5-6 May 2009
Around midnight
So I just finished listening to the This American Life podcast from last weekend (broadcast Saturday/Sunday 2-3 May 2009, a radio cut of the live show broadcast to movie theaters in April 2009) and in it Dan Savage told of losing his mother to pulmonary fibrosis in a hospital in Tucson and the Catholic sediment that stirred up in his psyche. I don’t know for certain, but it sounded like the same place where my mother died here in Tucson in 2003. (It’s a great show. You can look it up and listen to it at the This American Life website.)
Dan’s mom died after a five year battle with a chronic lung disease that essentially caused her lungs to come apart. On vacation visiting family here in Tucson she took a turn for the worse and was hospitalized. Everyone was expecting her to rally and be well enough to go home to Chicago in a week or so, but instead her lungs gave out and she died rather suddenly one afternoon.
My mother died during an operation to attempt to undo some of the damage from a botched medical procedure. She had a colonoscopy just before Halloween of 2003, but somehow her transverse colon was punctured during the procedure. Exactly how it happened, I don’t know. I have never gotten a clear explanation of how it happened and why it wasn’t negligence, but I never pursued it out of respect for Dad’s feelings. Her transverse colon went necrotic (a section of it simply died) and ruptured, flooding her abdomen with fecal matter. Sepsis set in and she spent a very awful last couple of weeks, finally dying on the Friday just before Thanksgiving.
They had taken her into surgery to attempt to clean up some of the mess, but she hit the anesthetic and just kept going, dying on the table before they could even open her up. A full autopsy was not performed, and her body was cremated a few days later.
Dan’s story brought much of this back up for me. He told of coming out to his mother, and her roaring out of the closet as a PFLAG mother after a short period of trouble with it. She had gone to her priest and bared her soul to him, crying about what she could have done to make him turn out that way, how god could have done this, and rather than cluck his tongue about the horrible-ness of it all, the father laid his hand on her knee and came out to her.
Shortly after that, Dan’s mother issued a statement to the family, saying that if anyone had a problem with Daniel’s orientation, they had an even bigger problem with her.
That sounds so much like my mother. My mom actually did much the same thing. After crying for a bit she turned around and laid down the law to the entire family: He’s your son, your brother, and you will respect him and love him, regardless. I didn’t even know that she had done that at the time. It was only recently that Dad told me about it.
I found out from my mother that she’d had a very good friend in high school (in the late forties in rural Eastern Ohio) that had come out to her. Not seeing any other options in rural Ohio in the late forties, he killed himself. Part of her tears at my coming out were for him.
It’s also not like I’m the first gay person in her family. Scanning some slides of a family picnic shortly after her wedding to my father in 1951 I saw a pair of unmistakeable “maiden aunts” in the crowd. I asked her about them and she said, “Oh, those were my Aunt Verna and Aunt Lillian. (Those aren’t the right names, but I can’t recall now exactly what she said.) They were spinster school teachers who lived together to save money. We always called them both Aunt, but really only one of them was the sister of my grandmother. The other one was her roommate for forty years.”
I said, “Roommate? For forty years?”
“Oh, yes, they even slept together in the same bed so as to save on heating costs. They only had to heat the one bedroom that way.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her and said, “Really? Just to save heating costs? For forty years?”
I watched a light dawn on her face as the tumblers slid into place and she realized that I wasn’t the first gay person in the family. “Really? Do you suppose? Huh. Well, that would explain a lot.”
That exchange took place in the summer of 2003 and I never got the chance to talk with her any more about them. Since then, I’ve seen my great-great aunts staring out at me in other family pictures. Judging from when they stopped appearing in the photos they must have died sometime in the late fifties.
Listening to the radio show tonight I almost cried when I heard Dan choking up talking about his mother. It’s been hard for him, I know. It’s still fresh (only a year), and he’s never really talked about it in any public way before this. Near the end of the show Ira Glass spoke about losing his mother about five years ago, and then played a clip with both his and Dan’s mother on the show from 1998. Ira was wistful, and he seemed a little pained about it.
It's a little spooky-strange that Dan, Ira, and I are all about the same age. Ira's about the age of my older brother Bruce, and Dan is either a few months older or nine years younger than me, depending on which source you believe. (Of course, if he's nine years younger, that means he started writing Savage Love when he was fifteen, so I don't think that's right.)
Even after more than five years, it’s still hard for me to talk about my mom in any serious way. It’s gotten better, but I still miss her terribly. Just today Dad was reminiscing about her and the pool and how much she loved swimming in it. Occasionally I’ll hear something on the radio or read something somewhere and think how she should hear this, she should know about this, before I remember that she’s gone.
Oh, well. I love you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.
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