My father retired from his Hardware business in the late 1970s, and a few years later my parents moved to Florida. They settled in Ft Lauderdale where they bought an apartment in a condominium community close to friends from Brooklyn. They had a good life. The sunshine and warm weather agreed with them, they connected to a synagogue community, they made new friends and reconnected to their friends from Brooklyn who had moved to Florida a few years earlier. My brothers and I visited frequently, sometimes for the holidays and sometimes just to take advantage of the milder weather. Since my parents didn’t drive, my arrival with a rented car provided them with welcome transport.
One trip included an appointment mom had made with her cardiologist. Most likely she had made it to coincide with my visit. It was a hot August day and she was dressed in one of my favorite outfits: a red and white plaid design in a cool summer fabric, one of her lively, attractive and flattering “going -out to dinner dresses”. Ironically, that was the dress that about 10 months later, I chose for her to be buried in.
We sat in the airy and extremely pleasant waiting room. The décor was uniquely Floridian- patterned wallpaper with large green vines against a white background, sturdy sofas which one could sink into, interspersed with dainty cane chairs covered in a matching fabric of vines and flowers. The room was crowded and there were not many seats. Dr. F. was running late. We sat there a while before mom’s name was called and we were ushered into a small examination room with an examination chair, a table holding instruments and two small chairs across from each other, where we sat. I gave the comfortable chair to mom while I sat on the swirly stool. We passed the time chatting easily as we waited. Then Dr. F., a fiftyish, slim, slightly balding man with a definite Type A personality burst into the room. I met him for the first time at this visit, though mom had been seeing him for several years. He was considered to be a good doctor by her friends and neighbors, and mom had confidence in him. I thus never quizzed her about what being considered “a good doctor” meant.
He greeted mom, addressing her by her first name, even though he was young enough to be her son. “Pauline, how are you doing” he asked as he skimmed her medical record, while nodding at me after mom had made the introduction. He listened to her heart, asked her to take a few breaths, checked the medication she was taking and said, “There is really nothing else I can do for you” as he headed for the door. The exam was over in a flash and he had disappeared before we could ask any questions.
The suddenness and harshness of his pronouncement, as well as the statement itself stunned me, and I burst into tears. Sitting across from me, mom responded calmly, “At least I won’t die a young woman”, trying to comfort me and perhaps herself. She didn’t seem surprised. Was that composure for my benefit or did she know that her angina could be controlled with medication, and that was all that could be done.
She was 82----indeed, not a young woman. But she was also sufficiently healthy to carry out her daily activities, and aside from periodic bouts of angina, was enjoying life in her community. She had friends, regularly attended meetings of her Hadassah and Pioneer Women’s groups, and continued to cook healthy daily meals when she and dad didn’t go out for their “early bird” specials. They both went for daily walks around the development and she occasionally used the workout equipment in the development’s meager and antiquated gym.
A tape of that moment has lived with me ever since, and as I have aged from 82 to 83 to almost 85, it plays more frequently. I heard it loudly when I was diagnosed at the age of 82 with lung cancer and then this year when I had recurring squamous cell cancers on my legs. For a split second, as I ponder my brush with death, I am back in that room, as mom faces her mortality while acknowledging she has lived a reasonably long life.
Mom died almost a year later from cancer, growing unbeknownst to all of us, in her digestive tract. Looking back, I realize that moment in the doctor’s office was perhaps a harbinger of what was to come.
My brothers and I learned of mom’s cancer long-distance. As was the case with most significant family news, we had to piece together a full story by pooling what each of us learned in our separate parental phone conversations. Mom had fainted during an evening out and was diagnosed with severe anemia and internal bleeding, probably in the intestines. Further testing was recommended, but mom emphatically refused saying, “I am not going to have mina kishkes schtupped and shlapped”(my intestines pushed and prodded). Arrangements were made for home hospice and we tried to figure out how best to support her and dad long distance.
We agreed that though we lived in the Washington DC and New York areas, we would try to have a family member visit each weekend, and we were mostly successful in that regard. But fulfilling our responsibility towards my parents did not put my mind at ease. Something else nagged at me: time was running out to bring closure and resolution to my relationship with her.
I never doubted that she and I loved each other, but I felt that more intellectually than emotionally. My feelings were mixed and complicated. When a new therapist, at our first visit, asked me to describe my relationship with my parents, I replied without a moment’s hesitation that I was a dutiful daughter.
Scores of snapshots of mom and me play on my mind’s screen, variations on the same theme. It is the end of a visit to my parents in Florida and mom walks me out to the car. I load the luggage, close the car trunk and think of the drive back to the airport. Mom stands by the car, waiting expectantly for a good-bye hug. My mind is elsewhere. Finally, she says, “Aren’t you going to give me a hug?” She guessed perhaps that I wasn’t feeling especially loving towards her, perhaps because she had been critical of me during the visit, but I did the dutiful thing and gave her a hug. I wonder what she felt and whether she saw the hug as dutiful rather than loving.
Visits home were difficult. No matter how hopeful and well intentioned I was when they started, by the time they ended I was ready to leave. I often said to friends that I regressed about 15 years for each day that I was there. The longer I stayed, the greater the strain, and the more my feelings were either hurt or disregarded. I was usually relieved and eager to get moving by the time the visit ended.
I am about 14 or 15 and it is late on a Saturday afternoon when mom decides she needs a few items from the neighborhood Safeway. She gives me the list and money and I head out to the store a few blocks away. It is a beautiful late summer day and there are lots of people out on the streets. I arrive at the store in a somewhat dreamy state. Tomatoes are at the top of the list. I pick a few from the pile, put them in my cart and go onto the other items. Soon the shopping is done and I return home with my packages. Mom removes the tomatoes from the bag and feels them. “They’re soft. Didn’t you check what you bought?” she asks. “You took the tomatoes from the top of the pile and didn’t even feel them,” she states disgustedly. I feel she is thinking, how could someone be so stupid? She looks me straight in the eye and recites from her storehouse of Yiddish and Russian folk sayings, “When you send a fool to the market, the merchants are happy.” Her judgement pained me and the sunny day turned dark.
Perhaps her most devastating criticism was to blame me for the break-up of my marriage, when I was at the most vulnerable time of my life. After my husband told me that he’s leaving, he decided we should go to New York to tell our parents. The mission that week end was clear, and I looked for a time when my mother would be alone. She was in the bathroom putting on make-up and I stepped in and closed the door. I got quickly to the point, perhaps too quickly. “Julie is leaving me”, I said. It was greeted with -stunned silence. She was shocked by the news, and I couldn’t believe that I had just gone public and made it official. I don’t know what I expected her reaction to be, but I certainly didn’t expect her to blame me for the break-up, especially since he was the one leaving and was disinclined to try to save the marriage even though our children were 9 and 12 years of age. “Sure, you are never around for your husband, too involved with your own interests,” she said. She was probably thinking of the MPH degree I was awarded the year before, when I traveled to Ann Arbor, Michigan one weekend a month for two years. When she realized what she had blurted out, she tried to soften her statement, apologize and take it back. Her explanations fell on deaf ears and after a long silence, I cried out, “Don’t you ever blame me for the end of my marriage, …ever, …ever, …ever!” Later we went for a walk: what was said remains a blur to this day. I was simply too numb to hear and too hurt and disappointed to feel that I could count on her for understanding. Yet at the same time, her accusation may have had some element of truth.
We are like dancers in a ballet of our intertwined lives. She reaches out her arms calling me to draw near. I approach tentatively, not completely trusting the safety of her embrace. She wants me close, but closeness means risk, possibly pain. My movements are tentative, my steps small and I am wary. We enclose each other in our arms, but I pull back. There is possibly hurt in being close. She isn’t aware of how and why she hurts me or even that she does; her thrusts come unconsciously. I stand still as she reaches out her arms beseeching me to join in her dance of love. I keep my distance with an aching heart. That way I am safe.
Things begin to change after I learn of her serious condition. I visited regularly and saw her frame diminish and her energy languish. Never a big eater, she ate less and less and relied on cans of Ensure. During one visit I made a watermelon drink for her in the blender. She loved it and drank it heartily, though there was nothing to commend it nutritionally. She was pleased that it is a popular and refreshing drink from Somalia, and that I shared a little bit of my African work experience with her. Our visits during these last few months were pleasant. I learned about friends who came by, cousins who called, and that “lovely, jolly lady from hospice” who visited regularly. She read a little, listened to opera on the radio and from the tapes we bought her, and slept more and more. Her frailty was becoming palpable.
She stood in the doorframe of her bedroom, to tell me she was awake and that we could visit a little before I leave. Always a petite woman, I am shocked to see how much she has shrunk and how fragile she looked. The roles have reversed. She once cared for me and now I am caring for her. Once I needed her for love and support, she now needs mine.
I went with her to the bedroom and helped her get into bed. I sat on the bed near her, and wore a coral blouse with capped sleeves and a round boat collar that she had crocheted for me. I chose it purposefully from my closet, when I packed. I wanted to wear it because she had made it for me, even though I hardly wore it up north, feeling that it was not flattering.
We chatted a little while longer and then I reached to hug her good-bye. She commented on the blouse and how the color suited me. As she stroked my arm, she said “this blouse shows a lot of you and there is a lot of you to see” undoubtedly referring to my weight, which was then the highest it had ever been. I heard the words, but I barely felt the thrust; it hardly broke the skin, it didn’t hurt this time and I didn’t pull away. Instead, I leaned in and said, “Yes, I am afraid I really enjoy food, and that’s because you were such a good cook.”
I have thought of that moment many times. It happened in a split second and I don’t know where the words that crossed my lips came from. Probably, from an unconscious desire to express my love for her and recalibrate our relationship, knowing that time was running out. Indeed, it was the last time I saw her alive.
Mom died suddenly two weeks later----not from cancer, though the cancer had weakened her body, but from a heart attack. Dad reported that she felt pain for the first time since she had entered hospice, and he rushed to the bathroom to crush a pain pill. By the time he emerged, she was dead. I thought it was a blessing as she was spared the suffering the cancer had not fully wrought. When I returned to Florida for the funeral, I picked out her favorite dress in the red and white plaid design, for her to be buried in.
We gathered for the funeral, shared our eulogies, and had a warm and loving family meal when we returned from the cemetery. I made vegetarian chopped liver, using my mother’s recipe, and we not only relished it but commented on how much my mother would have enjoyed being with us. We felt she was.
Although mom died thirty years ago, barely a day goes by when I don’t think of her. She was an industrious and ambitious woman, who sought more from life than she was able to realize. As I said in my eulogy, “her reach exceeded her grasp and she dreamt grander dreams at night, than she realized during the day.” A quilt she crocheted adorns the sofa in my den, and the percale cotton robe she sewed, recycled from the living room drapes in her Brooklyn house, still hangs in my closet though it never quite fit me. In addition, a painting from her Brooklyn College Adult Education art class hangs in my study. She copied it from a UNICEF greeting card and she did it justice. I look at it frequently in admiration of her diligence, latent talent, and desire to express herself. I didn’t know many mothers in Brooklyn who went “back to school”, albeit adult education, when their children were grown.
She was a woman of substance: insightful and wise. Her folk sayings seem as apt and psychologically insightful today as they did when I first heard them.
“He can see the pimple on someone else’s back, but can’t see the hump on his own”, or
“No one can build prison bars as high as the ones you build for yourself”.
Ever since her death I have wondered why she was so critical of me, while at the same time proud of who I was and what I did. When I described in a letter to her the underfunded and poorly resourced school in Yavne, the development town in Israel where I worked, she took it upon herself, unbeknownst to me, to organize a luncheon among her Hadassah friends to raise money for the school. I could not have felt prouder of her and her support when I handed the principal, to his great surprise and delight, a check for a few hundred dollars that she had raised.
How much did her unrealized aspirations contribute to her desire for me “to be perfect”? Did she see me as the vessel through whom she could achieve her ambitions, and were my imperfections an affront to her and thus unacceptable? I still ponder these questions.
When I realize that mom’s illness and death freed me to love her fully, I feel sad about the lost opportunities to express my love to her. She deserved it and deeply yearned for it, and I think she had no awareness of how she pushed me away. In dying, she became the mother I wanted and that she wanted to be. How sad to think about “what might have been.”
Could it have been different; could I have been the loving daughter she sought?
Perhaps…but I would need another lifetime, the distance, maturity and understanding I have today, to make it so.