After my mother suffered a massive stroke, I thought I could never get used to seeing her in that saddened condition, a mere shell of her former vibrant self. Yet oddly enough it is that picture of her that drifts into my memory far more naturally than the 44 years before it. I’ve grown accustomed to her face as it slipped on one side and turned towards me in quiet desperation.
In the picture on my bedside table she is sitting paralyzed in her wheelchair, braced leg and clunky shoes protruding from underneath one of the three mother-daughter matching dresses she purchased through a Christmas catalog. My two daughters stand on either side of her, wearing their flouncy outfits; my youngest tries to rest a hand on her grandmother’s slinged arm. And since my mother’s mind is no longer able to process the fact that she is not the young mother of my sister and me, her identical costume is too short, girlish—overdone pink and lacy, pearls choking her around the neck—the ensemble is completely out of character with her closet full of subtle, tasteful attire. Caught up in her enthusiasm over her purchase, she has urged me to snap the portrait, as she struggles to bring both sides of her face to an even smile. My daughters, like any little girls, eagerly slide into princess poses, but even at their young age want to save her from later embarrassment, and so cover her bare legs with a curtsey.
Some fourteen years later they still remember the awkward moment when their suddenly changed grandmother tried too hard. Not too long ago, one of them commented on how the photograph made her feel. “Why do you have that picture on the table? Put it away; it’s so depressing.”
I could see her point. I had never thought of it that way. With all the glamorous framed images of my mother that adorn the walls of our home, why would I find this disheartening one somehow reassuring? Not wishing to disturb my daughter’s sensitivity, I tucked it in a drawer. But despite its absence from view, it remains the first image I call to mind when I think of my mother.
How can this be? I struggle to resurrect the vision of her as she appears in the home movies before her illness. There she is in her designer dress and high heels, her hair a bonnet of loose curls, her face the visage of a movie star. And she was smart: Before the stealthy clot carried sorrow to her brain, she could finish both the Sunday Los Angeles and New York Times’ crossword puzzles in jet black ink. Yet it is the time period after the stroke, sitting by her lifeless side working the tiny squares she would now so easily confuse that I most readily remember.
All the years she cared for me, carpooled for me—you would think I would vividly recall the way she looked every morning as she sipped her coffee, the turn of her apron as she sashayed about the kitchen preparing the family Christmas dinner. Sometimes I can still see her sitting at the dining room table, but for the life of me I cannot glimpse the movement of her face, listen once more to the tune of her laughter as she turns to my father or tells tales with her sisters. She created memories for me that move in my heart like the muscles that pump it, but I have a hard time seeing her move in those pictures that form the past that made me.
And in the end, of course, as the experts say so succinctly, she became the child and I became the mother. Perhaps because I already had two children of my own, this role was all too familiar to me; I stepped right in like I’d simply birthed another, teaching how to take a step, changing diapers, bathing. And maybe just like I can recall every moment of my own daughters’ entrance into the world through childhood, I latched on to this, my mother’s sudden re-birth and dependence.
I vacillated between utter sympathy and intense frustration when, as hard as I tried to get her to stand, take hold of the walker--let me help you walk down the driveway, I don’t care if one leg is dragging and your shoes aren’t pretty--she refused to do the physical therapy exercises that might improve her daily existence. Selfishly, I wanted her to realize that I still needed her, despite my own mature age and motherhood status. I didn’t require her to cook my meals and take me shopping. Stimulating conversation and brilliant thoughts were not what I was looking for. I simply wanted her to be there, a presence in the room that rooted me. I wasn’t ready to go on without her and flounder in the unknown territory of maternal absence, so I decided I would will her towards recovery. Be strong like you always were; you can get better.
Engulfed in my own hunger for her healing, I neglected to consider that a human being might feel less than one without all its functioning parts, that despondency must have overwhelmed her as she discovered she had been halved. I wanted her to be content with the same thing I was—just any small segment of her, while she could not settle for only a fragment of herself and wished the clot had simply done its job and killed her.
My mother had worn two perfumes in her lifetime: Madame Rochas and Poison. So a few days after she arrived home from the hospital, when she asked me if I could get her some poison, naturally I assumed she meant her favorite fragrance. Anxious to contribute anything that would help her regain her sense of self, I swiftly retrieved the small bottle from her bathroom cabinet, and she looked up at me with the confused eyes of a child. “I can’t drink this; it won’t do the job.”
It’s the rawest version of heartbreak when the capable woman who nursed you back from tonsillitis and broken boyfriends asks you if there is any way you could please help her die. Who is this woman—the one whose life so cherished yours, now wanting you to end hers? And what form of madness and despair for someone you so deeply love causes you, just for a moment, to actually consider it?
I couldn’t bear her misery, her growing awareness that, in the blink of an eye, she was no longer the beauty for which she was legendary, that her mind was no longer the quickest in any room on any subject, and that she no longer possessed what all of us futilely chase after—control So this was now my mother, robbed of most of her own reason and half of her own body. For me, the most difficult thing of all lay not in the difference between this woman and the one I had known like I knew my own flesh, but rather in the few remaining things left to her that made her the same: just a glimpse again, every so often, of the woman closest to me, just a brief reminder to taunt me. Just a certain way she would turn her head, a fleeting sound in her voice—that was ironically both the hardest tease and the very reason I could not help her die.
But then, a strange thing happened: as the months turned into years, she became oddly more beautiful than before. Stripped of her false eyelashes and hued shadow, her eyes appeared unmistakably bluer. I saw farther into them without all that distraction. And minus the pancake make-up her skin seemed somehow flawless, smooth as rounded pebbles you might find in a small stream. She had softened. There was a kind of newborn beauty to her as the time passed; even her hair felt silkier. I liked to brush it for her while we looked at magazines and pretended to care about the fashions, and I preferred the wispy whiteness to its former blue-rinsed gray.
One day when I was going through old photo albums in the upstairs bedroom where I’d slept until I was twenty-two, I realized that as hard as I stared at the images, I could not close my eyes and muster up my mother walking across our kitchen floor. Even if I sat very still in complete silence, I no longer could hear the sharp click of her heels on the brick-red tile, the strength and comfort of her voice, confident and true. What I had been afraid I would never be able to let go of, I could suddenly no longer retrieve, and it frightened me. In the process of nurturing her, had I been asked to forsake my own childhood, my memories of the little girl with her mother now indistinct and distant? How could I not be able to recover the sight of her walking towards me, my mama?
Distraught and disoriented, I returned to the kitchen where she sat in her wheelchair, eyes closed, lightly snoring. I reached out and touched her fragile face and when her eyes opened she looked straight into mine. The left side of her mouth lifted in a small smile and she asked me Honey, for a sip of water. I knew right then that I had not lost her at all; this was every bit still my mother, just another bend in her road.
The curve that needed her to forget—and me not to remember—the way she used to be.
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