Mom was afraid of death. Her fear grew after Dad passed away from a heart attack in 1971. It is perfectly understandable. Her own father died at age 51, her mother passed away at age 60. Her brother Dick died at age 50, another brother Ray died at age 60. Her sister Nina died at age 52. Cancer ran rampant throughout the family, and Mom was terrified that her turn would soon come.
When I was 3 years old, Mom taught me how to say my nightly prayer:
"Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take."
Then I would ask God to bless Mom, Dad, and my siblings. After Dad passed away, Mom had me add two additional requests every night: "Please make Mom thin and healthy, and please let Mom live long enough to see her children grow up."
The nightly prayer for Mom was a constant reminder to me that Mom was not healthy and that she might die and leave me and my two younger siblings as orphans. Mom took lots of prescription medications for a number of health issues. After Dad died, I was given more responsibilities around the house, including helping her to get her maintenance meds. Mom instructed me to call in her refills and then pick them up from the pharmacy for her, so I remember many of the drugs she took: There was hydrochlorothiazide for her blood pressure. Thyroid pills for her non-functioning thyroid gland. Diabinese to treat her type 2 diabetes, Meprobamate and Valium for anxiety and depression, and anti-nausea suppositories for her nervous stomach. Sulfa drugs were frequently required to treat her recurrent urinary tract infections. There was always something going on with her health.
Mom was supposed to check her urine for sugar every day. It was similar to how we tested the pool to maintain proper chemical levels in the water. She would pee in a cup, dip a test strip, watch the strip turn color, then compare the strip color with the color key. She would call me to the bathroom to give her my opinion. This was not a good way to measure sugar levels, because color perceptions vary from person to person, and the lighting in the room also seemed to affect the way Mom and I interpreted the test. The bottom line was that Mom was obese, hypertensive, diabetic, and stressed out. The reality for us kids was that Dad was dead and Mom was sick. We picked up on Mom's fear and sadness, and her problems affected us too. It showed in our schoolwork. My younger siblings had nightly behavioral outbursts. There was constant shouting and violence during these years.
In 1973, it seemed that my prayers for Mom were being answered. Mom entered into a relationship with Paris Young, an imprisoned career criminal. Her giddy, schoolgirl type of love for him had inspired her to lose weight. During their long distance letter-writing romance, Mom had started watching her diet and became more active. As a result of this lifestyle change, the weight started to drop off.
Over the next 18 months, she lost at least 70 pounds, and her body changed from morbidly obese to a pleasingly plump and curvy shape. The type 2 diabetes disappeared, her blood pressure normalized, and her energy level rose. Her days were no longer spent in the recliner watching her programs on tv. She started wearing new clothes. Her hair, which she normally kept very short and plastered down with Dippity Doo, was allowed to grow. Before long, shiny golden curls softened her appearance. Mom had been continually ill during the sixties and early 70s, so seeing her transform herself seemed like a miracle to me. Mom was indeed becoming thin and healthy.
Mom started doing her own "Glamour Shots" to send to her boyfriend in prison. I don't know where this was taken, and I don't know who took the picture.
Christmastime, 1974. Mom's hair grew really fast. She sometimes set it in long coils like in this photo.
Unfortunately, the transformation was temporary. After her relationship with Paris reached its disastrous finale in December, 1975, Mom dealt with her humiliation and anguish by settling back into her unhealthy eating. Soon it was once again pizza, brownies, Chicken in a Biskit crackers, Mother's chocolate chip cookies, See's Candies and Tab while watching TV all day and evening. She steadily gained back every pound, and then added more weight to her tiny 4'10" frame.
In 1976, she became a clown and bought a camper for the truck so that we could go camping. She occasionally exhibited her poodle pups at local dog shows. But soon, she quit clowning, and the only people who slept in the camper were recently released prisoners who used it as a halfway house. Mom's high blood pressure and diabetes returned, and by 1978, Mom was right back where she started, morbidly obese, taking several prescription medications daily, and asking me to pray for God to make her thin and healthy.
In 1977, I had my drivers permit, and it came in handy for Mom's many visits to the Kaiser Emergency Department. Soon she was diagnosed with angina, and was prescribed a tiny bottle of nitroglycerine pills that she had to keep in her pocket, along with Kleenex and Tic-Tacs. At some point she had a mild heart attack, and that started her down the road to more severe heart disease.
Kaiser doctors tried to get her back on the right track. They enrolled her in a weight loss program, but she was an unwilling participant. She would never go alone. I had to accompany her to these meetings, and she would keep me out of school on the days she needed to attend the program. I could see that it was a waste of time. When it came time for the weigh in, she would not permit herself to be weighed. She would nudge me out of my chair, give me the "you better do what I tell you to do " look, and make me go up to the front of the room to be weighed. I am sure all the overweight women were not amused to see a 110 pound, 17 year old girl getting her weight recorded by the nurse. Mom was not interested in learning how to prepare healthy meals. She didn't even try. It seemed to me that she had given up on herself. Soon we quit those useless meetings.
When open season came around in 1978, Mom quit Kaiser and signed up with another medical plan. Dad's survivor benefits from Teledyne Ryan had changed our health plan to Kaiser, a new-fangled HMO concept, a few years earlier. Mom had been extremely distressed at having to give up her long-time physician, Dr. Hunt. She continued to see this doctor in addition to the Kaiser doctors. When the opportunity came up for Mom to escape Kaiser she jumped at the chance. The new plan allowed her to officially return to Dr. Hunt, her preferred internal medicine doctor, who had an office on El Cajon Blvd, just across the street from Hillside Hospital.
Mom loved Dr. Hunt. I mean it when I say that. He was very handsome, with light silver hair and Siamese cat-blue eyes. He also had a gentle bedside manner and a very soft voice. He would give his patients all the time in the world to sit and complain about their lonely lives and cry about their ungrateful kids. He was also very liberal when it came to prescriptions, which meant that in addition to all the middle aged women who clamored to see him, there were just as many hippies, who knew he would give them the prescriptions they craved. All these attributes came at a cost. Dr. Hunt had so many patients that the waiting room would be full all day long. If you had a 9 AM appointment, you would be lucky if you were called to the exam room before noon. He was definitely overbooked.
But Mom didn't mind the wait. She hadn't been employed for decades. With her days free, she had plenty of time to wait her turn to see the doctor, get some emotional therapy, and come out with some prescriptions to fill at the Fed Mart Junior on University and 3rd Avenue. Mom's crush on Dr. Hunt was obvious and it embarrassed me. His daughter was a student at St Vincent's Catholic School, where my young siblings and I had also attended. Mom would tell me that Dr. Hunt was married to a big fat lady who was way too ugly for him, and that their daughter Mara didn't look anything like him. She was inferring that Dr. Hunt's wife screwed around and got pregnant by somebody else. I didn't even know how to respond to these comments. I could just tell she was very jealous and it wasn't a good look for her.
In 1983, the Mission Hills-First Congregational Church took photos of its parishioners for a church directory. Mom rarely went to the church, but we kids did.
During the early 80s, Mom started heading downhill fast. She had been knocked down by a loose pitbull that was trying to attack her poodle, and the resulting back injury never healed. After awhile it became too painful for her to drive and walk. She bought a couple of electric mobility vehicles and used them to do her neighborhood banking and grocery shopping. She even rode the bigger one all the way up to El Cajon Blvd to see Dr. Hunt.
Mom went all over Mission Hills and Hillcrest in her vehicles. She had a sweet little silver Poodle named Gigi who went everywhere with her.
It was sometime in the early 80s that Mom's diabetes changed from type 2 to type 1. She had to learn how to inject herself with insulin. Although she was given instructions, she never did it properly. She left the used syringe sticking in the bottle of insulin in the fridge. She didn't really test and measure. If she felt funny, she would go to the fridge and give herself a shot in her leg or her belly. She never kept track of anything. Her skin got very irritated from the shots, and she had to keep changing the injection sites. Skippy started stealing her syringe out of the fridge whenever he dropped by. Mom bought a dorm-sized fridge, put it up on the dresser in her bedroom, and installed a deadbolt lock on her bedroom door so he couldn't steal her needles anymore.
By the end of 1985, she had lost all her energy. She could no longer lay down to sleep, because her lungs would fill with fluid and she would start choking. It was terrifying to see her this way, with clear water running out of her nose as she struggled to clear her airways. She was forced to sit up in her gold velvet La-Z-Boy recliner in order to get any rest. She would have to stop to catch her breath many times while walking through the house to get to the bathroom. The doctor prescribed a heart medicine called Procardia. Clearly she was having symptoms of congestive heart failure, and it didn't seem like there was anything Dr. Hunt could do to alleviate her terrible symptoms.
I visited her twice a day, in the morning when I got off work, and at night, on my way to work. I fed the Poodles, rabbits, and birds. Then I tried to ensure that Mom was eating something. She was way past the point of embracing a healthy diet. At this point, I just wanted her to have something in her stomach when she took her pills, so I tried to make sure she had some of her favorite foods, like strawberries, bananas and what she affectionately called "stink bread." I had to do a check of the kitchen every day, because Mom started placing perishables in the microwave oven. On many occasions, I found lunch meat, hotdogs, and cottage cheese that had been outside of the fridge for hours. I would tell her not to put those things in the microwave oven, and she would just discount my concern and tell me they were fine in there. I worried that she was going to get food poisoning, and I was terrified that I would find her dead, drowned in her own fluids.
Late 1985. Mom with her two granddaughters, Samya and Sabrina, and their new baby sister Reva.
By the summer of 1986, it was pretty evident that Mom did not too much time left. She was by today's standards still young--64 years old. But she had given up on her body years ago, and now her body was giving up on her.
