The Woman Who Can't Forget (13 page)

The next day my mom and I went shopping. Everything seemed normal, but it wasn't. There was a quiet space in my head where even the normal seemed distant, as if seen from a far place where it's clear but isn't. This was the first time that I started to feel what I can best describe as a disconnect from everyday life, which persisted for the next twenty months. I felt strangely distanced from the world and even from myself. It's terribly difficult to describe, and all I can really say is that it was disconcerting.

I went back to college on Wednesday, April 15, though I desperately wanted to stay home. Trying to concentrate on my course work became a nightmare. My mind started racing with memories of times I'd spent with my mother, cycling through our good times and our fights. I called home constantly and came home one more time for a long weekend, April 24–27, but it wasn't until April 29 that my dad called to tell me what the doctors had discovered.

My mother had been diagnosed with tinnitus, a continual ringing or roaring noise in the ear, caused by damage to the hair cells of the inner ear. The actor Tony Randall was afflicted with the disease and created the Tinnitus Foundation to help cure it. What a relief to find that although it was a serious condition, it was not life threatening.

That kind of scare usually sparks introspection, forcing reflection on the relationship that was in jeopardy and how much that person means to you. I should have taken a long look at my relationship with my mother at that point, buoyed by the relief that she was not in danger after all. Perhaps that could have taken place if there was more time. Maybe if it had all ended there, I would have found the inner space to self-reflect. It would have been a perfect opportunity to reconcile our differences and for me to work on our relationship.

Unfortunately, the drama of my mother's condition wasn't over yet. A few weeks later, in mid-May, I came home for two weeks and was waiting to go back for summer session in June. On Friday, May 22, Memorial Day weekend, I walked out the door at 12:30
P.M.
to meet my friend Jonathan for lunch. My parents were walking up the driveway as I came out, and my mother was crying in great heaving sobs. I had never seen her cry like that before. My dad looked at me, shook his head, and shooed me away.

Obviously something truly horrible had happened, but I knew my father didn't want to talk to me about it right then. He wanted to be alone with my mother. As soon as I got back home, I found my father, and he told me that my mother had gone for a brain scan that morning. The doctor who had diagnosed the tinnitus thought she should undergo tests to determine the cause of the ringing. The scan had revealed that she had a brain tumor and needed an immediate operation to remove it.

My father saw that I was about to break down from the news and wouldn't tell me anything more about it. For the rest of that day, and in the days following, my parents acted as though nothing was unusual. That very afternoon, my mother was on the phone planning a Memorial Day party. On top of that she invited Danny and Beverly to come over that night so that Danny could help my dad build a new barbecue. I could not join in their stoicism; I was terrified, and my memory went into overdrive, calling up every unkind word I had ever said to her, every fight we'd had through so many years.

When I went back to college for summer school seven days later, I had a migraine headache every day. The summer heat was blazing hot, and I felt weak, so my mom called my doctor and explained what I was going through, and he told her my electrolytes were being depleted. He said to drink Gatorade and take better care of myself. I was constantly worried and nervous. School became a nightmare again because I couldn't concentrate on anything except memories of my mother—good ones that made me angry at the unfairness of her condition, bad ones that made me feel guilty and ashamed.

Every time I called home, the answer was the same: everything is going to be okay. Don't worry. Everything is going to be fine. I was certain that wasn't true, and after a while I couldn't stand being away. The surgery was scheduled for July 8, and I came home on July 2 for the holiday weekend. What did we talk about over that weekend? We talked about the new car that they were getting me. We talked about a party we were having that weekend. We talked about everything but the surgery. The amazing thing to me was that acting as though everything was fine worked for the others in my family. I really didn't understand that then, because I didn't have that ability, and their insistence on not talking about the surgery made me angry.

I was distraught when I went back for the second session of summer school on July 5. On Wednesday, July 8, my mom had her surgery, and I called my dad's office as soon as I got back from class. His assistant was evasive, and that terrified me. When my dad finally called me later, I could tell something had gone wrong. He was always strong and sure, but in that call, he sounded more stressed than I had ever heard him: “Jill, something happened to Mommy's heart and they had to stop the surgery, but don't worry, everything is okay.”
Everything is

okay.
God, how I hated that mantra.

That was all my dad would tell me, and it wasn't for two days that I found out from my mom's oldest brother that the doctors had to stop the surgery because she had a heart attack during the operation. She had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia and had flatlined. The doctors had to break her ribs in order to get to her heart and shocked her seven times with the paddles before it started pumping again. When I talked to my father about it, he told me that when the doctors came out from the operating room, they looked as if they'd run a marathon. She suffered such trauma that they were going to have to wait to reschedule the operation until she recovered.

That night a strange new feeling began to come over me that added to my disconnectedness and persisted for months. I felt as if I were standing on a ledge, about to fall. It was hazy and indistinct at first, and I don't even know how to explain it fully. Solid ground was gone. I didn't feel that I could step back. I was just stuck on a ledge before some dimly lit huge abyss. The following weekend, I went home.

Finally, we got the word that my mother could have the surgery in November. My parents came out to college to visit on October 9, and I kept thinking that it might be the last time I would see my mom. I wanted to make up to her for all of the difficulties through the years, but as anyone knows who has gone through this sort of experience, there's really no way to do that, at least not in a few days' time. Our parents probably don't really expect us to make amends for all of the hard times raising us; most often they don't even really blame us for all the times we burst into a rage at them, or stormed out of rooms, or gave them the silent treatment. My mind was racing, though, with memories of how horrible I'd been to my mother; scenes of fights we'd had flicked through my mind relentlessly, and I was so on edge that of all things, I ended up getting into a fight with my parents.

I was determined after that to do something to show my parents how much I cared, so I went home a couple of weeks later to surprise them. I will never forget my dad's reaction when he opened the door: he was unhappy to see me. He tried to hide it, and the look just flickered across his face, gone almost as soon as it was there. But I saw it. I felt my whole body react with shock, as if I had just taken a bullet. He just didn't want me there.

My family was, and is, my center. No matter what I had ever done, I knew they loved me and had always forgiven me. I had never seen that look before, and now I would live with it all of my life. The pain I gave them is the pain I have to live with too. Forgetting and forgiving are bound so tightly together that one cannot exist without the other. The expression on my dad's face that Saturday, October 24, 1987, will never fade in my mind; it cut to the quick, and at that point, my mind became fixated on remembering the cycle of days that had led up to that day.

One date cued another in a vicious circle: Saturday, January 31, 1987—being mean to my mother. Wednesday, April 29, 1987—the “good” diagnosis of tinnitus. Friday, May 22, 1987—seeing my mother crying and being told about her brain tumor. Memorial Day 1987—the barbecue where no one talked about her illness. July 4 weekend—home to another party where no one talked about her illness. Wednesday, July 8, 1987—the operation and my dad's call to tell me my mom was okay. July 10—my uncle telling me my mother had almost died on the table. July 17—coming home to see my mother in the hospital and causing a huge fight with my dad. October 24—my father's face when I came home to surprise them. All those memories churning through my mind once again overwhelmed me. The feeling of disconnection got so strong I parted company with reality in some way I still cannot define. Tangible things weren't important anymore. I was me watching me, and I didn't care what I did or what I felt.

On Friday, November 27, the day after Thanksgiving, my mother told me that her operation had been postponed yet again and was scheduled for Tuesday, January 5, 1988. She told me that although she knew she could die on the table, she was going to take that chance because she wasn't going to have this brain tumor kill her. The surgery was going to deprive her of hearing in that ear because they were going to have to remove the whole ear canal. But she was facing that prospect with remarkable stoicism.

During the Christmas break that year my dad got me a job working as an assistant to Les Moonves, then senior vice president at Lorimar Productions. Before I left for work on Monday, January 4, my mom, our housekeeper, and I stood in the living room crying and saying good-bye. She was leaving for the hospital that day. There was a moment when I looked at my mother and knew I might never see her again, and it kept me holding on to her tightly. I knew that by the time I got home that night, she would be under premedication for surgery. At work that day, I made it through entirely on automatic. It is one of the few times I have absolutely no memory of the specifics of what I did. I couldn't concentrate at all because my memories were racing so wildly through my mind. The next day, when she was in surgery, would clearly be worse, and I told Mr. Moonves that I was going to stay home, which he was wonderfully understanding about.

The day of her surgery, I was so distraught that I didn't go to the hospital with my father to wait. I stayed in bed all morning, terrified. I simply couldn't go. I couldn't forget her surgery the past July, and I knew that the surgery was risky and she might die. I could not bear the thought of facing that news with all of the family and so many of her friends who would be there around me. I felt I needed to be by myself if it happened. I didn't have the words to explain that to her then, and I didn't understand it myself at the time. She and I both struggled for many years to come to terms with how I had behaved.

I now realize that I needed to know she was alive before I could go there. When Vivian, one of her best friends, called me to say she was all right and the tumor had been removed successfully and she wouldn't need any more operations, I could finally let the fear go. That night when I went to the hospital, my mom was still heavily sedated, and I just sat and watched her, feeling shame that I hadn't come earlier—shame that still haunts me regularly.

From the moment my mother was out of surgery, she went on with her life. What did I do? I could not stop remembering the ordeal, and I felt that I was losing my mind. The detachment I'd been feeling was strange and inexplicable, and I still felt disconnected from myself. I had stopped journaling that past October, after the crisis of my mother's first surgery, and now I was compelled to go back to it. I sat down and wrote all eight months of days from October 1987 to May 1988, and then up to the day that I finished, which was Tuesday, June 21,1988. The job had taken a month, and it helped me get some control over my emotions from the crisis, but it didn't purge the memories, and a deep fear of my own mortality began to plague me.

Then, two years later, the second big crisis that rocked my family during my twenties commenced. My mother and father were one of those couples everybody assumed would be together through the good and the bad for the rest of their lives. They had fallen in love in a whirlwind and had never looked back. But our home life had become more and more tempestuous, mostly because my mother and I fought so much, but I had never doubted for one second that their marriage was rock solid. My parents themselves almost never fought. Then starting in late 1989, my father started to feel that he needed a break, though he and my mother didn't tell me and my brother for a while that anything was wrong.

Looking back, I realize that my father's fifty-third birthday, Tuesday, November 14, 1989, was a sign of things to come. That night,
The Godfather
was showing on TV, and my dad had said that what he most wanted to do for his birthday was for all of us to stay home to watch it and order pizza. Then that morning, we got the news that my grandmother on my mom's side, Nana, had suffered a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. She had moved out to LA in 1983 to be near us because she had developed Parkinson's disease and was beginning to fail. At first she lived in our house, but then she moved into a retirement home close by.

That morning, my mom rushed to the hospital to be with her, and we were hugely relieved when they were able to stabilize her. Later that night, we were still planning to watch the movie, but instead, as happened much too often in my house, a fight started. My brother and I got into it first, and then my mom tried to stop us, and we all ended up yelling. And all of a sudden, my father stormed out of the house. He had never done that before.