A Carlin Home Companion (25 page)

My breath stopped. I felt like there was something else in the room with me, watching me, sitting with me. I began to cry. The words confirmed everything I'd been holding at arm's length. I now knew without a doubt that my mother was going to die. All the pretending, all the busyness, and all the denial that kept that impossible reality from me vanished in a flash. And I knew that what I was reading was exactly what I needed in this moment. Not what I wanted, but what I needed. What I wanted was the fairy tale with the happy ending, not the part where you have to face the ogres and witches of the dark forests.

Here in my hand was a map, my mother's emotional map of the territory of her own broken heart from her own mother's death thirty-four years earlier. This map was the bread crumbs from her life that could safely usher me through the dark forest of death. I slowly took in all that it had to offer. I read and then reread her sentence, “Within a period of six weeks I had to face the death of my young mother,” and I realized that on this day in May it had been six weeks since my mother was diagnosed. As I read further, I took in how she'd had to cope with her grief while my dad was on the road, not able to physically support her during that time. And I took in that she, too, had felt a need to keep a show of “cheerfulness and hope for mother's sake because that was what she wanted.” I sat with all the strange parallels and let the weight of their truth offer me a glimpse of the comfort and power I would need in the months to come. I knew that those words let me know that somehow I would survive this impossible ordeal.

After I finished reading her essay and creating her Mother's Day collage, my mom woke up and needed to go to the bathroom. The chemo had so ravaged her body that she could no longer walk on her own. The nurse and I began to practically carry her to the bathroom, when her body went into a violent fit of convulsion—her legs shaking uncontrollably. Then every part of her convulsed, and she screamed out, “Help, help me, I can't—I can't stop it! Make it stop!” We almost lost our grip on her but managed to get her back to bed. She was ashamed. I was ashamed. There was no control.

The next day, Sunday, May 11, was Mother's Day. I was exhausted, spent, and emotionally drained. Mom had sunk into some kind of childlike state that I couldn't identify. She acted and spoke like she was a three-year-old child. I wondered—does anyone come back from a state like this? This panicked me, but all I could think about was that I had to get her to eat or drink something—anything. She hadn't in two days. She couldn't. The chemo had ravaged her far worse than the cancer on her liver.

Dad was somewhere else—New York City. He still thought he was there for their future. But there was no more future for Mom. There was only that moment—me sitting on the end of her bed begging her to just take a sip of the orange juice. Her blood sugar was dangerously low. Like a bratty child she shook her head and refused. I couldn't blame her; she probably couldn't taste anything anyway. I doubt she could even have kept it down.

But I begged anyway. “Please, Mom, please, just a sip.”

“No!” she cried, and clamped her mouth shut.

I acted strong. “Well, if you can't drink your orange juice, I'm going to have to call the paramedics and take you to St. John's. Is that okay?” After a moment she nodded her head yes.

That was the last thing I said to her. Well, probably the last thing she remembered me saying to her: “Drink your orange juice, or I'm calling the paramedics.” Not what I had wished as my last words to her. But that's the thing with being in the middle of a crisis; there is no grand moment or time to reflect—it's just
do.
Do now what needs to be done in this moment. And in this second I believed, or at least wanted to believe, that getting her to drink some orange juice would make it all okay.

The nurse called an ambulance. Mom rested with her eyes closed. I didn't know if she was conscious or not. I cried as I called my dad to tell him that we were taking her to the hospital. Things were bad. I told him to take the next flight out.

I followed the ambulance to the hospital. Have you ever been to an emergency room on Mother's Day? There are children. Many, many children. And that morning they have all been making Mommy breakfast, and they have all burned or cut or scalded or scraped themselves in the process. By the time the tired, overworked ER resident got to my mom, he was in way over his head, because she was going down, and going down fast. One minute we—Bob, our dear friend Theresa, and I—were all standing in the cubicle with Mom and she was alive, not conscious but alive. The next minute bells on machines were going off, alerting all that her blood pressure was dropping, heart rate was racing, and pulse rate was plummeting. They moved her quickly to a private area to get control of the situation. We waited outside the room.

“Code blue! Code blue!” came over the intercom. A rush of doctors came at us, shouting instructions at each other. “Code blue!” Nurses rushed by. I watched all this from about ten feet away. It was all in slow motion—nurses racing in with carts—more shouting, words, motions. I turned around, walked through the doors outside, and screamed,

“No, no, no!” I collapsed against a wall. I thought,
This is not happening. This is happening to someone else. My mother is not dead. No, she is not dying. This is not how it's supposed to happen. This happens much differently; it's quiet, serene. We're all holding hands, Enya is playing, peace, love.… No. Not this. Not now. Not today
.

A nurse rushed out.

“They've revived her. She's on life support. She's alive,” she told me.

She was, kind of, but not really alive. It's that place where bodies take on air and blood flows around their arteries, but the person is gone. She was gone.

I wanted to call my dad, but I couldn't. He was already on the plane.

I spoke with the intensive care doctor and told him, “You must keep her alive for six more hours. You
must
. My dad has to say good-bye to her. It can't end like this. It just can't. He has to be with her. He's been gone for so much, he can't be gone for this.”

The doctor reassured me that he would do everything in his power. It was like a dream. I was not real; Mom was not real. This hospital was a figment of my imagination.

*   *   *

After a while they moved Mom into the ICU, and a crowd of friends gathered at the hospital. Mom had isolated herself these last five weeks from most of them, not telling many the extent of what was going on. She didn't have the energy to deal with their emotional reaction to what was happening. Most of them were people she had nurtured and sponsored in AA. Some of them believed that they wouldn't be alive without my mother. As word spread among her friends and the AA community, everyone's face told the story of the reality of the moment. I thought,
What are they going to do now?

What was I going to do now?

*   *   *

At five o'clock Bob and I took a limo to the airport to get my dad. When we got to the gate to wait for him, there were paparazzi. I found a security guy from the airline and told him my situation. He told us that Diana Ross was on the flight, and he'd usher her toward the cameras so that we could make a clean getaway with my dad. He did, and we did.

In the limo all was quiet. Then Dad spoke: “While I was on the plane I watched the moon and Venus rise together, and I knew that it was over. That this was good-bye.”

The ICU was not pleasant. Mom was hooked up to every possible device to keep her alive, and her eyes were open in a very disturbing way. She was not looking at anything. She was not conscious. But her eyes were open. Dad had not seen her in more than ten days, and she was very yellow, very bloated, and bald. He tenderly cradled her face in his hand, kissed her, and said, “Oh, Brenny. Oh, Brenny.” And then he wiped her eyes with a tissue. Two years later I would find this tissue in a box of mementos with a note in my father's handwriting identifying it as the tissue he wiped her tears with on that last day. His love was huge. My love for him was, too. We spent about forty-five minutes with her. But we knew that Mom was no longer alive. We knew that these machines were the only things keeping some semblance of her physical presence with us. We knew it was time. We said our good-byes.

On May 11, 1997, Mother's Day, at 10:38
P
.
M
. they turned off the machines. We stood above her and cried. About three minutes later Brenda Florence Hosbrook Carlin was released.

 

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

“Sunday Will Never Be the Same”

A
LL
I
WANTED,
needed, was to sleep. Every cell in my body stung with a hot fire. My mind screamed for relief. I went home to my parents' house to sleep in my old room because I needed to be near my dad and near my mom's things. All I wanted was to fall into the peace of slumber, but my mind resisted because it knew what I'd face in the morning—a world where my mother no longer existed.

Somehow, some way, I fitfully slept. When I awoke, the raw, burning pain was still there. When does this stop? Will I feel this forever? I couldn't imagine a time when I wouldn't. I stepped into the shower thinking that just maybe the water would temper the pain. As the warm water poured over me, my body began to convulse, and I sobbed. I didn't know how long I would have to sob to release even a small fraction of the shock and pain I felt, but I feared it was longer than my lifetime. I wasn't sure if I could endure this ordeal. That's when a pair of arms, my mother's arms, came around me from behind and just held me. My mother's voice filled the space around me: “Kelly, you're going to be okay. You will be fine.”

Even though I'd idolized Shirley MacLaine and flirted with every New Age ideology, I had never experienced an encounter with the “paranormal.” I was not one to believe in that kind of stuff readily. A part of me wanted to, but there was another part that really wanted to see the scientific proof. Nevertheless, in that shower on that morning, I absolutely felt my mother's presence and her arms around me, and heard her words. She was as real to me as she'd ever been.

As her loving arms held me, I felt a surge of strength in the inner core of my being. It was a strength she'd exhibited so many times throughout her life. It was the same strength she'd used to take that leap in 1960 to be with my dad; the same strength she'd used to support my father when he decided to transform his career in 1969; the same strength she'd used to rebound from alcoholism and addiction in 1975. It was her human spirit, and now it was mine. Her fierce love and warrior courage implanted themselves inside my being, and although the pain, fear, and confusion of loss still flooded my body, I knew that, yes, someday, I would be okay. I would be fine.

Immediately I got out of the shower, threw on some clothes, and ran across the house to tell my dad what had just happened. Like a child who didn't get what he wanted for Christmas, he said, “Fuck, man! Cool shit like that never happens to me!”

*   *   *

Those first few days Dad and I hung out and spent hours playing music—mostly vinyl records, some CDs—and drinking beer in his home studio/office. A clear sign that Mom was gone already: We were both drinking together in the middle of the day. Not heavily, but just enough to soften the sharp edges of the new reality. Dad was making a tape of songs that had some connection to Mom—“Somewhere” from
West Side Story
, Van Dyke Park's “Sail Away,” and Doc Martin's “If I Needed You” were a few—songs they'd shared and some that when he'd hear them he'd think of her. I added some songs, too. Mine were from my “broken heart” track list: Nick Cave's “Into My Arms,” Iris DeMent's “After You're Gone,” and Spanky and Our Gang's “Sunday Will Never Be the Same.” Spanky McFarlane, of Spanky and Our Gang, had been a close friend of the family since the 1960s. My mom and dad, with me in tow, often went up to Topanga Canyon to party with her and Nigel Pickering and Oz Bach, the other founding members of the band. The song “Sunday Will Never Be the Same” was part of the soundtrack of my early life. And now, with Mom having died on a Sunday, it was the anthem for my grief.

Hanging out with my dad those first few days after Mom's death enabled me to see a private part of him I had rarely encountered—his sentimental inner life. As each song played, I caught sight of the deep connection that had originally bonded him to Mom, a bond that their thirty-six tumultuous years together had naturally eroded. As he dug deeper into his enormous collection of music, his love for her seemed to be restored to its pristine state.

Something healed between us, too. My father became whole to me. I'd always seen him as the man of great intellect, which he proudly showed the world, but now I witnessed a man of deep feeling and connection, a part that the world knew little about. My dad was now as deep as he was great to me. It scared me a bit. This was uncharted territory for me. The safety I'd felt with my father most of my life had always been based on him being the rational one, not the emotional one. I worried:
Would he know how to venture into this dark place and get out?
I hoped so, because I couldn't be his guide. I had my own dark places to go now.

*   *   *

When we weren't soothing ourselves with music and beer that week, Dad and I were in full planning mode for the memorial. I knew memorials were to honor the person who had died, but I didn't know that they could save the life of the living, too. I'm not sure what I would've done that week without the focus and purpose it gave to me. Although in a surreal daze, at least I had a job to do. I was doing. Next foot forward—music? Pictures? Food? Valet? Words? All were questions that had to be answered.