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.
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| 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.
