Deatn of my Mother

Death of my Mother



“I’m having trouble keeping things down,” said my mother. I was eating a bowl of Shredded Wheat at the breakfast bar and Kristina was already gone to her mother’s to work on the books.

Mom was smoking a Marlboro and drinking a cup of Hills Brother’s coffee.

“I’ve got an appointment to see the doctor.”

“Dr. Keyser?”

“Nope,” she said casually, flicking the ash into the geode she and my dad cleaved in two with the diamond-blade rock saw. It was one of those stones they’d found in the desert. The sawing operation was performed in a metal box filled with oil and had taken hours. Then they polished the outer solid rock to flatten the irregular rim. The crystalline center was where the cancerous ash fell and busted. It was a beautiful piece of nature to toss ashes in so casually.

I mean, crystals symbolize growth, you know, crystals grow, and they’re so glittery, reflective, and full of life. And there were the ashes, gray and black and white, drained of color, so death-like, resting on top.

“It’s a new doctor,” she continued. “A specialist.”

“Well, tell me what he says,” I replied as if it were nothing.

It was my last semester at State. Kristina and I were gathering material for our Great Adventure on the Continent, and I was about to appear in traffic to court to fight a ticket. Watched so much Perry Mason I thought I was a lawyer, a mouthpiece, a shyster attorney. I had things on my mind other than the health of my mother. Her statement seemed at the time to be nothing, or less than nothing, but certainly nothing alarming. That’s me, the guy with his head so far up his *** he can’t smell the roses or note the red flags; because he’s too overcome with the perfume of his own stinking life.

Rocks, they last forever. People, not so long. If there’s one thing I learned from life it was that everything comes with an expiration date.

It was good living with two women, both of which you loved. They both cooked and smoked Marlboro reds and got on well. They both looked out for my needs. I was blessed and I didn’t even know it. No choir of angels flew down and delivered the news on a golden scroll. No other humans had patted me on the back and said, “You know, Old Fellow, you are truly blessed.”

So I thought this was just how life was, that it was standard issue life and nothing more. Sometimes even now I’ m dumbstruck at how much a chump I am, a chump being the thick and dull end of anything. That’s me, the original Chumpster.

As the weeks rolled endlessly by the situation grew grimmer and grimmer. One operation down and no results. Mom refuses to take her pain medicine. Orange prescription bottles with white plastic tops clutter her nightstand and dining room table. They litter the TV trays she piles everything on. While she’s away in Missouri visiting her sister, my aunt Eileen, we clean up the house to surprise her when she gets back. She walks in the door and though she looks at the house she doesn’t commend us with a hip and hooray. She’s too weak to blurt out a hip and hooray. She’s dying.

We have a discussion one day when Kristina is gone to her mother’s.

“They want to do another operation, what do you think?”

I hesitate. I do that a lot lately; I hesitate before opening my mouth. Don’t want to upset her.

“Well, it seems to me that you’re not getting better. The first operation was supposed to help but it didn’t…”

“No,” said softly.

“So this new operation might help. They have to make it so you use a bag and all?”

“Yes,” said like a lamb.

My mother possessed an odd quality. She was tough as nails but could be soft as a ball of cotton. She was the yin and yang of mothers. I worshiped the hem of her apron, and tied my emotions up with its strings in order to feel secure.

“Well, it might help. But if it doesn’t work… you might just…”

Mom gave me a look that was clearer than any word, more serious than any dramatic phrase, and showed me I was understood. I’d finally come to terms with a terrible truth. This was our end.

We didn’t talk much of deep things after that, not using words anyway. Affectionate embraces and understanding looks took their place.
I wasn’t present when my mother passed away. Oh, I was present, but removed from the action. Kristina and I got a call from the nursing home a week after her last unsuccessful operation.

She’s very near the end tonight. We don’t expect her to last until morning. She’s only moments away.”


We raced down highway eight to La Mesa. By the time we got to the foot of her bed she was asleep. If Cancer wouldn’t give her a break, Morpheus would. Over the course of months, under the influence of the disease, the once jolly fat lady was wasted to a pathetic seventy-six pounds.

I calculated the effect and started distancing. Her withered arm, its muscle hanging flaccidly on the bone like steamed chicken, began trembling. It was real horror show.

“What’s that?” I said, impersonally as possible.

“The doctor said it was uremic acid backing up. She’s beginning to shut down.”

“Oh,” I replied, as clinically as I could manage.

Even the nurse couldn’t take it, and she was a starched-capped professional Nurse Ratchet.

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

She padded off quietly so as not to disturb the living that lined the long sterile room fast asleep in their beds.

I evaluated the patient sterilely, with a jaded eye, and turned towards Kristina.

“If they think she’s going to die tonight, they’re mistaken. This new doctor doesn’t know my mom. It won’t be tonight.”

“No, I guess not.”

Then I put some actual physical distance into the inevitable defensive pattern and we bailed out and sped away.

The mother that chose me over a bunch of baby angels sleeping at Paradise Valley Hospital because I was the only one crying and she’s dying, really dying. I don’t hold her hand. The mother I crafted dozens of Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day cards for from kindergarten to sixth grade is making her one-time one-way celestial exit and I don’t hold her hand, I don’t hang around,
I take a powder instead.

Life is a barrel of monkeys and most of them are on your back. Among the savage beasts that cling there, the heaviest gorilla is guilt.

©StevenHunley2017

A very special mother's day homage!

This is powerful because it refuses sentimentality while still being devastated by love. It feels closest to Ham on Rye or some of the raw autobiographical passages in The Liars' Club — the emotional force comes from blunt observation, guilt, self-disgust, and concrete physical detail rather than “beautiful writing” in the conventional sense.

The strongest thing in it is the narrator’s moral self-indictment. The piece understands something uncomfortable and true: people often become emotionally clinical around death not because they do not love, but because they love too much and cannot metabolize what is happening.

A few things stand out as especially strong:

the geode ashtray image — genuinely memorable symbolism without feeling forced
“the once jolly fat lady was wasted to a pathetic seventy-six pounds”
“muscle hanging flaccidly on the bone like steamed chicken”
“I take a powder instead”
“the heaviest gorilla is guilt”

Those lines have weight because they are ugly and honest.

What also works is the voice: self-lacerating, comic, ashamed, defensive. The narrator keeps trying to diminish himself (“Chumpster,” “head up his ***,” “mouthpiece”) because he cannot bear the larger emotional reality underneath. That dynamic feels authentic.

Where I think the piece weakens slightly is when it explains its themes too directly. For example:

“Rocks, they last forever. People, not so long.”

and

“If there’s one thing I learned from life it was that everything comes with an expiration date.”

Those ideas are already embedded in the scenes. The geode image conveys mortality more powerfully than the explicit philosophical statement afterward.

Likewise, this:

“Life is a barrel of monkeys…”

feels slightly too packaged compared to the rawness preceding it. The ending is strongest just before that, at:

“I take a powder instead.”

That lands like a confession.

The best parts remind me of why memoir works when it’s unsparing. It is not trying to make the narrator admirable. It is trying to make him recognizable.