Motherless Daughters (14 page)

The adult daughter does, however, confront the loss with a relatively intact personality and more mature coping skills than an adolescent or a child. Instead of having her personality emerge from a grieving period, she brings an already-formed personality to it. Although intense crying, denial, or withdrawal may occupy her initial mourning cycle, she understands at some level that adjusting to the death of a parent is a developmental task of middle age. Losing a parent at this time violates fewer assumptions she has about her future. In the healthiest scenario, she internalizes the positive aspects of her mother that she wants to carry on, rejects the negative ones that troubled her, and continues on—motherless, but intact.

“Although the primal bond between mother and daughter may become warped, twisted, and violated, it never can be severed,” writes Martha A. Robbins in
Midlife Women and Death of Mother.
A motherless woman continues to renegotiate her relationship with her mother throughout her life, changing her perceptions and trying to find a place for each new image as it develops.

A woman who lost her mother during childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood often finds herself mourning the secondary losses as she reaches certain maturational checkpoints of middle age and beyond, and longs for the guidance of a more mature, experienced woman. Says Caroline, fifty-three, who was eleven when her mother died, “I’ve really grieved for her a lot as an adult. I could have used the passing down of woman-knowledge, to know what it’s like to be an adult woman and to go through menopause. And what it’s like to look back at your life, and think about dying. Of course, Mother never got to do that. She was forty-seven when she died. She probably never went through menopause. I don’t know. But all the wise-woman ways that she
could
have had—I’m grieving for the loss of those.” Even though Caroline has had two stepmothers she’s loved and many close female friends, her mother’s knowledge is what she’s wanted all these years.

Our mothers are our most direct connection to our history and our gender. Regardless of how well we think they did their job, the void their absence creates in our lives is never completely filled again. Says thirty-three-year-old Suzanne, whose mother died three years
ago, “When my mother died, a lot of people tried to comfort me by saying, ‘Well, you still have your father. You still have a brother and sister. You have a wonderful husband and beautiful children.’ And you know what? That’s all true. That’s all completely true. But I still don’t have my mother.”

MY MOTHER DIED the kind of death no one ever likes to discuss. It was sudden. It was dramatic. It was a panicky, dissonant scene. Her body weakened by a ubiquitous cancer, her spirit squashed by false hopes, she crawled onto the ambulance stretcher and sobbed on her back between the drawn curtains in the hospital emergency room. She no longer had the strength to sit up. I held her hand until the doctor arrived and my father sent me into the hall. Leaning against a row of silver pay phones, I stared at the tile floor in disbelief. I had never seen my mother that helpless before or watched a body fail to such a degree. I had never known such defeat.

But this is all emotion I recall here, because that’s what I always remember first. The visuals are more difficult to share. The final stage of cancer, when a person struggles to maintain control over a body that is failing her so completely, is a heartwrenching sight. “That’s your mother, that’s your mother, that’s your mother,” I had to force myself to remember each time I looked down at the hospital bed. Sixteen months of chemotherapy had transformed her into a woman of indeterminate age, had ballooned her body and stolen nearly all her dark, curly hair. When the cancer reached her liver, her abdomen swelled so large that at the moment of death she looked ready to give birth. There was a sick irony about it all. A few hours before she lost consciousness, she lost the capacity for audible speech, and though we tried to decipher the desperate, honking noises she made, we never found out what she was trying to say.

My father later told me that her last words were “Take care of my children,” which she whispered to him just as she slid into a
coma. I’d like to believe she somehow managed to force that dying request through. You hear about people who’ve been unconscious for weeks suddenly opening their eyes or making the sign of the cross or even sitting bolt upright and barking out a coherent sentence moments before they die, so I suppose anything can be true. Anything, in those last moments, if you want it to be badly enough.

But those final words are my father’s story, not mine. By now, we each have our own version, our own mythology, our own fragile grasp of the truth. My sister remembers a moment one way, I remember it another, and a friend of mine from high school reminds me of parts I could swear never happened at all. Fact or fiction, I’ll never know. The only story I can believe in is my own, and in my version, my mother doesn’t have a deathbed request because she never knows she’s going to die.

What she told me, what I heard, what I created to fill in the crevasses: It’s all pieced together like an awkward mosaic, forming a jerky path that somehow leads to a semiprivate hospital room. I know it began when an allergist found a lump in her left armpit in 1979. She had her gynecologist check it. “It’s nothing,” he said. “And besides, you’re only forty. Come back in six months and I’ll check it again.” Six months later, he said the lump was exactly the same size. “If it hasn’t grown, it can’t be cancer,” he told her. “There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just a cyst. You’re fine.” One afternoon two months later, as we sat together at the kitchen table, eating peanuts and dumping the shells into a green Tupperware bowl, she said she should probably get it removed, just to be safe, but that operations were expensive and money was tight that year. And after another six months, or maybe it was more, she finally went to a different gynecologist, who immediately sent her to a radiologist for a mammogram. Who sent her to a surgeon for a biopsy. Who shook his head and recommended she get a second opinion, just to be sure.

As I sat on the hospital bed after her mastectomy, she told me the cancer had spread to some of her lymph nodes but not to others, which meant, she said, that the doctors had been able to remove it all. Preventive chemotherapy began the following week. She responded to the first six months of treatment, and a CAT scan in November was negative. The following April, she came home from the next
scan smiling. “All clear,” she said. “Good news.” In May, when the oncologist started a new regimen of drugs, she told me it was just a precaution because her white blood count was a bit low.

In my story, we all saw cancer and chemotherapy as temporary inconveniences, as though my mother’s illness were a minor malfunction that any trained handyman could fix. When I found her crying in the bathroom, holding the first handful of hair, I reminded her it would all grow back within the year. We turned the purchase of her first wig into a comedy sketch, parading me through the store in Farrah Fawcett curls and agreeing I was never meant to be a blond. In May, she started knitting me a ski sweater she would finish before her treatment ended that fall. Only as she grew noticeably weaker and her stomach began to swell did it occur to me that something might be going seriously wrong.

I wonder: What level of precision determines when a body crosses the line between functional and dying? Is there a distinct moment, a millisecond or a nanosecond, when the number of healthy cells suddenly drops too low to permit the recovery of life? Or is there a single cell whose abnormal division creates a threshold where previously there was none, just one outlaw cell to blame? My mother seemed to speed across that line so fast. As I remember it, she was sitting in a reclining chair in front of the television one evening, bouncing her foot and impatiently waiting for her abdomen to recede, and the next morning she just didn’t get out of bed.

When my father, whose religious affiliation had formerly consisted of writing an annual check to cover synagogue dues, took an hour one afternoon to go speak to a rabbi, I stayed with my mother alone. She was lying downstairs by then, at sub-basement level, where the air was cooler against her flushed skin. When I carried her to the bathroom, she sat on the toilet and handed me a wad of tissue without looking me in the eye, too ashamed to admit she wasn’t strong enough to use it herself. “I’m so sorry you have to do this,” she said over and over again. As I was trying to help her back into bed, she stumbled, fell onto her side, and cried out, “I just want to die already. If I have to live like this, I just want to die.”

“Don’t
say
that,” I ordered, as I tried to slip a pillow under her head. “You don’t mean it. Don’t ever say that again.”

I’m sure I didn’t think it then, but now I know that hour was the closest I’ve ever come to hell, sitting in a dark basement with a dying mother, the air-conditioning turned up high in the middle of a heat wave in July. Everything around me had been reduced to sets of extremes: life and death, heat and ice, crazy hope and utter despair. Somewhere in that hour I lost all relation to a middle ground, and I didn’t regain it for what ultimately became a very long time.

In the morning, my mother woke up vomiting black bile, and my father called an ambulance. We’d done all we could for her at home. As she rocked from side to side in an agitated sleep downstairs, he sat me down in the living room and told me she was going to die. “Your mother has to go to the hospital, and I don’t think she’s going to come back”—that’s what he said.

I stared hard at the upholstery on his chair, blue and green paisley paramecia floating in a beige sea. When the muscles in my neck constricted, I could almost see their cilia beat. “How did it get this bad?” I asked, still eyeing the chair.

“I’ve known it for a long time,” he said. “Since the operation last spring.”

“You
what
?”

“The surgeon came out of the OR and told me he couldn’t remove it all,” he said. “He just closed her back up. He said, ‘At most, I give her a year.’ But how could I tell her, or you kids?”

You
what
? I thought, and he saw the accusation in my eyes.

“We’ve been lucky,” he said, rising from his chair with his palm pressed against his forehead as he heard the attendants on the front path outside. “We had her four months longer than she was expected to live.”

Lucky
? I thought, as I stood behind an emergency room curtain an hour later, holding my mother’s hand and trying to press ice chips between her cracked and blood-stained lips.
Could someone identify the lucky people here
?

When my father left to take care of the insurance forms, my mother and I were alone again. She lay on the stretcher and cried with her eyes closed, the tears oozing through the corners. “I’m so afraid,” she whispered. “I’m so afraid I’m going to die.” She tugged on my forearm. “Tell me,” she pleaded. “Hope, tell me I’m not dying.”

What does a daughter owe her mother in this last moment together? To do as she asked would mean to lie to her. To tell the truth would mean to dishonor her request. I had no easy answer, and allegiances were tricky: Was I to side with the parent I trusted most, who had borne me, or the one with whom I’d be left? My fingernails cut painful half moons in my palms as I whispered, “I’ll stay right here with you. I won’t leave you alone.” Even as I said it, I knew I was avoiding the point, and I’ve never quite overcome the feeling that in that most critical moment, I somehow failed.

As the family members arrived one by one that afternoon, my aunt and I sat together on the black vinyl couch in the hospital waiting room. “This is a nightmare, a total nightmare, and I’m surrounded by clowns,” I said. We were mixing our metaphors, talking in non sequiturs, but nobody seemed to notice or to care. There was too much to process, too fast. My mother had just telephoned her oncologist from the hospital bed. “What’s happening to me?” she asked him as I held the phone against her ear, and I could tell whatever he said still wasn’t the truth. That’s when I realized the extent of this, how many people had been hiding information from her all along.

The next evening she slipped into a coma, and the attending physician gathered the family in the hall. He warned us she might stay that way for days or weeks, even as long as a month. He told us we should try to prepare.
“A month
?
”
I thought, covering my mouth to push the protest back in. “How can we go on like this for a
month
?” Maybe my mother sensed the same. She died with my father holding her hand at 2:43 the next morning, as my sister and I slept on the couch in the waiting room down the hall.

The night before my mother died, I had dipped behind the curtain divider and showed the woman in the next bed a photograph of the family taken the previous spring. “I wanted you to see her as she really was,” I said. “And not to remember her as she is now.” But even as I said it, I knew the words were meant for me. It took years before I could remember my mother as she was before she learned she had breast cancer, years before I could bypass the terrible image of her lying jaundiced and comatose in a hospital bed, even though the first image lasted for almost two decades and the second for only two days.

When people ask how my mother died, I say, “She had breast cancer.” What this tells them is the cause of death. What it tells me is that I can still see the inside of the shop where we bought her first prosthesis, and can hear her voice singing out false CAT scan results, and can feel her hand gripping mine from the hospital bed. I may be able to tell you what my mother died from in only four words, but their subtext fills the page.

 

My mother died from cancer. My mother committed suicide. One day, my mother disappeared.
These may be grammatically simple sentences, but they aren’t simple statements. To sit up all night with a mother in pain, to find her suicide note on the kitchen counter, or to hear the graphic details of her accidental death are all images that, unless we block them out completely, remain with us forever. Psychologists agree that the cause of a parent’s death—along with the child’s developmental stage and the surviving caretaker’s ability to cope—is a leading factor in determining a child’s long-term adaption. As Nan Birnbaum explains, the cause of death influences how the family reacts, what type of support system is available, and what kind of stresses the child has experienced before the actual loss. “Let’s say an eight-year-old girl’s mom has been sick with cancer for three years, off and on,” she says. “That means from the time she was five, her mom has undergone various treatments, has been under various anxieties, and has had to cope with keeping up her relationship with the kids. All that has had some impact on the child already, before the mother actually dies. So that’s a different story than an eight-year-old whose mom is killed in a car accident. One is not necessarily more traumatic than another, but the child’s growth is affected in different ways.”