The Last Rodeo — Memories of Mama
Brain cancer killed Mama after two long years of treatment. It wasn’t her first rodeo — she beat ovarian cancer nine years earlier.
Mama and I joked that she never got colds or the flu, only aggressive cancers. Even as her cognitive abilities and motor skills were squeezed out by the glioblastoma, she retained her darkly goofy sense of humor and her big smile until a couple of days before she died. Then she quit eating cookies and started to sleep all the time. Never mind the medical shutdown signals — her disinterest in cookies was the ultimate indicator of impending death.
When I was little, Mama used to tell me a story about how one of her classmates got a cold, and she sent him a get well card with a ghost on the cover saying “I was sick once.” On the inside of the card was printed “and then I died.” We’d laugh until we cried, and then she’d go back to reading the obituary section of the newspaper. She loved reading about other peoples’ deaths the way some obsess about baseball scores. She didn’t want a funeral or an obituary for herself, so this collection of memories will have to do.
Counting sheep
The first inappropriate joke I remember Mama telling me was when I was 10 years old:
Question: What do you call a man in New Zealand with a sheep under each arm
Answer: A pimp
I don’t remember how she explained what a pimp was. But the joke remains a good one and I’ll share it with other peoples’ children once I’m old enough to be considered batty instead of perverted.
The last time I took Mama to walk in the park she fell asleep on every bench, she tried to convince me to eat blue-colored berries that were not blueberries, she lost control of her legs and nearly tumbled down a hill, and then she forgot it had all happened. A very pale lady with a fluffy white dog walked toward us on the path. I said “what a cute dog! It looks like a little lamb.” Mama said to the lady cheerfully and at full volume “it’s the same color as your legs!”
You are what you eat
My parents were members of a food co-op when I was very young. I remember being in a dimly lit room that smelled like decaying produce and damp cardboard. I watched people with long, greasy hair that fell forward over their shoulders and brushed the cheese they were packaging.
At three years old I knew the phrase “no artificial ingredients.” At four Mama told me that carob was healthier than chocolate and just as delicious. At five, knowing that sugar was forbidden, I shoved an entire pack of bubble gum into my mouth at a birthday party and almost choked. At 11 I finally refused to allow Mama to put garlic cloves in my ears when I had a head cold. At 12 I found Mama’s secret stash of chocolate and confronted her about the carob fallacy.
Mama decided to try a ketogenic diet to slow the tumor growth. She soon modified the diet to include cookies and chocolate granola. One day she showed me her favorite brand of cookies, opening the box and holding the bag up for me to see, but not touch. Pre-tumor Mama was an over-sharer of her food, to the point that I’d yell in frustration “don’t offer me everything on your damn plate, I have my own!” It was funny to see her without a filter, her sugary hedonism on full display.
Mama blamed sugar for her impressive number of dental fillings. That may have been one of the reasons she didn’t let me have processed sugar except on special occasions. Two months before she died, Papa found her brushing her teeth with a lint roller. She said she didn’t know why she was doing it.
Mama was an ardent believer in the power of vitamins and herbal supplements. She was forever forcing bottles of astragalus and cat’s claw and odd forms of magnesium on me. When Mama started hospice, I took grim delight in the shock on the nurse’s face as I trotted out 37 bottles of supplements so Mama could show her what she swallowed every day to “stay healthy.” I opened the drawer of “emergency backups” and joked that when the Zombie Apocalypse happened there would be enough homeopathy to sustain the entire neighborhood. The nurse was speechless. Mama scolded me “you’ve been looking forward to this for years.” I teased her that despite her terminal diagnosis, it was a genuine joy to finally have the opportunity to supplement-shame her.
Mama wasn’t always all about vitamins, supplements and carob. When I was a kid, she made delicious waffles. Papa was out of town, so we decided to have waffles for dinner with plenty of maple syrup. The waffles turned out weirdly mushy. Giggling, she threw one at me across the table. A full blown waffle-tossing fight followed, but no syrup was wasted (we probably drank it). Later we scrubbed the dough off the floor and walls together.
There’s an Italian plum tree in my parent’s backyard. Last summer Mama sent us out to pick plums and promptly gobbled a dozen. After carefully arranging and counting all the pits on the table (a compulsive habit courtesy of the brain tumor), she popped a pit in her mouth and looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and started trying to chew it. I asked her to stop for fear she’d break her teeth. She ignored me. I told her I’d give her another piece of pizza. No dice. Two pieces of pizza and two cookies were her price. She was a tough negotiator.
Six months before she died, I asked Mama if she believed in the afterlife. She shrugged and said “I’m considering being reincarnated as a dinosaur that eats people.”
Words matter
Mama was a talker. She cheerfully admitted that her eyes never saw something her mouth didn’t want to describe. This made it hard to ride in the car with her, especially because she over-enunciated every word and hissed her ss’s until my ears rang. When we traveled abroad, we went to as many museums and historical sites as time allowed. Mama would explain each painting and artifact to me in excruciating detail. On a trip to Spain when I was 12 I finally blew up and shouted at her to “stop explaining the living shit out of everything!” I wanted to go to the beach like a normal kid. My parents were displeased with my attitude. I decided our relationship would be better if I didn’t go on trips with them.
Mama’s attention to language helped me throughout and beyond my school years. She was a strict grammarian. I must have been the only second grader who responded “this is she” when people called the house and asked if it was me on the phone. She proofread my school papers and explained why I needed to adjust the sentence structure. In gratitude I got her a t-shirt that said “Grammar: the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.” When I cleaned out her closet after she died, I found that shirt and it was well worn.
As a college professor, Mama insisted that her students use the right words to express ideas accurately. While she was teaching at Penn State, football coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted of sexually abusing children. The university provided the faculty euphemistic talking points that Mama declared deceptive. She warned her students that they should not be distracted by phrases like “contact with minors.” She told the class “Let’s be perfectly clear: Jerry Sandusky was fucking children.”
Ralph was a New York City pigeon who stowed away on a ship to Italy because he wanted to see the elephants in Verdi’s opera Aida. Mama invented stories about Ralph and told them to me when I was in the bathtub. I loved her stories and as a result I loved taking baths. Mama taught me how to say “blood” the way a vampire would. The key is to puff out your cheeks and let the word fall out of your mouth — that’s what makes it sound like “blüd.”
Once I asked Mama how to make whipped cream. She sent me this recipe (note the lack of sugar):
- Buy heavy whipping cream
- Add some vanilla extract
- Beat the shit out of it
- Eat and enjoy
Mama wrote elaborate emails and letters. Her correspondence was poetic, warm and funny. Eventually we had to take away her phone after we realized she was sending gorgeously written, nonsensical emails to people who might not understand the brain tumor situation.
Delta Airlines emailed Mama a credit card offer. She responded:
Thank you kindly for you pursuits. As of now, we’re in a bit of a bind and shall not be able to contribute at present.
Love to you all, and ever more kisses and hugs.
XOXOXO
Out of the blue, she dropped a friendly note to their former real estate agent:
We have been to home searches & more than a few. We feel quite prepared for the ground swell and ambivalences from the wider world, including the notion of wider instruction. ( our timing seems off by a button or two….) Looking forward to being together very soon indeed — here’s our message to the wider world….
Love y’all….
XOXoOXO
XoXoXoXo
This is one of the last texts she sent me:
Morning thought
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
A better night of sleep for us both, so a cheerful thought surfaces. XOXOXO
The month before she died, Mama stopped speaking. She didn’t seem to realize or care that it had happened. She just kept smiling. She mustered a couple of sentences in the days before she slipped away, once to thank Papa for taking such great care of her during her illness, and then to thank me for some clothing. She knew that language mattered, and when she had few words remaining she used them judiciously.
Identity systems
Mama wanted to be an actress when she was a kid. Even though she didn’t pursue an acting career, she brought drama to everything she did. After she finished college, she became a nursery school teacher. She gave up teaching when she got pregnant with me, stayed home until I was in middle school and then she worked at the university library cataloging books. She would tell us about her co-workers, including the talkative lady with the inspirational poster of a waterfall that read “If you don’t understand my silences, you won’t understand my words.”
When I was in high school, Mama went back to school and earned her PhD in early American literature. She wrote a book called Melville’s Antithetical Muse: Reading the Shorter Poems. She also taught classics and began writing a mythology textbook. She never finished that textbook which made her sad. I wish she had pursued acting instead of following in Papa’s academic footsteps.
When Papa got a prestigious job editing a literary magazine at a university, Mama developed a posh faux-European accent of indeterminate origin. She would forget to use it when she was tired or angry. In the weeks before the brain cancer diagnosis, Mama was calmer, quieter and had thankfully dropped the fancy accent. She stopped complaining about drafts in restaurants and worrying about perceived food sensitivities as much as she used to. I’d been concerned she wouldn’t handle retirement well, and I thought she was happily relaxing into her new life. It was a huge relief until we found out that brain cancer was responsible for her newly mellow demeanor. Still, it was good to hear the New York roots in her speech again. She’d say “hey kid” like Humphrey Bogart when she saw me, and that made me happy every time.
Mama’s parents were better grandparents to me than they were parents to her. Her mother was a tough, funny and stylish special education teacher born in the Bronx. Her father was a World War II veteran with a black and white view of the world who disciplined his children violently. Mama told me she always pretended she was adopted after her father punished her. Her parents seemed to dislike anyone who wasn’t Jewish or American or preferably both. They had no love for my intellectual Cypriot father with his accented English and his Easy Rider mustache. When Mama married Papa they were displeased. Mama changed not only her last name, but also her first and middle names. Jan Carol Cohen was gone and Juana Celia Djelal was born. Papa called her Juanita. I initially thought it was cool that she adopted a new name, but later I realized she never really figured out who she wanted to be on her own terms.
As she became immersed in the world of academia, Mama grew wary of forming friendships. Her default assumption was that people who wanted to be her friend had some sort of flaw, weakness or sinister motive. Like most people, she wanted to be liked and admired, but she didn’t easily trust those who tried to be close to her. When she did make friends, she was fiercely loyal. As news of her illness spread, friends she’d known from every stage of her life came out of the woodwork and stayed in close touch until the end.
Fearless motion
During her college years, Mama studied dance at the Martha Graham studio. She enjoyed movement and would entertain me by demonstrating her jitterbugging skills. She loved the freedom of cycling. She used to ride from her college in Manhattan to Brooklyn to visit her grandparents. When I was a toddler, she’d put me into a metal seat on the back of her bike and pedal as hard as she could, with tiny me bellowing at her to ride faster.
Mama drove a car with the same intensity as she cycled. That earned her a lot of speeding tickets. Frequently when she was pulled over, she’d hiss at me “look sick” which was easy — I was already slumped over in my seat feeling vomity from her pushing 90 miles an hour on curvy roads. Then she’d say “officer, my child is ill and I am taking her to the doctor.” One time we got a police escort to the hospital — she waited for the cop to leave and then peeled out of the parking lot and continued on her way to the grocery store. By contrast, Papa drives perilously under the speed limit and gently rolls through stop signs and up one way streets the wrong way. Mama said, “If I survive this brain cancer I’ll probably end up dying from Papa’s driving.”
Mama continued to chase her love of speed into her sixties. A joy ride sliding down the bannister in their house gave her a tweaked back, but she said it was worth it. She knocked herself unconscious and gave herself whiplash at the gym by turning around and swiftly plowing into a rack of barbells. The icing on the cake was when Papa bought her a razor scooter because she looked so cute riding it around the grocery store. We drove home, and in the time it took Papa to put away the groceries, Mama managed to ride the scooter down a hill, wave at a neighbor, lose control, fly over the handlebars and slam face first on the street, teeth bashed in. We picked her up, took her to the dentist and she wore braces and then a retainer for the next several years. On a subsequent visit, I caught her zooming around their basement on the scooter, still blissfully unaware of how to use the brake.
Style over fashion
Mama believed in creating her own style and never followed fashion rules. She remorselessly cut the alligators off my Izod shirts, leaving holes. But she also let me choose my own clothes and dress myself from a very young age. Much to Papa’s chagrin, I’d appear at breakfast with my pants inside out or wearing three clashing patterns. Mama held firm that her four-year-old daughter should be allowed to choose her own clothes.
Last year I got a mohawk-mullet haircut and Papa freaked out. I asked Mama why Papa hated it so much. She looked at me like I was an idiot and said “it’s the style.” Then she said she really liked it because “it’s a lot better than that suburban housewife hair you had before” referring to my previous streaky Carly Simon shag.
When I was in elementary school I loved walking down the street with my beautiful Mama. She had long dark hair parted in the middle and often wore a purple suede mini skirt. She had a velour Marimekko mini dress in pale blue with dark purple patterns. She owned a long orange dress with a halter top decorated with mirrors and embroidery. She had shoes of every color and interesting jewelry from all over the world. Men would whistle at her on the street, and I would clutch her hand tightly, glaring but proud.
Speaking of wolf whistling: when I was a teenager, Mama sneakily drove down the street after me, and slowed down to whistle. Without looking to see who it was, I shot my arm high into the air and flipped the bird. She drove up next to me and congratulated me on my response. Seven months before she died, she said to me, beaming, “you turned out completely rotten, just the way I raised you.”
When she became a professor, she slid into a depressive style that was mostly brown, tweedy and shapeless. She dismissed bright colors as “too jeune fille for me.” As she neared retirement, her taste in clothing became brighter and less monastic again.
As the tumor grew, Mama’s judgement and memory suffered. She became obsessed with picking up, arranging and eating specks of food. One day I found her in the kitchen wearing a sweater, silk scarf, earrings, shoes and sheer tights (but no skirt or trousers). “Nice earrings,” I said wryly. “Thanks, I’m dressed to kill” she replied flatly, licking her fingers as she ate crumbs off the stovetop.
A month before she died, she pointed wordlessly at a modernist elephant pendant of pewter and glass I was wearing. I handed it to her to see and touch, and she grinned at me, put it on and would not give it back. She was a magpie until the end.
Love forever
There have been times in my life when Mama’s love and reliance on me were overwhelming. Often I wished I had a sibling so I wasn’t the sole focus. She said she and Papa didn’t have more children because when I was four years old and she asked me if I wanted a brother or sister, I said I would strangle the baby and throw it out the window. Given Mama’s flare for the dramatic, I have no idea whether that was true, but it’s a funny story.
I wish Mama had loved and believed in herself as much as she did in me. Although she didn’t always understand or agree with my decisions, she believed implicitly in my strength. From the time I was a teenager she was overly dependent on me for emotional support. Despite the emotional burden I sometimes felt, Mama was a great mother. She made me feel safe, important and unconditionally adored. I’m glad the long goodbye gave me the chance to thank her for the love she gave me, and to tell her how much I love her.
Mama remained affectionate until the very end. In late summer I was leaving their house, and she grabbed me and hugged me tight and told me I must not let go. She didn’t seem scared, just adamant. When I asked her why, she told me in a low, confidential voice that if I let go of her the entire house would explode. I asked her if she had planted a bomb in my backpack. She chuckled and said no. I gently let her go.
