Rules of Exchange

My Mother’s Debts

1998

Recovering from my trip today, so many things are bouncing through my mind. Some move quickly; some float slowly; some go up and down; some from side to side.

The fear; the incessant fear. Will I make it or not? How much time do I have? How will it all end? So many questions for me, and the answers come slowly, slowly.

Who am I and where am I going, and why is my life so hard? Will I survive, or will one of the many pitfalls of life finally do me in? After all of my work, will I finally succumb to something stupid?

Death was a prominent theme in my recent trip to Denver. My dad hangs onto life by a thread that grows weaker and weaker. He taunts my mother with it; challenges her to keep him alive. He has given over to her the greater part of the burden of maintaining his survival. He wants little involvement in it; wants mostly to be left alone to the few pleasures he still enjoys on this earth — eating, watching sports, reading, and being entertained. His movement has slowed. He is winding down.

But they will be in their struggle until the end, he and my mother, pushing and pulling each other brutally, always professing their undying love for each other.

My mother is very aware of her own impending demise; she referred to it a number of times, and is trying to hurry it along with alcohol.

All of us struggle with it, the life and death thing.

It seems I am playing a cat and mouse, hide and seek game with my mother. Taunting her, taunting her, putting the ball in her hands. Are you going to keep me alive, I ask her, because I don’t especially care. If you want me to stay alive, I am going to make you pay. You will have to pay with very large sums of money.

This is the dynamic I have established between my mother and me; a push-pull, hide-and-seek game, where I hide and she has to come looking for me. My mother is busy now in her later years, paying for the sins of her past.

I think she understands her position very clearly, and she seems willing to pay her dues. Her biggest fear at this point is that of losing any of us, those people she leaned on so heavily; gnawed on, tore chunks out of, and slowly consumed. She never wanted us to know how desperately she needed us, how utterly she feared our departure.

My mother is a person who understands the rules of exchange — she understands expenses and payments — and her life has been an ongoing calculation of the status of her various transactions. At this time of her life, she understands very clearly that after receiving so many payments in her life, it is now time for her to repay.

She has been buying on credit; charging, just as I do with money. And, as with credit cards, the interest on her borrowed lives is very high. My mother is fighting with everything she has to keep up, to keep going, to make ends meet.

But most days she feels she will never keep up, will never ever repay the debt she has incurred. And so she slips surreptitiously, way too often, into the little pantry that holds her salvation, and nips a little too often from bottles it holds, and wishes more often than she would like, for a swift and peaceful death.