Sacrificing the Chicken

I try not to think about the fact that my mother is dying; 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 of my mother's breast cancer. Mom and her husband David still keep the reports from Austin upbeat. Then my uncle calls my in New York and says don't I 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.

Stephen and I are contemplating changes then anyway. He hates his job and wants to become a teacher. Meeting him and getting my play optioned has satisfied the aims of my return to New York. We have increasingly begun talking about relocating to Los Angeles, a place he has always dreamed of one day living. A place where I don't mind being.

So we move to Texas. Underneath is the understanding that when my mother dies we will move to Los Angeles, but we don't talk about that. Once in Austin the structure of the days with my mother present themselves fully formed. David is exhausted from being the main caretaker for eight months prior while holding down his job so I take over the lead role. I cook for her. We have long talks. She is all I think about, the sole focus of my life.

People who lived in London during World War II sometimes say how wonderful the experience was, scary, but transformational. Everything else fell to the wayside while the importance of living, of feeling took precedence.

It is like that for me with my mother. I'm not even scared. I'm just with her and that's enough. More than enough. It's everything. At some point in the chemotherapy, radiation, macrobiotics, faith healing, meditation, self-help world we live in during her illness, I learn about a Caribbean religious practice called Santeria from my friend Tanya who believes in it wholeheartedly. Her father, a rich stockbroker, also believes. They say their babalao (a kind of witch doctor is the best way I can describe him) can help, but it will cost a lot. When Tanya mentions it to me I have a choice to make about whether I will bring it up with Mom. I am hyper-aware of wanting to make sure every important decision is made by her, not because I don't want the responsibility, but because I believe passionately that I have no special knowledge of what will make her well, that none of us, not even the doctors do, and I'm not going to position myself as some self-proclaimed expert. I don't want to put that on her and I don't want to put it on myself. I knew if she dies I'll have to live with every single choice I have made; every single word I have said. I believe they aren't my choices. They are hers.

We fly to Chicago where the babalao lives. Mom is weakening but you wouldn't necessarily know that to look at her. In fact, she looks better than she has in years, since the macrobiotics and chemo have contributed to a stunning weight loss. She started getting a little heavy once she hit her 40s and now she looks years younger. While in Chicago we are trying to cross a windy street and I shudder to remember that I grow impatient with how slow she is walking. For that moment I forget how sick she is. Why we are here. She becomes a little reproachful, saying it's hard for her to get around, and I am mortified. How could I have let myself for even an instant be so insensitive? There are two isolated moments like that during her illness that haunt me to this day. The other is during a day when a friend of hers is visiting and I feel like Mom is treating me a bit like a flunky. After all, I am there for her, not to provide bedside table service for her friend. I make the horrible mistake of telling her I feel a bit underappreciated. She bursts into tears. "How could you think that? How could you believe I don't appreciate you?" My stomach drops to my knees. How could I make her cry. Why did I say anything.

I block out a lot of the Santeria ceremony itself, even while it is happening. There is a fair amount of blood. A chicken is killed. Maybe a goat. But the clearest image that comes back to me is seeing that the babalao has the same linoleum in his kitchen as my mother, a fact she doesn't much like, whispering to me, "I know, I know," and waving me away when I point it out.

There is confusion about her correct name during the ceremony. Tanya blames the ultimate failure of it to cure my mother on this name confusion. The problem is we don't know my mother's real maiden name, because she isn't sure of it herself. Mom was on her own in South Texas from something like the age of eight, living as a sort of servant girl with a family who had a decidedly Anglo name that she took as her own. When I first became an adult that was the name I gave as her maiden name to financial institutions. But when she is sick we talk a lot about her life. It is never a proper narrative, just bits and pieces.

I learn that she had a Mexican mother and she believed her father was of Indian descent, maybe French-Indian, maybe Mexican-Indian. The fact that she isn't Anglo, and by association, that I am not either, only then fully dawns on me. Family photos make our mixed ethnic background perfectly clear but you don't know you're in denial about something until you stop denying it. Her Latino heritage is never mentioned by the Bernsteins. Photos of me with my brothers from my dad's first wife also make clear the distinction, or at least make it clear that we couldn't possibly have had the same two parents.

My father threatens me once, saying there are things I don't know about my mother, that she had a past. What could he reveal? Did she kill someone? Was she a whore at some point? I don't think so. But who cares? There is nothing he could say that would make me love her differently or think any less of her. I have no shame or embarrassment.

Maybe a week or so before she dies, I am helping her spruce up in bed. She takes a warm washcloth and wipes between her legs, then carefully wraps another cloth around it before handing it to me, saying I shouldn't touch it, that it's dirty. I don't care. I would bury my face in it weeping, except for fear that it might upset her.

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