Mommy Dearest - Part One
Mommy Dearest - Part Two
Mommy Dearest - Part Three
Mommy Dearest - Part Four
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I woke up that Sunday morning in May, feeling completely normal. My mother was in her basement refuge. My father was at the airport taking his flying lessons. He was trying, after years, to get his pilot's licence. When he was in the RAF during the 50's he wanted to be a pilot more than anything. His eyesight was too poor and he became an airline mechanic instead.
I ate breakfast alone and read my book. Dad came home and sat down to watch his motorcycle races on TV. My friend called and we made plans to see a matinee. Dad would drive me down to the theatre that afternoon.
I jumped into the shower.
When I was done I started putting coconut cream on my legs. Then I heard my father moaning. Years later that smell sent me into a very dark place when I accidentally bought the same cream. It's funny how strong a trigger scent can be.
I don't recall the brief sprint from the bathroom to the living room. One moment I was in the bathroom and the next I was standing over him crying and asking him what was wrong. He said he couldn't breathe.
I leaned over the banister and screamed for my mother. I grabbed the phone off the wall and called 911.
They took forever to get to the house. It was hard to listen to what was happening in the living room and carry on a conversation with the dispatcher. When the ambulance finally pulled up to the house I can recall being so frustrated and angry at how long they were taking, I was ready to attack them. Pull them into the house physically. They weren't rushing. They didn't get it. He couldn't breathe.
They hooked him up to monitors and started an IV. Then they left with him on a stretcher and my mother in the ambulance.
I have no memory of most of the time in between the ambulance driving away and my arrival at the hospital. I don't even know how I got there.
I saw him on the hospital bed before they took him to surgery. There was blood on the sheets and on his undershirt. I remember whispering that we'd have to buy him some new ones when he got home.
I worried about the work he would miss while recovering. I wondered if he'd have to get around in a wheelchair for awhile once he got home.
I still thought it was a heart attack.
They took him to surgery and my mother and I were led to the ICU waiting area. While we were there a woman and her young daughter came in. They picked up the phone to be buzzed into the secured ICU patient area. The nurse on the phone told them that whomever they were there to see had passed away. The lady sat in a chair and cried while her daughter stood beside her, looking confused. The ICU nurse emerged from behind the locked door and knelt beside her, holding the woman's hand.
I wondered who the person had been to the woman. I felt sorry for them.
It took hours. Eventually a nurse came in and asked for my mother. We were led into a tiny room no bigger than a closet really. We waited for the doctor. It was uncomfortable, but I was desperate to hear about what they had done to make my father well again.
The doctor came in and sat down with us. He said that he was very sorry. That they had done all the could but my Dad's heart had nothing left. He had died on the table. He had died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm.
I floated.
It's an odd feeling, knowing your mind is fragmenting. Your consciousness leaving your body. I was looking down at myself sitting in the chair, crying.
And then I realized that I couldn't let that happen. I stopped crying and pulled myself together. I said very clearly in my mind, "We'll deal with this later....". Family friends met us at the entrance to the hospital as we left where they were told by my mother that he had died.
They cried. I was numb.
When we got home, again not remembering the drive there, I went to my room and sat on my bed. I didn't cry. Id didn't think. It was like I had lost everything inside of me and all that was left was skin.
My mother made phone calls. We had the funeral. And I couldn't remember his voice. His smell. I couldn't remember a single day we had spent together before I had found him that morning. It terrified me. It depressed me. How could I lose him physically, and then lose all my memories? It was the worst and most sickening injustice.
Maybe if my mother had offered comfort. Shared her memories.....maybe talked to me about it. It could have been different. I don't recall her ever saying more than, "Are you OK?"
Instead I was alone in my mind.
I wouldn't allow his ashes into the house. I felt frantic at the thought of him being reduced to that state. I was a pretty docile child, with a great many phobias and fears - but I held firm to that. I fought it tooth and nail. Our family friends kept the ashes until my mother went with them to spread them over a waterfall. I stayed home alone. It was a place I got very conditioned to being.
Within three months my mother was dating again. By six months she had moved 45 minutes away to live with her boyfriend, rented the basement out to a trucker, and at 15 I was living alone in the house where I had found my father dying on the floor.
I went days without sleeping. I would pray for his spirit to rest.....to not haunt the house. I begged him in my mind to stay in heaven. Every noise I heard was terrifying. In 6 months I went from a protected child, coddled by a father, to living alone with nobody there.
It made me stronger. And it made me realize the absolute truth of my mother.
The next 2 years were the most difficult, liberating, terrifying, and exhilarating I had ever thought to experience.
...which would be ever so much lovelier if it dispensed money. Alas, it does not. So I'll just have to pretend.
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