About Survival Portraits
Survival Portraits were taken in Mexico City and Youngstown, Ohio, where Caitlin watched her mother slowly die of lung cancer during two months of hospitalization. They are all painful multiple exposures, her way of dealing with grief, loss… This is what she wrote, at that time, about what she felt.
“All Saturday morning I had been calling the hospital, but no one answered in her room. She was in Youngstown, Ohio. I was in Mexico City. Mom was in the hospital for advanced emphysema. I figured she was out for some kind of tests; so, at first I wasn’t all that worried. But by late afternoon, when I still couldn’t find her in the hospital, and someone else answered her phone, I started to panic. I called my aunt.
Jackie told me that her heart had stopped. And that she had been revived. Jackie told me to get on a plane now. I took the first flight I could get.
Mom smoked since she was a teenager and now she was 69. The emphysema was bad. I knew that. She had one of those portable oxygen contraptions for a long time. She had been in and out of the hospital for years. Most of the time she wouldn’t tell me. Sometimes I would figure it out on my own, like when I would call and call and no one answered her phone. I knew she couldn’t be out so long on her own; so I started calling the hospital. She was what one of the nurses called a “frequent flyer.”
My Mom hadn’t wanted to see me for nearly 10 years. I can’t say that our relationship was good. It wasn’t. But I kept trying to see her, and she kept refusing. And I respected her wishes. That was until her heart stopped.
I was afraid I wouldn’t make it in time to see her alive. That happened with my Dad. The county coroner called to tell me he had died of a heart attack. He had been fixing a leak in the roof. He climbed down, sat in the lawn chair in the back yard and died right there. It was the end of summer. A neighbor girl found him.
So, I thought the same thing would happen with my mom: another call from the county coroner.
But I got a second chance. Her heart stopped. She was revived. And it was a gift from God. I had two months with her. In those two months, she gave me all the love that she hadn’t been able to do in the previous 39 years. I don’t know if it was just death hovering over she shoulder that changed her, or changed us both.
She was on and off life support all that time, mostly on because she couldn’t breath on her own any more. She had a tube down her throat, couldn’t talk. So, she wrote and I talked. Then the doctor found the lung cancer. They tried radiation treatment for a time, wheeled her down there twice a day. I went with her once. That was enough for me.
But it was real clear that she would never breath on her own again. So, they gave her a choice. She could go to a nursing home, breath and be fed through a tube, maybe survive a year. Or she could be disconnected. She chose the second. All she wanted was to taste homemade butterscotch ice cream and for me to stay with her when she died. She got both.
It was a Friday afternoon. Her nurse helped me smuggle the ice cream into the hospital. We ate it in her room.
The doctor disconnected her on Saturday afternoon. I got her sister and brother-in-law in there to say goodbye. She liked that a lot. Her family hadn’t been to the hospital to see her. After they left, we sat and watched TV. She wanted to see the McNeil Lair Report, but it wasn’t on because it was the weekend. We watched some football. She liked football a lot. The night nurse came in and gave her some juice. Then we turned her, to clean her up. It must have been as we were turning her, that she had the stroke. The nurse was real upset and wrote a lot.
How I see it, Mom was still clinging to life. She didn’t know how to let go. So, she had a stroke. I guess it was her only way out. I stayed with her, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday morning. She smelled like vanilla: a soft sweet smell. The nurse said it was her job to take care of me, as well as Mom. And what did I want. I said I wanted sugarless cinnamon gum and for the machines not to make all kinds of noise when Mom died. She turned the sound down and brought me the gum. Mom died as the sun rose on Tuesday morning.
I had been driving her car. It was an old Dodge Dart, in as bad a shape as she was. But I needed that car to drive to the hospital. It was just too expensive to keep a rental. So, I asked God to keep that car running as long as Mom was alive.
So, I walk out to the parking lot, put the key in the ignition, and the car won’t start. I guess I just didn’t ask for enough.
They say you can’t take it with you. But Mom always was a driver in life. I imagined her pulling up to the pearly gates in that old Dodge Dart. St. Peter takes her hand and ushers her into heaven.”