Mother
Body of my mother broken down, dying. Decomposing into the ground, her body is probably by now dust. When I was a child she had cancer. I hurt myself and it hurt her body, but I never thought that Mommy’s body felt pain: it is like the earth, infinite, unexhaustible, impassible, unaffectable, feeling no pain, neither any sorrow or emptiness. What bullshit. From you I was torn in pain and wailing; the Cesarean scar like the plough’s furrow cutting across the whole empty body of the earth as if it were nothing to tear out the boy-child hidden inside. And they had to use suction because I didn’t want to come out; Jean’s anesthetized body cut open, gaping and raw, and sucked out because I clung to the inside of her, my world.
And the breast that nourished me became sick; its cells betrayed the order describing the body of Mother and grew according to their own plan, their own direction; they nourish themselves on the body hosting them and kill it (and themselves) by growing beyond all limit and restraint; they consume all the resources available to them and the body that hates/loves/grows/rejects its own/other cells continues to nourish/host the monstrous growth that kills it. The only real way to treat cancer (besides extraction) is to slowly kill the person and hope that the tumor dies first. Radiation fatigues. My mother had no tattoos except the spots on her to target the treatment. And anyway it didn’t work: her body, too fertile, continued to strangle itself by too much so they had to cut off the breast (the good one? the bad one?) and she couldn’t lift her arms above her shoulders for months.
Body of the inexhaustible mother never feels any pain because I did not imagine it to; but the inexhaustible body was my imagining too, and the exhausted mother-body was in agony. I hurt myself I hurt myself I hurt myself because there was no alternative and I hurt her I hurt her I hurt her; but there is no end to the pain we can conceal from one another, and it’s indecent to be in pain anyhow, so I continued and she continued. It would have been easier had I just died, but then there would only have been a body that was formerly a mother’s, and my mother as mother would have died with me.
Every time I ran I ran further, and every time I flew I flew higher, and I dug myself into a corner that I could not escape from that she could not get to to save me; because much as she would like to be, mother is not infinite, is not the sky, is not the earth, is only a animal with toes and armpits and mucus like me. Her lips were dry when she died because she couldn’t close her mouth properly; her tongue was swollen and cracked; they had to suck the phlegm out of her lungs with a tube so she could survive long enough to take a picture of her brain that didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.
And alas for the time that could have been but was not and alas for the time that was that should not have been and alas for her whose body never cooperated and alas for me who took more than could be given and alas for us who never saw eye-to-eye except right at the end and alas for the life that was cut short and alas for the lives that lasted too long and alas for the standing around and waiting for death to come and alas for the worrying and hoping that it will not and alas for every child and every parent and all born of flesh and blood and shit and piss and mucus and gunk and alas for every cell in me that flies apart on centrifugal spinning Earth.
For the prodigal son was greeted and hugged and though the brother jealous the mother accosted the mother the brother rebuffed and her love poured onto the no-longer-dead child whom she had lost whom she had found. The story ends there, but I expect that Jesus had in mind the all-mother-god who never dies and not the little-mother-god who does. And goddamn if my little mother did not die but barely a few weeks after I returned to her side: thank god I was there.
“Ungrateful son” does not begin to cover it, neither does “undeserving, arrogant monster.” On the last day she was herself she said to me, “you’re too hard on yourself,” and “spending time with you is the highlight of my day.” And life is made of the tiny birds that sing not knowing where they will sleep and the trees that push their leaves out into the sky knowing full well they will die and fall to earth to rot and the moments of joy that spring upon us unexpected but overturn the engines and machines we build in ourselves to conquer and exploit the freely-given body. For there is nothing more to life but a sequence of moments that go nowhere and come from nowhere but the grave/womb from which we spring and to which we return. And there is no up and no down but only one endless continuing that turns the permanent into dust and the long-lasting into an instant. Even the mountains melt into the sea; why should a person escape the same fate?
Why should the all-seeing all-loving all-crying all-bearing incomprehensible You not also disappear in the flakes of snow or the drops of dew or the scraps of sun? Why should the flesh momentarily gathered together not go the way of all flesh? How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so cruel? How could I have wasted and spurned the only person whose whole life was given over to mine? How could I have wasted the moments? And even when she lay dying I had to leave to take care of myself too because I could not stand there in the dry sterile air and watch her struggle to take breaths who even the day before had been with me in person and spirit and not just in flesh. And when she screamed and fought and cried I felt the minutest fragment of all the sorrow and all the pain and all the doubt and all the loss and all the suffering I had inflicted on myself on her. It was as if her brain just exploded: flames, then darkness.
“FIRE FIRE FIRE HELP HELP HELP” I knew what she meant but I couldn’t help her, because there was no fire except inside her and there was no help except to calm down, but she couldn’t hear us and just screamed like a frightened and lonely child. Much to my step-father’s chagrin she screamed my father’s name, since there is no time in the brain when the latter has all the structure of scrambled eggs. She died, ultimately, because she forgot to clear her throat: she drowned in her own saliva and snot. Was it worth it? Did they learn what they needed to learn from her? An anonymous, unknowable subject-brain in a vat waiting for a future scientist to say “isn’t it a pity?” What I learned when my mother died is that medical doctors are doing the best they can but ultimately do not know nearly as much as they would like to about the human body and can do even less to help it. Virgin territory was spotted off the prow of my mother’s dissolving synapses. The last thing she said to me when she knew I was there was something like “Preston it isn’t working can you fix it” because in the part of her brain still alive she remembered all the times I helped her use the damn television and that was what it felt like to die.
On the day of her funeral the world had the audacity to plan a beautiful day. It was one of the last hot, sunny days of September before the fall really starts in earnest; I never felt more pathetic than being in mourning during the precious last tatters of the summer. The cosmos, the whole world in its eternally-being-made variety, never stopped for anyone. The birds themselves, and the grass and the trees and the clouds and the fish and the worms and the squirrels, die in their season. And the next birds and the next grass and the next trees and the next clouds and the next fish and the next worms and the next squirrels will scamper and play across the distant empty face of the Earth mothering them all even as they pass from the womb to the grave, or the grave to the womb for all the difference it makes. And then the Earth herself will die too like the sun as everything goes to night as the unexhaustible/exhausted fabric of time and being stretches…
And she will never return. The entire cosmos has changed from the least of its component’s crossing from life to unlife; the tiny drop of her body is diffused in the sea of everything and can never be reassembled. What is done is done. What asinine wisdom. Better to do nothing at all than something that cannot be undone. Better not to have been born than to die. Better never to have known her than to have lost her. Better not to have loved than to be broken-hearted. Better to be gone than to be homesick. Better to have done with it than to continue.
