Not being Dylan Thomas

Over the past few weeks, Scott and his family have been coping with the serious and possible terminal illness of his mother. She has been sick for awhile now but, over the past couple of weeks, things have been heading south. I don't know Scott's mother and I have never met her...but I feel like I know her because of his father's writing. Scott's father writes one of my favorite blogs out there and often shares his memories about his wife and their life together and updates us all on her current condition. So, even though I have never met Scott's mom, I feel like I have.

In trying to be there for Scott, I am beginning to realize that I suck at death. That I am just not good at it. In fact, I think I am awful. I am smothering and overly emotional and end up being more needy than he is at any given time. I am not his rock, I am his sponge. I am not "standing by my man," I am plowing through him. In my attempts to give advice and help, I seem to make things worse.

This has caused me to reflect on death in my own life and why I am so bad at it. I have come to a few conclusions.

My first experience with death was with my uncle Eric. He was married to my wonderfully crazy Italian aunt, Marie, and the two of them were desperately in love. So in love, in fact, that they got married and divorced at least twice and would have probably gone for a third when Eric got sick. But they were, indeed, madly in love. They just felt that the best way to demonstrate that to each other was by going to extremes...so when uncle Eric did something wrong, he didn't end up in the proverbial doghouse, he ended up in divorce court. But that never made any difference to me. The thing I loved the most about my uncle was that he smelled good, wore soft plaid shirts, and would always turn up with "silver money" for me. I was only about three or four years old at the time but I would await his visits, and the silver dollars he would bring for me, like a child awaits Christmas. One day, Uncle Eric just stopped coming around. I was devastated.

I pestered my mother for weeks about his whereabouts until she finally told me that Uncle Eric had gone to live with Fluffy. I couldn't for the life of me comprehend why my uncle would prefer living with my deceased cat to visiting me but I got the point that he wasn't coming back.

The next death in my life occurred when I was eight years old. My grandfather, my father's father, who was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. I was close to my grandfather but he was a stern, solitary Englishman who I could barely understand. The most words spoken to me, at any given time, were "Girl, get me my Guinness." I was much closer to my grandmother and knew my grandfather primarily through her interpretations. As he got more and more sick, and had more and more of him cut away, he retreated even further. After having his larnyx taken out and replaced with a box so he could communicate, and when he needed help to go to the bathroom, he declared to me and my grandmother, "That's it. I am going to go to my room now and I am going to die, please don't bother me or call any more doctors or nurses." It took about a week but, indeed, that's exactly what he did. When he died, I was sad but not devastated. I only hoped that someone in heaven would be around to get him his Guinness in the evenings.

Then death took a dramatic turn for me. It became much more personal.

When I was 19 years old, my paternal grandmother died. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time around her and she was probably the closest person in my life. My parents were both busy and I was regularly deposited at her house on the weekends and spent most of my formative years around her.

She did all of those things my own parents didn’t: spoiled the crap out of me, dressed me like a Barbie doll, took me to dance classes, and generally gave into whatever whim I had without question.

Unfortunately, she was also bipolar which made things a little rocky now and again.

Nevertheless, I loved her desperately. When I moved to Philadelphia for college when I was 18, my grandmother started to go into a severe depression. Despite all of my best efforts on the phone every night, she was getting worse and worse. She had never been particularly healthy, per se, and was one of those people who spent her life having surgeries and being sick. It was her way to get attention and was also likely compounded by her mental disorder. When I was a kid, my grandmother was always getting something cut off. She had things removed that I didn't even know we had...but that just seemed normal to me at the time. Who wouldn't want to voluntarily remove their pancreas? Who wouldn't want to entertain the neighbors in graphic detail about what a small bowel resection is?

I think because she was sick or feigning being sick all the time, that gave me some assurance that she wasn't going to ever die. It was backward logic, I know, but because she had had everything removed there was to be removed...and was on every medication known to mankind...she certainly must be immortal, right?

When she had a massive heart attack the night after telling me on the phone that she was going to die because she was just tired of living, I was stunned. I raced up to Connecticut to see her ten minutes after receiving the phone call that she had had a massive coronary but I was too late. She had died a few minutes before I reached the state border.

I took it hard. I took it very hard. I blamed myself for killing her, for leaving her. I blamed myself for, the night before she died, not taking her seriously. To say that her death left me traumatized for about a year would be an understatement. But that's when I first realized how badly death hurts those who are left living.

I wasn't about to get a reprieve any time soon, however.

When I was 20 years old, my father killed himself. He had taken my grandmother's death even harder than I had the year before although he had been in a downward spiral for years. He wasn't the sort of man who one would ever expect to kill himself either. He was a brilliant professor and historian. He was a gifted writer and orator. He was a skilled politician. He came from a privileged Connecticut background and wanted for little in his childhood or his adult life. But he was also prone to depression and, although not nearly as pronounced as my grandmother, was also likely bipolar his whole life.

My father and I had a difficult relationship our entire lives. He loved me but he also wanted to control every aspect of my being. He saw many of the same talents in me that he saw in himself and decided that he would be the director of every single act of my life. When I didn't conform (and what teenager does?), he would morph into the cruelest person one could imagine. Someone who is gifted with words can be the worst enemy one can find when they are angry. This was all compounded by the fact that he was beginning to drink heavily so his behavior was all the more unpredictable. After years of living with this very damaging dynamic, I left. That is when I went to Philadelphia.

I saw my father maybe a half dozen times after leaving and before he died. On one of those last visits, he told me that he intended to kill himself. He held up a bottle of Jack Daniels whisky and said, "And this is how I am going to go." After years spent of trying to help him stop drinking, stop being depressed, and get help, I had no more fight left in me. I couldn't comprehend how someone could actually drink themselves to death in a short order fashion but he wasn't kidding. He started drinking that day and didn't stop until I received the call nine months later that he was dead.

My father's death didn't traumatize me quite like my grandmother's had because I saw there was no way to stop it. I still, somehow, couldn't believe that he would actually kill himself. I also, just like with my grandmother, felt that my leaving had fomented it. That I was to blame somehow.

I got a break from death until early 2001. That was the year my mother's mother died.

I was never close to my maternal grandmother like I was to my father's mother but I still respected her. She was one hell of a woman. Growing up in an Italian immigrant family, she was determined not to let anything get between her and the "American dream." She was an incredibly successful businesswoman in a time before it was even marginally acceptable for women to be entrepreneurs. She was the most glamorous dresser I have ever met. She would wear heels and makeup to go pick up her dry cleaning. She took every course available at the local community college and was constantly trying to learn a new language, a new hobby, or something to better her mind. She also went through three husbands and dozens of lovers in her life because men were attracted to her like bees to honey. She wasn't a particularly warm woman and she had a difficult relationship with my own mother but you still had to respect her. She was ballsy, classy, and savvy all rolled into one.

Rita was diagnosed with cancer in late 1999. My mother and I were in a row at that time and not speaking. She broke the ice and called me late one night and said, "I need you. I am still pissed at you and I know you are still upset with me but I can't go through this alone because I am bad with death. So, please, I need you."

Over the next year and a half, my mother and I became closer than we ever had been before. I traveled down to Florida as often as I could to lend support. I found this role odd because, to my mind, I was better at making people die than saving them. But that wasn't the point, my mother told me, the point was that I was helping her to stay alive and stay sane...what my grandmother decided was up to her.

That is when I learned that, in death, there can be humor. No, it is not funny when someone is dying but there are moments of laughter that are inevitable.

My grandmother, who had always treated life as one long round in the boxing ring, viewed her diagnosis as the prizefight of her life. She wasn't going gently into that dark night, that was for sure.

She moved in with my mother while undergoing chemotherapy and turned everyone's lives upside down. She was never one to hold her tongue to begin and could always be counted on to be the one who had one too many martinis at Christmas dinner and tell the whole family exactly what she thought of them. Her illness didn't temper that aspect of her personality a bit.

When she got what I believe is often unkindly referred to as "chemo brain," she was impossible.

"You're trying to poison me with these lobsters, I know it!!" she screamed at my mother during Christmas dinner. "Who the hell serves lobsters to someone on chemo, anyway? I HATE these lobsters. AND I hate your children, your husband, the color of the walls in the kitchen and the flower arrangement. I HATE IT ALL!!!!!"

Because "grandma on chemo" wasn't all that different than "grandma on martinis," we all just ignored it and carried on with dinner while she stalked off to the couch to continue reading the Dalai Lama's "Art of Happiness" and, for all intents and purposes, look like the most serene being on the planet.

My grandmother, who was always obsessively clean and consumed with new 'products,' took it to new levels when she was sick. It was as if she thought she could clean the cancer off of her from the outside. This manifested itself, most pointedly, with her obsession with baby wipes. I have no idea why this was the case but it was.

She would yell at my mother, "I am out of the wipes...or have you hidden them from me? It is probably those rotten children of yours stealing them and using them to...to...MASTRUBATE!!! Is your son using my wipes to whack off? I bet he is!!!"

My mother and I would sigh and look at each other and then go to the store on what we came to term, "The asswipe adventures." We would wander down the aisles, looking at the wide variety of asswipes and try to determine which one would meet my grandmother's approval and save us from another tirade.

"These smell like baby powder, think she'll like these?" I would ask.

"I don't know...they all smell like, well, Patti, they smell like ASS to me but let's go with that flavor this week," she'd reply.

Later, after my grandmother had thrown the asswipes out the bathroom door at one of us ("I am not a goddamn child!! I am not yet in diapers, I don't need to walk around smelling like some newborn's diaper-rashed behind!!!") we would cross another no-go item off of our list.

"I saw a package that had what looked like a spearmint leaf on them, do you think we should try that variety next time?" I would ask.

"What, and be accused of giving her a 'minty fresh' ass? No, I say we go back to the generic kind next time, " my mother would say.

We considered putting her in the hospital a few times but that had also been disastrous previously. She had accused the Haitian nurse of trying to practice voodoo on her and had refused to be treated by a doctor who was a "pierogie-stinking, vodka-drinking, stupid Pole."

Nurses quit on the shifts that they had to deal with my grandmother and doctors would call my mother and insist, absolutely insist, that she was "just fine" to be brought home even though we all knew she wasn't.

Eventually, however, she did become too ill for homecare and had to be hospitalized. She lasted exactly one night and died the next day. She had told us, in her lucid moments, that she would not go out being helpless and if we hospitalized her, she would die the next day because she didn't want to ever lose control over her own decisions about her life. She didn't trust us to do the right thing...and she wanted to die, as she said, "With both my heels and my makeup on."

And so she did. And, thank God, painlessly.

But those are my experiences with death. I think that part of the lingering problem for me, and why I can't be better with Scott about this, is that, by and large, most people around me wanted to die. They sort of made the decision for themselves, announced it and then left. Granted, my mother's mother probably didn't want to die but when faced with the more difficult parts of the "fight" to stay alive, she threw in the towel. Not that I am criticizing her, but that's just what happened.

So my reaction with Scott is bizarre in that I am trying to do too much, I think. I am trying to help because I never really had the chance to help before. I am also doing it because I love this man but in my desire to distract him or to give him comfort, I am acting like a lunatic. I am way too "helpful" in most circumstances anyway and am often prone to giving advice no one really asked for to begin with but it is like, when faced with someone's illness or death, I am in overdrive. This leads me, in our conversations, into deep periods of self-analysis which has caused Scott to say, on at least one occasion, "Hey, it's my mother that is sick here...why are we talking about you?" Then I am left feeling selfish and I go in the opposite direction.

"Stay on the phone with me all night, I am here!" I have insisted twice now to Scott.

"Here is everything I know about what medications your mother is on..."

"Are you OK, can you just talk to me for a few minutes (hours) so I can make sure that you are OK?"

"This is what happened to me, my grandmother, and ten of my closest friends..."

Like that.

Scott, on the other hand, is exhausted first by this situation with his mother and second, by his own girlfriend.

I need to break clear of this habit.

My brother, on the phone with me last night, said, "Patti, I know you're trying to help but give it a rest already. Sometimes it's just best to say nothing at all. Just let him know you love him and will be here for him and leave it at that, OK?"

I know that, really I do. But my brain and my mouth don't seem to work together sometimes.

But I am going to try because, in all honesty, I would really like to get to meet his mother someday. I read his father's blog and think, "Wow...now that is love. That is maybe not one but two people refusing to give up on each other..." It's really quite beautiful to read and comforting as well.

I am going to work on that from now on...being a comfort to someone rather than an over-emotional Nurse Nightingale.

I DO know a thing or two about asswipes, after all.