Childhood's End

By Lynn Sunday

One thing you will probably remember well is any time you forgive and forget.
~Franklin P. Jones

I was fifteen years old when my dad stepped on his bathroom scale and discovered he'd lost weight without trying. Soon after that he began waking in the night slick with sweat. I was sixteen when cancer killed him. He was forty-nine.

My mother fell apart during his final year when our lives were about doctors and test results and the antiseptic smell of hospitals. Surgeons cut my dad open and closed him up again. He returned home a bedridden, shrunken, frightened man — not my wise, witty father at all — whispering to me about fun things we'd do, places we'd go when he recovered. He remained at home with visiting nurses coming and going until he was moved to a nursing home to live his last month on a morphine drip, with round-the-clock nursing care. My mother sought relief in prescription drugs, one after the other, to ease her constant anxiety and depression.

She was fifty-five and white-haired when she became a widow. She'd married my dad in her late twenties — before that she'd lived with her brother who'd looked out for her. As a pampered only child, I had no idea that when my dad became too sick to work our family income stopped as well, and our financial situation was precarious. I didn't know how emotionally fragile my mother was, or how frightened she must have felt selling the suburban New York home she loved, and moving near her sister in Manhattan. I didn't know what it meant to have or to lose a life partner — and to deal with menopause at the same time.

But I was a teenager and to me the world was made up of my thoughts, my wants, and my feelings. The dad I adored and admired was gone. My mother — my adversary and nemesis since I turned thirteen and my hormones kicked in — was consumed by her sorrow, vanishing into a perpetual haze of legal drugs.

I felt alone — like I'd lost both parents, even while one still lived. My mom didn't cry when my dad died, or at his funeral or after that — never smiled or laughed again either. Aching for attention I reached out to a neighbor in his twenties and we became lovers. I was happy again, imagining myself in love. I got married and had a son a year later. I was eighteen years old.

My mom and I never fully reconnected after that, although she and my aunt lived only three blocks away from me. Our relationship was so stressed, I was angry when my mother had a breakdown and was hospitalized for a week — angry at my obligation to join the relatives in conferring with her doctors about her latest ailment and escalating depression.

"What's to be done about poor Celia?" the family asked, hands wringing, gathered around her hospital bed — while head hanging, eyes cast down, my mother waited for us to decide. But short of resurrecting my father and restoring him to her side, we had no idea how to help her and the doctors continued to prescribe pills.

My second son was born after we moved upstate. I earned my college degree and then divorced two years after my graduation. I moved with the boys to San Francisco.

Although my mom considered my cross-country move a personal betrayal, I was, given the circumstances, the best daughter I could be. I telephoned often, wrote letters, took my sons to visit her, and had her visit us. She drank us in like sunlight when we were together — but when goodbyes were said and I resumed my life her world went dark again.

She was in her late seventies when her sister lost her mind and was put in a nursing home. Her brother, who lived not too far away in Queens, died a few years later. My mom was eighty-seven, tiny, frail, and swallowed up by dementia when I packed her up and took her to a nursing home two miles from my home near San Francisco, where I lived with my second husband.

There was, at the end, a reconnection. One stormy day in September, the afternoon of my fifty-first birthday, I visited my mom at the home. It was a good one as such places go: clean, and the caretakers were courteous and kind. But I felt my own mortality gazing at the terminally old sitting silently in their wheelchairs, lined up along the hallways like pigeons on a fence.

I exhaled sharply before taking a deep breath and helping my mother to the enclosed front porch, the least depressing spot in the place. After seating her in a comfortable chair, I sat beside her setting out paper plates, the banana bread that she loved, fresh fruit, and chocolate cupcakes on a small table between us. We sat nibbling, looking out the big front window at the trees swaying in the wind.

I sat, as I had all my life, bearing witness to my mother's grief, thinking I could hardly remember back to when I was small and called her Mommy — and she smiled, laughed, gave dinner parties, made me dresses and birthday cakes, and cared for me when I was sick.

And then my mother spoke. "You know I'm not normal anymore, Lynn," she said in her charming Hungarian accent, with her precise, almost formal way of expressing herself. I turned to her, surprised, and she continued. "It can't have been much fun for you being my daughter all these years, since your father died. Honey, I'm so sorry for that."

I stared at her in astonishment. My mother — the mother I loved and longed for — still existed inside this ancient wreck of a woman. I felt a hot rush of love for her and tears slid down my face as I took her wrinkled old hand and stroked it gently. We sat together talking about my childhood, and the life she loved in the suburbs with her fruit trees and backyard garden. She asked if I'd loved my dad and I told her she'd given me the best father anyone could have had. We sat like that until she was tired and I took her back to her room and put her to bed.

When I came the next day she'd disappeared again. I searched her eyes for a sign she remembered yesterday's conversation. There was none. My mom died a week later, silently in the night, at ninety-one.

I was and remain grateful for that brief moment when the veil over her lifted and I heard my mother's voice filled with love for me — and our connection, battered but unbroken, was reaffirmed. It wasn't everything I'd dreamed of but it would have to be enough.

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