My mother was a woman of consumption. Not consumptive – that’s something else entirely (see
Camille, Alexandre Dumas Fils) but a woman would could, with no sense that she was doing it, consume volumes with no boundary. Things she consumed in no particular order included space, money, time, people, attention, eyebrow pencil, pills and Danielle Steele novels...but the most obvious point of consumption was food. In the time that I knew her – a full 33 years – my mother went from to heavy, to large, to huge, to large, to huger, to Jabba-the-Hut sized, to large, then finally to completely emaciated. In order to take her body on this trip she went on an experimental all liquid diet program and had no less than two drastic weight loss surgeries. In doing so, she managed to destroy her body from the inside out. There are those who think that she was just “of poor health and constitution.” The unspoken, unacknowledged truth I always sensed, however, was that for reasons she may or may not have been aware of, my mother could just never get control of herself.
I eventually was compelled to give up engaging in her health peaks and valleys simply because it was too constant and too complicated. I, selfishly or not depending on what side of the fence you prefer, had to get on with my life. Mom was sick, basically inexplicably so, and that was just what our family was. She had been bedridden for years, on and off, and towards the end – which none of us realized was truly the end until we got right there, she was bedridden straight through for months.
So, one day I got the call to come home. This was it – Mom was dying.
I did what you do… I flew back and forth, I said the things that you say, I stood vigil in the ICU, took care of my dad, bonded with my brother, uncomfortably accepted the attention of relatives and friends…. and then she died. We went through all of the immediate rituals of death and then finally - there we were – me, my brother, and my father – alone for the first time in weeks. Flowers everywhere, leftovers from the bizarre post-memorial luncheon put away. We stood there - relieved of the tension of what was going on in the hospital – how was Mom doing, who was going to go there when, what we had to do with the relatives. We knew how Mom was doing – she was in a box in the living room. On the wall unit. With her red hat lady hat. I think this filled us each with a morbid sense of relief we certainly didn’t speak about in that moment. All at once, as if the room itself had the impulse, my brother and I went to see what we wanted of Mom’s and Dad went to clean out her purse. My brother wanted her cell phone. I went to check out her jewelry. And this is when I saw it. Appalling. Horrid. Yet not at all surprising in the end. My mother, while bedridden, had apparently spent all of her time watching QVC. She had amassed boxes and boxes and boxes of low to mid quality costume jewelry – the pièce de résistance though – was the ring box. On the left of her dresser at which I had watched her get dressed for years, was a 8” x 20”ish box of rings – probably 40 in total that she had been purchasing while she lay in bed. Each ring was uglier than the last, shiny, impossibly golden rings with brightly colored stones, akin to the adult version of toy jewelry from the machine at the grocery store.
I was intrigued and yet horrified by this discovery – Mom – in a box in a living room – and her utter lack of self control – which eventually killed her – in a box in front of me. Stunning…
I took the rings home. I keep them in my living room and do wear a few of them. Guests try them on. Sometimes my roommate and I put them on and then change them as we go through phases of our evening. My favorite? The big ugly rhinestone butterfly. It is the gaudiest, most spectacular ring I believe that I have ever seen – which is saying something, because I share my mother’s love of big jewelry. People will often comment on that one when I wear it. I almost always stop myself short of saying “Thanks. Dead mom ring” as that response seems to make people uncomfortable – can’t POSSIBLY imagine why. What most surprises me about the box though, is somehow having it here with me, I feel like I have more of my mother with me than I did when she was alive. Some day I will make sense of that, but right now I just wear the big ugly butterfly and say “thank you.”
They dress up and go dancing every Friday night. She drinks one beer everyday, and he laughs out loud at the funny pages. He never leaves the house without his hat and she always carries a hanky in her handbag, where she also carries a theorectically secret pack of cigarettes. Everybody knows, of course, but she's so old they let her get away with it.
