February 12, 2006 – Journey’s End

February 12, 2006 – Journey’s End

It’s Sunday evening January 29th at about 7:30 PM, 1930 hours military time, appropriate since El Paso, where I’ve just landed on Southwest 1577, is a military town and has been for the last half century. My sister EV, who works at the airport, managing its rental properties, is at the bottom of the escalator to pick me up. As I walk down the moving escalator, my Targus PC bag over my right shoulder, I see her approach to greet me. I embrace and kiss and we turn to walk toward baggage claim. She begins to repeat what she’d said earlier over the phone while I was waiting for my connection in LAX.

Our mother had successfully survived a procedure to stop her racing heart and return it to a normal rhythm. She was now resting peacefully in the Intensive Care Unit of William Beaumont General Hospital. Shortly after the procedure completed she was sleeping peacefully in the ICU and the hospital staff had sent everyone home to get some rest as the stress on my aging father and my two sisters and niece was showing. Everyone had determined to return to the hospital as soon as I arrived to make sure she was comfortable for the night and in case she might have awakened from the drug induced sleep she was in when they left.

After I had collected my bag, we walked to the short term parking lot across the entrance drive of the airport and EV began detailing the events that led up to our mother's recent hospitalization. It had begun on Thursday evening when my sister was shocked by the arrival of an ambulance at my parents’ home. She lives nearby and rushed over to see what had happened. She said my father had called for help when my mother had begun gasping for breath. By the time the medics arrived with oxygen, she was struggling for air. He had made the right choice. She would not have been able to make the trip to the emergency room by car, even though William Beaumont General Hospital is only a mile away.

When she arrived at the hospital, she was treated for a heart attack: a flood of chemistry to bust any clots that had formed, to bring her blood pressure back into check, to stabilize her breathing and racing heart. By the time she was put into the intensive care unit, she was resting comfortably, her breathing less labored and her color had returned. The hospital staff didn’t want to put her through the physical trauma of an angiogram—a procedure enabling doctors to see the operation of the heart via X-ray and special dyes—that evening, opting to get her stabilized first and then perform the procedure on Friday or Saturday. My two sisters, niece, and father took turns staying with her Thursday night and by Friday morning her condition had improved significantly enough to move her out of ICU to a ward on the 9th floor of the hospital for continued observation and further tests.

Mom had been to Beaumont for a short stay right after Christmas because the regimen of medication to keep her blood pressure, sugar level, and other body chemistry within normal range was not doing so. She had been lethargic, dizzy, and had difficulty ambulating about the house. The medications were readjusted and the symptoms seemed to improve. My mother’s health had steadily declined over the past few years. I chose to believe she was coping but in reality she was struggling, no longer leaving the house except to attend church. Even visits to the homes of close friends had become increasingly infrequent. When my wife IM and I were home at Christmas, she remarked that she had become useless unable to cook and at times requiring help moving about the house, a task that was lovingly performed by her long-time help and companion, VA. It was VA who had taken over the care of my parents’ long time friend Charles Upton, a house-bound senior who was in his early 90s. Mr. Upton had become too much for my father, who had hip and knee replacement and more recently a broken leg.

When EV and I arrived home, I embraced by worry-ridden father, the anxious look of fear and uncertainty in his eyes. I embraced EV’s daughter, my niece CB, who had been my mother’s grand daughter and best friend—the two shared secrets. After putting my luggage in the empty room on the second floor just above my parents’ room on the ground floor, I came downstairs and said we should go up to the hospital. No sooner were the words spoken than EV’s cell phone rang. She picked up and walked half-way up the stairs talking into the receiver and then listening for what seemed like a long time. The silence was broken by the sound of her sobbing and I knew that the call was the one we had all been dreading. I turned to my father and relayed the unwelcomed news, though still refusing to believe it was true.

EV hung up the phone and she asked CB to call our sister LC and tell her to meet us at the hospital as we wanted to get their as soon as possible. Were we all thinking the same thought, that once we got there, we would discover some clerical mistake that had us getting the call for another patient who had expired? We all loaded into my father’s new White Uplander and drove the back way into William Beaumont General Hospital. The western entrance to the hospital near the intersection of Pierce Avenue and Alabama Street is closed after dark and everyone has to use the north entrance, off Fred Wilson Avenue at the corner of Russell Street. We drove in silence disturbed only by our collective sobbing. When we arrived at the guard gate at the hospital entrance we showed our drivers licenses and my father’s army ID card and were directed through.

At the hospital entrance we parked in a handicap spot near the large front doors and help my dad out of the van. We hurried into the empty hospital with no one in the lobby or in the halls as we made our way down the north-south corridor toward the elevator banks a few yards from the entrance. We boarded the elevator on the third floor and rode one floor up to the ICU on the fourth floor. There, we were met by the hospital chaplain on duty that evening. He knows my family by sight having seen them at her bedside earlier in the day. She went peacefully he says to the four of us standing there with tears streaming down our faces in shock and anguish. She seemed to take one deep breath then expired without regaining consciousness, he conforted. She suffered no pain, nor discomfort, he assured us.

My sister EV turns and leads us to my mother’s bedside. There we see her lying with her lips slightly parted as if asleep. I look up from her and look at my sister, my niece, my father, and then notice that my younger sister LC is standing by near the foot of the bed. I return my gaze to my mother’s face, and begin to stroke her forehead and cheeks kissing her every so often. I can feel the warmth escaping her forehead but still present on her cheek and neck. I realize that I’ve been repeating these gestures over and over and I step back and give my sister LC a chance to be beside her. I look at the instruments arrayed at the head of her bed, the monitor recording her heart rate now turned off. The wires and IV still attached to my mother’s still form but detached from the devices that once connected to her. Even the mechanical contrivances had realized that the life had drained from her body. In their mute silence you could almost believe they too were grieving because they had failed her, just as we were grieving for the very same reason. As we each turn from our intervals of speaking with my mother’s reposed form we spontaneously embrace each other trying at once to render comfort and receive it in return.

It’s hard to describe the experience one feels when confronted with a reality that is unacceptable. You stand in disbelief knowing it’s true but unwilling to allow the realization to take hold within your consciousness. At some point, we all hear the chaplain begin a prayer and we let his words accompany our collective weeping, a dirge of crying voices accompanied by spoken colloquy. At some point after the prayer has ended, I realize that our youngest sister has no idea of what has happened. I speed dial her number and she answers on the second ring and I tell her the dreaded news. I realize that she is being deprived of standing here by our mother’s lifeless form and saying goodbye to her, hoping that she is nearby, a spirit abandoning its body but not yet fled to wherever it is we go when we depart this mortal life. I ask her if she wants to say something to our mother and she says yes and I put the phone near my mother’s ear and hold it there for close to a minute, a futile act I felt compelled to carry out.

A while later, I ask her if she was finished and she said she was and wanted to ring off. I break the connection and turn to look at the others who are nonplussed by my folly. Then, the spell of grieving is interrupted by my eldest sister EV asking the Chaplain what we need to do to have our mother’s remains taken care of. He mentions form that need my father’s signature and leaves to find them. In the meantime, a male nurse comes into the curtained area, expresses his sorrow at my mother’s passing and explains that her passing was completely unexpected, that all her vital signs were strong and she seemed to be recovering normally. Then, without warming the heart rate jumped then flatlined. She had earlier given the order not to be resuscitated and they had honored her request. I realized that she had chosen her passing to be when we weren’t around. The sight of us by her bedside would have only made her reluctant to leave and she was tired and wanted rest from all the struggling that she had endured over her 80 odd decades on earth.

February 9, 2006 – Homeward Journey Last Leg

February 9, 2006 – Homeward Journey Last Leg

It’s Sunday afternoon, January 29th at about a quarter past three in the afternoon. I’m in the Southwest Airlines terminal of LAX waiting for the departure of SW 1577 at 4:45 PM for El Paso, Texas. I love and hate LA, especially LAX. I love it because it’s like me, a city of mixed ethnicity—Hispanic and Anglo and Negro and Korean and… I’m an ethnic mix of white father—half European, half Mississippi Cajun—and Pacific Islander mother—a lovely Filipina, as shrewd and willful and kind and compassionate as they come. My two parents would have fitted in well in LA. I hate LA for the same reason, because it’s like me, a mix of cultures, neither white nor any one ethnicity: a part of neither culture. If I sound as though I’m complaining, I’m not. I’ve grown used to being a part of a group while not being of the group.

I’m en route to El Paso to be with my ailing mother. My youngest sister DD is making preparations to join us from Boston Logan airport, She’d been away on Saturday and only just returned Sunday to hear the news at about the same time I got word, though hers went into cell phone voice mail. Her information about what’s going on was old and second hand, the updates having come from an earlier conversation she and I had before leaving home. I told her in our last call that I would put her on a three-way connection the next time I reached our oldest sister in El Paso so she could hear the next update first hand. I’m sitting in the boarding area of America West Gate 4A right across the wide center aisle of Terminal 1 from Southwest Airlines Gate 3B, where I’ll be departing from. I’m near the Gordon Biersch seating area beside a 4-payphone kiosk. I dial my eldest sister’s number and remarkably she picks up on the third ring.

I put her on hold and conference my youngest sister into the call. When I bring both parties on the line, I hear the voice of our middle sister LC beginning to talk—she’s the cardiac nurse and can interpret to us the arcane terms of the cardiac procedures our mother has been given since she was admitted to the hospital on Thursday. “Okay, she begins. Mom just went through a major cardiac intervention. The doctors stopped her heart and restarted it. She had experienced atrial fibrillation, a quickening in the heart rate, and the doctors had to stop the heart and restart it. She went through the procedure with no complications and her heart is now beating with a normal rhythm, All her vital signs are good and she’s resting.” DD, also a nurse, asks a couple of questions that go over my head, gets the answers she was expecting then tells us she’s booked on a Delta flight early Monday morning.

I confirm that I’ll be arriving on time at 7:35 and we hang up. I’m feeling better now that my mom’s heart beat is back to a more normal rhythm. The atrial fibrillation began the last time she had a heart attack, but the doctors decided against the procedure she just went through for fear she might not survive it. They opted instead to treat her with the drug Coumadin, an anticoagulant that thins the blood to prevent blood clotting, a complication occurring with an irregular heart beat. One side effect of the drug was my mother was constantly cold, no matter how warm the day was nor how hot the house was inside. This time faced with a quickening heart rate, the doctors had no choice but to bring the beat in check. The fact that she survived the procedure was a surprise to the staff, less so to us who know her strong will. The wait at the airport is tedious and I have a “B” boarding pass meaning little choice in seating. When we do finally board Southwest Flight 1577 at Gate 3B, I find myself in the last aisle seat on the plane, which is bound for Austin after it drops us all off in El Paso.

As soon as the last passenger took their seat, the ground crew slammed the door shut and the Boeing 737 was pushed back from the gate and onto the taxi way. From there the captain revved the Pratt & Whitney engines and the plane made its way to the end of the empty runway and took off, without waiting for arriving traffic, into an evening sky the sun was fast abandoning. Once at cruising altitude, I order a glass of red wine for $3.00 and settled down for the under two-hour flight to El Paso. It was just after 6:00 PM in El Paso and we were on time for touchdown at 7:30 PM.

When my Mom had her last heart attack I remembered most vividly her labored breathing as I experienced her anxiety and shortness of breath as I watched her struggle. I felt helpless and kept touching her hoping that I could somehow ease her labor. It was a futile effort as we are all destined to experience everything in life alone. We’re born alone. That young bunch of bone, sinew, and muscle—more muscle than we’re given credit for—has to make its way through the birth canal. Mom can help, but each of us must push its way into the world. You only have to see the reddened face and the tired eyes of a infant new born to realize the amount of effort he/she expended being born. We should all realize that this first struggle—getting into this world—is one of countless more we must overcome to stay in this world. I was now arriving to witness my mother’s next struggle.

February 8. 2006 - The Homeward Journey

February 8. 2006 - The Homeward Journey

It's Sunday afternoon, January 29th. I'm waiting on Southwest Airlines flight 1085 Mineta International Airport, San Jose, California, outbound for Los Angeles Tom Bradley International Airport at 2:00 PM Pacific Standard time. I’m in the boarding area of gate A3 in possession of a boarding pass marked “A” thus insuring that I’ll be in the first third of the plane in an aisle seat, as is my preference, unless I opt for the rear hoping to gain a row to myself or at least a row with an empty middle seat. Today, the reason for my trip is occupying my thoughts and I’ve not been concentrating on what’s going on around me since IM dropped me off at the curb of Terminal A in front of the Southwest baggage check-in area, a mob scene of travelers queued up to offload bags. I passed the bedlam by and walked up the stairs to avoid an escalator full of travelers and beat most of them to a near-empty queue at the Southwest ticket counter. I check my one piece of luggage, get my boarding pass and then queue up in a security check point in front of gate A3. The queue is backed up to the Southwest counter. After waiting for a relatively short period considering the disarray of the two x-ray screening lines, I emerge at the front of the queue; place my notebook and my ASICs running shoes on the x-ray inspection treadmill and walk through the screening portal—no buzz as the only metal I have is by watch and small belt buckle. I collect my laptop, a slab Dell Latitude D505 slip it back into my Targus carrying case and lace up my ASICs. The guy standing beside the row of seats where I’m putting on my shoes is questioning why he had been selected to have his luggage looked through by a security gate guard. The guard replies that it was routine since the x-ray had picked up something not clearly discernable as banned or allowed and not to worry, it would take only a few second to verify the suspected item.

I leave before the search is completed and take a seat in the boarding lounge for Gate A3. The seating area is sparsely populated but I know this will change as the flight departure time gets closer. I’m a full hour ahead of the takeoff time. I set about opening a Wayport wireless hot-spot daily access ($6.95). By the time the registration and payment process completes—these servers are really slow—I finally get on and launch my company’s virtual private network (VPN) connection to access my Outlook e-mail server. Once linked in I send a note to my boss saying that I had to take an urgent flight home due to a family emergency. I had left a voice mail but wanted to follow-up with an e-mail to have a record of my request for accounting purposes. I also make some work related requests and press send. I click the send-receive operation then log off oblivious of what’s been happening around me as I sat absorbed in my computer screen. In that time, the “equipment”, a Boeing 737, to carry me on the first leg of my trip has arrived and disgorged its passengers. Meanwhile the three lines of passengers for my flight had queued up in lanes A, B, and C. I have to make my way to the end of lane A.

This is the first leg of a flight that will take me to my parent’s home in El Paso, Texas—I’m connecting with Southwest Flight 1577 in Los Angeles: the salmon beginning his homeward migration to the place that has had a lifelong pull on him, drawing him back periodically to reassure himself that his link to the past, to the early years of the 20th Century, remains vital and intact and, perhaps more important, that there remains one generation between him and the end of days. Lane A begins to move and we slowly file aboard the Boeing 737, the captain jumping the queue, smiling and saying “excuse me” every few lengths of the line until he clears the jetway and makes his way on board the plane turning left into the cockpit. He passes me as I near the end of the jetway and I board less than a minute after he enters. Down the center aisle of the 737 past the front row, I see an open aisle seat in row 2 on the port side of the aircraft. I take the seat, stow my laptop in the small space below the seat in front of me and strap myself in. The line behind me flows past jerkily toward the rear of the plane and it takes another ten to fifteen minutes before the ground crew comes aboard asking for a final seat count. The cabin crew had been walking down the aisle counting all the filled seats—or do they count the empty seats and subtract from a maximum total?—and return with a count: 98 I hear the cabin crew pass on to the ground representative.

A short time later, we push back from the terminal and the plane reverses at a right angle to the terminal onto the taxiway for runway right. The 737 begins to taxi heading for the end of the tarmac. The PA system blares the official notices that precede every airplane flight since I can remember. “This is a non-smoking flight… There are six exits aboard this Boeing 737…” I tune out the patter, which on Southwest is peppered with sardonic humor. Mercifully it concludes with the Captain’s voice declaring that we’ve been cleared for take off and that cabin attendants should take their seats. A minute or so later, the captain turns the nimble plane into a u-turn that brings us to the end of runway right, whereupon he rev’s the twin Pratt & Whitney engines to maximum thrust and we begin our pell-mell rush toward the end of the airfield the wheel recording each crack in the concrete with a noisy bang. As we pass the control tower at Mineta International, midway down the runway, the plane’s lift breaks the hold that keeps us terrestrial and we begin to rapidly pull up away from the fast approaching runway end and lightly traveled Highway 101 below. Somewhere nearing the southern tip of San Francisco Bay, we begin a U turn, in a steep spiral upward to gain altitude that will put us out of the flight path of oncoming northbound aircraft queuing up to land at Mineta, well south of Gilroy and Salinas. By the time we reach the 101-Interstate 85 Junction south of San Jose we are well on our way to our 33,000-ft cruising altitude,. We’re above cottony clouds drifting over the farmland and suburbs of Morgan Hill. The clouds are the remnants of a cold front that dropped a spattering of rain on the Bay Area after midnight.

As we reach our cruising altitude, more obligatory patter over the PA system about seat belts and freedom to move about the cabin. I’m distracted by the sight of the shimmering silvery surface of the Pacific visible out of the windows on the starboard side of the plane, reflecting the early-afternoon sun, orbiting low on the winter horizon as it makes its way toward Hawaii and the Asian continent beyond.

My journey is tinged with apprehension as I’m en route to visit my ailing mother, now a decade short of a hundreds years of age. She’s resting in an intensive care unit at William Beaumont General Hospital in El Paso near the base of the Franklin Mountains. Mom is no stranger to this military hospital. In her youth, she convalesced when my three sisters and I were all adolescents. The visit was etched in my memory because of the bag of candy my father gave us to assuage our hunger—strange what memories come to mind from childhood. Back then the hospital was largely fatigue-colored wooden barracks providing the various wards. My grandmother convalesced here too for a brief stay that sadly ended in her demise at the young age of 48. It was this same hospital that our still-born sister CA came into the world only to leave it as soon as she arrived.

The hospital is the lifeline for many World War II and Viet Nam era veterans and their dependents, my father and mother among them. Several years ago, the hospital found a blood infection in my mother that threatened to take her life, a malady that took months to diagnose and cure. She endured all these stays with the stoic resolve of a willful spirit, refusing to succumb. In recent times, she’s been in and out of the hospital to treat her acute high blood pressure no doubt the product of her chronic anxiety over the well being of her children, grand children and more recently her great grand children. Every natural disaster that afflicted California demanded a phone call to El Paso to assure her, her progeny was safe.

Sometime the year before last she was admitted to William Beaumont with acute shortness of breath. She had suffered a mild heart attack. I rushed home fearful that this might have been seriously debilitating. Though she was weakened by the assault, she pulled through with the doctors performing an angioplasty to clear a restricted artery. Remarkably, her heart had not been severely damaged though it was beating faster than the doctors would have liked. They decided not to put her through the dangerous procedure of stopping the heart and restarting it to return it to a more normal rhythm. The alternative was to slow the rhythm with a daily regimen of drugs. In recent times she has grown weary of that chemical regimen, her lifeline. She bounced back and was able to resume her daily routine, even managing to walk daily in the company of my sister or father though only a few blocks away from home and returning.

I had seen her at Christmas and she had contracted the cold or flu or whatever was affecting the western states this winter season. Both parents had been given flu shots and the ailment produced none of the classic flu symptoms, just a persistent cough that gave my mother fits at time. She managed to get herself back to health, getting over the ailment and returning to a routine that seemed normal. Then suddenly I get a call on Sunday morning the week before last at 10:00 o’clock. I had decided to delay my Sunday morning run, otherwise, I would not have been home to receive the call from my eldest sister, who has borne a great deal of the burden of my elderly parent’s ailments. Her call was to tell me my mother had been taken to intensive care after suffering another heart attack and was about to undergo another angioplasty. I immediately began making arrangements to find a flight out as we spoke by phone and I surfed the Southwest Airlines web site for available options. I told her I would be home by 7:30 this evening. She would be there to pick me up.

The Southwest Boeing 737 began its descent into the LA Basin over the Santa Monica Mountains: a low transverse range that runs approximately 40 miles west from Point Mugu in Ventura County east into the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. You drive over the range going south on 101 to get into LA from Ventura County. The PA chatter began again, something about beginning the initial descent… I watched the landscape of the Los Angeles Megalopolis pass swiftly below while the pilot made a number of turns that took us eastward to get into the landing pattern for LAX. He soon came on to tell the flight crew to take their seats and prepare for an on-time arrival. He then brought the 737 down in a perfect landing and was no sooner on the ground than making a left turn to exit on to the taxi way rushing toward the Southwest terminal. When the plane stops at the terminal and the jetway is extended to the plane’s forward compartment door, the passengers, me included streamed out and entered the chaos of the gate area within the bowels of the terminal. We were like seed cast into a wind tunnel with a series of exits which each would take at his or her or their own discretion. I was halfway home and anxious to be on my way.