INTRODUCTION

In the summer of 2004, I moved my eighty-six-year-old mother from Edenton, North Carolina, where she was a well-known and much-loved musician, into an assisted-living facility near my house in Charlotte. I had no idea what the next few years of my life would be like, but I guessed they might be difficult. They were more than difficult. They were gut-wrenching, sometimes grieffilled years—and yet also more rewarding and soul-stretching than I could possibly have imagined. Sometimes in the throes of despair, I would write essays about what I was going through when I could find the energy. Then I began to think that sharing my experiences of dealing with an elderly parent might be helpful to others who were just embarking on this adventure—as reading about the experiences of others had been helpful to me.

So I started out to write a book about taking care of my mother. However, I found that I could not write about my elderly mother without writing about my younger mother. I couldn’t write about my sacrifices without writing about hers. And I couldn’t write about being a daughter without writing about being a mother. Then there were all the others who played such important roles in this journey: my brothers, my husband, my daughter, my friends both living and dead, even my dog. Mostly, I realized I couldn’t write about the present without writing about the past.

This is my spiderweb of a story. I have kept the real names of my brothers, my mother, myself, and many of my friends—with their permission. I have changed the names of my husband, his family, and our daughter out of respect for their privacy. I am sure they do not share my perspective on all the events that I describe. This story is my truth. Theirs may be something entirely different. I have also changed the names of the various places where my mother was housed over these years. Some of them were fine. Some were awful. I learned a lot about the way we treat our elderly and our caregivers.

One day while driving in my car, I heard an interview with Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, on the NPR show Here and Now. O’Neill said that “the best marker of whether a woman will live in poverty in her old age” is motherhood. I was shocked. “Being a mother is the one factor that correlates strongly with living in poverty in old age,” she said, adding that we don’t have policies in this country that support caregivers. O’Neill noted that caregiving is largely unpaid and largely done by women.

For my mother, Social Security represented her only income in her old age, other than what my brothers and I contributed. That, I discovered, is not uncommon. According to the Social Security Administration, about 90 percent of all elderly women live solely on Social Security. In addition, women live longer than men and their Social Security payments are less. Few elderly women have private pensions. Another scary statistic: by 2030, one in four American women will be over the age of sixty-five. I will be one of those women.

And what does this mean for the women who are doing the caregiving? According to a study by the Commonwealth Fund, 25 percent of women who care for a sick or disabled family member rate their own health as fair or poor, and more than half of women caregivers have one or more chronic health conditions. I can attest that while taking care of my mother, I often neglected my health for lack of time, energy, and money. The study also states, “Nearly one-third of all caregivers (31 percent) report a decrease in their family’s savings because of caregiving responsibilities. Overall, two of five women caregivers devote more than twenty hours per week to caring for a sick or disabled family member.”

Although my mother has always been a very private person, she understood my desire to tell our story. I have tried to paint a broader picture of her than the emotionally fragile old woman she became in her later years. She was so much more. In addition to possessing a wide-ranging intelligence, she was kind, generous, fun, and extraordinarily talented.

The centerpiece of this story is my mother’s requiem, a composition which she wrote as a memorial for two young men who died in separate accidents. This book is also my requiem for friends I have lost, for my mother, and for the long chapter of my life that ended somewhere in the midst of all these events.