location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
During the night Gretchen and I were awaken by two of our new DECT 6.0 handsets complaining "Low battery!" three times in a row. One had fallen off the dock near the bed and the other was in the living room. Gretchen sometimes demands too much of reality, and she began railing about how the phone in the living room hadn't been off its charger long enough to have a low battery. My problem was different, that the complaint of "Low battery!" should maybe happen only every two hours instead of every half hour. Then Gretchen seemed upset I hadn't moved a chair out into the garage, though I'd never said I would and hadn't really been in the place where the chair was to be reminded that it needed to be moved. We bickered about these things a little in our cranky half-asleep way before Gretchen said something like "I really don't like your mood right now, go back to sleep!" But the fact of the matter was that the way I was being was entirely a function of her unrealistic demands of reality.
Despite my continued problems with a mysterious cough, my health was otherwise fine (and much recovered from yesterday's hangover). So I decided I should probably drive to Staunton to maybe see my mother one last time just before she died or, failing that, to be there for her death's aftermath. So I gathered all the things I thought I would need, including various food items, a large container of water, toothpaste, and of course some beers.
I drove to Staunton using the Subaru Forester via Scranton (my usual route, one that doesn't require navigation). I hadn't brought anything to listen to and didn't bother with my phone, which meant I listened entirely to radio, usually switching to another frequency when one would become weak, start airing news, or playing a song I cannot stand (such as Aerosmith's "Dude Looks Like A Lady," which happened). It's amazing what fraction of the airwaves these days play nothing but Christian music, most of it Christian pop. I listen to this because I have to know what the fuck is wrong with America, but after awhile it grates. The problem with Christian pop is the narrow spectrum of what the songs are about. Conventional pop is mostly about sex or throwing your hands in the air to party, but it addresses these themes from numerous angles. With Christian pop, by contrast, every fucking song says the same fucking thing: I am a miserable human, but Jesus died for my sins, all my problems are solved, so there is no limit to the praise that Jesus (or, perhaps, God) deserves. Much of it comes across a bit as a hostage video does, since obviously God is the ultimate power, so questioning what he's doing (or wondering why he only gets credit for the good things in a Universe he supposedly created) is a dangerous pursuit best avoided. The monotony of Christian radio, coupled with its ubiquity, makes it problematic. It is, I realized, cultural pollution. The only saving grace is that people don't really listen to radio anymore. People in Shitsville, USA don't have to rely (as I once did) on radio as their source of culture. The Internet is a much vaster resource, though of course it has its own problems that might make it even worse.
I was down to two bars on my gas gauge as I drove past Wilkes-Barre, so I started looking for a place to by gasoline, as I was about to enter a large empty part of the map as I crossed numerous Appalachian ridges in east-central Pennsylvania. At $3.40/gallon for regular, gasoline seemed expensive near the Wilkes-Barre airport. So I kept driving, ultimately taking an exit that did the worst possible thing: putting me on another divided highway. Ultimately I got to a gas station where gas was only $3.20/gallon, but then I had to violate a no-U-turn sign to easily get back to I-81 South.
Pennsylvania comprises about 200 miles of a drive that is about 400 miles in length, and getting from the relatively big city of Wilkes-Barre to Harrisburg takes a long time, since the main measure of progress seems to be the crossing of ridges. The radio in this very Real America part of Pennsylvania continued to be terrible, with most of the stations playing the same syndicated Christian pop music content. The occasional country music stations are like an oasis in the desert, and I listened to what I could of those before their signals fuzzed out behind a ridge.
A roadcut on I-81 showing geology and an accumulation of ice near McAdoo, PA. Click to enlarge.
The Blue Ridge coming into view south of Winchester, Virginia. Click to enlarge.
After crossing into Maryland and then quickly into West virginia, I kept thinking that if I got call that my mother had died, well at least I'd made it out of Pennsylvania first. But then I drov down I-81 past all the familiar cities and towns of the Shenandoah Valley, it started seemingly like I might be able to see my mother before she died, even if it was unlikely that she was still conscious enough to register my appearance.
After parking in front of my brother Don's Creekside trailer, I took my first piss of the entire drive, and it came out a dark yellow, suggesting I was dehydrated. (All I'd drunk was an initial travel mug of tea and then coffee from that Wilkes-Barre gas station.) I also hollered from Don, who emerged from behind the trailer with a space heater for me to use should I want to sleep in the Shaque tonight. Getting that heating started was my only agenda item before driving to have one last look at our mother. (It turned out the space heater Don had found had a defective fan, but then I found that the tiny space heater I'd used to keep the Shaque warm back when I'd lived in it was still there and working fine.)
Just as I was loading up Don to make the drive to whatever the old folks' home currently is (it recently changed), I got a call from Joy Tarder. She said that my mother had died at around 4:20pm, which corresponded to when I'd been driving past Harrisonburg. So I'd missed her death, whatever that meant. Still, it was good to be there as Don received the news. He immediately went to get his phone so he could call our maternal relatives (the only ones we still have).
Don has a deeply-formulaic means of handling social responsibilities, obligations that often seem to me like a tiresome requirement for navigating society and so, for someone like Don who is much like me but turned up to eleven, must be even more so. When I answer the phone, for example, Don always gives a slightly-musty (and context-inappropriate) "It's nice to hear from you." Then he immediately launches into whatever he wanted to say without me getting a chance to say anything at all. This afternoon he quickly found his way to the formula he thought would work best regarding the death of our mother, a human tragedy people were going to want a meaningful response to. He said, "I feel like when she died, a part of me died/left with her." That actually seemed thoughtful initially (if perhaps a little cliché), but hearing him repeat it over and over again as he talked to different people quickly drained it of any meaning.
When we got to English Meadows (the new name of The Retreat), Don and I entered and then needed someone to open the door into the cheerful prison of Memory Care. Don strutted like a feral bull into the break room and no doubt announced (in the only voice he knows, the outdoor one) that our mother had died and could we get back to her room. I have a feeling mortality is such a tabboo in old folks' homes that this was considered highly gauche. But in any case, we were soon in Memory Care and heading towards our mother's room.
We found the hospice nurse and Joy in the room with our mother's corpse. There was no flesh visible, but there was a human-shaped object completely wrapped in a tight-fitting shroud on our mother's bed. The air smelled like essential oils, perhaps wintergreen. Initially I thought that might be a deodorizer immediately applied once a human has been determined to be dead. But perhaps we were smelling the oils Joy had mentioned using to "anoint" my mother when she died. If so, that was entirely for Joy's benefit. Thankfully nobody was asking me to touch or see my dead mother.
Jou gave me a hug just as a pang of sadness washed over me. I'd sort of hated my mother at least since 2012 and probably even before then. And she had been a sad shadow of herself at least since 2021, when I saw her for the first time since 2013. But there's something about the enormous finality of the death of a parent that overcomes how a human can consider it logically.
Don's formula for dealing with this phase of our grief was to call all the people in our family whose numbers he remembered. With each of these, he repeated (as he had to Joy) his stock observation that with our mother's death, a part of him was dead too. While Don had Barbara (our mother's twin sister) on the phone, I thought I should talk to her to give her a little more than Don's inflexible stock phrases. This was good, because it gave Barbara the space to reminisce. She told us all on speaker phone a story from when she and our just-departed mother were only three years old and living in a rambling farmhouse in Keene, New Hampshire. The two found there way via an all-indoor route to the henhouse, where they found a trove of uncollected eggs. They then proceeded to have an egg fight until they were ultimately stopped by their parents. (This would've been in 1940, when such a waste of resources wouldn't've been a cause for much laughter.)
There wasn't really much left to be done after that, and Don was getting restless. So we decided to go. Joy Tarder went with us out to the parking lot and I began the process of emptying out our mother's room by carrying out a side-saddle that had been in there with her to remind her of her horsier days (it was not a saddle I was familiar with). In the parking lot, Joy gave me a comforter my mother no longer needed to help keep me warm tonight in the Shaque and I gave her a box Gretchen had prepared with an espensive bowl we'd bought years ago at an open studio in Kingston. As I did so, I choked up a little and Joy gave me a hug.
Beneath the stock phrases he uses to simulate societal engagement, my brother Don is a simple organism driven by a few simple needs, one of which is to buy books. He'd asked on the drive to see our dead mother if perhaps we could also go to Books-A-Million in Waynesboro while we were out. Initially I'd been irritated by this demand, but by the time we were done with the dead mother part of the evening, I was okay with taking him there. I looked up Books-A-Million in Google and absentmindedly set our destination for the next one east, assuming it was in Waynesboro. But as we were driving in that direction on I-64, I happened to notice that our distance away was more than 80 miles. So I got off and did more research and discovered that the Waynesboro Books-A-Million was permanently closed (that is, like my mother, it was "vegan now").
The next plan was to get something to eat, and I would've preferred Chinese, but Don said he was sick of Chinese because he'd apparently been to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet only yesterday. He suggested we get Impossible Whoppers at Burger King. I wasn't excited about that option, but I did it anyway, since I couldn't think of any other options. While in the drive-thru, I broke the news of our mother's death to Gretchen.
Back at Creekside, I pretty much just said goodnight to Don and headed off to the Shaque, because I couldn't stand the cloying sour fragrance inside his trailer. I cleared off the couch and made myself a nest there as best I could. I then posted something about my mother's death on Facebook using a photo of her and our old dog Wilbur from 1975 or 1976. I also drank some scotch and allowed myself to get nostalgic, periodically breaking out in sobs. It wasn't so much that I was sad my mother had died as it was that this whole part of my life was now conclusively over, and here I was in the sad ruins of both my childhood and young adulthood. Most people's parents move occasionally after they, the kids, move out, so the connection to childhood is lost at that point. But here I was, in the place where I'd moved at the age of eight in 1976 and where I'd lived off and on until as late as the summer of 1998. All of the stuff from 1976 was still there, as was everything from the other years, all piled atop each other in a dusty chaotic palimpsest. And now it was done.
a few pictures of my mother, or "Hoagie," as I called her:
My mother being held as an infant by her mother while her father holds her twin, Barbara, sometime in 1937.
My mother as a teenager in the 1950s near Boston, MA with her horse Princess Pat.
My mother in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
My mother in 1961, from a photo found in my father's old wallet.
My mother with Natchez the Horse circa 1976 at our place south of Staunton.
Click to enlarge.
My mother with Wilbur the Dog circa 1976 at our place south of Staunton.
From left: my father, me, my mother, and our old dog Wilbur circa 1976 at our place south of Staunton.
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From left: my brother Don, me, my mother, my father, and our old dog Wilbur circa 1976 at our place south of Staunton.
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My mother in a photo found in my father's old wallet. It probably dates to the late 1970s.
My mother in an official photo in the early 1980s.
My mother in a driver's license photo from January, 1985.
My mother with my father in my father's "slope garden" just northwest of the floodplain. This photo was taken in 1988. Click to enlarge.
My mother in a photo found in my father's old wallet. It probably dates to the early 1990s.
My mother in a driver's license photo from January, 1997.
My mother in my childhood home, Dec 28, 1999.
My mother with Chaps, the predecessor of Maple the Dog in my childhood home, July 27, 2006.
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My mother talks with Gretchen in the Creekside trailer, January 1, 2008.
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My mother in a driver's license photo from October, 2010.
My mother with Sara Poiron in Stingy Hollow Road, July 15, 2013.
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My mother with Sara Poiron in the Creekside trailer, July 15, 2013.
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My mother surrounded by her hoard of useless crap in my childhood home, January, 2021.
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My mother standing in Stingy Hollow Road in January, 2021.
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