There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me (45 page)

I stood out in the hospital corridor on an iPhone whose reception went in and out because of all the machines and signals, and I told Lila my mother might need surgery and asked her if my mother had ever given her any inkling as to her wishes should she die on the table during an operation. Her reply was the last thing I expected.

“All I can think about is that little boy.”

“Excuse me?”

“All I can think of is that little boy.”

“What does any of this have to do with what I just asked you? Does she want to be resuscitated or not?”

“Oh, your mother never planned on dying.”

Holy fuck!
I thought. I was going insane. The doctors were all waiting inside the tiny room for me to check a box and they gave me the impression that time was of the essence, and I was just now actually learning a hugely powerful piece of information. I settled my reeling mind and regained my composure.

“Are you intimating that there is a grave some place and I need to start to find it so Mom can be buried next to a brother I never met? And does that mean she wants DNR or not?”

“Well, I remember a medallion that the priest gave your mother and me. I had it for years but it fell down the drain and when I found it, it was all black. He gave them to us after doing a small Mass for the baby. I think he was buried but can’t remember where.”

“You know what, I’ll call you back! Thank you, and I’ll keep you posted as soon as I get more info.”

I checked the box for “Do Not Resuscitate.” I reasoned that if she went, she would not be able to withstand the defibrillator paddles anyway. She was Catholic so I assumed she would let God make up his own mind. And even if Mom had wanted to be kept alive at all costs forever, I didn’t want that. I was sure I couldn’t handle it.

I signed the sheet, and as I was bent over the clipboard atop the tray table, my mom’s favorite necklace, which I’d recently begun wearing, swung out over the page. It was a big gold medal of the Virgin Mary that some guy had given her along with a little aluminum disk, exactly like the one that Lila had just described to me. I had seen this medal my entire life and never knew why she wore it. I went home in slight shock at the day’s events.

I was informed that the doctor had chosen not to operate on her arm for fear that the surgery might be too stressful. Mom was actually recovering and would probably be able to leave the hospital in a day
or two, once the pneumonia cleared. DNR was no longer on the table, but the medal still was.

•   •   •

It was time to deal with the other matter. I got a glass of wine and called Lila back.

Now, finally, I heard the true story about Baby John, a secret Mom had kept almost her whole life. Mom had gotten pregnant with a man named Philip Brady. She gave birth to a boy and named him John after her dad and brother.

She had met the father at the Peppermint Lounge in Manhattan. He was married. He knew she was pregnant. Mom promised not to get him in trouble for having an affair. She must have said she wouldn’t say a thing to anybody or ask for money, but wanted to have the baby. This was obviously Mom’s modus operandi, a modern and sadly sweet one at that.

As far as I can tell, Mom had also been with Murray (the same boyfriend she’d surprised by removing her fur coat), who was eighteen years her senior. Somehow they were dating when Mom went into labor and he was at the hospital for the delivery. He was convinced the kid was his, and his name was put on the birth certificate. She had the baby, but Lila told me that he died in the hospital within twenty-four hours. The baby maintains Murray’s last name and supposedly is buried somewhere in New York. At the burial, a priest evidently performed a service and then returned to give that saint’s charm to both my mom and Lila, her best friend and my future godmother. I assume Lila had been meant to be named godmother to Baby John as well.

It all made more sense now. Her terror when she had me so early. The fear, the squeaky door, the poop, the worry about the crib turned to the wall indicating a kid would be adopted. The strap attached around the chest. She panicked because she’d had a loss before. She was gripping on to a life—hers, mine, and Baby John’s.

The memory must have been too devastating for her to drudge up, and my own miscarriage must have derailed her and thrust her back to that horrible memory of her own loss. No wonder she couldn’t help me.

I remember sitting on the floor with my friend Stephanie years earlier, after my failed attempts at conception and my eventual miscarriage, thinking,
Why am I not allowed to be normal and have a baby like anybody else? I don’t work properly. I am a failure.
Mom always wanted me to be special, and I worried that this failure to become a mother was a by-product of being so “unique.” Of course I wasn’t normal. I was Brooke Shields. I wasn’t perfect, though, obviously, was I?

No matter what it all meant, I had finally learned the whole story, or as much as was available.

•   •   •

Once Mom was back at the residence, it seemed that she was exhausted and began spending most of her time in her own room instead of in the floor’s common area with the TV. She had totally stopped her reception-area visits. Her sister-in-law and nephew and nieces came to visit, as did Lisa, Bob, Lila, Stephanie, and Lyda and a couple other close friends of mine who knew my mom in her later years. Her full-blood sister never bothered. It was tough on Diana and she explained she did not want to see Mom the way she was. She was satisfied remembering the laughter and the fun all of us had had together.

I was with Mom the whole time at the end. It was so hard to watch her all bent and rigid as if rigor mortis had already begun to take hold. Except for the liquids that gave her pneumonia in the hospital, Mom had not eaten in almost a month. We called in hospice to start to visit once or twice a week. When I told them how long she had gone without food, they said they had never seen anything like it
before. Of course not. This was Teri Terrific. She defied the odds. This was about a few weeks until the end.

Her face was becoming pale and twisted and she’d bite anything that got near her mouth, including Lisa’s neck once as she was trying to tuck in a sheet. Either her lips were tightly pursed or her mouth gaped open. Her skin was remarkably smooth, soft, and unwrinkled.

The only sounds she emitted were dry mumbles, where her chin would flap like a ventriloquist dummy and her lips would dryly flutter. Cries of resistance could be heard every time someone tried to move her at all. Her fractured arm must have been excruciatingly painful. Her hospice aides flipped her over like a dead body in order to wash her and change her diaper and powder her. The bizarrely green-brown contents of her body were just the same color as an infant’s.

Her fists were clenched, and whenever I tried to open her fingers to clean her palms, she would try to bite my hands and scream through clenched teeth. She once bit the lose skin that covered my knuckle. She clenched down and simply would not let go and just bit and bit. As at the elbow, there are no nerve endings, so I just let her bite as much as she wanted. She wasn’t strong enough to break the skin. She was never able to relax, not once during that time. To get disengaged from her clenches, I pried her jaw open like I do with my dogs when they pick up something from the ground and won’t give it back to me. Biting never seemed to give her any relief, either. I guess she simply did not want to go. The feeling of fear radiated from her and all throughout the room.

At times Mom had fits of emotion, widening her eyes and looking terrified. At others, she would gaze up with a deeply worried expression and stare at a spot on the ceiling, scared and with seeming anticipation toward something. Lila told me she was looking at the
angels, but she looked too frightened to me. She looked like she was seeing the Grim Reaper. I thought anything divine was supposed to elicit beautiful and relaxed emotions. Mom’s eyes pooled with fear and panic.

•   •   •

The end finally arrived in late October 2012. As the fates would dictate, it happened that this period of time was devastating not just for me but for the entire East Coast as well. Hurricane Sandy had ravaged New York City as well as the entire coastline.

It was the deadliest and most destructive of the year and the second costliest in US history. Unofficially known as Superstorm Sandy, it hit New York and New Jersey on October 29 and created havoc. In the city alone we were experiencing a widespread power outage and a halt to life as we knew it. I was getting the feeling that Mom was getting close to dying because she was so unresponsive.

I did not have the awareness or the perspective to see the personal symbolism in all of it. New York City had no electricity, no water, no public transportation, and the National Guard was patrolling the streets. And those of us in Manhattan were considered the lucky ones. Other parts of the city looked like war-torn areas in need of real relief.

There was no gas to be bought, so when our car made its last trip uptown for me to get to Mom I had no way of getting back. So I stayed there. There was a declaration of a statewide state of emergency and Governor Cuomo had requested a pre-disaster declaration on October 26. I joked to my mom that if only I had gone to her years ago and requested a pre-disaster declaration, maybe things would have turned out differently.

I came to refer to all of it as Hurricane Teri. Close friends would nod in agreement when I said it was all by design. My mom would
never allow herself to be overshadowed by anything, especially not a hurricane with a name like Sandy. It was as if Mom were spiritually declaring, “Fuck you, Sandy! I’m Teri and ya ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

I’d joke that she had orchestrated the whole thing so I would have to stay by her side. I was by no means minimizing the pain and loss and devastation that Sandy created and that countless were still enduring—I was trying to stay present and intact, and humor was once again my only resource.

On October 30, the night before she died, I was sitting in a chair next to her bed and three women from the staff, who had ended their workday, popped their heads in and asked if they could say good-bye. I was surprised. I’d been coming there for weeks—how did they know now was the time to say good-bye?

They handed me a three-quarters-full bottle of Poland Spring water. Since we were smack in the middle of Sandy’s wrath and were rationing everything, I made no mention of the cracked seal on the cap. (It didn’t cross my mind that this residence had generators and hoards of supplies should disaster strike. Everything was available that people needed.)

I took the plastic bottle and held it in my hand and thanked them. The more maternal one of the three kept saying, “We are worried about you. You have not eaten or had anything to drink in a while and we are worried you are not staying hydrated.”

I said I was fine. A friend of mine had brought me soup earlier, and to be honest, I was (shh . . .) planning on having a snuck-in Duvel in a bit. They stood for a while and then suddenly, strangely, all plopped down on the floor in Mom’s tiny room. Well, I figured they were planning on staying for a while so I joined them. Mom was propped up as usual on multiple pillows and showed no signs of awareness that anybody was in the room.

The same staff member reiterated that they were concerned that I
was not staying hydrated. I needed to drink!
OK
, I thought.
Wow, stop bugging me. . . . I will show you that I will drink.

I took a huge swig of what I thought would be water from my little plastic bottle, only to discover that my throat was on fire with pure, marshmallow-flavored vodka! Not wanting to seem unappreciative or square at all, I sputtered, “Wow . . . thanks. . . . I needed that!”

Smiling and nodding, one of the ladies proudly announced it was very new and was called Fluffed vodka. Wasn’t it delicious? Huh? I felt like gagging. I hate any flavored anything. I drink my vodka straight and with a twist. No chocolate, cake, eggnog, or cotton-candy-flavored vodka for me, ever. But, I guess, it was time to make an exception. Down the hatch with another smaller gulp.

Then one by one each of these beautiful, hardworking, warm relative strangers began pouring shots from their own vodka in plastic bottles, into tiny pill cups, like I’d seen in the movie
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, and raising them to my mom. The toasts began. We raised our mini “glasses” as each person told her version of how my mom had affected her life.

One woman still in her hairnet began by saying, “I call her ‘My T.’” Another said she liked to call her “Teri Town.” Others preferred “Mamma T” or “T” or simply “T-town.”

Mom lay catatonic in her bed, mouth open, seemingly oblivious to what was happening. The bottom half of her body looked like it had melded into the mattress. Only her head and shoulders, propped up on the pillows, seemed to be in the room.

One story involved Mom going up to a woman and saying what a beautiful smile she had—the first time she had ever received such a compliment in her life. Another told a story about a daytime attendant who always asked incredibly obvious questions. Mom’s new friend was wheeling in the lunch tray, like she did every day at the same time, and this person asked if it was lunchtime. The attendant rolled her eyes, and Mom, seeing the exchange, made a face accompanied by
a rude gesture, signifying that she, too, thought the question was dumb. Mom made people feel noticed.

Another toast included how Mom knew when one of the ladies was having a bad day and was trying not to show it to the residents. Mom went over to her and said that no matter what was going on in her life, it would all end up OK in the long run.

She touched these women in varying ways and they kept repeating how much the staff as a whole had adored her. One of the women said that she always knew that Mom “had a little Dominican in her.” As did I, evidently, from the way I “gulped down that vodka!” This comment incited a mini-debate over whether Mom was more Dominican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban and what the merits of all were.