December 24, 2016 – It was a year ago today, Christmas Eve, 2015, that I arrived in Columbia, South Carolina to see my mother. This was the first time I saw her since my last visit in 2014, when her health was beginning to fail seriously. Starting with 114 pounds, she lost 9 of them in the last half of 2014. Below is the one photo I have from that trip. She was thin, but ambulatory. Weakened, but still possessing all the beauty of her remarkable and loving spirit.
Sadly, I had many photos from that short trip back to take care of my continuing legal education requirements, but the morning after arriving back in Vietnam I needed to purchase a mobile phone card to put more minutes on my cell phone. While walking along the street and inputting the lengthy code from the card I had just purchased into the phone to get credit for the additional minutes, two young men (19 or 20-ish) rode up behind me on a motorbike, with the one riding on back snatching the phone from my hands while the driver in front sped away with all my snapshots. For them, it was only a easy way to make a quick $20 or $50 dollars by selling the phone to one of the ubiquitious shops that resell mobile phones. Thus, I only have the one above as the single snapshot of the turning point in events that now defines my life, both leading up to that point and thereafter, representing the point where I might have productively intervened and saved myself from the irredeemable present.
More than a photo of my mother, however, the above image is a picture of my shame and regret for not having stayed in 2014. I very openly asked her when the visit began to wind-down whether I should stay to try to do what I could to help her address her medical issues. But as always, there was the issue of Dan, her second husband, who would have his usual “tizzy-fit” as she called them (always, I suspect, with his mother’s glum and cranky demeanor in mind) if I stayed there while I transitioned back to the U.S. Although she and Dan had separated by then, and under truly ugly terms, she always lived in fear of upsetting him. Indeed, the sheer shittiness of his “personality” was a daily consideration for her. And in discussing the situation we both recalled his cretinous fit when bringing me to the airport 2 years earlier (2012), telling me I was never welcomed back to the house for having “taken over the place” during my stay. Mom later discovered he was pissy because he had secretly re-established relations with his daughter after decades of estrangement and wholesale mutual-disregard and my frequently using the one computer in their house interfered with his surreptitious online meetings, which would usually occur before Mom would get up.
Additionally, Mom, always the optimist, assured me that she was seeing doctors and that they would figure out what was going on. She is of the time when people had blind faith in physicians, having been raised in the era of the good-intentioned Dr. Kildare. It was then that I myself was still entirely naive about the truth of the healthcare system. Moreover, I had told her that I had met someone back in Vietnam who was really sweet. And I know she wanted me to return to whoever that was. I cried at the airport, fearful that I may never see her again while alive, given how horribly thin she had become. While that sweet person I had met was to later become my fiance, then wife, I will always regret not staying in the U.S. and taking my chance that the relationship may have survived the time and distance, though the chance being certainly a small one.
The matter haunts me still because, had I started to push the doctors and medical system for a diagnosis back in 2014, without needing to badger Mom to get the house tested and to make appointments with doctors, as well as to work through intermediaries, though later especially Dan, as I did when back in Vietnam, I am sure I could have done more, sooner, with greater effect. Her Primary Care Physician’s clinical notes later obtained would reveal Dan’s dishonest efforts to derail my own. If I had been able to facilitate multiple diagnoses within 5 weeks after my return a year ago, though admittedly with the advantage of having already followed many dead-ends and having a few worthy leads, what might I have been able to do 2 years earlier when she was still strong and able? This question will always the a sword that cuts me dead-center in half because I am sure of its answer, that I could have done something more and something that would have furthered her life by an appreciable & precious amount of time. I would give everything to be able to return to that time, that crossroad between order and chaos, that clearing in the maze of my life that now organizes it into before that decision to return and after it, that now compels me to do better than before for her sake in some sense, as well as my own – the realizations of all of this feeling like just another gift from my mother and her goodness.
After months of trying to reconcile myself to her death, pondering the usual thoughts and feelings and hopes of life and an afterlife, eventually to mostly abandon such hopes of her being “out there” somehow, somewhere as wishful fantasies, because without much if any evidence, I stumbled across a quote that struck me as encapsulating the only path remaining for me to try to redeem myself in some very, very, very unsatisfactory way – unsatisfactory because of no benefit to her life but only to her memory and to me. That quote was a tweet by Jordan Peterson, a very well-read and thoughtful Professor & Doctor of Psychology at the University of Toronto:
Of course, in my own case this would only apply to my mother. The difficulty would be to understand how to apply that advice after her passing, though I desperately wished that I could have better embodied it while she was alive. This, is the road map for me till the end of my own time. Of how to best represent and be a steward for her goodness and love and to wring what residual meaningfulness I could out of life and goodness on her behalf.
She was very much a devout Catholic and, in keeping with that outlook, worried for my soul and my rejection of the church and its teachings. I know it was the goodness in her that attracted her to the goodness of Christian teachings, which largely explains why the sweet sentimentality of Precious Moments figurines appealed to her. She was a compulsive collector of such figurines for a long, long while, and for me they represented the intersection of her goodness and her sadness in life, as she obsessively tried to fill the void of her marital and personal life with each brief moment of joy in apprehending the sentiment and meaning embodied in each figurine. Thus, my own compulsion to capture the collection in individual photographs before Dan sold them or they were otherwise scattered in the winds. Looking and and “into” them gives one a glimpse into the goodness of spirit that she so cherished and embodied.
While I still cannot fully embrace the metaphysics of the church, I have at least been making an effort to try to cull from its teachings what I can, which include dealing with the inescapable suffering of life through acts of recognition, atonement, sacrifice, and redemption, as well as the sins (literally our missing the target of virtue and goodness) we commit. Because both she and my wife are devoutly Catholic, I attend church regularly in diference to them, but also with renewed interest. Christian metaphysics aside, biblical morality, through stories and figures, are of deep archetypal value in Western civilization with reason and even in my own earliest upbringing. Moreover, while the focus of Christian teachings are for obvious reasons Christ-centered, what speaks to me more is the role of Mary, as not only the name-sake for my mother, but as the embodiment of similar sort of archetypal virtues of motherliness, goodness, love, and selflessness.
For example, there is an image that circulates in artwork of Mary holding the baby Jesus up and away from a serpent that is pinned under her foot that has always had allegorical symbolism in my mind regarding my relationship with my mother. The biblical reference and image are supposed to represent Mary in the New Testament overcoming the serpent having birthed the Christ-child, in contrast to Eve in the garden of Eden in the Old Testament. Specifically, the child is held up and away from the dangers of evil and difficulties of chaos that serpents represent, well before their representation in the book of Genesis – no doubt going even further back in the collective unconscious of mammals defending their safety against all that is hidden and insidious, presumably why even chimps are fascinated by and fearful of snakes. While my family would no doubt roll their eyes at the unintended comparison (I am not comparing myself to Jesus), instead the image speaks to me allegorically, as a resonate, universal image that in my mind and heart apply to my own mother’s selflessness, sacrifices, and love, freeing and elevating me up to investigate and explore the world, represented as the globe and a ball in the images below. Of course, balls are also an archetype, universally used in games of play because, without handles or sides, they are the from most difficult to grasp, predict, and control, like life itself.
Here is one such image:
Here is the same wood sculpture seen from different angle.
It has been a year since my arrival in the U.S., under circumstances and difficulties I could not have anticipated. I have had my own health issues to deal with. I, and all of us, lost Mom. For myself, I am left with the dual burden and gift of making my own actions justify her suffering. I have some long-term ideas about this, should I overcome my current circumstances.
Meanwhile, this afternoon, to represent her, so to speak, in some very small way, and to mark anniversary of my arrival, I attended mass at her church, Transfiguration Catholic Church. I was able to do so because Dan (I was told) decided to visit Terri and her family for Christmas in El Cajon. I was happy to see Don and Arlene in attendance, since Don and Paul (their son) were the ones who picked me up from the airport a year earlier, after Dan refused to do so, Mom being too ill to do so herself. I had wanted to thank them for helping me for some weeks after I arrived here a year-before. Just before the mass started, I motioned to them from the right side aisle and mouthed that I hoped to talk to them after mass. I managed only to catch Don as he was making a bee-line out the door. He has a pained expression on his face from my effort to engage him in a conversation, so I wished him a Merry Christmas and let him continue his effort to beat the traffic of those exiting the church parking lot by car.
Seeing no-one else I knew, other than a couple of friends who had visited Mom at the hospital, but who would have shared with Dan my presence at the church, I too slid out the door, saying to Father Andrew “hope you and your pigs have a nice Christmas,” as a passed through the door to the outside.
Here I am back at the car. Uncharacteristically, I have a face full of mostly gray whiskers. Working in a cubicle at a temporary document review just and being nearly always unseen, I had stopped shaving a week before feeling that I was happy to let myself go on the outside, sensing I was about to enter into a long period of deep thinking, of how to make the actions of my life justify the suffering my mother endured. This blog will be a place were I occasionally talk to myself to figure out part of the path in answering that call.
