Free Coming Clean: A Memoir by Kimberly Rae Miller

socializing. And the mental hospital had only
kind of
helped my dad. He had become Dad-Light—mostly jovial, but there was still something missing in him. He was never again quite as interested in the world around him, a little more interested in the papers he carried with him and the voices coming from the radio. He wasn’t angry anymore, however, and I would take a jolly distracted dad over an angry distracted one any day. My mom was the only one of us left who had yet to fail at changing her life. I still believed that things would get better for us, and so when I was in fifth grade and she announced that she was going to have a series of spine surgeries to fix her back, I was optimistic that this was the change we’d all been waiting for.
    The surgeries would, she said, keep her from shrinking even more than she already had. They would consist of steel rods being inserted into her back, which would gradually encourage her spine to straighten itself. Her doctor told her that she had the most severe case of scoliosis he had ever seen, and the surgerieswould probably not correct her curvature completely, but they would help. She might one day have an almost normal body.
    We spent an entire year preparing for these two magical surgeries. I spent my weekends in hospital waiting rooms waiting for my mother to come back with news from her surgeon or the results of X-rays and CT scans, or sitting at her side as she donated blood for the doctors to use during her surgery. Boring, but exciting. My mom was going to be normal.
    In early July, a week before her first surgery, she told me that if anything were to go wrong during the surgery she had requested that she be allowed to die.
    “I don’t want to be a vegetable, and I couldn’t live as a paraplegic,” she said. “I want you to understand that if that happens, I wouldn’t be happy.”
    I had always hoped that things were going to get better, but knew if there was an option to get worse, that that would probably happen. We weren’t the kind of people that good things happened to.
    She went on to tell me that she had designated a friend of hers to be her health care proxy, not wanting my father to have to make the choice to let her die.
    “I don’t want you to blame him,” she said.
    When I woke up on the day of her first surgery, she was already at the hospital. She and my father had gotten up early to check her in to pre-op, and I had stayed up late soaking in every last minute with my mom. We both cried as we said our good-byes the night before. We had convinced ourselves that this surgery was a bad idea, but there was no backing out now.
    The first surgery consisted of her stomach being cut openfrom navel to back, her organs removed so that her intervertebral discs could be shaved and shaped to be make room for the rods.
    I spent my day at summer camp, trying to succumb to the distraction of kickball and swimming lessons. When my father picked me up from camp, he said everything had gone according to plan, and I started to relax a bit. Things might be okay for us after all.
    During the weeks of recovery between surgeries, my father would pick me up at my day camp after work and we would head to the hospital, where I would cuddle into Mom on her hospital bed and we would watch TV as a family. When visiting hours ended, my father and I would head to Wendy’s, where he would get a cheeseburger and I would get a chili from the dollar menu.
    I looked forward to these dollar menu dinners all day. My dad, without the distractions of the radio or his papers, was all mine for a moment in time, and I used it to my advantage, asking him question after question about his life before me. He had told me there was a steel door in his head and that he couldn’t access the memories behind it, and so stories of his youth were rare, but with enough prodding he revealed that he had been a track star in his teenage years. I learned he had a cousin who had made the Olympic team in