Cynthia Hogue

MOTHER CARES
            (In memory of Earl Hogue and Evangeline Erickson Hogue.)

My husband and I receive the news at Heathrow, are already en route to New York. It is noon, long security lines; then, delayed planes. When we arrive at JFK, we are hours late. It is nearing midnight and the traffic is bumper to bumper because a parking garage has been closed, and no one can park to pick up passengers. My aunt and I talk on our cells. She just missed us on her first swing by Arrivals. Her second swing takes over an hour. It is July 1 and very hot. Tomorrow, we will drive up to Albany, where my mother is in intensive care, following an operation for an aortic aneurism. They have put a foot of stints into the artery; they caught the aneurism, miraculously, before it burst, or we would have been going to my mother's funeral.

"Cindy, Cindy, save me!" she cries when she sees me. Then in a conspiratorial stage whisper, "You have no idea what they've done to me! They've brainwashed your sister and father. Get me out of here!" It is the Demerol speaking. My eighty year old mother, the daughter of a Lutheran minister who still preached in Swedish, thinks that she has been in a dungeon where the other prisoners were dealing drugs all night. When the nurses put in her catheter this morning, she thought they were raping her. My sister—the nurse who two years ago recognized the signs of stroke my mother was having at dinner, who because she lives near them is the one who has been there for them in by now about five elder crises—is in the corner, crying. Believing my sister "brainwashed," my mother has said some cruel things.

But she is not herself.

She will not let my father's hand go, even for him to go to the bathroom. She is in the center of the room in the IC, hooked up to many machines and IV lines, looking at us all askance, skeptical that any of us mean her well by now, unbelieving that she has almost died, cannot yet go home. To distract her, my husband tells her that my cousin has a new boyfriend, "He's very nice, but a Republican!" My mother, a staunch Democrat, stares at Sylvain, not seeing the connection. He notices the oxygen measuring device hooked up to her finger, which is lighting up red. He asks, "Vange, did you see E.T ? Your finger is lighting up like E.T.'s finger." Home, someone mimicks, probably me. My mother asks, "What does that have to do with Susie's new boyfriend? Are Republicans E.T.'s?" I do not know if she saw the film, or remembers what "E.T." stands for, but I have to turn to the wall. My aunt looks sharp to see if I'm crying, for my mouth is silently opening, my eyes shutting: weeping or laughing? If my mother does remember what E.T. stands for, then she who has almost died two days ago, and is not at all out of danger, but out of her mind on the Demerol, is making a joke. And then I am tearing up, because her spirit is strong and steady, though her body is failing.

"Thank you for this play," she says to us. "It was very well-written. Please now take me home. "

***

My mother is released several days later from the hospital. Over the next two weeks, my father and I will share nursing duties. He will also handle the many calls that are coming in, because he is endlessly patient and I am curt. I will handle the many dosages of drugs, the nursing schedule, the Home-Care nurse visits, the many doctors' appointments that need to be set, because I am precise, and my father, who has glaucoma, is going blind. Among the things my sisters and I realize during this time is that my mother has been my father's eyes when he drives. They had recently driven to a high school reunion 1000 miles away in Illinois, and back. I will be making all the meals, too, but that task eases quickly: all those calls translate into covered dishes dropped off with get well cards on the porch each day! My parents live in a small town where friends, neighbors, their church community, do this for each other routinely. I have to make only three family meals, and they are the special meals my mother had bought for our visit, for the family reunion—meals I doubt she will ever make again. My husband handles the errands, sometimes with my father, who will need to take a few breaks from the nursing duties while we're here (my father even goes off canoeing with my husband for a few hours, and he has always, like a cat, hated the water).

It's not that my mother is a demanding patient. It is that her care is demanding. She is too weak to get out of bed except for the bathroom the first week. " Cindy, " my mother calls, as soon as I have gone downstairs from feeding her, taking her blood pressure, measuring her level of oxygenation, helped her to shower. " I can't breathe." All that activity has exhausted her, and she is hyper-ventilating. " Dad," I call. We sit with her, for she is panicking; there is a lot of fluid on one of her lungs and she can't catch her breath. "I should call the doctor," I say. "No," my mother cries, panting. I will have to ignore my mother's wishes over these two weeks. My father will need to make decisions against her wishes. Over the course of a few days, we have to bring her twice to the ER, as well as to her cardiologist and vascular surgeon, to make sure her shortness of breath isn't a blood clot or pneumonia. Once she is readmitted to the hospital. "They tortured me all night," she explodes when we arrive to pick her up. I'm not sure how my father would have managed all of this without us.

By the end of the first week of home care, my mother begins to experience the post-operative depression. "You should have let me die," she says. She is crying. "There are children dying in Africa, and you're spending all this money on me." My mother was following the news about famine in Niger, civil war in Sudan, before her aneurism. She listens in horror to the news of the London bombings on July 7th, our original day to fly out of London. Because of problems with my husband's immigration papers, we had had to cancel and reschedule. There were no affordable flights on July 7th, so the planned visit to my parents of one week became two. That I would have had to come on July 1st with the news of the aneurism is an irony that has not escaped me. My mother's blood pressure shoots up with news of the London bombings so high that I turn off the TV. "Mom," I say, "for better or worse, you survived." I know she feels guilty about this. I realize that the problem for my mother will not be dying; it will be living. It isn't just that she is severely osteoarthritic, in chronic pain; it is also the world's condition, her incapacity to help anymore.

At the beginning of the second week of home care, my mother is writing a few checks, among them a donation to Africa through the UCC overseas charity services, explaining to me, "I know the money reaches the people in need with the UCC service. It doesn't go to administering the program!" My mother was, for almost forty years, a social activist as well as high school English teacher. As chair of her department, she started the Black Studies program at her school, the Native American Studies program (a legacy that was cut by No Child Left Behind funding cuts). She worked for the NAACP and League of Women Voters, was president of Literacy Volunteers. Even at eighty she volunteered to cook for her church's dinners for the homeless, and she often helped serve the meals and clean up, despite being in severe pain from a botched hip replacement. She was signed up to volunteer the week she had the operation, even though she had seemed more tired, everyone was telling her she did too much. None of us in the family could ever tell my mother what to do.

Every morning I spend some time sitting with my mother quietly. She wants me to look over her papers with her, the will, the living will, the "No extreme measures" papers, but this activity soon tires her. We never get through everything. "I know where they all are, Mom," I say. "Chrissie knows, too." Then she tells me what she would like for her funeral, that she wants certain passages from the Bible but not others, she doesn't want anything of that fundamentalist clap-trap (my brother-in-law is "born again" and tends to take over, rhetorically speaking, except in front of my mother). She worries that my father can't manage without her (I say, "Well, I guess you'll just have to outlive him, Mom"). She tells me how she has tried to be a good mother: "I didn't ask you to move home; I let you grow up!" she cries one day. I am her eldest daughter, fifty-four soon. I gaze at her; I believe my mother has just revealed that she never recovered from the empty-nest syndrome. I don't know what to say, so I say, "No. I mean, yes." Because of that secret, it has been, for her, the height of generous parenting that she let us leave home. She has tried to keep her secret from us, although I have to say, my sisters and I had our suspicions.

It is time for her morning pills, and I am going downstairs to get fresh water, and my mother calls, "Mother, take me home. I'm ready to go home. " When I return with the water, she stares at me, wordless, grips my hand in hers—I notice that my hands have begun to look like hers did when, well, when she was my age and I was my niece's age. I no longer recognize my mother's hands, they are so gnarled and blotched. But her hair is still blonde, hardly grayed. She used to be so beautiful, she and all her sisters. She used to have an indomitable belief that if she could work hard enough, everything would turn out all right.

"I don't like to think of you leaving home," she says each day, as if I might just move back with my husband, as if that act would restore her to herself, her absolute joy in mothering. I surprise myself with my patience, my capacity to take care of my parents, if only for these two weeks, for I have myself had a rather debilitating chronic illness for over a decade, and at times when I could barely, literally, walk, and my first husband had left me (there were no children), my parents have had to come and help me. In these two weeks, I have been blessed to have timed a visit perfectly to their dire need, blessed to have been strong enough to take care of my mother this time, to have been able to convey in action, not just in word, my love for her. For them. I hold her hand as if it's the last time, each day. I tease her about her death wish so she'll laugh a bit ("Next time, don't tell Dad it hurts!). My father is crying when I come down to the kitchen, "This is the end, isn't it." He's shocked, because he has never let himself think about things like death. I say, "No Dad, it's not the end. And I'm so glad we have this time here now," as if it were a normal visit, the visit we planned. As if he's not crying.

Cynthia Hogue's eighth collection of poetry, Revenance, will be published in Fall 2014 (Red Hen Press). In spring (2014), she was Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell. She teaches in the MFA Program at Arizona State University, and lives with her husband, the French economist, Sylvain Gallais, in Phoenix.