MOM STILL POSSESSED a great deal of her youthful beauty. One would never guess from looking at her that she suffered from so many afflictions; she had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and fibromyalgia, and was often tired or achy. She believed that her muscles had never forgotten those cold, cramped days in the attic and those exhausting, bumpy rides in rickety military trucks, traveling from city to city in search of the next temporary shelter. A visit to her doctor left her worried that her body was “falling apart,” but at least her skin was perfect. Neither the doctor, nor anyone else, could have foreseen that Mom would soon lapse into another depression. This one would be even more severe than the two that I had witnessed back in college and law school, over two decades earlier.
Something seemed not quite right in Hawaii, back in April 2006. Mom and Dad came with us as our guests over the kids’ spring break. My sister, Gwyn, and her family met us there, too. From the beginning, Mom seemed irritable. She was usually in high spirits on vacations. For all of her worries, she always loved an adventure. Sometimes I marveled at how well she went with the flow, putting up with everyone else’s moods. But not this time. Within minutes of arriving at the hotel and being informed that my parents’ room would have two double beds rather than the king-size one we had requested, Mom seemed bent out of shape. I felt responsible, since I had planned the trip, and guilty that Cliff and I got a king-size bed in our room. Mom said nothing to assuage my doubts about not offering her our room.
A day or so later, after a morning workout, Gwyn and I wandered into the hotel spa’s boutique. Coincidentally, Mom walked in moments later. Seeing us together, she looked hurt. Later, she asked me why we had excluded her from our shopping plans. “We didn’t make plans, Mom. We just happened to be there,” I felt compelled to explain. Another day, after I returned from a beginner’s golf lesson, Mom told me that she would have liked to be included. I was frustrated by her disappointment, particularly since she had never before expressed any interest in golfing.
By the end of the trip I was furious. Mom’s mood had ruined my week. Wasn’t bringing her on our vacation proof enough that I was a loving, good daughter who wanted to be with her? Why did our relationship begin anew every time the sun rose, like Groundhog Day, with no points ever accumulated for my prior efforts? I sensed that any attempt to express my anger would only lead to Mom’s feeling hurt. Even more disturbing, I sensed a change in Mom’s emotional state, somehow more raw and frail than usual, even though it would be several more months before I or anyone else could put a name to it.
Back in Los Angeles, things returned more or less to normal. But still, I sensed in Mom an amorphous, fragile quality, like an antique piece of fabric that still looked beautiful but could tolerate very little stress. Then, over Labor Day weekend, at Gabriel’s bar mitzvah, something again was askew. It was a subtle thing, something only an enmeshed daughter would notice.
Mom smiled and made appropriate comments, but she was distant. Absent was the overwhelming joy I had expected this devoted grandmother and Holocaust survivor to exhibit at her grandson’s bar mitzvah. As I greeted guests at the party, I wondered whether I had done something to upset Mom. Dancing with Cliff, I thought about whether Mom felt hurt that she had not had a more prominent role in the ceremony. Unfortunately, our synagogue had strict guidelines concerning family members’ involvement. I watched Gabe, gleefully laughing, lifted into the warm night air on his chair during the hora, and noticed that Mom was not in sight. Despite the joyful atmosphere, I couldn’t block out the lone cloud that hovered overhead.
Weeks later matters came into focus. Mom’s eyes and voice took on that haunting quality reminiscent of her depressions two decades earlier. She sat in my office, trying to describe what she was feeling.
“I have struggled so hard to deal with my father and the loss of my mother. Once we were a family, and now I can’t even go to their graves because there’s too much pain.” Tears rolled down her cheeks as she told me this.
“You can visit your father’s grave in Chicago,” I said.
“No. I can’t. I remember him from when I was a child, and then I feel all of the loss. And the pity I had for him. It’s too much.” Mom played with her hair, sobbing, then dabbing her nose with a tissue. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. I don’t want to upset you. I pray to God to let my true self emerge again and get past this temporary setback.” She shook her head back and forth, moving her hands expressively. When she referred to herself, or something heartfelt, she lightly tapped her chest with her fist.
“I always thought I had plenty of time to deal with my past and then still enjoy the future. Now suddenly number seventy is coming up, and I have never come to terms with dying.”
I had suspected that Mom’s big birthday, still several months out, was weighing on her. In the midst of this sorrow, still, she expressed hope. “Maybe you can use your contacts to help me volunteer somewhere,” she said, out of the blue.
“Do you realize how many schools and charities would be thrilled to have you volunteer? You don’t need my contacts.”
“Never mind. I know what I mean. It’s different when it comes from you.”
Had we not been down this road so many times before, I would simply have agreed to help Mom find a volunteer position. She would have been a tremendous asset to a child in need of emotional or academic support. But inevitably, Mom always changed her mind at the last minute and I was left running interference, explaining her change of heart to some disappointed executive director (and friend). Having to be at a job regularly, particularly for no pay, made Mom feel confined. Soon the issue was moot anyway, at least for the time being.
Mom could barely function. She had stopped driving her car and making social plans, and she barely ate. She left the house only for doctors’ appointments and trips to my sister’s or my home. Dad was Mom’s chauffeur and primary caretaker. Overnight his existence had become a nightmare. He was confined to his home with a stranger, in a melancholy, quiet world. Each day, wearier and more concerned, he looked closer to his seventy-five years. When Mom managed to talk about anything besides her own despair, it usually related to Dad’s not taking good care of himself or eating the wrong foods. Not only was Mom worried about turning seventy and her own mortality, but she was also obsessed with losing him.
Mom was in agony. Her psychiatrist struggled to find the right cocktail of medications to compensate for the chemicals that had been depleted from her brain during the course of her traumatic life. “I feel like I’m a shut-in. My whole body is in pain,” she told me. Her voice sounded worn out, or dehydrated from shedding so many tears.
Each morning on the phone, my upper stomach tense as a rock, I promised her that she would feel better, just as she used to promise me that the lump on my leg wasn’t cancer, or that she would be home after school.
“I hope so,” Mom weakly responded on one such morning. “Everything is so hard. Brushing my teeth, taking a shower. I just want to feel joy again.”
Blood rushed to my temples, adding to the dull, achy pressure. I had to help her. “Try and force yourself to get out of bed,” I pleaded, taking deep breaths to stay calm.
“You don’t understand.” I hated when she said that. “I would if I could. I just want to feel a spark, and then it will stay with me and I’ll make the most of it. But now, I need to be held and cuddled.”
Once again, despite all I had learned about depression since my law school days, I found myself blindsided. Mom had been so strong and optimistic in recent years. I had been surprised how even after our interviews she had been able to read through her testimony, over and over again, checking for errors. Now, she sounded like little Ruchel from a half century ago, slipping into an abyss.
Mom had been so young when she was traumatized. Had she been a few years older, she would have had time to develop stronger coping mechanisms. Instead, the damage put her at great risk for depression later in life. I had never seen her so distraught. I feared that her new psychiatrist mistakenly believed that delving deeper into her history was the key to her recovery. Perhaps he didn’t realize how much of Mom’s past decade had already been dedicated to this endeavor. Just to be sure, I called him.
“What your mother is struggling with is important for her,” the doctor told me. “But we are also trying to find the right medication to help that along.”
“I just wanted to make sure you knew that my mother is already very aware of her past. She has spent the last seven years telling me about it for the book that we are writing.”
“I know. And that opened up some old wounds. Ultimately it will be a good thing, I think, but for now it’s very painful.”
I got a sudden pang in my chest. Had I caused this? Was writing the book a mistake? It had seemed the best way to immortalize Mom’s life, to ensure that her voice would be heard. But what if, in an ironic twist of fate, it destroyed her instead? By adding dialogue to Mom’s recollections, putting words back into the mouths of Grandma Leah and other deceased relatives, had I made those memories too real? Perhaps Dad had been the most perceptive of all of us when he chose not to ask Mom about her past.
Just in case I had not been clear, I told the psychiatrist, “I need you to understand that Mom will never dig deeply enough to make sense out of what happened, because it was senseless. I only hope that you find the right medication or treatment so that she can enjoy her future.”
“That is exactly what I am trying to do,” he told me. “But these things take time.”
Over the next few days, I continued to wonder whether the book had been a mistake. Even if my conversations with Mom had not induced her depression, she was certainly not in any state to continue working with me. The window that Mom had opened wide into her past had suddenly slammed tight. But then Mom’s condition grew so precarious that my thoughts shifted entirely to bringing her back to life.
Mom was not responding to antidepressants as she had in the past. She was barely communicating, and her weight was down to ninety-seven pounds, from one hundred and forty or so the year before. I had read that Holocaust survivors suffered disproportionately from depression and premature senility. The cerebral tissue, which holds keys to depression and memory, is fragile and easily damaged by childhood trauma. Yet nothing I had learned had prepared me for this sudden, dramatic downward spiral.
My sister and I consulted psychiatrists around the country. Mom, unable to endure much more despair with no foreseeable hope on the horizon, was open to trying anything. Dad, nearing the end of his own rope, remained cautious, resisting any risky options. Eventually, however, he was outvoted. Mom underwent electroconvulsive therapy, also known as electroshock therapy, or ECT. This somewhat controversial procedure, in which small seizures are carefully induced in the brain with electricity, had been found to be successful in some severely depressed patients.
Dad, my brother, David, and I sat with Mom in the light blue, futuristic-looking hospital waiting room. My sister, Gwyn, was in another hospital room across town, having given birth to her second daughter, Noa, the day before. It had been upsetting to watch Mom passively witness her granddaughter’s arrival, virtually devoid of emotion. She was a different woman entirely from the kvelling, eager new grandmother of fourteen years earlier, who couldn’t stop smiling as she rocked my infant son, Gabriel, in her arms, mesmerized by his love for her.
David had come down from San Francisco with his family for this birth of his niece and to support Mom. At forty-one, he was a husband, father of a young son, Elijah, and a teenage stepdaughter, Zoë, and working as the principal of a special education school. Like Mom and me, he was a protector of children. He was still slim and youthful in appearance, with large, dark brown eyes, a chiseled nose, and prominent cheekbones. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that emphasized his serious, scholarly demeanor, and his dark hair was shorter than usual. For the first time, I noticed strands of gray in his temples. Mom sat between David and me and sadly put her head on my brother’s shoulder. He held her hand.
My cell phone kept ringing. David looked annoyed each time I answered. I’m always around Mom, I wanted to remind him. I can take all the phone calls I want. A nurse came and summoned Mom for her treatment. We hugged her good-bye, watching her disappear with an orderly behind steel double doors. Please let her come out physically and mentally intact, I said to myself. What if Dad was right, and we had rushed to a dangerous decision? Would he ever forgive us?
“I’m going downstairs to get a snack. Want to take a walk?” Dad asked David.
“That’s okay, I’ll wait here.”
I was impressed by David’s concern. I had spent so much time being disappointed in him in recent years that I had almost forgotten what an empathetic and kind person he was. Our relationship was not as effortless as it had been in childhood. David could not “get his arms around the idea” that I seemed to travel everywhere except to northern California, where he lived. And I could not understand why he did not come down more often to see all of us, particularly Mom and Dad, since he was the one who had chosen to move away. As I saw it, he had fled the city and assumed that my sister and I would cover for him.
That morning, David seemed sad. Probably not coincidentally, he had married a woman not unlike Mom. His wife was strong and bright, yet wounded, carrying around sorrow of her own. He and I were the only ones in the waiting room. I snatched the opportunity and asked David why he was feeling down.
After gathering his thoughts, he admitted that he wasn’t sure what the matter was, exactly, but he knew that his periodic bouts of depression were attributable to growing up with Mom’s. “I think I actually absorbed it by osmosis. Just by looking at me, Mom conveyed her need for me to make her happier,” he said. As a result, he developed a desire to please and a need to be there for others, even to his own sacrifice.
It occurred to me that David, like me, had probably wanted to be “good” for Mom’s benefit. Although he had a rebellious spirit, I never once remembered him saying anything mean or getting into trouble. Now I felt bad that this goodness had not shielded him from struggling with depression as an adult, just as in all likelihood it had never served to buffer any individual from suffering any other disease.
As David and I continued to reflect in the waiting room, he told me how proud he was of the way Mom had made a positive life for herself and for our family. His biggest frustration was with himself. He wished he could enjoy his life more.
Our conversation reminded me of a similar one I had had with Gwyn when she was pregnant with her older daughter, Sydney, and feeling down. I had sat on her bed in an attempt to cheer her up, all the while working on a crossword puzzle.
“I can’t talk to you while you’re doing a puzzle,” Gwyn had said. She had never liked my habit of multitasking.
“Then let’s go for a walk. If I sit here, I have to finish it.”
On our walk through her Santa Monica neighborhood, with its refreshing ocean air, wide, tree-lined sidewalks, and homes alternating between stuccoed Mediterranean-style mansions, Craftsman gems, and original early-twentieth-century bungalows, my sister revealed that she, too, connected the sadness she carried with her more to Mom’s past than to her own. “None of us earned the darkness we feel,” Gwyn had said. “Do you ever stop to think how strange it is? Here we are not even trusting the next moment, and yet our family won the lottery.” Mom had survived, after all, defying all odds.
Back in the waiting room I thought about the three of us. My sister, my brother, and I were strong and accomplished. In our own ways we led rather than followed, created rather than imitated, and sought to improve rather than merely critique our worlds. Among us, we had traveled widely. Still, when we came together, we were children again, and Mom was a central theme in our conversations.
Long ago, perhaps in the womb, we each had been exposed to Mom’s wounds. It probably had never occurred to her that her tainted blood could seep through to our immature emotional systems, and that we would be in the process of healing for most of our lives. None of us was as sad or fragile as Mom. Hopefully, none of our children would be as traumatized as we were. Each generation would be further removed from the shock and devastation of the original event. My siblings and I were doing what we could to make the world not seem like a fearful place for our children. And yet we wanted our children and grandchildren to have an awareness of Mom’s past. Her status as a survivor seemed integral to the values and strength they would develop.
Mom was wheeled out from her treatment. She was groggy but otherwise intact. It would still be two or three weeks and several more sessions before we would notice a difference. Even as she regained her spirit, things were not quite the same. When I looked at her now, I was always aware of the sorrow somewhere just beneath her stoic veneer. My illusion that Mom would ever be entirely at peace, able to truly enjoy the dawn she always hoped to greet once she made her way through the darkness, was shattered. All of the love and pearls and vacations I could ever hope to provide would never make up for what she had lost.