Then my mother ordered us into a back booth and called for the waitress.
“Pancakes and bacon and orange juice,” my mother ordered. “For everybody.”
The white waitress looked at us four Indian kids still dressed in the clothes we’d slept in. And then she stared at me.
“Your nose is bleeding,” she said.
I wiped my face and looked at the red glow on my fingers.
“His nose bleeds when he’s heated up,” my mother said.
It was true. But the waitress had her doubts.
“Did somebody hit you, baby?” the waitress asked me.
I thought about lying. I thought about blaming my mother. I thought about telling the waitress that my mother had slapped me. I thought about being rescued by white people.
But I was more afraid of any white people than I was of my Indian mother.
“My mom saved us,” I said. “She saved us from drunks.”
The waitress looked down at my bare and dirty feet. My mother had dragged her kids out of the house without putting socks and shoes on us. It was winter. But I don’t remember if my bare feet felt cold. They had to be cold. But I don’t trust this particular detail. I don’t believe we left the house with bare feet. There’s no way our mother made us walk with bare feet in the snow and ice. She would not have done that to us, right? I think my mind is adding a Dickensian detail to heighten the narrative punch. I hope our bare winter feet are only a metaphor or simile. I hope it means “Our cheap shoes weren’t much better than bare feet.”
“Did your daddy hit you?” the waitress asked me.
“No,” I said. “It was the other men who hurt us. Mommy saved us from the other men.”
The waitress knelt beside me.
“You can tell me the truth,” the waitress said. “Do you need help, little sweetie?”
“I’m hungry,” I said. “I’m thirsty.”
The waitress brought us our breakfast. Then she said that she’d pay for it when my mother said she didn’t have any money. And then, as we prepared to leave the diner, that kind waitress needed to help us even more.
“You take these kids somewhere safe,” the waitress told my mother. “Don’t go back to the place you ran from.”
I don’t remember my mother’s response to that waitress. I can only imagine my mother’s desperation and fear. She’d wanted to escape. She’d wanted to rescue her kids. But where could she go? Was there a place where she and her kids could be safe? Has there ever been a place in the United States where a poor Native woman and her kids could be truly safe? She had no money. She had no knowledge of family shelters. Did those even exist in the early 1970s? She must have debated her options. She knew that Indian children were often taken from their families for the flimsiest of reasons—as a late twentieth-century continuation of official government assimilation and termination efforts. Split up, separated, we kids would be sent to foster homes, where we’d be in potential danger. We might be sent to the last Indian boarding schools, where we would definitely be in danger. Our mother had already lost us once to Social Services. A second time might mean she’d lose us for good. She couldn’t risk it. She couldn’t trust any white officials. She had to go home.
So my mother drove us back to the reservation. Back to our HUD house. Almost all of the partygoers were gone. My father, scratched and bloody and bruised, was asleep alone in his bed. My mother and my siblings and I crawled into bed with him.
We slept all day and long into the night.
At some point, my mother woke alone and cleaned the house. Then she woke us, her children, and promised us that she would stop drinking booze that very second and would never drink again.
My mother was a liar. She broke many promises over the coming decades. But she kept that greatest of vows. She was sober for the rest of her life.
And that’s why I am still alive.
2.
Sacred Heart
IN MAY 2015, my mother, struggling to breathe, was rushed from the reservation to Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, where she was eventually diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She was seventy-eight years old and had been suffering with major and minor health problems since her husband—my father—had died twelve years earlier. I knew Parkinson’s wasn’t fatal, but it can significantly reduce a person’s life span and lead to severe physical and mental impairment, especially for older people. How quickly would it transform my elderly but mostly self-sufficient mother into an utter dependent? And what about the quality of her last years? How could I make sure she lived and died well?
I am not an organized person, but I suddenly felt the need to make serious and complicated plans for my mother’s life—for the end of her life. However, it felt more like formal duty than affection. My mother and I had often been estranged. We’d battled and exiled each other. And then, after my father’s death, we’d settled into a relationship based on irregular phone calls and occasional visits. My mother and I loved each other—mostly or partly loved each other, I think—but I’d always felt the need to armor myself against her emotional excesses, and I imagine she felt the same about me.
But she needed me now—financially and spiritually—so I booked an immediate flight from Seattle to Spokane to visit her, and my siblings, in Sacred Heart Hospital. In my taxi to the airport, I researched senior care facilities in Seattle and Spokane. Some of them were quite beautiful and offered extensive programs for residents with Parkinson’s. They also seemed to be legal pyramid schemes where elderly patients and their families poured money into end-of-life rent rivers that only flowed up toward the corporate owners and stockholders.
But if I were to be grifted, then let the grift be lovely.
I did the math on my book sales and expected royalties, and knew I could afford a great place for my mother in Spokane if I gave up my outside office and worked only at home. Maybe I could do more lucrative gigs speaking on college campuses. Maybe I could return to script doctoring in Hollywood. I had many financial opportunities, some more probable and profitable than others. I was the lucky Native American son—the fortunate writer—who could take good care of his dying Native American mother. Isn’t that an oddly tribalistic and narcissistic realization? Then again, isn’t tribalism a form of group narcissism?
“I can put Mom in a fancy place by the Little Spokane River,” I said to my sister on the phone from my departure gate in Seattle–Tacoma International Airport.
“That’s what she was worried about today,” my sister said. “She thinks we’re going to put her in an old folks’ home and forget about her.”
“Indians don’t do that,” I said, instantly romanticizing my race.
“Some Indians do,” my sister said, immediately deromanticizing us.
“I can also rent a cheap studio apartment near the senior-citizen home,” I said. “It’s just a few blocks away. And you guys can stay there when you’re visiting her. You can take turns seeing her every day.”
I felt my back spasm and ache from the heavy burden of my messiah complex.
“She doesn’t want to be in a place where everybody is white,” my sister said. “She thinks old white people will be racist toward her.”
“I don’t think she’s wrong,” I said. “I bet old white people are probably more racist in Spokane. Old people are probably more racist everywhere. Just look at Clint Eastwood.”
I thought about my late father, a Coeur d’Alene Indian, who’d gradually grown more racist as he aged. But it was a passive form of racism—if there is such a thing—in which he would use a lesser racist epithet to describe a person after a relatively tense encounter. Aside from the time he called a white cop Custer, my father never insulted anybody to their face. He once came out of a 7-Eleven complaining about the “towel-head” who owned the place, so I called my father buffalo-head for the rest of the day to shame him for his racism. That wasn’t quite a progressive move on my part. I wondered if my mother had also grown more racist in her elderly years. I
hadn’t spent concentrated time with her since my father’s death, so I didn’t know exactly how my mother’s personality and politics might have changed. I knew she was a fan of the callow Sarah Palin only because that former vice-presidential candidate had married a dude with a Yu’pik great-grandmother.
But, strangely enough for an activist artist like me, I had never thought about how white privilege, or lack thereof, can extend even into the last few days of a person’s life. I now had to worry about my mother being racially harassed as she was dying. So I researched senior-citizen homes that catered to more diverse populations—a difficult task in the very white cities of Spokane and Seattle—but I found a few reservation-based facilities that specialized in taking care of Native Americans.
“There is an elder-care place on the Colville Indian Rez,” I said to my sister as I waited in the Seattle airport.
That rez-based nursing home was one hundred miles from my mother’s home on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
“Is it Indian Health Service?” my sister asked.
“I think so,” I said. “That’s kind of worrisome, isn’t it?”
I worried about the quality of a government facility that served only Indians. Scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest flashed through my head. I didn’t want to turn my mother into Chief Broom. Or Randle P. McMurphy. I didn’t want her shuffling through the hospital hallways, leaning on a walker made of elk bones and coyote spit. I also wondered if my mother would want to live out her last years on another tribe’s reservation. I’d been an urban Indian for half my life and was often the only Indian in any gathering, but living on another tribe’s reservation felt even more alienating to me. How would it feel to my reservation-bound mother?
“Maybe there will be some old Colville Indians who speak a little Spokane,” I said. “Maybe Mom will get to gossip in the old language. Even if she’s on somebody else’s rez.”
The Colvilles and Spokanes speak tribal languages that are related and share some words, but they are distinct dialects.
“I think Mom would be even lonelier around a bunch of old Indian strangers,” my sister said. “I wouldn’t want to live on somebody else’s rez.”
“How about senior housing in Wellpinit?” I asked. “Maybe I could hire a full-time nurse to live with Mom there.”
“No way,” my sister said. “Auntie Vi lives there. And they can’t stand each other.”
Despite living only a few miles apart, my mother and her eldest sister hadn’t spoken in a decade. My mom had always been good at making enemies. Her sister, nicknamed Nasty Nanny, was even better at it.
“We can just take care of Mom at home,” my sister said.
None of us knew how sick my mother might become—how difficult it could be to take care of her. We didn’t know if she would eventually need help on a weekly or daily or hourly basis. My sisters were not physically well either. I worried they’d endanger their health by taking care of our mother.
“I want Mom to have expert care,” I said.
“She just wants to be home,” my sister said.
“Okay, I have to hang up now,” I said. “My plane is boarding. I’ll see you at the hospital in a couple of hours.”
In 1966, I was born in Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane.
My father died in Sacred Heart in 2003.
He’d wanted to die at home, but he was suffering and suffocating—drowning in his own fluids—so my mother and sisters had rushed him to the hospital. I’d seen him on his last night at home on the reservation but fled back to Seattle rather than be with him in his last moments.
He’d often abandoned me when I was a child. He’d often chosen to go on days- and weeks-long drinking binges instead of staying home with his wife and kids. So, to be blunt, I chose to leave him in the same way he had left me. In that difficult time, I chose to be with my wife and children—the family I had created—instead of the family I was born into.
Did that decision make me a bad son?
I suppose it did.
Do I feel guilty about it?
Yes.
But I don’t regret my decision. Given the chance to travel back in time, I would have still abandoned my father so I could be a father to my sons.
So, yeah, if you close your eyes and listen hard, then you can hear a drum group singing a powwow version of “Cat’s in the Cradle”:
coffee spoon, way ya hi yo
Indian moon, way ya hi yo
daddy is drunk at noon
and won’t be home soon
way ya way ya way ya ho
But my father wasn’t alone in his hospital room—on his deathbed. My mother and sisters were at his side.
At home in Seattle, I called his room in Sacred Heart.
“How is Dad?” I asked my sister when she answered.
“He’s leaving us,” she said. “His breathing is really slowing down. He’s not responding to us.”
“Put the phone up to his ear,” I said.
“Okay,” my sister said.
“Dad,” I said into the phone. “It’s me.”
I heard him sigh and move. I heard my mother and sisters gasp. Somewhere deep in his morphine coma, my father had recognized my voice and was trying to respond—had responded in the only way he could.
“Dad,” I said. “It’s okay. You can let go. I love you. You can let go. You can stop fighting. It’s time to say good-bye. I love you. I love you. Good-bye.”
Twelve hours later, as I walked through a Seattle toy store with my sons, ages two and six, my sister called to tell me that our father had died.
I paid for my sons’ new toys, drove us home, and helped them into the house. Then, as my wife held our boys, I collapsed to the floor of our living room and wept.
On my flight to Spokane, I used the airplane Wi-Fi to do more research on Parkinson’s disease. It would certainly make my mother’s last years incredibly difficult—even torturous. She’d be taking multiple medications many times a day. I wondered if Indian Health Service would cover everything or if I would have to pay for some of the more expensive and experimental drugs.
I then vowed to finally finish the years-late sequel to my best-selling book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I needed that money. My mother needed that money. I hadn’t been able to finish the book because of the pathological fear that my sequel would be The Phantom Menace instead of The Empire Strikes Back. But, on the airplane, I thought, “Okay, okay, Phantom sucked, but it still made big cash. I’m gonna Yoda this book for my mother.”
After landing in Spokane, I took a taxi to Sacred Heart Hospital and hurried to my mother’s room. I leaned over and kissed her forehead. She wiped away tears and said hello.
I hugged my sisters and my niece. She was our second cousin, but my sisters had adopted her and raised her as their daughter. My family, despite all of our troubles, had temporarily or permanently taken care of various cousins and friends over the years. In adulthood, many of my childhood friends told me they’d felt safer in our house than they ever did in their own homes. My father’s drunken kindness and my mother’s angry sobriety had provided an unlikely refuge on our reservation.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked my sister.
“The doctor said they’ll get Mom stabilized here and then send her to a rehabilitation center to work on her Parkinson’s.”
“How long will she be there?” I asked.
“Six to eight weeks,” my sister said.
“I can pay for a private room,” I said.
“They want her to have a roommate. So she’ll stay social.”
“Okay,” I said.
I sat on the bed next to Mom.
“Hey, Lillian,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’m old,” she said, and laughed. She was aware of her surroundings but also seemed confused, like she was two people, one much older than the other.
“How’s your brain?” I asked her.
“I get tired,” she said. “A
nd I forget things.”
“Are you getting senile on me?”
“I’ve been getting senile.”
I realized I had not seen her in at least four months. She’d been her usual witty self the last time we’d been together. But now she seemed fragmented.
“Do you like your doctor?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “She likes your books. She wants you to sign one for her.”
That was one of the best privileges of my literary fame. My parents had both received more attentive health care because they had conceived me. My father and I had the same name, so he’d often been asked by medical professionals to sign my books instead of me.
“I’m going to take care of you, Mom,” I said.
That wasn’t a lie, not exactly, but it didn’t turn out to be true.
During the early years of my writing career, my mother was afraid to tell me family stories.
“You’re just going to put things out there for everybody to read,” she said. “Ugly things.”
But after I became more famous in the Indian world, after other Natives would learn her last name and ask if she was related to me, and then ask for her autograph and take photos with her, my mother began to tell me more and more about her personal history.
She was a storyteller, too.
So, diagnosed with Parkinson’s, exhausted and afraid, she lay in her hospital bed in Sacred Heart Hospital and told me another story about that old and primitive house on the rez—about who we used to be and who we would always be. I’d heard all of her stories multiple times. She repeated them and repeated them until I learned how to repeat them.
When repeated enough times, the same story becomes a song.
“Okay,” she said. “So your dad’s cousins, Bill and Tinker and Johnny—they were brothers—and they always slept in the attic. It wasn’t insulated, but I don’t remember how they stayed warm. I guess we had a lot of blankets. I don’t think we had any sleeping bags. And even if we did, they would have been army surplus. And they would have smelled too moldy to use. And sometimes there were mice in them.