A Chinese Ghost Story

 Hong Kong producer Tsui Hark's A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) is the only kind of horror movie I can watch: high camp, a sympathetic ghost. One of many maiden ghost stories made into Asian films, it featured Leslie Cheung, Cantopop superstar and actor, who sang the theme song:

Street Dance of China (s1)

Watching Street Dance of China. It's all my brain can handle. I'm watching the first season with no English subs, and fast-forwarding through the talky parts. There are four team captains, all accomplished pop star dance performers. One is Tao who was part of EXO, if I am not mistaken. They start with individual auditions on a street set, with battles to make choices exciting; chosen dancers get a scarf. Then the action moves to a gym where they have to whittle the 100 chosen down to 50, with all four captains acting as judges. From time to time they have the rest of the dancers indicate their choice by putting a scarf around the neck of their preferred dancer. You get to know the dancers by their styles: b-boys, poppers, lockers, even some robot and waacking. There are several women, probably one in five. There is a style category they call "urban" which seems to be more lyrical and interpretive. One guy speaks English and is from the Kinjas crew; he seems kind of like a ringer. Once the big cut has been made, they divide them into ten teams of five and give them 24 hours to come up with a group choreography. Each team has a captain-choreographer, and they face off in a battle with another team. The losing team captain chooses another dancer to join a battle with ten dancers competing for two slots. I skipped over the long section where the four team captains assembled teams for a group choreography number. Now I'm half-way through the first season and I will get to see how they stage the next competition. I am tempted to jump into season three where there are subs, but I am enjoying the dance enough to stick with it for now. Here is a battle between two team captains, the super popular Wang Yibo and Jackson Wang. Both are terrific but Wang Yibo has great musicality:

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

 For the three weeks that my mother was in hospice care we spent a lot of time just waiting around. One of the only things I could do was watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It was the right kind of distraction: beautiful costumes, jokes, New York cityscapes, snappy dialogue:

mi mamá se nos fue

Last Thursday my mother died. She succumbed to multifocal glioblastoma--multiple brain tumors from a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. She had been showing signs of confusion and cognitive issues for a while but we thought it was the onset of dementia; she had even started taking Aricept, a medication for memory issues. It made her very sick and we were really worried about her because she had gastrointestinal issues, became very weak, and hardly ate at all for almost two weeks. We kept urging her to stop taking the medicine but she wanted to give it a try. It was so hard to watch her struggle.

When she stopped taking the medication,  we hoped she would get better,  but two days later we showed up at her apartment and she was unable to stand up from her chair, unable to walk. She was cold and started having mild seizures, with spasms in her arms and legs. We called 911 and a crew of EMTs showed up to take her to the emergency room. Because of Covid, we weren't supposed to be able to go in with her, but her confusion was such that they allowed me to go in so somebody could talk to the doctor about her symptoms. They did a CAT scan to see if she had had a stroke and discovered some swelling in her brain. An MRI showed that she had multifocal glioblastoma: multiple tumors or lesions in her brain. By the end of the day, there was a diagnosis. It was as if she had been struck by lightning. Suddenly she was deathly ill and no longer able to walk. In the hospital they asked her questions for neurological evaluations and she wasn't even able to remember her name.

Because of her age and weakness, the doctors told us right away that she was not a candidate for surgery, chemo or radiation, and that her prognosis was dire. At first they said six months, but then when we spoke to the oncologists they said maybe two months. They admitted her to the hospital but it was basically a place for her to stay while we got my sister's home ready to receive her for hospice care.  We were able to visit her, one at a time, while she was in the hospital. She could communicate but was weak and confused. She couldn't feed herself so we helped her eat what she could. We scrambled to clear a room for her. We needed a space for a hospital bed. We thought she might be able to use a wheelchair so we asked for one to be delivered. As it turned out we never used it because we were unable to transfer her safely from her bed to the chair--in the end, she was too weak to help us move her, so we ended up sending it back. 

Hospice care through Medicare and Kaiser covered the cost of all the equipment we needed, but we still needed to find adult diapers, bed pads, wipes and gloves to change her. Because of Covid, medical supply stores had closed so we ended up driving quite a distance to find a store that had what we needed. We were focused on taking care of the logistics but we were also terrified and filled with grief. She was transported home on a Friday, and the hospice nurse came the next day to help us get oriented. There was a whole medication packet. We had to learn how to change her diaper, how to avoid bed sores, how to medicate her for seizures and pain. In the first days of hospice care, she was still able to talk but mostly she responded to questions--she no longer really volunteered anything or initiated conversation. We did tell her what her diagnosis was but she never really acknowledged it. We knew that she knew, but her ability to communicate deteriorated day by day, and she ate almost nothing. The hospice nurse told us she thought it would a matter of two or three weeks. Within a week she was unable to eat or drink, and her communication was in whispers we could hardly understand. We were able to say that we loved each other but soon even that was taken away from us. She started having seizures and agitation, so we gave her the meds the hospice had provided: halidol at first, then ativan for the seizures, morphine for pain. She retreated to a medicated state in which she was mostly asleep and only occasionally surfaced to squeeze our hand or smile. This was hard to see, but we were reminded that our goal was to make her as comfortable as possible since there was no hope of improvement or a cure. We could tell she could hear us but she said almost nothing. We learned how to change her, to keep her clean. The hospice team sent a wonderful home health aide who gave her baths in bed and washed her hair. The nurses came every other day to check on her and show us how to care for her in ways that minimized discomfort. Hospice is all about helping a person die with dignity and the least pain and discomfort possible. It was so hard when we had to stop giving her food or water because she would choke on it. She lost weight visibly yet her body continued to use her reserves to continue her life even as she sank deeper into a state of unconsciousness. Finally her breathing started to change, and she had apnea---periods where she didn't breathe at all. The last night, she began to struggle with her breathing and it became shallow and labored. Finally she drew her last breaths and slipped away from us. We had all said goodbye days before but the human body is persistent.

My brother flew in from the East Coast, and my daughter was also able to be with us for four days. Friends visited, sent cards and flowers, offered help and support. Each day was structured around her medication and changing schedule. We were so grateful that she did not suffer and that her last days were peaceful. The process was at once extraordinarily long and very short. From the time we took her to the ER until she left us, only three weeks went by.   Everyone said they were glad that she was able to leave surrounded by her children and grandchildren, and we are also glad that could be so.  We will face the aftermath together but just right now, we are desolate.