Read What My Mother Gave Me Online

Authors: Elizabeth Benedict

What My Mother Gave Me (9 page)

But the losses of a lifetime had caught up with me. And, before school started in the fall, I had begun a series of newspaper and magazine columns that drew on my family's experience with alcoholism, mental illness, and grief.
Th
ey were like nothing I had written before.

I spent the next ten years digging through family documents, interviewing lost relatives and friends, trudging from my house to the Library of Congress and the National Archives, and traveling across the Deep South, Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and New York, trying to understand my family and the meaning of Momma's death. It didn't take long to locate the mighty river of depression, anxiety, and addiction that ran in her family.
Th
ere was something else, too, harder to define—a certain lack of meaning in their lives or faith in themselves, some way in which they did not know, for sure, who they were.

After years of slogging through documents and archives, I began to see my family heritage as a microcosm of the bone-deep conflicts in the history of Alabama, the Deep South, and the country itself. Yet now and then, amid all the information and note-taking, I'd find myself possessed of full-blown scenes from my childhood, which I called “bubbles of memory.” Many of them came from that time with my mother during the war.

Slowly, those long-ago days began to shine like new gold in my mind as I saw how events were connected and how important that period had been to me. No matter what time of night or day a bubble appeared, I'd have to write it down—get out of bed and go to the computer, or grab the back of an envelope, or drive off the interstate into a McDonald's and write on that thin paper they put on your tray. Bit by bit, that long-banished time fell into place and put my mother back into the story of my life.

I think now of those precious wartime months as the gift twice given. As a gift to my childhood, Momma's devotion at that time strengthened my sense of my own worth and enabled me to survive and go on without her. Forty years later, the memory of that gift—and the loss of it—brought her back to me in a way that could at last be shared and grieved.

Momma getting a parrot to talk. Momma at the kitchen table teaching me my part in a play. Momma scrubbing Knoxie's apartment and packing the trunks.

I remember. I had a mother. She loved me.

Th
e Last Happy Day of Her Life

CHERYL PEARL SUCHER

It was four o'clock in the morning, and I was alone, huddled beneath a white cotton blanket on a reclining chair in the darkened waiting room of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital's Neurological Intensive Care Unit, afraid to sleep.
Th
e hallway was empty but for a janitor waxing the tile floor. I had just sent my New Zealand fiancé home (our engagement was still a secret) so he could get some rest, and I was waiting for the ward nurse to call me in to say good-bye to my mother. I was determined to be with her when she passed. I did not want her to be alone. For her entire life, she had never been alone. She had survived the Plaszow ghetto, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps with the support of her mother, my Bubbah.
Th
ey lived together after the liberation, and my Bubbah moved in with my parents after they married in Lübeck in 1948, where she lived with them until her death thirty years later.

My mother suffered the first of her sudden paralyses and strokes, whose accumulation would ultimately be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, when she was only thirty years old and my Bubbah was round-the-clock by her bedside. After my Bubbah died, my mother, then confined to a wheelchair, was cared for by a series of robust, maternal Polish housekeepers who cleaned, cooked, and tended house as they bathed and dressed her, becoming her constant companions.

In 1982, my mother lost the use of her arms following complex surgery to remove her left kidney and insert a bladder stoma.
Th
e eight-hour operation left her a quadriplegic suffering from chronic itches that tormented her. She had to be fed, turned, dressed, bathed, scratched, and changed. Her caretaker was not equipped to handle the challenge and my father reluctantly placed an ad in the Polish newspaper for a housekeeper/caretaker, because he didn't want to put her in a medical facility. A hard-bitten, chain-smoking middle-aged woman named Regina Czarnowska from Ostrowenka, who had been a social worker in her native land, answered the advertisement. Tough, strong, and shrewd, “Krisha” would care for my mother for seventeen years, until the very end, sleeping in my mother's bedroom, working seven days a week with only an occasional holiday, employing young Polish medical students and drivers to sustain my mother's care when her lungs failed and she was put on a respirator a year after my father's death in 1993.

Krisha was not with me that night because she could not bear to watch my mother die. She had become the conduit of my mother's emotions and communications, the arbiter of her wishes, her arms and her legs. When I was suffering from the flu, Krisha would drive to my apartment in their specially fitted wheelchair van with homemade chicken soup. When I cried about a man I loved
—
a non-Jew who was intolerable to my father
—
Krisha told me that my mother's heart broke for me, and that she had tried to convince my father to accept our relationship, but his will was too strong. (At the time, my father told me that he would have accepted him but for my mother.) Now that my father was gone, my mother spoke for herself, through Krisha.

Th
e irony was my mother became a mother to me only after my father and Bubbah were no longer around to run interference. From infancy, my Bubbah had been like an offensive guard protecting my mother, the quarterback, from a sacking. If I was upset about something, my Bubbah insisted that I not tell my mother, for my woes would surely make her sicker. My father played the role of both parents to me and also became my best friend.

I saw my mother as the ethereal figure on the sofa, smoking her evening cigarette, watching television, playing mah-jongg. Whenever she fell, time stopped. She would cry like a trapped animal and only my father could pick her up. If my grandmother and I were alone with her, we would have to call the neighbors. When I was an adolescent and she would fall, I would try to get her back into her wheelchair on my own, but my attempts to get her to sit straight only caused her more pain.

For most of my life, I resented my mother and the illness that became the center of our family. Everything revolved around her needs. I hated the sound of her cane preceding her slow step as she came to wake me up every morning singing “Good Morning to You!” in her high-pitched soprano. I could not look at her stubborn legs with their medical scars, her clubbed feet in their shapeless orthopedic shoes, and the paralyzed hand that curled into her body like a dying petal. But her face was as lovely as ever—heart-shaped with pomegranate lips and dark eyes crowned by perfectly peaked brows and a full head of jet-black hair.

TH
AT NIGHT AT
the hospital thirteen years ago, my mother existed in the twilight realm between dream and consciousness. Her doctors had summoned me there earlier, explaining that even though her electroencephalograms were registering violent electrical activity, she remained in a deep coma.
Th
ey wanted to know if my brother and I would approve taking her off the powerful drugs that were elevating her blood pressure because they were beginning to cause damage to her vital organs. When we asked if she might regain consciousness, the consulting neurologist replied that he had seen such mysterious brain activity only once before, in another patient as chronically ill as my mother. It was his intuition that this wild, inexplicable mental tumult was the way her functioning mind was detaching from consciousness.
Th
ese ineluctable brain seizures, he explained, were marking her mysterious transition from life to death.

At her bedside, I saw that her lips were encrusted with pus and her limbs swollen like pupae from the total failure of her renal pathways. I thought about how she had always been the first person to call and sing happy birthday to me—and then she would say, in a wistful tone of voice, that the day that I was born was the last happy day of her life.
Th
is was no exaggeration, for she had suffered that first series of strokes three months after my birth. Rushed to the hospital, she was completely paralyzed except for the movement of her left eye. Sustained by an iron lung, her condition worsened.
Th
e paralysis was traveling through her body, approaching her brain stem. To stop its course, her physicians asked my father's permission to intravenously administer an experimental drug that was so strong they gave it only to those they were sure would die. My father consented, gathering around her closest friends and family as he expected her to pass that night. It was an unspeakable tragedy. She was only thirty-one years old. She miraculously survived, but a spidery scar remained on the inside of her left calf, a souvenir of the powerful drug's work. For the forty years left of her life, her blood pressure plunged to zero three more times. Each time, she came home from the hospital, defying the prognoses of her physicians.

But now my mother was not rallying. I had been preparing for her death for weeks, as she had been exhibiting a decreasing interest in life, similar to my father's behavior in the weeks before he died. When I visited her, she was despondent, no longer animated, and more often asleep than awake. She refused food and had difficulty swallowing. All the activities that used to bring a smile to her face now brought no reaction. She didn't want to go to the boardwalk in Long Beach to inhale the sea air or eat a chocolate Danish or even talk about her love for my father and our frequent family jaunts to Atlantic City. She wasn't even asking about Charlie and Sara, her beloved grandchildren. When I held her hand, it was without weight or resistance. I knew that she was letting go.

My brother and I approved the withdrawal of all drugs as well as her feeding tube. She would receive only a glucose drip to make her comfortable. But we didn't know what to do about her respirator. If we detached her from the machine that had been breathing for her for over six years, she would die immediately. After discussing it, we decided to let it continue to breathe for her because it was the respirator that had kept her alive long enough to witness the birth of both her grandchildren.
Th
en I started to shake the way I shook when my father was taken by ambulance to the hospital for the last time. I knew that there would be no more remarkable resurrection returns from the dead.

Since my father's death, I was in the habit of visiting my mother every Saturday or Sunday afternoon. No matter what my life's disappointments, she always said that my goodness and strength would ultimately be rewarded with love, success, and joy. During those weekend visits, Krisha would prepare an elaborate lunch and afterward we would retire to the den and watch ice-skating or golf, which we found soothing as background. My mother watched television constantly. It kept her from going mad. In those few hours, I would hold her hand and she would talk incessantly, letting go of all the thoughts and fears and questions that had accumulated during the week. In her darkest despair, she would rail about the tragedy of her illness, and a few times she even asked me to contact Dr. Kevorkian so she could end her life. When she was depressed, she was furious, and the tremors that beset her paralyzed limbs would increase in vigor and intensity. Her hands would go rigid and her face would freeze in an expression of fear and despair. But mostly, she was relaxed and happy to see me, reminiscing about what a good husband my father had been, how he had always looked after her and treated her like a queen. I did not contradict her, though I knew that my father often blamed his fate on her illness.
Th
e mythology of my father deepened in those weekend reminiscences. After his death, their marriage was perfect, and I did not dare challenge that notion.

My mother always asked me about myself, and if I had heard from any of the members of our small, extended family. Periodically, she would cough and choke and seize, and the respirator would start beeping.
Th
e Polish technician would run in, unpack a pair of powdered plastic gloves and clear the phlegm out of her lungs with a suction machine and plastic tubing. It was always painful and she hated it. But when she was wheeled back into the room, she would pick up our conversation. As her years on the respirator accumulated, she spent more and more time with oxygen infused into her breath, humidity added to ease the coarse flow of air.

She rarely complained, even when they pounded her back to release the phlegm, which was often thick as concrete. Sometimes she would ask me to scratch her nose, wipe her eyes. I'd make her laugh by taking the tweezers out of a nearby drawer to pull a whisker out of her chin. “You're getting to look like a hillbilly!” I would say.

“Cheryl, the day after you get married is when I'll die.”

“Stop talking nonsense.”


Th
ere is a bank account I created just for your wedding.”

I thought she was being playful. My mother had always been generous with gifts, as it was the only way she could express her love for her family. When my first novel was published after years and years of struggle, she sent me two dozen long-stemmed roses. She bought me my first set of pearls and surprised me with the gifts of my first laptop computers.

“Don't talk about that now, Mom,” I said, sure that when and if I got married, we would share the experience. “We'll get big strong men to lift you up in your wheelchair when we dance the hora
,
” I told her, laughing, rubbing moisturizer on her face, caressing her cheek. She would smile and shake her head wistfully, implying that was her final statement on the matter.

My mother met John Macready, my Kiwi fiancé, the previous Rosh Hashanah. I had brought him to our family meal, and he approached her in a way that most people did not once she was on the respirator. Somehow the mechanism of the speaker as well as the continuing drone of the breathing machine made most people treat her like she was one of the mechanical devices keeping her alive.
Th
ey maintained their distance, talking at her rather than making the effort of listening to her, speaking to Krisha and the caretakers, rarely to her. But when
my fiancé met her, he held the speaker to her throat, crouching down to hear her better, asking questions that she could barely answer because, by this time, she was weak and tired.
Th
ough our engagement was still a secret, I think she knew that he was the one. Somehow she realized that I was not going to be alone.

My mother did not pass that night, but lived in the hospital for two more weeks. Krisha finally came to visit after I relayed to her the words of my mother's kind Filipino nurse who suggested that my mother was holding on because she needed to say good-bye to her best friend.

When Krisha emerged from my mother's hospital room, she handed me a piece of paper—a bank statement.

“Your mother made me promise that I would show this to you before she died,” she said. It was a savings account in trust to me. “Since your father's death, she has been depositing a monthly sum for you. It's for your wedding.”

Th
e amount was substantial. My mother now knew that there would be someone to love and watch over me, the same way that my father had loved and watched over her.

“You know, Krisha,” I said, “if John were Jewish, she might have held on just a little bit longer.” We held each other, laughing and weeping.

My mother died on Shabbos, when the purest souls are said to go directly to heaven. Less than a year later, twelve years ago, I married John at a hotel in New York City, on the hottest day of the last century. My mother had left me enough money to invite everyone I cared about to a lavish ceremony and reception, and to take a dream honeymoon in Italy.
Th
e celebration she had always wished that we would share was held in her honor. John and I toasted her gift to us as I told my guests that I hoped that my mother and father were dancing together in heaven, where all good souls go to rest.

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