I am not a writer. (if you’ve read any other post on this blog, you may have noticed).

I like to express myself, and I have a lot of interests, but putting it all down and arranging it so it’s coherent and legible is not a personal strength. One of my friends described the way I speak as “jazz.” Another friend described my speaking style “as the rantings of a hobo.” This I know, is offensive, and I think that same friend would have not quite said it that way now. But the spirit is the same – I’m often incoherent

Building a website with a sort of niche famous term, I guess is my way of practicing “in public” which for some reason makes me feel more accountable, and makes myself open to, or subject to, a gaze.

The Herzogian hero is accountable to no one but himself.

I am not interested in being better at writing. I am interested in accomplishing a goal.

. . . . .

Today is October 9, which is eight days away from the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death. This time last year, I would have just arrived in San Diego, knowing I would be staying indefinitely.

When my mom got her terminal prognosis on October 4, 2021, I became zombified. I had just returned from a visit the weekend before, I wasn’t sure how I was going to work out being there for my mom’s hospice, while also keeping my job. But I had to, there was nothing else I could do. I remember that week being a total blur. People at work asking me questions, and whatever answer plucked out of my brain and emerged from my talk hole had literally nothing to do with me. I was on auto-pilot. Until I could get to her, nothing else would matter.

Cancer is bullshit. The cancer treatment industrial complex is fucked. The pathology of needing to “win” or “beat” or overcome makes people do crazy things to poison themselves. I’m not saying cancer treatments don’t work, or that people should not be treated. I am saying there’s a point where chemo does not help someone live a decent fucking life. My mother had terminal cancer from the first day she found out she had cancer cells, which were in her liver and very quickly found they were in her bile duct. Initially, the cancer was classified bile duct cancer. Later, it would be classified as pancreatic cancer. It was never staged exactly – it was always 3 or 4 – but it was subject to some debate between oncologists.

Living in Oakland, California, I couldn’t be near her throughout her entire cancer treatment. While my twin sister went through the daily experience with my mother, taking her to appointments, she said “google is not our friend.” For me, Google became my emotional support, I would furiously be googling the best biliary cancer treatment centers and mRNA treatments and FOLFOX. I had some hope. After the first round of chemo didn’t fucking work at all, the doctors called it pancreatic, which required a whole different kind of chemical cocktail to pump into her tiny little frame. Google told me that Alex Trebek and Patrick Swayze both died after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I knew that if two famous and wealthy white men couldn’t survive this, it was slim to nil that my mother would.

From afar and nearly from the jump, I knew that this cancer was going to be the thing that ended my mother’s life.

The cancer industrial complex, the Livestrong yellow bracelet Susan G. Komen walk, I think there is something very survivor-centric about it all. The stories you hear in people’s bios, is “they won their battle with cancer,” or “they beat cancer.” We hear of alternative treatments, or people’s inspirational bald head stories. Yes, survivors are amazing. It’s incredible. But it’s a game of chance, and a game of economics. If someone is poor already, we know that means disproportionate access and equity in terms of both treatments, and the other things like consistency and a stable environment. But rich people die of cancer too. Good and bad people alive.

Cancer is just one of the cloaks of the grim reaper.

There are parts of “healing” and “moving forward” that make sense to me. I know, and perhaps proudly, that part of me will never heal. I don’t want to heal, one doesn’t heal, I now just live with this abscess, or a chunk of a vital organ removed. In 2021 I was grief personified. Shaved head, scream crying alone in my room, sobbing in public. People call grief before something bad happens “anticipatory” grief and I think there is some truth to that description. But I think it was just regular ol’ grief-grief for me. It’s not that my mom was already dead, but she already lost her ability to do things she wanted. I held out some hope, but by chemo round two I knew we were likely never going to do that road trip to Montana that she one day happily decided she wanted to do with me, I would never take her camping (for her first time), we would never go to the Philippines together (for my first time, my first trip to her motherland). I was grieving the life I wasn’t going to have with my mom.

Of course throughout and intertwined with the grief process, my practice was to just be absolutely present. Not to get all cliche or wooey, but my brain wouldn’t allow me to focus on anything but the here and now. I can’t say my mother got the life she wanted in the last months of her life. But they weren’t altogether bad and we are lucky and blessed for that. She got to be with her grandchildren. I got to spend a good deal of time with her. I can say the times we had together were so many things: ecstatic, sweet, somber, difficult, loving.

I keep thinking about my mother’s life. I mean to write a eulogy. It’s difficult to write. I honor her in different ways, like with a portrait I did of her while she was on what would be her deathbed. The thing is that is mind blowing and heart-wrenching to me, is my mom was fucking heroic during her death. I wouldn’t describe my mom as having been timid in her life, but she wasn’t exactly adventurous. She just did what needed to be done, especially for me and my sisters, and especially in the most recent decade of her life, for her five(!) grandchildren!

She was heroic in death. Courageous, brave, immensely and unbelievably strong. All these traits which she kept under the surface of her, under a veneer of sweetness, lightness, being happy-go-lucky, rolling with the punches. She was feisty to be sure. Death has grown men, strong men turn into babies. My mother looked death in the face, and she went straight for it. It was the bravest fucking thing I have ever witnessed, and seeing her do that has changed my life forever.

I love her every minute.

Some day maybe I will share “what happened” here on this blog, but maybe it’s not appropriate or necessary. My thing is: being at her side for the last 8 days of her life, it fucking changed me. To see this woman, small, 5’1″, sweet, a bit deferring, just take life by both the horns and the balls and just wrestle it to the ground like defeating a minotaur. Witnessing her has given me an assignment in life. Finishing this Herzog-film-watching project I have given myself, is a weird sidequest in the main quest she gave me. Self-doubt creeps in when I chide myself for being melodramatic – there are countless caregivers who do this for years. I have a quest to do what my mother sent me to do, and it’s out of my lane in life, it feels unconventional and big. But I have to do it, and make it okay, and make it my life. It’s Herzogian. I don’t care if it’s melodramatic. I will either accomplish it or die trying.