I’m startled awake, feeling certain I’ve overslept. I check the time. It’s 5:30 AM.
I feel disoriented by the darkness, discomfited by the dryness of forced-air heat, and disturbed by fragments of memories floating to the surface of my consciousness.
I marvel at the persistence with which my mother continues to disrupt my sleep. She doesn’t appear to me in dreams at night, and I’m not actively summoning thoughts of her during the day, but I am immediately aware that I haven’t spoken with her in more than two months. And in another two months, it will be two years since I last visited her.
The guilt over having abandoned Mom in a memory care facility is unbearable.
* * * * * * *
“When a person’s father or mother loses control of their mental faculties, their child should try to conduct a relationship with them according to their mental condition until God has mercy upon them. If it is impossible to remain with them because they have become very deranged, let him/her leave them, depart, and charge others with caring for them in an appropriate manner.”
My mind knows the truth: there was no choice. Her physical health and safety were being compromised by her living independently.
When I called on her 80th birthday, I tried to break the seal that separates her present from her past by sharing my memories of her mom’s 80th birthday celebration. She didn’t know who I was, though she appreciated the call.
My heart knows another truth. I never felt close to Mom; she was often emotionally unavailable, distant. Now I am struggling to maintain a relationship with her. And I am failing.
* * * * * * *
I was a dutiful daughter, even as a teenager. Sure, sometimes Dad needed to warn me about my tone of voice when I was speaking to her, reminding me, “Respect your mother.”
When I was a sophomore in high school, Mom and her friend Sandy bought a coffee shop, becoming small business owners in order to contribute to their children’s college education. They served breakfast and lunch, six days a week, from 6 AM to 3 PM. She would wake up every day at 4:30 AM to open the store at 5 for the employees. I was the oldest of the children, so when a waitress called in sick on a Saturday—or on a weekday during a school vacation—Dad would shake me awake at 5 AM, saying, “Your mother needs you. Hurry up and get dressed. I’ll drive you over.”
When I visited Mom for Mother’s Day a few months after she moved into Memory Care, I saw signs of cognitive decline, but they were overshadowed by improvements in her physical health.
I noticed that at every meal she tries to clear her own place setting in the dining room and, thinking they are her employees, she tells the nurses and aides they’re entitled to a day off. They explained to me that she is “pleasantly confused,” but sociable and in great physical condition. “She participates in all the activities. She likes to walk the halls for exercise.”
* * * * * * *
Mom stands at the kitchen sink—it seems for hours—doing the dishes. She always washes and dries them by hand, despite Dad’s insistence that the latest model dishwasher be installed in the new house. Her fingernails, which she paints herself in subdued pinks and beige-browns, are submerged in soapy water. She scrubs the pots with Brillo pads and wears no gloves to protect her manicure.
I can’t remember if there was a dishwasher among the avocado green appliances at the old house in Staten Island. I remember her working to spruce up the kitchen, painting the walls, and laying a faux brick facade over the entry to give it the appearance of a fireplace. Soon after she completed that project, Dad announced we were moving to New Jersey.
In Staten Island, we lived in a semi-attached house that shared a front porch with the Cohens, another Jewish family on our block. Jerry Cohen had planted a weeping willow tree whose branches stretched across the fence, where Dad had planted an above-ground pool in our backyard. He called the pool his bathtub, periodically draining it and filling it with the hose.
I remember how I dreaded climbing the metal ladder that hooked over the pool’s rim—there was no deck, no place to sit and dangle my feet in the cold water to get used to its temperature.
Clinging to the ladder, I’d lower my legs backwards, splitting the water’s surface littered with leaves from Jerry Cohen’s weeping willow.
Dad complained regularly about having to skim the willow leaves and argued with Jerry about the tree, threatening to cut its encroaching branches (Mishna Bava Batra 2:13).
My brother and I learned to swim in that pool. Mom was a swimmer, but Dad taught us to swim (Kiddushin 29a).
In the new house in New Jersey, built on a spacious corner lot, there is room for a full patio with a table and chairs, and an in-ground pool surrounded by a concrete deck with lounge chairs. In the shallow end are steps wide enough to fit three friends comfortably. There we sit submerged to our waists—sometimes to our shoulders—in the heated water, sipping sodas and laughing at nothing in particular.
I can see Mom working at a distance, pulling weeds and tending the tomato plants in her garden. She stays out of the pool when I’m hanging out with my friends; either she wants to give us privacy or she prefers to be alone. Later, when we’ve gone inside, she’ll swim laps in silence until it’s time to prepare dinner.
* * * * * * *
When I met the activities coordinator during my visit, I told her that Mom used to be a great swimmer, swimming laps in her backyard pool every day, and asked if she would be permitted to swim in the pool. The only Memory Care resident who was not incontinent, she was granted permission to participate in weekly pool time with the other residents. The next morning, I bought her two bathing suits and left a reminder for the activities coordinator to add Mom’s name to the roster.
At the airport I consoled myself with memories of Mom in her twenties, thirties, and forties, before her memories began to dissolve. She taught me, by example, that I could be an independent woman, with a career, with hobbies and interests, and, if I chose, a spouse and a mother.
Feeling the weight of responsibility to preserve these memories, I wondered if they are all that’s left of our relationship.