Begging For Acceptance

For

Kasia

and all her family, past, present and future

Prologue

SEEING MOM LYING ON the padded hospital bath cart, terrorized by her mangled condition, a rush of cold dread raced through me I'd never known.  Mom's nurse stood opposite the cart from me, silently appraising my willingness to take over for her at that moment, knowing it wouldn't have been medically or legally wise to have me participate then, regardless.  There are rules for such things under Mom's circumstances, such as advance instructions and skill checks.  Besides, having just made my second flight from normal life with family far away to take my place again within this deepening well of constant physical, emotional and spiritual pain, I was as yet otherwise unprepared for Mom's daily shower.  Entering that room, I was still carrying two overstuffed purses and a wild array of interesting paraphernalia including two enormous metal hoops over my arms.  Mom had insisted I bring these to her from her home near Seattle so she could work on an elaborate macramé project to keep her busy when she wasn't either in surgery or therapy.  I was somewhat exhausted being fresh off the plane after a four-hour flight, having trudged more luggage through long lines and small spaces than one person ever expects to carry without assistance.  Upon reaching Mom's empty hospital room and asking where she was at that moment, I was directed to the shower room, told to go inside and say hello, that Mom had been expecting me and wanted to see me as soon as I got in.  I'm sure I must have looked pretty silly at that moment as well as while negotiating airports, struggling with Mom's many requested items stuffed into my winter coat pockets on a very warm fall day in Chicago.  I'd brought an enormous amount of required things that, as it turned out, were ignored and carried back to Seattle over three weeks later when I returned home.  Mom's level of desire to work on craft projects at which she was so expert was infinitely greater than her current emotional ability to perform them.

For the present, I'd understood I was there to attend frequent discussions with doctors, make sure my parents' bills got paid as the months dragged on, discuss eventualities with local relatives, and spend a little time at odd moments with Dad in whichever ICU he was moved to from time to time.  Up until then, I hadn't known that more than one kind of intensive-care unit existed.  This hospital had varying types, depending on diagnoses.  I prayed many times his coma would end positively or else that he be spared, through a peaceful death, what surely would have been instead a continuing, endless agony.  But as yet, even thinking about his likely death left me too desolate, too unwound to contemplate it.  Mostly, though, I was there to visit with Mom hour after hour, to keep her company and try to lift her spirits from a depth I couldn't fathom.  I didn't yet know how far to proceed.  This was a new, twilight zone-like territory for every family member involved.  I also hadn't a clue how much would actually be demanded of me by those I loved in order to achieve what became a series of unattainable goals.

I knew to a point what this drastic change in my parents' lives would likely demand from me and my young children.  I was looking into my mother's tearful eyes, knowing from experience that her expectations would become so much greater than appropriate or even possible to deliver.  She later came to believe she could be physically rehabilitated without sustaining the painful, demanding, fearful work to achieve it.  She insisted that I should endeavor to make her current misery bearable for her and that her welfare should now become my primary concern.

I remember so much lifelong emotional manipulation.  While I was a child she carelessly held power and sometimes used it harshly.  In her current diminished state, she still expected me to quietly consent to whatever her new claims would become, regardless of the costs to me and my family, according to her own definition of what all good, oldest daughters are traditionally expected to do without question.  She saw it as her due, not as acts of familial love by a caregiver, her daughter or anyone else.  I don't think she ever trusted the kind of caring that's beneficial for both parties and freely given.

I was the oldest of four children in a household where Mom, from much too early in my childhood, preferred to follow her professional ambitions and leave many of the day-to-day chores and child raising to me and a weekly cleaning lady.  I saw the child-like terror driving her at that moment though.  I wished then I wasn't so dependably accessible, so sure to fall into a role that meant negating my own and my family's privacy no matter what new situation would later arise; however, I realized my responsibilities were going to be determined essentially by her emotional state more than the physical, and by her overwhelming neediness on other levels that had always existed, on how much she would expect others to take care of her.

We didn't yet know if Dad would live from one surgery to another.  It was always more likely that he would not.

As our hospital room visits dragged on day after day, week after week, conversational topics were finally depleted.  They descended into my lengthy narrations and later into ridiculous babbling as her eyes bored into me in mute annoyance.  I mentally groped for any kind of minutia to pass the endless hours as I crocheted enough dishcloths to stock several kitchens for years.  I wanted desperately to convince Mom I was there for her to the best of my ability, that I would continue to be there; but at key moments she'd slice me to ribbons by insisting I didn't really want to be with her at all, that I couldn't wait to leave her and be off gallivanting with my cousin Tom Arden.  She moaned that my sister would be so much more comforting to her than I was and that she wished Madeleine could come again immediately to take my place.  Mom's brothers and she dubbed me Madame Defarge with my constant knitting while keeping a death watch over her and Dad.  Worst of all, after an exhausting day and the long drive to my Granny Huffington's Gary, Indiana, apartment where we congregated, were the dreaded emergency phone calls.  The phone would ring, everyone would freeze, and I'd force myself to walk over to pick it up.  It seemed the only incoming calls were from hospital staff detailing another physical set-back for Mom, or Dad, or them both, always of life and death import.  I had to decide while on the phone, immediately, whether another operation should begin, registering aloud as required that any surgery could swiftly result in death for either of my parents at that point anyway, even before any of us could drive back to the hospital.  There were always so many emergencies.

Autumn of The Year After the Mountain Blew[1] became worse than we could have expected, and then time continued to pass whether we were ready for it or not.  Children were eventually born, houses bought and sold, people entered and exited from our lives—normal activities went on as if nothing had changed at all.

Over time we got used to seeing it wasn't really Mt. Rainier's eruption we should have feared, even after all the warnings we'd been raised with.  It was another peak entirely that jerked our adult attention into high gear that year.  In addition to that was a deep, never-ending black hole that opened up several months later and menaced all our closest relatives, but most surely devoured my parents, my sister, two brothers and me when Dad's airplane crashed.

I came to envision Mount Saint Helens as a metaphor for my extended family's weakened condition.  It had been so beautiful yet deceptively dangerous, its summit often obscured by seasons of overcast skies, occasionally fully gleaming in the sun, glorious and perfectly round, a peak I'd thought was even more spectacular than the more famous Mount Fuji.  After enduring months of tremors, rumblings, eruption anticipation and much public and governmental speculation of what might actually occur, with five blasts of its inner core, Saint Helens roiled its legacy into modern history leaving us locals impotent and reeling.  It would be years before we put our fears aside.  Inventive entrepreneurs, however, quickly found ways to profit from what had killed some and wreaked havoc upon many.  They opened interpretive centers, advertised tours of the devastation with gaudy billboards along the freeway, or sold artsy glass creations designed from tons of lifeless ash.

August 14, 1980 wouldn't have become memorable except for the way it began.  My seven-year-old daughter Amy and I were doing our chores when the phone rang.  In disbelief I listened to a woman recount events elsewhere, in the skies over Illinois, where one of those undetected micro-squalls burst upon my dad's home built airplane while he and Mom were on their way back to Seattle.  My mind raced through the earlier dread I'd felt because, for the first time that my parents had taken a vacation, they hadn't left me detailed trip plans.  Friends didn't understand how unsettling this was for me.  Yes, they were going to the annual Fly In at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a favorite event for all the seven years it took Dad to build his own plane in his upstairs shop of the big house along the Fairwood Greens golf course.

I'd known relatives in Indiana would be visited before their return flight.  When exactly did they leave Indiana, or even fly out of Seattle in the first place?  It bothered me later that I didn't have that information as I'd always been given it in the past.  It wasn't until after they'd flown away that I remembered Mom hadn't told me.

That early August morning while listening to the woman on the phone, I sensed why sharing plans in advance is so vital.  It seemed to me then, if I'd known them, this nightmare conversation wouldn't be taking place, none of this distortion would be intruding.  But the woman didn't give me much time to reflect.  She insisted I repeat back to her what she told me.  I sat down on a kitchen chair near the window, giving back phrase after phrase, when I noticed my little daughter standing uncertain before me.  Her hand came slowly to my shoulder, with fright in her eyes, and tears beginning.  I had to get control of myself for her sake.  I hadn't yet realized I'd lost it.  I hung up the phone and we cried a minute while holding each other.  My shaken daughter then closed herself off in her bedroom, and I went into action.

Calling my sister Madeline put me into Mom mode.  That I was used to.  That I could deal with.  I needed something to do, some positive steps to take in order to transport me immediately to the Chicago spinal cord injury hospital, one of only ten in