Tag Archives: mental illness

The Entrance of the Irrational

Posted on by
These photos of my mother at the peak of her career are also from the years during which she began to experience signs of schizophrenia, unbeknownst to me or anyone else. Hindsight is an archaeological dig, sifting spotty memories and scraps of paper with her increasingly unreadable scribbles from inside a bottomless well of compassion and love.

The word “rational” was spoken often by my mother. And, by my father too, in another home at the far end of Pennsylvania. Starting very young, I learned what the word meant through the context clues of a lifetime. I inferred that emotion was not rational, but love could be, under certain circumstances. That compassion was illogical, but existed. That religion was not and never would be rational, and thus (at best) not worth our time and (at worst) a societal cancer. It was not until I was six or seven that one of my parents finally acquiesced and took me inside a church.

It was my father. I had asked many times before and been told no, or simply been pulled past any and all houses of worship by a firm tug on linked hands.

I knew nothing about what these buildings were. But as I was pulled by the hand around my narrow world, I recognized (from the outside only) that they shared certain qualities, shapes, and imagery.

Just inside the entrance of this first-ever church, neck bent back, I whispered, “The top of the ceiling is very far away.”

I pulled my father by the hand to sit. I knew what a chair was. And a stool. I ate my breakfast sitting on a stool. I also knew what a bench was. When I took walks with my mother in Central Park, benches were where I’d rest my short legs. But those benches were nothin like these.

Even the windows were outsized, and so high in the walls I could never hope to look out of them. I loved the way the sun carried the colors of the windows into the space and spread it in long shapes on the floor and opposite wall.

After several minutes, I asked, “When will the giants come out?”

I was being rational. What else could be explained by such tall ceilings, high windows, and huge benches? Clearly, giants lived here.

Logic. Reason. Cause and effect. These principles ruled the thinking of my parents. Formerly allied with the Objectivist Movement and members of Ayn Rand’s inner-circle-once-removed, they rejected psychology, emotional sensitivity, and unconditional love.

Each of them told the story with great delight, narrating my first experience inside a church, thinking there would be giants. I had passed some kind of test. Cute, logical Vanessa using data to draw a conclusion that made sense in her six-year-old mind. But they never really explained to me in any satisfactory way what the beautiful building was actually for. Their contempt for religion did not permit them to express what such a space means to some—many—people.

The superiority of logic and reason ruled the world I lived in. My empathic little heart, my inborn intuitiveness, and the fact that beautiful music and paintings made me cry were downplayed—basically unacknowledged—while my intellect and capacity for drawing crisp inferences were raised up as my greatest qualities.

My mother’s mind-over-matter strength of will was a constant in my life. Her fierce commitment to career. Her—for that era especially—meteoric rise in the world of fashion marketing. Her ascent from copywriting lackey to big boss and decider. Her cubby at L’Oreal of Paris became a huge corner office at Peck and Peck in just a few years.

The move from NYC to Buffalo just a few years before the end of high school never seemed rational to me. It felt like a disaster. It was a wound that festered until I went to college and was happy and free. But, as ever, my mother’s version of irreproachable logic prevailed and, as always, I was able to see things from her point of view. A steppingstone—more responsibility in charge of marketing for a whole department store chain—this job will lead her back to NYC and bigger and better things. I would see.

One day, when I was a senior in high school, the book my mother was reading, left splayed on a table, spine broken, registered on my awareness. Not the typical escapist mystery novel she usually favored to unwind, this book looked more like a paperback textbook. It was called Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts. Reading the back, I was confused but did not try too hard to figure out what it was about. As large as Lee Park loomed in my awareness, I had my own problems to deal with. Namely Latin and chemistry, not to mention loneliness and homesickness, and a keen awareness that as nice as the girls in my class were, they were insubstantial stand-ins for the people I left behind in the school I’d called home for most of my life.

But after that, when I saw my mother reading the book, I noted that, rather than relaxing into the couch with her book held loosely in one hand, she sat hunched over Seth Speaks, shoulders curled inward, pen tightly gripped. She annotated and underlined wildly. A stack of Seth sequels beside her bed revealed a long-term plan.

Occasionally she’d read aloud to me, something that was clearly profoundly meaningful to her but that I could barely follow, so limited was my frame of reference at the time.

One day, something she read penetrated more deeply, and I said, “Wait. Say that again?”

This woman, Jane Roberts, was not writing about her ideas or research or philosophy. She was speaking for someone else. But not someone real. A being. An entity. It was called channeling. She was channeling the self-named Seth. His words, her pen. His words, inside her head.

As bereft of spiritual instruction as I had been my entire life, I was lost. This sounded, most definitely, irrational. 

What has hindsight revealed to my brain that combines both the rational and the intuitive, a fact I’ve come to embrace?

My mother was searching for answers to explain the voices she heard inside her own head. The brilliant brain of Lee Park could not reconcile her conviction that reason, rationality, and objective truth were the only reality with the fact that she could hear things no one else could.

Jane Roberts gave her hope—for an answer she might be able to live with.

As it turned out, there was no answer outside of madness, and not really much hope, either.

The Pick-Up and Drop-Off

Posted on by

It has been a long 4+ years since I posted on my beloved SpiralWoman blog. I will not even try to explain why, mostly because it’s a combination of such complex reasons that I don’t really understand it fully myself. I am going to start posting again. Different material entirely. Instead of personal blogs and dives into my wide-ranging areas of passion, concern, or love, I will be posting sections of a book I’m working on. A memoir written by a woman who has an extremely spotty memory of her life. I am experimenting with an approach that is episodic, multi-genre, and in some instances actual short stories or semi-fictionalized narratives based on a combination of my own memory, research into my life, research into the life of my mother, and my imagination. Most of what I post will not necessarily be sequential so even if you have not read the last entry, you will be able to understand and follow the next. These entries are distinctly first drafts so read accordingly. I am eager for feedback if you are inclined to provide it. No expectations, however.

I have selected the following “chapter” at random from my ever-growing folder of pieces that will ultimately (probably) end up in the book. Hoping to post weekly. Thanks for reading. The photo below was taken when she was probably in her 40s, maybe by me (she once took me with her to the Bahamas on a business trip).

The Pick-Up and Drop-Off

She had agreed to take her meds, so the hospital agreed to release her. I had learned to take nothing at face value and was absolutely sure that she had no intention of taking her meds.

Until the day she died, she never admitted she was ill. According to my mother, her only problem was everyone else in the known universe—and their commitment to sabotaging her until there was nothing left of her life.

It was Valentine’s weekend. My husband, toddler son, and baby daughter drove down with me from New York. As my mother’s next of kin, I was to receive her. I left my husband and children at Grandpa’s house in Northern Virginia and drove up to the Springfield Hospital Center in Maryland.

Passing through a series of locked doors, I arrived in her ward. Tooth enamel white walls gleamed under dozens of fluorescent lights. The nurse’s station was behind glass with lockable doors. Just in case.

She was waiting at the back of the room, nearly dwarfed by an enormous suitcase and dressed in immaculate cornflower blue jeans and a crisp white blouse. Later, I saw that the neck of the blouse showed signs of fraying and there was a circular brown stain on the placket the size of a pencil eraser. Around her neck was a designer silk scarf—creamy beige with navy blue swirls. She might have had it for 25 years, but it looked elegant and unmarred. When she saw me, she picked up her purse. The cheap teal colored vinyl had bald spots and the gold-tone clasp was missing most of its gold. Purses get stolen more than most things when you’re homeless.

An empress in jeans, she allowed herself a tight smile when she got close and let me pull her suitcase. She walked toward the exit doors.

The nurse behind the glass spoke into a microphone. “Mrs. Lynch? Norma?”

Haughty as ever, my mother turned and looked at her. “Yes, Evelyn?”

“Mrs. Lynch you can’t leave without your medication and you and your daughter both have to sign some papers.”

“Very well,” enunciated Empress Mother.

We left the suitcase against the wall and approached the nurse’s station. Before she signed anything, she read every word of every document, glasses off, eyes two inches from the page. I watched as she signed. I never got used to her new name: Norma Lynch. Norma, the first name on her birth certificate—one that only her mother ever used. Lynch, the name of her second husband, Don.

The signature was no longer the big looping Lee Park I knew so well. This was much more straightlaced— Norma Lynch, as if a name could determine a signature. The unknowable Norma Lynch inhabited the body of my very own mother.

The nurse gave her a pharmacy bag. She shoved it into her purse, turned, and walked away. I paused and said, “Thank you, Evelyn, for your help and compassion toward my mother.”

Evelyn smiled. “Norma is God’s creature, and a unique one at that. We had a few long chats. I know for a fact she’s very proud of you.”

When I joined my mother at the door, someone pushed the unlock button and a buzzer vibrated the air. I leaned into the heavy door, and we walked out.

“You did not need to speak to that woman and there is certainly nothing to thank her for. She’s paid by my enemies to keep me here. She might not know it, but she is.”

“But you are leaving. And she was kind to you.”

“Darling, a kind jailer is still a jailer.”

My car was in the adjacent lot. I lifted her bag—it must have weighed 60 pounds—into the back seat of my car and opened the passenger door for her. We didn’t speak.

Within thirty minutes, we were driving through dusk-darkened streets looking for a parking spot.

With every block, my chest tightened with anticipated grief as my breasts swelled agonizingly with milk. Maggie had not nursed since wake-up.

I parked two blocks from the shelter. We walked in silence. I pulled the suitcase with one hand, and with the other I held my mother’s hand, as I’d done ten million times in my life. It was as warm and soft as ever. She gestured with her chin. “It’s up there. What time is it?”

“I don’t know. We left the hospital just before 5:00. It’s already dark so I bet it’s closing in on 6:00.”

“We aren’t allowed to line up until 6:30.”

How could I leave her? Just walk away from her as she paced the block dragging her suitcase, waiting for check-in time?

There was a Burger King on the corner. As soon as we entered, she pulled the medication bottle out of her purse and dropped it in the trash bin near the door. Two steps behind her, I pulled it back out.

She sat at a booth shaped out of a single piece of orange plastic while I bought two cups of coffee. I dumped the contents of five creamer pods into her cup and returned to the booth. My straight-backed mother stared ahead out the dark window, the monstrous suitcase taking up space in the narrow aisle.

She held the cup delicately between the outstretched fingers of both hands. It was such a subtle thing, but a signature of hers. A simple, delicate, oft-repeated gesture, more memorable in many ways than her former magnetism and the way she could fill a room with her personality and glow.

A digital clock on the wall said 5:56. Do I leave now, knowing she’s only across the street from the shelter? Do I wait till 6:30 and walk her to a spot in line? Exactly how do I navigate what will be less than one minute of my life? The single minute, one of so many impossible minutes. This one would be me, saying goodbye-I-love-you, kissing her cheek, and turning to walk away.

I finally said, “I need to get to Maggie soon. I’m really engorged.”

“Your place is with me. I know you don’t see it that way. You’ve made that clear enough.”

“Momma, I’m a momma now too.” She turned away, refusing to look at me, staring intently at the frail man slouched in the booth across from ours.

I reached out to take hold of her hand. She gripped mine fiercely, as if enduring awful pain and relying on me to ease it. Then she let go and withdrew her hand until it lay on her lap, below the table, inaccessible.

I looked at her face, unlined at 64, hair thin and darkening from blond to steel gray. Full lips set in a grim line. Bitter endurance had become her resting state. I put the bottle of pills on the table. She pretended not to see. I half stood to reach across and lift her shabby teal blue purse from the bench to the tabletop. Snapping open the chipped gold clasp, I dropped the bottle inside and put her bag back down beside her.

She pretended, again, not to see. I knew they’d be back in the trash the minute I was out of sight. I was shamefully grateful that she decided this time not to do battle, shout imprecations, or lunge across the table as if to wrestle me to the ground.

“Go if you have to. I’ll be fine.” She glanced at the clock. “I only have ten minutes to wait.” She was looking at me again. Her words were perfunctory, but her eyes were soft. Her mouth relaxed. Then she smiled. I could tell it cost her something, but she meant well. She felt love. She always did, somehow, when it came to me. She was being kind, in her way. Letting me go to my children was a gracious act. The daughter who chose to leave her at a homeless shelter rather than take her into her own home. The cruelty she attributed to me was a burden that pained her heart—and mine—every day. I was resigned to the fact that she’d never understand.

From inside her mind, the entire world had betrayed her, but the worst betrayal of all was mine.

As I walked to my car, my throat clamped down. In the driver’s seat, the sobs roared out of my chest. I sat like that for some minutes. Finally, as I tried to get out of the neighborhood and find a highway heading south, I did figure eights around the same two blocks a few times, and then found myself driving past the shelter. My mother was third in line, her enormous black suitcase blocking out half her body. Her gaze was fixed on the dusk-shrouded rooftops of high rises beyond her reach in more ways than one. She did not see me.

Gun-shy: Firearms and the Mentally Ill

Posted on by

I opened the door when she knocked. Given our last exchange–during which I had to haul her by the hand out of my place of work while she shouted about how my new boyfriend was part of The Conspiracy (corporate, federal, state, personal) against her–I was wary. But she was my mother after all. At 24, I’d been on my own for 7 years and a few months before she had moved 1800 miles to be near me. Not my idea. But she showed up just in time for me to realize something that I suspected was wrong really was seriously wrong.

The details are hazy. She pushed her way into the apartment, talking inhumanly fast—I don’t remember what she said, or what I said. I just know that within two minutes of her being there, she was so enraged at me that she had me flat on the floor and was pummeling me with her fists. My mother was about five inches shorter than I, but she was strong, and the element of surprise is a powerful strategy. But in her case this was no strategy. It was craziness, erupting, as it does. Willy-nilly.

Her inability to control what I was saying, convince me of what she was saying, or create a truth that I would be convinced by—well, the frustration was too much. She attacked the one person in the world she might actually love—in whatever way that happened for her—and the one person she could not afford to lose.

There was also the time she tried to grab the gun off the police officer’s holster. That one got her thrown in jail, and then transferred to the nearest mental hospital for an evaluation.

I’ve written about her on this blog before, but here my point is: mentally ill people cannot be held accountable for what they do. They are sick. Let’s take care of them. Let’s not throw them out on the street with no resources and no insurance.

And let’s not make it easy for them to buy guns. Can’t we all agree not to arm them with the firepower to kill themselves or someone else in an outburst of—often fleeting—rage or despair?

Fast forward thirty years to a few weeks ago. The suggestion on the table is this: “Shall we put something on our website that urges families to remove guns from the house if a mother is suffering from depression?”

I sit on the board of a remarkable organization that supports women and families dealing with maternal mental health issues, as well as educating medical practitioners and legal professionals about PMDs. When the suggestion is made, heads immediately start to nod. It makes sense. We should come out with a statement about that.

Then someone says, “We need to be careful. There are people out there who might be very offended by that. Red cape to the bull.”

Wait—REALLY?

I  live in a remarkably insular world because I don’t know anyone who would think it a bad idea for a concerned family member to remove a gun from a sick woman who regularly thinks about suicide and whose death would leave a child motherless.

gun image

I believe that people don’t have the whole picture. I mean, who has the whole picture? I definitely do not have the whole picture. I could not possess it even if I read every book, blog, and bullshit tabloid 24 / 7 for the rest of my life. So let’s all agree: no one has the whole picture. I know some stuff and you know some stuff. I’ll ask you what you know about and you can ask me, if you want.

What I do know a teensy bit more than some people about is mental illness. I was highly motivated to read everything I could get my hands on about the topic and then there was my front row seat.

My schizophrenic mother never attacked me again physically after that day. (Research has shown that most psychotic people show less tendencies towards violence than the average population.) The things she did on a regular basis that made my life a hell of tormented guilt, love, and anger just took other forms from then on. But what if she’d had an elegant little pistol in her pocket that day?

Would her rage and despair at the horribleness of it all at that moment have led her to start blazing away?

She didn’t have so much as a set of brass knuckles, fortunately, and my friend Michael woke from his nap to drag my mom off me and escort her firmly, but gently, from the apartment.

I’ve read recent studies about suicide. There is strong evidence that the majority of suicide attempts are one offs. I’m not sure how they do that study since many of the study cases are dead. But it involved many many interviews with people who have survived a suicide attempt. Some have tried multiple times. Some think about suicide often. But apparently most people who have attempted suicide, according to this study, did so only once. They lived to tell the story, and never tried again. Those people did not have guns.

Okay so a background check would not pick up on the random dude whose girlfriend is going to trash his heart and he’s going to try to end it all. But the patient with a history of hospitalization for depression, or schizophrenia, or whatever it is, will be a red flag and maybe the decision to provide this person with a firearm will be tabled for the indefinite future. I would really like that.

The 2nd Amendment was written when muskets were the extent of a citizen’s firepower. Now semi-automatic weapons and guns with exploding bullets (I’ll defer to you people out there who know about guns—I don’t) have been cleverly invented, manufactured, and put in the hands of regular people. The meek, the bold. The sane, the not-sane. The angry, the mollified. The upstanding, the ignominious. We don’t care. It’s our right to own a gun. It’s our right to protect ourselves. But it’s our right—and duty—to protect innocent people too.

Is anyone suggesting we take all guns away? I mean anyone credible? Most of the suggested legislation is about slowing things down. Background checks.

My friend Frank might have killed himself anyway. They found his body in his car with a hole in his head blown out by the shotgun he had purchased at K-Mart earlier that day. The receipt was in the bag, which was in the back seat. After that, we realized he’d been planning his exit for a while. He’d managed to say goodbye to most of us the night before, without telling us what he was doing.

But if the impulse of that moment—if his horrible confusion and sorrow about his uncertain identity, his troubling (to him) desire to wear my clothes on Halloween, and any woman’s panty-hose under his work pants on any other day of the year, his uninterested family, the homelessness he did not confide in us till someone found his sleeping bag in the storeroom at the restaurant where we both worked—if that impulse had passed in the time it took for him to be able to buy that gun, he may have lived until now. He may have been at the forefront of the LGBTQ movement, wearing green tights and flowing skirts with pride at all the parades and making drawling, sarcastic speeches that made everyone laugh. He may have come back the next night, the night after his goodbyes, flicked his hair, grinned his sad, sly grin, and picked up where he’d left off.

Frank as me for Halloween, 1981.

Frank as me for Halloween, 1981.

 

 

For my Mother

Posted on by

My mother at the peak of her advertising career. Mid-1970s (she was in her mid-40s) before the decline into mental illness.

My mother at the peak of her advertising career. Mid-1970s (she was in her mid-40s) before the decline into mental illness.

I wrote the following 9 years ago — one year after my mother’s death. Today on Mother’s Day I remember this account and offer it here. 

For years I was steeled for her death.  I never knew, when the phone rang, if it would be news that she had died, alone in some city, or if hers would be the voice I’d hear.  Either the harsh accusations or the begging born of anguished paranoia.  The urgent instructions to call this corporate giant or that estranged relative in order to vindicate her once and for all.  Sometimes it was the kind of call that ran the gamut from invective, to sobbing desperation to sinuous manipulation.  I was to drive 400 miles, tonight, and take her home to live with me, in her rightful place, because surely I owed her that.  Didn’t I owe her my life?  She never hesitated to remind me. And the gift of life meant I owed her everything she could demand of me, any sacrifice, my family, my job, my very self.

The manipulation-through-guilt was always hardest to take.  I had spent most of my life, even as a tiny child, believing that her fate was somehow in my hands, and that any unhappiness, or dissatisfaction, or mere discomfort was somehow about me: my fault.  If only I could do just the right thing I could fix it.  I alone could keep her from falling into the subway’s path.  I alone could keep her from loneliness late at night when her work was done. So, as an adult, I had to live day to day knowing that she was miserable beyond my own conception of misery, and that there was nothing I could do about it. The darkness in her mind made a reality that was almost too much for me to think about.  Years of therapy eased me to the brink of understanding that I could not protect her, and harder yet to believe, that I never could. I certainly could not keep her alive when half the time I had no idea where she was. And besides, she was consumed by madness, totally lost in her own irrational maze, cluttered, it seemed, with doors she could slam, but absolutely no exits.  As a grown daughter, uncertainty and helplessness defined my role.  However, I believed I was prepared, at least, for news of her death.

The five years that she was back in my world, living peacefully and safely, medicated and fairly stable, were so much better.  I had her back, at least a version of her.  She was not really identifiable as the mother of my childhood, though.  The spark and the laughter were gone.  The need was huge.  Her fears had abated to simmer just below the surface.  We could “chat,” and stroll through Wal-Mart shopping for blouses and selecting underwear with an invisible panty-line.  Each time I picked her up to go have coffee, or stop at CVS for moisturizer, she always made a point of asking about my husband and the children.  Because she had missed 20 years of news, I spent some time filling her in about the state of the world.  She had missed the presidencies of Bush Sr. and Clinton.  She did not recall ever hearing the term “gay rights,” nor did she realize the rainforest was at risk.  She asked innocent, childlike questions.  She thought Republicans still stood for small government.  The state of things confused her. Our roles had fully reversed.  I worried about her living situation, and worked to develop a rapport with the staffs at the two assisted living facilities where she lived during that time.

Meanwhile, I ached to actually look forward to our visits.  I wanted desperately to love our time together, but the time was painful, a chore, a fact which in turn haunted me with guilt.  She demanded much, and gave little in return.  Unlike a child, whose delight in life fills your heart even as you do and do and do for them, my mother’s primary emotion was dissatisfaction, seconded only by deep sorrow.  She mourned things she knew she’d lost and even things she could not remember ever having.  All she knew was that her life was empty.  I felt the terrible burden of being the only thing to fill it.

At this point, my preparedness for her death waned.  I became sure that she’d outlive people decades her senior.  Her mind was unstable, but her body, as always, was strong.  And now that she was housed, fed, saw the doctor, what would stand in the way of the tremendous longevity I imagined?  The weeks and months and years passed.  My life was full and busy and rich; my children grew, my job fulfilled me, my husband loved me and completed the circle of our family.  On the edges, never quite knowing how to be included, was my mother, who really wanted only me.  The sight of me pricked her longing for the way things used to be.  She saw in me her only hope of recapturing the past, her glorious past when she was beautiful, strong, lucid, admired, and had a trophy daughter worthy of her.  The life I now lived, as mommy, wife and schoolteacher, did not fit her dream vision.  She tried to care about it, but couldn’t really. She dutifully asked about the children.  She enjoyed hearing tales of their brilliance and accomplishments, because she could be reminded of when I was a brilliant and accomplished child. But always it was me, and only me, that she wanted.  For my part, I was willing, glad really, to tether her to life, be her tie to any shred of happiness or pleasure.  I imagined this role carrying me into my sixties, long after my children left home and into a time when I could give her more of myself, as she aged.

But all that changed.  Despite a move from a brief but unpleasant assisted living situation to a warm and supportive nursing home in Great Barrington, she sank deeper into depression. At that point, even I was hard pressed to provide her with so much as a glimmer of pleasure.  Enjoyment of any kind was out of her reach.  She was withdrawing further and further into a death in life, as she spent every minute of every day lying in a dark room on her bed, her cardigan pulled up over her shoulders.  Her dignity, you see, never faded.  She would not allow herself to languish in her nightgown, under the covers all day.  She got up, dressed, combed her hair, and lay back down on top of the made bed to doze her life away in the cradle of deep depression.  And then she got sick.

Her hospitalization and emergency surgery just after Christmas brought her quickly to the brink of death.  Post-surgical pneumonia prompted the doctors to call me at work to ask for a suspension of her DNR order.  They believed that she could come through this infection with treatment.  What do you want to do?  If we don’t intubate, she will die.  Soon.

I wasn’t ready.  I was pretty sure she wasn’t ready.  She and I had spoken several years before, when she prepared her living will.  She did not want a life on machines, but this was different.  She could come through this. And I still did not know the results of the lab tests on the mass removed from her colon.  We had no real diagnosis.  I stood in the hallway outside my classroom, the phone cord stretched taut, and cried to the doctors:  “Am I condemning her or saving her?  Can she live?”  I suspended the DNR and rushed to Pittsfield to see her.

There she lay in the ICU, a frail, pale woman breathing on a machine, an innocent Darth Vader, with air pumped in and out on a timer. She was, essentially, not there.  She could barely register my existence.  If this was going to be goodbye, it sucked. There it was again.  The guilt.  It was at this point that the surgeon finally told me the lab results: cancer.  The massive tumor he had removed from her colon was as malignant as they come.  If she lived through this pneumonia, what would she face?  Another kind of death, this one slow and painful? But would we both be ready then?

Three days in the ICU on penicillin and her pneumonia was cured.  She was healing amazingly well from the abdominal surgery.  She got out of the ICU and within three hours was making me laugh.  Who was this woman?  She was drugged and in pain, exhausted and confused, so her witty comeback to a comment I made to the nurse stunned me. Not to mention the fact that she had neither laughed at my amusing comments nor made any of her own for about twenty years.

Back at the nursing home, she was a woman reborn.  Though fragile and thin, with no appetite for food, suddenly my mother found her appetite for life and experience.  She sat up in bed and eagerly visited when I came.  She began to tell stories of her childhood, and share memories of mine.  My children came to see her and it was as if they were meeting their grandmother for the first time.  My daughter, Maggie, listened to stories of the horses on the Bauman farm, and tales of the retired polo pony, Johnny-Boy. She was delighted with this new grandmother with horsey stories to tell. As we left the room at the end of that first post-near-death visit, Maggie took my hand and said, “Mommy, she’s nice.”

I had a mother.  I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten her, but there she was.  She had complete amnesia about all the years of hardship, vitriol, anger, anguish, sorrow and emptiness.  Her forgetfulness sparked in me an ability to live only in the present, with this woman who was my mother, and memories of a mother I once had, and to forget the madwoman who haunted so much of my adult life.  This mother did not make impossible demands. My desire to do whatever I could for her increased with every passing day.

Months before her death, she came out of a decades long battle with paranoia and delusion and just "was."

Months before her death, she came out of a decades long battle with paranoia and delusion and just “was.”

Somehow, I recognized this woman.  Once luscious and full breasted, she had become skeletally frail. On the once beautiful face, her gaunt smile had become a rictus. Her touch on my skin was cold.  But still, she was familiar.  I felt like a daughter again.  And I remembered something.  I loved her.  Even though I’d been saying the words to her for years, they had always made me sad, because I could not feel that they were true.  Last year, as I watched my mother’s rebirth and death, my love for her tapped me on the shoulder and said, I’m still here, you know.  That love, it must have been standing in my blind spot for a time.

I had about a month before she began the active process of dying.  Although she could not fathom it, her days were numbered.  I thought:  I am not ready, but I can be.  I believed that I only needed some time.  Time with her.  Time to part.  To help her leave.  To forgive her.  To forgive myself.  To love us both enough to say goodbye.

Take it from me. We’re never ready.  But the parting is still important. I crammed twenty years of togetherness into a 12 day bedside vigil.  I never tired.  Never chafed.  I could not bring myself to leave her side.  Every tender massage of her feet or hands was an opportunity for me. Every offer of a sip of juice was a way of loving her.  The music I played for her, well, it made me feel better anyway.

My world shrank to a fifteen square foot space.  Once again, as we had for the first twelve years of my life, we shared a room.  Two twin beds, mother and daughter.

My few childhood memories of my mother as a nurturer are from when I was sick, my skin hot, my throat sore.  Even though she had to go to work during the day, when she came home she sat beside me and laid her hand, cool from the winter air outside, on my face.  This time, in her last days, it was my hand on her brow.  My soothing talk, her restless sleep.  My bustling, her gratitude.

I lived every day of that last week in a state of awe.  Every sense was tuned.  When we bathed her body, childlike in its state of advanced starvation, its beauty made me cry.  Her skin, like silk flowers, encased her once strong bones.  Her face, smooth-skinned even at seventy-five, could occupy my eyes for hours.  Much of the time I sat and read, or graded papers, or recited memories.  Many hours passed without my being aware of what had transpired.

I watched her watching the guest who spent those final days in the room with us, invisible to all but my mother.  She stared fixedly at a spot beyond me, murmured, “I need more time,” and yet reached out her arms.  She kept a vigil just as I did.  She seemed never to sleep.  At other times, she watched me intently.  We exchanged gazes.

Though she did not have enough fluid with which to make tears, I soaked the pillow by her head as I lay my face beside hers and grieved.  In those last days, my mother gave me the gift of her mothering.  Although she was busy strong-arming death to gain another hour or day of life, she found the wherewithal to wrap her bony arm around me as I cried on the pillow, to stroke my hair, to gentle me towards her eventual, regrettable leaving.

I yearned to crawl into the bed with her and wrap her up with my body, hold her and ease her way, but I couldn’t. She was so aching and sore in the last days that she could not tolerate any touch but the brush of my lips on her brow, or my open palm cushioning her hand.

She lived seven days past the day the nurses said she could not possibly make it another twenty-four hours.  During those timeless days, I forgave her and asked for her forgiveness.  I told her I would write about her.  I told her I loved her.  I said, “Give my love to Aunt Thelma and Uncle Mike.”  I told her she could go.  I told her she had to let herself go.  I said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll see you again.”

She waited till my husband Dan could be with me before she took her last breath.  She had teased me, though, into believing that though she was dying, she would never really die.  I was in the bathroom, washing up, when Dan called out, “Vanessa, I think this is it.”  I rushed to her bed.  She was staring, wide eyed, right at me.  The quiet in the room was deafening.  The strained sound of her breathing, the accompaniment to my days and nights, was agonizingly, horribly silenced.  After weeks of watching her inch her way out the door of life, when the door finally closed behind her, I was left absolutely stunned and bereft.  “Is this really the way it is? Is she gone?” I wailed.  Her leaving was so permanent; a trapdoor opened in my chest.  But: she was still there with me.  I could feel her beside me, around me, waiting for my last goodbye.

At last I could crawl under the covers with her, wrap her in my arms and hold that body one last time.  The one that gave me life. I owed that to myself.

Publicity shot from when my mother had a TV show out in California, mid-1950s before I was a gleam in her eye.

Publicity shot from when my mother had a TV show out in California, mid-1950s before I was a gleam in her eye.