Category: Family

Something she used to do was talk on the phone to her friends for hours at a time. A big old whitish-beige-y phone console, the cord stretched across the room, and her body, years and year away from cancer, stretched over her bed. Like a fifties schoolgirl, which she had been, and an eighties mom,…

Mom, I’m thinking a lot about Ferguson lately. There have been protests and boycotts and there’s a candlelight vigil for Mike Brown tomorrow, here in Wellington, on the other side of the world from Missouri. I want to talk to you about race and ethnicity. I want to talk to you about whiteness. Mom, I…

In the dream she leaned out over me, as if I were lying down in a bed. She had her short grown-in cancer haircut, but she could smile and talk, without confusion or pain. Her shoulders were bare, her skin glowing. (Had she just come in from a beach walk?). I was surprised to see…

For her anniversary last Monday I didn’t light candles or write a letter. I didn’t go to the sea by myself, as I’d halfway thought I would do. I went snorkeling at Shelly Bay with a school group through my volunteer gig and had lunch at an outdoor cafe and didn’t mention it to anyone.…

It’s almost a year since my mother died. I keep thinking of it as her ‘anniversary’ but it’s difficult to know if it’s hers or if it’s ours: mine and my sister’s, my brother-in-law’s, my nephew’s. All her family and friends, her next door neighbour she went on walks with, her co-teacher she worked with…

I don’t remember how long I’d been there: maybe only a few weeks. It was two or three or four in the morning when the staff at the Place came in on their regular checks and I didn’t completely wake up until one of them came back out of her room and said, almost casually,…

I must have caught the tail end of the dream just as I was waking up, because my first thought was “I will have to get a flight to Tampa.” My second thought was “Oh! Oh I thought she was dead. I thought she had died. What a terrible dream!” My third thought wasn’t a…

It’s going by quickly. I went to New York to see family and friends and to be very cold, and now I’m in California (the part where it is also very cold), currently sitting in bed and reading about gun control in the wake of the latest school shooting and wondering whether I have enough…

“Based on my experience, she’s holding back. Something is unfinished. You need to tell her it’s okay to let go! She’s worried about you! Just tell her! Tell her to let go! Don’t keep her here! Tell her! Tell her! Tell her!” –Our least favourite hospice night nurse, the night before it happened. “Wow. Your…

I was with her when she drifted away from us early Sunday morning. I did not, at first, know what I was seeing: there were some short sharp shallow breaths, and then there weren’t. “Take her vitals,” I said, “take her vitals.” It wasn’t until the night nurse unfastened the oxygen tube that I understood…

I’m so sorry your mum is drifting away from you, a friend from Wellington emailed me last night. When I read that I thought about when we first moved to the island, how Mom used to go swimming in February. A couple of years later she was as thin-blooded as any native South Floridian, but…

The first few times I gave it I treated it like it was battery acid, scrubbing my hands anxiously after each syringe. “We want to be conservative about pain medication,” I’d said, stupidly confident five weeks ago, “until it becomes necessary.” Hospice has insisted on sending nurses to stay here with us for the past…

She sleeps most of the day, now, and most of the night. Today she opened her eyes for breakfast and could use a straw but by lunchtime that was all over and she was drinking mochaccino smoothie spoonful by spoonful again. It’s Election Day and in between the bed bath and the pills and the…

Deal with it by coming off as really robotic. Dodge the well-meaning hugs of strangers (because that’s all there is in this part of Florida for you, strangers and family) and raise your eyebrows crisply and politely whenever anyone coos “Oh it must be SO HARD for YOU GIRLS because it’s YOUR MOM and it’s…

I sent my absentee ballot in today. Several months ago, in Wellington, I had registered as a Tampa resident, and got my documents emailed to me several weeks ago, back when I was still going to band practice and to my job. I’d been planning to exercise one of my democratic rights via the medium…

We’ve decided Mom will stay here for The Duration, and so I sleep on the couch, the same one she had on the island in March. She’s had it for years. It’s a terrible couch—too short, too squishy, and just generally unpleasant, but it lets me be here with her every day and every night.…

Her voice is heavy and hoarse now, as if she’s been screaming at the top of her lungs at a very loud live stadium show. Sometimes the words she speaks in this voice—their order, their pronounciation, their inclusion in the English language—make sense to me, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes she looks me in the…

Her speaking style, now, is hard to describe or imitate. It sounds like her, sort of, but there are so many little things that are not quite right. She mixes up her pronouns. There’s a lot of ummmms, a lot of uhhhhhs. I’m home sick today but I called her this morning as usual, skyping…

She’s in Tampa now, in The Place. (Mom calls it ‘the nursing home,’ which it isn’t, but I have to call it The Place). My sister is handling everything brilliantly: the move and the first parts of the transition (there will be many more) and the first visit to the cancer center up there, the…

I spent the weekend with my mom, visiting my only living grandparent in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where they have real winter weather. I haven’t been there for a couple of years but not much has changed about the structure of the visit: we get up for an early flight, we shiver, we sit in the tiny…

My mother and I are staying at the assisted living facility where my grandmother lives, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I have had to go back to our room for some reason and on my way back to Grammy’s “apartment” I get lost. I ask directions of one of the aides, who is pushing a resident in…

Mom Weekend was extra super fun, I am happy to report. We did a lot of shopping (I am neither confirming nor denying the purchase of a potential Perfect Pants contender) and a lot of eating and a lot of talking. We were emphatically rained upon when we went to the Snoqualmie waterfall and we…

It is raining and raining and raining and raining. Where is spring? Where are short sleeves? The cherry blossoms are being blown forcibly off the trees in squishy swirls of pink and white and the tulips out in our front yard are all pinchy and closed up, like, no thanks dude, we’ll just huddle up…

It’s been really fun to have my sister here this week. I’ve had to work every day, of course, but she’s done her thing alone during the afternoons and she’s picked me up from work and we’ve had a very good time. She’s almost all the way through the Firefly DVDs (another convert, aha!) and…

My sister is coming to Seattle this afternoon to visit for five days. I just saw my mom three weeks ago, and next weekend I’m going to visit my dad in New York. Los of family time this summer. I’ve seen or will see each of these family members alone. When Mom was here we…

Last Friday I had to go to the Apple Store to drop off my iPod. I dropped it and it broke. It broke hard. I’d been trying to get it in to the shop for, like, weeks but it turns out you can’t just drop your broke iPod off at the store when you happen…

I spent a long weekend in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Mom and Becky and I all met there to spend some time with my grandmother, who’s living in an assisted living facility. Three more soul-deadening words were never spoken, although I was relieved to find that the place my grammy lives is quite nice and well run…

I went to New York this past weekend to visit my dad. The last time I was there was two Thanksgivings ago, and during that visit he made the best Brussels sprouts I’ve ever had. I’ve been making them at home ever since, but never have been able to come close to the brilliance that…

My dad called me the other day to ask if there was any way he could convince me not to go to Italy in three weeks. He asked if he could send me to Hawaii instead. He’s worried about the Italian hostage situation. The hostages themselves are in Iraq but apparently there have been a…

When I spoke to my mom last night she told me that my grandmother is not doing well. “It could be days or it could be years.” When my mom went to see her for a routine visit a couple of weeks ago, Grammy just sort of fell apart. It’s similar to what happened over…

Last night it was dark by five o’clock. I guess four years living through winter in Seattle have not been sufficient to inure me to this seasonal fact. Every year it’s like the first time and I spend several weeks going “Oh, man! Gah! Dark! Oh! Potatoes, lots of potatoes, please! So dark! Yeesh!” Just…

My childhood cat Dabney was named after Dabney Coleman , of Nine To Five fame, one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. He was born in the backyard the summer I was twelve. My cat Sirithew (her name is a whole other story), had him and his littermates under a lawn chair,…

So I’m at my sister’s place in Tampa, Florida, listening to her put together her new office chair that our dad got her at Target today. She has this very nice cordless drill she’s using. I love a girl with her own drill. She’s also graduating tomorrow. I love a girl with a B.A. I…

This is my favorite cookie ever. I have one of the big tins on my windowsill full of dried lavendar, which looks really cool. Carl gave me a little one last week before I went to Tucson. He said I should use it to keep pens in on my desk at work. “But it’s full…

I have to finish packing and then go out to dinner and get magazines and plane food and then get to bed early because my flight leaves reaaaaaaaaally early tomorrow. Not quite at the crack of dawn, but something very close to it; the splintering-off-the-main-crack-of-dawn-even-though-your-mom-told-you-never-never-never-to-play-baseball-in-the-house. Something like that. Anyway, quite early, because tomorrow I’ll get…

Hey folks…I guess it’s Family Week because here’s that guest entry from my mom I kept telling you all about. She says she thinks she writes like me, but I think I write like her. You decide. And here she is! For my guest entry on Ampersand I would like to sing the praises of…

I should start calling her Rebecca, actually. She’s been Becky since about four, right around the time she started going to pre-school wearing black cowboy boots, but her real name is Rebecca and it’s a beautiful name and that’s what we’re going to call her for the rest of this entry. My sister turns twenty-five…

Vacation! I love vacation! I don’t count the time of my unemployment as such because I didn’t go anywhere and was sad all the time. I like the kind of vacation that involves going somewhere new and having fun and going out for a nice dinner, whereas being unemployed is more about sitting by the…

The first thing you should know about my mom is that she (probably) won’t even be mad at me for not writing about her until now. She thinks it’s great she can read me anytime she wants…because she’s the kind of mom who always asks to see the papers I’ve written whenever I’m in school.…