Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (25 page)

I nodded again. And before I even knew I felt this way, I found myself saying, “I wish I knew how much time there was left.”

“Of course you do,” Cy said. “Of course you do. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know. She’ll go when it’s her time, and that’s all you can be sure of.”

“I hope I can be there when it happens.” Again, this was not something I’d thought about saying before it came out.

“And you may be, and you may not be. I’ve been with many people when they’ve died and I can tell you that it is truly one of the gifts of life, to witness someone crossing over into whatever’s next for them. So in that sense, I hope it happens for you and your mother. But it may not, and that has to be okay, too.”

“Yeah,” I said. Over the course of our conversation, a field of energy, a tractor beam, had caught me, filling me with clarity and light and peace. And as I sat there, I felt an aching anxiety I hadn’t even known to be there melt away, and then there was nothing left to say but, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Cy said.

We soon got word at
Rent
that the entire cast had been invited to sing at the upcoming Democratic National Convention, to be held in Chicago. Since Mom was still at St. Joseph’s, recovering from her surgery, I scheduled myself a later flight back to New York the day after the convention so I could head down to visit her.

On the flight over to Chicago, I thought of a story Mom had once told me from her days as a pediatric nurse.

“There was this little boy I was taking care of,” she said, “and he was terminally ill, and we all knew it, but he kept hanging on and hanging on. He wouldn’t die. It was so sad.

“And his parents were always there with him, giving him so much love and support, but he was in so much pain, and it really was time for him to go.

“So finally some of us nurses took his father aside and we told him, ‘You have to tell your son it’s okay for him to go. You have to give him permission.’ And so the father took his son in his arms and he sat with him in a chair and held on to him and told him over and over that it was okay, that it was okay for him to go, and, well, after a few moments, his son died.”

The convention was something of an anticlimax. On the one hand, it was exciting to feel like we were a small part of history in the making, and to sing our song in front of the thousands upon thousands of delegates gathered together there. On the other, it was disappointing to be relegated to a basement waiting room until it was our turn to perform and to miss the opportunity to meet any of the delegates. We also found out later that our performance hadn’t even been televised except on C-Span, and that the real reason we were there in the first place was that David Geffen, who co-owned DreamWorks Records, was a big supporter of the Democratic Party and had pulled strings to get us this national exposure, which just so happened to be on the eve of our album’s release.

I was still happy to be there, especially because it meant I’d have another opportunity to visit Mom.

When I walked into her hospital room, I was relieved to see that she wasn’t hooked up to any machines, or even an IV drip, and that her room was airy and pleasant and bathed in sunlight. She was no longer in intensive care, with its mood of death and dread; she was now in a wing dedicated to physical rehabilitation, the hallways of which were full of patients practicing walking again or mastering their wheelchairs or visiting with their loved ones. There was life and hope here.

Mom was sitting up in her bed alertly—another relief to see—and she smiled when I came in. I gave her a hug and kiss, careful as always not to squeeze her thin frame too tightly.

“Hi, Tonio,” she said.

“Hi, Momma. How are you feeling?” We both knew I didn’t have long to visit her before I had to head back to the airport so I could perform in that evening’s show.

“Oh,
pretty
good.” Her customary response. But now that she wasn’t smiling at my arrival anymore, I could see a new weariness in her eyes.

“How’s your back doing?”

“Well, it’s all right. I’m having a hard time walking. But it’s okay.”

I sat and held her hand and looked in her eyes, which were starting to well up a little.

“I’m getting very tired of all of this,” she said, and slow, silent tears ran down her cheeks. “I really wish this wasn’t happening.”

“I hear you, Momma,” I said.

“I don’t understand how it all happened. I wish I could just be normal again.”

“I know, Momma.”

“I sometimes wish it was just all over, you know?”

I sighed. “Yeah, Momma, I do.”

“I mean, I want to be here so I can see you kids and see Rachel grow up and see all of the wonderful things that are going to happen for all of you, but sometimes it’s very hard to just feel so
awful
all the time.”

I squeezed her hand. I thought about the story she’d told me, and I thought about Cy’s words to me, and I said, “Momma, I just want you to know that if you need to go, you can go. I will miss you, and I’ll be very very sad, but I’ll be okay.”

“Oh, Tonio…”

“It’s okay, Momma, it’s okay.”

Suddenly, Mom’s sister Amy walked into the room. My heart sank. Amy was mildly retarded, behaving in many ways like a six-year-old in a forty-
something-year-old body, and I wasn’t sure if she’d understand if Mom or I asked her to come back later so we could have privacy. Besides, it had taken a lot for Amy to come to the hospital; she lived in a special home, had to obtain permission to leave, and most likely faced a time constraint herself.

Mom wiped away her tears. “Hi, Amy,” she said, her voice shaky.

“Hello, Mary Lee,” Amy replied in her childish blurt, not really looking at Mom as she said it. Mary Lee was what all of Mom’s family called her.

“Hi, Amy,” I said.

“Hey.” She didn’t really look at me either, and took a seat, staring at the floor. I sometimes wondered if Amy wasn’t so much retarded as she was severely emotionally traumatized; she struck me as someone who often had a lot to say, but who was deeply, terribly afraid to say it. We all sat there in silence, waiting for Amy to say something, and while we sat I longed for her to be gone so Mom and I could continue our conversation.

“So how are you, Mary Lee?” Amy said, at last. Again, she didn’t really look at Mom as she asked this.

“I’m okay, Amy, how are you?”

“Fine,” Amy said quickly, as if by rote. And then she sank into silence again. I glanced over to Mom, who looked at me impassively, resigned to the idea that our conversation was over.

“So are they taking care of you good here?” Amy asked.

“Yes, they are.”

“That’s good.” I glanced at my watch; it was time for me to leave. I squeezed Mom’s hand.

“I need to get going, Momma,” I said.

“I know, Tonio,” she said. “Have a good flight, okay? And have a good show tonight.”

“I will.” I leaned over and gave her a kiss, and then kissed her hand as I stood up. I turned to Amy. “Bye, Amy,” I said.

“Oh, you’re leaving?”

“Yeah, it was nice to see you.”

“Okay,” Amy said quickly, still not looking at me. “Bye-bye.”

I turned to Mom and waved goodbye, hoping it wasn’t going to be the last time I’d see her. She waved weakly from her bed, and I headed out.

T
he next time I saw Mom was about six weeks later, in October, the month of our birthdays. I flew home on my day off, trying to establish a new ritual of traveling home once or twice a month, a frequency that felt good, and yet seemed to be not often enough. I always remembered Grandma stopping me at Mom’s front door once when I visited home back in ’95.

“You need to be a better son to your mother,” she’d said sternly, her intense blue eyes burrowing into me. I felt pinned, heat instantly rising up the back of my neck. I knew she was right. “She needs you.”

“I will,” I said, also wanting to say,
Easy for you to fucking say. You need to be a better
mother
to my mother.
But I didn’t say that.

So in an effort to be that better son that I’d said I would be, I made my plane reservation, got myself to Newark airport on Monday morning, landed in Chicago at around noon, got in my little rental car, and tooled down I-55 to Joliet, blasting the radio the whole way. My old favorite radio station, WXRT, played Counting Crows, a band whose work I mostly tolerated and only occasionally liked, performing a song called “A Long December.” It spoke to me of my journeys home, and I turned up the music and sang along over Adam Duritz’s distinctively nasal croon:

As I walked into Mom’s little house, I felt the enormous contrast between the quiet of her world in Joliet and the noise of my life in New York, with its traffic and clamor, my late nights out with friends at bustling restaurants, my relationship with Todd, and performance after performance of
Rent
greeted with standing ovations and crowds of people waiting outside the stage door thrusting pens and programs and cameras into our faces to grab an autograph and a photo. These visits home, in fact, were pretty much the only chance I had to slow things down and be alone for a while, something Cy had encouraged me to do. Not that they were stress free, by any means. Just more quietly stressful.

I headed into Mom’s serene, sunlit bedroom to find Anne gazing down at her week-old son Brendan, who was lying on the bed next to Mom. Brendan radiated pinkish redness, looking impossibly tiny and fragile and alien atop Mom’s pristine white bed cover. Mom lay flat on her back next to him, her head turned so she could gaze lovingly at her first grandchild as he clenched one of her slender fingers in his tiny fist. She looked so at home there, as she always did around children, and at the same time she looked almost as tiny and fragile and alien as Brendan. I had to stop at the door and steady myself to keep from bawling at the sight.

“Hi, Tonio,” Mom said quietly, smiling.

“Hi, Momma.”

“Hey,” Anne said. Her face glowed, her cheeks bursting in a grin.

“He’s beautiful,” I said, not because he was (how could newborns be called beautiful when they looked so strange?), but because I knew I was supposed to say so.

“Thanks,” Anne said, now chuckling in the way that she did when she was excited and embarrassed. I sensed that she had become both more centered and more childlike in the wake of giving birth to her son.

I came into the bedroom and leaned over Mom to give her a kiss. Her lips felt papery and almost nonexistent. Brendan’s head lolled around as he lay there, his big blue eyes roaming across the ceiling, the room, Mom, and me. He continued to clutch Mom’s finger. I sat on the bed next to them and remembered the doubt I’d felt over a year ago, when Anne had reassured Mom that Mom would in fact live to see her grandchildren born.

“Can I hold him?” I asked.

“Yeah, but be careful,” Anne said.

I hadn’t been around many tiny babies before, and I was nervous about doing something wrong—holding him too tightly, supporting him in the wrong places, or worse, dropping him—but I cupped one hand behind his downy head and the other around his miniature back, and brought him to my chest. He looked at me hazily for a second, then continued his herky-jerky surveillance of his larger surroundings. I lightly bounced him up and down in my arms, only because I’d seen other people do that to little babies, and looked at the two of us in the mirror across the room. We looked strange together; I was pale and large and he was red and tiny. I knew I wanted children at some point, but at this moment the responsibility of protecting and providing for such a vulnerable being seemed much more than I’d ever be able to handle.

“If he’s too heavy, I can take him,” Anne said, although there was no way that he could ever be too heavy for anyone except Mom. But I was relieved to hand Brendan over to Anne; nothing bad could happen to him now that he was in his mother’s arms.

Brendan had been born on the 14th, five days before Mom’s birthday—a nice coincidence at a time like this. Her birthday had been two days prior to my visit, and I had agonized over what to get her. She didn’t need anything material these days, and this birthday was probably going to be her last, so what on earth could I have gotten her that would be fitting? I finally decided to buy her a dozen white roses, and had them sent to her at home. Better than nothing, I thought. Besides, she loved plants and flowers.

When I called her on her birthday, her hello sounded especially weak and sad.

“What’s wrong, Momma?” I asked.

“Oh, Tonio,” she said. “It’s so sad. It’s so sad.”

“What is? What happened?”

“Sarah got hit by a car. She’s dead. She died.”

“Oh my god.” I had to think for a second about whom she meant. And then it hit me: she was talking about one of Rachel’s friends, an adorable and insatiably energetic little blond girl who lived a couple of doors away. She was forever poking her face up to Mom’s glass patio door, screeching for Rachel to come out and play with her. It seemed impossible that this was the Sarah Mom was referring to.

“How did that happen?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, she just ran out into the street and some idiot was barreling down Gael Drive and he ran over her.” She sniffled. “It’s so sad, she was such a wonderful little girl.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “How’s Rachel?”

“She’s devastated. Oh, Tonio, it’s so sad.”

I could hear Mom crying in her nearly silent way on the other end of the phone. I wished so much that I didn’t have to just listen to her, that I could see her, that I could be there to hold her hand. “I’m sorry, Momma,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

After hearing this news, I didn’t know how to tell her that I’d called to wish her a happy birthday. But then she said, “Oh, and thank you for the beautiful flowers. I love them.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “I’m glad you like them.”

“They’re wonderful. Thank you.”

“Well, I was going to say happy birthday, but it doesn’t seem like it’s too happy.”

“No, it’s not, but thank you for thinking of me. Thank you for calling.”

“Of course, Momma. Of course.”

“This is a hard time,” she said. “Very hard.”

I breathed in deeply. “I know, Momma.”

“I love you, Tonio.”

“I love you, too. I hope Rachel’s okay.”

“She’ll be all right. She’s such a strong little girl.”

“I know.” I sighed. I wished I could be there rather than on the distant, cold phone. “Okay, well, I’ll see you Monday. Have a good weekend, if you can.”

“Okay, Tonio. Goodbye.”

“Bye, Momma.”

I hung up and sat staring at the floor for a long time. Calling Mom was hard enough without her having such sad news. At least when I was with her in person I knew I could be a little helpful; on the phone, quite the opposite was true.

And two days later I was with her, and even though she looked no better than the last time I’d seen her, even though I knew that this really was the beginning of the end, I felt more settled, more connected to her, as I sat in the recliner next to her bed watching her watch her grandson. My nephew. The roses that I’d sent her sat in a vase on her dresser; they had opened up spectacularly, their perfect white blooms enormous and beautiful. I had neglected to send Mom anything on so many previous birthdays and Mother’s Days that I was proud to have finally come through with a gift that pleased her and gave her room a touch of light and life.

Soon Anne gathered up Brendan in his baby blanket, gave me a perfunctory hug goodbye, and kissed Mom on the cheek, something I’d never seen her do. And then there Mom and I were, alone together for the first time in almost two months. I moved from the chair to the edge of her bed so I could be closer to her. It was then that I noticed the IV in her hand connected to a gray plastic box.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s how I get my pain medication now,” she said. “I self-administer it with this button. It regulates the dosage.”

“That’s cool,” I said.
Cool?
What could possibly be considered cool about pain medication? I tried to remember all the things that Cy had told me to think about these visits: be with her, don’t judge myself, just talk and listen from my heart. I took her hand in mine. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” she said.

“That’s good.” She really was okay in a certain sense of that word, in that she was still alive, and still able to talk and think, but there were so very many ways in which she was not okay.

As I sat there with her, I tried to fight the need to fit in everything I ever wanted to talk to Mom about. I kept my voice measured and calm. I kept a steady, easy grip of her hand in mine. I watched myself from outside of myself as I talked to her about how well
Rent
was going.

“I’m so happy to hear it,” she said. “It’s such a great show.”

“What were your favorite parts?” I asked. I realized I’d never talked to her at length about what she actually thought of it.

“I love that song that goes,
‘Will I lose my dignity?’
It’s so beautiful.”

“Yeah,” I said. Given her condition and her steady decline, it made sense that she’d connected to that song in particular.

“Jonathan was so talented,” she said. “Those stupid emergency rooms. What a waste.” Mom had watched the
Dateline NBC
episode detailing the two hospitals’ misdiagnoses of Jonathan’s aneurysm, telling me at the time, “Anybody with any sense looking carefully at his chest X-ray should have seen the swelling. It was there plain as day.” She had often shared stories with me of saving patients’ lives when she worked in hospitals, mostly from rectifying mistakes that doctors made. She prided herself on her diagnostic skills, deservedly so.

“I almost wish his death couldn’t have been prevented,” I said. “It’s easier to think that than to think it might have been avoided.”

“It’s very sad,” she said. “He seemed like such a nice man.”

“He was,” I said.

“What a shame.”

“Yeah.” Death was now more present in the room than it needed to be, so I decided to broach a different but still potentially difficult subject instead. “I wanted to share a letter I got with you,” I said, my throat tightening ever so slightly.

“What is it?”

“It’s kind of a fan letter, but what’s different is that it’s from a kid who’s having trouble coming out. It means a lot to me.” I carefully monitored her face for any possible glimmer of resistance but didn’t see any, so I pulled out the letter and handed it to her. It was type-written by a seventeen-year-old kid named Shale who lived in Highland Park, an affluent Chicago suburb. He wrote some flattering things about my work in
Rent
and then went on to say:

I have been struggling with something for a while now, and I thought maybe you would be the person to talk to about it. I realized this year that I’m different, that I like boys, but I’m not entirely comfortable with it. People say it’s a choice, but why on earth would I ever choose to be some way that society doesn’t accept? I don’t know anybody I can talk to about it. I hope maybe you can offer me some advice.

I watched Mom read the letter, her brow slightly furrowed but her face expressionless. When she was done, I said, “This is why I’m publicly out, so kids like Shale have someone to look up to.”

“That’s nice,” she said, quietly.

Emboldened by her willingness to talk, I continued, “I really feel like this is part of my life’s work, Mom.” I’d never said anything like that, but in the instant that I said it, I knew it was true. “It’s part of what I want to do with the time that I’m here. You know there are kids who are in much worse situations than Shale, whose parents kick them out of the house for being gay.”

“I know, that’s terrible. I’ll never understand that.”

“So if I can make a difference at all by talking openly about myself, I’m glad.” As I said this, I kept waiting for Mom to object, or to shut down, but she didn’t. She just regarded me, her eyes warm and a little sad.