Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  I was frustrated by her frustration with him. The same things that annoyed her had always done so. I told her she had to let it go. She got annoyed with me and told me that I didn’t understand just how difficult Matthew was: “You don’t know what he’s like.” I knew my dad was far from perfect. He was cheap and could be moody, but he loved her and had always taken care of his family, and he was one of the kindest and gentlest people I’d ever known. Most people shared that view. He worked for twenty-five years at General Motors, mostly on an auto assembly line making Buicks. He left the house every single morning before the sun came up, with a paper bag containing a Spam sandwich, a Thermos of tea, a piece of fruit, and maybe something home-baked. He came home every single day at four thirty—you could set your watch by it. Every two weeks, he would hand my mother his paycheck. Wherever my mother wanted to go, we went. We spent all holidays with her side of the family, we traveled to see her friends, and we went to the shore because that’s where she wanted to go.

  When we got her to the emergency room, the attending physician, Dr. Rothman, said Mom was suffering from congestive heart failure. I told him about the open-heart surgery she’d undergone two years earlier, and that she’d had her leaky valve replaced, along with a bypass and a ventricle repair, and that her enlarged heart had been shaved. To my mind, that meant her heart was like new. He said that unless she drastically changed her situation, the stress could still cause more damage. He told us that her failing lungs were the reason for her falls and the condition I’d found her in that mimicked a stroke. By the next day she was much better; a CAT scan showed no brain damage, no bleeds, and no evidence of a stroke.

  It would be easy to say I got lost when my mom got sick, but that’s not quite what happened. It certainly made things worse, pushed me closer to the edge, but I was already standing at the periphery, just hanging on. Mom getting so sick was simply the match thrown on a pool of gasoline that surrounded me. I’d discovered if I had too much free time, torture was my form of exercise. I don’t mean physical torture, but rather round and round mean, bad thoughts about myself and how worthless I was; how guilty I felt for, oh, fill in the damn blanks—not always packing healthy kids’ lunches; sending Ford to aftercare; not making Baldwin a full breakfast before she left for school; not working and making my own money; not calling my mother enough. I felt guilty for being overwhelmed. I fantasized about the mother in The Hours, based on the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway. She packed up and left her little boy and girl and husband and moved to someplace far away. She never saw them again. But while I used to fantasize about a rich ex-boyfriend rescuing me, putting me up in a luxurious Manhattan high-rise, I could never, even at my most desperate, imagine leaving my kids.

  On February 10, 2009, the day before my mom’s eighty-fourth birthday, I moved her into our home. My plan was just to bring her to my house for a week to strengthen her up, allow her to relax and not have to worry about cooking; she still cooked every meal for my father. They both needed to get some good nights of sleep, and my dad needed a break. I saw him getting thinner and worried that, in taking care of Mom, he was going to get ill. I turned our family room into her bedroom, where I put the rented hospital bed, commode, and oxygen tank. A walker and a rented wheelchair were all set and ready for her, although she was never again well enough to use them.

  I had to fight with Daddy, who didn’t want to relinquish what he believed in his bones was his responsibility to care for his wife. But she’d told me that at night when she needed help to walk to the bathroom, he couldn’t hear her calling for him. At eighty-four, he was overwhelmed with the demands of taking care of someone so sick. He relented only when I promised him that this arrangement was only temporary. At that point, they’d been married for fifty-six years and had never been apart, other than the times she traveled to her PTA conventions.

  He and my mother had been living fifteen miles from me, but Daddy came to see Mom at my house every single day. He would sit with her, and they’d watch their favorite soaps, The Young and the Restless and General Hospital. They’d nod off or bicker, just like they did at home. He was always trying to get her to eat more than she wanted or could, convinced that if she’d just eat, she’d get better. More than once, he literally pushed food onto her pressed-together lips. One Sunday Joan, my mother-in-law, came over to help out. She had cooked a big meal of fried chicken, mac and cheese, and string beans, and my father, who never yells, had it out with her about the richness of the food. He was frustrated that my mother didn’t want to eat and took out his frustration on Joan. Cliff and I were in the basement watching TV, but really hiding. I felt so sorry for my dad because he just didn’t know what to do, and for Joan too, because she’d just gone through two years of caretaking and had buried her husband only two months earlier.

  The first five days after she came to live with us, Mom was able to eat regular food and communicate fine, and didn’t need the portable commode. She was her usual sharp, funny, brutally honest self. A physical therapist came once but said she wouldn’t come back because there was no point. Mom’s will was strong, but her limbs were just too feeble. We also had a young, super competent visiting nurse, Keisha. When she first came on a Monday, she said mom’s vitals were good, that she was doing pretty well. Wednesday, Keisha came back and said she wasn’t quite so sure why Mom’s vitals had declined from the two days before. By Friday’s visit, Keisha looked stricken.

  “She’s doing bad, really bad,” she said. “Her pulse and her blood pressure are at the point where, legally, I have to call an ambulance.”

  I shook my head. I’d promised.

  “You can turn them away, but I have to call.”

  My mother was lying in her bed, looking frail, but her voice was strong and determined: “No hospital. I don’t want to go back to the hospital.”

  The paramedics came, and I sent them away. I’d made that deal with her when I convinced her to come to my house to recuperate. She was tired. After the paramedics left, Keisha asked me if I’d considered hospice.

  Hospice? We weren’t there yet, were we?

  “It doesn’t mean that the patient is going to pass right away,” she explained. “You can have hospice for six months, a year, even longer.”

  Could Mom have that long?

  I didn’t think so, but I’d take six months.

  After a week of Cliff helping me take care of my mom and me feeling like I had a newborn again—Mom would wake up in the middle of the night—I hired a hardworking, loving Ecuadorian woman named Sonia to help. God sent Sonia to me. I know that for sure. She came through a friend of a friend. I interviewed her a week after my mother moved in; I looked into her deep-set, light-brown eyes and felt a kindness and compassion emanating from her that led me to hire her before I’d even checked her references. I just knew she’d be perfect, and she was. Our hospice nurse Joe even commented on how lucky I was to have found her.

  He’d been through thirteen caregivers himself in trying to care for his father at home. I’d hear this story over and over—they were unreliable, untrustworthy, or just didn’t do the work. Sonia cared for my mother, “Miss Clarita” as she would call her, as if she were her own kin. Watching them filled my breaking heart. Sonia came Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. till 7 p.m. Cliff and I were on duty nights and weekends. There were nights when Mom wouldn’t sleep between calling me and yelling for Jesus to take her. She’d moan sometimes but more often these would be loud, begging demands. We’d bought a baby monitor, but on some nights, toward the end, I would turn it down. I was losing it. Some nights I’d sleep on the couch next to the hospital bed, just to be closer if I needed to give her one of the two hospice-provided medicines: one to calm her down, the other, morphine, for the pain. Often, she just didn’t want to be left alone and would scream for me to not leave, even though I was only going to the bathroom, which was right by the room where she lay.

  The clock has no meaning to someone who is chronically ill. On the week
ends Cliff and I couldn’t go out at the same time. We couldn’t leave Mom alone or with just the children in the house. If we both had to leave, Daddy would be in charge. He knew how to administer her breathing treatments in the nebulizer, but he didn’t know how to change her diaper and couldn’t prepare the kind of food she was able to eat, nor would he accept that she couldn’t swallow unmashed food. One Saturday morning—it turned out it was her last Saturday morning—I got up at six thirty to change her and put ointment on her butt, just like I used to do with my children. I washed her up and was preparing to give her breakfast and her medicines (at one point she had nine different prescriptions) when she said: “Neal, sit down. You’ve done enough. Take care of yourself. Go tend the children. You don’t need to do anything else for me.”

  “But I still need to give you breakfast,” I said.

  She, literally on her deathbed, was still trying to take care of me. I didn’t know it then, but she’d already begun to show symptoms of the death march. Her pupils were dilated; she was more upbeat but with a kind of flat affect, slightly detached from reality. I was dressed in my nightgown; my hair was a wreck in two big, loose, sloppy cornrows. I was fixing the sheets on her bed, rearranging her pillows.

  “You look so pretty,” Mom said. “Who did your hair? You look so nice.”

  At the time, I thought it was odd, but between sleep deprivation and grieving for what I knew was coming, I didn’t put any stock in the craziness of what she was saying. I was grateful that she’d never lost our connection. She never said mean things to me as she did to my father, her sister Marion, and sister-in-law Etrulia. Sometimes even the hospice nurse, Joe, and Sonia got the wrath of Clara.

  One day Joe was trying to examine her, and she regally told him: “I’m not receiving visitors now.” Her tone was enough for Joe to stop what he was doing and come and sit with me in the dining room, where I had been waiting for him. We’d needed to talk about what to do. Cliff and I were at our end. Mom was bleeding internally; buckets of blood would pour from her rectum. It had happened three times. We had no idea why—the doctors had theories but had ruled further tests unnecessary.

  “You could have her taken to the hospital and have her examined,” Joe pointed out, “but it would be invasive. What would be the benefit? You would know what’s causing it, and then what? You’re not going to fix whatever it is.”

  The first time, her blood soaked into the carpet, but that was nothing compared to the scent of the blood, a combination of rotten fish and burnt metal, that wafted through the entire house. It was one of the worst odors I’ve ever smelled in my entire life, and there was no escaping it. I could smell it in my office, three stories from her room. It was winter, so opening the windows or going outside wasn’t an option. By the third time the bleeding happened, I was convinced I couldn’t take it anymore, that I’d have to move her.

  Joe said that we could send her to their hospice facility. “But there are a lot of people on the ward, and she won’t get a lot of attention,” he said. “She probably wouldn’t survive the ambulance ride.”

  I decided to keep her with me, and Cliff agreed that we’d just have to push through. We’d just deal.

  She died the next morning.

  18

  Aftermath

  I PLUMMETED.

  Cliff called my friends the day Mom died, and by that afternoon several of them just showed up: Lynne, Andrea, Adrianne, Iqua, Jeanine (please forgive me if I’m leaving you out). Joni got on a plane from California as soon as Cliff called her. That night, as I lay in bed, lights off, not sleeping, not awake, Cliff brought Joni home from the airport. She walked into our bedroom, took off her coat and her shoes, and got in bed with me. We lay facing each other, hugging and sobbing, faces pressed together, tears mingling. My mother had loved her; she’d loved my mother; and Joni knew how much my mother and I had loved each other. She’d witnessed our bond; she “got” that Clara was different, special in a way some people just missed.

  Joni had been here for Cliff’s dad’s memorial service. When she came for Mom’s funeral, she was planning on staying a week or two with me, but after my mom died, she found out that her mother, Barbara Brown, who lived nearby in Roselle, had pancreatic cancer. Her mother had kept the news from her for almost three months, not wanting her to worry. From her diagnosis to her death was four months. We still have a hard time believing that we both lost our moms, twelve days apart. Joni ended up staying with me for six weeks.

  For the first days after my mom died, I hardly got out of bed. Cliff got Baldwin out of the house to the school bus and drove Ford to school. I didn’t even walk Charlie; he’d simply curl up with me in the bed and wouldn’t leave until the afternoon when Sonia would walk him to go and meet Ford’s bus. Joni spent most of her days visiting her mom in the hospital in Elizabeth, while I’d stay in bed until seven, when it was time for Sonia to leave. Although I’d hired Sonia to take care of my mother, after Mom died, I just couldn’t bear to part with her. She’d been there; she’d been a witness. She’d been with my mother during her dying weeks. She had also been there for me, and I needed Sonia’s kindness, her tending to the kids and the house along with my soul. When Cliff would come home from work and find me in bed, he never acknowledged it. He’d just talk to me about work and report on who’d sent condolences to me or to him.

  In dealing with his dad’s death and then two months later my mom’s, our home had been hit by an emotional earthquake, both of us walking around with gaping holes in our hearts. We were each dealing with it in different ways, however. Cliff had worshipped his father, whom he (and many others) had considered a genius. I’d loved him, too. “I miss my dad,” was all Cliff would say, sometimes out of the blue, sometimes in response to unfolding events. When BP’s giant deepwater rig blew up and oil and toxic chemicals gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, engineers scrambled for weeks with ideas of how to contain it. “If my dad was here, he could’ve figured out how to fix it,” Cliff said. “We would have had some good talks about what happened.”

  Even as we tried to cope with our losses, our financial lives were also unraveling. The year before, on September 30, 2008, Cliff and I had sat next to each other on the couch in the family room watching MSNBC as reports of the world’s financial markets collapsing played over and over. He knew all the abbreviations by heart, so as the crawl went by, he knew exactly how badly the companies were performing. I recognized only a few. Apple, or AAPL, had dropped from over $700 to $106 a share. The bottom of our financial bucket fell out almost a year to the day later, on the night of Rosh Hashanah, just months after Cliff’s father and my mother passed away. Ironic, I later thought, since that holiday is said to mark sweet beginnings. For us, it was the acknowledgment of the end of an era and of a lifestyle that had been flush. We weren’t rich by any stretch, but we had what we needed and a lot of what we wanted. I’d bought clothes and things for the kids without much thought, but we were now close to liquid broke. We could no longer afford the way we were living. We could barely afford our enormous taxes once we paid for our mortgage and food and insurance. At least our relationship at that moment was solid. We just hunkered down and held onto each other.

  We pinched off our savings to pay monthly expenses that had previously been covered easily by Cliff’s commissions, because the large check Cliff was given to move from Salomon Smith Barney to UBS was actually a loan and required an immediate payment that took a huge chunk of our monthly income. Everyone was suffering. Most people lost money, but lots of people, including my two best friends, also lost their jobs (they were unemployed for four and two years, respectively, and one is still very much underemployed). Some clients didn’t follow when Cliff moved to another firm, and the ones who did just weren’t investing the way they once had. Since the market had crashed, people were more cautious. Clients who had previously invested in stocks and funds now were choosing to put their money into real estate and other less volatile investments. My husband was now bringing ho
me a quarter of what he had in the past, and the very nice money from my books had also mostly dried up. Most people hear my husband works on Wall Street and think we’re rich, part of the 1 percent. We aren’t, and in the New York area, we never were.

  Right around this time, our dog Charlie started going blind. Our perfect storm continued to build, and even worse weather was on the way. Three months later Cliff was diagnosed with prostate cancer—which was how his father’s cancer had started. Unlike me, Cliff isn’t emotional. He’s calm and processes mentally, but hearing the word “cancer” momentarily rocked him. I was rocked too, but tried to remain steady for him. He called me right after he’d left the doctor’s office, where he’d gotten the news. Weeks earlier, his PSA (which stands for “prostate-specific antigen”) had been high—not to the sky, but elevated. It was a red flag, but both of us were sure that it was nothing. When Cliff told me that the cause of the elevation was cancer, I sat down with my hand over my mouth, as if that movement would trigger my brain to say something intelligent, something meaningful, something to make him feel better. Nothing came.

  “I’m coming home,” Cliff said.

  I googled “prostate cancer” and found what I pretty much already knew, that it was a “good cancer,” and that it was highly treatable as long as it was caught early, which this had been. We talked about it, and Cliff began reading everything he could find. The most helpful was a book called Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers, which was about the overabundance of prostatectomies. A friend told us about a chiropractor in Westchester County who specialized in vitamin treatment for the prostate. Cliff came home with about seven different bottles of stuff, including vitamin D, curcumin, turmeric, Zyflamend, and açaí berry. He had the name of an oncologist at Sloan-Kettering from when his dad had been sick. We were told by the surgeon that his cancer was in the very early stage and was located in a small quadrant. Prostate cancer was most commonly treated in one of three ways: surgery, radiation, or active surveillance, which means getting the blood checked every three months and a biopsy and MRI every other year.