“We can just take care of Mom at home,” my sister said.
None of us knew how sick my mother might become—how difficult it could be to take care of her. We didn’t know if she would eventually need help on a weekly or daily or hourly basis. My sisters were not physically well either. I worried they’d endanger their health by taking care of our mother.
“I want Mom to have expert care,” I said.
“She just wants to be home,” my sister said.
“Okay, I have to hang up now,” I said. “My plane is boarding. I’ll see you at the hospital in a couple of hours.”
In 1966, I was born in Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane.
My father died in Sacred Heart in 2003.
He’d wanted to die at home, but he was suffering and suffocating—drowning in his own fluids—so my mother and sisters had rushed him to the hospital. I’d seen him on his last night at home on the reservation but fled back to Seattle rather than be with him in his last moments.
He’d often abandoned me when I was a child. He’d often chosen to go on days-and weeks-long drinking binges instead of staying home with his wife and kids. So, to be blunt, I chose to leave him in the same way he had left me. In that difficult time, I chose to be with my wife and children—the family I had created—instead of the family I was born into.
Did that decision make me a bad son?
I suppose it did.
Do I feel guilty about it?
Yes.
But I don’t regret my decision. Given the chance to travel back in time, I would have still abandoned my father so I could be a father to my sons.
So, yeah, if you close your eyes and listen hard, then you can hear a drum group singing a powwow version of “Cat’s in the Cradle”:
coffee spoon, way ya hi yo
Indian moon, way ya hi yo
daddy is drunk at noon
and won’t be home soon
way ya way ya way ya ho
But my father wasn’t alone in his hospital room—on his deathbed. My mother and sisters were at his side.
At home in Seattle, I called his room in Sacred Heart.
“How is Dad?” I asked my sister when she answered.
“He’s leaving us,” she said. “His breathing is really slowing down. He’s not responding to us.”
“Put the phone up to his ear,” I said.
“Okay,” my sister said.
“Dad,” I said into the phone. “It’s me.”
I heard him sigh and move. I heard my mother and sisters gasp. Somewhere deep in his morphine coma, my father had recognized my voice and was trying to respond—had responded in the only way he could.
“Dad,” I said. “It’s okay. You can let go. I love you. You can let go. You can stop fighting. It’s time to say good-bye. I love you. I love you. Good-bye.”
Twelve hours later, as I walked through a Seattle toy store with my sons, ages two and six, my sister called to tell me that our father had died.
I paid for my sons’ new toys, drove us home, and helped them into the house. Then, as my wife held our boys, I collapsed to the floor of our living room and wept.
On my flight to Spokane, I used the airplane Wi-Fi to do more research on Parkinson’s disease. It would certainly make my mother’s last years incredibly difficult—even torturous. She’d be taking multiple medications many times a day. I wondered if Indian Health Service would cover everything or if I would have to pay for some of the more expensive and experimental drugs.
I then vowed to finally finish the years-late sequel to my best-selling book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I needed that money. My mother needed that money. I hadn’t been able to finish the book because of the pathological fear that my sequel would be The Phantom Menace instead of The Empire Strikes Back. But, on the airplane, I thought, “Okay, okay, Phantom sucked, but it still made big cash. I’m gonna Yoda this book for my mother.”
After landing in Spokane, I took a taxi to Sacred Heart Hospital and hurried to my mother’s room. I leaned over and kissed her forehead. She wiped away tears and said hello.
I hugged my sisters and my niece. She was our second cousin, but my sisters had adopted her and raised her as their daughter. My family, despite all of our troubles, had temporarily or permanently taken care of various cousins and friends over the years. In adulthood, many of my childhood friends told me they’d felt safer in our house than they ever did in their own homes. My father’s drunken kindness and my mother’s angry sobriety had provided an unlikely refuge on our reservation.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked my sister.
“The doctor said they’ll get Mom stabilized here and then send her to a rehabilitation center to work on her Parkinson’s.”
“How long will she be there?” I asked.
“Six to eight weeks,” my sister said.
“I can pay for a private room,” I said.
“They want her to have a roommate. So she’ll stay social.”
“Okay,” I said.
I sat on the bed next to Mom.
“Hey, Lillian,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’m old,” she said, and laughed. She was aware of her surroundings but also seemed confused, like she was two people, one much older than the other.
“How’s your brain?” I asked her.
“I get tired,” she said. “And I forget things.”
“Are you getting senile on me?”
“I’ve been getting senile.”
I realized I had not seen her in at least four months. She’d been her usual witty self the last time we’d been together. But now she seemed fragmented.
“Do you like your doctor?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “She likes your books. She wants you to sign one for her.”
That was one of the best privileges of my literary fame. My parents had both received more attentive health care because they had conceived me. My father and I had the same name, so he’d often been asked by medical professionals to sign my books instead of me.
“I’m going to take care of you, Mom,” I said.
That wasn’t a lie, not exactly, but it didn’t turn out to be true.
During the early years of my writing career, my mother was afraid to tell me family stories.
“You’re just going to put things out there for everybody to read,” she said. “Ugly things.”
But after I became more famous in the Indian world, after other Natives would learn her last name and ask if she was related to me, and then ask for her autograph and take photos with her, my mother began to tell me more and more about her personal history.
She was a storyteller, too.
So, diagnosed with Parkinson’s, exhausted and afraid, she lay in her hospital bed in Sacred Heart Hospital and told me another story about that old and primitive house on the rez—about who we used to be and who we would always be. I’d heard all of her stories multiple times. She repeated them and repeated them until I learned how to repeat them.