Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Wait, wait , I think, is it really the end, did he really die? Wait, wait, give me one eternal second more — forget meeting Death beautifully and finely, inviting it to come in and sit down and being a gracious host. Isn’t the most honest, visceral instinct to slam the door in Death’s face, bolt and barricade it, do whatever you can to keep Death out? Just a little while longer?

My mother battled her weight her entire life; I remember, as a child, the acrid haze of Sweet’N Low in the air; I remember her visiting fashionable fat farms, trying every faddish diet and dieter’s gimmicky trick, while things like reasonable portion size, healthy foods, and exercise were simply derided or dismissed, because, really, where is the fun or glamour in any of that? It wasn’t entirely her fault — I’ve seen the butterball baby pictures. She was dealt a low card from the genetic deck, destined to fight unfavorable odds on the wheel spin of human metabolism; by her late forties her body had taken on a mind of its own and she gave up the fight, succumbed to a wardrobe of caftans you could paper walls with, and a diet of chocolate, cheese, and chicken skin. The pains and aches began, she increasingly struggled to walk and stand and breathe — and she grew angry with me when I tried to suggest, so helpfully, and so annoyingly, I’m sure, maybe a healthier lifestyle, maybe some exercise? Maybe speak with a nutritionist, maybe be more mindful of some basic biological cause and effect? But she was a frolicking grasshopper, and I was a killjoy ant. Her vertebrae began to fracture and compress, inflaming nerves and curving her spine forward into a frozen capital C , hindering an upright stance. Her blood sweetened and her joints swelled; her lungs clotted up with chronic obstruction, requiring the constant companion of portable oxygen, just like my grandmother and her spaniel-tank, and the last fifteen years of her life devolved into unremitting pain and immobility. Every system in her body was breaking down, prompting a debutante’s complicated datebook of doctor’s appointments, hospitalizations, and procedures. She had a cluttered Lazy Susan of medications and became a junkie on prescription pain pills; she kept “losing” those pain pills, and kept charming her doctors, somehow, into prescribing more. She had always been a charming woman, the life of the party, the grasshopper dancing away in careless denial and defiance of stark, wintery realities — leaving those realities for other people to deal with. But she was also emotionally fragile, emotionally voracious, and now, imprisoned in her failing body, she became even more so, reduced to an infantilizing dependency.

I did my best to help her. But I had been taking care of her for so, so long, my whole life, it seemed — who was the mother, who was the daughter, those roles had blurred and reversed long ago — and watching her suffer, I was torn between feeling afraid for her and the chilly path ahead; despair at my inability to make anything better for her; compassion-free resentment at having to take even more care of her, be even more responsible for her now; a self-righteous desire to blame her for many of her own self-inflicted woes; and incredible guilt: This is my mother , who loves me so passionately, I owe her my life, I owe her everything. So I did my best. I told myself I was doing my best.

One month before her seventy-sixth birthday, her breathing became so labored she called 911 and then called me; when I found her in the ER she was gasping for breath — my goldfish mother, terrified and choking for air — hooked up to a million machines while a reassuring doctor reassured me she would be perfectly fine, would probably just go home the next day. Three days later she was moved to an ICU ward, an ill-fitting oxygen mask clamped on her face like catcher’s gear; she was miserable, it hurt, she wanted the damn thing off, get it off of her, and it was a battle to convince her it had to stay; she and her lungs needed that little oxygen boost right now, was all. I’m sorry, Mom, I said over and over, I’m so sorry. But she’s doing fine, her doctors told me, she’ll be just fine. Three days later — vague talk of pneumonia, maybe — they jammed tubes down her throat so she could both breathe and receive nutrients and moved her to some part of the hospital that was more intensively dire than ICU. She was crying nonstop, it was painful, she couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat, Please, Tara , she tried to mouth around the tubes, tried to scribble on a piece of paper, tried to letter-trace on my palm, like Janie so long ago: Please help me, it hurts, please do something, please.

I’m sorry, Mom, I’m so sorry.

Terms of Endearment is the ultimate mother-daughter story; Aurora (Shirley MacLaine) and Emma (Debra Winger) are caught up in a lifetime of love-hate, oil-and-water, emotionally consuming battle until Emma is stricken with some undefined malignancy. 82She is in the hospital, she is dying, in pain (a pain we never really see — her final scenes, while heart-tugging, have an almost Jenny-like sanitized prettiness), and Aurora politely reminds a nurse that it is ten o’clock; it is time for her daughter’s pain shot. The nurse, busy and distracted, assures her she’ll get to it. And Aurora goes off:

AURORA

It’s past ten; my daughter is in pain. I don’t understand why she has to have this pain! All she has to do is hold on until ten, and it’s past ten! My daughter is in pain, can’t you understand that? Give my daughter the shot! Do you understand me? GIVE HER THE SHOT!

she screams, in increasing volubility and hysteria, at every nurse she sees. And they do, of course, they scurry to help, to give Emma that blessed pain shot, and it is all because of Aurora’s power, her tiger-ferocious devotion and love; she cannot give her daughter any more life, but she is going to orchestrate this death, she is going to disappear Emma’s pain, goddamn it, and will happily kill anyone who gets in her way.

I want to scream at someone. I want my Aurora-self to help my Emma-mother, Do something , I want to shriek at them to fix this, I don’t understand why she has to have this pain , I want to make it all better for her, and, in doing so, prove to her I am a good daughter, that she was a good mother, that I love her, that I am sorry she has to suffer this, I am sorry for any second of my life I have not done or given her enough.

Instead, I ask her doctor, trying to be polite and good-girl-like, to please tell me what is really happening, here, please, be honest with me: Is this treatment , a miserable but temporary thing she must endure and get through in order to get to the other side of this? Or are we simply torturing her, for no reason? Oh no, he says. She’ll be fine. She’ll go home, soon. . although she will be in very bad shape, probably worse than before, she will need full-time care, and the nightmarish thought of that is no comfort — to me , for I am more focused in this second on my own pain and fear than my mother’s: How will I manage full-time nursing care, I cannot quit my job because then how will I manage to live, how much money is left, and if we run out of her money, which will happen soon, and I spend whatever money I have saved, how will I pay for my own sick and pained old age when it is my turn, me with no daughter? Will I have to put her in a Medicare nursing home? Promise me, she had begged a few years earlier, Promise me you will never put me in a home! I promise I will do my best to keep that from ever happening, Mom, I had said, choosing my words very, very carefully, so as never to break a promise to her.