Me, Myself and Mom - Ongoing

Story 4

Cancer. Cansssser - like a snake. Cancer. Can’t Sir - save you. Cancer. Can’t See Her - she’s gone. Cancer. Cancel Her - cancer had just canceled her.

The rain. The relentless rain. The weatherman using the powers of the Doppler 4000 had warned us, the soggy people of New Jersey, that a nor’easter was rolling through. They’ll be flooding folks. Rivers swelling, power outs. Stay put if you can. I had gotten the storm information from the radio in the car because with the electricity turned off after the bills weren’t paid, the television obviously didn’t work yet.

In fact many things in my mother’s part-time house (used in summers and for holiday weekends) didn’t work yet: the refrigerator, the lights, the heat, any access to the internet. And most of the furniture had been...well...i’ll use the word reclaimed by her boyfriend, whose relationship with our side of the family had completely disintegrated by the time of my mother’s death. So the house was basically empty except for a pool table, two stools at the kitchen counter and a bed in each of the three bedrooms.

Oh, and me.

No one, except for the furniture snatchers, had stepped foot through the door for over a year. The year we were shuffling Mom to and from doctor appointments in the city. The year she had tried so hard not to get canceled. The year there was no happy summer or holiday weekends.

I arrived at the house the day after her funeral. I had been her caretaker, had moved from Los Angeles into the apartment she shared with her boyfriend in Philadelphia and now, without her, I was essentially homeless. Except for her house, which I suppose was now mine and my brother’s house. But he had his own house. So I came to her house. Stay put if you can. Stay put? I have no where else to go you thoughtless weather person.

With whipping wind and rain, no heat, no electricity, no tv, no internet, nearly no furniture and only half a tuna and corn sandwich bought at a rest stop along the highway I did the only rational thing I could think of in that situation. I took a nightgown and a robe from my mother’s closet, put it on, curled up on the sheetless bed in her room and cried my fucking eyes off.