puckered lips

I was seventeen and gearing up for another school year--I always got impatient with summer and the heat and the listlessness.  I spent my time designing web sites, reading, and manufacturing blizzards for the masses.  Meanwhile, my mother was in the guest room dying of cancer.

There were many difficult conversations and I say difficult because, looking back, they were so exhausting that I avoided them.  One conversation I remember in particular.  My mother had decided that she was going to clean out her sewing room.  It was a large corner of the laundry room that for twenty years had accumulated fabric remnants, cases of thread, several sewing machines, and a few plastic and concrete geese for good measure.  When my dad told her she didn't have to worry about that mess she replied, "Terry, you didn't make the mess, I'm not going to make you clean it up."  And that was that.  For a day, my brother, sister, and I carried box after box--her life in sewing--from the basement up to the guest room where we would sit as she sifted and sorted each one.  Fabric was sent to the neighbor who quilts, thread was organized into cases, some things went directly to the trash.  As I sat perched on the edge of her hospital bed holding a box she sat directly across from me in a green wingback chair directing me.  I pulled out a few pictures of young women on a catwalk with feathered hair and crazy outfits.  My mother, without aplomb, told me that she had put on a fashion show while she was teaching home economics in Canada.  I was amazed at the idea that her life extended further into the past than my seventeen years.

In a rubbermaid tub I discovered the pillow my mother had sewn for me.  It was my day care pillow and I remember the pillow case being somewhat thin with a blue and red cartoon pattern.  I was surprised to see it--I had forgotten it existed.  All I could think about then was that one day my mother had sat down to sew me a pillow and a pillowcase and the amount of love evident in that simple small pillow sent tears slipping down my cheeks.  My mother said, "Marc, I would like to stay around longer, but I just can't."

It got really difficult for my mother to move.  Formerly a large woman, her body was literally withering away leaving large flaps of skin and weakened muscles and bones.  It got to the point she couldn't do stairs anymore and so one day my grandpa--her father--showed up and built a wheelchair ramp off the back deck.  It probably wasn't at all connected but I remember telling her about my upcoming choir class.  I got into choir.  The director practically begged me to be in the group--my audition was incredibly quick.  We are singing the national anthem at some event the first week of school.  Can you come and hear me sing?  In my memory I picture her standing where she used to leaned against the door frame between kitchen and dining room but I know she couldn't have been there; she was sick, dying.  I do remember her face and her hands.  Her elbows were resting against her stomach and her hands were up in front of her face, fingers touching in the "this is a church, this is a steeple" pose.  Her eyes expressed serious doubt when she said, "I can try."  The realization that she was dying washed over me yet again and I felt shamed that I had asked her to do something she deeply wanted to do but seriously doubted she would be able to.

My mother loved food and she particularly loved steak.  During the last few months of her life she couldn't eat--the cancer had blocked her intestines and so once or twice or three times a day I can't remember we hauled out a one pound bag of refrigerated milky white nutrients that we plugged into the port on her chest.  She was strong though, and was I think still holding out hope that she would pull through.  She didn't mind that we ate around her.  Sometime before she received her death sentence my dad grilled her favorite cut of steak--New York strip he has since hypothesized--and we were eating as a family on the deck.  My mother was watching television in the living room and I decided I would eat with her--I didn't want her to be alone, but maybe I was getting an inkling that I might not have too much more time with her.  There was something about watching me eat, or something about the smell of the steak wafting through the house but I looked up from taking a bite and her head was turned away from the set, her left hand covering her lips, tears sliding down her face.  I felt embarrassed.  I was young and fit and eating a dead cow in front of her when she would never eat again.  I put my plate down and gave her a hug whispering into her ear, "Sweetie your life isn't very great right now but if anyone can take it you can."

As the youngest child I probably got the most alone time with my mom.  Twice a year her hometown throws a celebration called Spoon River Scenic Drive--a glorified craft fair with fantastic fattening food.  Twice a year she would pick me up from school and we would drive two hours up to the festival.  We always stopped at the gas station on Main and Walnut and bought a bag of Chili Cheese Dorritos and munched on them the whole way there.

My mom died the first week of my senior year.  On the first day of gym class, we filled out the emergency contact cards and naturally I listed both parents.  These cards also served as a record of what units--badminton, tennis, basketball, walking for fitness, bowling--we selected throughout the semester.  As I was in fitness phys. ed. I didn't get to switch units but they still passed the cards back for us to sign each time the other students were switching.  A couple of weeks after my mom died there was a unit change and there, in my own writing, was my mother's name:  Carolyn Malone.  I was late starting the activity that day.  I couldn't get off the floor.

When my mother learned she was had cancer she decided to cut her hair.  For many years she had rocked what she called the "I have two kids in college" haircut but staring down chemotherapy and probable hair loss she decided to get it cut.  Her stylist was located downtown right next to the Illinois Theatre.  There was some sort of a street fair that day and I remember very clearly the irony of the sunshine while my sister and I hovered near a sandstone building trying to come to grips with our new situation in life.  My sister was on the phone with a coworker when my mother walked out.  Birkenstock sandals, khaki pants, grey blouse tucked in with a brown belt, trademark glasses, sophisticated new haircut.  She looked strong and confident.

She died four years later.  Sometimes I want to ask her things.  I am writing ten pages of my autobiography for an American Autobiography / Memoir course and I am trying to describe my neighborhood--modest homes with flat backyard boxes.  Then I realized that my backyard slopes downhill and borders on a field instead of someone else's backyard.  I remembered all of the sudden that the backyard was a selling point for my mother and I wondered, while smoking a cigarette in the humid parking lot, what did it feel like for her to move in to that house, go to sleep, wake up, and look out that back door on that view that was hers for the first time?  I want to ask her that, but I can't.

I miss sugar lips (my nickname for my mother to which she would always reply, "Oh stop!" and hit me with whatever piece of paper she was currently holding), my momma, my constant champion.