Time softens grief’s sting, but not its ache.

To my father, Dr. William Pollack: know that we are all thinking of you today, Dad.

My mom, in typical self-effacing fashion, had asked not to have an elaborate and ostentatious funeral, but had said rather that she wished to be cremated, and her ashes taken to the ocean. We commissioned a small vessel, the Oceanside Belle, for the purpose. There was some concern about getting my father on board, confined as he is to a wheelchair, but there were enough able bodies on hand to lift him over the gunwale.

It was not such a large group – besides my father, my brother David, my wife Nina, and me, there were David’s two grown sons Jon and Andrew, and a half-dozen or so close friends. We steamed out of Oceanside Harbor, under the warm California sun, with the Loch Rannoch Pipe Band blaring from the CD player. Once we were alone upon the waves, about a half mile offshore, we cut the motors and bobbed in the swell as, one after another, we spoke of this extraordinary woman and the many ways in which her all-too-brief life had enriched our own. David then strewed her ashes upon the water, and each of us in turn cast overboard a yellow (her favorite color) long-stemmed rose. We listened in silence to a recording of Pavarotti’s rendition of Nessun Dorma – a piece she loved – and then circled once around the floating flowers before cueing up the pipes once again and heading back to shore. We wept, all of us (I’m fighting tears as I write), but it was a beautiful, beautiful farewell, and I think she would have approved.

Thanks, once again, to all of you for your thoughts and prayers.

And thanks most of all to you, Mom, for the strength and beauty of your sweet spirit, and for the example you gave to us all of how a life ought to be lived. We love you far, far more than any words can ever say.

Alison was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1935. Her father, Ralph Calder, was a Congregational minister, and her mother, Elsie Morrison, was the daughter of Alexander Morrison, a well-to-do tanner from Tullibody, a small town in Clackmannanshire.

Shortly before she died, I sat with my mom and asked her to reminisce a bit about her early life.

She recalled the bombings in Glasgow – the Nazis had their eye on the shipyards of the Clyde, and once the silent early months of the war had passed, and the conflict began in earnest, there began to be frequent raids. She remembered losing a beloved teacher, as well as a friend’s father, to German bombs, and her own family’s roof being blown off.

In 1941 her family, which now included her younger sister Shiena, moved to Edinburgh, which was a much quieter place, because, as she explained to us, while Glasgow had all the shipyards, Edinburgh only had a marmalade factory. Once there, at the tender age of six, she began to attend a school called Edinburgh Ladies’ College (which has since changed its name to Mary Erskine’s School). The institution’s claim to fame, my mother recalled, was that Felix Mendelssohn’s daughter had been a student there, and the composer had written a processional march for the school. It was in a lovely part of the city, and my mother was very happy there.

After the war, though, her father took a position in London, so the family moved once again. My mother was twelve at the time – not a great age for being uprooted from one’s friends – and she didn’t like London at all. Edinburgh is a lovely city, with an ancient castle rising above the center of town, and London seemed grimy and ugly by contrast. (“Where’s the middle?” she said she remembered thinking.) To make matters worse, she was soon sent off to boarding school – a place called Milton Mount, in Crawley, West Sussex – and had a hard time fitting in, having arrived in the middle of the year with her Scottish accent and unfamiliar ways.

My mother was never meek, nor was she the sort who would patiently suffer scorn and unsympathetic discipline, so she gathered her things and ran away, making her way back to London, where she pled her case to her parents. Her father, however, although an admirable man, was not particularly soft-hearted, and said he would think more of her if she went back. So back to Milton Mount she went.

She was never happy at the school, though, and when she was sixteen – at which time students choose whether to test for further education – her willful and contrary side got the better of her, and she took her School Certificate (the equivalent, roughly, of a high-school diploma) and left. She would look back on this as an unwise decision, but at the time she was just fed up.

[As it happened, I did pretty much the same thing - I chafed a great deal in educational institutions in my teens, and when my high school, after skipping me ahead a grade with a promise that I could graduate early, told me they had made a mistake, and that I would have to come back after my senior year to make up an assortment of ninth-grade credits, I just dropped out, and took the GED test a little later. Everybody thought my attitude was crazy, and that I was "cutting off my nose to spite my face", but I didn't care. Now I know where I got it from...]

After leaving Milton Mount, Alison spent a year in something she described as a “journalism school”, then tried her hand at a few jobs, but feeling unsatisfied, and with a yen to do something, as she put it, “useful”, she decided to go for nurse’s training at St. George’s Hospital in London. This would have been in 1953 or so.

There she met my father, who was an intern (nine years older than Alison, he had been a medic in the Royal Navy during the war), and they fell in love. On December 4th, 1954, they were married. My mother was 19.

They were restless, and considered going to India to work in something resembling the Peace Corps. But they could not find a situation where they could be assigned as a couple, and when my father was offered a job in Vancouver, they set off westward. They sailed to Halifax, then traveled by train across the wintry vastness of Canada to begin their new life together.

I don’t think they liked it much in Vancouver, though (they were living in in area called New Westminster), and after a couple of years (during which I arrived on the scene) my father received another offer, this time to come to New Jersey to work in the research labs of Ortho Pharmaceuticals, a division of Johnson and Johnson. In October of 1956, when I was five months old, we emigrated to the USA, and settled in a pleasant apartment at 12 Dickinson Street in Princeton, just a few yards from the University.

This was the beginning of a quiet and prosperous time for my family. My younger brother David was born in 1961, and my father’s work went very well: during his time at Ortho he developed the immune-globulin serum that led to the eradication of rH disease, for which he received the Lasker Award, among others. As a result he rose to be Director of Research at Ortho, and times were good for the Pollacks.

In about 1965, though, my mother, then just 30, began to notice some stiffness in her hands, and before long she was in a fair deal of pain. She was soon diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, the disease that would progressively ravage her body as the years went by, and that would later kill her. This was a heavy blow; she was an active and athletic woman, who enjoyed tennis and Judo, and who also had two young children to look after.

The arthritis worsened rapidly, and she soon found that the only available relief was in the form of cortisone, which she began to take regularly. Cortisone is damaging to the endocrine system in a number of ways, and her health slowly began to deteriorate.

Nevertheless, she was never one to feel sorry for herself, and, looking for new challenges, she turned her keen mind to the pursuit of a degree in physical anthropology at Rutgers University. She went so far as to acquire a Ph.D., in the course of which she conducted a still-quoted study of sex differences in stress physiology, using the New Jersey State Police as her test group. (I still remember the refrigerator full of cop urine we had in the basement.) After receiving her doctorate she continued to teach at Rutgers for several years.

In the late 70′s my father left Ortho to work for Purdue-Frederick, and my parents moved to Weston, CT for a few years. In 1985, just as my daughter Chloë was born, they moved once again – this time to La Costa, California, to start a small pharmaceutical company of their own. My mother liked it there – she had felt hemmed in in woodsy Connecticut, and the bare hills of Southern California reminded her of the beloved Scottish countryside.

By now my mother was already suffering a great deal with her disease – her hands had become warped and weakened, and it was becoming ever more difficult for her to walk on her disintegrating feet. And as the years went by in California, the years of steroid drugs began to take a heavy internal toll as well – muscles and ligaments began to fail throughout her body, and her immune system began to lose the battle. Finally, this past February, we learned that a recent weeks-long bout of nausea had been caused not by a stomach bug, but by a vicious and fast-growing tumor. A month later she was gone.

My mother was an extraordinary woman. She was enormously intelligent, with a wonderful command of language, and an amazing gift for conversation. She was kind and loving, and fiercely loyal to her friends. She was proud of her Scottish ancestry, but was utterly free of any cultural or racial prejudice, meeting everyone on equal terms, always with an open heart and an open mind. While she had no patience for the foolish and pretentious, she spoke quietly and politely – I cannot recall a single exception throughout her entire life – to everyone, always, no matter what the circumstances. Despite suffering for decades with a crippling and painful disease that stripped her, by the end, of the ability even to raise her arms to fix her hair, or to grasp a pencil, she never, ever, ever complained or sank into self-pity. She had a terrific sense of humor, and loved nothing more than a good laugh with friends. She was absolutely selfless in caring for others, and I practically had to tie her to her chair, whenever I came to visit, to keep her from getting up to clear the dishes, etc., even when she could barely walk. She was a constant, devoted, caring and true companion to my father for 51 years. And never, never, never, even during my tempestuous adolescence, when I would have made Vlad the Impaler seem like a welcome houseguest, did I ever doubt for one second that she loved me with all of her heart.

She was a wonderful, inspiring, beautiful, sweet, generous, thoughtful, and utterly unique woman, and I am prouder than words can express to be her son, and to have shared her time on Earth. My heart breaks to think that she is gone. Please, please, if there is a God in Heaven (and how I wish I knew) – please, be kind to her gentle and loving spirit.

Thanks so much, Mom. Goodbye. I love you.

She had not really been conscious since late Sunday night; since yesterday afternoon she had been in a deepening coma.

It is a great relief that this awful time is over, and that her long years of pain and struggle are at an end. I will write a proper farewell to this extraordinary woman as soon as I can find the right words.

Later this afternoon, something remarkable happened.

After my mother had died, and we had said our goodbyes in the hospital and made the necessary arrangements, my father and I went down to the beach in Carlsbad for a walk along the seawall (well, I was walking; he was rolling along in his wheelchair). There was a damp cool breeze coming off the ocean, and the sky was a leaden grey, but it did us a lot of good. At about two-thirty we decided to go have something to eat, but the first two places we tried didn’t work out – one only had outdoor seating (not so inviting on such a dreary day), and the other was closed for a private party. So we found ourselves at the Carlsbad avatar of the Claim Jumper, one of those enormous steak-and-rib-and-burger-and-beer franchises.

As we rolled up to our table, I noticed at the booth across from us a sturdy and pleasant-looking fellow of about thirty years, holding an infant. It was nice to see some confirmation of the robustness of our species at such a dark moment, and I commented on his attractive young child (it was, indeed, a cute little thing). We exchanged a few pleasantries, and shortly he was joined by the distaff branch of his growing tribe – his lovely young wife, all aglow with health and fecund blondeness, and two chattering, golden-haired daughters of elementary-school age.

We dined, we in near-silent contemplation of the Abyss, they in happy clamor.

After about half an hour, our neighbors began decamping, always a logistically intensive process with kids that age. As the young Dad passed by, he gave me a cheery smile, and said something that went straight to my solar plexus:

“Now you can be at peace.”

I was dumbfounded, and after a startled moment, blurted out:

“Yeah, you’ve got THAT right…”

I quickly realized how that must have sounded, and said in some vague way that it had come out the wrong way. He didn’t seem offended, and headed for the door. But I felt it necessary to clear the air, and as his wife went by I explained the whole context. She was, of course, as bowled over as I was, and promised to tell her husband when she caught up with him.

I’m still startled. Not “OK, now you guys can have some quiet”, or “Sorry about all the noise”, but “Now you can be at peace,” from a complete stranger, in the booth right next to us, in the restaurant we ended up at after trying two others, three hours after my mother had died.

How curious this world is.

Goodbye, Mom. I love you.

My mother is now in an unresponsive state, and is in a Cheyne-Stokes respiratory pattern. She is receiving intravenous saline, morphine to control her pain (at 5 mg/hr.), and no nutrition.

The last coherent words she exchanged with anyone were with me, as I left her room late on Sunday night. She is already gone; perhaps she will still be breathing in the morning.

The staff at Tri-City Medical Center, in Oceanside, California, and her doctors, Daniel Vicario, James Brinkman, and Chris Lewis, are nothing short of saintly. I have seen quite the opposite often enough to appreciate it.

Thank you all. Added to my list of topics to visit upon resuming normal operations here is the book “Miracles”, by C.S. Lewis.

When I dashed back out to California on Thursday, I had every reason to imagine that my mother would already be gone by the time I got here. However, since all involved have decided to give up on treatment and switch to palliative care, she has bounced back a bit, and although she is terribly weak and frail both physically and emotionally, she is able again to speak with us.

Of course, now that she is not actively being treated for cancer any longer, the hospital is making noises about booting her out, and now we are faced with the difficult task of arranging somewhere for her to go, if it should come to that.

This is such a challenging situation – my father, though quite well at 80, is unable to walk due to a mysterious neuropathy he’s had for a few years; my mother has always been the one to do all the driving, and to cover all the other daily tasks that require ambulation. With her no longer able to do so, the picture is much more complicated. Meanwhile, I live 3000 miles away, have a job, a family, and other responsibilites in New York, and cannot simply transplant myself to San Diego County. I do have a brother who lives in CA, about an hour away, but he is heavily burdened with work-related duties and obligations (he is the CEO and CFO of MMFX Steel, a startup – or some would say “upstart” – steel company, and is usually on the road about 300 days a year). He has been back and forth nearly every day, often staying late into the night and working on three or so hours of sleep, but it is taking a heavy toll on him.

I don’t mean to complain here – I am glad, honored even, to help my parents through this awful crisis – but if you haven’t been through something like this yourself you just have no idea. And we still don’t have a clear picture, now, of what the next week or two will bring.

Ah, my heart… how very sad this is.

It is proving to be difficult for me to do any proper writing here during this trying time. Though there is much that I want to get back to, I simply can’t focus properly right now. Dennett et al. will be dealt with in due course.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

-Marcus Aurelius

I would, however, like to take a moment to remember, on the first anniversary of his cruelly premature death, my good friend, the gifted bassist Wayne Pedzwater. Here is the post that I wrote immediately following his memorial service.

If you should see this, Patty, know that you are in my thoughts.

I’m going to write one more rather personal post here, before returning to the usual bloat and blather.

The situation, though still very grim, is quite different from what I had indicated in my earlier posts. In what I consider an unconscionably callow act of thoughtless indifference to a patient’s feelings, my mother’s doctor, who was on vacation at the time, had given her the original diagnosis of stomach cancer – a diagnosis that would certainly have meant a quick and horrible death – over the phone, without, as it turned out, having personally seen her CAT scan. More careful examination has now shown that while she has metastatic tumors in her abdomen, they may in fact be treatable, and the primary tumor’s type and location is still unknown. It is definitely NOT stomach cancer.

Her prognosis is uncertain at this point; she is going to the hospital tomorrow for more tests. She is very frail, and, as a result of a 40-year course of steroid drugs to treat her progressive rheumatoid arthritis, has many other internal problems, some of which my be severe enough to do her in even if the cancer doesn’t. But she may have more time, if she has the strength for a fight.

By contrast with our original overwhelming shock – we thought we would certainly lose her in a matter of a few weeks – we now have, at least, the sense that we can deal with matters in a more measured way. We are still in some heavy surf here, but what had happened last week was as if we had been overwhelmed without warning as we stood facing the shore. Now at least we can see the waves as they approach. Very different.

I have yet to acquire a taste for Southern California, although I have been there many, many times over the last thirty years. In particular, the area between San Diego and Los Angeles, despite its clement weather and pleasingly three-dimensional topography, has limited appeal for me. Ninety-nine percent of the buildings look as if they had been put up last month, and I always have the feeling that a good gust of wind would sweep it all away. The scenery seems to repeat itself endlessly: the same stucco-sided, tile-roofed middle-income subdivisions, the same low-rise shopping malls, everywhere you look. Driving through it all, it suddenly struck me, is like watching a chase scene in one of those old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Remember how, as Quick Draw McGraw or Fred and Barney zoomed along, you’d see the same background scenery looping by again and again? The only thing that’s different in this case is that, instead of a retiterated sequence of animated cacti or Bedrockian dwellings, it’s an eternal recurrence of Taco Bells and Starbuckses and El Pollo Locos – all, apparently, built just last week.

Anyway, it’s good to be back home, and thank you all.

I’ll write what I can in the days to come, and I’ll try to get back to the usual pretentious rubbish as soon as possible.

Thank you again.

Last Friday I learned that my mother, who had been afflicted by nausea for a couple of weeks, has been diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer, and that the prognosis is very grim.

My mother (her name is Alison) is not old – only 70 – but she has been racked by rheumatoid arthritis for more than 40 years, and has been taking powerful steroid drugs for decades to control the disease’s progress. Such drugs have a destructive effect over time, and her health has been declining for quite a while. This, however, was completely unforeseen, and I am physically aching with sorrow. My mother is an extraordinary woman, a loving and gentle person of uncommon kindness, intelligence, and dignity, and I love her more than words can express. This is very, very difficult to bear.

In these extreme circumstances, when our complacent routine is upended, when the machinery of personality is thrown off the rails and down the embankment, we have, at grievous cost, a rare chance to see ourselves, and to glimpse the urgency of our own mortal predicament, if we can keep some part of our awareness above the waves.

My father and mother (yesterday was my father’s 80th birthday) have been married for 51 years. On Wednesday I will be flying to California to see them; my wife, son, and daughter will be joining us a day later. I’ll write when I can.