Novel Eye

Back in 2007 I posted this: http://noveleye.blogspot.com/2007/08/mortality-part-2.html and she's still here. Turning 85 today. So she's already lived a more than a year beyond the diagnosis. But something's different. She seems ready to die now. And it's hardening/closing faster, leaving her short of breath. I had to go down and clean up her apt. so she could come home from rehab after a small heart attack and small stroke that have left her blind in one eye. There's so much I could write about it, but I'm still processing--what I feel, what I need. They are saying six months now. We finally had that sort of peace that I was looking for. And now I hate myself for all the wasted years, but I can't do that. They might have been exactly as I feared they would be--all anger and pain. But now I need more time, more time, and that is what we never get.

My mother has an aortic stenosis . This means the valve in her heart is getting more and more rigid, and eventually it will stop moving altogether and she will die. Her doctor told her it could happen anytime with no warning, "Any time from two weeks to a year." That was five months ago. She mentioned it then, but I put it out of my mind at the time. That seems extraordinary at this moment but my mother has often cried wolf. Last night she mentioned it to my husband again and told him not to tell me as I'm so stressed from work. He, of course, told me after I'd finished speaking with her. I called her back and asked if the diagnosis had changed, if she felt different. If that really meant she had ONLY a year to live, or was it more in the lines of now, or some vague time in the future. She wasn't sure. She said it was just one of those things doctors say. She also said she had no intention of dying. She'll be 83 in October when I'm planning to see her. I h...

It's been a crazy week. More about that later, but part of that was visiting Mass Art on Tuesday to see the end of year exhibit for the Industrial Design program and speak to the head of the department about the certificate program. He was a rather unpleasant man with terrible halitosis--which is not a reason not to go to a school, I realize. He was just rather abrupt as well. Essentially he told me that the certificate program is like getting a BFA without having to do the core curriculum year, and I made small talk and said, "Oh, I didn't even have to do that at Amherst--Amherst doesn't have a core curriculum." And he said, "Well, that's not my problem," and moved on. In other words, stay focused on the case at hand. It felt rude of him, of course, but it made me think of all the times in my childhood when my mother would babble some meaningless or irrelevant comment to people who either couldn't care less, or were trying to stay focuse...