Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [201]
“I should have done what you did. I should have gone away. Maybe then she would have learned things. She would have learned that she didn’t have to be dependent on other people. She could have survived in her own world, in her own life, made her own friends, learned to turn the TV on. She would have learned to overcome some of her other fears. In many ways, it was her fears that just took her right down—so many ridiculous fears that just totally monopolized her health. You could not erase them, no matter how hard you tried or reasoned. She was afraid of everything. Of filth and cleanliness. Of water and dirt. Of medicine and illness.
“In the end, she wouldn’t accept any help, and the pressure was just too damn much for me. She used to say to me: ‘Why am I so sick? Why is this happening to me?’ I felt like saying: ‘You’re sick because you won’t be healthy. You’re sick because you want to die.’ But I couldn’t let go of that last bit of hope, and as angry as I got with her at times, I couldn’t bring myself to be that mean to her.”
One day it suddenly became apparent to Frank that things had reached a crisis point. For several days, Bessie had been sick. She would lie on her bed for hours, then get up and make her way to her chair in the kitchen. She complained of being exhausted all the time, and she wouldn’t eat anything Frank put in front of her. After a couple of days, Frank said: “Mom, I’m getting an ambulance here.” She became horribly upset at the suggestion.
“I’d been patient for a long time,” Frank said. “Probably too long. It was agonizing to see what she was going through. Finally, after two or three days of her not eating anything, I decided, ‘That’s it.’ ”
Frank called the ambulance and Bessie was taken to a hospital in Milwaukie, screaming that her son was trying to kill her. At the hospital, the doctors told her that her son had done the right thing and she should have come sooner. But she wasn’t having it. She took almost every dish the nurses brought her and threw it against the wall.
Frank went to see her two or three times every day. He saw the color coming back into her face, saw her becoming more cogent. After two days, the doctors said she was going to be okay.
“I was feeling so good,” Frank told me, “I walked all the way back home from the hospital. I got back and I was fixing dinner, and all of a sudden people started banging on the doors. Said, ‘They had to put your mother on this machine.’ They drove me over there, and when I get there, the doctors had her on a machine that’s breathing for her. I’d been there just a short time before and she was talking and looking better. I got upset and I talked to a doctor. He said, ‘Well, we put something in there to kill the infection that she has.’ She’d gotten some kind of infection from not keeping herself clean for so long. But her body rejected the antibiotic.
“She died on the thirtieth of June 1981, sometime in the afternoon. I remember it was a warm day and there was an eclipse going on. She had always been terrified of eclipses. She used to always say she would die during one. It turned out she did.”
I DID NOT KNOW THAT MY MOTHER WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. She hadn’t written my Los Angeles phone number anywhere that Frank could find. She had been dead for two days when word finally got to me. I had been through several family deaths before, but this was the first time that the news crumpled me up into a weeping wreck.
I went home and helped my brother bury her. He was forty years old, and he seemed lost without her.
The night of her funeral, Frank and I stayed at a friend