Many people don’t really have a worst day in their life. They don’t have a need for that category, or if they do it often times consists of a day the got dumped, fired, had a flat got stung by a bee and their dog shit everywhere, ate it and vomited the shit-vomit onto their favorite pillow or pair of shoes. I suppose I was no different up to a certain time in my life. Those worst days were something you could share with friends over drinks and laugh about and say “Man that fucking sucked!” but then, it really finally happens. You actually have the worst day in your life, and its something that you won’t ever laugh about, it won’t trigger any sense of nostalgia, it will only engender a sickening pain in the pit of your stomach and wish you had not stumbled upon the thought.
This post is not my worst day in my life. Its actually about the day that held that title for nearly three long years, until finally it was replaced by a day that in all honesty was truly terrifying. This day is about my mother’s 60th birthday.
I had talked to my step-dad Paul and hatched a scheme to fly out to Minnesota and surprise my mom for her 60th birthday. My grandparents and aunt had planned to be there and I thought it would be really nice to come out and surprise her. My wife and I bought our tickets, rented a car and were on our way north to Angora MN from Minneapolis. We rain into some rain and for the life of us couldnt get the wind shield wipers to do anything but lazily streak across the windshield barely giving us room to see. Most cars we had driven you simply push up on the wiper arm on the steering column and there they go. This car didnt work like that and we fiddled with the arm for about half an hour. We were laughing about how crazy it would be if we wrecked and no one would know where we were! then finally almost by accident my wife knocked the arm down and the wipers kicked in! “Seriously!” we yelled. Thats all it was? Down not up? we laughed about and vowed not to tell any how stupid we had been. Four hours later we arrived at my moms place.
My mom and step-dad live on 80 acres of forested land in northern Minnesota with a little stream that meanders across the front of the property. We drove over the little bridge and up to the garage. By that time the dogs, four of them, all started barking, alerting everyone to our presence. Everyone came out and everyone was very surprised, especially my mom. This was a great time, we all hugged each other and Paul, Erica and I congratulated one another on our ability to keep a secret and pull off something so good!
We all went inside and thats when we sat my mom down for her second big surprise. her birthday gift! We thought it would be nice for mom to be able to keep a journal or do some writing and cruise the internet so we had bought her a nice laptop. Mom and Paul would usually hang out downstairs in the family room which was connected to their bedroom. The computer room was upstairs, so we thought we could hook up some wireless and make the laptop into something she could use all the time. When she opened it she was blown away. “This is for me? I get this? For me?” yup, all for you mom. The only downside is that mom wasn’t very tech savy, so we set out to show her what to do.
We plugged in the laptop and fired it up and we sat on the couch, Erica and I on either side. Erica was walking her through how to find Word, so she could journal or whatever. She seemed very interested in doing that. So we opened a word doc and off she went, making her first of what we hoped would be cathartic musings about life, her experiences and stuff. Instead she wrote something very different.
My mom was a nurse and then physician assistant for over twenty years and she set about, in a very professional, detached and clinical fashion, writing a list of things to do for her when she became so ill she could no longer speak, nonverbal. I suppose this was on her mind as recently she and my sister had decided that they would do hospice care for her at Melissa’s house. This was not exactly what I had in mind, perhaps Hello World! would have been better or some reminiscence about sledding as a child or jumping onto her sister from the top bunk when she was seven. But no. No this was different. This was straight forward, direct, follows these instructions: Make sure I am warm, a blanket, cap and mittens may be necessary, I get cold very easily. She wrote in an almost outline form. Erica helped her indent and make bulleted lists for Music: Melissa Etheridge, and others and at this point I’m just starting to wither inside.
Then mom starts getting really graphic. I’ll need to keep moist as the chemo will dry me out and make my tender extremities and possibly blister and that could cause a lot of problems, so thats my hand, feet lips and labia. Yes. My mother just informed us that when her cancer gets so bad that she can no longer speak we will need to make sure she has mittens, cds and someone is moistening her labia with Vaseline, so as to avoid chemo induced blistering which could lead to infections and so on and so forth. At this point Erica and both leaning back a bit and look at each other.
At this point we had been sharing glances, reassuring one another approvingly, glad we could be helping mom get into using the computer. but this glance we shared now, this was different. This was a “Holy Shit this is the fucking most brutally real thing in the universe, are you going to throw up? look” and as Erica looked at me she could see I had tears starting to well up and I just felt crushed. All the happy big surpriseyness good times feeling had jsut been crushed out of me. I forced a smile and looked back to my mom who was trucking on her list of Hospice Care for Linda items.
The moment when you realize that all the monsters that have ever been dreamed, all the fictional horrors ever written about can’t, for a moment, hold a candle to the utter brutal terror of reality. That this moment is someone’s truth. That life had brought them to this moment, to be forced to think in these terms, to mentally be building this list over and over again: Hospice Care for Linda, until you can finally share it with your loved ones and everyone becomes starkly aware of the road that leads in front of them. no grand illusions, no sunsets or moving musical scores, just harsh, brutal, reality.
That was the Worst day in my life, up until January 5th 2010. All save that for another time.