It's cancer

Even before I finish this passage in the new book I know it's cancer that the woman is dying of. She's spitting up green fluid. Throwing it up into a plastic, kidney-shaped receptacle "provided by the hospital." I'm only two pages into this book and it's already reminding me of the death of my mother. Now, is that me, or will everything from here on out remind me of the death of my mother? I held similar receptacles under mom's chin as she turned her head and threw up green fluid. For someone who wasn't consuming anything but ice chips and water, she sure threw up a lot. With every hurl she'd fill the little bowl and I'd have to run to the sink in her room, toss it out, leave the thing with soap to soak, grab another one, and be ready under her chin to catch the next wave. I called one of her medicines "the anti-puking stuff," but I'll be damned if this shit worked even one little bit. The nurses said that if she didn't take it she'd be throwing up even more. Holy mother of Christ...

What is it about cancer that makes you sit and watch mindless, soul-sucking TV that you would normally never watch? Mom and I watched the dumbest things in the early days in the hospital. And by "early days," by the way, I mean the first two or three. She was only alive, and with me then, for nine days. Nine small days. The whole world was nine days. Built, populated, and destroyed in nine days. We couldn't even make it to ten. I was working before that. In Orlando. Dad had said on the phone: "Well, come if you want to" because at that point no one knew she was actually dying. Dying. I was looking at her and kissing her and holding her and crying next to her and lying on half of her bed while she slept and all that time she'd been dying. Her body was caving in. Giving up. Calling it quits. Making that last Hail Mary toss. Fuck. What if I had known she was dying? What would I have done differently? Joan, in her fabulous book "The Year of Magical Thinking" talks a lot about that. "What would I have done differently if I'd known he was dying?" And she didn't even have as much time as I did. She didn't have nine days. She didn't have nine minutes. When her husband keeled over with a massive heart-attack, he was dead before he hit the floor. "Pupils fixed and dilated," she writes. What Joan, I bet, wouldn't have given for nine days or nine minutes.

I'm surprised at how difficult this book is to read. Reading about someone watching his mother die from cancer. Probably not what I should have picked up right after the book about Joan Didion learning how to deal with the death of her husband of forty years. Mm-hm. I can really feel his pain. It's my pain. And I wonder if that was why I wasn't a good actor - because I couldn't feel anything. Not really, anyway. And I'm taking into account the Method method, okay? But acting is much more than any one school's technique - you either feel it or you don't. It's something you can't teach. The thing is is that I was a good actor. A great one, actually. But feel THIS...??? I don't know... I would have made a convincing show of it before, but not like I would now. Now I'd fuckin' blow the roof off the place. "Goodness, you really FEEL that she lived through her mother's ghastly death from cancer. It's eerie." Note to self: never do a play or movie in which I have to play someone watching her mother die of cancer.

The music is aggressive and too loud here. It's afternoon, so I suppose they're doing that good business practice thing where you make the environment comfortable, but not too comfortable or you'll have people sitting here all day, which is exactly what I'm doing. I'm here because it's better to suffer the noise and be close to M than be at home alone in the desperate, sinking quiet without a car. There's something about having a car, even when you don't need it, that's comforting. You can always get away. Always go. Always leave the hospital. And I did. I left. And I shouldn't have, but I was so tired. If I could explain, like a good actor, just exactly how tired I was you'd understand. You'd forgive me. But I can't. Just know that it was the awfulest tired there is. Except, I suppose, when you're a parent and your child is dying. That's a bigger, worser tired I betcha.

You have to wonder about medicine in cases like these. She's dying. She's definitely not doing anything else. I think that's what I realized on that horrible, horrible night. That horrible, horrible, horrible night when I was all alone in the hospital with her in the middle of the night and thought I was seeing my mother slipping away forever. I realized then, watching the residents jump through hoops going through procedures to bring her back, that she wasn't ever going to leave here. Wasn't ever going to leave this hospital. Wasn't ever going to see her home again. Her garden. Sit in the kitchen with me in the early morning - the first ones up. Always. I would never sit with her anywhere else but here. Right here. This hospital, this room, this view, and no garden or kitchen table anywhere in sight. Shit.

The book is getting more intense - do you like this play-by-play? - much more intense. I think of myself and hope I don't get cancer. I wouldn't want M to go through that. I'd have to think of something. Of course I know so much more about it now that I'd probably navigate it fairly well. "Hey, doc, seriously - am I getting any better?" "What do you mean by 'better'?" "'Kay, that was honest - I mean, am I going to get up and walk around and fuck my girlfriend and, you know, LIVE ever again?" (pause) "Define... 'live.'" (annoyed head shaking...) "Alright, you know what? Go fuck yourself, doc. And take me off these fucking drugs. Now. I want to go home." Yah. That would probably be the best way to navigate it all...

For all of my seeming sexy strength I am, truly, a puddle of mud. A puddle. Not solid but with loads of potential. Watery. Hopeful. Trying. I'd be much, much better if my mother was alive. I promise. Except - not, because, of course, I've learned so much as a result of all this. So much. Fuckin'-A. But you would, you'd see. I'd be... I could be... I'd certainly try to be... (pause, thinking... pause, thinking... pursing lips, head-shaking confusedly-) There's a word for it. It's something like "happy" and "present" and something with "joy" in it. Something like living. Alive-ing. Something like that. But for the life of me I can't think of it and so for now I'm a puddble of mud, trying to get to a cool, dry place where I can suck up all this water and... solidify.

The most burned woman I have ever seen just walked out of the Starbucks I'm sitting in. SHE'S alive. Survived being burned. Alive. Holy shit...

Bo. We ignored him. The eldest son of my first mentor. My English teacher. The man who'd gotten me into theatre and taught me everything. Bo. We sat at our table in the restaurant on a rare night out and Mom and Dad recognized him carrying a pitcher of water, going from table to table filling glasses. Mom did a sharp intake of breath as he approached us and looked down at her plate, pretending she hadn't seen him. The thing was he had seen her see him and even though we'd never known Bo very well, we all knew who each other was and the four of us knew that his mother was, at that very moment, while he poured our water, at home dying of lung cancer.

Quick! A quiz! What is this post about?????? If mocha and flowers was your guess, YOU'RE RIGHT!!!!!! What do you win? The chance to never read this post again. How 'bout that? This is a little self-congratulatory at this point so I'll leave off, but it's pretty odd, don't you think? That I come to just finish a beautiful, if heart-wrenching, book about a woman's husband's sudden death only to pick up a book about a son's mother's death from cancer? Fate, in my life, is nothing if not demanding. "Get a move on, Lex! Get off your butt! Let's go, get over this, there's A LOT of shit to do!!!!" My Fate is a drill sargent. Wonderful...

She was swelling with tumor. I know that now. I think I'm reading this book so I can learn to give myself license to say things like "she was swelling with tumor." As she lay dying her stomach, empty of everything but what was growing inside it and out of sight, was getting bigger. Huge. Becoming a burden. I remember thinking, upon seeing the swelling midsection, that my mother would have so much trouble getting up and out of the bed. I remember thinking that I knew she'd have so much trouble she'd never get up out of it again. I knew, in my bones - all the way in there, that deep - that she was dying, that she'd never be getting up or getting out. That she would die there where her stomach was swelling. In a cold, cream-colored hospital room with thin blankets and a stunning view.

There's nothing like feeling M naked lying on top of me. She's so beautiful and perfect and small. The most precious little thing. Not precious like "isn't she cute?" Precious as in valuable. Having a unique and high value. Irreplaceable.

It's time to finish this post. Don't you think? I'll read more of my book and think of more things to say, but I think I'll let them go now. Let them slip away. I've said quite enough for one day and I thank you so much for sitting here through it all. To share it does me a world of good.