missing: part two

Saturday, September 26th. Three weeks now at Mirabella. Mom has a new caregiver for the weekend, Alisha--Mulu has the weekend off. I sit with Mom. We read the headlines together and I read the articles aloud to Mom, sometimes paraphrasing their content to make sure Mom is following what I'm saying. A thwarted terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11. White collar union's response to Boeing's announcement terminating its education program. And then my personal favorite--"Anklet sniffs out alcohol," an article about how states are using new technology to monitor defendants who are court ordered to be alcohol-free. The anklet can measure alcohol in a defendant's perspiration and then automatically transmit this back to the server at the monitoring center. Nifty, right? Big Brother rides again! Mom gets pretty worked up about this one--disparages the use of government to infiltrate privacy. I'm surprised by her politics, I'd have figured she would be for anything that gets drunks off the streets and out of their cars. It's an age-old issue--when does the "public good" demand that personal liberty and privacy be impinged upon?

After several hours of reading and chatting, me sitting with my legs curled under me on Mom's bed and Mom resting comfortably in her elevated hospital bed, Alisha looks at us and says--"I can tell how close the two of you are....how nice that you've always been this way." There's a pause then in her train of thought before she finishes with--" I am not close to my mom. Never see her, in fact...and when I do, we don't get along. Not at all."

I watch Mom's face for her response to this unexpected outpouring, wondering what she might say to a blanket affirmation like this. I'm nervous actually, because I don't know how much Mom might reveal to this semi-stranger caretaker of ours.

There's a pause in the conversation before Mom begins to sputter. "I think...she and I...we do..." The words get stuck, and for once I'm grateful, grateful that she can't say what she might say, which is--"sure we love each other, but...but...but...we haven't always been close." Or she might say--"Close, yes, but there was that time..." Or, due to Mom's well-protected need for privacy, she might not be saying either of these, choosing to say nothing at all, letting Alisha's conclusion stand in place of the truth. After all, it does sound better, doesn't it? Better than the truth? But the fact that her face looks so agitated and her voice is working overtime to try to find the words (and this time I don't try and help her, I just let the words slip away) tells me that the last of these possibilities is not what Mom has in mind.

I know Mom is thinking about those "terrible years" in the mid-eighties-to-the-mid-nineties where Mom refused to talk to me, angry that I moved away to the "Hicksville" part of the state (Wenatchee, eastern Washington), angry that I chose to align myself with the "wrong man" or rather men (first there was the cowboy attorney, Mark, and then later my developer husband, Dana). As I've learned, Mom can be so uncompromising--it's her strength as well as her weakness. She never backs down, never admits when she's wrong--takes no prisoners. Not concerning me....and certainly not concerning my brother, Peter. That's what aligns Peter and me--keeps him breathing in my memory, despite how long it's been since I've seen him, as the two of us took on the brunt of Mom's displeasure: we acted "badly" and married the "wrong" people and (and this is an important "and" as it brings with it the social humiliations that Mom just can't forgive us for) we did so by eloping, without Mom's public or private sanction. So for Mom, Peter and I were simply "missing"--gone from her life, even if we were living and breathing in some other geography. Losses such as these are difficult to bear as there's no memorializing of the one who is gone--no ceremony around death that allows for the living to move through grief and on to other ways of being. They are "ambiguous losses," as psychotherapist Pauline Boss describes them. It's like Peter and I were MIA, only Mom's grief over this did not necessarily include a fervent hope for our safe return. Instead, she lived in a martyred world of unresolved grief, sure that things would always be this way, that a happy ending would not likely bring her children back to her.

I look towards Mom hunched in her bed, her neck bent sharply to the right. Her misaligned position looks painful, her limbs and torso frozen, like her arm or shoulder could shatter at just a touch. There's a silence here, as both of us are still in the sway of Alisha's revelation. I see the dark violet penciled brows that arch even when Mom's eyes are closed (Lorna's idea of how eyebrows should be painted). I see her fine fly-away-hair that never seems to keep it's curl, despite the hairdresser's attempts to curl-iron the facsimile of ringlets into her hair. I see the sag and bag of her cheeks, how her face no longer can carry the nuances of expression that it did when I was growing up, those years when I would scour her face like a nineteenth-century physiogamist for the slightest sign of what she may be feeling, thinking, sure that her face held the key to earning my mother's pleasure and approval. A smile meant "yes" you are my beloved daughter....an absence of a smile could mean so many things, but mostly that I'd disappointed expectation. Now her face, once so mobile, is a lacy webbing of wrinkles and sun spots that speaks her age. Every emotion leads unilaterally to a wrinkle-frown--overcoming the effects of gravity on the skin takes concentration, impetus. It's only those uncommon joys that light her face temporarily to an semblance of what it use to be.

After a few minutes of Mom's sputterings and Alisha's and my silence, it becomes clear that nothing more is going to be said. I'm relieved really, though there is a part of me that is curious and now disappointed, wanting to know what Mom would say about it all these years later. Does she really still hold a grudge towards me, like she does towards Peter? Am I still that "disloyal" daughter she decided I was, despite all the years that my presence has proven otherwise?

"So Mom," I say into our lull. My voice startles me, sounds odd to my ears--high, pinched, like the words are having a difficult time escaping. "So Mom," I begin again, "you never did tell me if you missed Peter after he disappeared for good?" I remember clearly how Mom dodged this question yesterday, but had done so in a circuitousness way, never actually saying "No....I won't talk about this." Instead, she just never got around to her answer. Or maybe there had been an answer but her Alzheimer's stole it away.

We are sitting just a foot or so away from each other, so intimate that I can smell her soured breath as it escapes her teeth and lips, forming a stale cloud of spent oxygen between us. So close that I can hear the intimacy of her bowels, the way her intestines just relieved themselves into her Depends without Mom initiating this happening. Mom too hears the release of her sphincter valve, her face contorting for a moment into what is either a grimace of pain or one of embarrassment. "Oh, dear," she mutters softly. I say nothing.

We sit like this for a bit. I can be as patient as I need to be and Mom has no where else she needs to be. We both are listening, me to Mom and Mom to what she can remember or allow herself to know.

It's been a day of firsts for Mom--first time she tried to brush her teeth (not successful), first time she spun the bicycle handlebars with her own volition (and she did grab a hold and spin these on her own, albeit slowly), first time she could pat the head of dog (not her dog's but the soft golden head of a visiting Labrador named Buddy), first time she could feed herself a sandwich (and she did grab hold of the corner of her grilled cheese and angle it into her mouth). All firsts, all amazing--I caught each one gleefully with my camera, just in case we forget they happened. But these are bittersweet victories for me. There's a glass ceiling for Mom--not sure of where it lies exactly but there's a limit to what she can achieve. Soon we will know. It's like pieces of Mom have gone missing, are now beyond her control--pieces of her arms and legs, bowels and stomach, spine and cerebral cortex, fingers and hands. The facsimile of these bodily parts are here, easy to be seen by the naked eye, but the "real," functioning parts have vanished. Missing. Mom's Alzheimer's will make sure of this, make the recovery of her corporeal self nearly impossible after her stroke. In its place is my ravaged mother.

"I do," Mom finally says in answer to my question about Peter. "I do miss him."

"But you never talk about him," I fire back to her.

"True," she says. Nothing more.

"But why not?" I ask her with a bit of an edge, feeling myself getting annoyed.

Mom pauses then, and I watch her closely. So much seems to hang in the balance with her answer. Why she never tries to get in touch with Peter, why she never seems to cry over him but can cry in a second over the very mention of her mother who's been dead since 1945, why she never talks about him as one of "her sons," why she disinherited him from her will. I listen and I wait. And then, in reward for my patience, Mom says it, the thing that explains Mom, makes visible what lies on the inside of her skin, and I'm almost sorry that I've heard, sorry that I've asked.

"He's not there," she says carefully, thinking this explains it all.

"What do you mean "not there," I say angrily, wishing myself a long ways away from this bed, from this dysfunctional woman who simply cannot be my mother. "He's s-o-m-e-w-h-e-r-e, Mom, living with a wife called Susan. We just don't know where."

"No," she says emphatically. "He's not...he's not the person...you know...not who...who he was."

Mom's words feel dangerous, terrible to me. Why? What is there here that I don't already know? Perhaps there is really nothing new...but her answer confirms things I haven't wanted to think about my mom, renews insight into how my mother handles those who make choices she cannot sanction. For Mom, Peter has literally gone missing with no return possible. Whatever parts of him that remain in Phoenix or Ketchum or Tacoma or Butte or wherever else he might be are not recognizable to her, and hence simply cannot be him. The "real" Peter, for Mom, is what she refers to as her "purely nice boy," not the man who shunned her, grieved her, refused to attend his own father's funeral and then disappeared for good. No other facts can exist if they don't fit with her "purely nice" knowledge.

The things we tell ourselves to be okay with present pain. The Alzheimer's bodies we prefer not to see, the sons we prefer not to recognize, the daughters we prefer not to speak to--all of these in the name of coping with unimaginable loss.

I look at my mother, prostrate in her bed, and consider what I can allow myself to know. Is this really my mother? Isn't this someone else's mother? It must be, because the body before me diverges so far from my memory of Mom as a lively, fit, intelligent woman. And yet, this ravaged self must be my mother, there's no doubt. I recognize the age-loosened curl of her cheek, the mole on the side of her neck that blends into a smattering of sunspots all from too many years worshiping the heat, the breasts that sag beneath her white cotton T-shirt. Her Alzheimer's stroke-damaged self must be what is real for me, despite what is missing. To say otherwise is to leave grief unresolved.

This is all that's left of Mom.

This is my mother!

Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--