My uncle will be at the hospital in five hours. Five hours. He is bringing his two young children and his wife whom my mother does not like.

After my exhausting night of travel I decide to go to a hotel for a while and rest. I can’t stay and stare at her forehead for five hours anyway. It is the only recognizable part of her face I can tolerate now. Actually, the top left corner of her forehead where it meets her hairline and the fresh haircut she got last week. That still looks like my mama. I have corralled my vision into that small territory.

I need a break.

I will need to be “refreshed” when they arrive. When decisions are made.

Tuesday Oct. 27, 2009

I hang up the phone with the nurse.

Mama is heading back into surgery. As her power of attorney I decide not to rush onto a flight but to wait at home in case they need me to authorize a procedure… or something.

My man is in Europe and unreachable. I deem it too early in the morning to call any friends for support. I wait.

The phone rings a half hour later. This time it is a doctor calling.

“Her heart has stopped. We are trying to resuscitate her. I’ll call you soon.”

She has a DO NOT Resuscitate order I think – but don’t say. I don’t really know my place in the order of things deathly and medical.

Now I call my friend Lynn, and for once I am happy she is unemployed. She arrives quickly and lets me know another friend, Erin, is on her way.

The doctor calls.

“We got her back.”

It took a half hour for her heart to start beating again. They finished the surgery and stopped the bleeding but he doesn’t tell me much else. I will learn, this night, that silence and ambiguity from doctors mean hideous things await.

I start to pack.

“I would know what to do if she had died but I don’t know what I am walking into now,” I jauntily tell my ladies.  I feel foolish as the words leave my mouth. You say stupid things when your mom is dying.

On this beautiful October day I arrive at the airport for a flight from Los Angeles to Dallas, a trip I have made excruciatingly often in the last two months.

It is delayed.

It is delayed.

It is delayed.

Finally a choice, fly into Phoenix and take the first flight out tomorrow or stay home and take the first flight out tomorrow. I want to get as close to her as possible – I fly to Phoenix.

It is midnight as I sit on a questionably clean hotel bed and talk to a new doctor.

“She made it through the surgery but her abdomen was so stretched and swollen we couldn’t close her up.”

“What does that mean?”

“ Tomorrow…or in a few days, we will try and close her up.”

Ambiguity.

I do not understand how her body can be left open. How she does not spill out onto the floor.

My uncle calls. A nurse spoke in code to him too.

Things are “Grave.”

“No gag reflex.”

Talk around the truth like a tornado, never say what is at the center.

Their use of the phone is cruel.

Austin TX, 1955

Grandma was a typical 1950′s housewife. Not the Mad Men style. She wore sensible shoes and clothes she made herself. She didn’t drink martini’s and listen to Sinatra albums. She cooked and cleaned and raised two children while my Grandpa did the drinking.

He was from Louisiana, Cajun. His mama only spoke French.

Their marriage was loveless and lonely for Grandma. Grandpa at least got to disappear on weekends with his buddies and get blistering drunk. Monday it was back to the office where he fixed people’s teeth. He was a good provider… of money. Nothing else.

Grandma married him to get away from her father, not a good trade. She was brilliant and a talented artist but the rest of her life would be spent tending to others and, building up her mean.

The mean streak in our family can be traced back to wagon wheel days when one Great-Great-Something or other found his three year old child with his head stuck in the spoke of a wooden wheel. Instead of rescuing him, he kicked his baby in the ass and said, “That’s what you get for being stupid.” And then he kept on walking.

Being mean didn’t mean we couldn’t be funny though.

Wit and teasing were the everyday language of our family. In 1955 my mama was already building up her mean, she was ten years old.

When her little brother started acting up, you know “being stupid” and irritating, she would run to a spot on the kitchen wall and pick up an imaginary telephone. She placed a call:

“Hello, is this the Devil?”

Pause.

“It is the Devil. Oh good. I want you to come and pick up my little brother. He is being very bad.”

At this point her brother would pitch a screaming fit about how he didn’t want the Devil coming to get him! Which only empowered my mama to continue her Devilish conversation until her brother’s complete disintegration.

In our family tears didn’t encourage the teasing to be stopped, it just meant tease harder.

Which was funny to watch, when you weren’t the one on the Devil’s list.