“The Sopranos” helped save my sweet mom’s life
“The Sopranos” turned 25 this year, stirring memories of the groundbreaking HBO series that made fictional mob boss Tony Soprano, played by the late James Gandolfini, a TV icon. I know I’ll never forget the very first time I heard “Someone’s” gonna get whacked tonight!” Especially since it came from my sweet 80-year-old mom.
I pressed the phone closer to my ear. “What’d you say, Mom?”
“Someone’s gonna get whacked tonight. On ‘The Sopranos.’ It’s a little gruesome,” she confessed, “but they really pulled you in.”
A laugh escaped me then. I could not help it. Good for Christopher, I thought, good for him “making his bones,” whatever the heck that meant. Anything that made my mom sound so happy back then was gold to me.
Just two weeks prior, during a routine chest X-ray, they’d noticed a suspicious bulge where a suspicious bulge shouldn’t be, sitting on her aorta. The thing about aneurysms, Dr. Google said, was they tend to grow over time, leading to stroke or instant . . . good God.
Mom used to dance in the kitchen when I was growing up, making up her own moves to songs she’d record off the radio using the little cassette player she carried around the house. I’d watch, entranced and entertained, peering over my PB&J as she’d pop in a cassette and then spin around or rock back and forth. Her favorite was “My Guy” by Mary Wells. She’d really rev up the engine then, shaking her hips and tapping a wooden spoon in the air, still damp from stirring her homemade spaghetti sauce.
Mom also spent much of my childhood lying on her bed, obsessing for hours about the latest life event to test her fragile nerves. Big stuff, little stuff, it didn’t matter. Her anxiety had a way of leveling the playing field: Making the “wrong” move at her bridge game became as triggering as finding out her firstborn, my oldest brother, had Type 1 diabetes.
Soon after being told about the aneurysm, she’d taken to her bed again, depressed and afraid to leave the house, lest something happened.
Then she met Tony.
She’d fallen asleep on the couch watching “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns. When she woke up hours later, Andy and Barney had been replaced with a balding guy holding a gun to the temple of a guy with a full head of hair, to hear her tell it. It startled her when the gun went off. The blood spattered. But for that shocking, magical moment, she forgot all about her sorrow. She kept watching.
Of course, being a sudden fan of the show made her a bit of a wild card in public. Mom never took up swearing or dropped any F-bombs, but she’d often repeat some adults-only phrases that Tony would say while failing to use her indoor voice. Noisy malls were fine. Movie theaters, less so. The center, red-leather booth at the Ruby’s Diner that we liked to frequent?
arely a week after the initial diagnosis, we were back for the consult with her heart doctor. More bad news. Any surgery to reduce or remove the aneurysm would be risky considering its proximity to her spinal cord. The chance of paralysis was high .
