For Mom
There are probably typos in this. I’ll fix them later. I don’t have the emotional energy to do it right now.
So please keep that in mind if you run across any.
I wanted this to be pithy and witty and wry. I wanted it to be impressive and memorable and terribly, terribly effective.
In the end, the piece written with that goal in mind was complete and utter bullshit, horseshit, and whatever other animal excrement you’d care to name. In consciously attempting to be genuine, it was pitifully disingenuous.
So.
I say again.
My mother would have been 60 years old today.
In October of 2009, my mother was brought down by the return of the breast cancer she thought – and we hoped – had been beaten.
When it had reared its ugly head again the previous Fall after a routine follow up examination that had been bringing all-clears for four years came back positive, I was in Florida as a guest of a convention in Miami. I hosted a quiz show. I went on a glass bottom boat. I went to a tacky tourist mecca called Shell World.
I called my mom to see how things were going with the tests I knew she was having, and I was worried.
Actually, on the drive down to Miami, I called and she told me that the tests were all good. They had come back negative, and all was fine, and I should enjoy my trip. No worries. She wanted me to have fun.
On the tail end of my trip, I went to Disney World. I had never been, and was swept along by my traveling companions to take the opportunity of being in the relative neighborhood to do so. I was sitting by that tacky Aerosmith rollercoaster waiting for my companions to return (I don’t do coasters) when I gave my mom a call and my grandmother answered the phone. Odd, that, as I didn’t know my grandmother was going to be visiting my mother, with my aunt in tow, from a distance of more than 5 hours. She said they had just popped down for a few days to visit, all was fine, and my mother was unavailable to chat as she was out shopping.
Well, okay.
I continued with my trip. I returned home. My mother wanted to speak with me.
The tests were not negative. The tests were positive. The cancer was back.
And I was angry that she had lied to me.
I felt betrayed.
To repeat – *I* felt betrayed.
Why did she tell me she was fine? ALMOST TWO WEEKS AGO. I was worried. I had asked her. And she lied. I had spent the past week gallivanting around Florida with not a care in the world because she had told me everything was fine. A goddamn lie.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I knew you’d worry, and I wanted you to have a good time.”
She did It because she loved me. She did it because she was my mother.
My mother’s birthday is close to Mother’s Day. As a kid, this synchronicity was a nice reminder that the approach of one meant the other was also due to be observed. Occasionally, her birthday would actually fall on Mother’s Day, which felt like she was being cheated out of getting a proper observance of both days. Kind of like kids born on Christmas.
My mother would have been 60 today, on Mother’s Day.
She was a wonderful mother. We would disagree, we would argue, but I knew she loved me, and she knew I loved her. She wanted much more for me than I feel I ever could be capable of delivering, but she loved and supported what I did and tried to do, even if she might not have fully understood it. I would try to make her laugh. She would make me laugh when she would mispronounce the word “Schlotsky’s”. Even after we tried coaching her on it. Every time.
It was small and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but immensely enjoyable to those of us who loved her.
She loved to make things. Over the years, it would go from painting to ceramics to cross-stitching to quilting to woodworking to stained glass to basket weaving. She would teach others. She would rather gift than sell.
She was a Guardian Ad Litem, and found time to take care of those at risk of falling through the cracks. She was a mother to all.
She was an amazing grandmother to my two young nephews, and it cuts me deeply to think they won’t have the joy… The privilege… Of growing up with someone who loved them so much and left them so soon.
My mother always wanted to learn the drums. That was her dream. She wanted to be able to play “Wipeout”.
She loved the original STAR TREK. She used to watch the reruns in the 70’s before I was born and while my father was deployed. We bonded over the films. When I was 12, we saw STAR TREK V in the theater. My mother liked it. I liked it. I still do. In that film, those characters were clearly a family who cared for each other. Like my family. Though we never sang in the round.
After mere months after years of fighting it, my mother’s war with that bitch cancer turned on what seemed a dime, and the decline was rapid. I couldn’t process that she wouldn’t prevail. That she wouldn’t get better. I wasted precious time I could have spent with her instead working into the night on my job, on my projects, on the odd little things she never fully understood but supported me on nonetheless. And when I did sit with her, as her life flowed away, I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to see her losing. I didn’t want to ever accept that there was a burden she couldn’t bear, when she’d borne so many of our burdens.
But I didn’t spend enough time with her. Time I could have spent with her. I didn’t. Because I was a fool. And it’s my burden to bear. I didn’t want to watch my mother die. Because moms don’t get sick. Moms don’t die. Moms are there when we’re sick. Moms are eternal.
My mother did not want to die in a hospital. She wanted to die in the home she lovingly crafted, surrounded by the family and friends she cared for and who cared for her in a life well lived. So an ambulance transported her the two hours from the cancer center and we set up a bed for her in the den, just off the kitchen, and a seemingly endless stream of people came to see my mom as she lay dying a death so painful and unjustified and cruel and fucking wrong. So fucking wrong. But she was loved. And everyone that came to see her told her she was loved.
I don’t believe in a god or gods or an afterlife. I believe in the person before me and the person I am, and the choices we make are the choices we make, and the only afterlife we have is the memories we leave behind in those that survive us. And in that, my mother leaves behind more love than we could possibly have given back to her in her too brief life.
And I miss her. And I miss my grandmother, my mother’s mother, brokenhearted at the loss of her first child, who sickness and injury felled last year, though I blame the loss of her daughter most of all.
My mother never learned to play “Wipeout” on the drums, but I have a basket that she made, and a father that she loved, and a sister that she cherished, and nephews that she adored. And I have me. She made me, too, and just as surely as that basket bears her mark, so too do I.
And I love her so much. And she was my mother. And she would have been 60 years old today.
And fuck cancer.
–Ken Plume
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.