Waiting To Exhale

Mom gets breast cancer while I am in New York with Stephen. She calls me, her voice breaking just a little, saying she has bad news, but that it is all going to be all right. Her reports are upbeat. I fly to Texas when she has her surgery. They say they got it all and we are relieved, pretending to be completely reassured of her good health. I can't contemplate her death for any length of time without going to pieces, particularly since as a child I endlessly obsessed about the possibility that she would die so often and so intensely that I sometimes made myself sick with asthma attacks and stomach pain. Year later I tell that to the psychic who now stays with our miniature dachshunds when we're out of town, and she says that from an early age I was psychically aware I would lose my mother too soon, and that this psychic knowledge was part of my possessive attachment to her. Now I live in California. I have taken our oldest dog for shiatsu where the practitioner smudged her to rid her of negative chi. It's easy for me to accept the word of our psychic pet sitter, if for no other reason than my mother's death was the thing I feared most in the world and it happened. Adam took her away from me. Then death did too.

In New York as it is happening I try not to think about it except sometimes at night, with Stephen's steady breathing in the background, and me sitting up, paralyzed. About eight months into it there is a recurrence. Mom and David still keep the reports upbeat. Then my uncle calls and says I don't understand: She is dying, I need to get back to Texas. I'm still grateful to him for that. I might not have had the sense to do it on my own.

This is not supposed to be happening now. I am in love with Stephen, in love for the first time, and I don't have A.I.D.S. And I am writing seriously. My nonexistent acting career (I'll write about that some other time) has finally morphed into what I should be doing.

I started writing a play about a dead mother and the ones she leaves behind.

But I began the script a year before my return to Texas; four months before my 48 year-old mother is diagnosed with anything. As far as I know she is perfectly healthy when I begin the dead mother play. Almost as soon as I finish the script a friend of an acquaintance reads it and options it. She was Delta Burke's manager though she is now suing over the "Designing Women" money. This was the big time. This rush of bliss crashes for no apparent reason before Mom has cancer. Everything is ostensibly coming up roses. But old feelings of failure press into me during my days alone when I am supposed to be writing, I think a lot about illness. And depression. And death.

I'm told that someone asked me when I was three or four if I knew what death was. I don't know the context. Maybe a dog died. Maybe I shot my father in his sleep. Apparently I answered the person that yes, I did know what death was, that it was knowing all the answers to all the questions you have without even asking. Spooky for a kid with no religious background.

Maybe writing the play is what gets me thinking about death so much around then. All the characters are dealing with it, with their guilt, their sorrow. Death starts to seem kind of nice to me, and comfortable, not in a suicidal sense. I just like contemplating the gorgeous quiet, the peace, and the release of it, the relief.

I have this tic that started when I was really young: Wherever I am, whoever I'm with, when they leave the room, the building, the house, or whatever, I listen for the door to close behind them. When I hear that click and know they're gone I can breathe easy. I'm no misanthrope. I might even go so far as to call myself one of the people who need people, though I would stop short of considering myself among the luckiest people in the world. Not surprising that the habit of waiting for doors to close started when I would wait to hear my dad leave the house, knowing it was safe to come out when he was gone. The habit continued though, through the years with my mom and step-dad, through my years in New York, with Stephen, and I still feel it now. I've come to believe it is a sigh of relief, the "Waiting to Exhale" moment of knowing the audience is gone. I can revert to being myself, whomever or whatever that is. I can be like a big blob with no one there to watch, no one there wondering why I'm not better than I actually am.

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