Harvey Orkin

Dialogues with My Mother

Joe Weintraub

Prologue

My mother handled Dad’s funeral quite well. Considering.

Considering that she had been removed against her will from her home almost a year before, to reside in an assisted-care facility, Tudor Hills, separated from my father who, in need of round-the-clock medical attention, lived a quarter mile down the road in the far more institutional setting of Avon Vale, among a far more damaged and dependent population.

Considering that she suffered from severe attacks of clinical depression, plunging her into states of catatonic anxiety whenever she was confused or whenever the rigid routines she had arranged to structure her days were in any way disturbed or displaced.

Considering that although she could participate in normal conversation--with her customary interest and affection--and speak accurately of the distant past, her recall of the previous days, hours, even minutes quickly vanished from her consciousness.

Considering that on the last night of my father’s life—his breath wheezing in his throat, one ravaged arm waving in slow spirals above his head in an effort to communicate, his profile that of a desiccated mummy--my mother still expected to bring him home and nurse him back to health.

So, although she once asked us as we drove to the cemetery if we were on our way to the hospital, and although she broke down in tears of incomprehension and loss at the gravesite, and although she acted, occasionally, as if she were attending another kind of family function—an anniversary party or a bar mitzvah—as we sat shiva at my sister Dianne’s house (the traditional ten-day period reduced to two in deference to her condition), it could be said that, considering the circumstances, my mother handled my father’s funeral quite well.

Dialogues

This past year, when my father was still alive, my sister, who lived near the complex, would usually see our parents twice weekly, and I would travel from D.C. to Philadelphia about once a month. We would stop first at Tudor Hills to spend some time with my mother before taking her down to Avon Dale to visit with Dad. But as soon as she saw us there, she was probably reminded of my father’s deteriorating condition, and perhaps fearful of what might be awaiting her down the hill, she did not once ask after his health. In fact, it often required considerable persuasion before she would agree to accompany us on our excursion to Avon Vale. (Once by his side, however, she seemed oblivious to his increasing frailty, his jaundiced complexion, the bruises on his thinning arms, and we would often spend as much time convincing her to return as we had trying to get her to come in the first place.)

Consequently, when we arrived to drive her to my sister’s house the morning after the funeral for our final day of public mourning, Dianne and I were both alarmed and surprised to find her eagerly awaiting us, expecting to be instantly taken down the road to Avon Vale.

She was wearing her favorite cashmere sweater and a bright, floral-print dress, and as soon as she saw us, she arose from the white wicker chair in the sunny alcove and approached, smiling.

“Well, it’s about time,” she said. “I’ve been ready for what seems like hours. Let’s go see how your father’s doing.”

Of course, we should have been expecting something like this. She had been forgetting so much so quickly. Why not also her husband’s death and his funeral? But we were hoping for the best, and we were certainly unprepared for her eagerness to be taken to Avon Vale and the cheerful attitude that accompanied it.

“He seemed so much better yesterday, don’t you think?”

“Mom,” I said, stammering. “Yesterday. . . . Don’t you remember?”

She looked toward each of us in confusion.

“Mom,” began Dianne, trying and failing to progress beyond where I had left off, “don’t you remember?”

“I haven’t heard from the doctors today. What do they say? When can I take him home? I don’t want to be here much longer.”

“Mom . . .”  and then Dianne looked toward me, and I tried again.

“Mom. Don’t you remember? The funeral?”

Her smile tightened, a hint of anxiety tracing across it.

“We’ve come to take you back to Dianne’s house. We’re sitting shiva. It’s our second day of sitting shiva.”

Dianne added quickly that her husband, her two boys, and my wife, Karen, were waiting for her there. “And Ben and Amy will be getting in from Boston any minute now. They want so much to see you. They were so sorry.”

No additional explanation was needed, and as the anxiety on Mom’s face turned to helpless panic, she seemed to shrink inwardly, and then she retreated backwards into the alcove, falling down into the chair. “But how could this be happening? He was getting better! You said he was getting better!”

Her shoulders were trembling, and the corners of her mouth slumped as if being yanked downward by fishhooks.

“I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this is happening,” she repeated until her words were overwhelmed by sobbing.

My sister and I drew up chairs from either side and draped our arms around her in that sunny alcove as she continued to cry and shiver like a child drenched by a sudden rainstorm, buffeted by cold winds. 

After about a half-hour, we finally calmed her enough to walk her to her room, and we returned to Dianne’s house without her. Fortunately, most of our relatives had paid their respects the previous day, and only Ben and Amy were disappointed by her absence.

The next day, Sunday, my wife and I stopped first at Tudor Hills before leaving for D.C. This time we had not notified the staff beforehand, but we arrived just after noon, when most of the residents would be relaxing after lunch. Mom was sitting at one of the cleared tables in the dining hall, and when she saw us approaching, she rose to meet us.

“Just a minute,” she said, after embracing us one after the other, “I’ll get my coat.”

“No, Mom,” I said, stopping her, holding her arm. “We just came by for a few minutes. We’re on our way back home to D.C.”

“But aren’t we going over to see your father, to say good-bye to him, too?”

Karen and I had discussed the likelihood of this happening again, and we had decided that we would try to avoid upsetting Mom by evading the truth. But with my father’s death and funeral so fresh in our minds, I was struck by the awful premonition that unless we made an attempt now to imprint that fact indelibly into my mother’s permanent memory, it would be lost to her forever.

“Mom, sit down,” I said.

“No,” Karen cried, “for God’s sake, don’t!” but still I led Mom over to the empty television room where we could be alone.

Of course, Mom broke down again, as she had on the previous day, and we had to delay our departure for almost an hour.

My attempt to engrave this event in her memory had also failed, as I discovered when I called her during the week. Rather than asking about the weather in D.C., her usual opening to our phone conversations, she immediately wanted to know if the doctors had told me anything about Dad’s health, and over the phone, without hesitation, I again disclosed the fact of his death.

I don’t believe I was being insensitive or foolishly optimistic, as Karen insisted, or needlessly cruel. Nor was I being blindly faithful to a truth that could not be easily discarded or wished away. Rather, I was convinced that Mom’s failure to recognize my father’s death would condemn her to a life of permanent anxiety, an endless mental torment over his fate and their future. On the one hand, she would persist in hoping for his recovery, but dread the formidable task of rebuilding and managing their lives under the daily threat of disability and decline. Yet every day she would also fear that he would never leave Avon Dale, and how could she bear watching him suffer through his final moments, endure the funeral and its attendant ceremonies, and return by herself to the deteriorating home she loved (a house and its possessions my sister and I were already arranging to sell) and live there alone without the man who had been her husband for over sixty years?

This was a condition I refused to accept, and perhaps I was hoping that my voice over the phone, distant and matter-of-fact, would help her absorb the reality of his death, relegating it to the past where it belonged, and the following week when, instead of asking after the weather, she wanted to know what the doctors were saying, I again told her the truth.

Again, after her cry of disbelief, I heard only static and silence, and I pictured the receiver dangling from its cord and my mother trembling and shrinking and clinging tightly to herself with both arms as attendants converged about her.

My sister called the next day to tell me that the director of Tudor Hills had reached her at her office and cautioned her to be more “solicitous”—his words—when speaking with our mother over the phone, that it had taken the staff “considerable time” to calm her down the previous times she had spoken to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s difficult.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, how do you deal with it?’

“I tell her he’s the same.”

“And when she still wants to see him?’

“He’s sleeping peacefully.”

“And when she persists?”

“I change the subject.”

“And if . . . “

“I turn around and leave.”

Dianne then asked if I would be driving up to Philadelphia that weekend, and I told her we’d be there late Friday evening.

Karen and I called ahead to remind the staff of our visit and to avoid surprising Mom, but by the time we arrived to take her to lunch on Saturday, she had already forgotten we were coming.

We found her in the community room, where a young woman, infectiously upbeat, was leading about half of her audience in a cheerful rendition of “Pack Up Your Troubles.” Although not singing along, my mother was swaying to the rhythms of the tune, and when she noticed us waving to her from the doorway, she smiled.

But the smile disappeared as she arose, and by the time we embraced, she was approaching the edge of panic as if she were expecting us to deliver a subpoena or a telegram from the War Department.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I’m shocked . . .”

“We’re taking you to lunch today. Didn’t they tell you?”

“They never tell me anything around here.”

“Well, let’s stop by your room. It’s getting chilly. You’ll need a sweater.”

“Are we going to see your father first?”

“We’ve already been down there today,” said Karen. “He’s not feeling too well. We should let him sleep.” After some discussion with my sister, this was the strategy we had decided to follow.

The alarm in my mother’s face deepened. “What’s wrong? He was fine yesterday.”

“The nurses aren’t worried, but they think that sleep . . .”

“I don’t care what the nurses think. What do the doctors say?”

“They don’t think it’s anything serious,” I said, jumping in. “They’ve been taking tests just to make sure. It’s nothing. Sleep’s the best thing. That’s why . . .”

She stopped me in the middle of the corridor to look directly into my eyes. “There’s something wrong. You’re not telling me everything.”

When I was a boy I was a good liar, lying audaciously to teachers, friends, my sister (especially my sister), and even my father without fear of discovery. But I was always reluctant to lie to my mother. She had an open, unsuspecting nature—tough, but with a certain modest innocence she carried with her from childhood—and although she preferred not to expose me, she invariably knew when I wasn’t telling the truth. 

Fortunately, Karen intervened. “Let’s go to lunch first, Mom. Afterward, we’ll call to see how he’s feeling and if we can visit him then.”

At lunch, we did our best to deflect her insistent concerns about Dad’s present circumstances and their possible futures together. But no matter how often we changed the direction of the conversation—introducing the weather, our last trip to Europe (with photos brought for the occasion), Karen’s new job, our hunt for a larger condo, the general cost of living—she returned us to Dad’s bedside, to the length of their stay at Tudor Hills and Avon Vale, to the state of their house and their finances, dissecting our responses, our devices, like some prosecuting attorney interrogating a hostile witness, probing ever deeper for inconsistencies and perjured testimony, burrowing beneath our surface distractions for the truth we were intent on keeping from her.

We returned to Tudor Hills exhausted by the experience, having revealed nothing.

The following day, Sunday, my sister and brother-in-law joined us on our luncheon outing. Our cover story this time was that Dad had been taken to the hospital for a few simple tests, but this tale only led to a barrage of troubled questions about hospital hours and visits, medical prognoses and treatments, release dates and post-hospital care, and, invariably, Dad’s worsening condition until, by the end of the meal, we had all fallen into a protective silence. On our return, with the others in the back of the car refusing to participate, and me, in the driver’s seat, next to her, exposed to the full force of her assault, I eventually succumbed.

“I still can’t understand why I can’t see him now.”

“Mom, the doctors advise against it.”

“Then it must be something serious. Why aren’t you telling me? There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“It’s not serious. It’s only a bunch of standard tests.”

“But how soon can I see him and when can I take him home?”
“We don’t know. It could be a while.”

“A while? But if they’re only standard tests, why should it take a while?”

I pulled into the Tudor Hills complex. “Ok, we’re here.”

“Why aren’t you taking me home?” she asked.

We dealt with this question in one of two ways. The first—frequently used when my father was alive, less so after his death—was that we wanted her to be close to Dad, just down the road in Avon Vale. Obviously, this was not now an option. “We don’t want you to be alone,” I said.

She twisted around to face my sister in the back seat. “When are you going to take me to the hospital to see your father.”

“I don’t know,” replied Dianne, seriously regretting the strategy we had chosen for the occasion and barely audible. “I have to work late most of this week, and then we’re going to Atlantic City for the weekend. We’ve been planning it for some time.”

Mom then turned back toward me, having remembered that we would be shortly leaving for D.C. “You’re going back to Washington this afternoon,” and after I said that we were, she asked when we were coming back.

“Soon, probably. Next month for sure.”

“Then who’s going to take me to the hospital to see your father?”

“Mom.” I replied, unable to dissemble any longer. “We’ll be back next month for the unveiling.”

“Unveiling? What unveiling? Who’s dead?”

This last exchange prodded my sister into action, and she thrust herself almost between the two front seats. “Nobody’s dead, Mom. Everything’s all right.”

But it wasn’t all right. I had apparently dislodged a nerve close to the surface, dormant but alive, waiting to be ignited. “But that can’t be. He was fine. Just yesterday when we saw him, he was fine, ready to go home!” and as she collapsed into tears, I sincerely hoped that if on the next day she failed again to recall Dad’s death, she would soon begin to forget that he had ever lived, so that she could begin to recover some fragment of a life for herself, undisturbed by the shadowy presence of her absent husband.

Epilogue

We didn’t take Mom to my father’s unveiling, and even though she persists in interrogating me whenever I see or speak with her, I’ve taken Dianne’s advice and always change the subject, lying whenever necessary, and continuing to lie, even though I’m sure she sees through me. I suspect that she knows Dad’s gone but that the fact remains submerged, just beneath her consciousness, barely discernible and still vague enough for her to imagine that some day she will be presented with irrefutable evidence of the contrary. In the meantime, we continue to obfuscate, divert, and overwhelm her with words whenever we are in her company and escape into silence when pressed too hard. It’s no answer, but it is a solution, and whenever I speak with Mom nowadays, I’m reminded of a particular conversation I had with her when I was eight years old.

It was on the occasion of the unveiling of my grandmother’s tombstone. My mother’s father had died when she was just a child, and she always viewed her own mother as a protector and her closest companion. Grandmom had been seriously ill for some time before her death, but it still struck my mother very hard when it finally came. Yet, even though Grandmom had lived with us from my birth, it wasn’t until weeks of accumulated absence and this morning of the unveiling that I, too, realized the immensity of what had happened.

“What’s an unveiling?” I asked Mom as she was helping me knot my tie.

“It’s another way of showing respect to someone who’s left us.”

“Grandmom’s in heaven?”

“Looking down at us right now.”

“Because the doctors couldn’t help her?”
“No.”

“But when she was in the hospital, you said they’d help her.”

“They tried. They could only do so much.”

“Why?”
“Sometimes people become just too old . . . “

“How old was Grandmom?”
”Seventy-three.”

“Is that too old to live?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why did she have to die?”

I was being as cruel and unthinking as children can be. But it was my first experience with death and loss, and I was frightened.

“Because God called her,” she said. Her replies had become agitated, but I wanted to be reassured and told that everything was all right, and although I knew I was upsetting her, I persisted.

“But why?”

“Because it was her time.”

“Her time?”
“Because she was sick and old . . .”

“But you said . . .”

“I know what I said,” she replied, her voice now quivering, yet still sharp enough to contain a warning that I ignored. “I said it was her time!”

“But why?”
“Because. That’s why. Because.”

“Because?’

“Yes! Because. Because. Just because!” and since she then left the room in tears, I had to settle for “because.”