[Editor's note: A disk showed up in my mailbox in time for the last issue, with M.P.'s handwriting on the label. Having used the poetry this week, it's time for the other file on the disk....]
My mother is dying. She is more or less at peace with this. I, personally, am terrified of the process. I think about it approximately as often as I think about sex. I am a twenty four year old male. My sexual appetite is quite healthy. Other preoccupations: my stomach (thirty two ulcers at last endoscopy), my hairline (receding), my teeth (in need of bleaching), and Sarah Michelle Gellar (the actress, whom I hope to one day marry). I have no illusions as to what it means, the fact that I am obsessed with my own death. Other than the ulcers, I am physically in fine shape. I do not, say, have terminal lung cancer and a prognosis of four months to live.
Hi, Mom.
I do not know who is the protagonist of this tale, me or my mother. As far as I know, she has had no experience in dying. I have died (almost) three times, wouldn't be terrifically surprised to have another NDE, and this is the bitch of it:
Each time it gets more terrifying.
I awoke this morning from the only nightmare I believe I've ever had. In the dream, I died. In bed. Sleeping. I exited my body as a cloud of invisible smoke and spent (in a movie-like sequences of quick, silent scenes) approximately four months wandering around my bedroom. I was a ghost, I suppose; I never left the house. This was the afterlife? No heaven. No hell. No oblivion. Nobody else there. I was alone. Jesus, I was alone. Finally, as my horror grew into plain old fury, I hopped back into my body.
Through a supreme act of pissed-offedness, I reanimated myself. I do not know how I got out of the coffin, out of the grave - I think I clawed my way out.
I was not a pretty zombie. My skin was grey and rotting. My right eye was goo. My voice - Jesus, what a voice. My internal organs felt, appropriately enough I think, like dead animals floating in preserving solution. No dates for me. My business was quick: cut from a shot of the Arisen Eejit to a press conference. Outdoors, on a grassy hill at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the reporters and crowds gather round. To hear what the corpse has to say.
"Being dead sucks was terrifying and I didn't understand it and I can't really describe it, y'all. Being alive, like this, blows goats too. I guess I'll have to go back to being dead soon. Any questions?"
Mainly, though, I bummed items from the crowd. I sipped a coke. I ate a bite of a cookie. My senses were intact. I remember slipping into a bathroom and attempting to masturbate - I'm not making this up - my penis came off. That's rigor mortis for ya. The last thing I did, I saw a dude smoking a cigarette. I asked him for a draw. I took a draw. I thought, My God, I've come back from the dead and I still want a goddamn cigarette. Fuck Marlboro. Fuck Winston-Salem. Cancer bastards. I tossed the cigarette over a railing, into a lake.
My mother is dying of lung cancer, as I have said.
I am smoking an Eclipse Menthol Mild as I write this.
I don't know what the dream meant. I woke up and did the usual day-off bullshit - breakfast, bleh, shower, bleh, watch General Hospital, make plans, break plans. I went to see Mom. I never know what to say when I see her.
The visit did not go well, because I never know what to say, and also because of beer. Take a sack of beer and draw a face on it. Name it "Henry", to pick a name at random. There you have my mother's boyfriend. According to the State of Tennessee, Henry is also my mother's primary caregiver.
Anyone can care for someone in the last stages of terminal cancer. Easy - make sure she's comfortable and gets her morphine on time. Anyone save Henry, who has been known to take the morphine himself. I never know what to say to Mom. I know what I want to say to Henry, but I don't, because for reasons that fully escape me, she loves the drunken redneck bastard.
No, I do understand: she doesn't want to die alone.
Henry is a great guy. I don't know, I don't want to hate anyone, I know he tries. He can't handle the fact that she is dying and I can't even handle the simple act of talking to my mother anymore.
Hi, Mom.
Because she is dying, and because Hospice provides free nurses, and because my mother has made many friends over the course of her fifty-two years, her apartment is full of faces. Friends and nurses, smiles and grimaces. Hi, Patricia. How are you today? Yes, the shelf needs dusting, etcetera - even now Mom keeps a clean house. Henry can handle the cleanliness. It's the people he can't stand, he said before storming out during today's visit. He says he is exhausted and wants to spend more time alone with Patricia, my mother.
As I may have mentioned, I never know what to say. Henry has beer, I have a word processor. Henry often makes furious foxhole conversions to Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization/philosophy designed to help people stay away from beer and morphine. As far as I know, there are no organizations available to help people stay away from word processors.
There are organizations to help one cope with one's own death. Hospice Care of Chattanooga, I believe I've mentioned it. Mom seems to like them. Henry can go to hell.
No, I don't mean that. Forget Henry - let's name him Goat. As in Scape. "If Henry weren't such an asshole..." What? I don't know. When you know someone deserves better than what they have...
That could go on pretty much anyone's tombstone, I guess. "He deserved better." Goat deserves to drink a magical potion which will make him strong and sane for my mother. I deserve a million dollars, in order that I can quit my stupid job, spend more time with Mom, buy her a house and all move in together, etecetera, et al. I still wouldn't know what to say. I will never marry Sarah Michelle Gellar. Were I to have said million and many more, some fame or power or other excuse to meet a Hollywood actress, this is what I would say:
"Hi. Love your work. Um, hi."
This is what I said during my first NDE: "I am fourteen years old, and I am going to die." It was appropriate enough - I knew exactly what to say back then. I was drowning and had perhaps two minutes before death, and that was the sole thought looping endlessly through my mind: I am fourteen and gonna die. Obviously I didn't. I don't know how. One minute, I was underwater and unable to swim, caught in some horrible sucking current; the next, I relaxed completely and floated to the top. You know, like a miracle.
This is what I thought after my second near death experience: what happened?
I suppose I believe in miracles. My mother has no illusions as to a miracle curing her cancer in the twelfth hour. I don't blame her.
I have no illusions as to what it means that now, at age twenty-four, I am half-mad with visions of my unimpending demise: I am nutty as a fruitcake.
Both my mother's parents committed suicide before I was born. I have never met my maternal grandparents, obviously. I hear tell my grandmother was also nutty as a fruitcake. My mother attempted suicide only six months ago. She didn't even know about the tumor in her lung. The doctors pumped her full of medicine to clear the eighty bazillion mgs of Valium from her system. They sent her to a mental hospital which, according to Mom, "did absolutely nothing toward helping me." She was released and went home and resumed her work. I would tell some anecdote about how she found the will to live again, but I hardly understand what made her want to die in the first place, much less reverse that desire. She found it on her own, let's say that. Then she starts coughing. Then she gets some X-rays done.
As Goat, Henry, might say: Life's a bitch.
I do not know why I have a stomach that makes thrice the acid of a normal person's. The ulcers began long before Mom was diagnosed, long before my fiancee left me. This is what she said: "I don't love you anymore." I made her say it. It's the sort of thing I would want one of my characters in my novels to say, I suppose. Eat, sleep, work, write; my life is more peacefully bland than a proverbial shepherd's. The ulcers have actually gotten better since the wife left. Lately, through no asking of my own, at random moments absurd feelings of peace and serentity infiltrate my thoughts, my mind, my nervous system. It's not unlike being stoned. A mystic might call it God firing happy-lasers at my brain. A shrink might explain these incidents in terms of chemicals the brain makes to relieve stress.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead explains such incidents, too. But they occur after death.
As far as I know I am still alive. I am not, for example, lying in the remains of a shattered car, experiencing a hallucination of a life as my real body experiences the first seconds of death. My second NDE occurred when I accidentally converted a 1981 Dodge Omni into a heap of twisted metal approximately the size and shape of a drunken driving commercial. Of course, I was not drunk. I was fully sober and fully aware until my head made contact with the windshield. I awoke with partial amnesia. What happened? Where am I? What happened? It was cold and I was quite annoyed to find a team of paramedics stripping me nude.
I have never experienced a soft white tunnel at the end of Death. Never a whit of peace. I don't know what the hell that's all about.
My mother smokes Misty Menthol Lights. Still. Even now, with tumors mushrooming in half her organs, she lights up. I tell myself it's okay that I smoke because I smoke only when I'm writing. This is a lie. I can't write without a cigarette. This is true.
Briefly, after the wreck, I quit smoking. For some reason the hospital ICU wouldn't allow me to have a cig. I was sixteen years old at the time. I had had the car less than three months. Life's a bitch. I was expected to recover, go on to college, get a degree and a nice job, and not, for example, be twenty-four years old and working third shift at a convenience store while waiting (still) to hear back from that most elusive of creatures, the literary agent. How you doing? asks my father when he comes in. And, often, When you going back to college? He cleared something like three hundred grand last year. He has yet to offer me a cent toward college. He paid his way through college by working in a morgue. I understand he was quite good at it. Now he sells used cars.
For the sake of this narrative, I will pretend my father is dead. Yeah, I know why I have ulcers.
My father, who divorced my mother twelve years ago and has since remarried twice, has yet to so much as send Mom a card. Wait, he has an excuse; the author just blew his ass out of the narrative. I don't know. Goat, my mom's boyfriend - does he think of me as a stepson? We don't even look alike. I do resemble my mother. I am happy with this.
I light another cigarette.
Puff, puff.
When I was a young Mike, very young, Puff the Magic Dragon was my favorite song. I was maybe three? I could read - really read - at age three. I don't know why. I do believe in reincarnation. I will ask my mother what she believes the next time I see her.
I think I've always wanted to be a Writer. Like that, capitalized. Professional. Rich. Famous. Married to a movie star - Sarah, where are you? It has occurred to me that when I get married, Mom will not be there to see it.
I believe in reincarnation and I am eight thousand years old. Today has been a good day: I haven't had to take any stomach medicine. I met a girl and it just might work out. Not bloody likely but...
I once watched myself turn into a fetus. That was the last NDE. Fucked up an a bad reaction between various prescription drugs, I saw myself shrink, go back into the womb. I wasn't dying; I was being born in reverse. Jesus. I prayed a lot, I think - my thoughts were not worth repeating. Call 911. Get me an ambulance, for God's sake.
I light another cigarette.
Tomorrow, I will visit Mom again. I may read to her.