Written An Hour Before The Palisades Fire

Write About My Mom

Everyone’s mom is dead or dying lately. I feel like I should be writing about it. I should be writing about mine. I was so ashamed of the circumstances of her dying, and terrified by them. My circumstances were shameful and perilous at the time, and that was terrifying, too.

My mother was in a fire and took nine days to die. The fire was in our apartment in the Palisades. I had moved out six weeks previously. Because of the way and reasons I left (badly, more shame, on bridge-burning borrowed money, with a really villainous man I very wrongly thought I could talk into loving me by the end of my grace period), I could not/did not get back to California from Maine during those nine days. Because of the amount of damage and destruction to the apartment and the one above, I was afraid I would be charged with something if I did try to come back. Because of the barbiturates I was still hooked on and running out of, I could not imagine lasting by her bedside through a detox even if I were able to get help from the villainous man’s wealthy family. (His mom took me out for lunch at a Thai restaurant to ask how he was coping with my mother’s violent death, though, so I knew she cared). (That was surreal. She picked me up from the villainous man’s shitheap in her Cadillac Escalade and genteelly lectured me about her son’s previous experience with death, his own father’s still being quite a challenge for him to handle all these years later, so its important I let her know how he’s doing in the wake of my mother’s misfortune, while I was thinking how one tire off her car would buy me a roundtrip ticket to the Grossman Burn Unit in Woodland Hills but instead she was handing me old basil from her garden and taking me to happy hour lunch at the shithheap thai place down the street and then while we were eating the homicide detective called me and I had to identify my mother in absentia so he could be sure it was the same person and then answer questions about cigarettes and enemies and the whole time the villainous man’s mom stared DAGGERS at me like babe it’s the murder cops about my barbecued mom sorry I can’t fawn over the spring roll sweepins.)

My mom and I did have Durable Power of Attorney forms done as well as her DNR a few years before this (May 3, 2016), which I kept copies of in my bag at all times, only I did mention earlier the barbiturates and also the villainous man, both elements which conspired to make the red folder and its vital forms totally impossible to find in the week following my mom’s burning (but preceding her death, understand). I tore around desperately while the villainous man Skyped with a galpal, then called the attorney who had drawn up the forms. He asn’t in the office. I started leaving messages. Three days later a secretary called me to say the attorney was on vacation and unreachable for another four days. During this week I spoke to attending doctors on the burn unit twice a day.

The doctors were suspicious of me. They didn’t understand why I wasn’t with my mother then or now. They didn’t understand what was keeping me from coming at once, although they were clear in careful voices to tell me, when I asked helplessly, that if I couldn’t be there, I couldn’t be there. They also weren’t the ones who notified me about my mother. No one did. I learned about the fire from an unscrupulous Armenian woman running a social security scam “care home” out of her own house who I had refused to let my mother sign her social security over to. I was on the phone with this woman for forty five minutes (it was our first conversation, I had tried to reach her for weeks, I had never met her, a former patient of my mother’s found the place, the same guy I burnthe bridges borrowing money from, and another former patient gave my mothers info to the woman’s emergency room haunt and coworker when my mother fell on the sidewalk a few weeks earlier, just shady shit all around) refusing to sign off (that’s that power of attorney) and she says to me, “Well, did you know your mother was in a fire last night?”

I enlisted a third patient of my mother’s who was a volunteer sheriff to help me find out what happened, and a former high school classmate -cum-physician with privileges at that ER to track her the rest of the way to Grossman. The hospital coordinators were glad to hear form em because I was able to help identify her. I don’t know what happened to her ID, the house was a mess before it burnt down though. But the doctors were less so, because I could not furnish them with the paperwork necessary to prove to them I had a vested and legal interest in stopping them from keeping my mom alive, or giving her grafts, or scraping her throat, or doing any of the shit I found out they had (understandably) been doing. SO those twice a day conversations were pretty fraught feeling.

May 3^nd the attorney finally fucking called me, sounding harrowed and anxious to be quit of the tragedy. The villainous man grudgingly gave me the fax number of his work (lobster dock), and more grudgingly drove me to get the forms and resend them to Grossman, for which I had to write a check to his boss. Then the forms had to be verified and approved. Then people from the end of life service had to call me. He pulled over on the freeway to do it, as soon as he got the approval. His name was Victor. He put me in touch with the crematorium, too. And told me how to get in touch with the coroner and get death certificates. Then I spoke to the attending on call who told me what they planned to do in terms of dilaudid, propafol, and morphine. About three hours later, Maria, the nurse, called me to say, “I wanted you to know your mother has passed. I was with her.”

Thanks, Maria.

Thanks, Victor.

Fuck just about everybody else.

It’s a fairly hard set of circumstances that is easy to be ashamed of and terrified by. But that’s not the point. The point is to talk about the after. And I can’t tell that story without saying how it started. How it started is how my mom ended. What I kept of her thereafter, where I even succeeded, what memories and dark grace chose me, were informed by that truly pitiful ending. And by my pitiful role in it.