Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (29 page)

“Yes,” Cy said. “It is hard. But that’s what hearts do,” she said. “They break. But if you let them, they break open.”

I caught my breath, trying to let in what she was saying, concentrating on her soft, soothing voice. “Yeah,” I said.

“That’s what’s happening to you. Your heart is breaking open. You have to let that happen. Don’t stand in its way.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Of course you can,” she said. “It’s already happening. There’s nothing more you have to do except let it continue. The only way out is through.”

“What do you mean?”

“There will be another side to this, I promise you, but you can only get there by going through what you’re going through. It might not seem like that’s possible right now, but trust me, it is. The only way out is through.”

I rested my head against the wall as I listened to her lovely, calm voice, and twisted the phone cord in my hand. I breathed in, swallowed, and managed to say, “Okay.”

“Just take good care of yourself, and be there for your mother. That’s all you have to do. That’s all you can do.”

“Okay,” I said again.

“Your heart is just pouring out some of the love that’s in there. That’s all that’s happening. You have a lot of love in there. You will come through to the other side of this.”

“Okay,” I said again. “Thank you, Cy.”

“Anytime, honey. I hope you know that. Anything you need, you let me know.”

We said goodbye, and then it was a matter of calling Adam and arranging his travel. I was relieved to have a task to focus on.

“I think she’s going,” I said to Adam, trying to maintain my composure.

“Are you sure?” His voice was steady.

“Well, I don’t know, but I asked her if she wanted you to come home, and she said yes.”

He sighed. “Okay,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later, I sat across from a travel agent, my eyes raw, my nerve endings ablaze, watching as she clicked away at her keyboard looking for a reasonable last-minute fare for Adam. A bereavement fare, it was called. I might need to supply some sort of a note from a doctor, she told me; she’d have to check into that. She was chipper and efficient, and her chipperness, which would usually be a comfort, set me on edge. Didn’t she realize the magnitude of the reason she was booking this travel? Couldn’t she tell I was sitting across from her in extreme pain?

As she was typing, I heard the opening chords of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” piped in over the office radio, and it took everything I had not to break down right there at the travel agent’s desk. I was turning into a sentimental fool, unable to function normally. I had to get ahold of myself. But Michael Stipe’s reedy, expressive voice had never felt more resonant, his words more true.

I picked Adam up from O’Hare, relieved to be out of the oppressively silent house, grateful to have another task to accomplish. Adam’s huge six-foot-three frame looked absurdly comic emerging from the jetway. We gave each other a brief hug and said our hellos, saying little else on the trip home.

Late that night, when Mom and Adam were asleep—my brother slept so much when he came home, as if the atmosphere in the house was infused with opium that affected only him—I finally decided to call Todd and tell him what was happening. While I dialed his number, my stomach locked up in dread. I listened to the rings and hoped for a helpful response.

“Hi, honey,” he said. He seemed to be in a good mood. That was a relief.

“I just wanted to tell you I’m going to stay longer,” I said. I braced myself to hear how disappointed he was; he often resented my being away from home, away from him, even for important reasons.

“I think it’s near the end,” I said.

But he wasn’t disappointed. Or if he was, he didn’t say so. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said. “I’ll take care of the cats, you don’t have to worry.”

I’d been steeled for a bad reaction, so I had to adjust to what I was hearing. “Um, great,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Just be there for her,” he said.

“I will.” Disarmed by and grateful for this lovely moment of kindness from him, I stuffed down tears. It was these moments, and my hope that they would become more common, that sustained me through our rockier times. I said, “I love you, honey.”

“I love you, too,” he replied.

Later that night I still couldn’t sleep, so I busied myself with responding to e-mails. As I sat at the kitchen table in the middle-of-the-night silence of Mom’s house, listening to the low hum of the refrigerator, basking in the glow of my laptop’s screen, I felt the return of my old sense of productivity and comfort. Night had always been my favorite time when I lived at home; there was no one to bother me, nothing to heed but my own will.

I became centered and clearheaded as I typed, glad to get caught up, glad to keep the connection to my life in New York alive. But in a pause in my finger’s rhythm, I heard a tiny sound from very far away. I froze. It was muffled and high-pitched, a plaintive cry that I realized was coming from Mom’s room. I leaped out of my chair, my heart thudding, and her words reached me as I headed to her room.

“Somebody? Somebody? Help? Somebody?”

I made it to her doorway, where in the moonlight I could make out her darting eyes, and her bony hands clutching at her bedspread. I rushed to her side.

“Momma, I’m here,” I said. “I’m here. What’s the matter?”

“I’m…thirsty…” she gasped.

“Here,” I said, grabbing her sippy cup, a curly straw poking out of its spout. “Here you go, Momma.” I gently lifted up her head and brought the straw to her lips, which clamped down desperately on the straw. Her eyes were huge as she gulped the water down. She barely registered my presence. She swallowed, breathed, then slurped some more.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded, her eyes still wide, looking more at the ceiling than at me. I eased her head back down to her pillow, tucked her quilt up to her chin, and smoothed her brow.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Whatever you need, Momma, I’m here.” My adrenaline was still firing through my veins, my heart only now slowing its crazy pace. “Go to sleep, Momma,” I said.

I stayed with her for a while, until I was sure she was asleep, my fingers lightly stroking the tightened and shiny skin of her forehead.

Word spread throughout Mom’s massive family that she seemed to be on her way out, and over the next few days more and more relatives descended on the house. It was a pilgrimage to a deathwatch. Grandma, whom I hadn’t seen since Anne’s wedding, was the first, accompanied by Diana, her shadow-daughter. Both of them were stoic and firm, their features pointy and formidable. Joe was next, his comically large wooden cross flopping against his chest, his tinted glasses above his sad mustache giving him the air of a guest star on an episode of
CHiPs.
One day Grandma brought Amy, whose sad-sack face was even sadder, and they lumbered into Mom’s room to sit silently and watch Mom’s labored breathing. Chris made it down from Wisconsin, his kindly, bearded face struggling to contain his fear and grief as he walked through the door.

I felt as though I had to defend against an invasion. Even though this wasn’t my home anymore, even though I had hardly been here at all, especially compared to Roberta and Anne, I was strangely territorial. I didn’t want Grandma and Diana and Joe to take up any of the time Mom had left. Grandma especially; she had caused Mom such heartache over the years. I avoided her presence, afraid of what I might say, what might spill out of my mouth. My edges were so raw, I knew I would have very little self-control.

And then one afternoon we were all in the living room, a group of silent zombies, not talking about why we were all there, none of us having the guts to bring up the words “Mom” or “death,” let alone both in one sentence. The television was on, and Grandma, Diana, Mom’s hospice worker, Terry, Joe, and I were dumbly staring at it. I was sitting as far away from Grandma as possible, crammed on the floor between the window and an easy chair, huddled down like a fugitive.

Oprah
was on, and her guest was Ellen DeGeneres. Ellen had recently come out publicly, which had made huge headlines and garnered huge ratings for her sitcom, and Oprah was talking to her about all of this and about her relationship with her girlfriend, Anne Heche.

From across the room, I heard my grandmother say, “What are they talking about?” She had trouble hearing.

Terry said, very matter-of-factly, “Ellen DeGeneres is talking to Oprah about coming out as a lesbian.”

Grandma screwed her face up. “Well, she’s a person, but—”

And before I could stop myself, I shouted across the room, “But what? She’s a person but
what
?”

Grandma looked stunned for a second, then said, “But why does she have to talk about it? It’s private.”

I wasn’t going to stop now that I had gone toe to toe with her. “People talk about their husbands and wives all the
time,”
I said.

Grandma glanced around the room, looking for support, but everybody else remained silent. Then she sort of shook her head and muttered, “Well, that’s why I don’t watch talk shows. Private things should be kept
private.
”

Restraining myself, I got up and went into my room, my blood pumping, proud of myself for speaking up, although embarrassed to have done it in such a forum, and disappointed that I hadn’t taken it further, that I hadn’t annihilated the enormous elephant in the room: my failure to openly acknowledge my own sexuality to Mom’s extended family. If they were going to make a scene at Mom’s funeral about Todd being there, I knew I would not be able to restrain myself then.

Later that day, after Grandma and the others had left, I sat with Mom. Her room was so quiet, her chest’s movements so tiny.

I said to her, “Momma, I think I know what song I want to sing at your memorial.” I didn’t know whether she could hear me. She seemed almost comatose. Lightly and tenderly, I began to sing:

It was a song from
Big River,
a show we had enjoyed together over the years. I held her hand as I sang, knowing she probably had no idea what was happening, knowing this would probably be the last time she’d hear me sing, if she could hear me at all. And when I was done, she squeezed my hand ever so slightly, and then she faintly smiled and said, with her eyes closed, “That’s nice.”

I kissed her forehead. “I’m glad you like it, Momma,” I said.

The next night, Roberta stayed behind when the others left, and she, Adam, and I opened a bottle of wine and went through some of Mom’s personal effects. Mom was a great keeper of mementos, so there were many boxes in the basement crammed with letters, cards, and assorted knickknacks. We huddled on the floor together, sipping our wine, the musty cardboard boxes strewn around us.

“Look at all this
crap,”
Roberta said, laughing.

“I know,” I said, also laughing. I felt giddy, on my way to a slight buzz. We passed around items of particular interest, such as homemade Mother’s Day cards a preadolescent Anne had given to Mom and drawing after drawing Adam had made as a kid.

“God,” Adam said, “I don’t remember doing
half
of this shit.”

I found an old leather-bound journal and opened it. It was written by Grandma, the pages filled with her angular, careful script. Faded black-and-white photographs were taped to some of the pages, the first such photographs I had seen of Grandma as a young woman. She had actually been pretty. Striking even, with her strong jaw and sharp eyes. I flipped through the journal and came across a note she’d written to Mom, when Mom was a baby asleep in her crib. Mom had been born in 1941, right before Pearl Harbor was bombed, and Grandma wrote that she sometimes wondered if she should have brought Mom into such a horrible world, full of violent, evil, terrible people. She wrote that life was hard and there is precious little joy in it. She wrote that she wished Mom would never have to know some of the pain she had experienced. I read the letter aloud to Adam and Roberta. “Wow,” I said. “That’s a lot to lay on a baby.”

“Jesus,” Roberta said. “Well, that’s Dolores.”

We sat quietly for a moment, regarding the heaps of stuff around us. I sipped my wine and said, “How much longer do you think she’ll last?”

Roberta chuckled ruefully. “God, I don’t know. She’s certainly hanging in there, isn’t she?”

I chuckled, too, in spite of myself. “What the hell is she waiting for?”

“She’s so damn stubborn,” Roberta said. “She’s always been stubborn, our mother got that right.”

Adam said, “You’d think she’d be sick of Joe just standing over her, breathing heavily and shit, and want to get the hell out of here.”