A Room with a Darker View

by Claire Phillips

  “I’ve been shot,” she kept insisting as my brother worked to dutifully wash her, confusing the unpleasant discharge with an unthinkable amount of blood.

  Cedars-Sinai

  My mother and I hadn’t been getting along well for some time. Burned out on hospitals—and frankly, phobic—I didn’t go see her at Cedars-Sinai. The tension in our relationship was evident by her greeting on the phone. If we were getting along I would receive the following salutation: Hi, darling. When we were not, when I had caused her distress with my vociferous demands, I was the recipient of a clipped: Hi. The “darling” pointedly elided from her greeting.

  On this particular afternoon when I called her at Cedars, I received the truncated Hi. She was angry with me for my obvious lack of compassion about the diarrhea that had landed her in the hospital, and I couldn’t blame her.

  She then launched into a litany of complaints about the hospital staff and the terrible treatment she received. Once again, I was incredulous. Vivid memories of her past accusatory behavior at Ramapo Ridge came to mind. Was she at it again, ascribing paranoid motivations to the staff? I didn’t call again for another two days.

  “Hi, darling,” she answered. I was forgiven and relieved to be in her good graces again. I missed these two simple words. I had come to count on them much more than I realized. “I love you, Claire,” she said then, apropos of nothing. “Just remember that.”

  Voices

  Continuing to read up on schizophrenia, I began to wonder if my mother ever heard voices.

  “Mom,” I asked during one of our nightly calls. “Do you ever hear voices?”

  “No,” she quipped. “Just yours.”

  In a better world

  In Mikal Gilmore’s searing, heart-rending memoir, Shot in the Heart, he tells a tale of family misery that recounts both his mother’s disturbingly haunted Mormon past and his father’s equally mysterious life as a con artist and cruel patrician, whose violent beatings of Gilmore’s three significantly older brothers destroyed any hope for a united family. The most notable and violent brother, Gary, gained notoriety for having robbed and killed two men in Utah over the course of consecutive nights. Once apprehended and imprisoned, Gary demanded that he be put to death by firing squad, a shocking and violent request based on Mormon traditions that would usher back the death penalty in the United States after a ten-year hiatus.

  A nationally recognized former music critic for the L.A. Weekly, Gilmore contemplates in his memoir the misery of being born of two people whose lives should have never been entangled: whose interwoven fates resulted in dreadful consequences. After endless beatings by his father, Gary became a juvenile delinquent, whose recidivist tendencies and struggle to remain on the “outside” effectively ended the day he shot those two Mormons dead. Gilmore includes at the end of this haunting and evocative memoir a proclamation of love for his long-since-deceased mother and father, whose affronts toward one another and their children were at times nothing short of monstrous.

  “I love my parents,” he writes. “These days I miss them both terribly. But there is something ironic that I have had to recognize about my act of contemplating my own family: In a better world, my parents would not have met—or at least they would not have married and had a family. In a better world, I would never have been born.”

  For some time after reading this passage, I felt the strong pull of these words. In a better world, I would never have been born.

  A pleasant day

  The day of her release, my brother kindly escorted Mom home from the hospital. He purchased food for her and hired a new health aide. He told me that she had been treated terribly in the hospital, her room was awful, and that she had been left to languish without care for days. Her complaints were real. Once again, I felt ashamed that I had chosen not to believe her. Shortly after her return home, I dropped by between classes to help her with laundry, as she told me that no one had done any for her for some time. When I arrived, she was seated on the floor before a clean pile of folded clothes stacked on her couch.

  “These clothes are clean,” I shouted, irate.

  “No, they’re not,” she insisted, picking up one after another article of clothing, holding it to her nose and sniffing. “They smell.”

  What ensued was painful. It was clear to me the piles of clothes were recently washed. I couldn’t accept that she was not going to get better. Mom ran from the room and collapsed onto her bed, begging me not to complain. We continued to fight that afternoon. Over the laundry. Over the money I believed she owed me for buying groceries last time I visited. After a time, I collected myself and offered to get groceries for her. When I returned, we sat down at her white pedestal kitchen table, the Santa Monica Mountains and the glittering tops of residential date palm trees in plain view out the bank of steel casement windows.

  It was a pleasant day. I liked being with my mother. I registered this despite the rancor I felt that afternoon. If only I had told her so.

  Low blood pressure

  The following week, frail and lightheaded, she had continual falls. What I feared most became reality. After her first fall, the paramedics were called. She was taken to the hospital where she was given a battery of tests. After a few hours, they sent her home. Her blood pressure was dangerously low. No one seemed to know why. The news confused us. My mother took medication for high blood pressure. Why then did she have low blood pressure?

  I continued to commute between colleges in the unremitting heat, for hours each day, allowing my brother to handle the nitty-gritty of my mother’s medical care. At this stage, I felt stricken that we were holding my mother prisoner in her apartment, our private source of shame and despair, much the same as Rochester held his first wife in the attic of Jane Eyre. What did I fear so much? I knew she wouldn’t commit suicide, or set an angry conflagration to the place, or harm anyone in any way.

  What I feared was her imminent departure and potentially grisly death. I could not abide the loss of my mother, the heartbreaking sight of her inert, lifeless body. I dreaded becoming witness to those last bitter moments. Even more, perhaps, I dreaded the unhappy confrontation with having failed her that her imminent departure would inevitably confirm.

  Nine lives

  My attention had turned elsewhere. Shortly after my mother’s first fall during the latest extreme heat wave—one that would go down as one of the hottest on record—my outdoor cat of thirteen years went missing only to appear two days later with an injured hind leg, unable to walk. This wily, semi-feral black cat, Quimby, who had survived numerous catfights, surgeries, and multiple coyote sightings, had expended another life. That Sunday at the suggestion of a friend, I whisked him to the VCA, an expensive animal hospital on the Westside. Shortly after an examination, I learned from the technician that my cat might have a torn knee ligament and would require an expensive operation.

  “Operation?” I balked.

  “We will know once we do the x-rays,” she said. I had torn my knee ligament and not had surgery. There was no chance I was paying for Quimby’s expensive knee surgery, and so I bolted.

  Over the next few days, I consulted with several cat owners. Get the operation and cage him, was the advice. What? This sounded impossible. I lived in a small apartment. Where was I going to put this cage for the required six weeks? How would a cat used to roaming the hillsides, venturing into neighbor’s homes at all times of day, deal with being caged? A local vet understood my cat’s needs.

  “You will never keep this breed of cat inside for more than two weeks,” she said, petting my injured black cat as she sat cross-legged on the floor of her exam room.

  I was relieved. Few understood the utter misery of trying to keep a semi-feral cat indoors for any length of time. After x-raying Quimby, she advised me not to get the surgery, a $5000 ordeal, with only a fifty percent success rate.

  Instead, I cared diligently for my cat with the aid of powerful pain medication, filling my mother in on my pet’s wellbeing
by phone. No one else in the family showed much interest.

  My mother, on the other hand, listened patiently, continually checking in with me. Never once faulting me for placing my cat’s care above hers.

  “How’s Quimby?” she would ask whenever she called.

  Yummy.com

  The week progressed, and I came to see my pet’s debilitating injury as an augur of sorts. My mother would endure another fall upon waking. This time when the paramedics came, they did not whisk her away to the hospital. They tested her in the ambulance, determining that she was not in need of any medical attention, before bringing her straight back up to her apartment. It was the start of a new Fall semester; I had only the weekend to prep for a new course I was teaching: “Eco Writing: Green is the New Red.” In the course description I had referenced Henry David Thoreau’s activist line: “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

  I felt a particular urgency to reacquaint myself with the material that my students at CalArts and I would be reading together, feeling somewhat estranged from nature, my days spent flitting about the congested freeways of metropolitan Southern California. Only when I reminded myself that I had once trekked the three-day Inca trail to Machu Picchu did I feel like I had anything to add on the subject of nature and the sublime. Late Friday afternoon, I called my mother after work, too tired to confront rush-hour traffic to make a trip to her apartment.

  “I promise to come by tomorrow morning and bring you groceries.” I said.

  “Okay, darling. Not to worry. I can always order from yummy.com.” We shared a laugh. My mother often complained that “yummy.com” was not very yummy.

  I then commented on her recent dizzy spell: “I’m really worried about you, Mom. I’m really worried.”

  “Don’t be,” she reassured me. “I’ll be fine.”

  At 6 p.m. it was still almost one hundred degrees. The desert sun is hottest at the end of the day. I knew my mother didn’t take much interest in staying cool.

  “Turn on your air conditioner,” I advised, knowing something had to be wrong. Again she told me not to worry.

  I went later that night to meet an out-of-town friend for a drink on Sunset Boulevard. Inconsolable after a couple of whiskey drinks, I must have had a sense of what was to come.

  Saturday, September 7th

  The next morning, seated in my small living room, a heap of books on the subject of environmental activism and nature stacked before me, I panicked. Once again, I was ready to put off spending time with my mother in order to do some work. I picked up the phone and dialed, anticipating a response from her that would be full of understanding. Instead, after an excessive number of rings, a strange man answered the phone.

  “Who are you?” I assailed. “What are you doing answering my mother’s phone?” In my heart of heart’s I knew.

  After a pause, the deep, compelling voice came back on: “Can you come to your mother’s home?”

  “Why?” I snapped. “Who are you?”

  Again there was a measured silence, a clear reluctance to answer. “I don’t want to tell you over the phone,” he articulated in a voice so distinct, I can still conjure it to this day.

  Slipping from my chair to the hard floor, horrified, I confessed shakily, “I can’t come there alone—I need a friend.”

  Overcome, I called a close friend, Melanie, whose mother suffered from a similar illness. In Hollywood at her friend’s private gym, she offered to come right over.

  Twenty minutes passed, and Melanie arrived at my door with a bottle of cheap champagne in hand. It was not even noon. I appreciated the gesture—but I was far too disturbed to open a bottle of champagne. Sputtering along Virgil Ave., past the low-slung stucco houses in Melanie’s convertible 1970s vw bug, we headed in the direction of my mother’s apartment, my grief and guilt pouring out.

  “Why didn’t I visit her yesterday? What was I thinking?”

  “Considering everything she had been through, she lived for such a long time,” Melanie reassured me, touching my knee. “She did incredibly well.”

  No one understood better the pain of seeing a loved one suffer than Melanie, whose mother had been over- and under-medicated with more or less the same regularity as my mother had been. Melanie knew all too well the toll and jeopardy involved in treatment. As she navigated L.A.’s congested Third Street that Saturday, I texted my brother paranoid messages, panicked that we would be found at fault for our mother’s untimely end.

  The endless and shadowless hereafter

  “What if they accuse us of neglecting our mother? Of killing her?” I texted in a state of mild panic.

  “Try not to give into your worst fears,” my brother responded. “We did nothing wrong. They should have admitted her into the hospital instead of sending her home.”

  I arrived at my mother’s apartment to find two policemen and her health aide milling about the living room. Someone must have told me that my mother was located in the bedroom, after which the Latino officer interrogated me on the subject of my mother’s medication.

  “Why was she taking so many pills?” the officer asked.

  “She suffered from schizophrenia,” I said. “They had her on a lot of medication. She had had a hysterectomy,” I continued, explaining away the hormone replacement pills. Seroquel. Haldol. Thyroid pills. Hormones. Cogentin. Zoloft. The list went on. Once I had detailed our mother’s medical history—the blood pressure, thyroid problem, mental illness—any further line of inquiry was dropped.

  I was not to blame. All this while a health aide sat in the far corner of the living room, one I had not met before. In fact, I was not even aware that a new aide had been hired, and was relieved to know that at least she had not been alone in her final hour. Subdued, she was an older woman, perhaps not that much younger than my mother. I felt for this woman working for minimum pay and who had the misfortune of being on duty during this difficult moment. I hoped she did not blame herself and said something to this effect.

  By the time my brother arrived, Melanie had already left. Pale and frantic, John dashed into the bright clean kitchen to take a moment for himself.

  “This should not have happened,” he said in a shaken undertone. “She should not have died.”

  Returning to the large living room, he asked for the details.

  I did not want to hear them and clasped my hands to my ears. Fully aware that a good writer, an ambitious one, would have been eager to hear what happened, might have stepped into her bedroom to view her body, to face her death, I found myself paralyzed and unable to confront my mother’s lifeless body.

  One of the L.A.P.D. officers took the lead in explaining to us that she had had a heart attack. The same officer whose voice it was on my mother’s phone and who would confide in me later, while flirting with me, the perils of a difficult job, his former use of alcohol and drugs in coping. He turned to my mother’s health aide to fill in the picture.

  She told us that our mother had gotten up from bed that morning and once again, like she had earlier that week, felt dizzy then collapsed onto her bed.

  “Should I call 911?” the health aide asked my mother. “No,” my mother responded. “Not now.” She waited a few minutes more for my mother to improve before asking again. “No,” my mother responded again.

  Defying my mother, she then called 911. By the time the paramedics arrived, it was too late, she told us.

  My brother had the courage to look at my mother’s body, but I did not.

  “She’s shorter,” he remarked, looking rattled.

  The police then confirmed that this would be the case: that we shrink upon death. We spent the next several hours with the policemen as we arranged for our mother’s body to be taken to a synagogue. If we did not make these arrangements, the police would be required to call for the Los Angeles Coroner to take our mother to the morgue.

  “You want to avoid that if you can,” the presiding officer explained. “It can take up to two days to get
her back once the county has her.”

  Our cousin Lauren suggested that my brother call the Sinai Temple. We waited for their arrival for more than two hours that afternoon, seated at our mother’s white pedestal table with the officers, who filled us in on the particulars of their jobs: the thrill of high speed car chases, the role of the Sheriff’s Department in physically subduing purportedly difficult detainees, and more. I appreciated the distraction the affable police officers provided us that afternoon, suspended as we were in the airy Park La Brea tower above the swaying date palms and loud water fountain below, suspended from the disturbing truth of my mother’s lifeless body and what I felt at the time was my failure in helping her transition with dignity from this life to Emily Brontë’s “endless and shadowless hereafter.”

  Suicidal ideation

  In the weeks, perhaps months, that precipitated my mother’s death I woke each morning with the idea of ending my life. Before opening my eyes to another sunny day, I would imagine taking a razor blade to the veins in my arm in an effort to dull the pain and to put an end to it all. I felt hopeless in my certainty that my mother would never recover and, convinced we did not have the funds to care for her properly, feared her commitment to an underfunded state psychiatric facility when her money ran out. I couldn’t imagine that in California public housing would be an option—in 2012, the state almost went bankrupt. No reassurance from my brother that my mother was improving countered these thoughts. Shortly before she died, perhaps a few weeks before, I dreamt that she was manic and viciously attacking me as she did when I was a teenage girl. Only in my dream, she was even more violent, stabbing me in the back multiple times with a large knife.