Family and Support

By Karen Dempsey

On vacation with my younger sister, Megan, and our families, I was sorting the laundry, her family’s from mine, when I called out to her, “Do you have a beige bra?”

“Noooo …” she said. “Because I’m not ninety.”

“Hey,” I said. “I have the same bras you have—I bought that push-up you told me about.”

“In beige?” she asked, laughing.

I was defensive: “Beige goes with everything!” I tossed the bra onto the pile of my clothes. Jeans and t-shirts. Khaki shorts. Frumpy underwear.

Clinging to hangers in the dim corner of my closet are some remnants of my life before kids, before forty. The sleek gold tank dress I bought for a trip to Bali, when I wore little clothing and a lot of DEET. The green wool skirt that my tailor exclaimed over before tsking protectively over the hemline. “A little higher,” I negotiated, and he shook his head, sighing, “Ah, my girl.”

Those clothes I’ve been holding onto might not fit any longer—my body, or my life. But Megan’s right: at least I can have nice underwear.

I ordered some bras from the Gap Body store online. They came in the mail stuffed with hard tissue-paper cups to hold their shape. My husband John tossed one of the cups at me, teasing, “Aren’t you supposed to leave those in?”

The bras fit okay, but they were still sort of ordinary. I decided to exchange them for some non-beige underwear. But they sat in my closet until the next time I was headed to the mall—which happened to coincide with a visit from my father, who decided to come along.

“I need to buy some underwear and return a bra,” I said to my father—very directly— as he rode beside me in the car. “Do you have any errands you need to run?”

He shrugged. “I’ll just come with you.”

Divorced for three decades and on the verge of leaving the business he spent his life building, my father is a man defined by his faith. He carries in his pocket a string of rosary beads and prayer cards with photos of Pope John Paul the Second and Mary, the Mother of Christ.

My parents—Irish, Catholic, junior high sweethearts—married young and had seven children together. They divorced when I was ten. I spent alternate weekends visiting my father, my pajamas and a change of clothes stuffed into the folds of my rolled up sleeping bag. When I started wearing a bra, I stuffed that in deeper—probably along with my well-worn copy of Forever.

Bras were a nod to my developing femininity—to sexuality. Although my father and I talked about a lot of things as I grew up, bras weren’t among them. I am fairly sure that up to this point in his seventy years, he has also been spared the task of shopping for them.

But I was well past adolescence. Married. With two children. He didn’t seem to be giving it a second thought. So I why was I?

At the mall, he followed me into Gap Body.

He trailed along behind me among the displays of silk and lace. It’s just The Gap, I reminded myself. But my father’s face was already turning red. I had already picked out a style online and, when a twenty-something, khaki-clad boy appeared and chirped, “Is there something I can help you with?” I decided to aim for efficiency.

“I’m looking for the—satin hipster?” I tried to speak softly, but the boy clerk, whose named tag read Justin, wasn’t having it. He nearly clapped with enthusiasm. “Thong or panties?” he shouted.

“Just—the panties,” I said, avoiding my father’s glance.

Justin led me through the store. My father followed, his face fixed in a blank expression.

Waving a thin arm over the display table like a magician, Justin announced: “Low-rise. Ultra low-rise.”

I scanned the table. White, gray, beige. Megan’s admonitions popped into my head. “Do you have anything more in back?”

“We don’t.” He smiled apologetically. “You were hoping for the lace?”

“Um,” I said. “Just maybe something with a pattern?”

I felt my father shift beside me. “You know, it’s fine. I’ll just order them online.” I said. “I do have a bra to return, though.”

Justin took the bra to the register and held it up high.

“Cinnamon red,” he said approvingly. “Ultra plunge.”

I looked at my father, almost against my will, but he did not look at me. He gestured toward the door and finally—finally—headed outside to wait.

He was quiet in the car for awhile then said, “You must be trying to get revenge on me for something. All those times I embarrassed you when you were young.”

At home over dinner, my husband John asked about our day.

“My daughter took me to the unmentionables store,” my father said. “With all the women’s underwear.”

“It was The Gap!” I said, exasperated.

But John nodded in sympathy, and my father frowned at me in a very familiar way. Reduced to the role of recalcitrant child, I did the only thing I could. I blamed my sister.

•••

KAREN DEMPSEY has written for The New York Times Motherlode blog, Babble, and Brain, Child. She lives in Massachusetts. Read her work at kdempseycreative.com or follow her @karenedempsey.

On the Pain Scale

by Jessica Handler

I have become, at fifty-three, a full-grown person. Two years ago, I stepped into the role of midwife to my mother’s death. I chose it. She was with me when I began. I would be with her when she ended.

Lung cancer had colonized her brain, her spine, her right hip and shoulder. Where did this begin? My father smoked, a lot. My mother smoked, very little. My parents and little sister lived fewer than ten miles from the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station on the morning that the reactor experienced a meltdown in March, 1979; I was away at college. Mom refinished furniture for a hobby, breathed the fumes, handled the toxins. After my father was gone from her life, her late-in-life boyfriend smoked. Where did this begin? Everywhere and nowhere.

“So this is what happens when you have six kinds of cancer,” Mom said the first time she fell. She said it again the first time she couldn’t stand unaided, and the day she threw up the crème brûlêe.

“It’s just three kinds of cancer,” I said, bringing her ginger tea to the table. We laughed, a little. We are dark-humored, and fluent in the language of terminal illness.

My mother had three daughters, of whom I am first and last. Susie has been dead for forty-four years, Sarah for twenty-one. Susie developed leukemia when she was six. I was eight. She lived less than two years. Our little sister Sarah lived with a rare blood disorder and died as a young woman. Mom and I spoke of them often. Often we spoke of them without words.

I told my sisters’ names to Y., our favorite nurse’s aide. “In case she’s looking for them,” I said. For dying people, past and present run together like chalk drawings in the rain. “She was calling for Susie yesterday,” Y. told me. I wondered aloud if Mom was troubled or frightened. “Not at all,” Y. said, relieved to know who my mother had been trying to find. “She was looking out the door, like she was calling in a child from playing.”

My heart broke.

•••

Some mornings I woke in my mother’s bed. Others I woke with my husband in my own bed, ninety-four miles from hers. There was a moment every morning when I didn’t know where I was.

Mom’s pain was usually a two or three. On the Wong-Baker FACES™ pain scale chart, that’s somewhere between a smiley-face with barely knit brows and a smiley-face that appears to have something serious on its mind. The zero quantity of pain-free is represented by an untroubled smiley face with a touch of crazy-eyes. Neither Mom nor I reached a ten, the greatest level of pain. Ten is a crumpled, desperate face shedding drops that could be sweat or tears. Or blood. Her oncologist told us we were lucky.

My pain would hover at five, if pain scales measured the heart. I dreamed that it was me on the blue plastic draw sheet the nurses used to lift her. At the grocery store, I got lost. Which aisle has the cranberry juice? Does Mom have English muffins? This grocery store is in my city, not hers. I’m stocking my kitchen one week, hers another. I don’t want English muffins. I don’t want juice. I have lost fourteen pounds in the last two months. My always-slender mother wasted away. She weighed so little that I could lift her like a toddler. From the bed to the portable toilet, to the wheelchair, to the piano, to the bed.

•••

When I was a little girl, I drew pictures of birds and of girls. I couldn’t draw faces, so I put bird heads on girl bodies and made bird girls. I concentrated while I drew, singing a two-note song to myself, sustaining what I’ve come to understand as a meditative state. What am I focused on now, watching my mother’s face and seeing my own in hers? The bird-girls of my childhood drawings never flew. They went to work and ate and played and smiled their giddy smiles with beaks. They had expressive eyes.

Before my mother flew, before she closed her eyes and dreamed morphine dreams, our eyes locked over the commotion; so much to say, and nothing to say. We spoke without opening our mouths. We spoke without words.

•••

Mom died in her bed at home. She was seventy-eight. Hers was what hospice will tell me is a good death. A great death, the social worker will call it.

Several weeks earlier, to a nurse, a visiting friend, a relative—I no longer knew, everyone seemed interchangeable but my mother and me—I spoke for Mom on her behalf, even though she was right there in the living room with us, in a wing chair reading about Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I spoke as if she weren’t there. “I don’t think Mom will want that,” I’d said, about a sandwich or a painkiller or someone’s insistence that she go outdoors in the wheelchair she loathed. Mom looked up from her reading.

“I can speak for myself.” She was smiling, but I’d hurt her feelings.

Drawing her out, I toyed with grammar, a subject that entertained us both.

“I’ve made you object and subject,” I said, “so what’s the verb?”

“Am,” my mother told me. “The verb is ‘I am.’”

•••

On what would be the last night of her life, I fell asleep just after midnight, curled up beside her. When the nurse woke me, I was surprised by my calm. But that night, we were doing nothing but waiting, my mother and I. She had been on morphine for two days, bitter pills the nurse slipped under her tongue. Mom winced when she tasted them. She hadn’t spoken for two days, and then only a whisper: “I love you,” to Y., who had been part of her life for nearly a year, who climbed into the bed with her that morning to hold her and weep. When I stood beside the bed and asked Mom to rest, to take it easy, she mouthed, “I will.” I told her she’s my favorite mother. She smiled. I’ve told her that for years. Two nurses rolled her like a log and changed the draw sheet. We had a hard night. The oxygen she never used, never needed, became urgent for the first time the night before when Mom suddenly couldn’t catch her breath. I rolled the blue O₂ machine from where she’d secreted it behind a nightstand. The evening assistant helped her with the cannula. “Do you want me to call hospice?” I asked Mom. She nodded, taking in the canned air.

At one in the morning, I sat cross-legged on her bed, holding her cool hand. I thought about how death is the exact opposite of birth. An obvious cycle and a thought not original to me, but I’ve never had a child and never witnessed a human birth. There was no sweat, no blood, no sound but Mom’s subtle breathing, arrhythmic and gentle. Her bedroom smelled of lavender from the bushy plant on the patio and from her hand cream. I held one of her lavender sachets to her nose. She grimaced, then relaxed. “Tell her what you’re holding so she doesn’t startle,” the night nurse told me. I did, then held the sachet to Mom’s face again. This time, she was calm.

The night nurse had woken me, saying barely audibly, “It’s time.” Time for what, I wondered, thick with sleep, then saw where I was, that my mother’s hand was entwined with mine. I was neither anxious nor weeping, not begging Mom to try and live one more day. There’s a falsehood in that statement: I was anxious. I lived with a low frequency of anxious for two years. I didn’t want her to ever die, to leave me. There was not one thing that I could do to change our course.

I asked the nurse to tell my husband, dozing in the den. She vanished, returned with him, tucked a chair behind him. We focused only on Mom. Her breathing slowed; her apnea grew longer and longer. She stopped. I looked up, gestured to the nurse. I remembered her name: M., from the compassionate care team, the end-of-life, round-the-clock team. She held her stethoscope to my mother’s chest, my mother skinny and sleeping in her white waffle-knit long sleeved t-shirt. M. shook her head, told me she’s still with us. Mom took another short breath, shallow, a surprise to me, and then she was empty. As empty as an overturned glass. M. flicked her penlight on and leaned into Mom, lifting an eyelid. She shone the light, closed Mom’s eye, and said, “She’s gone.”

We took from Mom’s pinky finger the silver and jade ring that my grandfather made, and I put it on my own.

•••

Full grown comes and goes with me. I don’t feel grown, and then I do. There is no choice. I wear the ring, and I feel my mother holding my hand. I hear her voice, flying just outside the scrim of my world. “I am,” she says. You are.

•••

JESSICA HANDLER is the author of the forthcoming Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief (St. Martins Press, December 2013.) Her first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2009) is one of the “Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read.” Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Brevity, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. Honors include residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writers Center, the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship, and special mention for a 2008 Pushcart Prize.

The Hole in the Story

ghosttree — By Beth Hannon Fuller www.etsy.com/shop/ebethfuller

by Jody Mace

When my father was a teenager in Atlanta, wild dogs had become a problem in Adams Park. He and his friends were enlisted by the park rangers to ride through the park on horses, shooting the dogs. He never said much more about the incident, but why would he need to? The bare bones of the story were plenty.

I didn’t entirely believe it, but it was still my favorite dad story. I liked it better than the many variations of how he impressed the staff at restaurants (Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian) with his linguistic prowess. (He punctuated these stories by spitting out guttural sounds that he claimed were phrases in those languages.) I liked it better than the one about how he played golf just one time, with coworkers, and they were amazed at his natural skill. Or how, while in the Air Force, he was invited to become an astronaut, and, after successfully completing training, he decided he didn’t want to be an astronaut after all.

Those stories were lacking a couple things, but most notably, teenage boys galloping on horseback shooting guns in a park.

There were some holes in the story. It didn’t seem likely that any governmental authority would enlist teenagers to shoot at dogs, even back in 1949. But not just that. At the time, my father lived above his father’s grocery store in an urban area, sharing a bedroom with his Yiddish speaking grandmother. He rode streetcars and bought candy. He didn’t have a Wild West kind of upbringing.

He’s eighty now and his memory is shot. It’s not just short-term memory, although the repeated phone calls asking me what time I’m picking him up for lunch can send me around the bend. He’s losing details about things I thought he’d never forget: which college my brother went to, what musical instrument I played as a child. The other day a new acquaintance asked him how his wife died seventeen years ago and he didn’t seem to remember that she died of metastasized breast cancer. He didn’t remember the chemotherapy, the radiation, the surgery, her devastating decline. He answered, “It wasn’t her heart,” then went quiet. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe it was too traumatic to revisit. But maybe the memory really was gone.

So when he tells his unlikely stories there’s no way to really know which details spring from memory and which are just from the habit of telling the story. When you repeat a story a lot, details gain authority—even if you’re not eighty.

•••

When my son was six, he accidentally knocked a trinket off a table at a flea market. The vendor exploded at my son and towered over him, waving his arms and yelling, until my boy started to cry. The item, which was worthless crap anyway, wasn’t even broken. My husband confronted the vendor. He didn’t actually say much—just, “If you have a problem with him, talk to me!” But we hadn’t even reached the car before the embellishments began. My husband was all in this guy’s face. He shoved him. The vendor cowered before him. He apologized. In some particularly enthusiastic tellings of the story, the vendor wet his pants. When I try to picture this event, I see it just as we tell it. My husband, nose-to-nose with the bully, standing up for our little son. I’m sure that our son, now fifteen, has no doubt about his dad’s heroics at that flea market.

That’s the power of story-telling. The way you tell a story can become more real than what really happened.

So who knows what happened in Adams Park in Atlanta sixty-four years ago? There’s no way to verify.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to try. During today’s visit after the usual business (the 500-foot roll of professional grade plastic wrap that he bought me off the internet, why his remote control didn’t work, the new brand of pickle relish he’s trying, which of the Harry Potter books is his favorite), I asked him about the story. For the first time, I asked him if it really happened the way he always told it.

And this time he told it a little bit differently. He said, “So they let us ride the horses for free or very cheap, and we rode around and scared the dogs away from the picnic tables.”

“So the part about the guns, that was just made up?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t shoot at dogs.”

“Had you ever ridden a horse before then?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

And suddenly the picture in my head changed. No longer did I see horses galloping through a park, ridden by wild, gun-wielding boys. Now I imagined city boys timidly perched on gentle horses, walking on a path.

The story was terrible.

“Dad, I think you should tell it the old way.”

But he had already moved on.

“No, I had never shot at anything at that age. Except this one time with Joe Arnold, who you didn’t know. He had a gun, a little .22 pistol, and we decided we were gonna go and shoot things. And I had a knack for it.”

He paused and leaned back.

“I shot a hole right through the middle of a dime.”

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child Magazine, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. She likes to hear people tell their stories, especially when she’s not sure if they’re true.