Losing Mom Part III

Returning to New York had always been a joy for me. This time it was a rite of passage. I had come as a son seeking his mother; instead, I found myself in an empty, memory-haunted house, the head of a family heading for disaster.
Once again, I found myself emotionally, but not practically prepared for crisis. Gregory, who had been supporting Mom since my father's death, was unemployed. Joseph was in a rehab program. Bills were piled up; the mortgage and property taxes hadn't been paid. My parents had managed family finances out of an old shoe box in which they kept payment books, canceled checks, etc. Mom's hospital costs were already in the tens of thousands of dollars and surging daily. Though well-insured, she still owed thousands from her previous surgeries. Our resources essentially consisted of her small savings account, a $2,000 life insurance policy and the modest row house we'd grown up in. Determined to keep the house and our family intact, I found myself worrying about losing both every day.
At the hospital, Mom was being maintained on heavy doses of morphine and little else. We asked that the dosage be cut back and discovered the pain had diminished. Other problems had developed: her feet and ankles had begun to swell with fluid; she couldn't swallow without choking. Her only sustenance was the intravenous solution that dripped slowly into her arms. Every day, untouched containers of soup, pasta, fruit, toast, eggs, Jell-O, tea, lined her window sill.
After ten days, she was finally transfered to Methodist Hospital's third floor cancer ward for chemotherapy. Each day, I'd imagine the runaway cells inexorably growing, approaching some critical mass.
"Do you think this can really help me?" she asked.
"Please, Mom I said, "there's nothing else we can do."
I'd half-convinced myself the harmless-looking liquids in the clear plastic bags above her bed could work some miracle. They were powerful cytotoxins that would kill any fast-growing cells in her body: she would lose her hair, develop sores in her mouth and the lining of her stomach, experience nausea or worse. On Friday night, she was given a cocktail of painkillers and anti-nausea drugs to prepare her for her first treatment.
I arrived early Saturday morning carrying coffee and a newspaper, eager for some hopeful sign. A nurse stopped me outside the room to ask whether Mrs. Coppola should be revived if she went into cardiac arrest. I rushed past her to find Mom semi-conscious, gasping for breath. A nurse was suctioning her throat with a vacuum device. The anti-nausea drugs had supressed the gag reflex that allowed her to clear phlegm: she was drowning in front of my eyes. We stared silently at each other. Half-a-dozen other patients were in distress; the nurse passed the vacuum tube and saline solution to me and left.
Mom revived, survived the first round of treatment. By then, she'd seen herself in a mirror and asked for Father Louis DeTommaso, her pastor. We all took communion together around her bed. Another lifelong image was seared into my consciousness. My relatives had begun placing religious pictures by her bed, alongside those of her grandchildren, Justin, Gabrielle Pia, and Thomas. Her brother Sonny and his wife Madeleine, postponed their annual winter trip to Florida.
In the cancer ward, some patients slept constantly; others never. One woman, suffering from both lymphoma and Alzheimer's disease shrieked through the night. Many of the patients smoked constantly. One of Mom's roomates, a woman apparently without family or friends to support her, endured three days of chemotherapy and then was preparing to make her way home alone. Gloria ordered me to drive her home. She had Greg give $10 to another, indigent patient.
Despite the high tech medicines and the decency of the caregivers, the ward was not a place to inspire hope. Half-a-block away on Seventh Avenue, the shops were ablaze with lights and Christmas decorations; men hawked Christmas trees on the sidewalks while carols played over tinny speakers. Our house, always bright and filled with people at Christmas time, was dark and empty.
Greg and I stayed in shifts. Our relatives visited regularly but we kept the haunted hours. Other families kept similar vigils; many of the "children" were my age. Two brothers, both in their 40s, had flown in from Florida at Thanksgiving to care for their mother. A month later, they were still there "trying to get Mom home for Christmas." At the other end of the scale was the daughter who publicly berated her dying mother for all the "trouble and expense" she was causing. The woman's last months would be spoent shuttling between cancer ward and nursing home.
Three days before Christmas, I asked Mom's permission to return to Atlanta to spend time with my children. She insisted I go.
"I'm okay, I've got plenty of company."
Holidays were important in our family, heralded by huge dinners my parents would spend days preparing. I sensed she was passing on the tradition to me. As I was leaving for the airport, torn between my responsibilites as both father and son, she handed me money for gifts and Christmas cards for Gaby and Thomas. Inside, she'd written,
"Grandma will love you always."
A patient died Christmas Eve. Three days after Christmas, a surgeon had cut into my mother's abdomen attempting to install a feeding tube directly into her stomach. He failed. He told us her liver was so enlarged with tumor, he couldn't find her stomach. A tiny tube he attached to her small intestine pulled free and Mom refused to have it reinstalled.
On New Year's Day, a 43-year-old woman whose husband and daughters had kept a lonely vigil in the room across from us died of brain cancer. Their wails echoed through the ward.
At noon on Saturday Jan. 5th, Gloria was discharged from Methodist Hospital. The plan was to get her out of the grim ward environment for a week, after which she'd return for three days of chemotherapy. Visiting nurses and home healthcare workers would help us manage.
I spent that morning at home scrubbing the floors and putting everything in order. Over the last year, Gregory had renovated the ground flooer of our dilapidated, 100-year-old row house, ripped out walls, exposed brick, installed new appliances, windows, even parquet floors.
While Mom was hospitalized, he had her dingy bedroom redone all sunshine and bright colors. I'd dumped the worn-out bedroom and living room suites, bouth new sofas and a bed--charged it all--framed and hung pictures of my brother Thomas and the grandchildren alongside her photograph of Pope Paul VI. My mother had spent her entire adult life living in that rundown house. The renovation was Greg's final gift to her.
On the sidewalk outside the hospital, she couldn't walk four steps to the car without gasping. The painful swelling that had begun in her feet by now had bloated her legs. When I'd massaged them, imprints of my fingers remained in her flesh. She couldn't have weighed more than 80 lbs. Her face was grey, her lips pulling back from ther teeth.
"It's so beautiful," she whispered as Greg carried her into the house. "So beautiful."

A neighbor had prepared lentil soup and run it through a blender for her. She couldn't eat. (At the hospital, she'd ordered her cousin Millie to eat the food I'd leave "...so Vincent wouldn't worry." ) She spent the day exhausted on a BarcaLounger we'd borrowed from a neighbor. On Sunday, a visiting nurse noted Mom's systolic blood pressure had dropped below 90; she looked at me oddly when I announced I had gotten Gloria to eat two full tablespoons of oatmeal. A medical reporter, I refused to acknowledge any medical information. It had come down to "...what God wants."
Sunday night, Greg carried Mom upstairs to her bedroom, the stairway as insurmountable to her as Mount Everest. It took six pillows to put her at ease and still she couldn't sleep. She called to me in the middle of the night. I lay awake next door in the narrow room that had been mine as a teenager.
"Vincent, my back...I can't get comfortable any more."
I adjusted her pillows for the 10th time.,
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not letting you sleep. I'm sorry I made you come up here so far from the kids."
I clung to the iron rail of her new bed. An enormous chasm stretches between the living and the dying, a gap love cannot bridge. I wanted to hurl myself across it. "Mom," I said, "There's nowhere else in the world I want to be." I realize now that I had been granted a precious moment. A chance to say those special things we feel for those we love but so rarely do A chance to say goodbye.
"Mom, I want you to know that you've been the best mother any son could have. I want you to know that whatever is good and special in me has come from you."
She lay there staring.
I was blinded by tears. "Mom, You know that I can't change this. I can't change what's happening to you. You know if would if I could."
"I know that," she whispered. "I know."
Monday morning, her blood pressure continued to drop.
"Vincent," she said, "I don't feel good Maybe I should go back to the hospital."
I didn't want her to die surrounded by gaping strangers in a crowded emergency room or wind up lifeless on an respirator. "Okay, Mom. Let's wait a little bit." I knew what choice I was making. The hospital had an arrangement for bypassing admitting procedures on the cancer ward. After a while, it became too much Greg drove to the hospital to find the head nurse. I was upstairs when Angela, a family friend, shrieked, "Vinny, come down! Something's happening!"
Mom had pitched forward in the chair. She'd grabbed Angela's hand She wasn't breathing. I pinched her nostrils and began breathing into her mouth. It was the first time I'd ever kissed my mother on the lips.
"Breathe Mom. Please, Mom breathe! Don't die!"
Somehow she heard me and delayed her passing. She came back, but only for a moment. Her last breath passed into my mouth. Later, Josie Stuto, our octogenarian Italian neighbor across the street would tell me this was a special gift.
I was aware of Greg kneeling beside me sobbing. I won't cry," he'd said, "until there's no hope." There were no open beds at the hospital. Angela dialed 911. Half-a-dozen police officers and EMTs piled thorugh our front door, pushing us aside. Mom lay on her back, her pajama top open as a team worked to defibrilate her. Her ribs and collar bones protruded It was the only time I'd ever seen her undressed.
At that moment, our brother Joseph walked in. He never got his chance to say a last goodbye, make amends, and tell her he loved her. Of course, Gloria knew that. Her last thoughts were of him.
As I write this, the tulips and irises I'd planted in the yard that last fall are beginning to blossom. I was going to surprise Gloria with them. Her favorite outfits and a few pieces of jewelry were given to family and friends, the rest donated to the poor. I would have kept everything exactly as it was. But life goes on. Her passing left a hole in my life into which I hoped would flow all the kindness she represented...
Sometimes, I wonder what might have happened if Alzheimer's had been the diagnosis instead of cancer...if those intense and devastating 10 weeks had stretched into 10 years. And I wonder about the road ahead for me.

I write these words as the opening post to Gowanus Crossing a memoir of lives unfolded on the fatal banks of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal. Remember how I'd assured myself that the cancer that killed Gloria's sisters had somehow inoculated my mother against the disease. In fact, my Aunt Mary, another of her sisters, and two of her brothers, Sonny and Tony, would all die of cancer. They grew up in a house on the corner of Carroll and Nevins streets, since demolished, a few hundred feet from the canal. As a boy, I remember the poisonous green tides flooding the cellar, my uncles wading into the noisome water to clear the drains.
Ours is just one story of a hundred families in a forgotten neighborhood. My hope is that neighborhood and its people will live again on these pages.
I remember wise guys dumping medical and other wastes into the canal. It was cheaper for their corporate customers than loading the toxic material on a barge and ferrying it out to sea. The deals no doubt done in Monte's Venetian Room, a restaurant across from our house. I couldn't afford to eat there until I was in my thirties.
As a boy, I played pirate on half-sunken barges, climbed a mountain of metal barrels filled with industrial chemicals. A king, I held "magic" turquoise crystals and golden powders in my hands when the containers spilled open. I remember raw sewage from our toilets passing straight into the water through a stone conduit alongside the Carroll Street Bridge.
Last month, the EPA declared the canal--now eagerly eyed by a new generation of developers and self-styled urban pioneers--a Superfund site.