Mama's Boy

by Dustin Lance Black

  The call from Jeff came about eight minutes later, when I was well on my way to the airport. “It’s bad, Lance, it’s really bad. Come back now.”

  Whether with actual words or my heated gaze, I told my too-calm cabbie to “hit the damn gas” and catch up to the ambulance that was fast getting away from us, my mother inside.

  It felt like an eternity until I was jumping out of the cab and tearing into the hospital’s emergency room. Jeff had already told the nurses I was coming and to let me go directly in to see my mom. He was outside her room, likely in shock. He had put her in the passenger seat of the car and buckled her seat belt; then, as he made his way around to the driver’s-side door, she had passed out, her head swinging forward and hitting the dashboard hard, her glasses breaking from the impact. Her heart had stopped. Jeff had pulled her small body from the car, laid it on the garage floor, called for an ambulance, and begun CPR. The ambulance arrived very quickly. The EMTs took over the CPR, pressing her chest with such force it broke ribs, but it got her resilient heart working again.

  By the time I made it into her room, the doctors were intubating her. It was a horrible sight. I hoped and prayed she didn’t know it was happening. But then her eyes shot open; she was fully conscious. Without her glasses, I must have looked like a blur—a familiar blur, but that wasn’t enough, so I shouted, “It’s okay, Mom! I’m here!” Now I felt sure that she recognized the blur as me and knew I had returned to fulfill the promise I’d made to her. The doctors asked my permission, and then gave her an injection to ease her pain and terror. She slowly relaxed and began drifting into unconsciousness, the horrible tubes down her throat now doing the breathing her body refused to. Her eyes were on mine, begging for her life, and putting that responsibility squarely in my hands.

  Todd flew in that night. My mom’s younger sister Mary arrived by car. All her life, my mom’s body had stirred doctors’ curiosity. That had sometimes led to special treatment—treatment we now gladly welcomed as the doctors put my mom in her own private room with big windows.

  Over the next few days, when anyone “got practical” about the likelihood of anyone’s coming off a breathing machine, much less my “fragile” mother, I refused to hear it. I was there to fight, not surrender. And I knew my mother better than anyone. She wouldn’t have given me this assignment if she’d thought she couldn’t survive. She was too kind, thoughtful, and loving to ever burden me with a failure of such magnitude. So I was going to fight, and she was going to live because it was the only thing that made her last words to me make any sense at all.

  After the fifth day of sitting by her side, rubbing her arm and talking in her ear, as her vital signs ever so slightly slipped the wrong way, the doctor told me about a procedure he wanted to do to see how strong her heart truly was, to more accurately assess her likelihood of recovery, and come up with a path forward. Others didn’t think it was necessary. They were giving up. I couldn’t. A promise is a sacred thing. Besides, it was only a matter of money: this procedure wasn’t going to cause her any pain, and perhaps it would shut the naysayers up.

  So Jeff, Todd, and I went into a waiting room on the morning of June 16, and the doctor began running a probe down into my mother’s irrepressible heart. Jeff and Todd waited through terrible nerves, knowing that the answers to come might very well break their hearts. I sat there stone cold, still trying and failing to make sense of this mission.

  A nurse came rushing in, ending all our brooding. “You need to come with me right now.” Her tone was soft but urgent. Her pace was swift. We got up and rushed behind her into my mom’s room.

  I knew it before her doctor could say a word. He had gone ghost white. I looked to the monitors, which showed my mom’s blood pressure dropping, her heart rate slowing. Then I heard the doctor or the nurse or maybe heaven itself say aloud, “Talk to her; she can hear you.”

  Now? My strong little mom who had always conquered every single impossible challenge was dying? It made no sense at all, and I had no time to find any sense in it. So I took her right hand, leaned into her ear, and whispered what I knew she needed to hear. “I love you, Mom. You’re the best mother there ever was. Ever. And because of that, we’re going to be okay. I promise you that. We. Are. Going. To. Be. Okay. You raised us that strong. And now you can move again, Mommy. Now you can fly. Anywhere you want. I love you. And I’ll be right here whenever you need to find me. So fly, Mom. You can fly now. Fly.”

  With those words, her impossibly strong heart stopped beating. And she flew away—away from the body that had been her greatest challenge and her immeasurable window into love and human compassion.

  But I had just lied. I wasn’t going to be okay. She had given me an order, a job, a holy assignment to fight for her life. I had made a promise, and I had failed to keep it. After all she had done and sacrificed for me, I had failed my precious mother in her greatest hour of need. It was a terrible ending to a spectacular love and it would take great pain, time, and an unexpected messenger to help that love find its home and purpose again.

  II

  The days ahead were a trial: I was privately wrestling with self-loathing while navigating a complex set of funeral challenges. My mom and Jeff had planned on moving back to California, where the mild weather would’ve made getting around easier for her. Jeff had long been looking for a job near Los Angeles, so we’d made what felt like a forward-looking decision to bury Marcus at Hollywood Forever cemetery—a lush, historic cemetery just behind Paramount Pictures where young people still flocked to watch movies projected onto its monumental mausoleum wall on summer nights. It had seemed perfectly suited to Marcus. So instead of a gravestone, we built Marcus a bench that revelers could drink and smoke and cause general havoc on when they came for movie night in among the graves. Most of all, my mom had liked the idea of being able to visit “his spot” after her big move back to the West Coast.

  That terrible week of her death, Jeff said he still wanted to move to California, and the spot next to Marcus’s was still vacant, so a unanimous family-of-three decision was made to fly Mom’s body to Los Angeles like we had Marcus’s, and bury her next to her firstborn. We were all a wreck, but seemingly the man of the house again in this moment, I was tasked with figuring out the arrangements: embalming, clothing, casket, a flight to Los Angeles with my mom’s body in cargo, a service, a wake, and doing my best to get whatever remaining relatives she had out to Los Angeles to say farewell. I did all of this feeling like an absolute fraud, knowing I was the one who’d let the strongest woman in the world die. I kept running through every sign I’d missed, all the opportunities to save her that seemed so obvious now in hindsight.

  In just a handful of years, I’d lost my dear composer friend, my great mentor Frank Robinson, most of my aunts and uncles, a step-grandfather, my big brother, and now my mom. I’d always kept my trusted circle quite small, and now it suddenly felt as if a plane had gone down with everyone I loved on it. I had always been able to find some light or wisdom on the flip side of such loss, but here there was only blur and darkness.

  I don’t remember many of the details. I believe we picked out a rosewood coffin. My mom liked the shade, and it only seemed right that our “Rose’s” brave body rest in her namesake.

  I remember insisting upon mint juleps at the wake. Like me, my mom wasn’t a big drinker, but she had talked about having a mint julep together on my porch when she finally got back to California. I would have hers and mine that night.

  And a little ray of hope returned when some of Aunt Josie’s family flew in to prop me up. That reconnection with my good Southern family was now easy, joyful, and strong.

  At the same time, in high-Hollywood fashion, Rob and Michele Reiner came to her service. My little mom never would have guessed that Meathead from All in the Family would help send her into the beyond. Chad also came.

  And Ryan and his husband flew down from
their home near Seattle. My mother’s death hit Ryan surprisingly hard. I watched him weep openly, uncontrollably. Like folks had back in Lake Providence so long ago, many of my kind now told themselves, “If Lance’s mom can make it with her differences, then I sure as hell can make it with mine.” Now the light of her mighty example had gone out, and we all felt its absence deeply.

  Instead of me flying to Tom in those weeks, he flew across an ocean and a continent to hold my hand and help give me strength. He had lost his own father to cancer a few years earlier. He knew what this was. He may or may not have been the answer to a soft-spoken, white-haired Mormon man’s prayers, but he was absolutely a gift from God.

  On the day of my mom’s service, the chapel was jammed. My mother’s life had moved and changed most anyone it had touched, so folks had made the extra effort to get to California in time for one last farewell. Those who couldn’t make it in person sent flowers, and by the morning of the funeral, my home was jammed with hundreds of vases and thousands of roses.

  On the outside it must have seemed as if I had it all under control. But even with the details coming together with the perfection of a well-planned play, I was more lost than I’d ever been—and for me that’s really saying something.

  What I do remember very clearly is struggling to figure out who would lead her service. My mom was still a woman of great faith, but she wouldn’t have considered herself a Mormon anymore. She wasn’t a Baptist or a Methodist either. She was still a Christian, but far more interested in Christ’s compassion than in any one brand of Christianity. I needed to get that right, but I didn’t know how to, so I made a call to someone who might know better how to thread this celestial needle.

  I had met Bishop Gene Robinson during our long fight for marriage equality. He was a joyful man with little round glasses, most often cloaked in rich red or lavender Episcopalian shirts and robes. He was also the first priest in an openly gay relationship to ever be consecrated a bishop in a major Christian denomination. And while that mattered a great deal to many gay Christians and Episcopalians, I mostly remember the sense of peace he brought to the most trying days of our struggle. He spoke with a simplicity and clarity that cut through the clutter. I trusted him.

  When I got in touch with Bishop Robinson, he was home on the East Coast. He wanted to know more about my mom before suggesting anyone, so I told him her story, this book’s story: that of a tough Southern woman who’d refused to sit still, who’d led a life of optimism some called foolish, passed that optimism on to me, and more often than not proved her doubters wrong. She’d also loved and supported me and my brothers even when powerful forces had pressured her not to. She was a woman of great faith, but without a church that met her standards. And then I said, “Well, I’m not sure she was ready to go, Gene.” He was the first person I’d shared this with, and I broke up inside putting words to my fear. “She wasn’t done.”

  That was when Bishop Robinson told me, “I think I need to come do this myself.” That wasn’t why I had reached out to him. But he insisted.

  The night before the service, Bishop Robinson arrived to a home filled with people from the South, the coasts, Texas, New England, the United Kingdom, and beyond. A house filled with food and roses. He found me in the backyard in a daze, my new normal. He gave me a good long hug, but I wasn’t in a crying mood. Then he did something surprising: he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, popped one in his mouth, and offered me one. A smoking bishop? I’d never seen anything like this in the church I hailed from. But you know what, from him, a man of God, how could I say no? So I lit it up.

  Then, like a skilled doctor, Bishop Robinson slowly coaxed my mom’s final moments from me. He knew there was a shard of glass in there. It’s likely why he got on a plane. But I had yet to tell anyone about my mom’s final order, my promise, and my failure.

  The words came slowly. “She grabbed my arm, looked me in the eyes, and told me to fight for her life. I promised I would, and…well here we are.”

  He took a long drag on his cigarette, looked up into the night sky, then blew a big white cloud up into it. When he looked back down, he had tears in his eyes, but he didn’t seem upset by my tale. Instead, a joyful smile took over his face—as if he knew something I just couldn’t see, something that was right there in front of me, that he could see with absolute clarity. With these words, he gently lifted the veil:

  “She wouldn’t have said what she did if she meant you had to physically keep her heart beating. She knew it was going to stop, and soon. She tried to tell you that, didn’t she? In many ways, I’d imagine? And you just couldn’t hear it?”

  I thought back. She had been telling me she was a dinosaur for months, and I had refused to acknowledge or accept the only thing that could mean. She had begun refusing to see doctors because she knew that what they had to say was redundant. She didn’t need a second opinion that she was dying. And when I had said, “We must do it all again soon!” she hadn’t lied to me. She hadn’t said her normal “See you soon, my Lancer!” She had told her most difficult truth with her silence. She knew she wouldn’t be seeing me again.

  Now tears started to fall in that backyard. I lowered my head to hide them from the guests, but the kind bishop tilted my chin back up and looked into my eyes. “Her life is what she told you to fight for. And you agreed. And she heard you agree. And she believed you…and so she knew she could finally let go.”

  I was starting to see the direction he was walking me, but I’d had no sleep for days, my heart had clouded my head, and I needed plain words.

  “Your life and your mother’s life were one. You told me that. You taught each other how to live when others said you couldn’t or shouldn’t. You taught each other what life can hold when you were promised so little. And even if you can’t see it from here, she could. She knew it was a precious and powerful thing you created together. So maybe ask yourself, what did she give you, and what did you give her? What did you two discover together? What bridges did you build with her that no one believed could be built? And how did you build them? That is her life. That thing that was even more powerful than the sum of your two magnificent parts. And it’s still right here, and now it’s yours to hold and foster and pass along, if you’re willing to keep fighting for it.”

  I thought back to the look in her eyes when she had told me to fight, the surprisingly sturdy grip on my arm—perhaps the very last of her strength—and she knew it. I heard her words again, and now they fit perfectly into the puzzle of her life. That gay bishop, that embodiment of the great contradictions of our time, could see so clearly what I had been far too close to see. Curiosity and compassion. Believing and fighting. Creating and fixing. Those combinations had defined her life and then ours even when it was difficult to find compassion, belief, and any bridges or fixes. And with dark clouds of division on the horizon, I knew the life I had to fight for, and the immeasurable building and fixing it would call for.

  The next morning Todd, Jeff, and I went out to Mosley, who was sitting in my driveway, now candy-apple red. We fired her up. She was loud, bold, and determinedly Southern. Debbie and Nan had flown in for the day, and they whooped and hollered at Mosley’s brazen glug, glug, glug. And together with Jeff and Todd, I drove Mosley, the great symbol of the reunion of my Americas, to Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and under a dazzling blue sky, we laid our brave mother’s body to rest next to our big brother’s. On her stone, covered in roses, are the words: “Roseanna Bisch—Sister, Mother, Wife—Her spirit made us grow.”

  III

  Rose Anna Whitehead was born in 1948. She moved her legs for two years before polio robbed her of them. I was born in 1974. I had a normal enough childhood for six years, before I learned I was too different for our world. Now, having seen almost every continent and met countless, infinitely varied people, I know without a doubt that my mom and I are not the exception to any rule. We are the ru
le. Every single person on this planet is different from everyone else in at least one remarkable way. Still, every day, children learn that for this reason or that, they’re just too different, and then comes a list of what they’ll never achieve because of it. Everyone reading this has probably experienced that terrible moment at some point in their lives, because sadly, this fear of difference is our current state of being—despite all the proof that it’s our differences that make this world magical, delicious, entertaining, innovative, and downright livable. It doesn’t help that we live in a world still led by too many men stoking the fear of difference for power and their own personal gain.

  My mom had seen a storm coming. I’m not guessing at this; we’d talked about its clouds on the horizon. She had felt what I had, that forces were aligning to turn back the clock, to reclassify variety as inferiority, to reinforce divisions with fear: between North and South, West and East, coasts and valleys, left and right, red and blue, white and black, Christian and Muslim, disabled and able-bodied, cis and trans, gay and straight, and on and on until we live in little tribes in our own myopic versions of America and the world. Because if we are all divided into little tribes, a plurality of the selfish, who care little for the golden rule, might rise and rule from a place of fear again.

  Those clouds were approaching when my mom gripped my arm. And in classic Anne fashion, she hadn’t left me to wonder what it was I ought to do about them. She had been crystal clear. She didn’t worry whether I could handle the heavy burden she was leaving me with. She knew we only rise as high as the challenges before us. And she knew, like I did, that all of those gathering clouds were filled with nonsense, that we didn’t live in one America or two or even three but an America filled with infinite variety—variety worth fighting for. Our Americas. Our world.