Write On

This is the year that my mom dies. I mean, most likely. I’m not hurrying it along but I am aware that it is, realistically, a thing that will occur.  It is early January of 2022.  She entered hospice care in November of 2021 meaning the medical community thinks that she has less than six months to live. That’s why they let you into hospice.  For me hospice means that she has a few extra pairs of eyes on her with the mandate of keeping her comfortable.  And it means that I can start thinking about her death in a very real and concrete way.    I want to trust the hospice nurses when they tell me that she isn’t in pain and even though I’ve asked them to come on board for their professional opinion, I find I have a hard time believing them.  I think it is because I personally am in pain a lot of the time right now.  I’m 51. My hips hurt and my back hurts and sometimes my knees hurt and when I’m in pain, I am not always wincing.  I don’t know if my blood pressure is up or if my heart rate i

My Mom was 80 when the way I saw her radically changed. Mom stayed home to raise my brother and me on the Seattle homefront while my Dad traveled the globe during his storied career at Boeing. Mom’s comfort zone took up a very small radius. I knew Mom to be timid and hesitant. She hasn’t driven in years but when she did it was with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake. I could count her regular destinations on one hand. Any detours away from the familiar would throw her into a panic behind the wheel. As a Chinese woman in 1960s, Mom was defined by her relationships to others as a wife, mother, sister, and daughter. Caring for others was her primary purpose. Dad’s career came first. His booming temper of authority regularly made the walls shake. During his frequent business trips, home was quieter. It felt safer to exhale for all of us. It was during Dad’s absences that Mom would regularly run the vacuum cleaner over the wall-to-wall shag while wailing at the top of h

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“Becca!  Look at this.”  Ellen plopped her bag in front of a pointy stone that looked like a smaller and fancier Washington Monument.  “I found the Foggs.” The Fogg memorial stood in the middle of a big grassy rectangle marked off by low cement stones sort of like the ones my mom always bumps into in parking lots.  Except these were granite and rounded.  In the center towered a marble obelisk with the single name “Fogg” embossed in capital letters.  Lined up in rows and clusters all around were oodles of dead Foggs.  I stepped over one of the barriers, super conscious of the fact I was standing on top of people and skirted between graves to an area that looked older.  Right under a huge pine tree, stones dating back to the 1700’s had creepy winged skulls carved on the tops and eerie, barely-legible epitaphs.  Thick roots bulged up around them like splayed fingers.  I stumbled over uneven ground and, catching my balance, read aloud from Zipporah Jane Fogg’s 1765 grave.  “‘As you are now