Coming Clean: A Memoir (19 page)

Stony Brook University Hospital was the “good hospital,” the hospital she should have gone to when her stomach pain started, but the ER at our tiny neighborhood hospital was less crowded. The Stony Brook ICU was a giant circle, and instead of curtains there were actual walls separating the patients. My mother had her own room, her own bathroom (not that she could use it), and a nurse that spent time with her and asked about her comfort levels.

Dr. Philipps, her new surgeon, was sweet and quiet. He was
tall and seemed uncomfortable in his own body, like a puppy with giant paws. There was a self-consciousness that came across in his mannerisms that was endearing. His arms folded and unfolded as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them without some sort of medical instrument to act as a prop. Dr. Abdallah had spoken highly of him when he’d told me about the details of the transfer. “He specializes in gastrointestinal surgical oncology. He’s very skilled in this area of the body. Your mother will be in good hands.”

Dr. Philipps directed his questions to my mother, which I appreciated. She didn’t know how to answer them, but I knew it mattered to her that he considered her the first source of information when it came to her own body. I filled him in on my notes from the other hospital, realizing how screwed up her medical records were. They said nothing about liver damage, but instead claimed that my mother was suffering from an infectious disease.

He appeared to believe me but couldn’t necessarily take my word for it, and ordered a new batch of tests to determine the severity of my mother’s injuries. For today, he said, “she should rest.” Just being at Stony Brook made me feel like we had turned a corner. Her room was sunny, her doctor was thorough, and her nurses were much more proactive and attentive.

The words
strong
and
brave
had become interchangeable in my daily conversations with friends, family, and random hospital workers.
You’re so strong. You don’t have to be strong all the time. You need to be brave right now for your parents
. But I was not being particularly strong or brave. I was merely in a situation I had no other choice but to be present for. Mostly I was biding my time for my mother to be out of earshot so I could go back to crying.

Following another battery of tests, when Dr. Philipps made his rounds to my mother’s room, he told us that our new plan was no plan. “Her body is too fragile. All we can do is watch her, monitor her kidney and liver functions, and hope the edema goes down.”

She was moved from the ICU to the oncology floor, where most of Dr. Philipps’ patients were. She didn’t have cancer, but she needed the constant attention the nurses on that floor provided. It was a quiet floor with intermittent waiting rooms designed for families and the giving of bad news.

After two weeks, her kidneys started making urine again. Her liver was functioning, albeit on a slower scale, and there was nothing else Dr. Philipps could do for her right then. Her body was still too fragile to surgically repair the damages that Dr. Abdallah had created.

“There’s no use in her staying here in the meantime. She should go home and be comfortable until we can do the surgery,” Dr. Philipps said. I could tell that he thought that he was delivering good news.

“When do you think you’ll release her?” I asked. I wanted him to say a week. Or two weeks. A month would have been great.

“A couple of days, probably by the end of week.”

I thanked him. I circled the oncology floor trying to quiet my brain enough to come up with a plan. All I could think of was filth. She was going to leave the hospital, go back to the apartment, and be surrounded by filth. She was going to slip on papers or fall over broken computers, abandoned boxes, and the plethora of shoes that made their home in my parents’ living room. She wasn’t strong enough to stand on her own and there
was no way she’d be able to navigate their home like that, no way her walker would fit through the piles. This was the first time that I’d ever really resented my father.

Before there was ever a word for hoarding, I knew that whatever driving force drew my father to garbage was beyond his control. I never felt like he loved stuff more than he loved me. He loved stuff. And he loved me. I never blamed him for that. But I would blame him if something happened to my mother.

Until then, the only act of rebellion I’d ever followed through on in my life was piercing my navel. My generally liberal parents believed that body piercings were disgusting. Luckily, I had friends who saw things my way. For my eighteenth birthday, Anna took me to the local tattoo parlor to get my belly button punctured. It was the winter break of our freshman year of college, and it was terrible timing. Piercings need to be cleaned regularly, and for the next three weeks I would be living in a house without running water. I took to cleaning it out in store bathrooms and friend’s houses, but the infection that came was inevitable. My stomach still bears a keloid scar from the mass infection that took over my lower abdomen for the majority of 2001.

Eight years later, my mother was leaving the hospital with a hole in her abdomen. Instead of a ring, hers had a tube protruding from it with a grenade-shaped plastic ball hanging from the end, collecting the bile that her gallbladder was once responsible for. Over the previous few weeks, I had listened numerous times to her nurses as they explained how important it was to keep her wound clean, that the hole led directly into her stomach cavity and an infection could kill her.

In the years since leaving home, I had cleaned my parents’
apartment countless times. Each time I swore it would be the last. Each time they were embarrassed and grateful and promised it would never get that bad again. They never kept their promises, but even the clutter and filth of their current apartment was a reprieve from the abject squalor of my childhood home, and I was grateful for that. I hadn’t purged their apartment in over six months, attempting the tough-love approach to parenting my parents while I went about my daily life, running between auditions, shoots, and blog deadlines. I had hoped that without me to fall back on, they’d see the error of their ways and clean their own apartment. I was tired of being asked to “help.” I was tired of asking Anna and Rachel to take weekends off from their lives and families to help me manage mine. But my plan had backfired, because the apartment was at its messiest yet, and I needed to dig them out yet again.

Pacing the oncology ward, there was only one person I could think of to call, and it wasn’t Anna or Rachel. Not my father, or my aunt, or my boss. It was my friend Abby, Paul’s old friend from Brandeis.

In the years since my breakup with Paul, I had become close with several of his friends, especially Abby… she knew me as the woman I had become since leaving Long Island. I was a comedienne and a writer, and I had my life together. Abby grew up not far from me, on the East End of Long Island, where her mother owned a cleaning company that serviced well-to-do Hamptonians. We shared stories about our upbringings, and she’d often joke about her childhood wearing Armani and Burberry, the hand-me-downs of her mother’s clients. I joked about my hippie-dippie parents and overachieving rebellion. I never talked about how I lived. Aziz, Becky, and Abby knew me as the
person I’d always wanted to be, and now I was about tell her who I really was.

Abby had dropped by the hospital a few days earlier, on her way east to visit her own family. She brought magazines and flowers and reminded me that if I needed anything I should give her a call.

I don’t think she realized what kind of call she was inviting me to make, and as the phone rang, I realized I should have probably practiced this speech a couple of times in my head beforehand.

“Hey, lady. How’s your mom?”

“Hey, Abs. She’s a fighter,” I told her. “They’re actually going to be releasing her from the hospital later this week. They can’t do corrective surgery for a few months, not until the edema goes down.”

“That’s great—well, that she gets to go home.”

“Actually, that’s why I’m calling.” I was exhausted and desperate, but more than anything I felt like I was about to sacrifice everything for clean carpets yet again. “I was wondering if your mom or any of her employees are looking for some extra work? I want to make sure my parents’ house is clean enough for my mom.”

“Oh, sure, I’ll call her now. I’ll be out on the Island this week. I can help.”

“Abby, this isn’t a small job. I’ll be there cleaning, and I’m sure Anna and Rachel will help too.” I didn’t know how to say it all without saying it. “My dad’s a hoarder.”

A year or two prior, no one would have known what that meant, but thanks to A&E, people plagued with the compulsive need to collect were now the subject of cult fascination. I didn’t
find comfort in that fact. “The house is pretty bad. I usually come home to help every few months, but I haven’t been on top of it. Please let your mom know I’ll pay whatever it takes—it’s a lot of work, I’ll try to do most of it.”

“Don’t worry, hon, they’ve seen it all before. I’ll talk to my mom and let you know what she says.”

Based on Abby’s reaction, it was clear to me that she didn’t realize just how big of a mess it really was.

W
HEN I CAME ACROSS
the many shows about hoarders, I would promptly change the channel. I couldn’t even stand to watch commercials for them. I imagined casting directors scouring piles of applications from those so desperate for help they would willingly exploit themselves and their families, for those they believed would have the most outrageous stash or spectacular nervous breakdown on the front yard. The people on shows like
Hoarders
weren’t my parents, but there was a part of me that wanted to protect them as if they were. Because like my own parents, I was sure that they were more than their disease. Many of them were probably parents who rubbed achy bellies, told bedtime stories, and waited outside dance recitals with bouquets of roses.

I had spent my life protecting my family’s secret, keeping it close to my heart and surrounding it with revisionist stories, and now that I’d told Abby, it was finally out in the world. I didn’t know how to protect my parents from the judgment I knew was imminent. Abby and her mom would come to my aid; they would help clean out my parents’ apartment, because I needed help and they were good people. But I wasn’t sure what would
happen after that. How could I explain that my parents really were the sweet, funny, loving people that they were—and yet they lived the way that they did?

I decided not to tell my mom yet about my confession to Abby. I wanted to tell my dad first and give him a say in the matter. It was his secret, after all, even if she was the one who was ashamed of it.

“These flowers have really lasted a long time!” my mom said when I wandered into her hospital room, alert for the first time in weeks. She didn’t know it, but I’d been going to the hospital gift shop while she was asleep to buy new bouquets. Her room was full of flowers and cards and cute knickknacks I got her, racking up quite the credit card debt in the process. I told her they were from my dad and me. I just wanted to make her happy.

The fact that she noticed the longevity of the flowers around her was a good sign. In a moment of clarity or stubbornness, she demanded that her morphine intake be reduced drastically, afraid she might become addicted. The morphine-reduced version of her was more normal, which meant she was back to being angry with my dad instead of with me.

“Where is your father? He should have been home from work an hour ago!”

She then turned her sights to me. “Have you eaten?”

“Where is your father?” and “Have you eaten?” were the two most common sentences in my mother’s lexicon.

My father was late for just about everything—he’d lose hours at a time and have no idea what he did with them. But I did. He would get lost riffling through one of his plastic bags or listening to NPR on one of his radios. I was sure that at that moment he was in the parking lot, rummaging through his car for a portable
one to bring into the hospital so he wouldn’t have to miss
Talk of the Nation.

“Calm yourself, Mamala.” I replied. “He came by on his lunch break to see you, but you were sleeping. He brought me a sandwich.”

“And no one thought to wake me?” she retorted. “I’m glad I matter so much to him he can’t even ask how I’m doing.”

“I gave him a rundown of the day,” I told her.

“That’s nice, but you’re not his wife.”

I was relatively certain that I would not be able to keep my promise not to get angry at my mother, but this was a good sign—my mother, perpetually afraid that she wasn’t loved enough, was on her way back to the living.

My father then walked into the room, carrying a portable radio connected to headphones—one earbud in, one earbud out—and wearing a large shopping bag like a purse.

My mother growled at him, bearing her teeth.

He laughed, slapping his thigh. “Someone’s feeling better, I see!” He waved a hello.

While she was in a drugged haze, my dad kissed her on the forehead when he came and left. But now that ended. My mom hated kissing, always had. Every once in a while, my mom would accidentally tell my dad she loved him, at the end of a phone call or as he left the house, a force of habit generally reserved for me. She’d blush, cover her mouth and ask, “Do you think he heard me?”

After a short while my mom nodded off, which she was prone to do every hour or so, and I told my dad about Abby.

“I’m going to have to do some cleaning before the crew gets there,” I said. “It’s too much to do in one day.”

There was an immediate shift in his physique; his hands took up residence in his pockets and his broad shoulders rounded forward. My sixty-three-year-old father looked like a high school kid on the verge of suspension.

“Okay, what do you need me to do?” he asked.

When Rachel and Anna would help me clean my parents’ apartment, we spent hours, sometimes days, throwing things out, but the house never truly got clean, just less messy. But what my mother needed now, with a hole in the middle of her body, was clean—which was why I needed professional help. Which was why I had to tell our secret to yet another friend.