Riddles at Parties

Six-and-a-half hours after our mother died, I stood at Staples with my brother, trying to figure out what size cardboard boxes to buy, and how many. I needed to sort our mother’s clothes into categories: boxes to ship to myself in Los Angeles, and boxes to donate. I didn’t expect to be at Staples, I was still in the liminal space that extends between people who live in the world, and people who exist in the ICU.

People who are having normal days, doing normal things, and people who don’t understand how neurons and protons and atoms are coming together to form anything, anymore. People who are staring at cardboard boxes but thinking about maternal michrochimerism.

People who are at Staples because they’re moving in together with someone they love, like the couple a few feet away from us who were heading to IKEA next, and people who’ve just lost someone they don’t know how to live without, and are standing there because even small decisions feel overwhelming. As if buying the wrong size box will change anything.

I’d spent most of the prior month in the ICU with our mother. The fluorescent lights at Staples were whiter than the fluorescent lights in the ICU, or maybe it’s that the walls at Staples were bright white; the light bouncing off them hurt my eyes. The walls in the ICU were a pale yellow-beige-green mashup and the light cast that same shade onto everyone’s faces. Possibly, that was by design.

I’d said goodbye to my mother a few days prior, sobbing. It had become my habit to fly back to Los Angeles once a week, look at my kids, make sure they were okay, hug them, and fly back to New York City. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t let myself think about the money, I just booked the flights and went. I didn’t let myself worry about anything except trying to stretch myself across three thousand miles. I could feel her dying.

I had planned to return the following day to meet the hospice team at the apartment where I grew up in New York City. I’d filled out 29 pages of paperwork to switch my mother into the hospice network instead of regular insurance. I’d done that when I got to Los Angeles. A man from the hospice team had explained about the paperwork as I walked to Penn Station to take the train to Newark Airport. It doesn’t really matter what coast I was on, what city I was in, she was dying.

I was walking in the door of my house, hugging my little family, and it was like gasping for a huge breath after you’ve been underwater too long, but knowing you’re going back under. Trying to get enough oxygen to fill your lungs. I was ordering furniture to go with the hospital bed that had arrived in New York City, and was now waiting for my mother in my parents’ bedroom. It was supposed to become my mother’s room for her last few weeks. Of life.

I wanted the aides to have a reclining chair and soft throw blanket and reading table and lamp, and I didn’t know what else. What do you order to make sure someone can be comfortable and get some rest, but not sleep through it if your mother, who cannot speak, needs help? Comfortable, but not too comfortable. Maybe I’d just end up sleeping there myself, I knew I wouldn’t sleep through it if she needed me.

Then I got a call from her best friend to get on the next flight; she wasn’t going to make it home the way things were looking. He held the phone up to her ear for me. I said, I love you, Mom, I’m coming. Hang on if you can.

She’d spent two weeks on a ventilator due to a sudden and unexpected worsening of ALS symptoms, after a diagnosis that came out of left field right as we were all processing the first global pandemic of our lifetimes. I know I’m not telling this in a linear way, but it doesn’t need to be linear for you to understand.

She began to have symptoms just after the pandemic started. She blamed it on me, the symptoms I mean, and eventually the ALS. That story is too long for an essay, we’d have to go back to the day my dad left her, or maybe the day she found out he’d been seeing someone else when she was pregnant with me. Too far back is the point. I’m writing a whole book about it.

It hurt like hell, but that isn’t the point, either. Slow progression with ALS is expected, and that happened for months, but then she’d experienced a very rapid decline in a matter of days. I know why, but there isn’t a way to tell you without hurting someone I love, a thing I cannot bring myself to do. What I can say is there will always be charlatans on the internet ready to sell miracles. What I can say is watching YouTube videos and “doing your own research” is not the same as spending eight years getting a medical degree, and it takes a certain kind of blind arrogance to be confused about that.

By November of 2021, when she ended up in the ICU, the entire floor was full of COVID patients on ventilators. I will not describe the things I saw, but I have no tolerance for anyone who says ICUs were empty. I am not a violent person at all, I never have been, but my first thought when I hear someone say something along those lines is I’d like to kick them in their stupid, lying teeth.

ICUs had been full since the beginning of April, 2020, then overflowing, so much that sometimes hospitals in New York City had to call in refrigerated trucks to handle the influx of dead bodies because the morgues were full. I am sorry to write that sentence, but what exactly are we doing?

Why is time being wasted grilling Dr. Fauci now, when the president who was in Office at the beginning of the pandemic is president now, and has started a war in Iran he can’t figure out how to end? Congress doesn’t have time to be looking backwards, and at Dr. Fauci, of all people, and not Jeffrey Epstein?

Of course mistakes were made, we’ve never had a global pandemic in our lifetimes, but we were not the only country with masking requirements, vaccination requirements, social distancing, school closures, etc. Do you see other countries’ governments dragging their top epidemiologists in for questioning, shouting expletives at them, insulting them, and holding them in contempt of Parliament or whatever? This really is a banana republic, and wildly embarrassing.

Some of us lived through the pandemic, millions of us did not. By November, ICUs were full of COVID patients, some of whom had not gotten vaccinated, some elderly people who’d been exposed at nursing homes, and others with compromised immune systems. Hospital morgues were no longer overflowing. It’s hard for me to think about the hospital morgue, I try to make myself think of other things, but sometimes I can’t help but think about it, for reasons that have to do with a lack of foresight about what would happen in the hours after my mother died. I feel crushing guilt and sadness when those images come, like I let her down and there’s no way to fix it.

I was there, though, I saw the human beings in every single bed, and the machines breathing for them. The sound of oxygen being forced into a person’s lungs, C02 being sucked out, the rhythm of it, will live inside my head forever. The beeping of the monitors. The alarms going off. The way you never know what time it is because time doesn’t matter in the ICU. Doctors and nurses have more important things on their minds, like saving lives, or comforting family members.

I told my mother it was okay for her to go, but that was a lie. It was not okay for her to go. I was not going to be okay. I just didn’t want her to suffer anymore, and she was suffering so much. My mother, who had always been a force of nature, who never went to the doctor and had never been sick, who was always put together and never left the house without lipstick and jewelry and perfume.

My mother, who got her hair blown out twice a week, and didn’t own sweatpants and only had dressy black jeans, not blue jeans, was reduced to little more than bones in a bed. She didn’t care about her hair anymore, though she thanked the very kind nurse who came with dry shampoo and gave her a “spa treatment” on one of her last good days.

I’d made friends with all the nurses by then, and the social worker on my mother’s medical team. Her lead doctor changed every Monday, a thing they do at Mount Sinai so a new set of eyes can come in and take a look at the care plan. Her neurologist was in constant communication with the team and with me, but there isn’t a cure for ALS, and when they got her off the ventilator, she refused the bipap machine, even though she knew what that meant. Too much C02 build-up. We all know what that means.

The nurses saved me every day. I don’t know what kind of state I was in, but I couldn’t eat and I barely slept. I don’t recall being tired or hungry, though, I just remember being there in the room with her, talking to her, shifting her if she wasn’t comfortable, leaning her forward onto me so I could fix her pillows, and then lifting her gently so I wouldn’t disrupt the feeding tube, or the wires connected to the monitors reading her heart rate and blood pressure. Lifting her gingerly because it felt like she could break.

It was holiday time in New York, the city was dressed up first for Thanksgiving, then for Christmas, and I would walk from the Upper West Side where I grew up, to 16th and 1st Avenue every morning, and back again every night, sometimes at 9pm when visiting hours were officially over, sometimes at 10pm if certain nurses were there who didn’t mind if I stayed late. I needed the walk, it kept me tethered to the world. I could feel gravity pulling me toward the center of the earth as I felt my mother impossibly leaving the planet.

It made no sense. I couldn’t leave with her, I have children here, but how could I keep existing on a floating rock where she would no longer walk? I wanted to throw up a force field, some way to keep her grounded, but I know when I’m beat. I could see it in the doctors’ faces, and the nurses. The social worker’s especially.

It’s not that I blindly accept whatever a doctor says, or that I don’t realize Big Pharma is corrupt, or know our healthcare system is broken. Of course I investigate things for myself, and I advocated for my mother every step of the way, just like I researched every vaccine before I got my kids vaccinated from the time they were babies. You have to use your critical thinking skills with everything these days, and media literacy is also good.

You don’t listen to two ignorant, unserious, unqualified old men without medical degrees or licenses when it comes to vaccines for your children, that ought to be clear to everyone. The president signed an executive order attempting to change the vaccine schedule for children in the United States on August 10th, and talked about how “they pour a soda-bottle-sized vat of liquid vaccines into a child’s body” by the time they’re one, which tells me he never took any of his children to the pediatrician, because no they do not.

During the Q&A portion of the signing, a reporter asked Trump if there was any evidence for his comment that the MMR combination vaccine is “quite lethal.”

“What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way,” Trump said. “And I say, well, let’s say there’s a 5% chance of it.”

“Let’s split it up,” he continued, adding that when the MMR is given separately, “they” say “there is no impact. In fact, they’ve said how safe it seems to be. But I’ve heard when you put them together, they can be explosive.”

“…some people say.”

He wants to split the vaccine for Measles, Mumps and Rubella into three separate shots by Executive Order, thereby sowing a little more distrust in vaccines, and making it harder for low-income families to get their kids vaccinated. Each shot requires a separate doctor’s appointment that way, a separate co-pay, another trip to the doctor’s office, more gas money and/or time off work.

This is solving another problem that doesn’t exist, like “solving” election fraud. Vaccines do not cause autism. They do prevent disease, though, and this Executive Order will lead to the spread of more disease amongst children, and the wider population. That’s how herd immunity works, or more accurately, this is the pathway to how it erodes.

People will also tell you New York City has changed, and now it’s full of rapists and criminals. They’re the same people who tell you the ICUs were empty and the MMR vaccine should be split into three shots. I am holding back the expletives and it’s taking all my self-restraint, but I don’t need a Venn diagram, they are in the same circle and they watch the same program that has the word “News” in the title, but is entertainment of the Rage Bait variety.

New York City is no more or less “full” of rapists and criminals than it’s ever been, and I was born and raised there, so I know what I’m talking about. I walked back to the apartment where I grew up every night my mom was dying, past Macy’s with all the windows dressed up, past Fifth Avenue with its twinkling lights, past Central Park South, over to Columbus Avenue, and eventually over to Broadway. It was the only time I felt like I was in my body, the cold air biting into my face until I felt alive again, until I felt something.

It’s a big city, so yes, you have to keep your wits about you like any big city, but no, it’s not suddenly a hellscape. Matter of fact, violent crime in the Big Apple is down this year, in record-breaking ways. Hmmm, what’s changed since last year? California isn’t a nightmare, either, sorry to disappoint the same circle of people. I wish more folks would pause and question a headline instead of believing it, or that they’d take two seconds to check the veracity of a story before sharing it, but I wish so many things these days.

Someone sent me an article about the “mass exodus” of millionaires fleeing New York because of Mamdani, and the resultant $11 billion dollars in lost tax revenue, with the comment, “Wow, New York City is really in trouble!” and I thought, huh, that really doesn’t sound right, so I clicked on the article they sent me and read it, a thing they clearly had not done.

I know this, because if they’d read the article, they would have seen the study cited was conducted by the Citizen Budget Commission (CBC) and it covered the time period of 2010-2022, which, if you’re keeping score, you’ll know was prior to Mamdani’s mayoral term. It has nothing to do with him, but you’d never know that from the headline, or more specifically, the subtitle. This isn’t an accident.

“As per the study, New York’s share of the nation’s millionaires fell from 12.7% in 2010 to 8.7% in 2022—the steepest decline of any US state. Although the number of millionaires in New York increased by about 34,000 during that period, states such as Florida, Texas and California recorded much faster growth.”

I feel like it should not be too much to ask that people read the articles they share, and not just look at a headline and say, “Yes, goddammit, that fits the narrative I support! I’m going to pass this on!”

I was thinking about all this because I got a lump in my throat on a plane last week and was trying not to cry. It was one of those times when it really hurt. Sometimes those lumps are not extremely painful, but this one was the kind that isn’t messing around, and then the tears hurt, too. They feel a bit prickly, like tiny knives in your eyes, and if tears escape, they feel hot on your face. Maybe that’s what got me thinking about standing in front of my mother’s closet seven hours after she died, a thing I wasn’t at all ready to do.

I didn’t yet know that I was going to be dealing with PTSD for a year or five, or that I’d have horrible nightmares about the moments right after she died, or that I was going to have the first panic attack of my life in a couple of hours. I just knew my stepdad was having his own reaction to the grief, and he’d said he needed a room where he wasn’t hit in the face with her things every time he turned his head, and if he could have the bedroom, that would be great. I’d gone to Staples with my brother to get boxes in a daze.

The lump in my throat happened because I was on a plane and I started thinking about the decoy plane, the one that’s been in the news. The one that was supposed to be carrying the president and other senior White House officials — along with the press corps — from Ankara, after the NATO Summit, back to the states. Then the Secret Service told the president there was a credible threat on his life, it seemed an Iranian terror cell had snuck into Turkey and knew his movements, and they were concerned Air Force One would be targeted.

You know those riddles people ask at parties sometimes, or kids ask if you’re babysitting, or happen to be someone’s parent or aunt? “If you had to choose between saving a train full of 350 people, or saving yourself, what would you do?” There’s only one right answer, all grownups know this, but also, we never expect to be in a position to be tested.

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

One would hope if you decide to run for president, though, it’s because you’re ready for real-life riddles like these. That is the job. When is it worthwhile to risk actual human lives, and for what? The human lives you’re risking are not your own, they’re all individual people. Each life is precious to that person’s mother, father, partner, kids, best friend. Just one life is a whole universe to someone, and you know this if you’ve ever lost someone you love.

They’re the lives of other people’s children, in your own country, or in other countries. If you decide there is something valuable enough to risk sacrificing human life, any decent citizen would hope the weight of that decision would not be made without deep and serious soul-searching. You don’t give that responsibility to a man who posts AI images of himself for hours on end. He lacks the capacity and the depth to care.

The lump in my throat formed because I suddenly thought of all those journalists on that plane, and all their families. All the staff, the pilots. All the innocent people sitting there, having no idea they were in danger, and the casual way in which the president decided his “consequential” life was worth risking all of theirs.

Of course riding with the president is always a risk, but I imagine they assume if there is an imminent threat, the plane won’t take off. The president had options, he didn’t have to take the catering truck to a different plane and send those people up into the air when he knew they might be at risk. He chose to do that, and apparently “he loved” the subterfuge. He was having a good time.

That’s the part that made the lump in my throat form. The fact that so many people decided to put this man in charge, a man who doesn’t care about human lives, who doesn’t think about each of the 5,000 active duty sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln who’ve been deployed for over 260 days. Sometimes there have been food shortages, no ability to do laundry or make calls home, no port calls.

Family members have been worried about the mental health of their loved ones, and reports of self-harm; one sailor did go overboard last week, and others have been stopped from trying to throw themselves overboard. Today, when pressed, the president and Pete Hegseth said this wasn’t true. The families are not concerned, the sailors are fine.

The president said they had not been deployed too long, in fact, “not nearly long enough.” My heart hurts. The “support our troops” people are deathly silent.

I know what it feels like to lose someone in a horrible way, and to be unable to make their suffering stop. A person making decisions about people’s lives should have some sense of the sanctity of life, but the man in the Oval Office does not. He does not.

He will never know what it’s like to be at home and see Fedex arrive with cardboard boxes the week after your mother has died. He’ll never know what it’s like to open those boxes filled with her clothes, but also photographs and letters, things that make you sit on the floor of your living room and weep, grateful your kids are at school, and there’s only your dog there to see you falling apart while he nudges you with his nose.

I don’t know why it isn’t obvious to everyone you’d want a man who cares — or even more, that a woman who cares will always trump a man who doesn’t.

I’ll never know why that wasn’t the most obvious thing in the world.

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