Hymn to Her, Part 1
This was just the kind of thing I would love to talk about with my mom, with my headphones on, walking my dog.
[content warning: death and some, but not enough, curse words]
I’ve just gotten inside from walking my dog, Leo, in a cold Upstate New York morning. In the past, the walk would happen later on in the morning, so as to dodge the speeding cars of parents dropping off their kids at the elementary school our own daughters had once attended. These days, the walk has to be early because I started a new freelance job that has normal business hours.
The reason I bring up the dog walk is, when I walk Leo by myself, I know I have a chunk of time to talk on the phone. The only person I have ever had extended phone conversations with is my mom. Patti, or Patches as we called her in the past decade, was always down for a long-ass talk about the state of her health, the latest on the family front, and my getting laid off at my job and what prospects I have.
On this morning’s dog walk, I couldn’t call my mom because she died.
My mom died exactly one month ago. I can’t believe I am typing those words, “my mom died.” It makes my eyes well up just to fucking type them.
A month and a day ago, I did what I call my Cannonball Run Drive down to South Jersey. A few days before, mom had been taken by helicopter from one hospital to another after doctors determined she had experienced a heart attack and needed a stent placed in her to open up vessels. Like many things family-related, my updates were given over the phone and text, and things moved quickly. She was helicoptered to the hospital, and the stent was in before my third phone call. I was about to pack up to drive down when I got another update: mom needed some more stents, and had to go to a third hospital to get them. For this, mom would be in the operating and recovery rooms, and I wouldn’t get to even see her until the next day. So I stood down and waited.
I think it was Meri, my sister, or Bill, my stepdad, who told me she’d be home after that.
So I drove down Wednesday, talking to mom a couple of times. She seemed tired of all the attention. The main thing she was afraid of was the whole going in a helicopter thing. At almost six feet tall, she was worried she would have her feet dangling out. Bill, Vietnam vet that he is, told her she didn’t have anything to worry about. Plus, he said, unlike his helicopter experiences, no one would be shooting at her from the ground.
When I got to my mom’s place, I was happy just to sit down and eat some Wawa food and shoot the shit. On the table beside her chair were a bunch of post-op prescription bottles and appointment information for rehab and check-ups.
We talked about everything. We always talked about everything. She used to call me the “big talker,” while my sister kept things a little closer to the vest. Whenever she said that when I was younger, I took it, on some level, as a statement of my manhood, my lack of toughness, a general tendency to get emotional about things. In recent years, however, I wore it as a badge of honor. Maybe in my twenties, when I was just trying to figure out my shit, I resisted being more open. But thirty years later, with a marriage and kids and a career, talking about everything with mom was not only OK, it was the fucking best. Nothing like a tough-as-nails Jersey girl mom to get advice about things.
As I sat and we watched sports and episodes of Gunsmoke and NCIS, I told her I felt like I was a bad son for taking a couple days to see her, to come down to New Jersey days after her procedures. I had a job interview that morning, and I was still wearing a tie.
It felt like I was confessing to her, with “taking a couple days to see her” working as the collective noun in place of all the things I did wrong to her over the years, from talking to her disrespectfully as a teen, to not talking to her for extended reaches, to arguing with her second husband about stupid shit. I just couldn’t handle being this person who couldn’t take care of her and be the dutiful son.
“Oh, it’s fine,” my mom said it was fine. She was just happy to see me.
That afternoon turned to evening. When Bill went out to get pizzas, mom had to use her bathroom chair, and asked me to leave the room for a bit. When she said I could come back in, my mom was standing up, making her way back to her chair. As I walked over to her, she had a dizzy spell, and asked for my help. I grabbed hold of her, and she got her balance back. With my arms wrapped around her, I could feel her frailty, and knelt down in front of her as she made her way back into the chair. I patted down her pajama shirt, gingerly putting it back in place.
As I stuffed my face with pizza, I started thinking I needed to get back on the road so I could have a decent night’s sleep for the next day. I had a backlog of papers to mark, a couple more interviews to prepare for. I started doing calculations of how big of a coffee I would need to keep me revved up for the Turnpike and I-87 ride home.
But I stayed longer.
We watched Jeopardy. I guess I brought up the subject that I was, in fact, still wearing a tie from the job interview I had that morning before getting on the road.
“I am just so mad that you have to do all this, after all the years you worked at that college,” she said.
She talked about all the hard work it took me to get there: putting myself through college, then putting myself through grad school, the first in our family to do either of those things; living in New York City and surviving it, meeting a wife and being a father to two daughters. She was just proud of what I had done to get there, to be a professor. And she was so mad that it was taken away, and I had to find a new job at this point.
My mom has a version of this stump speech since the day I found out my job was gone. But that night, as we wolfed down pizza and guessed Jeopardy answers, her words seemed more put together and more pointed about how she was proud of me. I swear I am not looking back and assigning this meaning. I felt like it was different, in that moment, as I heard it.
I started to make my way out as we watched some quiz show where words were linked to each other in some elaborate fashion. My mom had guesses and they were right. She had her wits about her. She was ready to make appointments, to figure out when to take all these medicines. She was overwhelmed, sure, but she was still ready for the rehab, the dealing with doctors, even the ones who were younger and shorter than her, which is saying a lot.
I got home around midnight and texted her I made home right away. An hour later, at 1am, mom responded, not with the usual effusive “I love you” but a simple “Thank you.”
I didn’t see the response until the next morning as I was marking papers and answering emails. At some point that morning, my wife walked, tears in her eyes, talking to my sister on the other end. She handed the phone to me, as if in slow motion.
Mom died, Meri said.
It must have happened in her sleep early that morning. My sister was already at her apartment, Uber-ing over from her apartment in Philly.
Maybe it was because I was 234 miles away. Or I had just seen her 18 hours before. It just didn’t feel real. It was just words over the wire, really. But the words were from my sister, and her voice was shaking and she wouldn’t lie about something like this.
It was just about a month ago when the biggest thing in my life was wondering whether to accept a job or turn down another. There was talk about me starting a job—nothing big, just an hourly freelance thing that I had almost forgotten about. I thought I tanked the job interview and pivoted to lower-paying jobs that had less pressure and the promise of more stability. But this job was freelance and I could try it out while my soon-to-be-old job finished up. I could make some extra money and who knows, maybe I’d like it. I thought I was going to start one date, then the agency ghosted me, then my mom had a heart attack and I ghosted them.
And then my mom died. Nothing else seemed, or seems, important.
I didn’t want to write any of this. All I wanted to do was talk to my mom while I was walking my dog, the fog of the morning lifting over the houses, and the voice of my mom in my ears.
to be continued