She is a tough cookie, my mother. Not warm and fuzzy, not one to utter a word of praise or affection. I still remember the halting way she told me, for the first time, that she loved me when I was in high school (yes, high school). She had been going to therapy for a while, and I guess her therapist suggested she use the L word with her kids. It was very, very awkward.
She has always been a world-class complainer. No near-perfect person or situation could escape her criticism. She never let anyone forget any small favor she did for them. She looked at motherhood as a burden thrust upon her, and it showed. She would promise things (like money for college), and then on a whim change her mind with little explanation. She has always been consummately and utterly dissatisfied with life. Needless to say, my relationship with her has been fraught, at best.
In 2016, I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer, and spent the better part of a year fighting it with surgeries, chemo and radiation. I was so fortunate to have the support of my friends and family. People sent us dinners and took my son out for fun outings. My mother-in-law, sisters, and sisters-in-law all flew across the country to take turns caring for me during my 8 months of treatment. You’ll notice who did not come. Not that I would have expected her to, nor would I want her there as she doesn’t do well when things are not all about her. But she never even called me, not once, throughout the whole nightmare. Even for her, that seemed unfathomable. My years of carefully crafted ambivalence toward her faltered.
A year after treatments ended, I began calling her again. Of course, there was no mention of my health, just a gradual return to the usual: “How are you? How’s Dad’s hip? Has it been a cold winter?”
In one conversation, she told me she had thrown out her back trying to pull the rug tassels out of the vacuum. I suggested she finally hire a housekeeper.
“Oh, I don’t want strangers in my house,” she said as she always did when I suggested she hire any sort of help.
“You can go with a company,” I explained. “Their people are vetted. When I was sick, my friends sent me someone from a place like that.”
“How bad was that cancer you had?” My mother asked, probably to change the subject more than anything else. It was the first time she mentioned the c word.
“Well, it was stage three of four,” I said slowly. “It wasn’t great.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” my mother said. She was nearly eighty, it was certainly possible that she didn’t remember. I decided to test her a little more.
“I had a double mastectomy, then four months of chemo, reconstructive surgery, 28 rounds of radiation. It was no picnic.” I thought about throwing in some more details for her, since she seemed to have forgotten. The lung infection I got after the surgery. The violent way I was sick after that second chemo, while my four-year-old stood outside the bathroom door crying. The mouth sores, rashes, relentless vertigo. But I spared her those details.
“Oh, I’m so sorry you went through all that,” my mother said, choking on tears that it was hard to imagine were authentic. She knew; of course she knew it all from my siblings.
“Yeah, me too,” was all I could manage before asking how my father’s hip was doing.
By the following year, my mom was repeating herself more often; her litany of complaints ran in a constant loop. At first it was hard to tell because she was the way she’s always been, but now just magnified. In 2019 she was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
The isolation of the pandemic years accelerated the pace of her decline tenfold. Every time I went to visit her, a little more of her was gone. If ever I had wanted to have a tough conversation with her, the door to that was now firmly and irrevocably closed.
This past year, it was no longer safe for my mother to live at home, and so we moved her into an nursing home facility. I helped take on the arduous and depressing job of cleaning out her house. I began to find lots of notes – scribbled in random notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, notes written in marker on construction paper probably left out by kids or grandkids.
“Heal Your Brain, $20 a month, 12 DVD set,” she had scribbled down along with an 800 number.
“Natural supplements for mood focus and memory,” she wrote, followed by a long list. She jotted down the names of books with titles like “Brain Training,” and “Eating for Brain Health.” It made me sad, and also wonder when she had written them.
Another page in a notebook: “Have not been sleeping well – BIG ISSUE (FOR YEARS)!!
Have memory concerns, common ones:
‘has so and so died?’
Going places – Bob has to come with me.
I forget what day it is.
Is tomorrow garbage pickup?
Can’t picture my sister Phyllis’ house
Bob says I’m not getting worse, but I’m not getting better!!
Again, no date. Ugh, mom, I think, can you give me a clue?? When did this really start?
“I can’t learn anything new anymore,” she writes on another slip of paper. “Feel very nervous about my future My husband has epilepsy, so I’m the only driver. At 78, with impaired memory I feel very vulnerable.”
And there it is. My mom was 78 the year I had cancer.
My mother was never an easy person. She has said and done a lot of things that have been hard accept if not forgive her for. But to know her cognitive decline had already begun when I was sick and she was absent, really does help. While I support her through the worst part of her life, I now have a better understanding why she wasn’t there when I went through mine.
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