IN MAY 2015, my mother, struggling to breathe, was rushed from the reservation to Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, where she was eventually diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She was seventy-eight years old and had been suffering with major and minor health problems since her husband—my father—had died twelve years earlier. I knew Parkinson’s wasn’t fatal, but it can significantly reduce a person’s life span and lead to severe physical and mental impairment, especially for older people. How quickly would it transform my elderly but mostly self-sufficient mother into an utter dependent? And what about the quality of her last years? How could I make sure she lived and died well?
I am not an organized person, but I suddenly felt the need to make serious and complicated plans for my mother’s life—for the end of her life. However, it felt more like formal duty than affection. My mother and I had often been estranged. We’d battled and exiled each other. And then, after my father’s death, we’d settled into a relationship based on irregular phone calls and occasional visits. My mother and I loved each other—mostly or partly loved each other, I think—but I’d always felt the need to armor myself against her emotional excesses, and I imagine she felt the same about me.
But she needed me now—financially and spiritually—so I booked an immediate flight from Seattle to Spokane to visit her, and my siblings, in Sacred Heart Hospital. In my taxi to the airport, I researched senior care facilities in Seattle and Spokane. Some of them were quite beautiful and offered extensive programs for residents with Parkinson’s. They also seemed to be legal pyramid schemes where elderly patients and their families poured money into end-of-life rent rivers that only flowed up toward the corporate owners and stockholders.
But if I were to be grifted, then let the grift be lovely.
I did the math on my book sales and expected royalties, and knew I could afford a great place for my mother in Spokane if I gave up my outside office and worked only at home. Maybe I could do more lucrative gigs speaking on college campuses. Maybe I could return to script doctoring in Hollywood. I had many financial opportunities, some more probable and profitable than others. I was the lucky Native American son—the fortunate writer—who could take good care of his dying Native American mother. Isn’t that an oddly tribalistic and narcissistic realization? Then again, isn’t tribalism a form of group narcissism?
“I can put Mom in a fancy place by the Little Spokane River,” I said to my sister on the phone from my departure gate in Seattle–Tacoma International Airport.
“That’s what she was worried about today,” my sister said. “She thinks we’re going to put her in an old folks’ home and forget about her.”
“Indians don’t do that,” I said, instantly romanticizing my race.
“Some Indians do,” my sister said, immediately deromanticizing us.
“I can also rent a cheap studio apartment near the senior-citizen home,” I said. “It’s just a few blocks away. And you guys can stay there when you’re visiting her. You can take turns seeing her every day.”
I felt my back spasm and ache from the heavy burden of my messiah complex.
“She doesn’t want to be in a place where everybody is white,” my sister said. “She thinks old white people will be racist toward her.”
“I don’t think she’s wrong,” I said. “I bet old white people are probably more racist in Spokane. Old people are probably more racist everywhere. Just look at Clint Eastwood.”
I thought about my late father, a Coeur d’Alene Indian, who’d gradually grown more racist as he aged. But it was a passive form of racism—if there is such a thing—in which he would use a lesser racist epithet to describe a person after a relatively tense encounter. Aside from the time he called a white cop Custer, my father never insulted anybody to their face. He once came out of a 7-Eleven complaining about the “towel-head” who owned the place, so I called my father buffalo-head for the rest of the day to shame him for his racism. That wasn’t quite a progressive move on my part. I wondered if my mother had also grown more racist in her elderly years. I hadn’t spent concentrated time with her since my father’s death, so I didn’t know exactly how my mother’s personality and politics might have changed. I knew she was a fan of the callow Sarah Palin only because that former vice-presidential candidate had married a dude with a Yu’pik great-grandmother.
But, strangely enough for an activist artist like me, I had never thought about how white privilege, or lack thereof, can extend even into the last few days of a person’s life. I now had to worry about my mother being racially harassed as she was dying. So I researched senior-citizen homes that catered to more diverse populations—a difficult task in the very white cities of Spokane and Seattle—but I found a few reservation-based facilities that specialized in taking care of Native Americans.
“There is an elder-care place on the Colville Indian Rez,” I said to my sister as I waited in the Seattle airport.
That rez-based nursing home was one hundred miles from my mother’s home on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
“Is it Indian Health Service?” my sister asked.
“I think so,” I said. “That’s kind of worrisome, isn’t it?”
I worried about the quality of a government facility that served only Indians. Scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest flashed through my head. I didn’t want to turn my mother into Chief Broom. Or Randle P. McMurphy. I didn’t want her shuffling through the hospital hallways, leaning on a walker made of elk bones and coyote spit. I also wondered if my mother would want to live out her last years on another tribe’s reservation. I’d been an urban Indian for half my life and was often the only Indian in any gathering, but living on another tribe’s reservation felt even more alienating to me. How would it feel to my reservation-bound mother?
“Maybe there will be some old Colville Indians who speak a little Spokane,” I said. “Maybe Mom will get to gossip in the old language. Even if she’s on somebody else’s rez.”
The Colvilles and Spokanes speak tribal languages that are related and share some words, but they are distinct dialects.
“I think Mom would be even lonelier around a bunch of old Indian strangers,” my sister said. “I wouldn’t want to live on somebody else’s rez.”
“How about senior housing in Wellpinit?” I asked. “Maybe I could hire a full-time nurse to live with Mom there.”
“No way,” my sister said. “Auntie Vi lives there. And they can’t stand each other.”
Despite living only a few miles apart, my mother and her eldest sister hadn’t spoken in a decade. My mom had always been good at making enemies. Her sister, nicknamed Nasty Nanny, was even better at it.