 

My girl-friend’s name is not Alice, but for the purpose of this essay and for the sake of her anonymity, let’s call her that anyway.

Alice would have helped had my dad not stopped her.

“We can get in a lot of trouble,” he said.

At that point, my family had been waiting for help for my mother for a good ten minutes and there was no sign of anyone coming soon. Mealtime is usually the hardest time to get any kind of help in a nursing home if you are not already getting it.  Meanwhile, the poor, old woman was by herself and her food was getting cold.

Alice is very sensitive, and so I neglected to mention the old woman’s passing  for fear of an emotional reaction. So what happened on that drive home from the movies when I eventually told her? She remained generally unfazed and I cried so hard I didn’t properly calm down until the next morning.

I felt that I personally had contributed to denying a dying woman a last bit of humanity, but mostly I felt like it could have been my mom that died just as easily.

By the time I got around to calling my dad about his ejection from the nursing home the next day, the situation had been resolved. He briefly went over the details and I quickly put them out of my mind.

Today, I’m sitting here writing this and I realize that I’m not quite done going through the ringer. Darker times lay ahead. I’m desperately nostalgic about the time I spent across the country when my troubles were only my own. But, when you love people, you welcome your own suffering if it means they suffer less.

And you wouldn’t have it any other way.

my virtual alter ego

When I was in middle school, I pleaded desperately with my parents so that I might get a Nintendo for my birthday. It was 1989. I was turning fourteen. My mom was firmly against the idea, citing it to be an expensive waste of time, but she was open to reason and invited me to try to change her mind. I wrote for her an essay outlining exactly why it was imperative that I owned the game system. I can’t recall the specific points but I’m certain that it was better organized and more thoughtful than anything I composed up until that point and probably well after. My mom may have thought so too, because she kept the hand-written document in the drawer of her night-stand for at least a decade. But I never did get my Nintendo.

I look back at this childish disappointment and realize that I am a better man for it. I am probably more productive, more engaged, and significantly less stupid than I would have been had I spent all that extra time immersed in artificial reality. Appreciative though I am, I can’t deny that, for the past twenty years, my urge to inflict monstrous, simulated mayhem has been welling up inside of me. When I got my PS2, the flood gates were opened.

I’d like to say that that is all out of my system and now I can direct my precious little mental energy to where it needs to go. (I plan on visiting my parents this weekend for one thing.) I suppose time will tell. Like Wilford Brimley’s character in The Thing, I went a little crazy, but I’m much better now and I’d like to come back inside.

This moment came back to me this past weekend as I sat beside my mom in her bed at the care center where she is now staying.  At first, I was massaging her hands, but as I attempted to invigorate her and coerce her into more immediate consciousness, I held her by her wrists and made her pantomime playing the drums to the Christian rock station to which we were listening to on the radio; positive and encouraging K-LOVE.

I asked her if she remembered our jam session however many years ago, and, to my relief, she said that she did. By now, my mom has had more surgeries, strokes and seizures than I can keep track of and she spends most of her time in deep, medicated sleep. Naturally, her memory has suffered for it. 

Earlier during my visit, I told her that I recently found the pin that she gave me when I first told her of my intentions to be a writer. For the longest time, I had thought that I had lost it. The pin says, Quill and Scroll, and depicts the same. A smaller scroll at the bottom says, editor. She told me at that time that she wore the pin when she worked on her school paper. Now, when I asked her to clarify some of the details surrounding the pin, she didn’t seem to remember the name of the paper, what she did, or even what school she attended.

She did seem to recall the actual giving of the pin though.

She has two memories in particular that she deliberately clings to and shares with me as often as she can. The first is when, one summer, I tried to beat the heat by improvising a swimming pool with a plastic tarp and a giant cardboard box. There is a photo somewhere that she took just as my invention was falling apart, spilling me and an untold amount of water across the lawn. Her other favorite memory is of me performing a spastic rendition of Singing In The Rain in the street while she watched from our living room window. The former was for my own amusement but the second was for hers. These are, for her, vital living memories and because of this I never interrupt her frequent recounting of them.

For myself, I’ve been struggling recently to locate a meaningful memory of my mom that didn’t involve her being sick. It has been much harder than I thought. She has been suffering for so long and that has colored most of my experiences with her, certainly since I returned to Pennsylvania. I am deeply grateful for our jam-session memory. I had to wait until it came up in context, but when it did, it demonstrated the vitality and humor and the spirit that makes her outstanding.

My mom has made no mention of either of her favorite memories during either of my two most recent visits. Next time, I’ll be sure to try to remind her.

Right now, my mom is in a nursing home slowly losing her mind. Her vision was the latest thing to go. The past several months before that, she basically only existed from the neck up, retaining only limited use of her right hand. Every time I visit her, she seems more and more diminished and I can’t decide if it is happening slowly or too fast.

At the same time, my dad is also deteriorating.  His alcoholism has made it nearly impossible for him to deal with everything from his own mounting health concerns to his basic, day-to-day existence.

Both parents are seemingly dead-locked in a race to the finish.  And whoever goes first, the other is likely to soon follow, and it will be my brother and I sifting through the remains. Right now, when things seem to be getting progressively darker, it’s hard to imagine a time when I’ll be able to look back at all this and not feel crushed.

That’s largely why I haven’t written much lately. I’ve been reluctant to try to organize the morbid facts into a zippy narrative; thus spending even more time dwelling on them than I have been already. Even though I usually feel better after having done so. Many of my recent attempts have been non-productive. I crave escape and welcome distraction.  I stare so long at the screen that I forget what I wanted to get down (such as what’s happening to me right now).

I suppose that deliberately trying to make light of grave matters takes more skill than I have or requires a degree of insensitivity such that I lack. Doing so feels like a denial. I should just get used to the idea that things are going to be rough for a while and not try as much to color things any differently than what they ought to be. 

But I have been writing. And I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. I’m buying some time. In the next several weeks I hope to finish and post the stuff I’ve been struggling to complete during the last few weeks. I pray that things stay only as crazy as they are right now.

“Ray” is an abbreviation of “Raekwon.” He was named after the famous rapper by some stoner friends of mine that lived off-campus where I went to college. They were Ray’s first owners. My mom often jokes that Ray is an educated cat for having been to school.  Sadly, his collegiate experience mostly consisted of using  a pizza box for a litter pan and having idiots blowing their bong hits in his face.

“Duuude, he really likes it! Seriously!”

Since my epic move and subsequent return from the left coast, Ray has been in the exclusive custody of my parents. As my mom’s faculties declined over the years, she couldn’t do as much to care for him, but she grew to value his company more and more. They had many ”therapy sessions” where he would perch on her lap as she lay in bed and he’d knead his paws into her doughy belly; making biscuits.  She had long associated Ray with me, but in my absence, he had become a tangible expression of my love for her.

Ray, an artist's rendering.

Last Christmas, my mom gave me a painting she made of Ray back when she was taking art classes. It was one of her last finished paintings before her condition made it too difficult to control a brush.

My dad became care-giver, not only for my mom, but the cat as well. In hindsight, they both might have been better off with my stoner college pals. Dad has enough difficulty discerning food quality for himself. Until recently, there was only two kinds of cat food he could buy: cat food what’s in a bag and cat food what’s in a can. The latter being the fancy kind.

Ray is now officially an older cat. My dad is almost 70 and tries to eat like he’s still in the army. You might imagine that making dietary accommodations for the cat might be well down on his list of priorities, especially when he has my mom to worry about.

For over a year now, mom has spent most of her time living at hospitals and nursing facilities, and my dad has been by her side. That means Ray has been without meaningful human contact for just as long. Occasionally, there are exceptions. Sometimes my dad will let Ray nap with him on the couch, his doughy belly an inferior substitute to my mom’s. However, their typical interaction takes place in the kitchen: Ray will hear my dad rooting around- which he does quite noisily- and he will come in to join him. Ray will beg for food and/or attention, as cats do, to which my dad responds by throwing a metal baking sheet on the floor scaring him away for several hours.

In the time that my parents where in Pittsburgh, Ray’s care was entrusted to a neighbor, who, until recently, was a stranger. He was given food, but, to date, that’s all I can confirm. My dad was able to return for a few days to tend to a few details and the news I received was discouraging. Ray had taken to throwing up and using the bathroom all over the apartment, and rarely the same place twice. Maybe because his litter box was over-run or maybe he was feeling spiteful, likely it was both. I suggested that Ray might be upset.

“He’s upset?!”

My dad couldn’t understand why my sympathies were with the cat when he was the one who had to clean up after the stupid thing.

When my parents returned home, my mom was likely troubled that Ray rarely appeared from hiding and insisted that he be taken to the vet.  He remained there for several days receiving treatment for a bad urinary tract infection. He has returned home this past weekend but, so far, he hasn’t stopped acting weird. 

Now, I’m facing a serious dilemma. This coming month I hope to be in a new apartment and I’ve been mostly looking at ones that allow cats, thinking specifically about Ray.  I would be able to take him and love him and feed him appropriately and in so doing, lighten my parents’ burden, but, at the same time, I would be denying my mom of one of her dearest treasures when she has already lost so much.

Help me, dear reader. What shall I do?

Getting him on the phone in the first place is challenging enough. Usually, when I call and he answers, he hands the cell phone immediately to my mom, forgetting for the moment that she has difficulty doing things like holding cell phones. But he is already in another room before she can speak a word, whereupon she drops the phone between the sofa cushions. I stand by for a couple minutes, listening to my mom’s mounting frustration as she tries to recover it. Every once in a while, I’ll throw out a, “HELLO…?!” hoping that she can just follow the sound of my voice.

Eventually my dad will return to the room but the connection has since been dropped. Meanwhile, I’m trying to dial them back but I only get their voice-mail, which they don’t know how to check.

And that’s the way it goes until my next surprise visit several days later when I walk over to the couch and fish out the phone.

“Oh, we’ve been looking all over for that!”

And all that’s presuming if they answer at all.  They don’t mean to make it so difficult on me, it’s just that the tedium of charging the phone, making sure it has enough minutes, and making sure it is even turned on are responsibilities that they are not used to and, if you ask them, they could do just as well without.

Today, I was lucky and my dad called me back. But, I’m not too pleased to announce that things for them are nearly back to normal. They are back at home after an unscheduled, extended stay in Pittsburgh.

(Forgive me for another brief aside,  but in my last entry I said my mom has endured four brain surgeries.  Well, I lost count. It was actually five. My brother reminded me after reading my last entry. )

I had become quite spoiled while my parents were in town as guests of the renowned University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC for those in the know). For several weeks my mom’s care was in the hands of professionals. My dad and I were even able to hang out socially, something which, I’m tempted to say, has never happened before. Brother and I were hoping that Dad would make arrangements so that they could remain in Pittsburgh. Easier said than done, I suppose.  And so, once again, the limitations of their insurance forced them to return home.

For all of the hi-jinks it takes to get my dad on the phone, I wish I could say it was worth it. That I shouldn’t be so concerned, that mom is actually doing quite well.  But, in the handful of days since their return home, they have already relapsed into frightening territory. Yesterday, my dad tells me, while he was napping, my mom got antsy and decided she wanted out of her wheel chair, temporarily forgetting that she often lacks the coordination to even sit up without help. 

Dad was adamant in expressing that she didn’t fall. Certainly, he would face more than a little scorn from me and my brother if that wasn’t the case.  Instead, she probably did what I had seen for myself before; she tries to straighten herself until she is essentially laying in her chair at a 45 degree angle. Her butt soon crests the edge of the chair and gravity does the rest.

Fall or not, my dad still had to call the paramedics to get her off of the floor.

But there is good news, and I have no idea why it was kept secret from me until just now.  UPMC had arranged home care for her starting tomorrow.  I’ll try to call again as soon as I can to see how it’s going. Which could mean it might be weeks before I’ll know anything.