The Big Hurt

I sink into my swivel chair, holding my head in my hands. Within seconds I slide off the chair and slip to my knees, whimpering. I tell you, I have never felt anything so painful or that made me feel so mortal.

I want to be with my wife so I stand and wobble over to the stairway and begin to stumble down. The pain is not letting up, and I simultaneously starting to feel like I am freezing. I hesitate to wake her up, but I consider that the alternative might be her waking in the morning to find me dead. Which was worse.

"Honey," I moan.

Rachel sits up instantly. Something in my voice told her this is important. She's a family nurse practitioner, and a damn good one. "What is it?" she asks. "What's wrong?"

"I hurt myself," I gasp. "Really bad. My head."

"What did you do? What happened?"

I lie down beside her, and shifting to a horizontal angle only makes it worse, like my head is a bottle full of pain, and someone has shaken the bottle, and the pain is now sloshing to and fro, and each slosh throws me from side to side.

She fusses over me in the dark, feeling my forehead, checking my pulse, chattering about possible diagnoses – a migraine, a burst aneurysm, a blood clot, a stroke.

"I'm cold," I say, shivering in the sheets.

Rachel fetches a handful of Advils, which I gulp down with water. The throbbing continues, but by lying still I am able to get some kind of distance from it, like it isn't my pain any more, like I'm just a tourist alongside some smoking crater, having my picture taken.

I fall asleep like that, and sleep for three hours, when the alarm rings. When I awake, the headache is gone, although my head feels beat up, like a puddle on a battlefield that has been driven through by many tanks.

"I can’t believe you went back to sleep," Rachel says. "I was up worrying you wouldn’t wake up."

We talk about what happened. She goes over the possibilities again: migraine, aneurysm, stroke. I want to think that the least possible thing has happened. It hurt one time, but it was a fluke. The stress of tomorrow's trip might have triggered it.

I don't feel like I am going to die right away, like I did before. I feel -- like a gong that has never been struck, and now it has been struck, and the reverberations still hang in the air. I feel hollow and beaten. But I seem able to do my usual things -- stand, walk, go to the bathroom. I'm probably well enough to travel. Hell, I'm probably fine.

And so we decide that I will proceed on my trip to Ohio for a week, to be with my mother who has crushed her foot in a bad fall. She really needs someone there to help with meals, laundry, and bathing. I'll schedule a doctor's appointment the day I return home. I'm definitely fine.

I board the plane to Ohio with some premonitions. If I have an aneurysm or have suffered a stroke, it's conceivable to me that the air pressure of the cabin might have a negative effect on me. I picture the pressure in my head building as we increase altitude, until I splatter against the double-paned plastic plane window.

It doesn't happen. I touch down in Cleveland with my head intact and drive to the empty house right on Lake Erie, about 35 miles west of Cleveland. My mother is still at the nursing home. The place is in disarray. I bound up the stairs she slipped on a month earlier, disintegrating the bones in her left foot. Mary Mulligan Konik is 76 years old, a Type 1 diabetic for 25 years -- the serious kind. The injury was such that she has had to stay in a nursing home until she mends enough to return home. I am here to make the first week at home easier and to accident-proof the house.

From the looks of things my mom is at low ebb. Since her second husband (my stepdad) Dick died of a brain tumor in 1991, it has been one thing after another. A thief broke in and made off with her family treasures. A flood washed through her house and wrecked everything else. Distraught after all this trouble, and weakened by diabetes, she suffered a major heart attack and required open heart surgery. She has terrible diabetes. Every day she swallows a plate full of pills, many of whose primary functions are to counteract each other. A medical miracle, she was just climbing out of this figurative hole when she slipped on the literal stairs, and the bones in her left foot turned to moosh. The only academic article Rachel ever wrote and published was on this very nightmare: "The Diabetic Foot."

I drive to the nursing home. I come upon my mom in the cafeteria, and I am heartened by her appearance. Everyone else in the room looks very old and depressed. My mother is holding court with some ladies over lemon-coconut pudding-cake, and her eyes are bright. She knew I was coming for her, and she wants witnesses that she is making good her escape. She is a gifted talker, and very good at getting people a little less smart than her on her side, like courtiers. She is a regal woman who blesses you with her attention. Today is a victory for her. She's leaving this place on the arm of her successful son.

It is especially a victory because, in our family, I am the runaway bunny come back to the briar patch. I quit college when I was a sophomore in 1969, and disappeared without telling anyone. It was just another in a series of heartbreaks for her, but I felt like I needed to break free from this house of pain to live my own life. I wound up settling down in Minnesota.

I have always been absorbed in my own plans and my own family -- not the good, attentive son who calls twice a week. But I try to be cheerful and supportive in a long-distance sort of way. She is proud that I am a published writer -- it gives her something to club other people over the head with. Best of all, I am here now.

My mom is not your usual mom. Though she didn’t go to college when she was young (she did that when she was in her sixties) she has read nearly a book a day, generally history or biography, throughout her adult life. Now in her seventies, following two heart attacks and fifty years of juvenile diabetes, her retention is no longer so good. She can finish a book one night and start reading it again the next morning, because while she may have forgotten a lot of it already, she knows it was a good place to spread a mental blanket and ponder.

She lives in a little white house nestled in a hillside alongside a smelly little creek, separated from Lake Erie by a busy highway and a pair of train tracks, for loading cars and trucks from the Ford assembly plant a mile down the road.

For years she ruled her inelegant and nonverbal stretch of the Erie Coast like an elegant, literate queen. She is still very verbal, and unlike the other old people in the cafeteria she looks ... contemporary. She smiles at me. "Hello, Michael." She puts her hands to my face as I bend to kiss her. I spend the next hour packing her up and moving her home.

My mother's father was an Ulsterman from County Down said to have lost his ticket to America -- aboard the Titanic -- in a card game. You may recall seeing a scene like that, involving Leo Dicaprio and some Norwegians, during the credits of the movie. I doubt it was that cinematic, but tempers certainly ran high, for my grandfather felt his future had been stolen from him. When he did come over, about three boats later, he found his way to the farm country north of Flint, Michigan, where he raised quarterhorses and dairy cows. Mary Josephine Mulligan was born in 1923. I do not possess, but I one time saw, a picture of my mother when she was 13, astride her favorite horse. A breeze that blew for only an instant, long ago, is moving across her face and long dark hair. Her look, as she pats the neck of the horse, is all beauty and unawareness, a slight but determined dimple in her brow.

The Depression hit Michigan hard. As she neared high school graduation, her father informed her that even though she was the oldest, and helped raise her sister and four brothers, there was no money for her to go to college. She wound up waitressing in a Flint coffeeshop, on the lookout for a way out of the life she was leading. One day, my father came in for lunch.

Paul Finley was the prince of a relatively well-to-do Scots-Irish family that raised cigar tobacco and other crops in a Wisconsin township called Rising Sun on a high ridge near the Mississippi River. As a boy he was in a sledding accident, crashing his sled into a barbwire fence, and tore his face up, so that his nose sat a little higher on his face than most people's noses do.

He was a clever boy but he had trouble, as all Finley boys seem to, relating to peers. When he was fourteen his relations with schoolmates was so bad he left home to live with his big sister at college, to get away from bullies. I imagine he was very cocky then, because he sure is now. And here were negative feelings against his family because his mother led numerous help-the-poor efforts in the area, and some families resented her generosity. That may explain why a few township kids picked on him. Paul was smart and ambitious, but impulsive. By the time he became an engineering student at General Motors Institute in Flint, he had plans to become head of GM some day. He once told me, fifty years later, that the only thing he really wanted from life was to make women, in particular beautiful women, laugh. (I looked up at him, and told him that was all I wanted, too.)

The story my dad once told me was that he was in love with a woman that looked just like my mom. She threw him over, so when he met Mary, he saw it as a chance for redemption, or at least replication, and began applying pressure on her almost immediately. Their first date was at a wedding, and to steal attention from the bride and groom -- this had to be my dad's idea -- Paul and Mary announced their own engagement on the spot. The waitress and the engineering student saw one another as the solutions to the life problems of the other.

It started as a joke, but they actually followed through it and got married and started having children. They caused way more problems for one another than they solved.

So I get my mom home from the nursing home, and we spend a week together. I make meals and clean up for her, and set up some safety rails in her bathroom.

"You know," I tell her the first night, "something happened to me, to my head the night before I flew down." I know this remark will carry freight because of her second husband Dick’s malignant brain tumor. I assure her that whatever happened to me, it isn’t like what happened to Dick.

We get along reasonably well during the week. I am able to clean up and cook. But as the days pass, my persistent cough moves into the laryngeal area, and by Wednesday, I am unable to make a sound, even when coughing. It seems a rip-off that on my one visit all year with my loquacious mom I am be unable to utter a sound, and can communicate only by handwritten notes. EAT YOUR PEAS, I pencil with great certitude on the spiral notebook page.

Privately, I feel more uncertain. I am sleepy, a lot. Sometimes it steals over me in a moment, and I have to lie down on a couch to sleep -- sometimes for two hours. It can happen right after waking up in the morning, too -- very unusual for me. Fighting off this kind of torpor is unthinkable. The call to quiescence must be honored, it cannot be resisted. The best I can do is get horizontal, quick. And before I nod off I may hear a bubble rising up inside my head, like a dish on the stovetop, still sputtering as it cools.

And I have a "wounded" feeling in my head, like it was in a fight, and needs time to get its powers back. I can nod, and I can shake my head no -- but only gently. I do not want to shake my head and feel the pain again. I feel like there is a gun in there, and it is cocked and loaded, and I do not want to bump it and make it go off.

I notice that when I do anything a little strenuous, like stepping up two flights of stairs at a moderate pace, the pain begins to return to my head. I get a swimming feeling, then a noisy throbbing, and then I close my eyes from the pain. I have to take it easy. The slightest thing can set it off -- a big yawn, or "pushing" when I go to the bathroom. If I were constipated, my life would be in danger, I think.

At night, in my old teenage bedroom, far from home and feeling a little lost, I attempt to masturbate. But the pain prevents me. The closer I draw to completion, the worse the pain becomes. You know when you are excited, and you feel the blood pounding in your head? That’s how it is for me, only the pounding is very loud, and the pain is incontestable -- I can't permit it, I have to back down from it, like what I remember a ferocious beating feels like, and will do anything to avoid another.

During the week I am in Ohio, I try masturbating every night, to see if my head is getting better. I am unable to get even within striking distance. I feel like a dog in an electric collar, that shocks him whenever he approaches the property perimeter. It finally dawns on me that I have done something very debilitating to myself.

Despite feeling woozy, I make a point during my visit to get out of the house once a day. I go grocery shopping at Rini Rego. I pick up the mail. I drive through the town I grew up in, Amherst. I like to see our old house, and wonder who's living there now. I visit the sandstone quarries to the south of town, enormous pits where workers carved out the steps of just about every library in America.

And I visit my sister Kathy's grave nearby. Kathy was the oldest of us, born in 1945. My dad was off winning the war at some naval station in Sault Ste. Marie, keeping Lake Huron Nazi-free, when Kathy was born. There was something wrong with her -- her skin was dark, with a bluish cast, and her energy was poor. My mom found out that Kathy was a "bluebaby" -- a cyanotic condition caused by a defective heart valve, more common before 1950 -- not from her doctors but from an article in Life magazine.

Kathy was not expected to live long, but she managed to eke out 15 years with us. She was an artistic person who loved to draw horses and perform in little plays in our garage. She suffered but did not complain much. Some of the kids at school made fun of her complexion: "Look out, Kathy, here comes the Purple People Eater!" Some of it was just stupidly cruel.

When she was 15, Kathy needed to have dental work, because she never outgrew her baby teeth, and they were all rotting in her gums. The dentist knew it was a dicey procedure, and had my mom sign a release. Sure enough, the extractions caused Kathy to go into a coma, and within a couple of days at Amherst Hospital, she died.

It was a horror to have a child die. My mom's heart broke. To this day I dare not bring up this awful event with her. My dad's heart also broke, perhaps doubly because my mom would not allow him to comfort her. I remember them at the funeral parlor, her sitting in stunned silence, him standing miles away from her, wringing his hands. Within a year of Kathy's death, my dad would move away to California forever, leaving us to figure out what happened by ourselves.

I remember how embarrassed I was being at the eye of the emotional hurricane. At the funeral I couldn't bear the gaze of my classmates upon me in my grief. I wanted to laugh out loud, to seize control of the moment, and turn it around. And I remember how kind Kathy always was to me. In our crazy family, she and I were perhaps the two most similar people, outgoing and sunny. I spent much of my childhood fetching things for her. I never begrudged a moment of it. How scared she must have been, all her life. Poor little girl. Poor sis.

It's been 34 years since she died, and the stone is already at a tilt, like the graves of nearby Revolutionary War soldiers. And I'm thinking that surely her suffering immunized our family against another great sorrow. She died in order that we would all live uneventful lives, because we just can't take another blow. I must be OK -- Kathy warranteed me with her death.

I don't let on about my worries to my mom. With me using a notepad, we converse as if nothing were amiss.

"Tell me about my grandchildren. How are they? Why couldn't they come, too?"

IN SCHOOL. I answer. DANIELE'S A FRESHMAN IN H.S., DOING FINE, HANGS AROUND WITH PUNKY FRIENDS. JONATHAN IS 10, PLAYING BASKETBALL TODAY. WROTE YOU A LETTER, BACK IN MY SUITCASE.

"What are you writing these days, Michael?" she asks me.

BUSINESS BOOK ABOUT MOBY DICK, I write, nodding for approval.

"Moby Dick?" she says, wrinkling her brow. "That's one book I could never get through. And what does it have to do with business?"

See, my mom knows nothing about business. Once, when I took a job as an account executive at a PR firm, she asked how I could do that when I was never good at math. It took me a few seconds to realize she thought an account exec was like an accountant.

WE SAW THE MOVIE IN 1956, I write her -- ORSON WELLES & GREGORY PECK?

"Oh, Gregory Peck was a favorite of mine," she says.

Actually, we didn't see the movie. She bought me a kids' stamp-book of the movie -- I was 5 -- and I spent days carefully tearing the stamps out and smoothing them onto their respective pages. My favorite was a shot of Ishmael and Starbuck looking up over the riggings at the special effects of Saint Elmo's Fire. I remember wondering what the effect actually looked like -- in the movie, or on the open sea. And wondering who St. Elmo was.

I also remember how frustrating it was for a 5 year old to carefully excise a half dozen scored picture stamps, lick them, and neatly paste them over the appropriate boxes -- only to tear the corner of the seventh stamp, or to have the eighth stamp buckle in the middle and not lie flat. Making books was hard then, and it remains hard to this day.

When the week is over, I embrace my mother goodbye. Is this the last time I will see her alive? Or the last time she will see me alive? I pat her cheek, and tell her to be good and take care. She smiles crookedly at me -- I think she senses something is askew with me, but the deal is not to mention it. I smile sadly back at her, and kiss her on the forehead.

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