The Hardest Call
Jennifer
Loyal readers of the blog may think I’ve forgotten that I already wrote about calling the young man who killed my grandmother in a car accident, but this is a different grandmother and different phone call.Â
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My mother should have realized by December ’87 that there was an important reason she had been losing weight for a year or so and had begun to have difficulty in keeping food down, but she refused various medical tests which she had previously vowed never to have again. By March ’89 she was diagnosed with untreatable stomach cancer. In April, May, and June pagan spirituality became increasingly important to her. The Goddess was going to save her. Also in that period of time she talked for hours on the phone with all kinds of people about the exciting connections she was making between things she heard on the radio about physics, observed about birds, saw in art shows, remembered learning about the native people of ___, etc. When I overheard snippets of those phone calls, I wondered: What would my experience be on the other end of the phone? Clearly, I would listen because she was (my sister / my daughter / my best friend from college from whom I hadn’t heard in 10 years), but would I be excited by the connections she was making or would I think she was crazy? Would I have any idea, on the other end of the phone, that this 5’ 7†tall woman now weighed 85 pounds?
My mother had read, and had asked us all to read, Bernie Siegel’s Love, Medicine, and Miracles. We weren’t supposed to think that she was going to die. This from a woman who had considered euphemisms to be way worse than many people consider swears – she never could respect people who said “make love†instead of “have sex†or “pass away†instead of “dieâ€. (I know, I know, Bernie Siegel wasn’t suggesting we use euphemisms, but that we all live love and hope. Screw that.) Despite that, it was not too hard for us to tell those who asked how she really was. But my grandmother (her mother) didn’t ask any of us.
My mother asked for and we planned a big solstice celebration. Just as the sun would turn, would travel the other way, at the summer solstice; the Goddess was going to begin healing her then. We double-checked with the hospice worker who came to the house, “How long?†I didn’t really need to double-check. I was gaining 20, 30, 40 pounds and making a new life inside me, due to be born just after the solstice, she was losing 20, 30 pounds and … (no euphemisms, now). Her favorite creation myth had been the Wintu Indians’ story about how birth and death came to be, because the gods had first planned humans to experience neither one, but ended up with both: “They will know the gladness of birth. They will know the sorrow of death. And through these two things together people will come to know love.†(Take that, Bernie Siegel.) So I knew. But we really weren’t sure her mother knew.
So I called my grandmother. I haven’t been able to reconstruct the words I chose, but I suspect I thought that by focusing on the cycles my mother so appreciated, I could pretend I wasn’t using euphemisms. The conversation wasn’t quite as hard to have as it had been to anticipate – my grandmother did know. I learned then that there is no age after which it becomes easier to lose a child. (Or if there is, it isn’t age 88.)
We had the solstice celebration. My mother died four days later. Three days after that I had a terrifyingly brief labor and m’hija, La Chica, was born.
I am so glad your mother lived for the solstice and you had the celebration. On some level that had to make her feel better. How sad that she passed before LaChica was born, but how beautiful for you to give life so soon after losing your mother. This was a beautifully written story.
Comment by La Rad — April 27, 2006 @ 8:30 pm
With untreatable stomach cancer is there a better place to turn than paganism? And for a woman who faced the world unflinchingly, a better escape than metaphor?
I love how you’ve written this, Jennifer. A painful subject, to be sure, but a fascinating read for the unattached. In your email you said: I guess it could have been submitted under your “near death†stories challenge, but it didn’t come to mind then because it’s mentally filed under “the toughest phone call I ever made.â€Â Well, this lives in a category of its own.
I have a good friend, a retired Unitarian minister, whose husband died at few years ago. I asked her, “At eighty-one does loss get easier to cope with?†Her answer, “No.†That’s not what I wanted to hear. She also told me that of all the reams of words and concepts she’d used over the years to comfort parishioners for their loss, none of it worked for her. “He’s part of the world around you, he’s now in the trees and the grass. Who cares. All I want is my husband back.â€
Comment by michael — April 28, 2006 @ 5:55 am
I second Mike’s “category of its own”. Told without euphemism, and yet with grace and poetry (no mean feat, for someone who has claimed difficulties with the latter). Thanks very much for sharing this, and for writing it so well.
The experience of loss, even without inverting the “natural” (or expected, anyway) order of death, seems to change with age, but easier is an elusive adjective. The acutely Ptolemaic reaction of the young can give way to a more cautious, and perhaps empathetic and inclusive experience, but at the same time, one becomes vulnerable to the shock of things that push through the insulations that take years of acquired illusion of control. Bravo for allowing your mother her choices, and for facing not only your own struggle, but also the otherwise unbridgeable one of your grandmother.
Comment by adam — April 28, 2006 @ 6:40 am
Lovely story, Jennifer. Thanks.
Comment by homefront:waiting wife — April 28, 2006 @ 6:52 am
I was so moved by the tale itself that I forgot to comment on the preamble … In your 4/7/05 entry “The Right Thing”, you merely characterized the teenager as “involved” in the accident and (the subject of that entry) called to apprise him of the possibility your grandmother had been trying to kill herself, hoping thus to mitigate whatever trauma he was experiencing. Here you peremptorily refer to him as “the young man who killed my grandmother”. ‘Twould seem a helluva shift in perspective …
Comment by adam — April 28, 2006 @ 7:37 am
to Adam, 5. Interesting catch. But I don’t think I’ve made an emotional shift since last year. When I first wrote about it, I wanted to avoid using a word which has a condemnatory connotation but at this point I was using shorthand. It’s a lot quicker to say “who killed my grandmother in a car accident” than “who was the driver of the other car in the two car accident which was fatal for my grandmother”.
Never mind how long it just took me to say THAT.
Comment by Jennifer — April 28, 2006 @ 7:05 pm
to homefront:waiting wife 4. Wait, are you home and waiting? I thought you both were. Thank you for your advice on it.
Comment by Jennifer — April 28, 2006 @ 7:07 pm
Michael had asked me to write that piece over a year ago, but I never got started. It was his recent piece for ratings week that called it forth. I guess there’s something important about the conversations that one can or cannot have with and about people who are or might be dying that I’m still working out. Actually, I noticed that last summer: I took a workshop on forgiving and discovered to my surprise that I had pretty much forgiven the (ex-)friend who told me 15 years ago that we couldn’t be friends any more but not for the reason that I thought (wait, which of the 7 reasons I can think of is it NOT?), but I refuse to consider forgiving Bernie Siegel whom I have never met. (Could you tell?) Love, Medicine, and Miracles forbade us to have some conversations which I still would like to have had.
Thank you, all, for having some of them with me.
Comment by Jennifer — April 28, 2006 @ 7:26 pm