From 1990 through 1995 Steve and I painted up a storm. Our work was voluminous. The more we painted the larger the canvases became, the more lively and gestural the work became. Imagine having the scale of an old livery stable in Bodega, a thirty foot ceiling topped the sixty foot long painting wall in our lower studio. Just one wall. There were two other walls in Bodega and another large wall in Steve's apartment on Del Mar in San Francisco.
In the fall of 1993 we moved from Bodega into a studio apartment in The Cloisters at the top of Green Street in North Beach and a small live-in art studio downtown. We wanted to be located in San Francisco, closer to Heather and my mother and farther from the restrictions of small town Bodega and so much death that had been occurring there. Our apartment was connected to our studio at Sixth and Market Street by the best Cable Car rides in the world. In the early morning, on days I didn't work up north in Santa Rosa, I stood on the wooden rail swinging around the tourists or alone on the platform holding onto the metal poles shined and smoothed by thousands of gripping fingers over some hundred years by those other lucky folks who knew the secret of surfing down hill on pale sun filled and cerulean blue mornings. The evenings I didn't work in Santa Rosa, Steve and I rode back uphill to our apartment holding hands on the outdoor benches through sparkling crisp nights after an evening's painting. This magical little life was the gift that buoyed me through my mother's last year. She died seven years after first telling me she had lymphoma. I told her I didn't think she could possibly die from it she looked too healthy, she was living a life beyond what she had ever dreamed she would, there could not be an end coming to this great effort and the enjoyment of its fruits. I told her there would have to be a remedy. I just could not see life without her. I asked her if she really thought she would die from this. She said she didn't know, but she would do her best not to.
My young and vital mom, Carolyn Kay Mitchell Parson, only nine years older than I sit right here, spent her last year in her sturdy winged chair not the soft and roomy one she cradled Heather in. She lay in bed not asleep, but manipulating her pain. When her strength waxed, she maneuvered through her home by walker, angry at the dust piling up and the meals she couldn't cook or eat. Car rides out in the countryside were replaced by trips to the emergency room at Stanford University Hospital, suffering the humiliation of being wheel-chaired and handing over medical cards and payments to curt women she couldn't see. In triage, she was never a priority, the woman was dying, that could easily be seen. Where was the emergency in a dying woman's fatigue and pain when someone who would still be alive next week had influenza to survive.
When it became clear that all the healthy diets in the world would not save her, I brought mom Eclairs. She loved waving them in the face of all the diets she lived on and fell off her whole life, na-na-na-na-na-ing the rules that failed to have any more meaning for her, small compensation. When she couldn't really eat anymore, I just brought my cheerful tender hearted self. On days I worked and couldn't travel down to see her, I called as soon as I got home, sitting on the apartment window sill and I reported everything I could see from there, Alcatraz Island looking like a birthday cake at dusk, the Golden Gate Bridge towers wearing a rolling fog headpiece, giant container ships with unpronounceable names, a hundred sail boats facing the same wind like a marching band, Coit tower bejeweled with car headlights ringing the skirt of its hill, windows across the East Bay in Oakland and Berkeley burning back at us impossibly orange. Heather and I took train rides down to Palo Alto to lie with her on the bed, to press little morphine pills into the corner of her mouth, tending the wounds of her disease, remembering stories, to whisper "don't tip over, now" when she fell into sleep sitting on the edge of the bed. Mom wanted to get up and walk away from all this nonsense in the bed. She would grip onto the walker rail, white knuckled. Sometimes she would be able to stand, then she wouldn't know what she was doing, weak and afraid she would take help turning around, back onto the bed's edge. Her restlessness would give way to her exhaustion. We straightened out the sheets and the bed-sore padding, brushed them into some sort of cool comfort, trying carefully to lift her diminished leaden body across to the fresh side of the bed. We covered her aching little self with a sheet, a blanket sometimes, more for protection, a sense of normalcy in this little nightmare we were enacting more and more frequently as fall fell to winter and despair.
On weekends, after the train ride back to San Francisco, Heather and I would go back to North Beach or her apartment on Belvedere in the Haight. We would head straight for the comfort of one of our dark cool bathrooms to wash up, to wash off the grime of death-is-coming. Heather sat at my knees one late afternoon on our return, I sat on the toilet lid too stunned to cry or move. Silently Heather tended to my hands. She tenderly softened my cuticles, filed the arches of my short nails, worked softness into my hands until the tears rolled down our cheeks. She is so remarkably my girl, tending to my loss, maintaining her mom.
On a sunny afternoon, the week we began spending every day in Palo Alto, mom wanted her walk-away, she wanted her turning in circles, she wanted her bed edge sittings. But she couldn't move her body at all. I knelt on the bed and carried her from one edge to the other, I propped her against my body at the edge of the bed and held her hand. I lugged her back to the middle for her rest. One tough lug across the bed popped my vertebrae, sent searing pain through my body, turned my back and legs to stone. There was not a thing I could do. My mom was truly suffering all the pain of dying. I could not complain, up against her pain. I could not ask my sisters or my girl to take my turn, we were all so broken, we were all losing our strength, dear little saddened piles of humanity staring or sleeping through until our next turn at watch. Default elected me the morphine pump job. I took my frightened body to the floor for minutes between checking and pumping, kept the vigil.
On February 21, 1994 my mom, in the middle of the night, with her three girls and her granddaughter and Rhea, her ladies in waiting with the single idea that she should not face this moment alone, was wrenched from her body by death. Earlier that day we began to take turns watching over her, death was clearly that near. We had been watching her body it seemed for years, to see if that rattling breath was death, if that motionlessness was flight, if that hanging mouth was the end. Amazing how long a soul who learned to fight death as a youngster can carry on that battle. There was no gentleness in my mother's leave-taking. In the afternoon we could feel her slipping, we saw her climbing into a boat on the sea. She began to face the other side of the bed, near the wall. We took turns crouching in the tiny space looking to see if she was still in her eyes. We took turns, we watched the horror, we tried to translate the mumblings the mute screaming, we listened for the rattle. By midnight we all lay on the bed or on the couch nearby like sick animals curled up on ourselves and each other, losing our mom, our Grandma Kay. We took our turns minute by minute watching her eyes and holding her, and then the girl holding the girl holding the mom, like spoons from behind in the dim yellow lamp light on the big old bed under the Honey Bear flowered wall paper that we had pasted up on New Year's Eve twenty-eight years before. Tears were flowing, quietly, we didn't want mom to sense our giving up before she would give up herself. And then, in a very sudden moment, she did give up. At one o'clock in the morning death grabbed at her one more time, and won. Our waiting and watching was in one blink over and the loss was a specter larger than the room, larger than the whole house, than the neighborhood, it was as tall and wide as Orion who lived over our house, there on Waverley Street in Palo Alto. Mom, gone, for the most part. Some of us were aware of her wandering through the rooms that night, because she could again. Not me. I had a fear of the darkness the rest of that early morning. I would startle awake after some sort of falling to sleep. My mind was full of emptiness and a fear wrapped its arms around my loneliness. I could not find my mom that morning after she died. I never found her again.
In the summer, Steve and I moved to a bigger, less expensive apartment on Geary Boulevard near the Cable Car Burger shop. I was so very reluctant to leave the North Beach windows where I could remember the stories I told my mom. I also hated to leave behind the comfort of the studio where, after trips to help with mom, I sat on my little painting stool in the few feet that defined my space, in front of my own canvas, resting against the strength of the wall. Steve, two feet behind me, cooked rejuvenating dinners in the electric frying pan, while I sat speechless, gathering myself back from the rigors of helping mom to her death. I sat for too long, stunned by disbelief at the true loss of my mom, my only and ever mom. There were many good things about this apartment on Geary. Steve and I made a studio in the largest front room with a little window and a lot of walls that we covered in canvas. You could take a walk clear around the apartment, in a circle, which I used a lot over the next years. The studio led to the kitchen which led to the bedroom with its window to window walls and through the closet into the bathroom and from there right into the studio again. We also had a sunset facing porch to sit out on, talking, planning our lives. We continued our painting in the Geary studio. We no longer had the luxurious painting time that our earlier days afforded us, more work time took its place. We used the dark hours of the evening to paint from projections over coffee and Madame Butterfly. And we painted our way through each weekend.
The summer of 1995 I left my job at Creative Living Center in Santa Rosa, a great loss to me after sixteen years. I had come to believe that if I kept driving home late at night after thirteen-hour work days, I would die in a car accident. I had the thought, I saw the picture of my death too many times to believe that I could escape it if I didn't take action to save myself. And I very much wanted to stay alive. I arranged to quit working those hours and taking that drive.
Shortly after leaving behind the responsibility of my job, one afternoon after my volunteer job at the Doggy Day Care Center, that back that had taken an injury for my dying mom, just gave up itself. I melted onto the floor and couldn't find a way to make my legs get me back up. That afternoon was the beginning of a year I spent alone in the Geary apartment watching my own pain, feeling to my own marrow the loss of my mom and my own life as I had known it, trying to find my way back into the world.
Stones is the one painting I made in that year. I was able to stand. I was able lie on my right side. I could not sit. I could not move my arms away from my body. I could not reach to the side or turn around to see behind me. I could not gesture. I could stand at a canvas and paint with a tiny-haired brush. I could place a dot on the canvas for every tear stored inside me, for every thought of loss I suffered, for every lonely breath I took throughout every solitary day, for every fun moment I no longer spent with Steve because I was busy managing my own body instead, and for every long dark night I spent awake harboring and corralling this pain. Stones is one of many pieces I found myself making in an effort to understand losing parents and most of the family I knew as a child, friends and old loves, and my dear Jake. The study for stones is a collage of photographs and drawings of the site on Gravenstein Highway in Sebastopol that I decided would be where my dad is buried. This painting is as stiff and painstaking as I was in that year. The saving grace is the tender colors and the layers, so many layers reflecting all the world of loss's trauma, strength, rightfulness, and hope. It is a record of each of a thousand times the brush touched the canvas marking any kind of step that could possibly follow a year of such magnitude.
