Commentary : Mourning a Loved One, and the Loved Ones Left to Struggle Alone

I stared up at the billboard, my eyes frozen on the words, my heart numb.

High above Santa Monica Boulevard, the numbers screamed: 281,859 dead because of lung cancer in 1988.

The date was Nov. 11, and, less than 2 miles away, my mother was in a Century City hospital. She had just been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.

Every day the numbers would creep up on that billboard. As I drove by, I wondered at what point in the tally my mom would become just another number.

Would she make it to Thanksgiving? Hanukkah? Christmas? New Year’s? Mother’s Day?

She died Jan. 9. The billboard had been zeroed out, its annual count begun anew.

Now there’s Mother’s Day, but no mother.

Darlene was her name. I don’t want to make this a maudlin tale of how I miss her, although I do miss her. Terribly.

But, after four months, I’m pretty much resigned that she’s gone. And the urge to call her every time I want to chat is subsiding, much to my chagrin.

But there still isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of her a dozen times. And as Mother’s Day approached, my anxiety grew.

My family is going to gather this morning, and there will be plenty of mothers in our clan to celebrate. But my best friend, my big booster, the woman who turned my second-place finishes into world championships--she won’t be there.

Those thoughts swirling in my head--and my heart--the past few weeks were not sparked only by Mother’s Day, however. I spent much of April with senior citizens, mostly in nursing homes and board-and-care facilities, working on a weeklong series for KNSD-TV about life in nursing homes and cases of abuse and neglect of the elderly.

The research took me into a world where I was confronted with the vision of what my mother might have become.

Her death had come quickly, although at the time, as I watched this beautiful 61-year-old woman being consumed by an aggressive cancer, the two months between her diagnosis and demise seemed an eternity.

We hoped that she would stabilize. But that meant tackling the question of how to care for her.

Do we hire a nurse? Should she be in a nursing home? Wouldn’t she be happier in her own home, surrounded by things familiar?

We never had to answer those questions. She died, at home, in her own bed.

But as I wandered the halls of the nursing homes last month, as I walked past the closet-like rooms with two single beds jammed in, as I watched seniors wheeled to their tables in crowded dining halls, I thought of my mother. And I thought about visiting her in a place like that--not as a reporter, detached and taking notes, but as her son.

It was a jarring, gut-wrenching experience. Because, much as I didn’t like to admit it, my honest response was that I was glad she had died if this were the alternative.

What a horrible reaction! Here I was surrounded by seniors--some in terrible physical condition--who were struggling just to survive, sometimes barely holding on.

How could I favor death when so many were fighting so hard to stay alive?

I hated myself for thinking it, and yet it was what I felt.

I thought about what the mothers in the nursing homes would be doing today. More than any other complaint, the seniors we talked to yearned for visitors, especially their children. Sometimes the patients would talk about how their kids were due to show up anytime. But the truth was, it had been some time since their children had seen them.

My anger rose.

But how could I be grateful that my mother had avoided institutional life, and yet also be angry at the children whose parents weren’t as lucky?

I had no answers at the time. I still don’t. I don’t think I ever will.

“People are so busy with their own thing, whatever that may be,” Wylie Haywood had told me. Wylie had lived in a nursing home for five months, after he was run over by a car while he was crossing a street. He suffered two broken legs and a skull fracture, but gained an insight into a life he hopes to soon leave.

“They don’t have time for the old folks,” he said of his fellow residents’ children. “That’s regrettable, very regrettable.”

Yes, I am glad my mother isn’t living in some nursing home.

But I wish she were alive so I could visit her there.