NOTE: This was a very difficult piece for me, but also a very cathartic one. I should warn you that this story involves vivid descriptions of self-harm, violence, and other things that may be a little (or a lot) triggering. That being said, I hope this story helps you in your darker moments. Much Love –Cam
“Mr. Pendergrass, I’m calling to inform you that unfortunately your mother has expired.”
As if it weren’t enough to liken one of the most important people in my cloistered-college-kid world to an inedible cup of yogurt, she couldn’t even get my last name right. So goes the final chapter in my mom’s tragically short life— rendered over the phone by an uninterested RN in the afternoon on a Monday.
I suppose before I get to that point, I should explain how we got there in the first place:
I am notoriously bad at remembering significant dates, whether birthdays or holidays, but Lisa Simmons Ronning (there was no née since she was too stubborn to take my dad’s last name) was born in Minneapolis on April 17, 1956. I remember the date for a couple of reasons: firstly, because she would often fondly recall, with her usual bizarre and occasionally unnerving sense of humor, that she shared a birthday with Adolf Hitler. Later I would find out that this was, in fact, untrue— Hitler was born on the 18th— but I find it illustrative of who she was anyhow.
The other reason I remember her birthday easily is because of a school assignment somewhere in my distant memory between the grades of three and six. I was asked to profile one of my parents, perhaps as my first ever writing assignment. For the most part, my immediate family has never been particularly good at conveying information to one another, and really when I say that I’m referring to my brother, my dad and myself. In contrast, my mom was a bit of an over-sharer: not especially talkative, but able to say things that were more or less unsayable by the rest of us, usually in between drags on a cigarette. I picked my mom.
Between my parents’ individual Colorado hippie experiences, and despite her occasional weirdness, I always felt drawn to her a little bit more, largely because her past always seemed more mysterious and exciting. By age twelve or so, I had already become jaded about my dad’s legitimately-cool-in-retrospect lifestyle as a mountain man, having grown up running around in picturesque meadows while he loaded logs onto his log truck. Even at this stage of my life, I was more excited to hear about my mom’s adventures following the Grateful Dead and partying at some now defunct commune on Maui called the Banana Patch and the watching Pipeline surfers on the North Shore of Oahu. It all seemed so exotic, with palm trees in place of lodgepole pine and warm sunshine instead of the snow that I grew up in. If you’ve ever read Joan Didion’s piece Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I don’t think to would be a stretch to see my teenage mom hanging out with the destitute weirdos in Haight-Ashbury back in the day.
This elementary school profile assignment wound up taking a jarringly different trajectory though, like an old and dried out box of fireworks, exploding uncontrollably and zipping all over the place. Despite her obvious excitement in the prospect of her oldest son showing interest in her history, she had been drinking, and it was clear even to my young sensibilities that it was about to get dark. The aural journey across my mother’s childhood slurred through a number of US locales and elucidated an upbringing riddled with physical and verbal violence, often at the hands of her own mother as well as her mother’s numerous husbands and boyfriends. Apparently, Marlys (we’ll call her grandma) had a bit of a thing for military men, and as it seems to be unfortunately common for many formerly uniformed soldiers, most of them were good at drinking, screaming and swinging fists or sundry other household items like belts and coat hangers.
Perhaps my mom was too drunk to remember that she telling all of this to her child (who was literally sitting on her lap) but what I remember most from this hourlong-or-so conversation was that the seemingly ever-present tears balanced on the edges of her eyelids never quite made their way down her red cheeks. Through the flurry of abuse and neglect, her childhood came to a conclusion when she was arrested as a runaway on her way to Woodstock as a teenager and placed in a juvenile detention center.
To that point, a good portion of my mom’s childhood had been spent in a suburb of Los Angeles called Claremont, which ironically is a relatively short distance from where I currently live. I suppose that initial drunken foray into her past opened some wounds, as she would sporadically fill me in on little glimpses of her childhood, typically involving incidents that left scars, both physical and emotional. I recall very few of these little anecdotes that didn’t end with some manner of violence; a hummingbird being killed outside her bedroom window by a neighbor kid with a pellet gun, for example. Or another in which she witnessed a bystander being shot in the face with a teargas canister during a riot in LA.
In fact, I recall very few stories that my mom told me that didn’t involve death, brutality or something awful happening. Read what you want into that, but I have to assume that it’s the root of a lot of my own more morbid curiosities, right up to the day that I write this. Even the fun stories that she would tell me tended to be tinged with sadness and suffering, her west-coast hippie euphoria riddled with bad trips and abusive boyfriends.
Strangely, most of these stories still provided fodder for me to be excited and interested in her world. Both of my parents loved music, but she was the one who compelled my own interest. She who, thanks to tickets she won on the radio, brought me to my first ever concert at Red Rocks when I was six (Jackson Browne) and treated my dad by hitting up her rock star ex-boyfriend (guitarist for Emmylou Harris) to get them backstage at the same infamous venue a dozen years before. My dad has good taste in music— Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills, the Allman Brothers— but my mom had weird taste, at least to my virgin ears— Zappa, The Wailers, Warren Zevon. She even dropped me off at my first “real” concert, (aka, the first time I dropped acid) with a wink and a nod as I stepped out of our family’s gold and faux wood-paneled Jeep Wagoneer. She also handed me a beer when I got home later that night, likely seeing right into my dilated pupils, sensing that I probably wouldn’t be sleeping any time soon otherwise.
And this is the crux of why I am writing this cautionary tale and homage to my mom. The booze: it was always there, but it got bad. To my young eyes, the trashcans overflowing with beer cans were just something that everyone had in their home. My dad is no slouch either, and I say is because he stills throws ‘em back by the gallon. But with my mom, I learned to think nothing of the fact that she was on a first-name basis with the liquor store owner down the street. The circumstances surrounding my mother’s deepening addiction and slow unraveling maintain a domineering sway over my own worldview. There is a large portion of my anxiety that may as well be named “Lisa’s stuff” like a dusty cardboard box moldering in the damp cellar of my subconscious. All those shocking little anecdotes, well, they were real incidents, and in-kind they took a very real toll on her mind and her existence in this world.
Before I go on, I’d like to tell you quickly about two more stories she had told me at some point involving those early years of her life. First, there was a harrowing and consequential acid trip: she had attended a concert where she knowingly shared a bottle of juice among five of her friends into which someone had dropped some liquid LSD. Turns out “some LSD” meant a whole lot of LSD, and as a result, she was the sole member of the group who was not committed to some sort of psychiatric care after the fact. I could sense unmistakable pride in her tone as she said “I tripped on my friend’s couch for three full days and I was the only one who made it”…no small feat for a woman who stood five foot five on a taller day. This brush with becoming an acid casualty no doubt shaped her perception of reality, and I have my suspicions that it marked the beginning of her slowly unwinding mental stability.
The other story was about a time she was on a road trip that ended with physically rather than psychologically dire results. Her friend driving the van hurdled over a bluff in some unknown countryside, broadsiding a longhorn bull standing like a barricade in the middle of the road. Fortunately, they were wearing seatbelts, or else I probably wouldn’t be writing this now, but my mom endured a whiplash neck injury from which she suffered until her last days. Despite the chronic nature of that injury, she still managed to emphasize the graphic mercy killing of the bull at the barrel-end of some redneck sheriff’s revolver, yet again dwelling in the shadow of ever-present violence. (I would remember this later when I stumbled upon the carcass of a euthanized horse on a ranch where my dad was working, with a large bullet-hole between its withered eyes.)
These stories and the previous ones impart an unmistakable gravity upon my life, as well as my interest and exploration of my mother’s addiction and gradual decline. Like ice forming on the clothing of someone struggling to escape a frozen lake, the weight of these experiences clustered and grew on the frayed fabric of her ailing mind. I have no doubt that the chronic pain in her neck drove her to drink, but the emotional and psychological wounds were the ones that really did her in. I’m sure there were other stories of which I have never become privy, probably for the better of my own mental wellbeing. There were mentions of violent spouses, abortions, and various other unsavory things, but it all bleeds into a larger picture of an irreparably damaged human being.
Before my parents’ marriage began to fall apart, things didn’t seem quite so bad. She always had a temper and I remember embarrassing moments where she might bark profanities at a stranger for some minor boundary infringement, or start crying when no one else seemed to be upset. Often in public, always irrationally. The gradual devolution of their marriage, although hard to cope with at the time was more or less to be expected in this realm of strange behavior. In retrospect, I have a lot of love and empathy for them both because they really did ‘stay together for the kids’. I recall going with my dad to look into rental properties as he considered abandoning the project, but backing out in favor of not giving up on my brother and myself. This is even more remarkable when contrasted with seemingly regular occurrences in which my mom would very publicly humiliate him by misguidedly accusing him of infidelity, wholly unreasonably, and usually right in front of his supposed mistresses. To my knowledge (and his credit), my dad was completely faithful throughout the marriage.
Despite my own neuroses around this childhood exposure to paranoia and anger, navigating my parents’ crumbling marriage was likely one of the most invaluable experiences in my own lifetime, and also the reason that I have been goddamned certain not to have an unplanned child. However, the screaming and rage seemed much more driven from my mother’s side, and similarly, the resultant drinking to cope often seemed to happen predominantly on her end. Both of my parents were (and are, in my dad’s case) good people, but they were not good for each other. That much is indisputably clear.
As my brother and I started to get older and began learning about the world by making lots of our own mistakes, I would occasionally sense my mom’s apprehension in the things that we would do— or more appropriately, get caught doing.
When I was in high school, a friend of mine got his hands on a half-ounce of mushrooms. That’s a lot of mushrooms if you’re not familiar. Being the intrepid young psychonauts that we were, we split the bulk of that sandwich baggy between us on a walk home one summer night. When we made the impressively ill-advised decision to part ways in a small wooded area near my house things got terrifying, and I eventually found myself trembling in my bedroom listening to Pink Floyd and watching my feet melt into the carpet. When I crossed the I-can’t-handle-this-on-my-own threshold, I decided that the best course of action was to walk upstairs and ask her for help. At this point, my parents were well past sleeping in separate rooms— fortunately for me because I have a feeling I would’ve been ‘up shit creek’ in my dad’s eyes. Frightened and sheepish, I simply said “mom, I need help because I ate too many mushrooms.”
I laid next to my mother for the next three hours, having what to this day is still the most important and vividly intense psychedelic experience of my life. Eventually I slithered out of bed and back to my own room where I triumphantly played my guitar until I was ready to sleep, propped up by the sense that I’d really dodged a serious mind-loss situation.
The next morning, she greeted me with a cup of coffee, but the wink and nod reaction that I had procured from that previous concert experience had been replaced by a clear sense of motherly concern. “Don’t do that again” came out unmistakably as “please don’t do that anymore, because look what happened to me.”
Around this period in my life, my memories take on a sepia-toned quality of weirdness that I’d just assume forget. Oddly, my memories of my mother have begun to feel even older and hazier than the ones from years before with certain cripplingly clear details: her stern, simmering visage as she sat unmoving in her worn armchair, reading books that she probably wouldn’t remember later, an ever-present cigarette in the ashtray and daytime television blaring in the background. Or her emaciated frame trundling down the hallway, catching herself on the wall as she would occasionally lose her balance. Her brittle, waxy skin which bruised far too easily and fingernails gnarled from insufficient nutrient intake. Her complete lack of care in not even attempting to hide the bottles of vodka under the sink anymore. At this point, she had more or less sworn off social interaction, rarely leaving the house and having largely ostracized herself—and also our family from the various other families with whom we used to camp in the summertime. They moved into nicer, bigger houses in better parts of town while we stayed in the same one, watching the carpet wear and the paint chip. She was even derisive toward mine and my brother’s friends, occasionally swearing at us— or one of them— in a ruthless and intentionally humiliating snarl. It was kind of an open joke among my friends and I played along, but to me, it was always painful and ugly.
The unspooling of her mental faculties was accompanied by increasingly paranoid and odd behavior, her temper unmanageable, her filter for right and wrong becoming vaguer. At one point she literally chased me around the kitchen table waving a paring knife, shrieking that she was going to kill me. I don’t even remember what I said or did to inspire this outburst of hostile energy, but I left and didn’t come home for two days. My dad, my brother, and I did what we could to cope with this downward spiral in our own ways. My memories fuse helplessness with smoldering anger as I would attempt empathy while my brother and my dad tended more towards standoffish stoicism. None of us really knew what to do, but none of us really handled it well, and I clearly was no saint if she was willing to chase me with a knife.
Somewhere in the midst of my senior year in high school, my mom, in a moment of clarity that I would imagine was likely becoming fewer and farther between, mentioned to me that she had had a dream in which the three of us left her to die in the desert as she chased our taillights into the horizon. I have to guess that this was less a dream interpretation than a glimpse into her frightened reality.
I left for college without much fanfare. My dad and I were more less no longer talking to each other, and my brother was struggling through his own stuff in his own ways. My mom, seeming as frail as an 80-year-old in decline, rarely wore anything besides a threadbare nightgown by this point. The only thing she gave me as I walked out the door was a large, wooden-handled steak knife, no doubt forgetting completely about the paring knife incident. She said, “you never know when you’ll need a steak knife” as if it were some survival tool that would be paramount for my dorm room experience. I’m pretty sure she stole it from Outback Steakhouse.
Although, my forward-thinking mind sought a fresh start, this first year of college was pocked with the typical freshman experiences (drinking, drugs, sex) but I remained shackled to my familial anxiety, knowing that this shit-show was only a two-hour drive away. I made that drive for Thanksgiving break, and things essentially hadn’t changed much. The tension between my dad and I felt like it had eased a bit, my brother seemed to be doing alright but was obviously doing his own share of partying to cope and escape. My mom was a ghost. She looked like she hadn’t been outside in months, her skin was scabbed and bruised from falls. She had the hazy grey gaze of an Alzheimer’s patient.
The day before Thanksgiving, my dad offered to buy me some new tires, maybe as a peace offering, but probably as an early Christmas present to prevent me from dying on the hundred mile drive back to school. The three of us left, and no doubt my mom watched our taillights as we went.
The remainder of that day stands out like an exposed nerve in my memory, as I’m sure it does for my brother and my dad. It went something like this:
We came in through the garage as we often did, and we found a pillow, covered in blood and with charred black hole in the center of it. There were trickles of blood speckled across the floor and up the stairs. Following the trail: ruby red blood in the sink basin, blood up the stairs to my mom’s room. I remember my dad struggling to remain composed while standing at her locked door yelling to tell us what had happened, and my brother jimmying the lock open with a screwdriver or something of that sort.
Her room was dark and cold and she lay in bed sobbing, holding a towel to her head.
My mom had indeed watched us leave, then proceeded down to my dad’s office where she opened the gun safe and pulled out his .44 caliber magnum revolver. She walked to the back yard, where she lay down in the grass. Then she pointed that giant, heavy gun at her head and pulled the trigger.
_________________________
There are dark family jokes, and then there are dark family jokes. Ours is that my mother was so hard-headed that it was bulletproof.
I tend to imagine that the weight of the revolver was probably just a little too much for her to be able to handle properly with her weakened hands and wrists, but the bullet from that giant handgun (the Dirty Harry gun if you’re unfamiliar) had ricocheted off of the bony plate on the front of her skull and into the pillow and dirt above her head. For this reason, she was lucid and awake enough when we found her to say the words “I tried to end it all.”
We helped her into a pair of jeans and put a coat on her and we got her in the car. I don’t know if we were too embarrassed as a family to call an ambulance, but we opted to drive her to the hospital ourselves. When we barged into the emergency room, a woman started yelling at us because she had been waiting to be treated for a broken wrist and I responded by yelling “she got shot!” as if someone else had done this, not by her own hand after years of degrading traumatic experiences and substance abuse culminating in one penultimate act of self-annihilation. I defaulted to some other, perhaps to avoid my own feeling of guilt and helplessness as if this had been my fault and I had been too ashamed to own up to it.
She went into surgery and they managed to put her back together, removing the now shattered chunk of her skull and replacing it with a carbon fiber plate, and stretching the remaining skin on her forehead up to mask the wound— her “facelift”, she later called it; yet another dark and significantly less funny family joke. The time between her admission to the emergency ward and us picking her up is riddled with little moments that are just as strange as the overall situation. When Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” came on the radio on our drive home, (of all the mournful, our-relationship-is-over-in-the-saddest-possible-way songs that could possibly come on in that ten-minute timespan), my dad slammed his hand against the car stereo to turn it off, muttering something along the lines of not fucking now with the subtlest crackle of emotion in his voice. That was the closest I’ve seen my dad to becoming emotional about the whole incident.
A few days later, prior to her discharge, I went in to visit her in the hospital. She was shivering and sweating, a nightcap like the one they put on babies covering her now partially shaved and sutured head. Only later would I connect the dots that she was going through alcohol withdrawals. At that moment though, I did find my bearings enough to verbalize to her how painful this whole situation had been, and how sorry I was that she had been hurting enough to do this to herself. I offered to help her— or at least I like to think that I did— but the underlying message was we (I) can’t go through this again; what can I do to help you stop drinking? This came off as something of an ultimatum: it was a choice, presented by her eldest child, to choose between her vice and her family.
None of us were surprised when the drinking continued. Her choice was clear within a week of her exit from St Anthony’s Hospital.
Months passed, and like a cut with a sharp knife, once the initial shock of the whole gruesome incident settled in, the pain swelled and doubled in intensity. The resentment and anger festered in me. We were no longer on speaking terms. In retrospect, this stonewalling was an act of desperation and self-preservation on my part.
Despite the support of many friends and even parents of friends in the aftermath of my mom’s attempted self-murder, I made numerous bad decisions in this period: drinking and letting my own anger get out of control, punching holes in walls; stealing Adderall from my roommate and doing whatever other drugs I could get into my system. I sabotaged my first real relationship and torpedoed my grades, rarely going to class and not paying attention when I did. I basically did everything that you’re not supposed to do when you are under intense emotional strain. Strangely, I don’t regret much, because I feel like it’s something that I made it through: my own Dark Night of the Soul compelled by one of my parents barely escaping their own.
Meanwhile, my parents had processed a divorce, and my mom was now once again dwelling in her own strange version of ‘freedom’. She got a job at a local grocery store, bagging groceries and gaining a reputation for being largely unmanageable, and was eventually fired. Once the divorce was finalized, my mom took off and used the money from the settlement to make her way to Florida, where she would spend her final days drinking the rest of her life away.
I would occasionally receive a phone call from her, always responding from behind my barricade of despondency and resentment. Who was this person who was trying to reconnect with me even despite my constant dismissals? Was that real desperation in her pleas to connect with me?
I received the call that my mom was comatose from complications related to cirrhosis and undiagnosed hepatitis the day before Valentine’s Day in 2003. The nurse informed me that due to my parents’ divorce, I was listed as her next of kin: I would need to make the call as to whether she should remain on life support. She also let me know that my mom’s condition worsened by the hour, and that she had been restrained and sedated after trying to claw hallucinatory insects from her skin. I gave the order not to resuscitate, and it rolled off my tongue like a run-of-the-mill transaction. I was numb. There would be no goodbyes, no reconciliation. She was dying, writhing in psychic turmoil and there was nothing I could do from my perch 2,500 miles away.
The following day I was informed that she had ‘expired‘ as I walked home from an English class. I sobbed the entire walk across campus, in all likelihood freaking out plenty of other kids along the way, and when I got home I strummed the only Jackson Browne song I knew— a cover of the Velvet Underground and Nico’s “These Days”— over and over and over again. To this day, even when I think about this song, my mother’s early words of encouragement to keep going when I got frustrated practicing my instrument led me to value music as one of my primary pressure valves for emotional distress. Keep going even though it’s hard. She was cremated and her ashes were delivered to my dad’s home in Denver in a cardboard box. I used my meager inheritance from her to buy my Taylor 612c acoustic guitar, literally the only possession I own that I don’t think I could part with, even now.
I am releasing this essay into the world on Valentine’s Day, eighteen years to the day of her physical death, but it still feels like it was only one or two years ago. I suppose I was partly compelled because I have been writing this story in my head for almost two decades. In fact, in college I passed it off as fiction and my professor pulled me aside and asked me if I was interested in being mentored by him. I’m not sure why I didn’t follow through with that offer, but here I stand today, writing it anyway for no one in particular, but just to have it on the page.
Mainly, though, I write this now because I finally feel like enough time has passed to see how much positivity has squeezed through the cracks of all this darkness. Still, the specter of my mother’s mental illness and death are all around me; little reminders in the withered gaze of passersby who have that distant, lonely and inebriated stare, or in eavesdropping on high school kids struggling to pretend like everything is okay when clearly it really isn’t. It has also provided one of the most potent bonds between my wife and I since she had also managed the death of her own father under different but similar circumstances not long before we met. We both made it through this mortal gauntlet to find each other.
My mom may have survived that ill-guided gunshot, but to me she succeeded in her mission to end her life. She was a ghost in the waking world for many more months, but in my mind she has been dead since that November morning. Despite all this, everything that I value and cherish most to this day has some reflection in her memory, and I have followed her path in many ways, even geographically in reverse from Colorado to Hawaii and then to California, winding up not-so-far from where she so viscerally learned about pain only to teach me that it’s part of life. Her ashes were scattered off a cliff’s edge at Big Sur.
Mostly though, I remember the vibrancy of the woman who was always ready to mom-dance when the music started and wasn’t afraid to encourage others to join her— but also wasn’t afraid to keep going on her own, either. She showed me the importance and value of art, music, and language, taking me to the museum, the library, and the theater when she saw me resisting my dad’s push to play sports. She showed— not taught— me that it’s alright to be a weirdo, because the weirdos are the really cool people. And truthfully, we’re all pretty weird when you stop to look at things.
When I was in sixth grade, I unexpectedly won an essay contest for writing a one-page paper for the rightly-defunct D.A.R.E. program about why I would never do drugs. (Being a staunch proponent of the benefits of psychedelics for self-care, the irony of this is not lost on me today.) My teacher, a nasty old spinster hag named Ms. Fanning, surprised me by informing me that I was reading the essay to my entire school at an assembly a half-an-hour later. Mortified, I called my mom without knowing what to do. I was a scared 12-year-old boy who needed his mom. She didn’t answer; I left a message on our home phone.
I remember that long walk from one end of the school to the other, my little heart hammering in my chest. As I walked up to the front of the cafeteria, I remember reading from my sheet of wide-ruled notebook paper, trembling and unable to look up— the longest two minutes of my short life. Finally, when the applause broke, the representative police officer handed me a little brass medal with a red, white, and blue ribbon, the D.A.R.E. logo in the center of the medallion. I didn’t know where to look with the other kids standing and clapping, so I looked to the back of the cafeteria where my mom stood, casually leaning against the doorjamb at the entrance, her radiant smile beaming at me from across the room. I’m not sure if she even saw the whole of this— my very first— public speech but she somehow, miraculously was there for me and that made all the difference in the world. I see that smile whenever I accomplish one of my myriad goals, even now as a 38-year-old man all these years after she was thrust, literally kicking and screaming into the great beyond.
Some of the most abundantly reported deathbed wishes of dying folks tend to involve regrets about the loss or disconnection with an important person in their life, be it a child, spouse, or friend, or regrets for things left undone. We have a finite time on this earthly plane. Dwelling in the negativity of loss and never seeking resolution will not result in your long-term happiness. Getting your affairs in order means not wasting this precious time, and being there for each other, learning from these experiences rather than dwelling and ruminating on them. Also, if you feel yourself going down that dark road toward substance abuse, don’t wait for your own personal rock bottom to ask for help. Pain is to be expected, but suffering is optional and in the end, we’re in this together. Reconnect while you still can.
I’ve decided to share this essay as a message to others who may be in a similar situation but who don’t know what to do. It was written in hopes of reminding at least some of you that it’s okay to feel bad, sad, or angry when your family feels like it has fallen apart, but giving up, numbing the pain, and falling into despondency is not the answer. If you’re reading this and you truly don’t feel like anyone else could possibly understand the feeling of helplessness in watching someone you love waste away, whether it’s from drinking, drugs, overeating, depression, disease, or any of the other multitude of ways to die slowly, just know that your story is our story and you most definitely are not alone.
Cam Prendergast
February 14, 2021
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen