New Beginnings

It has been dreadfully long since my last post... I did not intend for it to be that way, however. I took off on the race that began with Joy departing in February. But perhaps like the runner that embarks on a marathon without sufficient training, I ventured out on this journey ill prepared for the mountains that I would face along the way. I will fast forward and issue the Reader's Digest version of the last couple of months events.

Picking up with my last post, my grandma passed away in early March. She was very much a second mother to me. She was always the one that took care of my brother and I while my mom worked so hard taking care of us all so that we could get by. My grandma instilled some of my early desires to work hard, and my love for history, current events, political and social issues came from her many stories about the Depression, World War II and whatever happened to be on the news while we were eating meals together. I have early memories when I was 3 or 4 years old of my grandma telling me stories in the evening, which always kept alive my boyish excitement in magical things, like what it would be like to fly, or the mystery of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. My grandma was a special woman and though her mental state deteriorated over the last several years, she always greeted me with a warm smile and a hug that never let me forget the huge investment that she poured into me over the years and the special place that always had in her life. My family didn't have a funeral for her, the plan was to have a memorial in the spring and plant a tree in her remembrance. That is what we did for my grandfather about 9 years ago and my grandma wanted the same thing.

However, the events that would follow over the course of the next several weeks and months, would prove to be an even bigger uphill battle than I could have ever anticipated. My mom had been feeling sick since August of 2006. She went to many doctor's appointments, but there was nothing medically that ever came to light. She began to lose weight and energy and found herself able to eat less and less. She was tested for digestive disorders, bacterial and fungal infections, heavy metal toxicity and carbon monoxide exposure. The list could go on and on, but she was eventually diagnosed with idiopathic gastroparesis. For those other than the few doctor friends I have, basically her digestive system stopped working for unknown reasons. I am certain that it was no coincidence that her health made a turn for the worse after my grandma passed away. It was apparent that depression had set in, and that just made all of her physical symptoms worse. I convinced my mom that staying in NY wasn't good for her anymore and suggested that she should come and live with me. We made plans that at the end of the school year in May that she would come move in with the boys and me.

Unfortunately that plan was never realized. Toward the end of April, my mom had to stop working; she no longer had the energy to make it through an 8 hour workday. She still went to the doctor regularly, but no new information was realized. I went to NY during Easter to visit and help my brother go through all of the things that my grandma had hoarded and cluttered the house with. There was enough garbage to fill two 40 yard roll away dumpsters. It was difficult and painful to see my mom as sick as she was and continuing to get only worse. We talked about how she only had less than two months until she could enjoy the change of scenery, warmer weather, and the company of myself and her grandsons. That seemed to help a lot. I was going through a lot of other changes during this time as well. I had made up my mind that I was going to leave Louisiana at the end of the school year and move back to El Paso for the duration of time that Joy was in Iraq. Louisiana was very isolated and most of my closer friends that could help me with the boys had already moved away before Joy was deployed. So I was working on packing up my house, in the midst of teaching 7-9th grade English every day.

As the end of the school year closed in, my mom's condition grew worse. About the middle of May, my mom was hospitalized for malnutrition. She could no longer eat enough at any one time to get the nutrients she needed. If she ate more than a bite or two she threw it back up again. In fact, once she started intravenous nutrition she would still throw up even though nothing was passing through her stomach. School ended, but there was no way that my mom could travel in her weakened state. Her doctor was trying to come up with a long term plan to get her well, but in the interim she had to rely on the hospital to maintain a very substandard status quo. As I was traveling from Louisiana to El Paso, with most of my belongings, my two children and my dog, my aunt called and told me that my mom might not make it. She had a high fever and had contracted MRSA, which is a dangerous, drug resistant bacteria. I couldn't stop moving midstream, so I finished my drive to El Paso, unloaded my belongings , and I was on a plane to Virginia to drop of my sons at my in-laws, and was immediately on my way to NY after that.

Things were a little more hopeful for a while. I got to spend a precious 8 or 9 days with my mom in the hospital. The infection went away, although she still was being plagued by some less serious ones, which held up some procedures that were going to try to get to the bottom of what was wrong with her. But she was identified as a candidate for a new procedure to help her digestion. She was going to be considered for a "gastric pacemaker," a newly approved device that helped about 80% of people that had gone through the clinical trials. My mom lit up every time I came in the room, and we had many great conversations about all kinds of things. She told me stories about my dad's side of the family and we reminisced about many good times in the past and talked about great things that we could do in the future.

As the week wore on, things became not quite as good. She still felt terrible and as I was getting ready to leave my mom gave me something that made my heart sink. She gave me a ring that my dad had given her right before I was born. It was made of opals. It was an unusual ring, but she told me that she wanted me to have it now because no one else had seen it before and that if it was read in the will no one would no what she was talking about. When I was getting ready to leave to go back to Texas, my mom looked at me and cried. She held me tight and her body language told me everything she couldn't. She was telling me goodbye. She didn't think she would ever see me again.

Her intuition didn't prove to be far off. She was denied acceptance into the medical program in NYC for the gastric pacemaker because she refused to complete a psychological evaluation. Within two weeks of me returning to Texas, the doctors were finally able to do a couple of procedures including a biopsy of a lymph node near her lungs that had looked bad in an X-ray. The results came back positive for small cell carcinoma. Small cell carcinoma is a particularly nasty cancer, that has a low rate of survival for those people that are healthy to begin with. My mom wasn't healthy though and 10 months after she first felt sick now the doctors had something concrete to work with. But it proved to be too much too late. She started chemotherapy right away and it helped initially. Her digestive system even jumpstarted for a couple of days and she could eat regularly again. But after about a week, she was back on the downhill slope. The doctor noticed some odd things with her eyes and after an evaluation by the neurologist, it was determined that the cancer had spread to her brain.

I received word that my mom's passing was imminent. Leaving at this time was difficult. Aaron's birthday was the 9th of July and I knew that leaving would mean that he wouldn't have either parent there for him on his birthday. I notified the Red Cross and they sent Joy home on emergency leave. We arrived in the evening of the 6th of July. My mom had been told that we were coming and that seemed to be the only thing the she was holding on for. Nothing could have prepared me for the way that my mom looked that evening. Her face was sunken, her speech was nearly unintelligible, and she was hallucinating about being at work and trying to take care of the other people that were in the room. The mom that I remembered was already on her way out, although she did recognize me and gave me a hug and shed some tears for a moment. She was exhausted and in a great deal of pain. She had weighed over 200 pounds for as long as I could remember before she got sick, and now she lay there broken and frail and barely weighed over 100 pounds. That night they gave her morphine which she had resisted until I got there. They told us to expect that she wouldn't wake up again. She was finally comfortable and drifted off to sleep. She stopped breathing early the next morning on July 7th.

July 7th, or 07/07/07, captivated a lot of people's interest because of its inherent implication of good luck. I wasn't sure that I felt very lucky on that day, however in retrospect I do have a bit of a reflection. While countless people rushed to get married on that day, or go to a casino, or do whatever else their hearts directed them to do in the name of "good luck," my mom got released from the burden of this life and the prison that her body had become. In my life I have seen God do amazing healing of people that were in worse shape than my mom. But more often than not, He doesn't. I don't pretend to know why, but I do know that while that my faith pales in comparison with the likes of Job, I still don't blame God in the midst of loss. And even though, I would much rather have my mom here today, I know that her healing came from being able to go to a better place and be with Him.

We had a memorial service for my mom the next week. She had wanted to donate her body to science like both my grandma and grandpa had done, but unfortunately it wasn't possible because she contracted MRSA again before she died. It is highly contagious and dangerous, so the medical center would not take her. She didn't want a big funeral or burial or anything, so she was cremated. My childhood friend Woodly, who recently took over as the pastor of Redeeming Love Fellowship, was gracious and agreed to do his first funeral. I told him that at least if he messed it up, that he wouldn't have to worry about offending the family. It was some much needed comic relief in the midst of everything. The memorial also honored my grandmother, because with my mom's illness we were never able to do anything for her like we had intended. I wrote a eulogy to honor my mom's memory. She was a pillar of strength to me and I believe that the words that I shared did a good job of remembering her. I will share those words with you in my next post to commemorate the wonderful woman that she was. The service was outstanding, and I am thankful to those around me that made it as great a success that a loss could ever be.

I returned to El Paso, and Joy got to spend about a week with the boys before returning to Iraq. Life has gone forward, albeit a little slowly. I hope to be able to continue with updates through this blog. In some ways I regret not being stronger and able to chronicle my thoughts and feelings more regularly throughout this time. I started this blog with the intention of providing hope and insight, along with some much needed humor to others facing difficult trials. Somewhere along the way in the last couple of months I lost my inspiration and vision for that and I wasn't sure that I had much to offer or give. I am not sure if this post will provide any of those things that I set out to do. It will however provide some much needed catharsis and resolution of my own feelings and grief over this period. Thank you to my friends and family that made this difficult time more bearable. Especially the Vidas which have poured their their lives back into us, especially my boys. They have watched them countless times, and gave Aaron the best birthday party a boy could hope for.

So now it is a time of new beginnings. I have started a new chapter that doesn't look like anything that I have ever experienced before. It is like the type of book that you certainly can't discern from its cover, and each page has twists and turns that leave you eager, yet cautious of what lies on each subsequent page. Stay tuned for the story as it unfolds...