It Came by Loss

By Bill McCausland

It Came by Loss concentrates on Pete Gordon, about to graduate from Stanford. The tale launches with Pete sitting at the hospital bed of his extroverted and charismatic mother, as he tries to come to grips with her demise from alcoholic liver failure.

An attraction with the young nurse caring for his mother draws Pete to reveal hi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Lacquer Press & Marketing Inc.
• Release date: Aug 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948288316

Bill McCausland

Bill McCausland has a doctorate in clinical psychology and is APA board certified in the treatment of alcohol and other psychoactive use disorders. He has treated addicted physicians for numerous years and has a wealth of experience. He also has a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

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Copyright © 2018 by Bill McCausland.

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CHAPTER ONE

Covering Up What Wasn’t There

The sterile room’s pictureless ashen walls have a closing-in, strangling sensation. All magnified by a grievous stink of disinfectant and ethanol, and bleach that are comingled with her deteriorating body’s moldy and ammoniac odor, like the smell of rotting cabbage. It’s an oppressive weight that makes my eyes squeeze shut when my nostrils pull in a breath of the air’s dense stench. Her head depressed against the pillow makes ruffled star-shaped contours orbiting her wasted-looking face. Her life was elegant, like a tasteful and precious multifaceted gemstone; but one flaw now brings her to somnolently teetering on the periphery of a crumbling cliff’s gravity.

The vital sign monitor watches the life that’s left. Busy green and yellow and blue lines on a black background put on a show of ECG heart rhythms, systolic and diastolic blood pressure peaks and valleys, and pulse. Digits register respiration rate and body temperature. At least the monitor screen isn’t a series of horizontal lines and blanks where the digits should be. I’m not ready yet for the screen to go vacant.

I look out the window at the lonely, bleak gray sky shutting out any glimmer of sunlight. Then my gaze returns to her. There’s another fleeting look at the monitor, and my aqueous eyes descend on her to study the outline features of her cadaverous cheekbones. I fight my shaking chin and force a watery swallow through my constricted throat.

Her absences in my life have always made me suffer, which makes letting go now complicatedly anguished—letting go of the passage of time and her wonderful parts, and mourning what I didn’t possess and missed and longed for. The vacuum left by her withdrawal wasn’t a void because it was filled up with pretending it wasn’t there and making excuses for her and covering up my layers of maddened fury that were inescapable.

She abruptly jerks and then is tomblike still, followed by the monitor’s blurting the visual and auditory alarms. I freeze. My heart explosively races. I fight to get a breath from the room’s turgid air. Short gasps are caught in my throat. And my stomach squeezes tight. My breathing is faster and faster while I struggle to get air. And now my chest beats in a crescendo like feverishly throbbing tribal drums.

A lithely bodied nurse throws open the door and she sprints into the room. In the commotion, I get a glimpse of her hospital ID badge and catch her name—Julia. Her stare twitches back and forth across the bed and at the lines on the monitor. Suddenlyher eyes widen in recognition, and then she reconnects a dislodged wire undone from Mom’s movement. The monitor alarms switch off.

I catch my breath as though I’d just run a sub four-minute mile. Julia pulls her hand across her bosomy chest, cocks her head while expelling a lungful of relief-spelling air through her rouged lips. Her sharp-featured face relaxes into a look of release. Julia’s youthfulness adds to her well-favored looks, and I imagine her filling a blank canvas of a missing woman in my mind. I gather myself up to say, I’m anything but the faint of heart, and that scared the holy living hell out of me to the point of being cataleptic.

It gave me quite a start too. Our eyes meet, and we share a nervous smile. We both must know each second marks a reprieve, but skirt revealing the unspoken certainty.

I stand up. Julia, my name is Pete. I’m Louise Gordon’s son.

Julia comes over to me, and places a hand on my shoulder. She nods, aligned with a sympathetic smile. A blink and my grin acknowledge her understanding gesture. She softly closes and opens her eyes, and then dips her head to signal good-bye. Cleanly uniformed Julia turns and walks with a stately pace out of the room. The door closes with a muted click behind her. has a stately pace when she steps out of the room.

I stand over Mom. Her skin has turned a fleshy yellow—almost making her naturally creamy white skin look tannned—from hepatic failure, backing up bilirubin and bile, infusing her tissue to an aberrant golden shade. Bending over to kiss her cheek, I sniff her metallic-smelling breath. Her eyes flicker open—not seeming conscious of the alarms sounding—the whites now the color of egg yolks. Mom’s tinged skin draws a brutal contrast to her natural silky chestnut-brown hair falling around her shoulders without a single strand of gray. Everyone always says she’s a beauty, and now—this.

She’s woozy, but pulls together enough air to speak. Pete, you remember my favorite joke?

Dad’s death left me alone to handle Mom on my own. When he was alive, I still had unloosened knots tying me to being a child. When he died those vestiges went with him, leaving me to be my own man. And there are the times I make myself be slightly numb to forget and be a child again. But today, I stand with the set, upright posture of a soldier, hiding my fear as though I were stepping on a battlefield where fatalities are a certainty.

Mom has always been an irreverent soul. And today—despite her condition—her condition—her cheekiness hasn’t changed. I answer, You have lots of pet jokes.

Her face is vacuous except for the words that push through her bow-like curved yellowish lips. The tennis ball joke. A guy is jogging down the street, sees a tennis ball in the gutter, and puts it in his pocket. He keeps jogging and— She blinks as though she is fading. Her voice trails off into a faintly audible hush and I labor to hear her say, You finish it for me, darling.

Mixed-up emotional sensations surge from my stomach to my throat. I turn to look out the window of the third-story room. I’m slumped over, looking at the landscape that seems to be dry brush and a tinderbox on the verge of exploding in flames with the slightest spark. The oppressive overcast sky is laced by dark clouds on the horizon.

Mom’s breath is limp. She whispers, Dear?

I turn back around, feigning being okay by standing straight. My cheeks and my chin must be shaking from the sad tension under the surface of my skin. The memory of a doctor I vaguely know announcing that her lab tests show that the transaminases and cholestatic liver enzymes are completely out of whack engulfs me, and I feel as though I’m being held underwater and struggling for air.

I drag myself back to the present to draw her comic story—now tragic—to a close, recognizing the painful message behind what would normally be a funny witticism; but the context is sadly all wrong. And he sees a friend who is watering his lawn, and the jogger stops. The friend says, ‘What’s that bulge in your running shorts?’ The jogger says, ‘That’s tennis ball.’ The friend says, ‘I’ve heard of tennis elbow, but that must really hurt.’

The corners of her mouth rise in a last-ditch smile. And her face collapses. She becomes dozy. I sit. Waiting for what is going to happen becomes a grievous tragedy superimposed in my mind, overlaid with competing sensations of fear and terror, and boredom. And then I unhitch for an instant with an aimless, spaced-out gaze through the window and across the barren, muted steel-gray sky.

A childhood celluloid-like clip involuntarily bubbles up in my mind. I’d saved and saved my allowance to buy her a fine-looking cookie jar as a birthday gift. I waited for her to come home. The excitement grew. And there was more waiting. And she didn’t come. The last shred of daylight fizzled into nothingness. Excitement turned into a bland feeling, trailed by a mournful emptiness. Nobody was home. Dad was still at the hospital making rounds. And if he hadn’t been so perpetually hard at work and stressed but instead had taken care of business at home, he would still be alive instead of his heart fatally exploding in his chest. Mom’s absence that day set-in, and it felt like being gouged by a barbed hook.

I walked down the country road leading away from the house and waited to intercept her. A minute was like an hour. An hour a week. Finally, after my childhood sense of time had been dragged out into infinity, Mom sped by in her Cadillac. I wasn’t seen, but left standing isolated in the shadows. The abandonment pain throttled me like an endless deepening vacuousness, since it was a familiar feeling from so many times before. A thick frothiness hit the back of my throat. I swallowed. A sick feeling erupted, standing paralyzed in the rural shadows while I spent minutes glancing around in the darkness looking for answers. But no answers came. I took one labored step after another, making my way back home.

Mom was sitting in the living room taking hefty swigs from a crystal Baccarat bourbon glass. She cavalierly said, Where you been, honey? Upstairs? She had a shit-faced grin. I heard the greatest joke. There were three guys whom—

Julia adeptly marches into the room—breaking my mommy ruminations—to play out her routine of decoding the combination of vital signs whizzing across the monitor screen. Her voice shatters me from being miles away in a childhood scene that I want to say doesn’t exist. She says, Are you okay? I frightfully jerk back, blink, and swallow. Would you like to see the chaplain? Is there anything I can do? Julia seems different than before. She speaks as though her words have been mechanically repeated so many times she sounds as if she has health care worker compassion fatigue.

I swirl in an inundation of wretched gloom, and sorrow twisted like a choking vine around my rage. My eyes swell as I fight back tears, wondering if Julia is safe to talk to or if she’s just going through the motions of her job. Julia’s offer is professionally polite, but now her heart sounds worn out, like it’s numbly disconnected from her words. I stand up. Thank you for being so kind. But no, I’d just like to be here with my mother. I’m stricken and hesitant. My words are gracious and sound removed and formal.

Julia cocks her head. She squints, looking as if she is examining me. She runs her fingers through her bangs, pulling her brunette hair off her forehead, fully exposing her demurely chiseled feminine face. I feel so conspicuously and emotionally caught when her eyes soften. She humanly steps toward me, and professional boundaries evaporate into a sympathetic hug. I enfold into the embrace, feeling for a split second that we are one person. I feel the solidness of her torso. Her breathing is slow and deep. Before, she seemed physically larger because of her influence of being a specialist and of my being absorbed by her presence, but as we hug, I realize that she is quite petite and delicate. I want to take in her humaneness and simultaneously fear it, like I’m too mournfully out of sync to let it in. She pulls away, her subtle, soothing hazel eyes looking into mine as her open hand touches my cheek. Take care of yourself. Julia dips her head, soothingly raises her eyebrows and nods, showing her sensitivity.

She’s more than an automaton who dispenses pills or checks a medical this or that. I simply whisper, Okay. I don’t know what else to say or, really, what it means to take care of myself. You seem like a very kind person. I scratch to say something. Anything. It means a lot at this moment. And thank you for that.

Julia takes a step closer. She softens my pain by angling her head up and down. The way the corners of her mouth turn upward shows me a calming understatement that she cares. Julia turns and is light-footed when she passes out of the room.

I feel submerged. There’re insecurities attached to loving my mother. The history of not knowing what’s capriciously going to happen next with her makes me think of its influences on my broiled connection and breakdown with Karen. I’m dying to have intimacy and purity and peace, but with Karen, there’s the consistent feeling of being caught without direction in a labyrinthian confusion, leaving only uncommitted relationships with other women forged by having fun and feeling no more than the depth of their skin.

Bonding with Karen was like being rubbed raw by sandpaper. Then when our relationship was over, I superficially tramped around with other women, not having a drop of glue to tie me to more than handshake-type sex. When it comes to women, I start out feeling sharp and clever and end up feeling senseless and dense, like I lead with being smart and follow with being stupid. Feeling like a failure, I skid into stopping myself just short of plunging into shadowy self-pity.

Mom and Karen involuntarily became superimposed in my mind. And sometimes I’d try to split to decamped myself from them. Getting away didn’t work. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough, always being inextricably snapped back by an invisible elastic band. How fast and how far do I have run so I don’t have to run anymore?

I stand at the window. As a result of a recent rain deluge, alongside the building there’s a sprouting green carpet under a field of lifeless dun gray-brown bushes. The first time I looked out, I saw only the dry tinderbox dead foliage and didn’t see the nourished earth underneath. I need to pay attention. Out of a void—like a trick—I dredge up bits and pieces of Aldous Huxley’s book Island. Attention. Attention. And, Here and now, boys. And, We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way. Let’s see how that can work, or maybe this slant is just one more phantasm I try to grip that ends up slipping away when I put it to the test.

I’ve pretended to not be a casualty in the face of faking that I’m immune to my mother victimizing me. A mask of my own making is a thickly made protective exterior coating, sometimes bulletproof, sometimes it porously fails. What’s sad is Mom didn’t cause this on purpose. It was an automatic consequence of who she is, and what she unwittingly does by toasting herself into oblivion.

Two pieces spontaneously link in my mind, making my eyes feel as if they are helplessly sinking into my head. I think how senseless and avoidable her condition is, driving my love mixed with resentment toward her. And then—as if enlightened—there’s a knowing and understanding the power of her compulsions, and I suspend judgment and anger; but still I’m mixed up, and my psyche is a mess.

I second-guess myself, wondering if I’m trying to make too much sense of everything.

The past has driven Mother’s illness; and her illness has colored in the annoying parts of who I am. It brings me to be in such a state, leading to a fall-short conclusion with women. Not seeing what was happening with Karen, and not having any clear conviction about how to be a man with women caused me to be foolish and incendiary, and I went into a downward spiral in my relationships.

There were chances to make good choices or bad choices with women. I’ve had good women interested in me. And on reflex, I picked Karen, who twisted me up in a dark, gnarly knot. Or I’ve picked women where there’s no knot at all. I look at Mom and see she is a victim of her disease, and I do not have to be one more underdog fatality. Snapping my fingers to demand my instant cure is as stupid as spinning out of control with Karen. The trouble is I don’t have a clue about what to do. And then I’m disgusted and get grabbed by self-loathing and shudder at the thought that the tension caused by being at odds with women is my only and twisted way of being affectionate. Oh my god. My nostrils flare with disgust as I shake my head back and forth.

Mom stirs. My attention piques and falls on her. Her eyes flicker open. I move to her and brainlessly struggle to think of something to say. What was the best thing in your life?

She’s drowsy but doesn’t equivocate or stall. All the parties.

I want to voice support for whatever she can manage to say, but all the drunken parties are what’s killing her. Mom closes her eyes, and her brief lucidity wanders off in lost consciousness, making me wonder—leading to doubt—if she’ll ever come back.

I have a restless stance and start to pace and think. No, I’m not cured yet. It’s going to be a long haul.

My father’s premature death made an incomplete life. And now Mom is on the verge of passing through the threshold into nothingness except the memories. The memories that stand out eclipse what’s positive, like the erosion caused by her disease—ruts that have worn so deep they are canyons. My brows pull in. I softly shake my head, being on the brink of becoming an orphan, albeit an adult one—so different—having no parent instead limping along with one parent who’s tarnished.

I make out my six-foot-one frame faintly forming a muted griseous silhouette in the window. The room’s light catches the glistening vitreous blueness of my eyes, casting an unexpected apposition of color in the dark apparition-like reflected image. The sight makes me shiver, thinking the shadowy likeness is the backdrop of life’s end filtering into the present as a warning. Suddenly the penetrating mirrored blue pools flicker a heat calling to deliver me to life’s bottomless existence and saying it’s to be taken in and soaked up to animate everything I can possibly be.

My torso cools. I take a chair and gaze into the opaque sky, making out the forms and textures and dimensions of the steel-gray celestial space. A transient brainy thought sifts through of my studies as a kid and at the university in biological sciences detailing the life cycles of animals and plants. One thing never mentioned is obvious. The expected life cycle of the adult human is entwined with losing one’s parents. My gaze starts to bounce from place to place. This dodged topic has countless designs for the final act’s curtain closure. At this moment, I realize the answers for losing parents are confined to a secret codebook. I’m on my own. What’s the code? I don’t know what’s encrypted in the surreptitious key. My shoulders curl over my chest.

I stand up straight. Mom?

She doesn’t answer.

More forcefully, "Mom?"

Nothing. I glance up at the monitor. The series of colored waves are still dancing across the screen. I’m occupied by waiting, a sinking kind of feeling. The waiting is not resting. There’s tension twisted with ennui that leads to a tedious weariness. I grit my teeth, then relax and sit and push back into the chair. Waiting makes a fertile cradle for my mind to coast into thoughts and images and reflections and memories.

One Sunday morning, in my early days, I heard Mom making her way down the staircase to prepare breakfast. I crawled into bed with my father. He held me close, interrupted by a telephone ringing. He answered, Dr. Gordon here.

Dad listened, shook his head. He squinted, having a disbelieving look, then let go of me and sat up straight, his back pressed into the headboard. His face was ashen, and his eyebrows knitted together, while the corners of his mouth were downturned. This muscle of a man turned to a shaken softness I’d never seen before. I felt suspended on a tenuous thread, sucked up into the vacuum of suspense as to what Dad was hearing.

Before this time, what I knew about loss of life was in a concrete and black-and-white physical sense. Things either lived, or they didn’t. Death was a red-shouldered hawk waiting for prey on a perch and swooping down on a field mouse to making a kill. Or it was a dead mud hen decomposing near the marsh.

The day Dad answered the telephone, all life’s intangibilities circled and festered into a crushing feeling that reorganized my child’s heart. Something nurturing was taken away. Someone who was kind and whose passing seemed to be a vanishing connection, But there was a sense of permanence left from the ground up that could never fade away. She was the big woman who pulled me into her bosom, who cuddled me when my mother was absent. I felt loved. I gave love back. And what we had was an asset that couldn’t be seen, but gathered up inside me and gave a sense of texture and of having substance.

My childhood mind was at a pinnacle that turned life and death into an abstraction, apart from a living thing either being animated or dying to rot and wither into being reabsorbed by the earth.

There was Dad’s one-way conversation that I heard. He’s educated sensibilities fell down a checklist, asking what took place, when, where, and how it happened. I pieced together that he was talking to our housekeeper, Mary’s, husband, Abraham. I saw my father’s eyes well up, and a glistening tear from the corner of his left eye that trickled down his cheek. Dad’s knuckles turned fleshy white, and then his hand relaxed as he held the telephone receiver. He bowed his head and let go of a gushing disturbed breath. I remembered only a blur of the kind words he said so he could emotionally hold up Abraham. Dad put the receiver in its cradle. He was a tireless sort, but now he looked consumed.

I scrutinized him. He wiped his cheek and eye with the back of his arm. Dad, is she— My eyes were watery, filled with salty weepiness. I felt a fluttery, empty, tattered feeling in my stomach. Please tell me. I can’t stand it.

Abraham said, ‘Mary, she dayd.’

I stood on the bed, looking at my father, who was folded in, lamentation spilling from his face. They were on their way to a Pentecostal gathering up north near Los Angeles. At the moment, I remembered his past explanation of their Holy Roller practice. Understanding their practice never did quite click for me. A speeding driver ran a red light at an intersection and hit the rear panel of Abraham and Mary’s car. The car spun around. Abraham held tightly on to the steering wheel. Mary was thrown out. Abraham said, ‘She kilt right away.’ My father looked in my eyes. You know, Pete, I can’t get Abraham’s words out of my mind, ‘Mary, she dayd.’ Dad had a bewailing ashen and waxen look covering his face.

I fell into his lap, and he wrapped his arms around me, holding me closely to his chest. I felt the warm wetness of his fallen tears on my forehead. His physique must be the same as when he played football at the university—strong and defined broad chest narrowing down to his waist. I looked up and sawanother drop cascading in slow motion from his eye, and it grew in size before it plunged and hit my cheek.

I leveled my head and made out my own wet sadness soaked into my father’s cottony pajamas. And then a translucency filled the room. I stood and caught sight of a yellow light reflecting a spectrum of prism colors in a saline drop dripping from my father’s eye. And the glued connection I felt with my father at that instant was the eight years of feeling protected, and being the subject of his intellect and emotion and guidance and everything else beyond those earthly things my father did to forge a bond that bred certainty, compressed into this shared moment.

Mary was employed as a housekeeper, but she worked her way into feeling like a beloved family member. It was the first time—maybe the only time—I remembered crying with my father.

An impetuous shift came to me. At the moment, I was unable to focus on anything else but my mother. I asked Dad why he never did anything about the one thing that was making Mom a mess—and in retrospect—put her where she was right now. He said, I wouldn’t want to burst her bubble. This was an answer, but it wasn’t an answer. And to this day, it was a muddy perplexity how a man of such substance and trustworthiness gave Mom a pass on what would end up killing her. I could only presume that I would never know beyond speculation’s guesswork. Maybe an informant or digging would undo the obscurity of what stalled my father from combating Mom from funneling every bottle of aqua vitae in sight down her gullet.

I’m seemingly intelligent, but I’m dumb and clueless about how the relationship with Karen was a twisted mirror of my family, like she was pulled into my life on the tail of a slipstream’s suction. She was perfect in every way. Strange how sex with her was either graceless or so driven it was completely unbridled. It was still a mystery why we didn’t work out. It wasn’t only me. She had the ability to pull out the best in me. As well as the worst. And what she did—the event—that I would always remember. I knew what she did. But I didn’t know why she did it.

Every fifteen minutes throughout the day Mary died, Dad repeated Abraham’s words, Mary, she dayd. Afterward, in the days and months and years, the grief never left, as if it was like something floating on a murky river that you thought should have drifted out of sight, but when you looked twice, you saw the object was permanently tethered. The grief has always