Mommy's Boy is Dead

   I graduated from Harvard back in the late 90s. That’s when I was officially a doctor. I traveled around a bit doing residency. First it was at a hospital in New Orleans. Then from there I was at a place in Arkansas. I wasn’t there very long. Eventually I ended up back where I had started, or at least as near to it as I could be, and still today I’m not sure if I would have been better off across the country or not.

I was pushed from elementary school to be perfect, to exceed any expectations that people may have had of me. The problem with that was my expectations from the year before would always have to be bigger and better the following year. Like I was always in a competition with myself and who I am today is just the enemy of tomorrow.

When I was thirteen I grew my hair out for an entire year and used only natural products without chemicals to keep it clean. I took careful note not to wash it too often, because that could strip it of its nutrients. I washed it with only a small amount of shampoo followed by conditioner every other day and put a few drops of natural oils on it after every shower. After one year my hair had grown well passed my shoulders and draped over half of my back. I got compliments on it everywhere I went, but I mostly ignored them and asked them not to touch it, even when they tried to. I made sure not to spend too much time outside so that the sun wouldn’t damage it. And after one year to the day, on April 1st, my mom pulled my hair back into a ponytail and chopped it off without a second thought.

I remember looking at it and thinking that it looked like a dead animal from a well-loved home. Like it had been taken care of its entire life and that somebody was sad it was dead.

She used rubber bands to tie knots in either side of it and placed it in an air tight baggie. After she put it in an envelope to send away she wrapped an apron around the front of me and shaved off what was left of the hair on my head. I was left with fine prickles that reminded me of hot sand.

At fifteen I started working fulltime. It was at a restaurant down the road and all I did was wash dishes all day. I didn’t mind it; I actually enjoyed the work. I went straight there after school Monday through Friday and worked until ten o’clock. I worked on homework until one or two in the morning, and did it all again the next day. The weekends were used to look up medical schools, draft cover letters that I would revise later, apply for scholarships, and study for the tests I had coming up.

One hundred percent of the paychecks I earned washing dishes went straight to donating them to wherever I could. I didn’t need the money, my parents made sure of that. They made sure I had plenty of food, shelter, and anything I might have needed back then. Physically or materialistically, anyway. I was working to give back, not to support myself. I sent my money off to all kinds of different causes. One week it would be to the World Wildlife Federation. The next to Hope for Warriors. Then to the Ronald McDonald House. After that maybe it would be the local soup kitchen. It didn’t matter, what mattered was that I was giving it to people who needed it.

I worked as a dishwasher all the way until I graduated high school and by the time I had moved into my own apartment in North Cambridge, I was donating plasma once every month and blood every two months. The money I got from that went straight to blood disease and bone disease research organizations like America’s Blood Centers or the Red Cross or some cancer place.

My parents paid for my apartment and my groceries and my car, and anything I needed to live. The scholarships I had applied for throughout high school, along with the funding from my father’s GI Bill, ensured most of my college was entirely paid for. I went to great lengths to make sure everything was covered and that I wouldn’t have to pay anything for college, that way everything I earned went directly to somebody else. Not just money, but my time, my energy, my dedication, my life.

After I completed four years of residency, I moved back to Boston and started practicing there as a pediatrician. As much money as I made, my parents still paid for everything I owned. Nothing was in my name, not my phone bill or my house or my car insurance. Up until they bought my house, which was only one bedroom and six-hundred square feet, I never lived in anything more than a studio or drove anything newer than ten years old. Even when I started making six-figures a year my materialistic things were nothing more than what you would see of somebody making thirty-thousand dollars a year.

After about three years practicing, it became an event. People from the hospital would come, people from other hospitals would come, people from the organizations I donated to would come and setup tents, people that felt I had helped them in some way would always show their support. On April 1st of every year I would donate my entire yearly salary from the year before to ten different organizations, not in my name, but in my sister’s name, Elizabeth Darlene Farmer. Some people called me a hero, or an angel, or just a great person. But none of them really knew what they were talking about, the only people that knew anything were my parents. By that time I didn’t even know anything anymore, I just did it. Like that was the only way to do things.

My mother always made sure the largest portion of my donations went to an organization that helped children and families dealing with the loss of a child. She would say, “Your sister would have wanted it that way.”

I had never thought about relationships or love, marriage and children never crossed my mind. But a few months after my father died when I was thirty-two I saw madness. I knew my mother blamed me for his death, too. Before his death she looked at me the way a carpenter looks at tools, or the way a doctor looks at medical supplies. But after he died she looked at me the way a doctor might look at carpentry tools.

She told me one day, “You’re a doctor and where were you?” It was a couple years later. I wanted to tell her I was finishing up doing an overnight stint at a neighboring hospital. They had just lost a doctor and needed help with keeping up with some of their patients, so I volunteered to go over and help them where I could. But I didn’t tell her any of that, I just said, “Let me pay for his funeral.” She said, “Damn right you’re paying for it.”

She wanted me to start donating more toward heart disease than anything else. So I did. Within five years after my father’s death I had donated one kidney, part of my right lung, and was preparing to donate a part of my left lung. My mother stopped paying for my house and my car, which was fine I had enough to pay for it. But it felt selfish, so where I lacked donating things financially, I started donating more of myself physically. That was when I realized that madness is just doing anything to the extreme, and generosity was my own personal madness.

A nurse came up to me one day, it was a week before I got part of my other lung removed, and she told me, “Are you trying to kill yourself?” Her name was Becky.

I looked at her and I said, “Of course not.”

“Then why are you parting out your body like a car from the junk yard?”

It was a Sunday, I remember. I remember it because I volunteered at the soup kitchen on Sundays and I was just about to go there for dinner. “I don’t need it, so why not give it to somebody else?”

“You do need it though,” Becky told me.

I looked at that woman, at Becky, the way I had never looked at anything before, and maybe it was because she looked at me like I had never been looked at before. She didn’t want anything from me, she wanted me to keep everything to myself.

She said, “You don’t have to give everything away all the time.” Then she said, “I’ve seen the things you’ve done for years and it’s more than anybody else does in a lifetime.”

She had on blue scrubs, like every nurse did, and her hair was pulled up into a bun on top of her head with a few strands falling out of it. Her eyes were blue and they were framed in thick, red glasses that fit the shape of her face so well it was like they were made for her.

I wanted to tell her that I did have to. That it was my responsibility to give back for what I had taken. That there was nothing I could give that would bring my sister back, and my parents made sure that I knew it, too. They made sure I knew it every time they talked to me, or even looked at me.

But how was Becky supposed to know any of that? Nobody knew anything. My parents played out Elizabeth’s death as an accident, that she didn’t understand her allergy and had accidentally eaten too many cookies. They didn’t tell the police or CPS that I had tricked her into eating a dozen peanut butter cookies because I told her they were sugar cookies. They didn’t tell them that when I ran upstairs to tell them Elizabeth wasn’t breathing I had the pack of cookies in my hand with only one left.

I started talking to Becky a little more after that. And eventually she moved into my house with me. My mother stopped talking to me all but once every few months. I kept donating blood and I had finished up with my partial lung donation and was almost done with my recovery.

Of course, I learned in medical school how extremely rare it was for somebody to actually die of something so small as a peanut allergy. Did it happen? Of course it did. Did it happen to Elizabeth? Probably not.

I had just learned about April Fool’s Day, and I wanted to play a prank on my sister. I didn’t know what a peanut allergy was, I only thought she didn’t like peanut butter. We never had it in the house, and I thought it was just because Elizabeth didn’t like it, not that it could cause her to die. So when she was around five, I would have been seven then, I gave her a cookie that I said was a sugar cookie, but it was really peanut butter. Then I was going to say, “April Fool’s!” But after her first one she wanted a second, and by the time I had noticed we had eaten the entire dozen.

Then she passed out and began vomiting in her sleep. After my parents had come down to look at her and realized what had happened, they blamed me from that day on. It wasn’t until my third year of medical school that I realized my parents blamed me because they just didn’t want to blame themselves. But even when I realized it, it didn’t change anything. My sister was still dead and my parents blamed me for it. We always have to blame somebody but ourselves. Even after my dad died he didn’t think anything differently. He died thinking I had killed my sister, and in that way I suppose it didn’t matter if I did or didn’t.

I was still practicing in Boston and I was still donating as much money as I could, but the big events came to an end. I was just a regular pediatrician. Probably around that time is when mommy’s boy died and she started talking to me less and less because I wasn't meeting her expectations anymore. Becky and I got married and had three children. At that point I also donated sperm so that other people might get pregnant.

My mom died in the Summer of my thirty-eighth birthday. She hadn’t talked to me in two years at that point but we all went to her funeral, although my kids didn’t really know who she was and Becky resented her because I told her everything that had happened and why I did the things I did. I was sad, of course, but I was also free. It was the first time I told her that it wasn’t my fault. She had to have known it wasn’t me. The medical examiner would have told her the cause of death wasn’t a peanut allergy but a seizure from untreated fetal alcohol syndrome. My mother always tried to ignore the fact that she had a problem, and in that way we all ignored it. It must have been easier to blame me instead of herself.

So I told her while she was in her casket that it wasn’t me, that it was her who had killed Elizabeth. I said it nicely, without judgment. I said it in a way that I hoped she would understand that I wasn’t mad about it. Like when a child doesn’t know what they did was wrong and you have to explain it to them so they understand. She was in a pink dress and her hands were clasped together across her stomach and they were so wrinkly that she looked a good ten years older than she actually was. She smelled like embalming fluid, make-up, and flowers. I had never looked at her so clearly before. Elizabeth had my mother’s nose, and I had the shape of her eyes.