That Damned Good Night

Sometimes fixed, always in need of repair, though frequently broken. That’s my life.

In my family we don’t go gentle into that good night. We have raging at the dying of the light down to an art form. A ballet of body and mind where the mind never stops dancing. I’ve watched family members age, some gracefully. Some not. My brother, Dan and I, took care of our mother as her odometer clicked into the 90’s. She was trim, fit, and stable right up until the stroke disconnected brain from body. And the dancing stopped, abruptly. Or so we think. As you age who knows what’s going on in the old noggin? And what happens when the noggin can’t nog anymore? Life is a mystery. Enjoy it while it is here. For when it stops. It stops.

I used to say that my mother walked a mile every day and ate barely enough calories to keep a small human alive. Seriously. I remember as a kid watching my mother pack her lunch for work the next day. She would make a sandwich and then cut it in half, carefully wrapping one half to put away. She had two lunches. For desert, she had a sweet tooth. She liked twinkies. She would split a pack of twinkies so she could take one twink with each of her lunches over the next two days. Seriously? Do you understand the concept of metabolism? Nutrition? Keeping alive? Subsistence agriculture? She was a secretary in a hospital, so she knew how to organize. And then disorganize later in life. Entropy will out in the end. Always. We watched that happen to our father twenty years earlier. Now this.

I asked Kristin about my behavior when I was in the hospital after my motor scooter accident. By all rights I should have died. Should be dead. I’ll try harder next time. But with my combined Celtic and Slavic backgrounds, there’s no having that now, Laddie… Comrade… A little death now and then never hurt a Cossack. Or a Celt. Up and at ‘em, now. Chop, chop!

See, the thing is in my family we tend to lose our minds before anything else. And as the machine starts singing, “Daisy, daisy…” we just linger off into la-la land. Or worse. We can get paranoid, accusing, disoriented, which only makes us more paranoid, accusing, etc. Kristin told me that I was paranoid in the hospital. She was trying to comfort me and reassure me that everything was OK. She was saying all the right things to infuriate someone already paranoid as hell. Poor girl. I thought she was patronizing me. Of course I would. One thing I am glad for. I did not go on any offensive. I was defensive. Suspicious. Self-preserving. That makes perfect sense. I was under assault! I had just been splashed across Route 6 in Brooklyn, for crying out loud. When up against the wall, the only thing you have to preserve is yourself. You’re no good to anybody else otherwise if you can’t take care of yourself now, are you? Good point.

But at least I wasn’t nasty, which is one word I learned to associate with my mother above all else. Well, a tiny bit. Yes, Mom could be a bitch. And I’m her son. And that makes me what, now? But mostly I was confused and in self-preservation mode. And that’s not a bad thing. If you don’t preserve yourself how can you possibly preserve anybody else? I just wanted to hear that I was not abusive. That’s hard to take while trying to demonstrate compassion that you do not feel in a mental state that is not your own while lying in a hospital bed that is not yours. Try it. I’d rather die than insult the ones I love. Let me go. Remember me as kind. Or at least not cruel. I will honor you in whatever afterlife there is. Do I pass this trial? Or do I prove myself the barbarian, bereft of compassion? Cold of heart? Numb in spirit? Going not gentle into any good night?

No. Just. No. Here I stand and I say No! I will be human for as long as I can. I will affirm life. In all its forms. In all its varieties. In all its vigor. In all its... Life.

I passed the test, I think. I am here. Now. Alive. Today. And what else can we ask for?

I won’t say that I was always compassionate. There are things I knew better at the time but just neglected. There were times I was just too stupid to know how to act. And there were times I realized that it was up to me. Now. Here. I and only I can make a difference. Maybe it takes fifty years to learn how to be a good son. Maybe 60. Maybe I’m not there yet. But I journey.

Mom went into a nursing home in Plainfield. Nice place. Dan and I interviewed some of the staff and gave it a smell test (literally) before we felt comfortable placing our mother there. Dan did most of the heavy lifting. He’s the true hero of this story. The good son.

I don’t always do the right thing. Family is muddy. Inconsistent. Way out there. Flawed. Imperfect. Ours. The only one we’ve got. But I’d rather fail with integrity with the ones I love than succeed as a tyrant among anonymity.

Our mother. Ourselves. Always.