My mother died this past Tuesday, December 22, 2009, at 72 years old. She suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke in the early morning and fell into a coma. When found some hours later, she was unresponsive to stimuli tests though her stubborn heart continued to labor amidst increasingly shallow breathing.
I was vacationing at Lake Tahoe with my family on Tuesday morning and we were on our way to Diamond Peak Ski Resort when I got a call on my cellphone. I was clearing snow off my car and my gloved hands couldn't fumble the phone out of my pocket in time to catch the c
all, but I saw from the call log that it was from a childhood friend. While I was ringing my voice mail, another call came in, this time from my mother's cellphone. But my mother wasn't on the line. It was my mom's Filipina boarder, living at my mom's place while she worked out some H1B status issues. I couldn't understand a word she said because she was so distraught. But then my childhood friend's mother (who still lived around the corner from my mom) took the phone and gave me a lucid description of what had occurred; of course, I had already deduced that my mom was in trouble. Then a fireman took the phone and gave me additional information and identified the hospital that would care for her.My family and I of course pre-empted our vacation and immediately began packing up for my mom's and our hometown. There had been fresh snow in the Sierras the night before, but reports indicated that the roads were clear enough for us to make it to the lowlands. We were in contact with the hospital during the drive and learned that my mom's shallow breathing had worsened, requiring support from a respirator. Time was running out if we hoped to see my mom alive.
Six hours later, we arrived in our hometown and went to the hospital. My mom was quartered in a Neuro ICU room, numerous medical machinery, IVs, sensors, tubing, and monitors arrayed on both sides of the hospital bed. Most prominent of all were the regular compressions of the respirator, 14 breaths per minute. Sadly, my mom was a still thing in the midst of various electromechanical beeps, sighs, and tremors. She seemed so small. My mother hadn't regained consciousness or demonstrated any stimuli response since arriving at the hospital. I learned from the neurovascular specialist who oversaw my mom's care that the stroke and subsequent intracranial pressures from the hemorrhage (which continued to bleed until her passing) led to catastrophic brain damage and a dismal chance of recovering to anything more than a vegetative state.
About 14 hours after receiving the initial notification of my mother's distress, I held her warm but unmoving hand as her advance directives were enacted and her body unmoored from this life.
I last wrote at length about my mother in 1985-86; I had chosen her as a subject for the college entry application essays I had to write. (Given the astoundingly positive responses I received from all of the colleges to which I applied, it was perhaps an inspired decision.) In those college application essays, I stressed how my immigrant mom overcame various formidable hurdles during her life, persevering to achieve the singular goal of sending her American-born child to college, living the dream. How despite a limited education she was able to teach me crucial life lessons. And how I hoped to be half as good and generous a person as she was. How I adopted her Christian ethic of working hard and being charitable toward others.
Reflecting upon my mother now, a few more lessons and anecdotes come to mind.
Pick your battles. I learned this lesson from my mom when I was in kindergarten. Some neighborhood friends and I were playing follow the leader or some other distraction which involved us walking around on meandering paths on the sidewalk outside our homes. At one station on our route, we each had to tap the spring-loaded h
ood ornament on a neighbor's car, bending it down toward the windshield. I was in the middle of this juvenile conga line and the hood ornament survived our abuse. The next day, however, the hood ornament was gone. At this point, a neighborhood kid who had a gripe against me (he was justified; I had recently jabbed him in the cheek with a pencil) told the vandalized car's owner that I had taken the ornament after breaking it. The owner trooped over to my mom's apartment and demanded reimbursement for his missing hood piece; the car just wasn't ostentatious (garish?) enough without it. I explained to my mother what had happened and that the owner's claims were suspect (not in so many words, but with the same gist). She told me that she believed me but that it would likely be cheaper to pay off the angry car owner than to fight and feud about the issue for years. I later discovered that lawyers use this same tactic during litigation, settling matters that just aren't worth the time and cost to fight.
But if you must fight, fight to win. Perhaps feeling guilty about her prose-worthy life getting me into an expensive college, my mother sought increasing levels of responsibility from her employer, an owner of multiple laundromats in the San Francisco Bay Area. My mother managed first one laundromat, then two, then five, and finally up to eight laundromat
s with direct management of five full-time employees and some few part-time workers. My mom was the lone bastion of dependability and honesty in the laundromat chain locations and kept the business operating efficiently and profitably. In my senior year of college, my mom's workload grew to a point that required her to ask her boss, the business owner, for additional help. He ended up hiring a male assistant manager. My mom later discovered that this outside hire was earning more than she was but doing significantly less work. My mom blew up, immediately went to the owner's office, and quit. (Not one for negotiation, my mom.) Some weeks later, the owner contacted my mom to re-hire her at increased wages because the assistant manager he'd hired didn't work out (he wasn't the hands-on type) and receipts were down (i.e., shortchanging the till was up). My mom politely told him that he should have treated her fairly in the first place and hung up on him. She denied his subsequent entreaties in similar fashion.
Never be too proud to laugh at yourself. My mother loved to laugh. She was fond of overt vaudevillian humor to be sure, but she also appreciated the spontaneous levity that arose in daily life. In many situations, she was the cause of mirth. When this occurred, she didn't become defensive or petulant about the laughter but instead embraced the situation and laughed as hard or harder than anyone else, savoring the absurdities. A few grin-worthy episodes come to mind:
- My mom disliked insects and other creepy crawlies. This perhaps harkened back to her life on a Philippines farm when hundreds of worms would surface during some rainstorms. Anyway, initially unrelated to this, I impulse purchased a rubber jumping tarantula from a joke shop; the spider was tethered to a bulb that could be squeezed to make the spider jump at unsuspecting passers-by. The spider sat unused for some time, awaiting prey. It found some one afternoon when my mom had come over to assist me with packing for a change of residence. Loosely placing the spider between two boxes, I set the bulb pump under a loose floor tile. When my mom worked her way into that section of boxes and stepped on the triggering floor tile, the obvious screaming and cringing occurred. When my mom took a closer look and discovered that it was a fake spider, she began laughing so gustily that her eyes teared. But the best was to follow. She wanted the spider for herself and put it in her purse. The next day when she went to empty her bag and pulled out the spider, she went through the same cycle of visceral fright followed by uproarious laughter.
- During Easter when I was a young lad of around eight years old, my mom, my stepdad, and I were huddled around the family room television watching The Ten Commandments. Instead of popcorn, we were each going to snack on a boiled egg, so my mom set the pot to boil while we watched Charlton Heston get his Moses on. During one engrossing scene, a nailbiter, we were startled out of our seats by a loud pop. This was the mid 1970s, so we didn't have a surround sound home theater system to explain away directional sounds of explosions during movie watching. While we were pondering what was happening, we heard another loud pop and then another. Coming from the kitchen. When we got there, nothing initially appeared to be out of sorts. But then we noticed the pot that had held the eggs was empty; no water, no eggs, just bits of shell and solid egg whites, but not enough material for the three eggs that had been in there. Then we looked up and saw the true aftermath on the kitchen ceiling and upper wall. Charlton Heston's believability as Moses notwithstanding, it was hard to get back into the movie as we were all laughing so hard. Many years later, a similar situation occurred during an incident involving fresh chestnuts and a microwave. 'Nuff said!
- I do love cheeseburgers. Mom was frying up a burger for me one night and giving it her usual loving preparations. When she served it to me, however, I immediately noticed something vital was missing. "Hey mom, are you trying to rip me off?", I teased. She looked puzzled and didn't immediately understand my jest. I then asked if the hamburger patty was on layaway and I needed to make the final payment for her to add it to my burger. I ended up serving myself, chuckling, because mom was doubled over laughing.
She nevertheless found ways to be generous of her spirit, time, and possessions. My mom still took pleasure in life's lighter moments. And I know that my mom's care of my son during her final years enriched him beyond measure.
Thank you, mom. I love you. Toil no further, but rest in peace.
