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Life Arts    H4'ed 5/11/14

Golden Ma

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The Examiner story sparked Ma for awhile. It made her feel like she had added something, like somehow she was being useful, "Maybe it will make people see how much more help they should give older peoples' needs." After reading Ma the McLeods' award winning six-part series, and after reading Beth's particularly touching story of how she cared for her dying folks, Ma added, "It's good they did those stories. Old people are important, and more people should know about them."

On her honest talking days, Ma could zing the other side of the Caregivers stories at Marlene and I and the sandwich generation by quoting her Ma, "Bubba used to say. 'A mother can take care of five kids, but five kids have trouble taking care of one mother.'" Oh, how true that lesson can be.

Where do I vent the lessons of my Mom's last years? I hate the cigarette companies, who hooked Ma on smoking for 50 years. Am dumbfounded by stupid smokers who recklessly gamble on losing the independence Ma once had. Incensed at the inconsiderateness of those health crapshooters who are thoughtless of draining precious life time from those who may have to care for them in the future. Upset at myself for not being better prepared with time, confidence and cash flow to handle more of Mom's day to day life when a once strong mother is replaced with an emotionally, mentally, and physically handicapped mama.

But it's not time to be angry now. I'm too busy crying, thinking, and writing out my sadness. Mom's cries over the years of, "Why didn't you let me die?... Put me in a rest home, I'll die quicker... Bubba, Bubba, I want to see Bubba ... Why can't I die, I'm useless to everyone..." were answered at 9:00 am on January 20th 1997.

After I rolled up the bed next to Mom's that the hospital had provided me for three nights, I looked out at the San Francisco houses, the University of San Francisco Church steeple and the skies that had given us nothing but gray and flooding rains for weeks. Over those days Mom had moved from letting me feed her a little, to sucking an Ensure milk shake, to spoon feeding her liquid, to placing crushed ice in her mouth. Through the night Mom sucked air from the oxygen tubes, sweat, wet, and rolled limply when the nurse's aides and I moved and changed her. Ma's blood disorder had probably worsened to leukemia, was infected with newly anti-biotic resistant vaicomycin resistant enterococci (VRE), and was probably approaching pneumonia. I could hold her little fingers and stoke her soft baby skin. I could walk to and look out the window, listen to her breathing behind me, and talk sadly to myself. I did that for several minutes Monday morning, before I didn't hear her rattled breathing.

When I turned from the window, her head had turned from me, and fallen to the right. Her lower dentures hung out of her mouth. Dentures she needed in older years because in younger years she skipped those costly dental visits to instead plant money in her little white envelope marked "Kids".

Doctors weren't needed to tell me she had begun her journey to see Bubba. I could still hold her hand, stroke her hair, kiss her moist forehead, and look out the window. And as I did, the window changed. For the first time in many weeks, I saw California's blue skies, puffy white clouds and bright light. For an hour the skies opened. A beam of God's light caressed my Mom. And I could dream that a jovial Angel in a limo was picking her up with Bubba, Dad, her brother, sisters, Uncle Bob, Scott, Mrs. Rini, and Grandpa holding a pair of dancing shoes on her seat...

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Dwayne served in the Peace Corps in the slums of Mumbai, India, worked several Habitat Projects, and was on the start-up team of the California Conservation Corps. He has a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University, has been a builder, teacher, (more...)
 

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