Volume 4, Issue 5: Giving Mom Her Flowers While She Can Still Smell Them
This is a public issue of Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice.
CW: parent with terminal illness, big feelings
Hi friends. Last week I said that my mom maybe has ~2 to ~12 months to live. She has an infection getting in the way of treating her cancer and the cancer and her liver issues are getting in the way of treating the infection. The plan was to continue to treat the infection enough to eventually be able to do some palliative chemo and give her a few months of life.
Well, the cancer has advanced more quickly than anyone hoped and the palliative chemo is no longer on the table. We are, as the French say, truly fucked. The doctors now give Mom a few weeks of life left. She is in the hospital and we are working on a hospice care plan. In the meantime, we are trying to flood her with visitors and greeting cards. The isolation and loneliness from the pandemic coupled with her living on Maui is why she moved home last November in the first place. She moved home to be around family and loved ones so we are doing everything within our power to make sure she gets to do just that.
There are two books that I have read and past job experience that have helped me during this time.
Years ago, I worked reception at an animal clinic and I got invaluable experience in talking about hard things. Don’t get me wrong, it always was terrible having to ask families if they want the ashes of their pets back, maybe a ceramic paw print mold or inscription. Having done that many, many times though, has helped me be able to talk to the palliative care team and advocate for my mother without having a meltdown any time anyone so much looks in my direction. Yes, I recognize that it is a totally valid time to have many meltdowns but it helps to be able to hold off. Related, I recommend reading Let's Talk about Hard Things: The Life-Changing Conversations That Connect Us by Anna Sale. It has also helped me at this time.
The other book that has truly helped me at this time is The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time by Nancy David Kho. “Who helped you become the person you are today? As Nancy Davis Kho approached a milestone birthday, she decided to answer that question by sending thank-you letters to the many people who had influenced her, helped her, and inspired her over the years: family, friends, mentors, teachers, co-workers, even a couple of former friends and exes.”
The last few weeks one of my frequent pastimes has been to hurt my own feelings by thinking about what I would say in a eulogy for my mother. She is still totally alive, by the way! But I am really good at saying, “Wow, I’m sad right now. You know what would make me even MORE SAD? Thinking about these things!” During one of those times I started getting angry that people wait until folks are gone to say all the good things about them and thank them for what they have done for you or inspired you to do. I have heard too many eulogies and funeral speeches colored with regret and I don’t want that.
People deserve their flowers while they are alive and can smell them. So that’s what I did. The other day, I got really snotty and cried a lot and held my mom’s hand and thanked her and told her how much I love her and everything I would say in a eulogy because she is still with us and she deserves to hear it. I have a lot of regrets in life, but I will be damned if my mother doesn’t know how much I love her.
Mom also reads this newsletter, so I’m going to take this last part of this newsletter to sing her praises to all of you who want to read this part and for her to read it, of course.
My mother, Teresa, is an amazing cheerleader in that she will pump you up like no one else. She always wants everyone to know when they’re great. When we were in her hospital room surrounded by the medical team and they basically told her that she doesn’t have long to live, do you know what she said at the end of the meeting? She said, “This was a great meeting. You all have done such a great job. Thank you for taking care of me.”
My mother is everyone’s favorite. I joke that I am amazed she never got kidnapped because she will make friends anywhere and everywhere. She will talk to anyone. Once when she flew into LAX to visit us in LA she texted me a selfie from the airport of her with CeeLo Green and she was like, “Hey! Look at who I saw and talked to!” There was a med student on Mom’s floor during her first five weeks in the hospital and when he had to say goodbye to her, he cried. He said even his parents know all about her and she is so special to him. Hassan, I don’t think you’ll ever read this but if you do, Mom thinks you’re going to be a damn fine doctor.
My mother would learn the names of all the unhoused people that would come into her workplace or live in the neighborhood. She wouldn’t be afraid to hug people (Mom is definitely a hugger, boundaries be damned!) and have conversations with folks who were panhandling. She would literally give the shirt off her back. If there was something she owned (or, much to my dismay, that I owned) that she thought someone else would appreciate more, she would give it. Even if it was ill-advised or she didn’t have it to give. I know academically that this is not necessarily healthy behavior but with the amount of people that have shown up for us within the past few months, we are all reaping the benefits of her extreme generosity.
My mother would not always make the most responsible decisions but I guarantee you, she would always make the most fun decision. My mother had me when she was just a month shy of 21 and often she was more friend than parent but damn, we had a shit ton of fun. Spontaneous trips to Disneyland. 7am Salt n Pepa or ABBA sing-a-longs on the way to school, bass cranked up to wake the dead. New York City trips where we would see 10 Broadway shows in 6 days. Convincing me to get up at 3am to go to the peak of Haleakalā to watch the sun rise beneath us then hop on bikes and ride down the side of the volcano. Absolutely terrifying taxi rides in Rome. Instigating pranks when she was one of the parents during our camping field trips in junior high. If there was a swimming pool nearby, my mother was definitely going to 1. Throw you in and 2. Jump in fully clothed. My mother was an excellent swimmer. Apparently when she was younger she was also quite the terror on roller skates and let it be known that my penchant for knee socks and short-shorts didn’t come from nowhere.
My mother has an amazing and powerful laugh. I can (and have) identified it through multiple floors of a building or from multiple blocks away. She is hilarious and continues to crack incredibly distasteful and morbid jokes while she is in the hospital. My cousins and aunt visited the other day and we were somehow crying and laughing hysterically for much of their visit.
I am grateful to have inherited my mother’s absolutely phenomenal powers of memory. She used to remember everything. Names, addresses, directions, phone numbers, social security numbers, birthdays, a person’s favorite flower, what food a person liked from a specific restaurant, what someone’s favorite color is. If you said it once, even in passing, my mother would remember and then she would tactfully surprise you with a bouquet of your favorite flowers in your favorite color. My mother is a romantic. I don’t think she would use that word for herself and I don’t mean it in the way of like, Valentine’s Day romance or even a romance linked to some sexual relationships. My mother loved to give gifts, to buy dinner for friends and loved ones, to surprise people my GOD she loves a good surprise. My mother had an absolutely bananas ability to find just the right greeting card for any person at any time.
My mother taught me to be curious and to ask questions. “You don’t know if you don’t ask,” is one of her go-to sayings. She demanded that I think for myself. When I was 13, I was still going to church with my grandfather every Sunday. One morning while I was getting ready for church, my mother (who didn’t go to church) looked at me and said, “You know, you don’t have to go to church. If it doesn’t feel right to you, if you don’t believe in what they are saying, you don’t have to go. I will never force you to do something you don’t feel is right.” Integrity above all.
I like to say the phrase, “Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man” but I don’t actually need it because I already am incredibly confident and I owe that to my mother. She has always believed that I could do anything and raised me to believe in myself the same way. Am I insufferable? Yes. But my mom thinks I’m pretty neat and that’s what matters.
My mother is 64, a Boomer, and fucking LIGHT-YEARS ahead of a lot of this country when it comes to being a decent human being. My mother was in the army when she was pregnant with me. My mother is Filipina and white. My father is Black. They were not married and my mom actually had a girlfriend (white) when she was in the army, who left when my mother was discharged so she could help raise me. I like to claim I was “raised by lesbians” and say it in the same way someone would say, “Were you raised by wolves?!” but it’s beyond that. My parents remained friends. I grew up in a culturally diverse city and our home was truly a motley mix of folks coming in and out. My mother tells me that a friend had brought by THE Angela Davis when I was a young child. Our family and friends and loved ones were gay and straight and queer and dozens of different ethnicities and when I was a kid I thought it was so weird when my classmates had families that all looked like each other because of this. I was truly raised in a home where I was shown that it is okay for me to love anyone, as long as they’re cool.
When my wife told my mom she is trans and I was like, “and I know you’re unsurprised I’m queer” my mother’s only concern was that we weren’t breaking up. She gives no shits about our genders or orientations, only that we weren’t getting divorced. Of course, as I mentioned, my mom is a cheerleader so she was all in after our coming out. Rainbow flags and trans flags and “Love is Love” shirts for every day of the week and rainbow hats and definitely calling me with excitement when another queer or trans person joined her team at her job. Whatever I am, whatever I’m doing, Mom was fucking in it to win it. Case in point, this text she sent to me on February 1st this year that has a lot going on and I love it:
Thank you, Mom, for everything. I love you morely.
A hui hou kākou.
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