I stepped away from the dinner table innocently enough – to
do something simple, to clear a few plates after dessert.
When I returned my mother had a wonderful smile on her face,
cheeks puffed full of laughter just waiting for the right moment to chuckle forth. It took me a moment to understand her
bemusement: it was mid-August—on the table we had a wonderful heaping bowl of fresh berries and
another of whipped cream.
My mother had taken a very large dollop of the cream and
plopped it down in the open pages of an Architectural Digest magazine. She was beside herself.
There’s no need for confusion. My mother was in the vast middle ground of
Alzheimer’s disease, with her world blended between a spectacular imagination
and somewhat shaky grasp of what we would call reality.
The consummate hostess, she had been taken by a photograph
in the magazine, a regally set dining room table, and realized that it would be
nothing short of rude not to share our own rich bounty.
I knew my mother loved the magazine and others like it, for
the picture-book relief and indulgent clarity they gave to her own fragmented
sense of past, present and future. But
this was the first time I realized how interactive her truth had become.
I struggle now to explain the jumble of emotions I felt in
this moment: stunned with anger and sadness, a sudden elation – yearning love –
fear; confusion; an utter loss for words.
So I did the only thing that came to mind. I started laughing, laughing with her,
pointing and laughing.
I whisked another sizable helping onto those already slimy
pages.
It was the only thing I could do.
Never before or since have I understood so clearly how
comedy and tragedy are opposite faces of the same dramatic coin. However widely we both smiled, I couldn’t
escape the awful fact that I had just lost one more piece of my mother.
I learned a great deal more in the two years between this
magazine shortcake and my mother’s death, most of which I am still trying to
figure out. Amidst a complicated legal
battle with her second husband and medical emergencies that ricocheted into
anguishing decisions about how best to care for the body that housed her
failing mind – between this and the simple struggle to remain present, to
visit, to listen to her disjointed stories that became mumblings and screams
and sometimes just the thrashings of her arms and legs, I realized that I knew
very, very little.
I knew almost nothing, but I felt more than I ever imagined
possible, each day more than the next. I
felt my stomach in knots, my heart racing, my legs fatigued by thought and my
brain numbed by hours of running, the only thing that could occasionally bring
a shred of calm. Anxiety came and went
as a flash in the pan or an elaborate, consuming, seven course meal. The same thing with happiness: an irreverent,
geeky pun that offered a chuckle all my own, or moving conversations with
friends over days of splendid vacation.
It didn’t matter how many hundreds of books I had read, nor
would the thousands more in my scholarly queue.
Better put: knowledge does not displace emotions, and it’s as helpful
for confusing what you feel as for providing any sense of order or reason.
When I would spend time with my mother at her care facility,
I saw with piercing effect how our inner lives are created and sustained by the
complex minutiae that accrues as our emotional existence. She and the other patients acted out the joy
and sadness, the bliss and spite, the empathy and jealousy and forgiveness and
hatred that had combined into their being and now emerged no less intensely for
its profound randomness.
However pretty the softly wallpapered walls, the colorful
posters, the medical equipment hid by gentle covers and an ever kinder staff,
however peaceful and serene this home strove to be—
Imagine an elderly, toothless, disheveled and entirely
helpless woman hunched over in her wheelchair whimpering with endless malice:
“get him. Get that bastard. Get him.”
Or my mother, clutching her stuffed-animal cat and staring
frantically off into space while insisting that you find her lost pet, weeping
at the thought of having let him go.
There were inspiring moments, too. Couples flirting like high school
sweethearts, old men bickering over a baseball game on TV, for them played
simultaneously in three or four different decades: “That’s Mo Vaughn.” “No, you fool. Babe Ruth.”
Or was it Sammy Sosa. Black,
white, Latino, whatever—peanuts and cracker jack, I don’t care if I ever come
back.
But this isn’t purgatory.
It’s you and me. It’s all of us
right now.
For some reason we’ve come to think that growing up means
getting ourselves together, smoothing out the complexities of life. Naïve and with little to be self-conscious about,
we go into that awkward abyss called puberty, and hope and pray that at some
point things will start to make sense again.
Maybe.
A little less high-pitched and squeaky, perhaps.
But like it or not, it’s complexity and confusion from here
on out. Which is as wonderful as it is
terrifying.
Now I can hear various pundits saying to hell with this
wishy-washy, touchy-feely crap. Toughen
up. Let men be men, earn a good living
and enjoy a cold beer, and give women the teary-eyed space needed to be a caring
mother. Or any other line from the
countless men are from mars, greatest generation fantasy books.
If you’ve ever looked into the eyes of a solider just
returned from war, or a father holding his child for the first time, or simply
those of a good friend on a hard day – if you’ve ever been honest with yourself
– you know that we live our lives in constellations of feeling as vast, diverse, contradictory and nuanced as any in this universe.
To pretend otherwise, to let cynicism and petty cruelties
callous your emotional being: this is an irreparable loss, a foreclosure on the
liberty we have to exist as wholly human beings. The snide remarks, the falsely righteous
comfort of thinking yourself smarter, sexier, stronger, more stylish and
successful than the next – even just the stolid pragmatism of adulthood: these
needn’t be replaced by selflessness, humility and endless sacrifice. Just a little bit of honest vulnerability.
Together we each possess an emotional genius that has
nothing to do with our talents in calculus or our ability to master
Presidential politics.
The goal isn’t to be forever childish, or to be
irresponsible or to take foolish risks for the sake of thrill.
All the same: we take ourselves way too seriously, but nowhere’s
near seriously enough.
As I struggle to let myself cry, to be loved, to remain
honest in pain and in pleasure, I remember that whipped cream. And that laughter. I hope you can hear it, too.
The National Rifle Association’s bullying, funded by hysterical members and gun manufacturers fighting to maintain market share, has long blocked legislation to permanently ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and to close the gun-show loophole on background checks. 
