Ever since mom had pneumonia she's different, or maybe I'm different. She's seems weaker, or her brain less, more like a haunted amusement park but maybe because we were both affected by that battle for life, her body fought so hard physically, and mine just blown back a step by the sheer battling of a life force.
I wish I could pretend to understand what the fuck is happening. I only raised my hand (with my brother's help, he pushed my elbow up) to say yes I will take on my mom, of course, I'm not leaving her. That was four years ago. It was easy at first because I was young, a child, a dementia care infant.
Now the house has blown off in a tornado and I'm still here holding the applesauce spoon and she is still eating.
But that pneumonia made her see-through almost. And when I got home from the fair the other night, after having a long chunk of time away from looking at her, I could see that she is not just my mom, she is a very sick human.
I went to bed that night thinking wait is my mom just a regular human? Like just a person, in a body shell? How could she be so unspecial, to me she is this icon, superhuman, like all my parents, you think they are supernatural which they ARE but then when it comes to dying, I am shocked because how is it that we are all just actually NATURAL. We are all the same planetary beings.
I don't like this. I feel tricked. Who tricked me? Was it love? Why can we not see love but love takes us by the throat and makes us throw ourselves in front of emotional trains? What is this LOVE says shakespeare and austen and tolstoy and cummings and l.m. montgomery and everyone worthwhile.
I was thinking since I had been at the fair that okay we're all on this loud and bright carousel, and some of the horses go up and down and do stuff and we all wanna get on those, and then there's the solid standing ones that don't move and just stay straight the whole time.
Okay so trees are those things in the natural world, we can be trees and live longer unless we get Dutch Elm Disease or something but no, in general, they breathe air and stay in one place rooted or we can be humans and do stuff and move around and see other things but live shorter, live way shorter, but also we don't get to PICK, no one gets to PICK what they want to be on Earth, we just wake up at like 5 years old in this muscle sack with a fistful of goldfish like what is this miracle
So we're just placed here by random, just long enough to realize that we're not trees and even though trees always seemed boring because they were always just there as you get older you're like damn you trees the joke's on me, I'll never see the end of you but you'll see the end of all of us
but you have never been on space mountain I will yell you have never jumped off a boat with a bikini on into lake water and lost your pants
I wasn't minding my mom being sick because she was still right here, and I could move her wherever I wanted her and she was still HERE, in my vision, and she is my mom. I can't lose my mom. She's the buoy. But last night I was hearing her little cough as she slept and it wasn't a dangerous cough like last time but I was thinking all of a sudden that she is a fleshy human who lived a glorious life the way mostly she wanted to, on her own feet, picking her own paths and fights and happinesses, and then she probably wouldn't have picked this many years to be not able to rack up the memories and the time with love where she could feel it in the conventional sense but she can still feel and still laugh and touch reach out to touch and feel comfort and see faces that love her. We can't erase the illness, that's why we stand there forlorn with our pockets inside out. Torn to shreds cause we couldn't stop something from hurting our personal heroine.
If people are just bodies and organs and tubes then why do we get so obsessed with what show they're on or if they won an Oscar? Is it because we're curious animals? We like to see how far we can get? But then as you get older you just see how love stole you, and forced you to care deeply about only about a handful of worthy people.
In reality. What other life can we have, just sitting in a room alone not touching anything and mattering to no one? Or the one as a tree in the woods where we're tied in one spot but reaching for the sky? We didn't even get that option. The only option is (and we don't know it because we're little kids when we're waking up so of course) we roll into that brightly painted room and we fingerpaint on all the walls and we get all wrapped up in hiding in clothes racks in department stores because that's a jungle and in building a sheet fort in the living room and in stealing what we can get away with and grabbing hands dangled down to you and getting jelly on everything and eating our own toes. I guess I'm wondering how you know it's too late to get out now way before you would ever want to get out and then you don't want to get out, you just don't want to realize it's all this feathery illusion on top of the actual physical life, the life without the attachments.
So there is my mom with the physical life of everyone else, the lifespan of the wingspan of a human, the birthdate and end date, the expiration date, the body failing, the view out the eye windows fading. We know the scientific facts but they can't be justified with the loud carousel going on of EVERYTHING ELSE that makes up a life. How can both the things be the same thing?
There is alot of shouting going on but what is real?
I know when my mom was coherent (her version of coherent, let's be real here) she would say family is all that matters. She would always guide me back. My dad would be doing fun stuff and making cool shows and I would have work like once some head of a studio called me BACK about a script of mine and I was so excited, I was like 35, and my mom grinned at me and then gently tipped my head back to the two naked babies on my front lawn, the real job I was in at the time, and that I'm still in now, and she was never wrong. I never felt ripped off not even for one moment of one day with these kids. I never felt like I wasn't in the best job in the entire world. Not with the wrong people. The little people and the handful of others, that has been a big enough pool. I don't think you can do the work that I'm capable of in a group bigger than about 11. Maybe 15. That's maybe why I feel so confused in a bigger setting. It was just strictly more than I could handle with confidence and ease. It's good to know how best you can give an authentic you to the world.
The world is exhausting, my mom would probably say. That's why you have to drive so fast on back country roads and try to get to work EXACTLY on time and not early. Because you don't want to miss out on anything before or after. And then during.
She would say damn jumping off the boat and losing your pants is one of the best things in life. Losing a vest, and eating a sundae with your people afterward, even sad, one of the best things. Saying goodbye to a daughter going to grad school in Colorado, a leaping-in beloved moment. Nothing is actually being taken away from you by loving it. Unlike the fleeting body and the flesh timeclock we all have going on like Logan's Run, love is going to run up and down us and all over the floor and it is going to be a big fucking spilled pile of steaming gigantic mess. Trees are going to keep stoically breathing the air and showing us their flowers. Pointing out the way. But we have to live for it.
