Jersey Girl Goes Home

For the first time in my life, I spent this last Thanksgiving with a stranger.

She was an old lady who, if I may be candid, was out of her mind.

Mostly she kept to herself (or was trapped inside herself), puttering and dithering about, nattering incoherently in lieu of engaging conversation head-on, behavior that almost seemed to pair with the pale sunlight of the day, complement the tiresome routine of a holiday get-together, rather than the special joy. Every once in a while, her confusion ignited into hostility, suggesting, at times, a desire to lash out physically, which just might have been possible, were she not so frail, so not a threat to anyone or anything, anymore.

The day wore on.  Macy's marched past. Detroit defeated Minnesota. Cowboys over the Redskins.

Sometimes the expression on her face would broadcast in no uncertain terms her mood, her state of mind, tapping into that unique way much younger women have of expressing displeasure, or disapproval, and erasing 60 years from her face in an instant: a sharp "As if...?" crinkling of her nose, a glottal huff accompanied by a "You can't be serious..." roll of her eyes, a long sigh of impatience, or indignation, each had a way of transforming her back into the 20-year-old girl she once was, long ago.

Not unlike girls I'd dated when I was that age, in fact. Back then, such behavior was a cue I best not miss and dare not ignore, revealing or signifying a desire, a need, for something to happen, something to change...maybe for a "better Jared" to appear and take care of things, or at least pay attention, sit up straight, prove that he's actually heard what has just been said to him.

But this was not a woman I was dating and expected to answer to (nor, for my part, am I the shiftless, selfish putz I was at 20). This was my mother on this last Thanksgiving, and her huffs, eyes rolls and protracted sighs were not responses to some gaffe or insensitivity on my part. They were not sly or acerbic, emblematic of the fairer/smarter sex in any way...nothing I could charm my way out of by throwing a little boyish levity into the mix. They were completely unwarranted...flashing pulses of anger, annoyance or frustration coming from someone, somewhere unknown, overwhelming the all-too-brief glimpses of my actual mother, the kind, gentle soul who'd raised me in a matter that might best be described as fair and balanced.

It was not only on Thanksgiving that these outbursts happened. They'd been going on all through the year (adding a glossy finish to what's universally regarded as the shittiest year in recent memory), and the year before that as well, becoming more frequent and pronounced as dementia slowly squeezed the life and light out of her, keeping her confused, unaware, unable, and eventually unwilling, in spite of herself. The "outbursts" were her attempts to fight back, I (choose to) think, to hang on...little battalions of frustration rising up in an effort to assert herself against the ruthlessly unconcerned personality of her disease.

So it was really nothing new, but this last Thanksgiving was a milestone nonetheless. It turned out to be the day I've been thinking about for a while - the day my mother no longer recognized me.

It always played out much more dramatically in my mind.  I look like my mother, inherited her fair complexion, freckles and nose...but I really look like her father; he's the progenitor of my countenance, for better or worse. And as I always imagined, I would one day walk into the room, my mother would look up with a bright but utterly confused smile, and chirp, "Hi Daddy!", and I would know that we'd turned a corner from which there would be no turning back. 

There is drama connected to that notion, but also humor...just a little bit of humor. You always need to laugh, or accept that something can be laughed about.  But there was neither drama nor humor present when the awful moment arrived (because life isn't a movie, or a chapter in a novel): as I helped her to the bathroom, my arm linked in hers, carefully watching that she not stumble, waiting patiently as each step brought a newly furbished need to reclaim her balance, she said, in a mildly blank voice, "I'm really sorry...who are you?"

"Jared, Mom...I'm Jared," I replied, italicizing my name for emphasis as tenderly (and calmly) as I could. For this carefully measured response, I received no recognition, no realization, no light flickering on.  Just, "Ohh, okay...hello."

I was right about one thing: in that moment, I knew we had turned a corner. Her disease had progressed to a new point, would require a new game plan, a new level of game play, in the new year.

But my mother would not make it to the new year. Exactly two weeks after that last Thanksgiving, she passed away. All the lights out. Power shut off.  Game over.

Death has been skulking around the last few years (a close friend of mine, another close friend's mother, my dad's best friend, my dad's sister, all since 2014), but until now, never struck a direct hit, never managed to catch an immediate family member in the face. The very flavor of the grief is different when it hits close to home. You'd think it would be more potent, but for me anyway, it isn't. I've cried, surely, mostly in those vulnerable late night hours trying to sleep, but I'm not wrecked. Mostly, I'm philosophical. My mother was 82, afforded a nice fair share of life, and had been ill for a while. Not physically ill so much as mentally, but either way, that fact makes her death as much a release - relief - as a tragedy.  Everyone in my family feels the same, even my father, who was married to the woman for 51 years, and whose sense of loss must be profound, to a depth one can't really imagine unless (until) it happens to them.

And for most of us, half of us at least, it will happen eventually.

What's most upsetting now is the aftermath. A pall has fallen over all of us, a little bit for remembering the past, but also anticipating the future: my father's solitude, the seismic shift in family dynamic, the relevance sucked out of every personal item my mother once called her own, the attendant grim task we now face of deciding what stays and what goes from a house that now is even more "too big" for my dad to be "rattling around in".

There is also the heart-breaking realization that my mother never had a chance to spend her final years in her beloved New Jersey, where she grew up, which she wanted probably more than anything. And for that matter, the unsettling acknowledgement of a new disease lurking in our family's bloodline. I got my mother's complexion and freckles...will I also one day be puttering around, forgetting every second of my life a second later and trying to fight the gathering darkness by lashing out at loved ones through fleeting portals of lucidity that collapse and wink out as suddenly as they appear?

Worst of all, I have to live with that last Thanksgiving being the final memory I have of her, a kind of dark swan song to a dark, difficult year. I cooked a duck, a new take (for me) on the waterfowl tradition of the Thanksgiving kitchen. Got to say, it was delicious, but there was little in the way of appreciation from my mother. She ate, smiled a little, said it was good, but was only partially there, partially aware that it was a duck she was eating, not a turkey. And the few lucid moments the fates allowed her were guaranteed to be forgotten.

When it's Dory in "Finding Nemo", forgetfulness is cute, not so in real life. It's an abomination, a motherfucking outrage, really. They say you have to cherish the little moments, gather your memories while you may and what not, and my mom did that throughout her life. She had lots of photos, kept them organized, in chronological order, and there were all sorts of totems from days past on display around the house, but none of it wound up mattering in the least. In an agonizingly slow grind to ground level, my mother was not only robbed of making new memories in her final years, but left unable to enjoy the old ones she'd spent her life "gathering". That sucks out loud.

I now find myself working backwards through time, from about 2012 (when signs of her disease were first upgraded from noticeable to concerning) all the way back to the first glimmers of daylight in my own consciousness, when my mother was fully there, fully aware...as close to that fussy 20-year-old girl as I could ever know her to be...and her lap was the high tower from which I surveyed my world, a world of bright morning sunlight, macrame pot holders and zucchini bread, AM radio, 8-tracks and PBS captured on rabbit ear antenna, with the theme song to The Bob Newhart Show, or the music of The Carpenters, playing softly in the background. Bleaching out the sick joke that was the last four years (culminating, more or less, on Thanksgiving), I need to remember the woman who raised me, and my brother, and helped raise my son, and my step-son, as she actually was --

The woman who gave me life also introduced me to death - literally - by explaining once when I was very young (among my earliest recollections) that the skeleton we were hanging up, a Halloween party decoration that had caught my young eye, was a person who had died.

My mother was great like that. A gentle soul, who wasn't afraid of frank talk, open discussion about anything. I would not have wanted her any other way. She read the childhood classics to me, like any good parent - "Clifford the Big Red Dog", "The Cat in the Hat", "Green Eggs and Ham", "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish", "James and the Giant Peach", "Websters Beginning Book of Facts"...okay, maybe not a classic, but a marvelous children's encyclopedia nevertheless. She wore that book's pages out, actually, reading whatever chapter I requested ("Dinosaurs" was my favorite, and "Time", which starts out with the heady line, "The sun was probably the world's first 'clock'...")...sometimes over and over. Sometimes past my bedtime. I still have the book. I read it to my sons when they were little, and one day maybe they'll read it to their children.

But she also sat down with me and read, "Where Did I Come From?" by Peter Mayle, the innovative (for its day...very "Seventies") sex-ed book for children. And then, with neither awkwardness nor righteousness nor secretiveness, answered every single question I had. I had a lot of them, and although I was young, I remember that she did not blench once, and that made a difference in a million incalculable, but profound, ways.

FAMILY TRADITION - "Webster's Beginning Book of Facts"...my mother read it to me, I read it to my sons, and one day maybe they'll read it to their children...lushly illustrated and pretty well written, it's an ideal 'first step' into the world.

The woman who gave me life and introduced me to death, and the birds and the bees, also introduced me to spirituality. She was Catholic, devout if not always practicing, and one afternoon, at the end of a week in summer during which our family cat had mysteriously disappeared without a trace, she consoled her distraught youngest son by suggesting we pray for the animal's return. We sat at the dining room table in silence for just a few moments. I followed her lead by closing my eyes and assuming a posture as close to "repose" as I could muster at seven, and begged God to bring my cat home.

And damned if Samantha didn't emerge from the woods across the road that very afternoon. No joke, no gilding the lily for dramatic effect, that cat returned from wherever she had been the last week within a few hours of our prayer session. I'm not saying God had anything to do with it, necessarily, but even if it was only a coincidence, it was a coincidence brokered by my mother.

The woman who gave her fruit salad and fruit pizza to two generations of neighborhood kids.

She was the hardest working person I have ever known...a machine really, the main bread winner in our house on account of a compulsive work ethic. My mother stayed busy, typing medical records at the hospital for eight hours, sometimes ten, never refusing an overtime opportunity, then bringing work home, typing late into the night. My dad worked too, but my mom worked so much, so continuously, it was my dad who did the household stuff, the cooking, the laundry, the dishes. I didn't think there was anything unusual about this growing up, and there wasn't. It was the kind of natural role reversal that can enrich, edify, sharpen and widen a child's worldview.

My mother oddly could be the "good cop" parent or the "bad cop" parent, depending on her mood and the nature of my infraction. But no matter what I did, and however harsh the punishment (and this was true of my father as well), I never felt unloved by her.

She was the woman who laughed completely, from the gut, when she thought something was funny. "Major League" and "Sister Act" were her two favorite movies, "Frasier" her favorite TV show, but she found humor in everyday life too. She wrote down funny things her children and grandchildren said, and for years tolerated a house full of boys (then men) brimming with off-color remarks, while handily holding her own against their unending stream of over-the-top opinions about everything under the sun, which at our small family gatherings sometimes reached a feverish pitch, and I'm sure got (can get) pretty annoying.

She was the woman who was never satisfied, meaning always thinking about something better. Wanting something better, and believing it was possible. She maintained the right attitude about what needed to get done, and when, and who was going to do it. In that vein, she encouraged my dreams, however fanciful (ridiculous), but at the same time was not overprotective, nor afraid to be honest with me. Her "frank talk" lasted well into my adulthood, and more than once involved some entirely warranted form of, "Jared, quit bitching and whining and do what needs to get done!"

Her favorite album was Chicago 17...not too surprising for a woman in her fifties who was a voracious reader of romance novels (swooning to "You're the Inspiration" and "Hard Habit to Break")...but she also bought a David Lee Roth cassette back then..."Crazy From the Heat", I think, which I thought was embarrassing as a kid, but now see as pretty amazing.  My mother wanted to stay youthful, in mind if not body, and this led her to having an open mind for just about everything. Some twenty years later, she would totally weird out my son when he stopped by their house and discovered her watching Eminem perform on television.

And this same woman went to see Brooks and Dunn perform live, dragged my dad along for this. He has no love for country music, and as I recall, referred to them as "The Brooks and Dunn". But he went with her, dutiful husband, and she scooted her boots, or pushed her tush, or something...in her mid sixties.

She never, never turned curmudgeonly, even in old age, until dementia yanked that youthful spirit clear out from under her and made off into the woods across the road, leaving her no choice but to head off into those woods to get it back, and never returning. (No matter how much I prayed.)

She was the woman who accepted my children - even when they came early in life, unexpectedly, and even if they weren't mine. There was no weird favoritism on her part. She was "Buma" to both my sons, lavishing them equally with toys and treats as they grew. Yes, that's how it should be in a mixed family, but sadly isn't always.

And yes, in many ways, she was the wellspring from which all other women in my life have flowed, and was welcoming and kind to all of them through the years (NOT like Ray Barone's mother on "Everybody Loves Raymond"...another of her favorites...😊).

As much as anything, she was a reliable one half of a solid parental set I could not have custom-ordered any better.

Back to Irvington you go, Mom, at long last.  Back to Irvington, just as you left it, and as you were.

Remembering "Dotto", keeper of my family's legacy...

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do: walk into my aunt Dorothy’s vacant room at the nursing home – just two days after she’d passed away - and go through her things.

Deciding what was worth keeping and what could be (had to be) thrown away in the immediate aftermath of her existence was bad enough, but knowing most of it would end up in the trash made it extra heart-breaking.  We are a small clan, this family; there isn’t a lot of “posterity” out there for whom things must be saved, handed down, kept for the sake of anything or anyone. My aunt never married, had no children. I’ve been told there were a few marriage proposals in her younger days, but she never accepted. She liked her privacy. She was a sweet woman with tremendous empathy she offered to the people around her on a daily basis, but she was just salty enough to where it might be said that at the end of the day, in her personal life at least, she preferred to be left the fuck alone.

I’m not a crier, for the most part, and I had already coped with her death before it came, already made my peace – as I think she had – with the finality of her diagnosis and the futility of her prognosis. She was 80, and had made the decision not to seek treatment, opted out of waging an unwinnable war, and while she was not entirely unmoved by this decision – none of us were – it seemed, by the breathlessly labored words she spoke those last couple of times I saw her, that she stood by it. There is much solace to be drawn from a resolve of that magnitude, facing that level of consequences.

So I had prepared myself for the inevitability of her death. I even wished, privately, for it to come quickly, a merciful release from her now broken mortal coil long before the three months the doctors had given her. I got my wish. Barely three weeks from diagnosis to death, and relatively little physical pain. A few of those breathless words, of love and support - from all of us - then nothing.

Which, when you think about it, kind of sums up life.

But walking into her room that afternoon, I was hit with a wind blast of sadness that stole my breath and weakened my knees. For a moment, just a short moment, I felt I could not move, lest I fall. There before me was a final snapshot of her life, like ancient ruins mysteriously abandoned in a flash by a forgotten civilization: her little packages of candy waiting to be eaten (one of them started, never to be finished), a small pile of bills waiting to be paid, a calendar planner with appointments penciled in on several dates in March. But no Dorothy. Just five cardboard boxes graciously provided by the nursing home for her belongings, set in a row on the bed that would soon be someone else's. My son, accompanying me for this grim task and similarly coping with the loss internally, in small, measured doses, felt the same thing at the exact same moment.

 “This just turned really shitty really fast,” he muttered, his voice noticeably agitated.

The room itself was no help for the task at hand. It was kept warm and stuffy, presumably to protect residents from chill, and heavily perfumed, a floral odor so sickeningly thick it was practically condensing on the edge of the furniture. The anemic sunlight of this February afternoon – leap day, no less – drizzled through the window and positioned itself cleanly on the linoleum floor. Through that window I could see a small courtyard, crusted over with late-season snow, and a bird feeder. No visitors this afternoon. Fastened to the glass, some religious window clings, those infantilized-looking Christian images of Jesus, lambs and crosses that normally adorn the walls and windows of the children of the faithful at Easter.  My aunt was Jewish, but I think at the end, she was just extremely faithful.

I had only visited her three times in the four years she lived at this nursing home. Two of those visits were in the last week, coming home after receiving word of her illness, and both were kept short. She was weak, noticeably more so the second time, had difficulty speaking and breathing, difficulty sitting up. She was facing physical challenges that, in hindsight, may have been the beginning of her body relinquishing its command of her essence.

The other visit was three years earlier, when she first moved in. At that time, she was still the aunt Dorothy I’d always known, the sweet and salty woman with the tremendous empathy and sharp tongue. We spent some time in the commons area talking, and although a move to a nursing home is never cause for celebration, the news was not all bad...sort of encouraging actually. She’d only been there a week or two, and was already rocking bingo and the Wii Bowling competition, had met some people and taken to being concerned for their well-being, as was her way.

It became clear that life in this nursing home, like life anywhere, at any age, was what you made it. Yes, this was an aggregation of people living with hardship, in their twilight years, and more or less at the mercy of much younger people you could only assume - and hope - were kind, patient and empathetic as they did their jobs. But if you were social, relaxed a little, tried to walk on the sunny side of the street, and lucky enough to a) still have your faculties, b) not have constant physical pain, then you didn’t have to be alone, didn't have to be lonely, and in that moment, the thought of growing old wasn't so upsetting to me, and the oft-quoted words of Tennyson's "Ulysses" flashed into my mind:

“It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, and see the great Achilles whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are…” 

Obviously, Aunt Dorothy had placed herself well within her new community and circumstances. She appreciated my visit; we had a nice chat, traded some memories from my childhood, of which I have many that involve her. I updated her on my new life three hours away, on my children (almost grown), and she was happy to hear that, for the most part, the news was good there too.

But when I brought her back to her room, helped her out of the wheel chair, she began to cry - wet, long sobs that perhaps had been on the horizon the whole day.

“I’m sorry,” she wept, looking up at me with blurry wet eyes full of guilt, because we are raised to be ashamed of our tears, to peg those who cry as “criers”, even though each and every one of us is outfitted at birth with the impulse. “I’m sorry…!”

“Dorothy no, please, don’t be…” I stammered, completely at a loss for how I might go about comforting her, helping her cope with this sudden emotional switch. I realized quickly that I couldn’t. She was dealing with an implacable enemy; a larger, unmanageable (and totally inconvenient) truth, the kind that makes criers out of us all, suddenly was in the room with us: the child Dorothy had once lavished attention on, delighted in showering with gifts and taking on mini-road trips (in lieu of having her own children, I would one day realize…), was now a 40-year-old man who just had wheeled her back to the last place she would ever call home.

It was a heady moment. For both of us.

Sifting through her belongings now was not just an emotional roller coaster, but a physical challenge. There was a lot of stuff in that room. She was a pack rat, delighted in sharing and receiving magazine and newspaper clippings, inspirational quotes, cute little cartoons, and saving all of it. I wanted to honor this vigilance by keeping every scrap, believing that if they had moved her enough so to save, they were in some way a part of her, and should be remembered.

But that simply isn’t practical, and that alone is a discouraging thought. As I write this, I'm sitting in my office, where I have my own collection of keepsakes and mementos, an entire room's worth of shit on the walls, in fact, that I've decided tells a story about me, a kind of intellectual man cave I keep with the vigilance of a museum curator. It's lovely. I like being in here, like writing in here, like the way the light looks on the walls as the afternoons become evenings. But I know that for all the thought I've put into what goes on these walls, or on display on these shelves, when my time comes, most of it will cease to matter, and someone will have no choice but to dispose of it.

But my aunt Dorothy was a writer, like everyone in our family, and among her magazine clippings and greeting cards, her subjective collection of other people’s words and sentiment, were countless stories she herself had penned. And this was a horse of an entirely different color.

Her writing style was simple – testament to her years as a newspaper reporter - her stories sweet parables with lessons she felt a compulsion to share, without intending to preach. And as I went through them, took a moment to read a few, I realized to my amazement that she was writing them right up until the end.

I was already impressed that after retirement, after leaving the newspaper where she had worked for thirty years, and then moving into the nursing home, she kept writing. In fact, she wrote for the facility’s monthly newsletter, had a little column that had a little readership. But here, sorting out her things, I discovered that she was writing even after her diagnosis. There was one still in the works, a St. Patrick's Day fable planned for publication in the newsletter in March, which my brother had the honor of reading aloud during our last visit with her.

And that I was profoundly moved by. It is what being a writer is all about. It’s easy to write when you’re young and healthy and full of time and opinions and still feel a largely unqualified sense of relevance, part of the stories you’re telling. It’s quite another matter to know you're living your final years, able to see the rocky shoreline of your existence appearing through the mist, and still write.

And it's quite ANOTHER matter, still, to realize you're about to crash onto the rocks of that shoreline, potentially in a matter of days not months, and still write. Write straight through to your last moment. Your last breath.

For better or worse, it is my small family’s legacy. My father, my son, my brother, even my mother, in days past, we all write. Seeing as writing is the only thing a) I’ve ever cared about, b) the good Lord deigned to make me any good at, I can only hope that I am as tenacious as my aunt Dorothy when my time comes.

I like to think I will be. As I navigate these stormy waters of transition - of my family, my body, my face, my priorities - I’m reminded of another line from Tennyson.

“Death closes all: but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done…” 

My aunt Dorothy was proof of this. And she was, before all else, the best auntie anybody could ask for.

This picture, the expression on her face, says it all. Sweet and salty.

Not everything could be saved, Dorothy, but you will never be forgotten.