Sometimes We Make Our Own Hard

Here it is, the final video interview, dated January 5, 2021. Mom has exactly 19 weeks left in her life, and this is the video where I can see the effects of the brain metasteses most clearly. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be--my memory must have been jumping ahead to how she was when I visited her in Florida that April—but it’s there. She’s slower in her responses and she’s mixing up details. She looks so tired. Her face is swollen almost beyond recognition. That is not my mother, I remember thinking when we logged on. Watching this deterioration is excrutiating.

---

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Prior to this interview, we had decided she would spend time talking about the most important people in her life one by one here at the end. She wanted to start with my sister, Catherine, so I sent her several questions to help her prepare ahead of time.

What is your favorite memory of Catherine?

BIRD BIRD MOMMY I GOT THE BIRD!

Mom recounts a story she loves to tell about having to pry a dead bird from my very proud-of-herself sister’s grip one summer in Kentucky when we were small. “Then we doused her hands in Lysol,” she told me and I told her a similar story wherein my daughter had to pry a dead bird from our dog’s mouth. “And then we doused her in Lysol.”

What do you admire about Catherine?

Her tenacity and perseverance. She panics, but when the chips are down, she's there, you know, there in a heartbeat.

When did you first see evidence of that quality in her?

When she was about 14, 13, 14 years old? Maybe a little older than that, but certainly what she did for me after your father died, helping me, you know, find my way. She was very young to do that. And she did it. She found the place. She did the things. She sure did it. And I never would have known what to do.

I tell Mom that I admire this quality in Cath, too.

It’s a quality you would admire in anybody. But to see it in your sister or your child, that’s a pretty big gift.

Now we remember together her young, difficult preganancy with her daughter, Lauren.

It was always hard for her. It was. Sometimes we make our own hard. But even as she made her own hard, she corrected as she went forward. She didn’t stay stuck. She’s grown a lot.

Can you talk about a time when Catherine taught you something?

Here, mom starts to describe the Christmas Catherine left for Rocky Mountain Academy. And before I go on, I need to talk about what that place was and what it did to our family.

---

Rocky Mountain Academy was a behavioral modifaction high school for troubled teens in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. It was part of CEDU Educational Services which itself originated from Synanon, a cult connected to hardcore heroin recovery founded in California in the 1960s. My sister was, I guess, a troubled teen. She was willfull and obstinant, sometimes disobedient—a quality my parents particularly struggled with. She partied and smoked cigarettes from an early age. I guess she also messed around with some other illicit substances, but to this day I don’t know what they were. She spent some time in a residential treatment center in Connecticut where we lived and then my parents—at their wit’s end, the story goes—found this special boarding school in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho that cost all the money in their bank account and promised—ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED—that if they sent her there, she’d graduate and come back a new/good/better kid.

It did not do that (spoiler alert: she was already a good kid!) and the story of what happened to my sister at RMA is one that I have yet to fully hear or understand because I have always been too afraid to ask her about it. I am ashamed of this and plan to rectify that, soon.

I have my own memories of the time and they are desperately sad. They include my coming home for Christmas to find my parents depressed and without a tree to decorate. They include my not being allowed to correspond with her because siblings were seen as potential enablers. They include some paintings she sent me at Easter with a letter about how much she missed and loved me. I know that her experience ended with a dramatic “escape” from the facility into the dense Idaho forest during a lightning storm with two other inmates students. When she was returned to the school (and here the details are hazy), she promptly grabbed an administrator by the crotch, leading to her immediate expulsion. My father flew to Idaho to pick her up from a state hospital—another place she did not belong.

Now, here in this video as an answer to the question about things she learned from Catherine, Mom talks about learning from the “strength and humility” her youngest daughter displayed when she left for Idaho.

It’s what helped me get through it. If she had been screaming and sobbing… but she wasn’t. She put her big girl pants on at the age of 15? She did what she thought she had to do. She didn’t want to do any of it. But she knew at that point, she did what she knew had to be done and she was able to do it. So this was great strength and tremendous humility in what she did.

Humility.

I can see my face as Mom uses this word and I remember making an in-the-moment choice not to counter it. I also decide not to push on the idea that my sister “did what she thought she had to do.”

Of course she did. She was fifteen years old and given no other choice. I’m also bristling at the comment that Catherine’s demeanor made the time easier for my mother. I am in this moment of writing trying to connect to the deep sadness and desperation I know my parents were feeling back then (they did love her, albeit imperfectly) and trying to give them grace for sending her away, and at the same time frothing with rage at the idea that it was a child’s job to make her own exile easier on her exilers.

She did, she got through it and she came out on the other side.

Yes, I agree. She did. Luckily for all of us.

---

Photo by J Yeo on Unsplash

What would you hope to see for Catherine’s future?

What I want for Catherine is joy and happiness always. Really all I want is for her to just be happy, and I don’t wish mansions or gems. I wish peace, serenity, love and joy. That’s what I wish.

What advice do you have for Catherine as she continues to grow in her life?

Well, the biggest thing for me is that Catherine will actually see and appreciate who Catherine is. I think she still struggles with some of that.

What are the qualities that you see in her that you hope she can appreciate?

The qualities that I hope she’ll appreciate are the fact that she is beautiful inside and out. That she is a gift to all of us. She needs to know that she’s a gift to all of us. She doesn’t feel that in a lot of places in her life. She seems to be developing some relationships with a couple of my brothers, which is very nice to see. Not necessary, but nice to see because they love her. I mean, my brother Tommy, he thinks there’s nothing better than Catherine. She is very special.

I completely agree. Very, beautiful and very, very special.

I would also add: strong as steel.

---

Photo by Noor Sethi on Unsplash

Mom felt like she had more to say about Catherine at the end of this much shorter video but she was losing her focus and her energy. I told her not to worry, she could take another day or two to collect her thoughts and we could either add on to what we already had or else re-record the whole conversation. I don’t know what I could have been thinking—there was no way we’d be able to re-record it given her health.

And I don’t know what stopped us from continuing with videos about Gary, Sarah & Kelly, my niece, my kids, her siblings… I mean, lung cancer stopped us, obviously. But was there something else that cropped up? Did she have a sudden decline that I’m not recalling? I don’t know.

Here at the end of viewing the videos, I also don’t know what comes next. I titled this post after the thing Mom said about Catherine “making her own hard,” and I feel a little like that’s what I’ve done to myself with this project. I have other prose and poetry manuscripts that I could surely spend my time on in meaningful ways, but I feel a sense of obligation and, more importantly, (morbid?) curiosity about where this is going to take me.

The videos are done but not the exploration. I don’t know what comes next but I’m ready to pull on the threads I’ve woven here and maybe unravel some of the fabric of my mother’s life to make a new garment—heavy brocade—to wrap around me as I continue.