Death, Loss, Spit and Pathos

Today is October 25, and despite the odds against it, my mother is still here. Her kidneys are still functioning. Her respiration is improving. She spends most of the day watching television. She makes eye contact. She occasionally tries to vocalize. She is a nine year multiple myeloma survivor as of August 10, 2018. We have gone from More Birthdays and celebrating her living on another year to celebrating in tiny increments.

So I sit here and plan on another Halloween with my mother.

I remember my mom was present at the book release for The Void Between Emotions, which turned into a wake and remembrance for Greg Hug, who died a month before the release party.

This is a picture of Greg Hug from Valentine’s 2017 at Wicked Grounds, along with the painting I did for “Spit and Pathos” after I altered it with Photoshop. The original sits on my kitchen table. I tried to capture the haunted look Greg had in his eyes near the end of his life. A lot of the poetry in the book, most of it, is directly or indirectly about Greg and processing the loss. The stories I wrote were written just before and during the wake of (following) Greg’s death May 26, 2017.

Many of them were for the HorrorAddicts.net “Next Great Horror Writer” contest. Others are stories I wrote for other contests and anthologies that were released, like “Balm of Brackish Water,” which was released immediately after I read it for the Afrosurrealist Contest outside of the ProArts Gallery.

There are also award-winning essays from 2016-2017, including one about Toni Morrison’s relationship to the horror genre, and one I won a Reframing the Other contest for at BCC about when one first realizes they are “other” – reframing other from the view of the othered person and focusing on how becoming aware of otherness changes ones self image.

The book release is at Octopus Salon at 5pm on Friday November 9 and I hope some of you can make it. I am, of course, nervous about my mom’s health. I am worried about how she will be doing on that day and if she will even be here. We live day to day here, me and the rest of my family. Still, I got her a crow mask. I am dressing up like The Crow from the movie, and she can dress as the spirit animal on Eric Draven’s shoulder.

Since my mom’s health declined, I have become very isolated. People don’t know what to say, so they avoid you. They pick fights for no reason, and babble stupidly about how they don’t know how to handle death -and that’s why they have abandoned you when you are facing the wane of your mother’s glorious and vibrant life. Afraid of their own mortality, they demand you remain positive and are eternally insensitive. And you stop complaining. You stop asking for help that won’t come. You retreat, and spend days sitting by your mom’s bedside, coming up with ways to make the inevitability of death less difficult to face.

So you put snap chat filters over your silent mother’s face. You plan to join Halloween Festivities at the hospital. You Thank God for small things, like Mom making lazy eye contact these days, or larger ones, like rescuing mom from the Kevorkians over at Summit (even though you know that there are some who will argue with you that your mom’s quality of life isn’t worth having. You ignore those…)

Mom mostly watches television these days.

And she sleeps.