Goodbye!
I am with a friend who has just finished crying.
“Enough!” she says.
She casts her balled tissues onto the table before us.
Also on the table are two tall glasses half full of gin. The gin is cloudy with lemon juice.
“The nerve of me,” she says, “crying the blues to you.”
She means this as a kind of compliment. She means she considers her problems trivial when compared to mine.
I know what will happen next. Next, my friend will ask me about me.
“Tell me everything,” she will say. Asking about me is her way of asking me about my mother.
But what is there to say about my mother? Whatever it is, I am not the one to say it. Let someone else do that. Anyway, I am at this moment too distracted by my friend, who is still crying, though she insists she is not, and by the wad of tissues before me, someone else’s litter, damp with someone else’s tears.
My mother, at this time, is not well. She is not so good as she was, better than she soon will be. We — my mother and I — have entered the days where each day will be a little worse than the last. Each day will hold a little less for her, a little more for me.
I have many ways of thinking about this. In one of these ways, we are drinking wine, and she pours her wine into my glass, saying, “Here,” because she knows that I enjoy having drunk too much.
In another, she is handing me items from an open drawer, a drawer that magically holds all and sundry things, the beaters for her mixer, her many dictionaries and lexicons, letters I sent her just before our long estrangement, which she has kept in their original envelopes and which are particolored but of a general scheme, egg-yolk yellow, robin’s-egg blue, etc. She hands me each thing. I take it, placing it in an open box. It would appear we are moving her out of this place and into another.
I have another friend who is a widow. Her husband died before I met her. She says he was a sweet man, and I believe her. She was mourning him when I met her, and she is still mourning him. She does not make a fuss about her mourning, but I can see her mourn when she stirs her coffee with her spoon, looking long into the coffee.
Once, she told me she’d been married to her husband for almost fifty years. In that time, she supposed they had spent only a few days a part. Four days, she supposed, maybe five. Six, tops, out of many thousands. When he died and she was looking at his body, she thought, “I wish I’d spent more time with him.”
More time!
I wish she had not said this to me. I know she had good intentions. But her good intentions sicken me, as good intentions do.
“Here,” say her intentions, “let me help you with that.”
But I do not want help with this.
“Leave me alone,” I say, “please, leave me alone.” I am careful to say this quietly, so that no one will think me proud.
My mother, incidentally, also refused all help at first. She, too, demanded that I leave her alone.
“Leave me alone!” she once cried.
She was in her long, gray, threadbare shawl, her skinny, white, varicosed legs descending from its bottom edge, her arms up, holding her head at each side, as if it would fall off her neck if she let it go.
When I was at the outer edge of adolescence, I often begged my mother to leave me alone. I screamed it to her from my bedroom doorway, or from our kitchen, or from the walkway that ran up to our little tumbledown one-bedroom, where she took me to live with her after the divorce.
“Leave me alone!” I said.
“Don’t give me that,” she said, as if my need to be alone was something I was giving her.
I often wonder whether my daughter feels as I do, as my mother did. She was certainly a taciturn child, which suited me. Put her in a chair, leave the room, call the gas company about the bill, return, she is still in the chair. Who she is now, and what she is, and what that serious, taciturn child has to do with this tall, brazen, headstrong stranger, that is harder to know. Her life is now a drama I watch at a distance, as if through opera glasses. Sometimes it is not even that. Sometimes it is a thing she must describe to me, in a call, in a letter, on the odd visit home, as if she has seen a show I would have loved, if only I’d been with her.
Due to my habit of mistaking one thing for another — my mother for my mother’s condition, myself for my mother, so on — it is hard for me to talk about my mother, which is to say, my mother’s condition. Even a simple discussion of nomenclature, what words I will and will not accept, what euphemisms I will allow myself and others, is a discussion I have at my own peril, which is to say, my mother’s.
I know, for example, that I abhor the word “dementia.” I abhorred it before my mother’s condition presented, and I abhor it only more, and only more confidently, now that I have looked into it, and into my mother’s condition. From the French “demens,” meaning “out of one’s mind,” I abhor its connection to the adjective “demented.” A demented person is not simply a person who has forgotten something, and that is who my mother is. She is a person who has forgotten something. That she is a person who has forgotten many things, and things of great importance, and that she will continue to forget things until she has nothing left to forget, and that I am one of these things she will forget, is forgetting, has forgotten, this is all beside the point.
As for talking to my mother, sometimes I talk to my mother as if I am teaching her how to talk. I speak loudly and slowly, and I use small words. My sentences hold very little information. Rather, they are examples of language, demonstrations of language, broad performances of language that would insult a native speaker. Here is your blanket. Look, mother, here comes the nurse you like. Mother, it’s me. Things of this nature. I repeat these words, as if I am pressing them into her hands, closing her fingers around them, “Here,” I am saying, “hold onto these for me.”
In life, my mother despised small talk. Once, she was thrown out of a book club of neighborhood mothers and grandmothers and widows and spinsters and asked never to return. She was very proud of this. Her friends, one and all, became her enemies. She was brusque with young waiters. She demanded they come to the point. But they were only being nice, telling her the specials.
Often, after I have spoken to my mother in this awful new way of mine, I think, “How she would hate to hear me talk like this.”
When I taught my own daughter how to talk, I did not talk to her the way I talk to my mother now. I talked to my daughter freely, idly, as if she could understand me perfectly. Perhaps I said things I shouldn’t have. No doubt I did. I was often alone with my daughter in those days. Those days were bad days between her father and me. A stark, cold crevasse had opened between us, neither the first nor the last of its kind. Whatever I did with my daughter, I did it while doing something else. The dishes, my grading, some chore that, unlike the long labor of raising a child, I could not put off until later. I spoke to her from behind book pages, over the tops of my reading glasses, from other rooms.
Not long ago, she came home on break to visit. We stayed up late, she and I, and after a time we came to the topic of our past, hers and mine, which we do not discuss in front of her father.
“You were always talking to me,” she said.
“Oh?” I said, as if I did not remember this. “What was I saying?”
“This and that,” she said, as if refusing to break a confidence, for which I was very grateful.
When my daughter’s first book came out, another chill came between me and her father, narrower but no less cold than any other. We did not talk about the book, which was a book of excellent, sad stories about mothers. We did not talk about anything, not even our usual things, which was perhaps our way of talking about the book.
“Look,” I wanted to say, “not everything can be for you, or for us. Some things are for me alone.”
His sorrow seemed so greedy. The book, after all, was dedicated to us both.
I do not remember my mother chatting with me, not when I was a girl. Later, yes, perhaps, when, for most purposes, we were the same age.
I have tried and tried to remember my mother chatting, with me or with anyone. For my efforts I have found old memories of my mother issuing orders to me, admonitions, often about my posture, my habit of sitting with my legs apart, my preference for trousers, my loud speaking voice, preface — so she insisted — to hostility, even in civil conversation, the clear appearance in my life of bad influences.
I can admit now that she was only trying her best. But to do what? To make me into a certain kind of woman, I suppose, who stands up straight, crosses her legs, abjures trousers, speaks softly and sparingly, is impervious to all influence, good or bad, which for all I know is the kind of woman my mother was.
But what was I doing, really, with my daughter, in that thin, hungry time of mine, of ours? I am not sure. I would need her to tell me. But it is not the sort of thing you can ask. You would not be able to trust the answer if you got it that way.
Whatever I was doing, I see myself doing it elsewhere, at odd moments you would never guess. That visit of my daughter’s, I woke up very early, the morning she was to leave. It felt like I had awakened to a needful task, and in that spirit I got out of bed, pulled the covers up beside her father, went down into the kitchen, made the coffee, ran the water into the sink, retrieved the tins of last night’s leftovers, transported them into smaller tins, all this in a strange way, neither thinking nor the opposite. I was doing these things, but I was also watching them be done. I wanted to see what I would do next.
Later, during all the detente of our farewells, I pressed these tins into my daughter’s hands.
“What is this,” she said, “what are you doing.”
First, I said, “For the road, if you get hungry.” Then, I said, “I don’t know.”
We laughed, then there were our goodbyes the three of us, then our goodbyes just me and her, at her running car, these latter goodbyes unspoken, unspeakable, as were our promises of a future reunion, then my tears, in private, or a performance of privacy, these tears, like everything important in my life lately, also unspoken and unspeakable, silent, as if I were finally heeding a bit of my mother’s advice.
And I see myself doing it, whatever it is, when I talk to my mother. You would think I would see it less and less there, as these conversations of ours become less and less meaningful, more spacious, more and more a preface for a long silence to come, our scant words lying over that silence like leaves over a pit trap. But no. I see it more and more, as it turns out, this strange thing I am doing.
In time, I will do my mother’s talking for her. I will tell the nurses that my mother has no appetite for apple slices just now. I will tell my sister that our mother does not want a fussy funeral. I will tell myself that my mother is comfortable in her chair, that her blanket is not chafing her, that the view of the parking lot pleases her. This will be a solemn, unhappy process, as all transfers of power are.
I have heard it is common for one to say a dying person’s name to them as they die, as if to call them back from their death. I wish I had never heard this. I wish I could remember who said it to me. I would find them and tell them, “For shame, for shame, be more careful next time,” which is what I want to say to my friend, the widow, though in that case, I yield to propriety.
I do not call my mother by name, not yet, but I can foresee a time when I will. After she is dead, I will refer to her by name in the legal documents which will be mine to execute, to the priest who will perform the order of her burial, to the engraver who will carve her headstone, to all the functionaries of my mother’s death who do not know her name.
For now, I call her “mother.” But even the word “mother” is not the word it once was; noun, a woman in relation to her children, or, verb, 1. to bring up (a child) with care and affection, 2. to give birth to. This word is being stretched by a pressure from within, collapsing under a pressure from without.
For example: my mother moves to pick her nose with her fingernail, which is a long, magenta falsie.
“Mother!” I say. Verb, a command to desist, syn. “Halt!” “Cease!” “Stop!”
We are all doing work we were not meant to do.
Furthermore: for admonishment, “Mother,” I say, “no.” For agreement, “Yes, mother, isn’t it?” Sometimes, “mom,” for a more familial remark, e. g. “Are you warm enough, mom?” or, if I detect distress, simply, “Mom?” “A nice, view,” I say, looking out onto the dismal empty parking lot, the standing trees, their bare arms stretched to the gray heavens, “isn’t it, mom?” “Mother …” in distress of my own, “Oh, mother,” sometimes, when I am not with her but am overcome by the memory of her, “Mother,” indeed, to call her back from something, “Mother,” less a name than a word, less a word than a cry, yet a cry fraught with all the meaning of a word, no doubt to say, “Don’t go, not yet, come back, come back,” and then, “Very well, but take this with you.”