Why You Haven't Heard From Me
Esther Carbone
My Mother In Her Younger Days, Prospect Park
Hard times, and I've fallen silent. I know that writing about it could actually be helpful, but I'm still too deeply immersed to do so. It has to do with my mother, whom I've written about often in this blog. She fell, and she got pretty banged up, including a head injury and a broken hip, and she's been through hell, and right now she's in a rehabilitation and skilled nursing center following surgery. We're trying to get her back to a reasonable degree of comfort and stability so she can return to the assisted facility where she'd been living for a decade.
She's a month short of 90, and I've had the feeling lately that she's been fading away, but it fills me with anguish to see her suffering. Right now she just wants to go back home, where everything was, as she says, simple. And of course I've been all churned up inside since this happened.I guess what I'm feeling is the immediate stress of trying to help oversee and manage things to the limited extent possible, traveling back and forth as best I can. Also, it's heartbreaking to see her so vulnerable and scared and in pain. And underneath it all is perhaps the premonition of the strangeness and sorrow I will feel when she is gone.
It's not that I see her as dying in this moment, but I do think it would be naive not to recognize that someone so elderly does not fully recover from an event like this. Often, it accelerates the downward spiral...and she's far from robust. So I'm hoping for her recovery but bracing myself for that not-too-distant inevitability.It's oddly masochistic of me, but I've also been looking at old letters, photos, memories, reviewing the trajectory of her life, with its bleak times and terrible losses, trying to make some sense of it or find a few forgotten reasons to smile. So far it has only made me heavy-hearted.
We all have complex emotional histories with our parents, and this one was particularly tough, as those who know me (or have read my essays) understand. But even if she wasn't so good at being a mother, maybe she did the best she could. So it's been a complicated relationship, and there's a lot of pain and ambivalence, but in the course of the last several years everything I felt about her had distilled into pity and forgiveness and even flickers of affection, maybe a funny kind of love, if that's the name. I saw it as my duty to check in on her and try to bring her some cheer and comfort, and that's gone on for a pretty long time, and the cessation of it will leave me both strangely unfettered and terribly sad. In some ways I see I've been oddly devoted.
But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. She's still here, drawing upon some stunning residue of spark and resilience, and I hope we can get her back for a period of peace, comfort, and relative contentment. When I see her in physical therapy, just bones and long white hair, I marvel at her determination, taking steps with a walker, pedaling the bike, trying with all her might, which isn't much, to regain some mobility. There's something so touching and brave about it. She isn't asking for much, really, and I hope she can do it. In the meantime, I'm beyond exhausted and emotionally depleted. Given her frailty, limited financial resources, and the overwhelming maze that is the way things work, I feel like I've been wandering through a very dark, depressing, alienating place. I need to come up for air.
The good news is that when I came home the other night, the frogs were singing, and the stars were ablaze with their milky light, and I couldn't believe how comforting this was. My two tall girlfriends swept me away yesterday for a day in town.
And some people are very kind.