Just Die Already by DJ Chernovsky

Avi reflects on how his childhood was shaped by his mother and her sickness.

Image generated with OpenAI

I am the sole fruiting of the brief and often antagonistic union of Matthew Kleinman and Sarah Levy. Theirs was a marriage that started out as an obsessive need, but soon drifted towards doubt, then declined into disappointment, before finally settling on searing regret. By the time I was out of diapers, both parties of this marriage had already fallen down the staircase of expectations and were laying prone at the bottom, casting accusing glances at the other and grimly rubbing their bruised limbs.

I have very few memories of our time together as a family and certainly no happy ones. My strongest memory is of my parents arguing in the kitchen while I busied myself with some toys on the floor nearby, half listening to their angry words, half engaged in repeatedly crashing two toy trucks together. At some point, my father spun around in anger and frustration and put his foot clean through the side of an enormous pumpkin that my mother and I had set aside for jack o'lantern carving.

The sight of the ruined pumpkin, with a gaping hole that leaked seeds and goo down its side, coaxed a loud shriek from my throat. High and oscillating, like an air raid siren. My mother swooped down to gather me into her arms, pressing my head to her shoulder to stifle the noise. "Look what you've done. Are you happy now?" she hissed at my father, before displaying my blubbering face to him.

But whether or not my father had in fact seen what he had done, and whether that observation had in turn generated any sort of emotion at all, he chose not to acknowledge. Instead, he simply walked over to the back door and threw it open so forcefully that the doorknob buried itself into the drywall. And then he left.

Though I did not understand it at the time, this incident was actually the rousing finale of my parents' marriage. My father, at the time a Vice President at a change management consultancy, shortly thereafter announced his intention to spin himself off after six years of marriage to my mother to pursue exciting strategic opportunities with one of his junior colleagues. Over the next few months, he proceeded to explore mergers with this colleague in every conceivable configuration and setting, before eventually concluding that a formal acquisition would be untenable. Years later (by this time comfortably ensconced as a partner at a different consultancy) he would eventually find a more suitable woman to marry - Mandy, a second-generation Korean-American dermatologist, with whom he eventually produced my half-brother James. Together, my father and Mandy purchased the large, austere home in Winnetka where I would serve out my unhappy high school years. But that was later.

I actually recall the period after my parents' split as a happy and fulfilling time. My mother was my everything, and she and I lived alone together in a hopelessly disorganized but loving world of our own creation. In contrast to my gregarious father, my mother did not seem to need any other human contact aside from me. An art teacher in the Chicago public school system, she was a quirky woman, prone to unpredictable behavior and blurting out truths that more socially aware people left unsaid. Most times, she was a loving and attentive mother, the perfect match for a fretful boy like myself, who could sometimes miss her so keenly that I would burst into tears in the middle of class.

I would come directly home after school and do my homework at the kitchen table as she cooked. She'd wash the dishes and I would dry them and place them in the rack. Most evenings, we watched TV together or played board games. On weekends, we'd take long walks in the city, collecting 'curiosities', as she called them. Dented hubcaps, twisted pieces of metal, beautiful pieces of broken glass in interesting hues. My mother would use all these found items to create her strange and disturbing sculptures or mesmerizing murals. To her, the items she found were not trash, but rather objects awaiting transformation into a new form.

One Saturday, we were walking along Ashland Avenue when my mother spotted what looked like a car's side mirror lying in the gutter, its glass spiderwebbed but still largely intact. She got so excited that she actually clapped her hands together like a little kid. "Avi, look at this," she said, crouching down to examine it. "See how the cracks catch the light? It's like looking through a kaleidoscope." She held it up so the afternoon sun could shine through it, and suddenly the broken glass threw a dozen fractured rainbows across both our faces. "Beautiful things are supposed to break eventually," she said, turning the mirror this way and that. "That's what makes them beautiful in the first place. It's the people who throw them away who are broken, not the things themselves."

At home, she'd spend hours in the garage workshop she'd set up, arranging and rearranging her finds. Sometimes I'd sit on an overturned milk crate and watch her work. She'd hold up two pieces of metal, turning them slowly, squinting at them from different angles. "What do you think, Avi? Does this piece want to be part of something bigger, or does it want to stand alone?" As if trash had desires, had agency. I started to see it too. That bent spoon wasn't just a bent spoon. It was reaching towards something. That bottle cap wasn't just a bottle cap. It wanted to be an eye.

Our board game nights had their own rhythm. We'd play Scrabble mostly, because my mother loved words, loved their shapes and sounds. She'd play words I'd never heard of and then define them for me with the kind of intensity most people reserved for religion. "A phosphene is that light you see when you close your eyes and press on them," she'd say, demonstrating. "Isn't that wonderful? That there's a word for something so small and private?"

But then there were the other nights. The nights when she wouldn't get out of bed, when I'd have to make myself cereal for dinner and eat it alone in front of the TV. The nights when I'd peek into her dark room and see her just lying there, staring at the ceiling, not crying, not sleeping, just staring. "Mom?" I'd whisper. "Do you want some toast?" She'd turn her head slowly toward me, and for a moment it was like she didn't recognize me at all. Then she'd say, very quietly, "Not now, sweetheart. Mommy's just very tired." Those stretches would last three days, sometimes four, once a whole week. And then one morning she'd emerge, pale and shaky, and make us pancakes, and we'd never talk about where she'd been.

My mother's art grew larger, more elaborate, until it filled our house, leaving only narrow passages. Some of it had sharp edges that I learned to avoid. One piece was made entirely of broken mirror shards arranged in a spiral that seemed to pull your eye toward an empty center. Another was a mobile of rusted chains and chandelier crystals that made an unsettling tinkling sound whenever someone walked past. My mother would stand in front of them for hours, adding a piece here, removing one there, never satisfied, never finished.

"Sometimes things break," she told me once as we wrestled a wooden chair frame (already shedding flakes of paint) into the back of her car, "but most times they can be fixed. Not always the same way as before, but in a new and sometimes better way. It's just that most people don't see the value in doing it." But my mother saw that value.

Still, there are some things that cannot be fixed. For instance, when some mutated cells in my mother's pancreas lodged colonies of their progeny in her liver and lungs, there was very little that could be done. Strange thing, pancreatic cancer. Its symptoms are hard to identify and can usually be dismissed as any of a dozen other common ailments. By the time it is formally detected, there is often almost no point in pursuing treatment.

In my mother's case, she had battled an upset stomach for months. She swilled bottles of Pepto-Bismol and crunched her way through jugs of antacids, all the time believing that she had a stress-induced ulcer that was steadily worsening. But a schoolteacher's health insurance is not designed to encourage visits to expensive specialists. So by the time she finally saw a gastroenterologist, she was horrified to learn that he estimated that she had perhaps three months to live.

When my mother was admitted into the hospital, it was with the intention of fighting the hopeless battle. An aggressive regimen of chemotherapy and radiation caused her to lose her dark curly hair in clumps and transformed her skin into a sallow tarp. It became apparent only too soon, however, that the fight was pointless. A little laminated butterfly was affixed to her door and from then on the only chemical interventions were the liberal doses of morphine which kept her semiconscious and largely unable to interact with me in any meaningful way.

While my opium-addled mother lay in her hospice, I moved in with my father and his new family. I had only been to my father's house a few times, as he (perhaps at Mandy's insistence) usually drew a firm division between his old unsuccessful life and his current life that was so full of grace. The house was huge, with empty white walls and spotless shelves that held nothing except perhaps a small vase. I was given an empty room to stow my things in. "We'll get some furniture, you know, if it comes to that," my father muttered while Mandy hung silently behind him, her face flat and unreadable.

To be fair, Mandy was unfailingly polite to me, even though she was not particularly warm or welcoming. When we spoke she wore a practiced smile that failed to crinkle the corners of her eyes (smile lines being bad for business). Still, she always made sure to watch carefully whenever I played with my half-brother James, her muscles taut and ready to spring into action in case I decided to harm James out of jealous spite or perhaps simply as a consequence of the crazy that was undoubtedly programmed into my genes.

One morning, about a week after I'd moved in, Mandy made me French toast. Not just regular French toast, but the kind with cinnamon and vanilla, cut diagonally, arranged on the plate in a fan. She set it down in front of me without comment, then went to wipe down the already spotless counter. "Thank you," I said. Mandy glanced at me, and for just a second, her professional mask slipped and I saw something that might have been pity. "Your mother taught you good manners," she said quietly. Then she left the kitchen before I could respond. I stared at the French toast for a long time before I could bring myself to eat it. It was delicious, which somehow made it worse.

My school was half an hour from my dad's place in Winnetka, so he would drive me to school each day before continuing on to work. After school, I'd walk over to the hospital to take up my post by my mother's side. By this point, she was there but not there, in and out of consciousness every few seconds, flitting in that space between narcotic bliss and the cool comforting peace of death.

Day after day I kept my watch over her. I did my homework, watched TV. The nurses would come in, give me a thin-lipped smile, flick a switch or two and then breeze out of the room again. Sometimes I held her dry papery hand while she slept. Other times I read aloud to her. I'm not sure I would have ever made it through Wuthering Heights except that I believed that she enjoyed listening to my reading. I managed to convince myself that the very mention of Heathcliff was enough to stir her back to consciousness, though oftentimes when I lifted my eyes from the page she would only be lying still with her eyes closed and her mouth slightly agape.

But truth be told, my visits to the hospital were mostly empty time, an interminable wait. Her periods of consciousness grew shorter and less frequent as her dosage increased, but her vital signs remained strong and steady. We were stuck together at the way station and my mother's departure was indefinitely delayed for reasons that were unclear to me.

I pissed in every single toilet in every single men's room in the hospital, just to have something to do. Still she lingered. I learned that it was exactly 94 steps from my mother's room to the vending machines. Every day I purchased a bag of Cheetos, popping them one by one into my mouth and sucking on them until they dissolved into nothing but grinds that stuck in my molars. To this day, the mere sight of Cheetos creates a leaden ball in my chest.

As the days grew shorter, it would be almost completely dark outside by the time I arrived at the hospital. The lobby was festooned with cardboard Santas and wreaths, relaying a hollow merriment. Christmas carols echoed in antiseptic-scented hallways, only compounding the lonely melancholy. The entire autumn had come and gone yet my mother lingered on.

One day, I was in her room. I remember it was late, my father would soon come by to pick me up. I was looking down upon her, she hadn't moved in hours, but the beep of the EKG showed she was still very much alive. And suddenly, an anger, a deep resentment, welled up from some hidden reservoir inside me. I leaned in closer to her face. I could hear the hiss of the oxygen from her nose tube. Her eyes were shut, her mouth hanging and her lips dry and flaking.

"Just die already," I said aloud. "Why don't you just fucking die already?"

Her morphine-heavy eyelids fluttered and then folded back. Her deep brown eyes stared dazedly at the ceiling and then she started to cast them back and forth across the room until they landed on my face. I could see them slowly focus until, for a moment, life returned to them and those empty orbs were my mother's eyes again. She was once again the woman who was my only friend in the world, the woman who held my hand as we walked through the streets looking for garbage to turn into art. And I saw those eyes fill first with recognition and then with tears. Until she closed them again and turned her head away from me.

I was stunned.

"I'm sorry," I tried to say, but nowhere near loud enough. "I'm sorry," I repeated again and again, but the words caught in my throat and only escaped my lips as a whisper.

"Mom? I'm sorry."

No reaction. She was asleep again. It was almost eight o'clock anyway and my dad would be waiting out front in his BMW SUV. So I left.

I couldn't go back. Not the next day, or the day after. When my father asked why I didn't want to visit anymore, I told him I had made my peace with her. The truth was I couldn't bear to see that hurt in her eyes again. Maybe she'll forget, I told myself. Maybe she'll think it was just a morphine hallucination.

Five days later, I was sitting in the dark of the middle school auditorium, just a ripple in the ocean of the assembled adolescent crowd. The school orchestra was barreling its way through a medley of holiday favorites. The director swung his arms madly, laboring in vain to unify the tempo, but the different instrument sections preferred to tootle along at their own paces, and the song pulled and stretched like a taffy version of the familiar standards. The result was mesmerizing, and frankly much more creative and interesting than the intended rendition.

A sharp elbow to my shoulder shook me out of my reverie. "Yo Avi," said the owner of the elbow, "Peterson wants you," and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the end of the row. Principal Peterson stood in the dim aisle, the red and green lights from the stage reflecting off the shiny dark dome of his head. He motioned frantically with his hand for me to join him while my father stood at his side, face grim and eyes downcast. And I knew at that very moment that she was finally gone.

It turned out my mother had expired near the end of second period that day, while I was crunching my way through yet another math worksheet which my checked-out teachers gave in place of actual instruction. I was assured that she went peacefully and without pain, though of course I have no way of knowing if that was actually so. Sometimes I wonder if maybe some nurse finally took mercy on her and administered a fatal dose of morphine. Or maybe my mother had simply taken my words to heart and just fucking died. I suppose I will never really know for certain.

The funeral, in keeping with Jewish tradition, was held just a day later. In fact, we did everything by the book. Not because anyone in my extended family was particularly religious, and God knows my mother certainly wasn't. But religion provides a handy guide on what to do in situations like this. Just follow the instructions, no matter how pointless and ridiculous, and just get through it the best you can.

I wore the suit my mother had bought for me to wear at my Bar Mitzvah, which had been scheduled to take place in a few weeks. I never did get officially Bar Mitzvahed in the end. Instead, I buried my mother to mark my entrance to adulthood. And as far as coming-of-age ceremonies go, I think that one ought to fucking count just as much.

Rabbi Moskowitz gave the eulogy, though the only thing he really knew about my mother was that she became impatient and hostile when my Bar Mitzvah lessons ran long. Maybe that's why Moskowitz chose not to focus on her life and who she was as a human being, but rather on her death and on me.

"'What is love", he asked the sparsely assembled mourners, "if not standing by someone's side as they die? Doing so must be the purest example of devotion of one person for another. You loved your mother, Avi. You were there for her throughout it all, her constant companion. I know your grief is deep, and we grieve with you and for you. But maybe someday, and God willing it will be soon, you will find comfort in knowing that your mother loved you very much, and that in turn, she felt your love for her. And through this love, you fulfilled a great mitzvah. Maybe the greatest of them all. May God grant you long life, Avi, and may he shine His countenance upon you and upon all His people Israel."

Amen.

Except what Moskowitz said was all complete bullshit. I knew very well that I wasn't there for her in the end. Worse, my mother knew that I had abandoned her. In the end I told her to die. And she did. I had let her down, in the most terrible way, just when she needed me most.

The cemetery was out in the suburbs somewhere, a flat expanse of identical headstones stretching in every direction. The day was gray and raw, with a wind that cut through my Bar Mitzvah suit like it wasn't even there. They lowered the plain pine box into the ground with canvas straps, and the rabbi said more prayers in Hebrew that no one understood. Then came the part I hadn't prepared myself for: each mourner was supposed to shovel some earth onto the coffin. The sound of that first shovelful hitting the wood, a hollow thud that was half swallowed by the open earth, made me flinch. When it was my turn, I threw it down into that hole and listened to it scatter across the top of the box that held my mother, and I thought: this is real. This is the most real thing that has ever happened. She's in there and I'm up here and I told her to die and now she's dead.

After the burial, we all retired back to the house that I had previously shared with my mom. I had been living with my dad's family, and I hadn't actually been inside my old home for weeks. In my absence, it had been cleaned and prepared for the shiva, and doing so had drained it of character and human warmth.

I recognized all the objects in the house, but none of them felt like mine. It was as if I had entered a stranger's home. The piles of half-read books and magazines, the half-finished artwork that clogged every room, the baskets of folded laundry lying on the couch... all of it was mysteriously gone. Even the comforting smell that used to greet me as I walked in the front door (vaguely reminiscent of mac and cheese) had been scrubbed away and replaced with chemical floral scents.

Black cloth hung over all the mirrors, and I had to sit on a low stool and accept the condolences of all the visitors. Why? Because that's what the instruction book said to do. So there I sat, while my extended family and schoolmates jockeyed for position about our dining room table, now laden with deli treats.

"That's right," I thought to myself, "go ahead and stuff your faces, you fuckers."

I saw someone waving to me out of the corner of my eye, and I turned to see my uncle Sammy motioning for me to follow him into the kitchen. Grateful for the opportunity to escape the hollow condolences from family and classmates (garbled from the half-chewed bagel which filled their mouths) I leapt up from my stool and nearly ran into the kitchen.

Uncle Sammy was a short man, powerfully built. He slapped a wide hand onto my shoulder and squeezed until I winced. But I made no sound, my eyes were locked on his. Though his eyebrows were bushier, the eyes beneath and the bridge of his nose were identical to my mother's.

"Avi," he began with a smoker's grumbly voice, "I can't even imagine what it's like for a kid your age to go through something like this. But you're a fighter, just like your mom. Your mother was a fighter. Life was never easy for her, and she had to fight her whole life. She fought to the end to stay with you. You're a tough fucking kid too, Avi. Your mom was always proud of you. And so am I."

Then he tapped my cheek twice with his palm and started to make his way back to the dining room table before all the good stuff was gobbled up by the hungry guests. "Uncle Sammy," I said. "You got a minute? I want to show you something."

I led him down the wooden steps into the garage. The overhead fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered when I turned them on, casting everything in a harsh, uncertain glow. Mom's artwork had all been moved down here to make room for the guests. Her glittery murals of broken glass, the kinetic sculptures of recovered scraps, the wooden frame chair still only half painted in wild swirls of paint. There were dozens of pieces, maybe more, crammed into every available space. It was her complete corpus, assembled in one place. Her final testament.

Uncle Sammy strode into the middle of it all, slowly turning to take it in. His expression was tight, his jaw working. Finally, he spoke, more to himself than to me. "Sometimes when we were kids... sometimes when it really got bad for her, she would make things that looked like this." He gestured at a mobile made of razor blades and Christmas ornaments. "She'd lock herself in her room for days. I thought she was just hiding... But then she, your mother... she'd come out and show me these... these things. Dolls made of newspaper and wire. Paintings that were just black and red. Just strange things. Scary things."

I felt something cold settle in my stomach. "What are you saying?"

He finally looked at me directly. "I'm saying your mom was sick, Avi. Not just the cancer. Before that. Maybe her whole life. And I don't think you should've been alone with her as much as you were. That wasn't fair to you." He put his hand on my shoulder again, gentler this time. "You were a kid. You are a kid. None of this was your responsibility. I'm sorry if I wasn't there to help you more."

I wanted to tell him he was wrong. My mother's art was beautiful. Our life together hadn't been perfect, but she wasn't sick. She was just sensitive, just creative, just mine. But standing there surrounded by all those fractured, frantic pieces, I felt something shift. How many nights had I fallen asleep to the sound of her in the garage, hammering and shouting to herself? How many times had I found her standing in front of her work, tears streaming down her face, unable to explain what was wrong? How many times had I whispered, "It's okay, Mom, it's beautiful, it's perfect," when some part of me had known, even then, that something was very wrong?

"She loved you," Uncle Sammy said. "I know she did. But love isn't always enough. Sometimes people need more help than love can give them." I couldn't look him in the face.

I stood there for a long time after he'd gone back upstairs, really looking at the artwork for the first time with different eyes. A sculpture made entirely of broken glass pieces arranged in a spiral that seemed to pull inward, inward, forever inward toward nothing. A mobile of rusted bike chains and chandelier crystals that caught the light but made an unsettling chattering sound when disturbed. A canvas covered in layers and layers of paint, colors buried under other colors, scraped and gouged and repainted until it was thick as tree bark. These weren't just broken things made beautiful. These were broken things screaming.

Maybe Uncle Sammy was right. Maybe our hermetic little world hadn't been a sanctuary at all, but a trap we'd built together. Maybe when I told her to die, I wasn't just a cruel, exhausted child, I was also a child who'd been drowning for years and didn't even know it.

After the shiva ended, we emptied out the old family house over the next week and prepared it to be sold. I had little sentimental attachment to most of the things there, the beat-up old sofa or the leaking beanbag chair in my room. But the artwork that filled the garage had a strange hold on me. It seemed to speak to me in a language that my mother and I had shared, even if I was only now beginning to understand what she'd actually been saying.

"There's no way we can keep all this," my dad said, though the house in Winnetka was certainly large and empty enough. "It's mostly just worthless junk anyway." But I knew that he and Mandy just didn't want my mom's art around. It disturbed them, made them uncomfortable, forced them to acknowledge things they'd rather not think about.

In the end I kept only one of her works, though it was far from my favorite. It was a small sculpture of broken glass and twisted metal. I remember finding some of its components myself during one of our afternoon strolls in the city. It even included that car mirror with the spiderwebbed glass. The sculpture fit easily on a windowsill, catching the light and throwing ghostly rainbows across the room. Sometimes, I'll sit and look at it, trying to see what my mother had seen. Trying to understand whether she'd been transforming brokenness into beauty or just making more beautiful brokenness. Trying to figure out if there was even a difference.

I have never known if my mother had finished working on the sculpture or not. It's the ambiguity, the not-knowing, that I like best about it. Because the truth is, I'll never know the full truth about my mother, about our life together, about whether I saved her or failed her or if those are even the right questions to ask. All I know for certain is that I told my dying mother to hurry up and die. She heard me. She turned away. And then she did what I asked. And I have to live with that.