In the mid-1980s my parents move to Rochester, Minnesota. To me, it seems as if they go there to die, although to live in a retirement complex associated with the Mayo Clinic is not without logic. This move scares me. I don’t want to feel my fear of their deaths, so I look for the joke. I tell my friends I have the only parents in the world to retire in frigid Minnesota. Visiting them in Minnesota is scary. Who are these two old people? Have I ever known anything about them? They’re going to die with all their secrets intact. They’re going to die alone, even as they’re surrounded by people. I want to imagine they have souls that will slip from their mouths as they exhale their last breaths.
In the restaurant on the top floor of the retirement complex, my parents’ friends meet me. They exclaim about my wonderful parents. I smile and agree. What a fascinating career my father has had, they say. I smile and agree. My father gives lectures wowing people with the breadth of his knowledge. After one of his lectures a letter to the editor appears in the local newspaper with the headline “Positively Electrifying.” The letter ends by saying, “Dr. Silverman, those who know you must truly love you!”
I want to bolt. Because of the hypocrisy? Because my parents have gotten away with it? There is no one to significantly disturb their final days, interfere with their decorum. Even if I told these people in the restaurant the truth about my parents, they would not hear me. The truth would be too difficult to consider. After all, each table is set with linen and flowers. The arrangement is too pretty. Who would want to disturb it? Who would want his or her equilibrium interrupted? No one wants to hear; so no one will know. But of course I am the one who says nothing, who can’t tell these people, who can’t confront my parents. So maybe I—not these people, not my parents—really, I am the one unable to face it.
Instead, like a Fundamentalist preacher, I am obsessive in my mission to “save” them before they die, as if I can be the one to nourish their souls. I talk about spirituality, about the need to discover a higher power, to believe in something greater than ourselves. I ask my parents about themselves as children. Mom—what were you really like as a child? Dad—who were you? I want them to remember themselves, find something within themselves that’s gentle. Surely they—all of us—began as sweet, cute children. Or maybe I am the one who wants to know them as children. Before they die, I want to be able to love them, if not as adults, then as children, as who they were when they were little. But even though they listen to me, they don’t understand me and aren’t able to respond to anything I say.
In a way, though, perhaps they help to “save” me instead, by giving me what they always provide: money. When my insurance ends they agree to pay for my therapy. And while money isn’t spiritual, it helps, is a way they can help “save” me, even as they don’t understand that what happened in the past is why I need it.
While visiting them I sleep in a blue sweatshirt with an emblem of Mickey and Minnie Mouse across the chest. One evening when I’m saying good-night to my mother, she reaches forward to touch it, pretending she wants to see the design more clearly. I step back. She steps forward, her arm still outstretched. Unable to say “stop,” I again step back until I’m against the wall. She laughs awkwardly, asking what’s wrong. I say the word “boundaries.” She doesn’t understand. I draw an imaginary line in front of my body. Still she doesn’t understand I now own my body and she can’t touch it. In her need she lunges forward—I try to turn—but her fingertips graze my chest.
My father has diabetes, and in the morning the resident nurse comes to check his blood sugar. My father is in his underwear, but I don’t want the nurse to see him this way or know this is the way we live. Since I’m afraid to say anything to him, I whisper to my mother, “I think it’d be better if he put on a robe.” She doesn’t say anything to him either, but she hands him his robe. He puts it on but then fails to tie it.
Shortly after they move to Minnesota my father undergoes heart surgery. I fly up immediately; my sister doesn’t follow. My mother catches a cold and can’t visit him in the hospital, so I am the one to stay with him for hours, days, alone with him—my duty. Am I a martyr? I believe my impulse is fear: If I don’t do what is expected my parents won’t love me. I, the adult, am still not able to love her, the child, enough by myself.
As my father recovers he kisses the nurses’ hands and flirts with them—this sick old man who is dying. He must tell every nurse on every shift about his career to ensure they know how lucky they are to be allowed to care for him. He believes he has graced the hospital with his presence. I want to scream, Daddy, nobody cares. I say nothing. I sit in the plastic chair in his hospital room and stare out the window at a bitter winter sky. To me, he will describe in detail the bath the nurse gave him earlier this morning. Now, he says, he feels clean all over. Is this an invitation? Again I say nothing. My father will never stop. I know I will never have the power to stop him.
Soon after the operation my father’s mind begins to slip into other realities, even though, to him, little has ever been real. To hide my fear, I joke to Randy that my father has “slipped his gears.” This is how I see it, though. His mind, once knobby with information, spins smooth, grooveless, as he chucks out unneeded and unwanted facts. He creates a fantasy fourteen million dollars that my sister and I are to inherit and presses me to set up a company to handle the money. Have I hired a lawyer? he asks. For weeks he grills me about plans for the corporation. He wants the board of directors to meet with him. I do not try to reel him back to reality. As I have always done, I enact the play with him, play the role I am assigned by him, and allow his mind to float far away from the inconvenient confines of his skull. When my patience thins and I barely respond he gets angry—and still the little girl gets scared.
Finally, in the middle of the night he sneaks from their apartment and is found wandering outside. He must be moved from their apartment down to the third floor of the complex, a nursing unit, where he receives constant care.
Even though she never smoked, my mother gets lung cancer and needs surgery. When the surgeon calls to say the operation was a success, my feelings are ambiguous. I’m not truly relieved; yet, while I knew the operation was being performed, I compulsively cleaned my house.
While my father is on the third floor of the complex, my mother now moves to the fourth, where the residents’ problems are physical. They will never return to their apartment, never again be together. During the past few months, my sister and I have spoken more frequently then ever before, not just dividing up our parents’ possessions, but also, perhaps, needing to hear each other’s fear as our parents die. Now, over Christmas, I fly to Rochester to ready their things for the movers.
I am alone in my parents’ apartment. Outside their twelfth-floor window is a gray December day. Inside, I am awed by silence. My parents will never be in these rooms again, will never see their lifetime collection of furniture, paintings, art objects, photographs, books. They will never eat from their plates or drink from their glasses. They will never use their silverware. These objects seem still and waiting, as if willing to accept the inevitability of a thin layer of dust until they have been relocated, willing to accept the inevitability of a new location. These objects owned by my parents will outlive my parents, yet their footsteps will always be felt in the weave of rugs, the touch of their fingers felt on the skin of glass vases.
The apartment is not large—two bedrooms. Still, I wander in and out of the rooms. I open closets and stare at shoes and clothes. Pink sandals. L. L. Bean boots. Some clothes still have tags. For my parents the end has come suddenly, now that it’s finally come. In the pantry is a file cabinet filled with business papers and personal letters, saved over the years. My sister wants to throw all the letters away, but I will save everything. In the refrigerator is a half-finished loaf of rye bread. Fruit-juice bottles not yet empty. Daddy. Mom. I want you to be able to finish them.
I touch their possessions as if I have never before seen them. There are vases, plates, and tea sets that my father bought in Occupied Japan after the war. There are masks and fans from the South Pacific islands. A set of Wedgwood plates from the West Indies. Candlesticks my parents purchased in Israel, when it was still Palestine. Oriental rugs from the Middle East. A handwoven rug from South America. Antique photograph albums. Silks from Hong Kong. An enameled plate from Egypt. Engraved plates from Puerto Rico. Furniture my father built, years ago, with that electric saw. There are bits and pieces of households from Washington, Maryland, St. Thomas, and New Jersey.
My father’s bedroom is a shrine. Every morning, upon waking, he was able to worship himself, worship his success. The walls are crammed with signed photographs of governors, senators, congressmen. There is a photo of Justice Louis Brandeis, since my father prepared the legal brief on behalf of the United States Government in the Edwards (The Grapes of Wrath)case, argued before the Supreme Court. A letter from President Truman, framed with a photograph and a presidential pen, commends my father’s work on behalf of Guam. There are pictures of bank openings. A photo of my father with his colleagues on the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission. And more. Most of these men are dead, of course. Of those still living, none will be with my father as he dies. None will call. Relationships remain lifeless photographs. But tucked among the mementos, hung on the wall close to his pillow, is that one small photo of our family at the opening of the Saddle Brook Bank. My father stands between my mother and me—my sister slightly detached. My father beams. How proud he is of the lovely picture he created.
In the closet I find my mother’s button jar and pour all the buttons onto the rug. I trail my fingers through them, inspecting each one. Blue buttons, red buttons, white buttons. Leather buttons, metallic buttons, glass buttons. Plain plastic buttons. Buttons with intricate designs. Buttons with thread still dangling from the holes. Buttons covered with material. A pearl button with a fake diamond center. All these buttons managed to survive all the shirts, skirts, slacks, sweaters, shorts, all the clothes worn by my family.
One special button I put in my wallet to carry home with me on the plane. It is a white button with two large holes for eyes. Around the holes, eyebrows and eyelashes are painted. Below, in red paint, is a dot of a mouth. A button face. A yellow playsuit with button-face buttons. Perhaps the playsuit had first been my sister’s, then mine. I see them: all our playsuits, all our pretty cotton dresses, our pinafores, our jumpers, our sailorsuit dresses, all swaying on a clothesline in a summer breeze. I imagine I lie on the grass and gaze up at our playsuits, at our dresses, almost transparent in blinding white sunlight. I see this thinness of material, like a transparency of an undeveloped photograph, with no little-girl bodies inside.
At the bottom of a wooden trunk, under a pile of blankets, I find my senior high school yearbook. I haven’t seen it in years, and had lost track of my high school friends shortly after graduation. I sit on the floor and skim the pages of photographs, a chronicle of proms, class plays, sporting events. I turn to the senior class pictures. Jane—still smiling her New Jersey smile, one I never learned to imitate. Christopher. His young, innocent shyness is frozen in time, his face one I will never forget. I lean close to read the faded inscription, wanting to recall what he thought to write to me years ago.
“Dear Sue—What I say now I mean sincerely. You have been a part of my life that I will never forget. I’ll remember the good times, the bad times, and the confusing times. Love, Christopher.”
I wonder if he does still remember those times. Christopher, do you remember me as often as I remember you?
I turn to my own picture. I stare straight into the camera. My hair, the flip I adored, is still rigid, sleek, perfect.
I close the yearbook and ruffle my long curly hair. No longer do I need to look perfect.
In my father’s desk I discover a leather journal. Embossed in gold on the cover are the words “My Trip Abroad.” It is a honeymoon journal kept by my father when he and my mother sailed to Palestine. Inside is a dried red rose pressed into the cover with a short item from an October 27, 1933, Chicago newspaper:
CHICAGO ATTORNEY AND BRIDE PLAN TO LIVE IN PALESTINE
Irwin Silverman, young Chicago attorney, and Fay Silverman, who are to be married Sunday in the home of the bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. M. Silverman, 515 S. Central Ave., plan to make their home in Palestine. Immediately after the wedding they will leave for a honeymoon in Ireland, France, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Smyrna and Egypt. From there they will go to Palestine, where Silverman plans to join a firm of attorneys.
They sailed on the M.V. Georgic of the Cunard White Star Line on Friday, November 3, 1933, at 8:45 P.M., from New York City. The captain was F. F. Summers. I want to hold time in my hands, contain it. I want this trip back. I want the clock to read 8:44, and they have one last minute before sailing. They have just been married. But this time, before the ship sails, in this final minute, but a long-long minute, the ship must be delayed while a squall batters the harbor. All the leaves gust from trees, all the feathers fall from wings of the birds, and in this violence of nature, they, my parents, must balance nature. They must be the calm. So this time when the ship sails, the journey will be different. They will not return on the M.V. Brittanic, September 15,1935, two years later. Maybe if they’d never returned to the States, maybe if they’d stayed overseas, then they would have been different.
I remove the rose from the journal. It smells of ancient, dusty paper and crushed burgundy petals. I am awed it has survived the years. I imagine my father purchasing it for my mother the morning they married. What was he thinking that morning? Who was he that morning? Would he even once remember his mother, his first years in Russia? Surely his parents and brother and sisters would be at the wedding, even though his mother vehemently objected to the match. She insisted that my mother was beneath her son, that her truly beloved son could do better.
My parents had met on a beach, introduced by my father’s cousin, who also knew my mother. By chance they had the same last name because immigration officials redefined their parents’ identities by baptizing each family “Silverman.” I want to ask my parents if part of the attraction between them was a narcissistic whiff of incest: We are the same name; you are me; and I am only capable of loving my own image.
On their first date my father proposed marriage, although my mother initially refused. For weeks he persisted, threatening suicide if she didn’t acquiesce—until she did. What was his persistence, his obsession, his compulsion, his need? Did you know I was coming, Daddy, a baby girl just for you?
I replace the rose inside my father’s honeymoon journal. Most truly, it can only smell bitter.
Now, my mother is alone in her room, my father alone in his. They do not see each other, for my mother refuses to see him. Enraged, my father tries to escape to find her, hissing to me that the Nazis have kidnapped him and won’t allow him to return to his apartment. Later, he will sob that my mother has left him. The nurses secure an anklet on him that sounds an alarm when he crosses the third-floor boundary. Finally a boundary is established for him—his first ever. He is contained, trapped. He can’t reach any of his three little girls. And all it takes, all it takes, I see now, is a thin plastic band around his ankle, a band to sound an alarm. If only I had known this—how simple.
My mother sees him only one more time. After she learns the cancer has spread to her other lung, she goes to his room once to say good-bye. She will cry. He will not fully understand what is happening, only understand it is bad. I want to comfort him. I want… No longer do I even know what I want. Just not this. I don’t want my parents to die, each alone, in separate rooms. I want to bring them home with me. I want to baptize them with balms to cool fevers. I want to give them life. Over and over, like a mantra, I tell my father I love him. He tells me the same thing back. These words he remembers. But still I doubt if he understands what the word “love” means.
As I sort through my parents’ possessions, it’s difficult for me to part with anything because there wasn’t enough love in our family. In the same way I have gorged on sugar, I now try to stuff myself full of my parents’ trinkets as if, by the weight of these objects alone, I will feel weighted with love. The cost of the items isn’t the issue. If my parents were homeless I would fill a plastic garbage bag with every scrap of tattered rag. If my parents had fifty cents I would hoard my quarter, resigned that I had to give my sister the other half. In a pocket of my father’s sports jacket I discover a package of Lifesavers. I sit on the floor of the hallway gripping it, knowing I will never part with it. I am almost overcome with the image of my father walking into a drugstore and buying it, making the selection. Why this package of five flavors and not another? Cherry, lemon, lime, strawberry, orange. The package is unopened. Surely this is one of the last things he purchased. He never had the chance to place one on his tongue to let it dissolve, allowing him to concentrate on the flavor for a few moments rather than concentrate on—what? This package of Lifesavers I put in my suitcase with his honeymoon journal; I wouldn’t want the movers to accidentally lose it. When I get home I put it in a drawer with my jewelry.
I decorate my father’s room with photographs of his family—his family of origin and also us, the family he created. I put a pretty plaid blanket on his bed. In his closet I stuff too many of his clothes from the apartment, even a sports jacket and tie, as if his condition is temporary. It isn’t. A series of small strokes causes my father’s dementia. His circulation has slowed, almost stopped, causing his hands and feet to swell until the skin cracks.
But even with his dementia—no, because of it—I can talk to him now, as if for the first time. His mask is gone. His career is gone. The face he wears in the world is lost to his dementia, and now he is alone with himself. He’s not in time or space as we know it, but does that matter? Sometimes he believes I’m his sister, sometimes his daughter, but it doesn’t matter. He is quiet, almost gentle.
He tells me his mother and father should never have married, that his mother used to beat his father with a stick, beat him with a stick. His mother was cruel, he says. She hurt him. Even though he is over eighty now, I see the hurt little boy in his eyes, in his face. And I have to ask him what she did to him, even though I understand it’s not right for me to know. “How did she molest you?” I whisper, bending close to him, our eyes level. His hand makes a small gesture toward his face. “With the mouth,” he whispers back, our secret. “My mother was a whore.” This is all he says about it.
“Your mother and I should never have married either,” he says. And because the room is stuffy, because his skin is cracked and dry, because he is always asking for glasses of water, he says, with an odd accuracy of a mixed metaphor, “She and I were like glass and water.” His smile is small, almost timid. “You and I are exactly alike.”
I wonder what part of him says this. Is it the father of my childhood or the father who’s now dying? I wonder if he remembers us, the way we used to be. I wonder if this is why he loved me the way he did. You and I are exactly alike. Incest. In his narcissism he could only love his own image. He’d even given me the same middle name as his own, which was also his father’s name: William. He didn’t love me, could never have loved me. He could only love himself.
Later that same evening, after this conversation about his mother, his mind worsens as if quickly needing a strong fix of the soothing drug dementia. Every fragment of his mind seems to disperse, profoundly forgetting secrets lived, secrets revealed. He is restless. Trying to leave his wheelchair, he falls. The nurses put him in bed but he tries to get out. Again he falls. When they place restraints on him he thrashes his arms and screams, terrified. He has never worn a seat belt, always got angry when asked to wear one, has always been claustrophobic. Now, I know why: He is a young boy. He is pinned to a bed of straw. His limbs feel paralyzed. And so they are.
Tonight neither the nurses nor I can calm him. I try giving him juice. I show him pictures of the family. I talk to him, but he waves me aside. I ask him if he knows who I am.
“Of course I know who you are.” His voice is angry.
“Who?”
“Josephine Missouri.”
No one. Anyone. A meaningless name. A random selection of words pieced together in the jumble of a mind disassembling. Josephine Missouri. Maybe to him I always was—and am. Later, when I tell Randy what he called me, I am almost able to smile.
My mother wants no photos of the family in her room. No mementos of her life. No flowers. No decorations. She slips off her wedding ring and gives it to me. She hands me the money in her wallet. All she’s brought with her from her apartment is her radio, her closest companion. She will be listening to news or a talk show on politics, I know, when she dies. World leaders, political leaders, the state of Israel—distant voices on a radio, faraway events and places—are her closest friends. Even disasters, like wars in the Middle East, comfort her, actually suit her better, since disasters create more of a distraction, consume more energy, more time. Oh, Mother, I want to say to her, why don’t you feel sad because you struggled to love your family, because you struggled to love your life?
I know I never fully understood her life. On the counter in her bathroom in their apartment is a small cut-crystal vase filled with miniature dried flowers. Surrounding it is a girlish arrangement of perfume. Most of the perfume is from St. Thomas, yet the seals have never been broken. She has saved this perfume all these years as if for an emergency. I realize I never knew the girl (I must call her a girl, here), who arranged this girlish display. I never knew the girl who waited for a stranger good enough for her to sample her perfume. Who—what did my mother want? Did she desire me or my father? Did she want us to stop or desire for us to continue while she waited for someone worthy of her perfume? Did she want to preserve our family, our home? Did she want us all to fall apart?
I sit with my mother in her room as she drifts into sleep. I switch off her radio and lean back in the chair, watching her. It is dusk. Just before dinner. A wedge of light from the hall seeps into the room. Her breath is faint, her sleeping body still. In this absence of sound, in this quiet, quiet light, I wonder if she senses me here, close to her. Mom, do you know your daughter is with you, waiting for you to waken? Do you know this is what daughters are meant to do, be with their mothers while their mothers are dying, be with them because they want to?
Now, as she is dying, I wonder if she remembers those moments, those times, when I must believe she did want to preserve our family, when she wanted us to be a family, when she understood what she must do as a mother, when she understood the definition of the word “daughter.” I want to ask her if she remembers—I want to ask her if she knows who was the mother I called that one particular night, years ago, the mother who knew how to listen, the mother who knew how to whisper the word “sorry,” the mother who wasn’t scared?
It was the time, it was one night, when I was in my early twenties, Mother. It was night, late at night. All evening I’d sat on the black corduroy couch in my apartment, the telephone on my lap. All night the night felt as if it would last as long as my life, as if it would never ease forward. I hadn’t moved all night, had continued to hold the phone after he’d called to say he didn’t want to see me again. All I could imagine for the rest of the night, for the rest of my life, were men falling both toward me and away from me like dominoes. So I gripped the phone as if it were all that remained of the relationship. It was all that remained of any relationship. I didn’t know how to release the phone. I was afraid to. I was afraid to go to bed. I believed I had to hear something, know something, feel something, before I’d be able to release the phone and go to bed. I believed, at that moment, I needed to hear my mother.
“What is it, dear?” she’d said when she answered the phone. “What time is it? Is something wrong?”
“I think I’m kind of having an emergency.”
Of course I had awakened her. I imagined her fingers clutching the buttons of her bathrobe. I believed I said the word “emergency” to be sure she’d hear me, a news flash on her radio, and that even now she was imagining a fire, a car wreck, cancer, three weeks to live, or random violence, paralyzed from the neck down. But I also said the word “emergency” because right before I called I’d heard a siren splitting the night, sure it raced toward me to rescue me, here, where I sat on the black corduroy couch in my living room all night, having an emergency.
“Tell me,” she urged. “What’s wrong.”
“It’s just—” Now I wasn’t sure how to describe the melodrama of an emergency.
“Did something happen? You need money?”
“No, no. I don’t need money. I need—”
You.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, maybe if you’re not too tired we could just—” I’m all alone, Mom, help me. Please just don’t hang up the phone. “Maybe talk a little while.”
“Of course we can talk, dear. But tell me what happened. A man?”
“Well, kind of.” I wanted to speak; I was scared to speak. I leaned back against the couch and pressed the palm of my hand against my mouth. I felt pressure, where it always began, in my throat, rising hard toward my mouth. This pressure scared me. I was scared it might leak out. Once it started leaking… I curled my fingers into a fist and pressed my knuckles against my neck. “It’s just, things don’t seem to be working out the way I want them,” I said.
“Yes, yes, I understand, dear. They never do.”
“But I mean really.”
“I had no idea,” she said. “Don’t worry. One day you’ll meet the right man. I promise.”
The pressure deepened. I pressed my knuckles harder. “But maybe I’m not the ’right’ girl.”
“Why you’re a lovely girl. You’re friendly. Intelligent. Any man—”
“Mother. Wait. I think I’m really, really—not doing too well,” I said.
For a moment there was silence. The siren had faded. Our voices had faded. Then, very softly, she said, “Oh, dear. I’m so sorry.”
Slowly I released my fist from my throat. Sorry, I’d whispered to myself. Sorry. A word I’d waited to hear, a word to ease me through the night, a word to protect me until morning.
Now, as my mother is dying, I wonder if maybe I am the one who needs to remember those moments, those times, remember there are other words to hear, other voices that must be remembered.
In March, when I return to Minnesota, my father’s face has yellowed. His cheeks are sunken, pulling his lips back to expose his teeth. His eyes are dim, the skin across them gluey. Sores and scabs cover his feet and hands. His ears brown in decay. Whoever he once was seems lost to sulphuric clouds of a futuristic landscape inhabited by skeletal creatures in a place unable to sustain skin, organs, blood, life. Still, when he sees me, for this moment, now, the expression on his face seems to rise from his polluted landscape and glow with joy. This lasts only a moment. I want to hold it—and can, and do—in my mind.
This visit he can barely speak, and I can barely understand him. He sleeps more. But every time he opens his eyes I tell him I love him. He nods his head and mouths, “I love you, too.” I want more. I say these words insistently, as if now, even at this late moment, he can be redeemed, as if something can be said or done, if not to erase the past, then to diminish it. If he would ask forgiveness. If he would tell me he ’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. If he would even just acknowledge it. But the past, in an inversion of time, seems to have fled to that futuristic landscape choked with sulphuric clouds. Still, like a stubborn, willful, yet loving child, I sit by him in his room, waiting for some acknowledgment before he dies.
Later, I leave his room and go to sit with my mother in hers. This trip I seem to journey back and forth between my father’s room on the third floor and my mother’s room on the fourth, as if I hope to discover a new answer to the mystery at the end of this incomprehensible voyage. Or perhaps I can entreat new spirits to invade my parents’ bodies, quickly, before they die. To help me, I want to light candles, inhale incense, perform a secret ceremony. Now I gaze into my mother’s eyes as I’d gazed into my father’s, as if searching for someone new, searching for clues. Except in their eyes I see no new spirits, no new clues. And still I do not see eyes that reflect their daughter.
If only I could hear, once again, the mother and daughter who spoke on the phone that night, now, before she dies. If only my mother and I could discover a way to say good-bye to each other, if not with truth, then at least with grace. We cannot. For ceaselessly, during recent phone calls, she has demanded to know whether I would, if I could, provide her with enough pills to kill herself, even though she knows legally I can’t. “This would be an act of love,” she says, her voice brittle as glass, announcing Kiki would do it for her. What she wants to know is: Do I love her as much as Kiki loves her, love her enough to kill her? What I want to ask her, what I want to know, is whether this is an inverted test of her daughters’ love or whether her desire is darker, an ancient ritual she needs performed. But how can she not know that even if I magically conjured the sleeping pills she desires, there would never be enough tablets, potions, or incantations to truly ease her journey?
“Can I bring you a tray, Mom?” I ask her, since it’s almost time for dinner.
“This’s plenty.” In a small plastic baggie my mother keeps a meager supply of nuts—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now, with a thin hand she reaches into the bag for an almond, then slides it slowly, lovingly, into her mouth as if believing this one nut will summon starvation rather than prolong life.
“How about juice?”
“No. Nothing.”
I can understand a desire to die because she’s in pain. What I don’t understand is her desire to die coldly, to die without comfort, die in isolation. Now, I wonder, I wonder if it’s possible, I wonder if she decided to die that moment I told her, when I was in the hospital, that I’d been sexually molested. At that time I thought she ’d barely heard what I said. She’d barely responded to what I’d said. But maybe, overwhelmingly terrified to acknowledge her fear behind the truth of our family, this is her response: Unable to protect her daughters, she thinks she deserves to die. I think of Macon, that woman who’d tried to kill herself, because she, too, was scared to see and to hear her daughter. Couldn’t Macon have found another way? Can’t my mother, can’t we, can’t all of us, find another way, discover something better, something softer, than dying alone in small rooms of fury and shame? Oh, Mother, how can you not know that a simple apology would do?
“Maybe I could just stay with you while you eat.” I nod toward her nuts.
“I’m fine.” Slowly my mother crunches her one thin almond. “Go eat with your father. You know how happy he always is to see you.”
As I obediently stand to retrace my steps back downstairs to my father, I pause by the door and glance back. Mother, a simple desire for you to want to eat with me, for you to always be happy to see me, would be enough, would do.
I eat dinner with my father in order to feed him. He needs help eating. With the swelling in his hands he can’t manage silverware. I cut his food and hold it to his mouth, small bite after slow bite. We sit with the other patients, all in various stages of sanity and life. Music from the 1940s tries to calm the inhuman sounds of dementia. Yet I am tense, as if tenseness can protect me from the sounds of dying, protect me from where all of us are eventually going. When I call my husband, he says when we baby boomers hit the nursing homes they’ll play rock music and give us tie-dyed bibs to catch our drool. I imagine tapping a gnarled finger to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
So, yes, I feed my father. I hold apple juice and coffee to his lips. I cut his banana and his meat. Like a recalcitrant child, he won’t eat his vegetables. His eye is on the ice cream, and he wants to eat it first, he wants to eat it now, before his dinner. Why not? Since I eat with him, I eat my ice cream first, too. We smile at each other, two naughty children—always—breaking the rules.
Late at night, unable to sleep, I call Randy’s office, only needing to hear his answering machine and leave a message. I tell Randy about feeding my father. In my mind I hear him answer: You ’ve always fed your father. I would nod my head, agreeing. Would you like to stop? he would ask. Yes, I want to stop. Being here, feeding my father, I feel as if I’ve never stopped. You can stop feeding him, Randy, I imagine, would say. He can’t hurt you any longer if you stop.
But I’m scared to stop feeding him. I feed him because I love him, because I can’t stop loving him. I feed him because I can’t stop wanting him to love me. I feed him because he needs it so badly, feed him because he’s never been nourished. I feed him and feed him—just one more time, I tell myself. I’ll feed him one more time and this time, this will be the time, when everything will turn out different, this will be the time I’ll have the family I always wanted.
I hug my mother good-bye, hug her, I know, for the last time. The skin on her shoulders is a loose fit for her frail bones, yes, rejecting her body as quickly as possible. Yet I hold her shoulders tight, as if I can hold her together, as if I can insist she feel me, feel the warmth of her daughter now, before she dies. “Mom.” Don’t leave yet. I’m not ready. Perhaps if I remind her of that late-night phone conversation—perhaps if she hears and remembers her daughter’s voice, she’ll want to live. “Mom,” I whisper. “Wait, remember—”
“You have such a kind husband,” she says. “And your therapist—”
“Yes, I know, I’m very lucky.”
“After we’re gone you’ll have enough money. You won’t need to worry.”
“Yes, I know, thank you. But, Mom —”
She sighs and shrugs her shoulders. No, I can’t remind her of that phone call. I’m scared to remind her, scared she won’t remember. Slowly I release her shoulders, my mother’s shoulders, my mother, the antithesis of my father, my father who needs too much, while my mother needs too little, rejecting nourishment and care, even now as she’s dying. Still she’s terrified to allow her family to warm her, much more terrified of this than of dying. Slowly, I back out of the room. She seems to be dissolving. White hair. White skin. White sheets. Her blue eyes are her only color. They aren’t bright or sparkling but are deeper, bluer than usual, as if all that she is has coalesced to these blue eyes. I pause in the doorway, gently letting my own eyes say good-bye, letting my eyes say, wanting to say … It is too late. There is no more time. But, Mom —all I ever wanted was you.
Two weeks later, on Friday, April 3, 1992, the phone call comes: My mother is dead. The nurse who calls says that after my mother died the rabbi brought my father into my mother’s room to say good-bye. “Do you think he understood?” I ask. “It’s difficult to know, but probably,” she says. I imagine the scene the nurse describes. My father is hunched in his wheelchair. He takes his wife’s hand and holds it, this last time. His wife. After all these years, this is virtually the first time he’s seen her in months. He will stroke the papery skin on her hand, the raised vein that travels between her knuckles. What will his heart want to tell her that’s too late for his voice to say? But Daddy, you always told me she never heard anyway. The nurse says he motioned for her, the nurse, to bend down, and she imagined he’d wanted to tell her something. He kissed her cheek instead. He probably thought I was you, she says to me, and I agree. For weeks I believe this. And maybe it’s true. But I think of the nurses he kissed in the hospital, and I believe it could have been anyone.
My husband and I take the next plane to Rochester. I’m coming, Father, for you. Since he knows my mother is dead, I want him to know there will still be someone to care for him. I’m coming, Father, for you. He must know this; he must feel the plane drawing closer and closer. I literally can’t stand the thought he’ll believe he’s alone. Right now nothing that happened matters. I have to be with him, that’s all.
By the time we reach my father’s room he’s sleeping. My husband and I stand by his bed gazing down at him. He’s curled like a sick, feverish child, and I bend to touch his forehead. He is small, helpless, innocent. He is vulnerable. Unprotected. Anyone could hurt him. But who would ever be able to hurt someone so small, so faint, so diminished?
When I whisper good-night my father’s jaw moves as if he’s chewing. “An involuntary reflex,” my husband whispers, not wanting to wake him. All the months, years, since I told my husband what my father did to me, he’s hated him, has been capable of anger toward my father that I haven’t yet been able to reach. But right now even he, watching my father, seems to find it difficult to sustain it.
As we turn off the lamp, my father’s jaw is still chewing.
The next day Mack, Kiki, her daughter Sarah (Todd, my nephew, has not flown up here), and I sit in the lounge making arrangements for the memorial service. Sarah sits beside me on the couch, leaning her head against my shoulder. I slip an arm around her. Still young, in her early twenties, she seems exhausted with the family crisis, maybe scared of this death, scared of her grandfather’s dementia. Just scared. She has come to me for reassurance, for comfort. I want to give it. Always I want her to know how much I love her. And for a moment I think about that winter night Todd was born in Boston, and how I felt, for the first time in my life, what I can only call love, an ancient love, a need to protect. I felt the same later when Sarah was born, another small treasure, yes, but as babies and children helpless, too, I noticed, when I baby-sat for Todd and Sarah when they were little.
Sarah, now sitting close beside me for comfort, is relaxed. And I realize: She is not scared of me. We talk frequently on the phone. Whenever possible I visit, or she, whenever possible, visits me. She is not scared of me. She knows she is safe with me, has always been safe, from the moment she was born. I glance at her to check this reality. She smiles at me. I know, I’m sure, she’s not scared of me. And suddenly these six words reveal to me a lifetime of lies—my parents’ lies.
But truth, too. I see a startling truth: That just because you are molested as a child does not mean you must grow up to be a molester. You do not have to pass it on. I have not passed it on. For what I truly discovered that moment I first saw Todd—discovering, only in a glimpse, at that moment but am discovering more truly now—is that the definition my father had taught me for love, of how to love a child, is wrong. But more than wrong. Simply, yet profoundly, his definition has always been absent in me.
And a deeper truth: My father and my mother each had a choice, could have chosen a different definition of love. They could have realized they didn’t know how to love their children healthy, love them well. They could have understood their impulse and sought help. Until they recovered, they could have sent Kiki and me to live with my aunt and uncle. They chose to stay together. They were the parents, the adults, they chose to be. We all are the parents, the adults, we choose to be.
I think of last night, of my father’s jaw, chewing. Was he chewing in order to swallow? Swallow his grief? Now as he’s dying is he grieving, too late, the death of a daughter? Is he grieving the real death of his wife? His wife, my mother. Who was she to him?
He never left her; she never left him. So I must know they wanted to remain married all these years, almost sixty. Daddy, for me? Did he stay with her in order to stay with me? Or did he stay with her because she was his wife? She was his wife, the one to whom he wrote beautiful anniversary letters. Who was I, then? Certainly I wasn’t his daughter; certainly I wasn’t his wife. A mistress? A lover? A slut? Yes, my mother always called me that. She received the tribute, the money, the title of wife while she allowed me to perform unspeakable acts with her husband, acts she didn’t want to perform herself. Her love: I was a present to her husband. His: how gratefully he accepted me. They chose to be dangerous parents. It is a choice: to choose to protect children or not. To choose a different kind of love or not. Right now I’m angry she’s dead, angry because right now I want to kill her.
By the time I go to bed that night, I know my mother’s body has been cremated. What is the chill in the black brick oven where her naked body sleeps? It is the steel pallet she’s placed on. It is the whoosh of night roiling down the chimney. As the harsh lick of flames devours her body, it is the inner core of her bones cooling the oven. Each strand of hair is ignited, her head a bristle of fire surrounding her face. Her face will be the last to perish. Her toes and fingers curl in heat, her breasts wither. Through the transparent skin on her neck, her throat glows like the glass chimney of a hurricane lantern. I see inside. I see the gaseous venom of her words spew into her mouth like ash. With the force of the sharp syllable “slut,” her jaw cracks open and flame explodes, igniting her tongue and her teeth. They burn to soot. Soot dots the corners of her lips. Her eyes, still, are peaceful: She escaped the rage of my father; she desired his rage for me. And she is peaceful now becausethis—in this black brick oven—is where she has always lived and where she has always wanted to be. Now, no longer can anyone touch her. She dies before I reach my wrath; she dies before I can remind her I’m her daughter.
The next day we receive the ash and bone of my mother. She is inside an 8 X 6-inch black box, 5 inches high. The box is made of heavy plastic and was constructed in Orlando, Florida. The box is too big for her and when I turn it the ash slides from side to side. I hear her sliding. Feel the weight shifting. Attached to the box is a Certificate of Cremation by the Southern Minnesota Crematory, performed by Ron Hodge. A stranger. She would like this, the way she loved to display her body to doctors. Surely her darkest fantasy was to be placed naked by a stranger inside a black brick oven. By a man. By no one she would ever have to know, by no one who would ever know her.
My father remained married to his wife to be with us all: his three precious little girls. By staying with us, he had all three of us dying for his love and affection. Even though he had none, ever, to give us back.
Father, I want to ask you: What do you remember? I want to ask you: What do you know? How did you first decide to open the door to enter my bedroom? What was your desultory, internal passage through time and space that brought you to my body, brought you to my bed? I want to ask if you remember what we did behind all the bedroom walls. Where no one could see. When no one was watching. No one saw the curtains barely shudder as you opened the door. Softly. So no one could hear. Or was no one listening? Because no one would want to hear this, ever. Except I heard. To me, your footsteps echoed as if you walked deserted corridors, always coming toward me. The air around you was fierce and tense. It was as thick as heat and unbreathable, combustible, urgent. Because I heard, I remember. And because I remember terror, Father, I remember you.
Father, what do you remember?
What I remember is that we never spoke. That I never uttered a sigh. I—your silent accomplice to unforgivable crimes. Your secret partner in unspeakable sins.
Did you love me, hate me, or think you merely owned me? My body/your possession. What did my skin say to you? Did my skin shudder like the curtains, or was it still, shocked to silence?
You are the core of a red sun. I stand encased in a sheet of burning glass until the sun shatters it. In silence. The pieces fall. You shattered me. You made me fall.
It happened at night.
Secrets happen at night.
I waited for you to come at night. You still come at night. Except now you come in dreams of blood.
It was only in the morning, every morning, we cleaned up the evidence, Father, all that blood. Every morning you and I were grimly clean. And still silent.
I’m asking you, Father, what do you remember? If you say nothing, I will tell you. If you say nothing, I will remind you that you, Father, were the one to hurt someone who was faint, who was diminished, who was small.
Your nightdaughter
Six days later my father dies. There will be no memorial service for him. Neither my sister nor I return to Minnesota. He, too, is cremated. His ashes, like my mother’s, are kept by my sister.
My father couldn’t live without his wife for even a week. People think they died together because they loved each other so much. They died together because they loved to hate each other so much, because they didn’t know how to live without it. They were addicted to hate, addicted to destruction. The destruction of their lives’ work, their life together, has been completed.
So I couldn’t save my father, after all. Urgently, he tried to discover life inside my body. Urgently, I tried to nourish him. Desperately I failed, for it was death he, alone, swallowed.