This is an exercise from the Workshop with Deena at Rowe in February 1996. After identifying different selves Deena asks us to identify one story that two of your selves share: I choose my father’s death, shared by the one who didn’t come to this workshop and the one who asks “How can I express all that is in me?” The story about my father’s death is actually the story of the last weekend I spent with him. That story is part of this blog, it’s a page called July 4th monologue.
One who didn’t come:
My father is dying of cancer. My mother is too drunk to take care of him any longer. I go home to help so he can have a last weekend at home before he goes back to the hospital for radiation. I have trouble getting home, I can’t find enough to eat on the plane, I get shaky running from one plane to the other in Pittsburgh. I have brought my medicine and vitamin B6 and acidophilus with me. Mother is not very sympathetic. I know I can’t take care of Dad, he has a colostomy bag and a complex series of medications. I call for help and get nurses to come round-the-clock. Mother is angry about it. I try not to let it bother me but focus on seeing that Daddy is comfortable. I can’t sleep at night. I hear the chiming clock ring the hours until 2AM and then am shocked awake at 6AM. I take a message from the doctor and then forget to deliver it. I have to cook meals for myself because I can’t eat processed food. I wash the frying pan and put it on the burner and turn on the burner to dry it. Minutes or hours later I walk into the kitchen and find the burner bright red. I am confused, who turned it on? It had to be me, there’s no one else, but I can’t remember. I’m terrified by the failure of my short-term memory, what important thing have I forgotten. I feel like I’m going through this in a fog. I call my aunt for help, when I hear the voice of a sympathetic responsible adult I burst into tears. She is very supportive. I talk to my brother, tell him I’m really having trouble with my health — he says “get outta there, sis.” As my father is taken to the hospital, he looks straight in my eyes and says “Thank you.”
One who wants to express:
My father is dying of cancer. My mother is too drunk to take care of him any longer. I go home to help so he can have a last weekend before he goes back to the hospital for radiation. I don’t believe the way they are behaving. My father drinks the whole time, he’s continually sipping a little glass of vodka, though he can’t get food past the obstruction in his throat. I refuse to deal with the colostomy bag, so I get free lance nurses to help out. Mother keeps complaining about the nurses, no matter what I suggest she makes me wrong, she makes constant cruel remarks. I write it all down, it’s the only way I can stay sane. I feel like I’m in Long Day’s Journey into Night and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf rolled into one. I’m writing as fast as I can, as though taking dictation from a master dramatist. In my wildest dreams I couldn’t come up with dialogue like this. Mom & Dad fight about the nurses, about paying the bills, about what to watch on TV. My last evening with Dad, he spends most of it worrying about what happened to one of the plastic flasks that he wants to fill with vodka and take to the hospital with him. When he’s out of earshot, Mother says “I don’t understand why he has to go for more radiation.” The nurse says “It might ease the pain.” Mother says “But why do that?” I want to smack her. She says “If he just stopped being fed…” I almost ask if she’s going to take responsibility for stopping his food but stop myself. But I feel like an avenging fury. I want to grab her and shake her till her teeth rattle and yell that she’s talking about murder. Feeling the need for help, I call Aunt Betty. I’m sick of carefully editing my conversation. I tell her they’re behaving like infants. I say I had to get the nurses in the house because neither Dad nor Mom would take responsibility. She is shocked. She tells me to go home and let them fight it out. As my father is being taken away to the hospital, he looks directly in my eyes and says “Thank you.”
Is there some understanding I missed from the first character? Only what a daze she was in, how hard it was to take care of herself in this chaotic environment, how shut down she had to be. Desperately trying to do the dutiful daughter. ?? But does she see this? I don’t think so.
And from the second person? O I am so angry at those two jerks. Their precious precious lives, wasted in an alcoholic stupor. Their marriage degenerated into a battle for control. This is no way to finish a life, to finish a marriage. Deena says “That’s because you know a better way to do it.”
Well, there’s my anger. I really am angry at my mother and I didn’t know it til I wrote this piece.
I am interested now, reading this, to see that I wrote it, just like the original, in the first person, in the present tense, do not use the word “and.” I notice that I occasionally call my father “Daddy,” but I never call my mother “Mommy.” One thing I don’t say, in either version, was that when Daddy said “Thank you,” his last words to me, he had an expression in his eyes I’d never seen before. The only words I could find were “His whole soul came into his eyes.”