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Have you ever tried to wake up someone who was dead? It can totally change a person. For me, this happened shortly after my thirteenth birthday, and the person I tried to wake was my mother.
She was divorced, and although she had a boyfriend, we lived alone. My older brother had lived with us, but moved out to live with Dad a few months before. My mother was an alcoholic who had recently gotten sick, so there I was trying to take care of her. I did not know what was wrong with her health. I still don’t.
Mom and I had argued a couple of hours before this about something mind-numbingly stupid. Valentine’s Day was coming up, and despite the fact that I was the chubby and funny (/“funny?”) kid with glasses, I wanted to buy a little trinket for a girl I had a crush on. It wasn’t much, and frankly I did not have many expectations about how she’d receive it, but I still wanted to give her something and had a glimmer of hope that she would see how I felt about her. My mother had promised to take me to the store that Sunday.
When Sunday came, she was not feeling well and had stayed in bed all day. At some point in the late afternoon, as I realized that the store would be closing soon, I went in to her room to plead my case, to beseech her to help me on my romantic quest.
She was very groggy and completely out of it. To this day I don’t know if it was because of her migraines, the medicine she was on, that she was dying, or the wine she drank, as evidenced by the empty glasses next to the bed, each with a different set of concentric crusted red rings at the bottom. She did not know what day it was, and I tried to explain that it was Sunday around 5:00 and to remind her that she had promised to take me to the store.
I knew firsthand the disorientation which can happen when you wake up from a nap and do not know what day or time it is, but I still got frustrated and angry with her for being confused. I was being totally selfish, although that’s not entirely unreasonable or unexpected for a young barely teenage boy with an infatuation. It was just the two of us at the time, and we lived out in the country, so if I were to get this bauble, her giving me a ride was really my only option. I rode my bike a lot, farther than I was supposed to sometimes, but the store was miles and miles away and I don’t even know if I knew how to get there on my own.
I got tired of trying to explain it, so I went to the kitchen in a bit of a huff. I goofed off for a while, watching the little 13” black and white TV we had on the counter. I don’t remember what was on, and it doesn’t matter.
Eventually I started to get hungry and was trying to decide what to make for dinner. I loved to cook, and I believe I was thinking of making one of my favorite dishes at the time, sweet and sour chicken. Or pork perhaps. I went into mom’s room to see if that sounded okay, and perhaps to either apologize or to entreat her one last time, although at this point it was late enough that the store I had in mind was closed. I was still kind of pissed off, honestly, although not that much. Or for long.
She did not answer my knock, but the door was open and she was a fairly heavy sleeper, so that was not out of the ordinary. I went in and asked her what she wanted for dinner. She didn’t answer.
I gently shook her shoulder and said, “Come on, Mom. It’s time to get up now,” or some such inanity. She normally was a fairly loud snorer but her room was completely still and quiet, the heavy curtains blocking most of what was left of the daylight.
Still no response. I was beginning to get a bit worried, and tried to listen for her heartbeat or to feel a pulse. Theoretically I knew how to do both of these things. My brother was a volunteer fireman and had been on the swim team, and I had studied first aid and had CPR training in school, at camp, and in the Boy Scouts.
This may have been the first time in my life where I realized that despite any half-assed training, I was completely helpless. It took me far too long to decide if I could feel a pulse as my own heartbeat was racing and thundering in my eardrums and in my fingertips.
Total panic.
I lost it and started completely balling. My face was wet as I pleaded to her; to the God I did not believe in; to everything in my small world for her to wake up. I vaguely remember going into shock halfway down the hallway to the telephone, kneeling on the floor wailing. Reaching the phone, I realized that I had not the first clue what to do. Fuck training. Nothing can prepare you for this, especially when you’re barely a teenager. My self was on the other end of a tether and I could not even communicate much less function. I called my dad. I don’t know what I said through my blubbering, but somehow got across that I needed an ambulance immediately and that I thought mom was dead.
In retrospect, as I waited for the ambulance to arrive, I remember getting angry with myself for taking so long to react, for not immediately calling the EMS myself. I knew most of them, and the firehouse was about a mile down the road. What the fuck was I thinking? I blamed myself. Had I reacted sooner, had they been able to administer CPR, would it have made a difference?
It had been at least an hour or two since we had argued. For all I knew, she may have died shortly after, making my panic-induced indecision moot. It was moot regardless. I don’t even like to go to bed mad at someone, and here the very last words I had with my own mother, the woman who taught me how to do and be so much, were a stupid fucking argument about what time it was.
I don’t know what else happened until the paramedics arrived. I think I went back in and tried to revive her myself, telling myself that I had been mistaken, that perhaps she was sleeping or just passed out wasted on wine and pills.
When they got there, I do remember them running into the bedroom and trying to resuscitate her. They were too busy to notice me watching from the corner by the door. I saw them put a board under her, I assume so that the chest compressions would work better, as the soft bed gave too little resistance. They were frantic but I think even then everyone in the room knew it was hopeless.
Someone saw me and took me from the room, into the living room. We sat down and I cried. We held hands and did not say anything. My dad and older brother got there. Again, I was in shock and don’t really recall much other than some kind sympathy from strangers and friends, neighbors and the paramedics. I was completely numb and suddenly could not even cry anymore.
I don’t remember the drive to my dad’s house. My entire life was suddenly and irrevocably changed. I was uprooted. I no longer wanted the toys I had, and which I still embarrassingly played with, despite being an age when I perhaps should have outgrown them. Adulthood had thrust itself on me, baking me in the hottest kiln I can imagine, burning away the last vestige of being a child. It hurt.
There’s a blur after of saying goodbye to my friends at school, of entering the new school at my dad’s house and making new friends and neighbors. I know that even before this happened I had been a bit of a clown, quite naturally and with no ulterior motives, but also as a way to guard and protect myself – the fat smart kid with glasses is not as much of a target if the popular kids think you’re at least funny.
This layer of insulation, a different kind of fat, blubber to protect my emotions and my spirit, served me well although I did not think of it that way at the time. I pushed on. I relearned how to laugh and have fun, and persevered despite the occasional breakdown alone in my room. I lost it once or twice in the merciless face of adolescent boy humor: ‘your mom’ jokes suddenly were not only not funny but a knife thrust straight into my heart threatening to crack my jovial candy shell and spilling out my turmoil, guilt, and shame filling all over the sidewalk in front of my new friends and enemies.
After a couple of months, I decided to get in better shape. I started running and bicycling. I had always been active ever since I was really little, but before I also had overeaten and was lazy about changing my habits. The new me, the adult trapped in a thirteen year old boy, used my negative energy to make positive changes in my life, to be responsible for correcting the things I had complained about previously. It was an escape but it was at least a healthy one. I was not doing any sort of crazy training, but I was putting a lot of work into it over the summer between 8th and 9th grades. On some level, I wonder if I was enjoying the punishment I was putting myself through, the physical pain being a salve for my guilty conscious. Flagellate away the pounds!
I discovered that it was really difficult for me to cry, even at her funeral. I felt guilty for not crying as much as I wanted to, so sort of faked it, then felt guilty about that too. I wondered if I had cried so hard when I discovered her body that maybe I had somehow lost the ability or run out of tears or something.
I still sometimes wonder if perhaps it’s all a matter of relativity; the experience and shock of finding this dead person who you not only love, but never got to make peace with was a new craggy mountain in my emotional geography. Compared to that, even the shittiest moments in life were bumps, mere hillocks of pain that I knew I could surmount. Hell, I could stand on my pain, take it all in and enjoy the view.
Ahh! Smell that air, kids.
It’s still true, although I have relearned how to cry. I cried as I wrote this and the release felt really good. I no longer blame myself for her death, and have not in well over a decade. I started accepting not only what had happened, but also how happy I am for the many good memories I have, and for teaching me so much. I learned how to take care of myself from her; not exclusively, as all of my family has taught me valuable things, but she taught me a lot of basics, including just being confident that I could learn how to do something. I got my sense of adventure from her, and the ability to simultaneously be hard as steel but soft as warm butter.
She busted her ass for me and my brother and for herself. She loved to go out dancing or take us on road trips, completely remodeled the house a couple of times, built furniture, and who knows what else. I don’t think I truly appreciated how much she did for us when I was a kid, and now I find myself marveling at how the hell she did it without it killing her.
Oh right.
That reminds me: this experience has taken my fairly bizarre and twisted sense of humor and coated it with inky tar. If I offend you, I do apologize. I was already practically raised by sailors and cab drivers, and there is not much that offended me before, but now I’ve lived the cliché and find it’s so true. You have to be able to laugh at life, to accept and understand that death is part of life, but without being all doom and gloom about it. Carpe diem, and all that shit. We also all live on through each other, through memories and lessons, a finger’s indentation into the clay that makes us who we are. I’m still learning decades later to appreciate and understand those marks we bear.
It’s strange because I really am a pretty light-hearted person despite being so dark and fucked up. Perhaps because of being dark and fucked up. I can get out my snap shots and artsy photos of the breathtaking landscapes I’ve stood on, breathe deeply, and can see so far that it stuns me. I don’t believe the glass is half empty or half full, I think we need to get off our asses and fill it if we want more, but still be able to appreciate the half that is there, and maybe the half we already drank.
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