Showing posts with label Rachel Rodell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rachel Rodell. Show all posts

Friday, October 13, 2017

Echoes of loss: Missing Mom & Tom Petty


The admission will cause some to label me a real SOB, but I’m having trouble deciding who I’m missing more, my Mom or Tom Petty.

Mom, 84, died July 7. Petty, 66, died too soon.

Petty wrote “The Waiting,” “Refugee” and “Free Fallin’.”

Mom wrote grocery lists with detailed brand instructions involving feminine hygiene products.

I’m missing Mom more than I thought I would. I thought I’d feel relief that her demise was tidy and involved none of the negative hypotheticals I’d indulged the last years as her mind bit-by-bit began floating away. 

I miss laughing with her even as toward the end her punch lines were unintentional. Remember, her last best joke was when they were wheeling her off the porch to the ambulance parked outside her senior living home (she’d fallen and shattered her wrist). Her neighbors asked her what was wrong.

“They’re taking me to the hospital. I’m gonna have a baby!”

I think she was joking, but who knows?

I find myself driving past her old place at odd hours. One of her favorite things to do her last year was for me to take her on long rides in the country while Broadway show tunes played on the radio.

I still sometimes make the rides, but now I’m all alone. She was right up to the end the most persistently sweet person I’ve ever known and the reason no one who’s ever met her would ever dare call me or my brother a son of a bitch.

I miss her.

But I miss Petty, too. I just didn’t see that one coming.

A friend, another steadfast Petty fan from way back, said “he’s the only artist who never even once embarrassed me with a look, a period, a statement, or song, much less an album.”

Heck, even his Christmas song is good.

SNL’s 10 p.m. show last week was from ’79 when Petty & The Heartbreakers were the musical guests. They played “Refugee” and “Don’t Do Me Like That.” I hope you caught him, all thin, snarl and sneer. 

He made looking cool so effortless. Same with his songwriting. His knack for writing compelling, catchy hits is unmatched.

How many artists have their last album (“Hypnotic Eye” ’14) be as stellar as their first four decades previous? And with zero lulls. Drop the needle on any song from any album and your pulse will begin to hum.

My favorite album? It was his least favorite.

It’s “Echo” from ’99.

I remember hearing the first notes from “Room at the Top of the World” and feeling I’d just been introduced to a new best friend. It would be there with me for the rest of my life. And it has.

It was like that with every Petty album.

He hated “Echo,” I’ve read and never played any of it in concert. You’d never know it from the often-raucous songs, but the album was for this soulful man an anthem of defeat. His marriage was ending and he was fighting a heroin addiction, the same scourge that was simultaneously killing Heartbreaker Howie Epstein.

I urge you to download the “Echo” title track. It’s an exquisite lament. Knowing its enigmatic message so pained this beloved and gentle man only adds ache to the inherent poignancy.

I like what Val said when I told her the news. “Oh, that’s too bad. He seemed like such a delightful guy.”


I like that she didn’t mention his music. Because he was truly delightful. It shone through in his songs, his videos and his funny cameos in movies like Kevin Costner’s “The Postman,” “King of the Hill,” and “The Larry Saunders Show.”


His joys, even in the face of woe, were irrepressible. I love in the “Runnin’ Down a Dream” rockumentary when he’s asked about his addictions during the “Echo” period. He in hushed tones, very serious, says how drugs can devastate lives and kill creativity. And, clearly, he means it. He’s felt its unholy ravages

But then his blue eyes begin to twinkle and a small grin appears. He asks the interviewer, “You don’t happen to have any drugs, do you?”


And he cackles unrepentantly. It’s very funny.

I read him saying this summer was going to be his last big tour. He had a 4-year-old granddaughter he was looking forward to spending time with.

Thus, the Heartbreaker leaves us broken hearted. 

Ah, life can be a such a bitch.

Especially when you lose the ones who weren’t.


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Thursday, July 13, 2017

RIP Mom: Why feeling sad is so elusive


I woke up Saturday for the first time in my life without either a Mommy or a Daddy.

I remember thinking I was glad I paid attention when they were teaching me how to tie my shoes.

Mom, 84, died peacefully Friday morning at 8:05. She’d shattered her left wrist in a Sunday evening fall at her apartment. The shock precipitated a cascading raft of maladies that led to respiratory failure involving undetected lung cancer and pneumonia on top of her escalating dementia.

I’d like to thank all those who prayed she’d overcome all her deadly ailments.

I’d especially like to thank those who prayed she wouldn’t.

Her care was exemplary. The first responders transferred her to Latrobe hospital at 7 p.m. Sunday and it only took them five days to finish her off.

I hope you’ll forgive me for deviating from our scripted bereavements.

I know I’m supposed to say I wish they could have done more, that she was still with us, that I’m deep in mourning. And in some ways, I am.

Heck, I haven’t used an exclamation point in seven days.

But, honestly, hers was a very good death and just in the nick of time. She’d been slowly, but steadily and lately dramatically been succumbing to her dementia.

But with our help, she’d been able to live her last seven years on her own and free of all medical intrusions. 

Our fears when they admitted her was how drastically that was about to change.

“Our best guess is she could hang on another six months,” one caregiver said.

I’ll let you imagine just how those six months would have played out.

Instead, it was like she cheerfully surrendered.

We had one very bad night followed by two days of her being alert and feisty enough to make us all smile and laugh. I’ll most remember her in perfect pitch singing songs from “The Sound of Music,” which Josie had cranked on her iPhone.

Then it was two days of watching her sleep, the pulsing vein on her exposed neck growing more and more faint.

My brother Eric was there when she passed. He’d driven solo up from Nashville on  Independence Day and had presciently spent Thursday evening with her in hospice care, the unit to which they’d transferred her the day before.

I called him at 7:50 a.m. He said she’d awoken just once, at 9:45, and tried to get out of bed like she was intent on going on a soulful stroll. Mystics can surmise perhaps she was being beckoned to journey to some other place.

I told him I’d be over in an hour or so.

“Take your time,” he said.

He called back 15 minutes later and said she was gone.

He was alone with her when she died and reported no profound last words.

Lucky for him the situation wasn’t reversed. Had I been alone with her at her passing, I’d have claimed her last words were, “Chris was always my favorite!”

Or maybe, “Bosco!”

I’m grateful for all the kind gestures of so many friends. They uniformly tell me they’re sorry she’s dead.

Me, I’m overjoyed she lived. Truly lived.

She spent part of everyday over the past 84 years either laughing or doing something to make someone else’s life better. She was a true angel long before she became an actual one.

Death is something even basic morons can achieve. But to live and live well in these troubling and divisive times is breathtaking. To laugh, to sing, to exalt, to revel as she did, ah, these are a few of my favorite things.

Understanding these combined factors make it nearly impossible for me to feel sadness usually associated with the passing of a dear loved one.

So, yes, to me it was a very good death.

But an even better life!

That exclamation point felt so, so good.



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Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Mom's fallen & may not get back up


I’ve been the primary care giver for my darling 84-year-old mother since 2010 when she first began exhibiting signs of mild dementia. In the last two weeks under my primary care, the old gal’s been diagnosed with lung cancer, pneumonia, severe dementia and osteoporosis after falling in her kitchen and shattering her left wrist.

I think I’ve finally found my calling.

Primary care giver? Murder Inc. has nothing on me.

Oh, that poor woman.

She’s since Sunday evening been in the ICU at Latrobe hospital. She’d spent the day on our porch sipping wine and complaining about needing a nap. I took her to her apartment, settled her into her chair and told her I’d see her Monday.

Unlike many dementia patients, she was still capable of living alone, albeit with our daily visits. She can make coffee, work the microwave and — hallelujah — take care of her intimate personal needs.

It was about 7 p.m. when the neighbor from the floor below heard her fall and called 911 and me.

From my understanding, her dementia is rare in that she’s become even more cheerful than she’s ever been — and she used to make Fred Rogers seem like a sourpuss.

I’ve often said she gave me my sense of humor, which means she gave me everything.

On what was to become her worst night since, I guess, a 1982 double mastectomy, she was joking about needing wine and telling the paramedics the pain was a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. If there was pain, it was not at all evident. No moaning. No grimace.

When they wheeled her stretcher past the ladies gathered on the porch outside, she responded to their questioned concerns with, “They’re taking me to the hospital. I’m having a baby!”

I wish I could say with certainty she was joking.

The pain didn’t ding an obvious 10 until two hours later when they gruesomely reset the bones. One doctor gently held her wrist, another her fingers, and together they began gingerly tugging in opposite directions. 

I remain surprised she muffled her screams. Had she not, I wonder if I’d have run like a coward out of the room. Instead, I stood at the end of the bed messaging her feet and feeling sure I’d failed her.

We spent the next seven hours in that room with me trying to patiently respond to her deliriums about the location of her purse, her need for Kleenex, why her arm was in an annoying sling and what all these friendly strangers were doing in her bedroom. Every 10 minutes I’d literally have to wrestle this 104-pound grandmother back into the bed to prevent her from getting up to undertake various missions.

It was all so much pain and absurdity.

I’ve read how some children say they felt God’s divine presence in the death room when a loved one passes. After Sunday, I wonder if the presence I’m destined to most feel will be that of the late Moe Howard.

A chest X-ray revealed a lung cancer and pneumonia. She’s rallied from her Sunday evening lows when the doctor described her status as precarious, but an experienced nurse described her as feisty. She pegged her term at six months.

She has a living will and we’re today looking at hospice options. We have maybe three days to decide.

I told an oncologist about how the sudden onslaught of deadly diagnosis made me feel like I’ve failed my mother. He said: “Did you think under your watch she was somehow going to become younger and healthier?”

I guess in these situations we’re all hardwired to feel like failures.

I remember after a round of petty gripes involving having to devote so much free time to her care telling my daughter that if after Mom dies and she sees me crying she’ll know the only reason I’m doing so is because I think someone judgmental might be watching.

Right now, my fear is if I start crying I may never stop.



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Thursday, June 2, 2016

Demented Mom's sweetness making me crazy




Being the primary care giver for an elderly dementia patient is like walking on a windy day with a beloved balloon at the end of a long string.

It’s there, but it’s not.

You feel like you’re being responsible by holding onto the string, but if a gust carries the balloon off to heaven, do you really care?

We just had Mom, 83, spend two nights with us over the weekend and it was wonderful. She and the girls shared so many laughs. It was so wonderful, in fact, we’re talking about the logistical possibilities of having her move in. 

I wonder if I can take it for reasons that may surprise you.

See, Mom’s so sweet it makes me crazy.

With frequent tending, she’s still fine living alone in her South Hills condo where she’s happiest.

And she’s very happy. Really happy.

I mention her dementia in my “Crayons!” presentations and someone always comes up afterwards to share their experience. Happened again two weeks ago.

“Does she have the nice dementia or the mean one?”

Oh, I said, it’s the nice one. She makes Fred Rogers seem like a sourpuss.

“You’re lucky. My grandmother had the mean one and we all wanted to kill her.”

Yes, I’m very lucky. First of all, because she is my Mom. I credit her with bestowing me with my humor and sense of wonder about life. I have no residual taint from poor parenting. I believe I’m well-adjusted and that’s mostly thanks to her.

Sure, I’m always broke, but I can blame my fun-loving Dad for that so it’s cool.

But Mom was a marvel. People her whole life have always loved her. Still do.
I think it’s because she had was genuinely funny all the time and wickedly sarcastic some of the time.

Now, the wit is gone and all that remains is the kind of sweetness so overpowering I suspect it could cause cancer in lab rats. 

Being with her for an hour is like watching a “Little House on the Prairie” marathon speeded up.

She says without any seasonal context that she believes in Santa. Then she’ll say it again. Her memory is shot and the only thing she remembers is to reflexively announce every 10 minutes how beautiful everything is.

So, clearly, creeping dementia’s not only killing her, it’s killing me. Because it’s looking increasingly like the only thing she’s bequeathing to me is her sarcasm.

Being around her for more than an hour unleashes my inner smart ass.

It’s how in July I’ll be taking the family to Minneapolis to see me accept a national award for Acme Lumber Salesman of the Year.

See, I got tired of explaining to her I’m a writer. It’s too complicated for her simple mind.

So I told her some months ago I took a job at the local hardware store. It’s respectable, easy to grasp, something concrete — and we sell concrete on aisle 6.

I’d tell Val the same thing for the same reason, but I’d hate to see her cry when I had to admit it’s all pretend.

Mom likes the idea of me working at the hardware store. She’s always asking me about it.

And it wouldn’t do for a glory hound like me to be just a regular shmoe. No, I have to be the best (I’ve been employee of the month for six straight months).

That’s why I told her about the big award. I thought it’d be fun brag about national recognition.

It is.

She’s really proud of me. 

Of course, stories like that are mostly benign.

It’s the story of the angry barber that upsets Lucy.

She’ll be 10 in two weeks — and I love telling her it’ll now take her twice as long to write her age down.

She adores Nana and hates it when I’m sarcastic.

She doesn’t want me to talk about the angry barber anymore. He’ll go down in family Christmas lore.

It was lunchtime on Christmas Day. Mom was here. The joyful morning festivities had concluded. I’d showered and was helping set the table.

Mom said, “Oh, your hair looks so nice,” (I told you she’s demented). “Did you just get it cut?”

I rolled my eyes and said, “Yes, Mom, I went and got a haircut on Christmas morning.”

“Your barber’s open today?”

I told her he hates his family and can’t stand being around them even on Christmas Day.

It would have been forgotten had I not mentioned at a wholly inappropriate manner — right during the Christmas dinner prayer. 

Heads all bowed, I said, “Thank you, dear Lord, for the feast we’re about to enjoy. Bless those who are here at this table, bless our loved ones who are scattered around the country or with you in heaven. And, please, Lord, bring peace to this sorry world so that next year my angry barber will be able to enjoy Christmas at home instead of at his barber shop.”

Josie snorted hysterically. She thinks it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever said. She thinks this because it’s both sarcastic and sacrilegious — a Christmas prayer two-fer!

I still bring it up because it makes her laugh. But I can’t do it around Lucy because it makes her mad.

“You shouldn’t be so mean to Nana,” she says.

She’s right.

I may not be a nice person, but I’m proud to be raising one.

I hope she’s one day as patient with me as she wishes I were with her beloved grandmother.

Because besides her mind, she’s otherwise robust. I wonder if she’ll live to 97, as did her father.

That means I’ll be 67 when my days of caring for Mom conclude.

I fear one day her creeping dementia will turn cruel. That the woman I so love and admire for so much will become an unrecognizable ogre that’ll leave a durable scar on a memory that even now is so precious.

My fear isn’t that if I let go of the string the balloon will float away.

My fear is it won’t.


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