Yesterday, I visited my mother: Each time I see her I marvel at how she is still here, still processing information, still eating and breathing. If she makes it to her next birthday, she will be 101 years old. However, these visits come at a price. They are bittersweet, they are double-edged: The steel of the sword is reflective of the temperature of the visit, warm with joy, cold with fear.

I came with the usual bag-in-hand and notes to myself. Things to leave, things to pick-up. Don’t forget to leave the rent check. Put the knishes in the fridge, leave extra garbage bags. Take the mail which has been left for me in a clear plastic Glad bag. Hope that at some point a letter comes indicating that for once all the paperwork I completed and submitted was approved for continued benefits without a glitsch, something that has not yet happened and left me spent, each year, scrambling to fix the messes of bureaucracy.

 

 

What I also had in my bag was a DNA kit. My mother is the last living old-timer of the family and I was thankfully prodded by my friend, Phyllis, to extract a cheek swab and see how far back we can travel genetically, via my mother: Phyllis is the daughter of a very close friend and colleague with whom I used to work. We recently learned that we are related distantly and we are trying to find out how. This might be my last chance. But first, let me tell you about my visit.

I was at my mother’s apartment during the hour that one aide left and another would arrive. I entered the room and announced myself: my mother is no longer able to see faces due to her macular degeneration. She responded. She sounded like my mother, the mother I knew. Her voice was clear and steady and rang like the bell of the voice from earlier years. The voice that used to sing show tunes and that knew all the words. This is my mother. But when I look at her I barely know who she is. She is an imposter: a tiny, dark-haired, child-like person with bony fingers wearing teeny clothes, pushing a walker across the room. Her skin is like an old suit that no longer fits. There are stray white hairs poking from around her chin. Her eyes no longer afford her the luxury of close examination. I’d like to demand: “What have you done with my mother?,” but the question is fruitless and not worth asking. She is buried somewhere inside this person. In that burial she is tangled in the realities and confusions of memory.

I brought up my cousin, Steven, the son of her sister. The nephew, who has three children, one of whom I just made contact with. Names she knew years ago, now lost in time; I named cousins and extended family members, it took her a while to internalize and to sort through, to put the pieces back on their proper shelves of gray matter. And then there was a connection, and then the flood—and the storm.

While we sat on the day-bed, looking at one another, the sun had set, the room was brightened by the 5-bulb lamp. Her dinner had been delivered and sat on a tray on the table, waiting for the aide to arrive and warm it. Under the plastic lid-mausoleum I could make out a baked potato.

We journeyed to the past.

How I remember it: When my mother was in her late 80’s and still living in Florida, she often socialized with her sister, my aunt Annette, and her husband, Joe: They lived a drive away in a classy condo and would pick her up and take her to lunch. They liked to eat midday, “it was better for digestion.” At some point my cousin, their ill adult daughter, passed away, suddenly. Then my Uncle Joe, leaving Aunt Annette behind to fight off what I recall as kidney cancer. She was moved to a medical unit.

My mother, as I recall she reported to me years back, would take a public bus and visit her. Initially my Aunt would converse. The nurse was concerned that my mother, who was obviously very elderly, was traveling to see her sister alone. I don’t know how many times or how often my mother visited. My mother tells it like this:

She took one or two buses to visit her sister. When she entered the room she saw her sister “HANGING from the ceiling, looking down, making eye-contact. “I could see her feet dangling.” My aunt said to my mother, “Pauline, you have a dark spot over your lip.” When my mother looked in the mirror there was no spot.” My mother says she returned, “maybe the next day” and there was Aunt Annette still hanging from the ceiling, looking at her. “Annette, speak to me! why aren’t you speaking to me?” My mother added that her sister never responded.

And, then she said she must have been very naive, that she didn’t know much about death, that Annette must have been dead, but why didn’t they take her down and bury her? In the Jewish religion the dead must be buried immediately. I told the nurse my sister has a son, Steven, in Chicago, and they should tell him!”

“Mom,” I said, horrified and trying to keep my composure, trying to negate the images that her words conjured, “I believe that your sister was dying of kidney cancer. She was in her 90’s. She was eventually in a coma. She must have been in bed, possibly attached to tubes, propped up. “Mom, people aren’t suspended from the ceiling in the hospital!” She wouldn’t buy my version. 

She declared that her sister could NOT be in her 90’s, it was not possible. They were only a few years apart and my mother was probably in her 80’s (which she was). That she was dating Milton, the photographer and that my father was dead for a while. She was essentially lost in detail after detail, event after event got knotted together in a morass.

But, she insisted, that this is how it happened; she leaned in close to me several times in that hour and cut me short: “Listen to me! I know.” As the hour progressed and topic after topic was challenged and corrected or dismissed, I began to shrink. I became as small as my mother. Reduced to eighty pounds, cut to size and diminished by her memories and ideations. There was no winning. And was there really any point to trying to set her straight? What would I be the victor of? Reality?—whatever that is.

I waited until the end to do the genetic cheek swabs. She didn’t fully understand, she was defensive, fearful, perhaps, as my watered-down explanation was not fully comprehended. She told me that if I found any family members not to meet anyone I might find, that people can bring problems, that as people age there are more and more issues. She was back to her suspicious self. She took a detour to the bathroom and returned and began to rush me out. “It’s late, it’s almost 5:00, Sally is coming, oh, oh, hurry, hurry!!”

It’s OK, mom, let’s just do this. I swabbed the interior of her cheeks, fearful that I wasn’t getting enough of a specimen, that I didn’t get the whole needed 45-second-cheek-sweep. I couldn’t get over how tiny her mouth was, how few teeth she had. It was then that I saw her need for a tweezers; I was both saddened and repelled.

 

 

 

I broke the swab tips into the little vials of liquid, as directed, hoping that I had caught enough cells, cells with precious information that might open doors. The last gift my mother could give me of herself. I felt like a thief. Guilty and elated, running off with the prize. The family jewels that my mother always wore, long after she gave up her rings in fear that they’d be stolen.

I have had ambivalent feelings about her for years, the burden, the anxiety, the expectations and fears, the hate of the phone ringing and terror of what message might be at the other end.

The longer my mother lives the more stressed I get, but I know that at some point, likely sooner than later, we both will have relief. And then the next generation will carry on.

 

 

This series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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