The three of us sat in silence. And then my mother turned to Mel.
“I remember saying that to her; I do,” she said. “I did that. And at the time I believed it.” Her voice started to tremble when she turned to look at me. “I had no idea that you have been carrying this around all these years, and I am so sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t feel that way anymore, and I haven’t felt that way for a very long time. I know that doesn’t make up for any of it, but I hope—”
“It’s okay,” I interjected. I didn’t want her to have to explain anything, and I couldn’t possibly have felt more uncomfortable. I know that this is the point of therapy, to lay bare all the bumps and scars and disfigured shapes in us so that we can understand ourselves. But my mother had given so much of herself to me already. She was my main support as a full-time single mother, the one who picked up the phone to listen to me scream. She didn’t owe me anything. She really didn’t. She had poured blood and sweat and tireless physical energy into the care of my children, and I had no right to ask her for anything.
“Heather,” Mel said. “Let her speak.”
My mother nodded.
“I love you now as I loved you as a child, perhaps even more. I love your children. I love the way you love your children. And, Heather, I love who you have become, what you have taught me about loving and how to love. I learned through you that I was wrong about how our relationship was supposed to work. Because I cannot deny the love and respect I have for you not only as my daughter but also for the woman you have become. You are you. You are you, and I could not possibly love you more.”
Her last sentence was choked as she tried to hold it together. I covered my face with my hands again to hide my tears and vulnerability.
“Please forgive me,” she said, and when those words hit my ears, my entire chest jerked with a sob.
I know how lucky I am. I know many people do not have the privilege of having this kind of relationship with their mother and either desperately wish they did or wish that they were even on speaking terms. I know some of you routinely stab the eyes of a voodoo doll fashioned in the shape of the woman who gave you life, and then you stomp on it and shove it into the garbage disposal. Please don’t give Marlo any ideas.
I am lucky, and I don’t ever take this gift for granted. She is the most generous and loving mother a human being could ever hope for, and I am the one who got her. I am the fuckup who scored her.
Now that we had that little chips-and-salsa misunderstanding cleared up, it was time to make a plan. Mel whipped out a pencil and pad of paper. I thought about making a joke about smartphones with apps that render list making and sharing quite easy, but my mother had just made an apology I didn’t know that I needed to hear and an entire chamber of my heart had instantly healed. I could shut my mouth for once.
“Two days a week. You need to give her two days,” Mel stated, and I nearly fell off the sofa.
“No!” I yelled. “You cannot ask her to do that. Not two days.”
“Why not? It’s just two days, Heather. We are not asking your mother for a kidney, although clearly she’d give you one.”
“Because you don’t know my mother’s life!” My mother retired from Avon to spend more time with my sister’s five kids and my brother’s five kids and my two kids and my stepfather’s four grandchildren. That’s, like, 5,000 people she has to love, and she doesn’t show love like some normal person. My mother is the valedictorian of showing love, and when she is not clocking steps around her living room, she is taking care of grandchildren. There’s this joke that my siblings and I tell each other, except it’s less of a joke and more of a bitch session. It’s about the relationship my mother forges with each of our children, how at some point during the first three years of each child’s life they will—and there have been zero exceptions to this—cry out at night for Grandmommy. Not for Mom or Dad or even Santa Claus. Grandmommy. And the only way to retaliate is to call her at whatever ungodly hour it is to say, “SHE WANTS YOU.” Except my mother does not process this as retaliation. She relishes it.
“I can give her two days,” my mother said.
“That’s too mu—”
“I WILL BE GIVING YOU TWO DAYS. So, laundry, dishes . . .”
“Can you help her with her grocery shopping?” asked Mel.
“Absolutely. And we’ll help the girls get showered on those days as well. We’ll come and get the chores done as the girls are finishing up homework and then we’ll make dinner and help get them to bed. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. Thank you, Mel.”
Mel was scribbling on her notepad as fast as she could. After underlining something twice, she looked up at me with a smirk.
“Was that so hard?” she asked. “How much money have you spent in here having me tell you to ask her for help? You could have bought a boat, Heather. And now your mom’s going to be washing your underwear.”
That was the plan we made—two days a week. Mel also made me promise that I wouldn’t protest if my mother offered even more help. Didn’t I know how lucky I was that she was my mother? I mean, with such a wonderful mother, one wouldn’t think I could get so depressed. However, depression like this is just as unmoved by a wonderful mother as it is by a long, hot shower. And so, in honor of every other parent out there struggling to do all of this by themselves—every other parent scrambling to hold it all together, all while meeting deadlines and paying bills and not running out of gas on the way to parent-teacher conferences or play practice, and, yes, the backdoor needs a weather strip and the kitchen faucet is leaking—we will get to those things after we get to the book report and the science fair project and talking our child down from an existential hormonal crisis. We have only two hands and we do this all alone, every day, again and again and again. On behalf of those of us who didn’t score my mother, I promised I would accept her help.
ELEVEN
PLENTY OF FISH
THE CALL TIME FOR every treatment seemed to run later and later, and they didn’t need me to come in for my fourth treatment until 2:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. This would mean another twenty hours without food, so by pure accident I had begun practicing a form of “intermittent fasting.” I don’t want to dismiss it as a fad diet, given the testimonies I’ve read and heard from people who believe it has changed their lives; but after the marathon was over and I couldn’t lose the ten pounds I’d gained while training for it, I was desperate for some solution. A friend told me about intermittent fasting: some people fast for sixteen hours a day, others fast for an entire twenty-four-hour period twice a week. It’s supposed to help with weight loss and sharpen your memory and lengthen your life span. I tried the sixteen-hour variation and lasted a week. I thought about food constantly. I was ravenous, and when you take food away from someone who (a) cannot stop thinking about food, and (b) wants to be dead, that person will become even more obsessed with food.
In the seven days since I had started the treatment, though, I’d lost two or three pounds. I broke out a pair of jeans I hadn’t worn in over eighteen months and paired it with something other than a T-shirt, something that looked like it might have been ironed. I woke up an hour early to shower knowing that I had a weekly team meeting with the nonprofit shortly after I’d be getting home from dropping the girls off at school. I even put on a little bit of makeup. There was something about the idea of being around all these technicians and nurses and doctors who were performing something so, well, intimate on me that I started to feel like I needed to show up a bit. Like I needed them to know how much I appreciated what they were doing, what they were attempting. Walking in without trailing body odor seemed like a good place to start.
When my mother and stepfather showed up at 1:00 p.m.—yes, nearly an hour early—to head up to the clinic, I was in my bedroom putting on a necklace and a couple of gold bracelets. My mother called out to me and found me standing in front of the mirror in my bedroom, fastening the clasp on my necklace. She gasped.
&nbs
p; “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Heather, you look stunning,” she said. She’d placed her hands over her chest to brace herself.
“Aw, you’re being really nice. You have to say that because you’re my mom.”
“No, really. You look so lovely in that outfit.” My outfit? Straight, solid-colored jeans, a white blouse made out of a fabric that looked like it had been ironed when in fact it needed no ironing at all, black boots that laced all the way to the top. She was right. It was an outfit. I hadn’t worn an outfit in . . . weeks? Months? I’d literally worn nothing but yoga pants, sports bras, and T-shirts for so long that I couldn’t remember ever thinking about what shoes would go best. I was always wearing my running shoes or flip-flops because I didn’t have to think about those. And the exhaustion of thinking about it is what prevented me from wearing anything that would require thinking in the first place. But I really hadn’t thought about it much that morning. I knew I had to get up early, I knew I had to shower—HOLY GOD. I had taken a shower and I hadn’t grabbed at my torso in disgust.
“I took a shower, Mom, and I didn’t hate it,” I blurted upon the realization. “Isn’t that weird? Like, I’m glad I showered.” She started to chuckle. “If this whole thing doesn’t work, at least I’ll be clean for three weeks. The study may be free but I’m going to have to buy more shampoo.”
As we climbed into the minivan my stomach audibly growled, and yet I wasn’t really bothered by it. I was hungry, yes, but I wasn’t ravenous. I wasn’t thinking about food or the next meal I would eat. The last seven days had forced my attention elsewhere: Would this work? Would I ever feel better? Were we wasting our time? Would I ever not want to be dead? This was all I thought about now, because if this didn’t work, what then? And I tried not to go past the “then” into the various scenarios, which of course ended up with me living homeless and alone.
I walked ahead of my mother and stepfather into the waiting room at the clinic. As I headed straight for Greg and his clipboard of questions, a staff member named Lauren walked around the front desk. I never knew what color her hair was going to be on any given day: sometimes it was pink but that day it was purple and she was wearing a black-and-white polka-dot dress with opaque silver tights. I have always had such admiration for people who can dress like this, who can bear the attention of the people they know and don’t know analyzing their wardrobes.
Lauren stopped me before I could get to the desk and grabbed my right arm.
“You have the most amazing clothes!” she said, assessing me from head to toe. “Like, I love to see what you’re going to wear each time you’re here. It just keeps getting better.”
I almost fell over. This was the last thing I ever expected to hear from anyone ever in my life, especially from a person who could pull off the most outrageous combinations of clothes.
“Oh my God,” I stammered. “That’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. I . . . just . . . thank you.”
“I’m taking notes!” she added.
“So am I! I mean, look at your legs. Those tights!”
“Oh, these old things? I have them in every color of the rainbow. I was feeling the silver this morning.” She patted me on my arm and continued past me so she could attend to her administrative work. Just then my mother leaned over to whisper in my ear.
“Is she the most adorable thing, or what?”
That was something so remarkable about this place, the ease with which everyone interacted with each other and with the patients and with those who accompanied the patients. It didn’t feel clinical or medicinal or fraught with the weight of Here is where we shock people into seizures.
Everything from that point forward proceeded as usual. We waited about a half hour after I filled out the Just How Depressed Are You? questionnaire (still really, really depressed), and then Molly and I chatted about the myth of cranberry juice and its supposed magical effects on UTIs as she struggled to get the needle into my right arm. Still hadn’t had sex! What would it be like to want to get naked with someone? Bare skin touching someone else’s bare skin? Who does that? Gross. Stop. Don’t even get a room; just occupy yourselves otherwise.
When I walked back into the waiting room after the needle insertion, I nodded at my mother to indicate that it had been awful yet again, and she took hold of my arms as I sat down beside her.
She looked at the bruises in both arms and shook her head. “There has to be a better way of doing this, right? Why are they making this so painful?”
“I don’t think it’s their fault,” I said, wanting to take Molly’s side. “They aren’t used to these needles. And, my God, if this is the most painful part of this procedure, I think we are walking away with the bank.”
Only a few minutes passed before they called me in, and I crossed the hallway into the room toward my gurney.
“Heather B. Armstrong. July nineteenth, 1975,” I answered before the nurse could even ask me. And before I knew it I was awake, propped up in the gurney, and being rolled into the recovery room. It had gone by that fast. A blip, like someone had snapped their fingers. I remember the vial of propofol, the Velcro, and the wire, but who was the anesthesiologist? I . . . I couldn’t . . . Jesus Christ, my eyes!
“Who stabbed my eyes? Was it you?” I yelled at a nurse I couldn’t recognize. “Why did you stab me in the eyes? Why would you do this?”
“I’m sorry, do your eyes hurt?” he asked, his voice professionally gentle.
“Do they hurt?” I drunkenly shot back at him. “Didn’t I just say that you stabbed me? Why would I say that if they didn’t hurt? Why would you do this? Was it you?”
I blinked several times and then frantically looked for my mother. When I found her across the room, reaching into the tiny fridge to grab me a cup of apple juice, I blinked a few more times and asked, “Were you there the whole time? You didn’t leave me, did you?”
She quickly turned around and rushed to my side. “Of course I didn’t leave you. I was there the whole time. In fact, they let me take some pictures of the abyss!”
I ignored her enthusiasm, at least temporarily, because of the agonizing pain in my eyes. “Did you see if my eyes were closed? Were my eyes closed?”
“I’m sure they were,” she answered. “I watched you go under, your hands falling to your sides.”
“My eyes hurt like . . . I can’t explain it—”
“We can ask the team to tape your eyes shut from now on,” the nurse offered, even though I had just brazenly accosted him. “Sometimes your eyelids can drift open a bit when you’re under. We’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
I was still feeling drunk, so I laid my head back against the gurney, shut my eyes, and began to make a list of what my chart must look like: allergic to fentanyl, becomes constipated by something unknown, must tape eyelids shut. This list fanned out my many charms as well as my online dating profiles, which was yet another reason I’d ended up wanting to be dead.
* * *
The dating scene in Utah is a beautiful backdrop for a suicidal ideation.
I’d been in two long-distance relationships after my divorce. Both times I realized the mileage between us was untenable, given the demands of my kids and my job. Sure, sex can be really great when you haven’t seen someone in six weeks, but during those six weeks I still only had two hands and needed to unload the dishwasher, fold four loads of laundry, help my kid with the Pythagorean theorem, build a robot for the science fair, take my kids to the dentist, volunteer for the bake sale, and somewhere in there make enough money to pay rent and buy food and put gas in the car. Those romances were more like fantasy vacations than actual relationships. Then I made the horrible mistake of deciding that I should try to date men who lived within a day’s driving distance from my house. This ended up being one of the worst mistakes of my entire life.
While training for the Boston Marathon, I set up an account on Match.com. What on earth was I thinking? It just seemed mo
re adult than swiping through Tinder because I was not looking to hook up or date casually. I did not have time for that trivial nonsense. I had no interest in that kind of dating, since I never took a lunch break and hadn’t had time to grab a cup of coffee with a friend since my kids’ father moved across the country and I got primary custody of my children. Since then.
I did have a Tinder account, and a Bumble account, and eventually I signed up for an account on a site called Plenty of Fish. I kept it open for the specific purpose of being able to reference it in case I ever needed to prove to someone just how terrorizing the dating pool is for women in Utah. It may be just as terrorizing for men—I mean, look at me! Have you met me? I’m so crazy, I agreed to let a doctor flatline my brain ten times! Also, one should note that I will at some point want to have rough picnic bench sex with someone else, although I did fail to disclose that in any of my profiles. What I did eventually end up writing in every profile I had was “The fish that you caught or the deer that you shot do not matter to me as much as the words coming out of your mouth.” Because, holy shit, y’all, the photos of dead animals in the dating profiles of men in Utah . . . And, my God, do not even think of setting up a dating profile, dude in Utah, unless you have a shot of yourself in full gear on the top of a slope at Alta Ski Area, or you will not be getting any in the near future. Any of what, I’m not sure.
I just opened my Plenty of Fish account, and underneath the heading “These people are more likely to respond to your messages—start having more conversations now!” is a photo of a man straddling a dead moose. He is straddling it, the moose that is dead. And, OH MY GOD, I just looked at the rest of the photos in his profile and you will never guess. He’s holding not one, not two, not even three dead fish. He is holding six dead fish. Plenty!
The Valedictorian of Being Dead Page 11