My friend of 45 years lived with his mother for eight years before she died last week on her 95th birthday. She died of natural causes but had suffered with Alzheimer’s for the past decade. I wrote this short story about my friend two years ago.
As his younger brother acknowledged at her funeral, “Brother, these past few years have been your finest hour”.
I couldn’t agree more. Here is yet another story of waving and drowning at the same time.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Google™ Maps, on any given day in the past six years, could zoom in and find my childhood friend sitting on the floor next to his 93 year old mother on the couch, watching her watching, “Andre Rieu: New Year’s in Vienna” on PBS.
He watches as she sings along and talks indecipherably to Andre. She may be propositioning him. She winks and makes a clicking, hey-hey sound out of the side of her mouth. My friend smokes a joint the size of Havana and calls me. It’s September, a hot September day.
“Happy New Year!” he says.
“Oh, no!”
“New Year’s in Vienna, baby!”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
Today, he’s 64 and chronically unhappy with the toll age and living has taken on his eternally boyish physique, face and hands.
“I’m on a diet, “ he says. I hear her singing in the background. Or, she could be choking, which she has started doing in the last few months.
“What have you been eating today?” I ask him.
“Just apples and WASA bread. Ten Honey Crisp apples.”
“Ten…?”
“Ooooowheeee,” he says. “Andre’s hair is flying.”
His Irish Catholic family, they of creative addictions and estrangements—is fractured beyond repair. He is the only one who talks to all family members, but, then, not all have survived their addictions to continue on with their estrangements.
“Ten apples?” I say to him. “One day? Wow.” I think it may be dangerous.
“Dangerous?” He reminds me of his incarceration in California for drugs years ago, when a 6 foot 200 pound transvestite decided that he was “her” soul as well as cellmate.
Years ago, when he was asked, in a month long hospitalization following an overdose, about how he was able to swallow all those pills—he simply said, “With a fine wine.”
I decide to recite my version of W.H. Auden’s poem about suffering, how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along or watching Andre Rieu for the umpteenth time.
“Suffering is when my I can’t roll a joint the size of a toilet paper roll,” he says while taking another long drag and holding his breath, and then on the exhale, sputters, “The smoke is so thick around Ma’s head, she can’t see Andre!”
His laughter is loud. It registers on Google™ Maps as a land mass, a phantom of geography appearing through the heat of a September day—while billions eat, open a window or simply bear witness, as best they can, to those disappearing from the earth.
© Text and Photo -Pat Coakley 2007-Cannot be Reproduced without Written Permission
