Dead Mom Walking

by Rachel Matlow

  Later that night I wrote an email to my bosses at Q, letting them know that my mom had terminal cancer and that I’d be needing some time off in the near future. “How it makes me long for the innocent days of last fall,” I joked.

  It didn’t take long before the shock wore off and I could feel the excruciating pain of what was happening. It was now a sure thing: the person I loved most in the world was going to die.

  Over the next few days I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, jolted into consciousness by the reality of Mom’s diagnosis. The sheer intensity of the panic I felt was new every time. It was a real-life nightmare. I’d never had such an urge to turn back time. My mind kept searching for all the things I could’ve done differently to convince her to get surgery. What if I’d talked her into seeing a real therapist? Maybe I could have physically dragged her into the operating room? What if I hadn’t given up so fast?

  Once again I was levelled by the difference between kind of knowing and really knowing. The warm bath of denial had drained. Familiar feelings of regret and helplessness were rushing back with a vengeance. I’d already been dealing with the blow wrought by Jian; now I was suffering the cumulative effects of these two life tsunamis. I felt heartsick on top of being heartsick, anxious on top of being anxious, depressed on top of being depressed. And once more I had to reckon with the worst part of the bubble bursting—confronting my own self-alienation, the naked fact that I’d been so disconnected from my own voice for so long. How had I allowed myself to get pulled into the vortex of Mom’s magical thinking? How had I let myself get bullied into Jian’s reality distortion field?

  Mostly I was back to fixating on why Mom had refused medical help in the first place. She had rejected a ninety percent chance of being cured. Who does that? Why did she make such an irrational decision? Why had she turned away from reality? I felt strongly that her rejection of conventional medicine went beyond any rational embrace of alternative healing. There was something more powerful driving her actions. What was she so afraid of? I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it. But all I kept thinking was It didn’t have to come to this.

  STAGE 4

  14

  PHOENIX TEARS

  While I was turning over every conversation, every single thing I could’ve done differently to steer Mom down a different path, she was staying the course. “They don’t know what I know,” she continued to say. She decided to make one last-ditch attempt to cure herself and began looking into alternative cancer clinics in Europe—places where they practised unconventional methods like hyperthermia, photodynamic laser therapy, and small doses of chemo in the middle of the night. Mom spent time researching her various options. “This one has a saltwater pool and lovely food,” she said, as if she were picking out a spa vacation.

  Finally she set her sights on a “biological medicine” clinic near the Swiss Alps. I googled it. It looked nice—and expensive—but it seemed more like a place for people with treatable health conditions, not for those who were actively dying. I questioned how legit it was. I mean, they offered ear candling (and even hippies don’t believe in ear candling anymore).

  I wasn’t surprised when Mom asked me to go with her. She could barely drive now, never mind fly overseas on her own. I worried about her going by herself, and I didn’t want to miss out on any time I had left with her, so I said yes. I thought it was absurd for her to spend so much money on magnetic-field therapy and mistletoe injections, but if going to one of these last-resort health resorts would make her happy, then why not? She’d get her spa treatments, and I’d lounge by the pool. I warmed to the idea of us going on one last European vacation together.

  But I knew the Magic Mountain fantasy was just that—a fantasy. It was clear that Mom was in no shape to go anywhere. She was getting skinnier and skinnier, except for her legs, which were swelling up from edema. It was difficult for her to walk up the two flights of stairs to her apartment. I was afraid that even if we made it to Europe she’d become too sick to travel home. Or worse, she’d die there, and I’d be stuck in the Alps with my mother’s corpse. No. Freaking. Way.

  I tried to dissuade her, but Mom wouldn’t budge; her heart was set on it. Even Josh and Aunt Barbara stepped in to try to talk her out of it. Although I still resented them for not having challenged her a lot earlier, I was happy to have their support now. I suppose they were finally willing to risk Mom being angry at them.

  I was at work when Mom called to talk about booking our plane tickets. I took my phone out into the hallway overlooking the CBC’s atrium and gathered the nerve to put my foot down. I knew she wasn’t going to be happy, but I told her that it was just too irresponsible for us to go. “Please,” she begged. “This is my last chance.” She started to cry. I couldn’t bear it. She sounded like she was drowning. “Okay, okay, I’ll go with you,” I said. She immediately calmed down. I told her I would be there for her, which was true, even if I had no intention of getting on that plane.

  I hung up and tried to focus on the script I was writing for an interview with Joan Armatrading. I felt sorry for Mom—I knew she needed the idea of the trip more than the trip itself—but she was driving me bananas. If it wasn’t stressful enough to have a dying mother, now I had to deal with a dying mom on the lam. By that point I wouldn’t have put it past her to fly off without me. I had no idea where she drew the line at “reasonable” anymore. She knew she was too weak to travel, but I knew that her letting go of the dream amounted to a final surrender. Accepting that she wasn’t going to Europe meant accepting that she was going to die.

  Eventually, to my immense relief, Mom found a loophole. She’d discovered clinics in Toronto that offered “almost the same services” as the Swiss spa, she announced, so she’d stay home and do them here.

  “Sounds like a good idea,” I said. Thank fucking god.

  * * *

  —

  MOM WAS BECOMING a little less avoidant. Her new approach was essentially “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” And even if the worst wasn’t going to happen for another year or two, she agreed that it would be prudent to start getting her affairs in order.

  There’s no step-by-step manual for how to help someone wrap up their life, but I was a producer, goddammit, and I was determined to produce the best death possible for Mom. I cut down my work schedule to three days a week. Between the shock and the sadness, there was a lot of shit to get done. When my own doctor asked the reason for my time off, I said “Dying mom,” then after a pause blurted out “and Jian!” He’d been stressing me out for months, if not years, leading up to Mom’s decline—why not let the record show it?

  Mom and I first set out to tackle the administrative tasks. We went to the bank to empty her safety deposit box. We met with her accountant to organize her finances and prepare her tax return (still one of life’s two certainties, until the other one got her). Teddy found her a lawyer so that she could update her will. Meanwhile, Mom gave me permission to sign her up with the Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) so that she could receive home care from a personal support worker and palliative care doctor. At first Mom was reluctant to accept the help—she found it hard to let others do things for her—but once her new support worker, Maymouna, started showing up to do laundry and other household chores, Mom was extremely grateful. “Dying is hard work,” she’d say.

  Then there were the finer details. I asked her to jot down her passwords for her email and social media accounts. “70StillSexy,” she wrote on a cue card. Next, we created a list of those she wanted notified “if anything were to happen.” We began by going through all her contacts and then, one by one, assessing who should make the cut. It reminded me of when I was a kid and Mom would help me narrow down my list of birthday party invitees. Except this was the guest list for her funeral, which we’d started referring to as the After-Party. Mom’s Top 100 would be a very exclusive group. She wanted to invite only those peo
ple in her life she really wanted there. (It’s not as if she’d have to deal with anyone’s hurt feelings.)

  By April, Mom didn’t have the energy to drive anymore, so I kept her car at my place. On the days I drove up to the Hemingway I’d often stop to get her a scoop of artisanal gelato. She wasn’t eating much, but she still had an appetite for the finer things. I would gently place her cup of lemon lavender in a cooler bag and then race over as if I were transporting a donor organ on ice.

  Being Mom’s personal Make-a-Wish Foundation wasn’t entirely altruistic. Doing things for her gave me something to focus on—a way to channel my anxiety and feel useful at the same time. There was at least something I could do in an otherwise helpless situation. Watching Mom cheerfully devour her gelato with the mini plastic spoon meant everything to me.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I WASN’T helping Mom prepare to die, I was getting ready for the rebirth of Q. Canadian hip hop artist Shad was announced as our new host, and it seemed the storm was finally starting to clear. No more guest hosts, no more intense media speculation about the future of the show. Perhaps there really was a blue sky on the horizon.

  Shad wasn’t an experienced broadcaster, but what he lacked in interviewing skills he more than made up for in kindness. He was incredibly gracious, humble, and genuine—the anti-Jian. His mere presence was healing. Our first official show with Shad was only three weeks away. We’d all worked so hard to keep the ship afloat, and now we could finally see the shore.

  And so, even as the foundation of my life was disintegrating, keeping one foot planted at work gave me a sense of stability and normalcy. Work had always been helpful through tough times. After every breakup, I was glad I had my professional obligations to keep me grounded (and distracted). It would’ve been too disorienting to leave work altogether. Besides, I still didn’t have a real sense of how long Mom had left. Six months? A year? Two? In any case, I needed some time to catch my breath and come to terms with what was happening.

  * * *

  —

  BUT I STILL felt torn when I wasn’t with Mom. I hated the feeling that time was running out and I wasn’t taking advantage of every minute available to us. On the other hand, it’s not as though I could’ve spent every day with her anyway. Mom was busy. She was still keeping her regular appointments with her herbalist, her reflexologist, and her energy healer. And she was still maintaining her daily routine, which included the Rife machine, the infrared sauna, and meditation. She didn’t want me around all the time.

  I began to resent her alternative treatments all the more, if that was even possible. Not only had they led to her dying in the first place, but now they were eating up what precious time she had left, time she could be spending with me.

  Yet I also recognized that her regimen gave her something to focus on. And by that point I was actually fine with her continuing to believe. If she woke up and regretted not having gotten the surgery five years before, it would just be too painful—for both of us. For so long I’d hoped she’d snap out of it and come to her senses, but now it was probably best that she didn’t. If a glimmer of hope made her feel positive, that’s what was most important.

  * * *

  —

  FOR MOM, HOPE next came in the form of cannabis oil. With hardly any chips left to play, she decided to go all in on weed sap. She learned about the miracle extract from a video called Run from the Cure (the cure being Western medicine). “Everyone in the video got better,” Mom said. The host, Rick Simpson, had named his oil “Phoenix Tears” after watching a Harry Potter movie.

  Mom was determined to score some of these magical Hogwarts tears, and as it happened, Aunt Barbara had a friend who knew a jazz musician who made the proper recipe. This was months before weed dispensaries started popping up around the city, so Mom had to get her drugs the old-fashioned way: by asking her child to take her to her dealer’s place.

  As we drove up to the old loft building on College Street, it was obvious that it would be too hard for Mom to climb the stairs. I took a deep breath and flashed her an ironic grin. “Thanks, sweetie,” she said.

  While Mom waited in the car, I hopped up the stairwell to the jazzman’s apartment. I handed him Mom’s whack of cash, and he put five Phoenix Tears—branded ampules in a brown paper bag. I dashed back down, relieved by the swiftness of the transaction, and saw my friend Nicola standing in the lobby. Busted.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  I held up my bag and smiled. “Just buying some stuff for Mother.”

  Nicola laughed. She was familiar with Mom’s proclivities. They’d connected over their mutual love of literature and woo-woo, exchanging hot tips about astrologers and silent meditation retreats in Oaxaca. She came outside to the car with me. “Hi, Elaine,” she said as Mom rolled down her window. It was subtle, but a passing look on Nicola’s face told me she was registering just how frail Mom had become. For the first time, I was seeing Mom’s state through the eyes of a friend. My heart sank. I forced a laugh about our run-in. As I started the car, Nicola entertained Mom’s sales pitch for Phoenix Tears and kindly offered to get her a re-up whenever she needed it.

  Mom began a regimen of rubbing a drop of the dark gooey oil on her gums twice a day. When I asked her how it was going a few days later, she reported having felt a little disoriented. “Whatever. It’s not like I have executive meetings,” she joked.

  Mom dialed back the dosage, but meanwhile I was living in my own hazy dream world. I tried to appear normal, and I probably did, but I was sinking deeper into my head. The scrolling ticker was still ever-present and growing louder: MY MOM IS GOING TO DIE, MY MOM IS GOING TO DIE, MY MOM IS GOING TO DIE. I was anxious all the time. The air felt thick to breathe. I couldn’t relax. I yearned for the days when I could take my mom—her very existence—for granted, knowing that, if I felt like it, she was just a phone call away.

  I knew things were about to get dramatically worse, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle it. When would life ever be okay again? Would it ever be okay again? Logically I knew things would have to get irrevocably worse before they could ever creep back toward something better. But I couldn’t even imagine “better,” because a life without Mom could never amount to “better.” I refused to consider a future without her in it. This was the paradox I wrestled with every night as I lay awake in bed. As someone who relied on the equanimity of logic, I was confronted with a problem that overpowered every cerebral muscle I depended on to make sense of the world. This wasn’t something I could think my way out of.

  * * *

  —

  MOLLY’S BIRTHDAY was coming up, and I’d planned a weekend getaway for us at a charming country inn with a private cabin that had a fireplace and outdoor hot tub. It was the first birthday of hers we’d be celebrating together since we started dating, and I really wanted to do something special for it. Between my broken leg, work trauma, and dying Mom, Molly was proving to be my rock. She was sticking with me through thick and thicker.

  That Saturday I tried my best to give her my full attention, but I was distracted from the moment we hit the road. I wasn’t able to enjoy the picturesque scenery or our five-course candlelit dinner. Our “peaceful surroundings” made me feel anything but relaxed. The rushing sound of the cascading waterfalls only increased my agitation. Time was slipping away. We were only an hour from the city, but I felt homesick. I’d never considered myself a mama’s boy, but now I couldn’t deny that Mom was the most important woman in my life. I wished I was able to give more to Molly, to be present for her, but it was next to impossible in the face of Mom’s impending death.

  In the morning I couldn’t wait to get back to the city. Before we got into the car I gave Mom a call and was immediately soothed by the sound of her voice. I told her that I wanted us to spend more time together. She promised we would. We made plans right then to take one last roa
d trip the next weekend to her friend Irene’s country house in the Bruce Peninsula. I swung back from child to parent; I kept thinking, From now on I’m not gonna let you out of my sight.

  I knew Mom enjoyed my company, but the truth was she needed me too. Although it had always been her rule never to lean on me, she’d become too weak to do many of the things she used to do. She just couldn’t continue being so damn fiercely independent. It wasn’t easy for her, but she slowly allowed herself to rely on me more and more (beyond end-of-life planning and drug runs). A switch had flipped. Mom had realized that she didn’t want to do “this dying thing,” as she called it, on her own.

  In the weeks following Mom’s terminal diagnosis, we tried to carry on somewhat as usual. We celebrated Passover as a family, which we actually hadn’t done in years. We threw Teddy a party for his seventy-fifth birthday and retirement from the judiciary. I spoke to an investigative reporter who was writing a book about Jian. (You know, the usual stuff.) I don’t remember exactly how I was able to get out of bed every morning and put one foot in front of the other. I guess I didn’t really have a choice. Life kept coming. Perhaps sometime in the future I could collapse, but for now the show had to go on.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER MONTHS IN limbo, we relaunched q with an eclectic range of guests before a live audience at the CBC. Shad interviewed WTF host Marc Maron about his techniques of the trade, and Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq put on an electrifying musical performance. The packed theatre cheered. There was a lot of pressure riding on this day, and we appeared to have pulled it off. Afterward we took celebratory photos with our newly branded lowercase q tote bags. For management it represented the pinnacle of their Moving On campaign. We were genuinely happy to be going forward with our lovely new host, though for several of us long-time producers, moving on wouldn’t be so simple as a new letter case and theme song.