The Parting of a Mother

©2010 Daniel A. Brown

Decades after extolling the virtues of youth, we Baby Boomers are finally discovering death.

We are doing this courtesy of our aging parents, many of whom are coming into their nineties and defying most of the conventional wisdom their offspring have mistaken as truth. For example, most of my generation has been led to believe that if they lived a healthy smoke-booze-red meat-free lifestyle with plenty of exercise and a daily meditation practice to render them blissfully positive, they would stay young and beautiful forever.

But by now, I have attended enough funerals of friends who did all that and died before they reached 65 while my own parents, violating every one of the above precepts, lived a combined 194 years between them. However, they never told their children how to prepare for their eventual deterioration and demise, believing that they were going to live indefinitely. My Dad was still functioning quite well at age 95 and could beat me in arm wrestling to his immense gratification. When I dared asked what I was to do when he got old, he snapped “I’m not old!” and walked out of the room, Inwardly I knew that the day was coming when their lifestyles would implode and I dreaded that day, knowing how unprepared I would be. It was that proverbial ticking time bomb, unwanted yet inevitable.

And when it happened, it happened fast and my sister and I were suddenly immersed in a crash course on the care of the elderly. My mother fell and needed 24-hour care which I arranged only to discover that the caregivers were using her failing memory to obtain multiple payment checks per week. Their apartment was sold to a new owner who wanted to evict them and go condo so it was only a matter of time before we packed 44 years of life and memories into one truck and moved them both to Langdon Place in Keene. My dad died soon afterwards at age 100.

My mother was placed in the semi-independent wing but as her memory collapsed so rapidly, she had to be moved to the locked-down Alzheimer’s unit. And so it was that within a year, her life transformed from a spacious apartment overlooking Central Park to a tiny room right next to the nurse’s station. This new truncated life was as much a shock to us as it was to her. As her dementia cemented in place, she wondered when she would be leaving this nice hotel she was staying at and returning home to New York.

Mentally, I was going through my own roller-coaster ride, made bearable by accepting the sometimes irrational thoughts that were bouncing around inside my head. Initially, I resented my mother for not being young and vibrant anymore. I would stare at pictures of Mom when she was in her thirties and try to remember a mother who wasn’t presently gazing owl-eyed from a wheelchair and repeating the same questions a dozen times. I wanted my mommy back but knew that if I was going to stay emotionally healthy I would have to accept this woman under the new terms.

Which I learned to do. I also had to accept how little I knew about her, despite the family mythology that was based on as much fabrication as truth. I also had to confront her on some of the more dysfunctional elements of our turbulent family which happened during a lively two-hour car-ride among the hills of southern New Hampshire. Suddenly, Mom was speaking with a clarity and an honesty I had never encountered before and it was as if a mighty wall had come cascading down. Although those circumstances rarely returned, subsequent visits with her became events to look forward to instead of endure. In the last five years of her life, we saw more of each other and shared more than we had in the previous 35.

Her memory was all shot to hell by this time, remembrances flickering in and out like a faulty circuit breaker. She would relate recent conversations she had had with family members who were long gone and I would correct her and we would both joke about it. At times, her mind would clear allowing her to converse insightfully about aspects of my life she was interested in. I always brought an album of photographs which we would look at and even though she would get me, her father and her late husband all bollixed up, the act of sharing the images was pleasant for both of us.

As the end approached, slowly but irrevocably, she decided that she didn’t want to eat anymore or get out of bed. A week before she left, I asked her about this and she answered humorously, “I’m lazy!”, and then more cryptically, “It’s time for me to be the audience” meaning it was time for her to put aside her sense of duty and giving to others and receive. I kissed her on the forehead and told her I’d see her again soon. A partial truth.

Because when I did see Mom again, she was lying almost mummified in bed unconscious under doses of morphine. Instinctively, I knew that her spirit had already departed a body that was slowly winding down. I sat with her during those final hours, holding her hand and waiting.

Our images of deathbed scenes are conditioned from too much television and hokey movies. In reality, there is no soaring background music, no poignant parting words. Mom was breathing laboriously and then she stopped. It was like a fan shutting off. In the background, I could hear the night nurses discussing a movie they were watching. The overhead light hummed. Mom was gone.

The tears came later, brought about from both loss and the loving support of my friends. At her service, I closed my eyes and found myself thanking God that she had been my mother, warts and all, and in my family, the warts were predominant creatures. But in the end, the thankfulness won out.