Ben Taub County Hospital, Saturday, 2 a.m.

Ben Taub County Hospital, Saturday, 2 a.m.

The flourescent lights are blinding. I am alone in this never ending hallway of stark white walls and beige tile. Approaching the huge double doors that separatethe barren hall from the horrible world of hurt where my mother and others exist, I lift one foot and somehow it steps and I move forward. My body leans against the cool, dark, black steel. It holds my shoulder, I drop my head, close my eyes, press harder still into its comfort, until the door finally gives and swings open against my weight.

A barrage of white overhead lights and yelling, bustling people crashes into my senses. Worried families in cheap sweats gather in too few chairs, most with dark skin. Nurses scurry across the way with arms outstretched, directing, pulling IV’s, pushing gurnies, barking orders. Nearing them, I am consumed by and become them. I know that as I search for my mother I will see someone else’s mother before I find mine, someone else’s daughter, someone else’s sister, someone else’s ex –wife, friend, co-worker.

I am walking through the maze of halls, beds, moans, searching. I peer through a set of curtains as discreetly as I can. A tiny, black man with white hair tries to lift his withered face from his bed. Guiltily, I snap my head away from him.

Is she in the next set of curtains? I don’t look into the ones where someone is calling loudly for the nurse, where a woman is crying outside of them, where there is a scream. I can’t. And then I see her. Wait, is that her? Yes. I see the round curve of her hip. I see her roll onto her back. I slowly push back the curtain. She doesn’t see me.

I step further inside. I see her cracked and purple lip caked with blood against her yellow, leathery face. I observe her distended middle, her legs so small in comparison. I see her bloodied knuckles, split and thick, dirty fingernails. Hair that is dry, unwashed, tangled, graying.

This is my mother. My mother whose once slender hands used to play “Moonlight Sonata” on our upright piano. My mother who had gorgeous reddish, brown hair, a slender waistline even after two kids, smooth, freckled, fair skin. My mother who sang at weddings, was the church secretary, and taught preschoolers to finger paint with pudding.

Bring Me a Brewsky, Amazing Grace

Bring Me a Brewsky

Tie her down with the straps. Please. She is weak. She shouldn’t move. But she is detoxing so violently that she is out of touch with reality. Hallucinating. Just strong enough to move and fall out of the bed in her flailing attempts to get me to “bring [her] a brewsky!”

She reaches and claws. The worst mixture of love, sympathy, empathy, disgust, sorrow, nausea.
That’s what I feel. It actually swallows me. I am bound by it as sure as the canvas straps of her hospital bed bind my mother.

Her skin looks like some kind of leather dyed yellow; she is dying of alcohol-related cirrhosis. Her stomach is actually eating itself and she was found unconscious, hemorrhaging from mouth and anus in an abandoned gas station parking lot. The male voice that called the ambulance called to let me know, and remained anonymous.

Amazing Grace

Nothing soothes her. Not the Adderall, nor the pain killers. She is wild and virtually psychotic. I am completely helpless; I cannot help her. To watch her is torture. So, I do the only thing that I can imagine. I begin to sing a prayer that she used to sing to me. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. Immediately she looks up at me, mouth agape. Her eyes attempt to focus. I keep singing: that saved a wretch like me. She begins to sing with me, “I once was lost…” I smile at her, and she at me, “but now am found, was blind but now I see.”

Lice

Mom had been on the streets by now for about 5 years. I had learned to let her be. I had learned how to go on with my life. She had made a number of choices that I had tried and failed to stand up against over and over again. I had a young son, no husband, and a demanding teaching job with at-risk youth. To keep food on the table for him, I had to keep all these things juggled and could not support my mother financially or emotionally. I could not have her blacking out and becoming violent and trying to have bedtime at 8 for my son and me.

I don’t even remember which hospitalization this particular occurrence belonged to.

I just remember that she was there, in that bed, with the sun shining on her face and hair, and the lice were crawling. They were so large and so numerous that I could see them. I could see them past her scalp line in hoards. One crawled across her forehead, then another.

I said, “Mom, I think you have lice.” Her expression was startled and disbelieving. “No!” she half asked, half declared.

It was terrifying to know that she was so completely out of touch with reality, with her own state, with her own skin and hair. This is my mother who used to tediously comb my hair when wet, use a certain brush when blow –drying it, be upset that my bangs wouldn’t “lay right” due to the wave in them, give strict limits to the sitter not to put my hair in “wings.” I never once had lice growing up. Her own hair was always gorgeous.

What I feel guilty about is what I did next. I told the nurse about her lice. Mom felt beyond awful. She could barely get to the restroom, even with help. She should have died. And yet I was concerned about the lice. I pretended to myself that it was for her – and there is some slight merit to that. But there is a great amount of truth to the fact that I couldn’t stand for my mother to have lice in her hair.

And so, in her pained state, and as she complained about later, the nurse washed her hair not once but two times. And the lice were gone.

At least in reality, they are gone. I now have an obsession. I think I see them in my hair from time to time. I live in fear that I will be unaware and out of touch. So, I am hyper vigilant.