October 2005, Bellevue, Washington

By Hyewon Jin Grigoni

I’ll never forget seeing my mom in the hospital two years ago. The next evening she would be diagnosed with cancer. But that first night, before we would know, was the night that really did a number on me.

My sister and I arrived at the hospital as soon as we got the word from our dad. Someone led us past a couple of occupied beds and opened a curtain to her section of the room for us. There she was. My mom. She laid on her side with her hand covering one side of her face. She looked exhausted.

When it was time for us to go and let her get some sleep, there was no question about it for me: I was staying the night too. I was not going to leave my mom alone with coughing, moaning strangers as roommates. My family thought I was being valiant, though I’m not so sure for whose sake I stayed.

A nurse brought me a blanket and folding chair. When she bid us good night and drew the curtain closed I climbed into bed with my mom and pulled the covers over both of us. Ain’t nowhere else I’d be with my mom lying in a hospital with tubes and I.V.s sticking out from all over.

We laid like spoons. I slid my arm over my dear mama’s belly and wanted to squeeze with all my might, though you can’t squeeze a person too hard when they are in the emergency for severe abdominal pain. I eventually put my arms high around her neck and held on as best she could take it.

I had just come back from Chicago visiting friends and family and was reading ‘’The Grapes of Wrath'’ at the time. I never leave the house without a book or two in case I’m ever caught in a situation with nothing to do, so I had ‘’The Grapes'’ with me. Through the night I read about Tom and Mama Joad. I slept. I prayed. I talked to my mom.

She was connected to a machine that gave her a heavenly rush of painkilling morphine at the push of a button. It was programmed to administer the drug no sooner than 10 minutes between doses. My mom vacillated throughout the night between feeling high as a kite and bludgeoned in the gut. Then, every once in a while, she would speak with utter clarity. It was my mom. No tipsiness, no pain.

“How was Chicago?”

“Good, but I’m glad I’m back.”

Silence.

“Mom, I love Dad so much more than Uncle Bruce.”

“Of course you do. He’s your dad.”

We talked about my trip, our family, nothing. Mom pushed the button as the pain ebbed back.

Then late, late into the night, when she faded into tipsiness again, Mom began divulging old family secrets. She confided in me things that mothers don’t tell their daughters. Family gossip concerning sins that happened before my time - the kind of information that people instinctively know to keep within their own generation. I knew it was the morphine that loosened her tongue, but didn’t feel guilty for letting her speak. It was a sort of lucky recompense for being the kid who had to change her mother’s diaper.

A couple hours before going to bed, my mom was given one drink called “Fleet” and another called “Go-Lightly.” The purpose of these diuretics is to basically trick your bowels into thinking their job is to hose down a small house fire. This, the doctor said, would clear things up for a colonoscopy in the morning.

With that, the nurse handed my mother … a diaper.

A 62-year-old Korean woman in a diaper. You think of how cute baby diapers are. Little padded diapers for little baby bottoms. You can’t believe how cute they are, actually, as cute as the toosh that goes in them. But adult diapers? Not so cute.

Seeing my mother wearing plastic panties the size of a large globe was a new experience. But when it’s your mother, you do the only thing you can do; you pretend we all wear plastic panties to sleep, then you kiss her cheek good night and try to get some sleep. The end. But it wasn’t the end.

Every couple hours throughout the night, my mother would try to not need her adult diaper. Then in bleary fatigue, we would have to shuffle together to the bathroom for a change. She held onto her IV-on-wheels, I held onto my mom.

Each time I helped her change her diaper I noticed it weighed a good pound or two, carrying adult-sized waste. It stunk. I was surprised that these were measured observations, not something that disgusted me. By the wee hours of the morning we had somewhat of a system down. Negotiating the many tubes stemming from my mother’s body, the confined space, the balancing on one foot and then the other. We became pros, a sort of expert adult diaper changing duo.

At some point, when fatigue became delirium then became the funniest thing either of us had ever done, I imagined my mom as the youthful, spirited new mother she was long ago. I imagined the times she performed solo diaper changing feats for my siblings and me without complaint. For years on end, pounds and pounds of pee and poop. The image broke my heart. There I was, 4 o’clock in the morning, teary eyed and touched by a soiled adult diaper in my hand.

It was the kind of moment when you are lucky enough to realize the significance of service. With the rare opportunity to experience such humility, duty becomes a compulsion, not an obligation. And even in dealing with poop, you no longer mind the stink.

Because I stayed in the hospital with my mom she didn’t need the help of any nurses that night. I knew that those wee hour acrobatics in the bathroom with her daughter in fact kept my mother’s dignity intact.

By morning I knew it was an honor to have been the kid who was there the night Mom needed help with her diapers. I knew even then that those hours spent in service to her would be some of the most precious I have ever spent, with any person, in my life.

Hyewon Jin Grigoni is a freelance writer. She recently moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and infant daughter.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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