Idle essays

Can’t stop thinking, this a.m., about my mother’s demise: essentially a form of suicide. One that she inflicted on my father and me and anyone else who happened to be around her.

She smoked herself to death. 

When I say “inflicted,” I kid you not. She engineered a particularly gruesome way to die — one that she had watched as it killed her own mother — and she deliberately chose habits that she could not have NOT known would do her in, too.

The habits?  

Endless puffing on cigarettes. And guzzling bootleg booze.

She KNEW what either of those fine traditions would do to her. And she not only went right ahead and indulged them, she kicked into high gear.

Literally: if she didn’t have a cigarette in her mouth, it was because she wasn’t awake. I knew when she woke up during the night because I could smell the stink of her wee-hours cigarette. And in the morning? The first thing she did, before she lifted her head from the pillow, was light another fuc*king cigarette.

She and my father had learned to brew their own booze while we were in Arabia — where alcohol was illegal. They had a hidden still out there and cooked up their own hootch. When they got to Sun City, here in Arizona, my father thought it would be fun (and cheaper!!) to brew his own. And so they indulged in a daily swiggle of high-test booze…every afternoon, before their dinner.

Not surprisingly, this habit caused some chaos with their health. It helped lead my mother to a fine, high-octane case of cancer.

She’d had to care for her own mother as the wild-a$$ed mother lay dying of cancer induced by wild promiscuity and repeated back-alley abortions. So she knew what was involved. And she knew that cancer makes for a mighty hideous way to die. Hideous for the victim, and hideous for everyone around her.

By the time she landed in their bed, too sick to lift her head from the pillow, my father, pretty clearly, understood exactly what she was doing. When I tried to lay beside her to comfort her, he literally chased me out of their bedroom. And he wouldn’t let me go back.

By then, I wasn’t living with them. They were in Sun City — a bland old-folks’ suburb of Phoenix — and my husband and I had a home in Phoenix’s beautiful downtown historic district. So, I had to drive a half-hour or forty minutes to get to my parents’ house.

Dear Daddy’s beating me away from my mother’s side did not inspire me to go back. Doubt if I returned more than four or five times before he locked her up in a nursing home, waiting for her to die.

You hafta say: he wasn’t the soul of tact. In a less generous mode, one could say he could be pretty damned mean. Not to her: he truly worshiped her. That, though, was not so where his weird little daughter was concerned: the nutty brat who wanted to grow up to be an astronomer.

And just like everyone else in those fine domesticated 1950s when I was a kid, he thought I was crazy. I was supposed to grow up to bake cakes, paint my face with expensive make-up, spawn children, and wear frilly clothes.

When you think about it, it’s pretty damned weird that I never smoked as I was growing to adulthood. My father didn’t smoke as much as she did, but truth to tell, they both puffed stink-sticks with élan. Truly: he must have seen me as some sort of distorted outlier.

WhatEVER. He surely didn’t want me underfoot as his wife — incidentally, my mother — lay dying.