Before she died, when she knew that I was going to make it and live and enjoy life in a way that she was never able to, my mother and I finally talked about that part of our lives. About the dark nights and days, about the uncontrollable urge to surrender to the great well of sadness that was always licking at our heels.
In a cruel twist of fate, my mother found out just months after her medication finally offered her mind some hope, that she had breast cancer. My only solace in the nights and days of the few months that I took care of her was that I could finally do something for her. My mother, because she knew exactly how I felt, had taken care of me and the girls and Paul for so many years I am ashamed to remember them all.
It was my mother's physical illness that finally brought me to my knees at her bedside. We both knew on that cool summer morning that there weren't many days left for her. We both knew that within hours she might slip away into that dark place where you go before you cross over.
For months and months, I had watched my mother fall another inch or two away from me, grinding in pain, first on her couch, then in her bed, then back at the hospital and then back to her own bed. My parents had both chosen a new hospice program because my mother wanted to die at home. And really, after a certain point, there wasn't a damn thing traditional medicine could do to help her except keep her doped up to control the pain, which was something both my father and I demanded. My own depression was under control by then, just six years ago, and after all the years that I had spent crying, I found it a miracle that I could lie on her bathroom floor and cry for thirty minutes straight without stopping. One part of me was glad that I could manage to dig so deep inside of myself, in all those scary and sick places. The rest of me, most of me, was overcome with a grief that defies description.
Throughout the sixteen years when my depression had been rifling through my life full speed ahead, there had only been my mother to understand and hold me. Only my mother who would know, without me saying a word—when I showed up at her door with the girls in my arms, dark circles under my eyes, and the smell of gin on my breath—that I was caught up again. Only my mother, who would take the girls and tuck them into my old double bed and put on the teapot and then hold me like a baby on the couch while I cried and cried. She was able to hold me back from the edge.
I thought I was prepared for everything after that. I thought because I had managed to climb out of my own hole that I could handle everything for once in my life with grace and elegance and with all my wits about me. But that was before I knew my mother was dying and that she needed me as much as I needed her.
That morning when we talked, the last time we ever spoke to each other using words and not just our eyes, was one of those cool summer mornings for which Wisconsin is famous. It was early June, and it should have been at least mildly hot by then, but spring that year would not relinquish its hold on our part of the world. That morning I was firm about making certain my father went to see his pals for a while downtown at the coffee shop. After I had organized my mother's medication for the day, I popped open her bedroom window just a crack to let in a wisp of fresh air. I knew she liked that, and that throughout her entire life she had always slept with the window open.
My mother turned toward the window when she felt the cool air move across her bed. She closed her eyes and looked as if she was drinking in something fine and wonderful. “Come here, sweetie,” she said as I watched her open her eyes and look at me. I sat on her bed, brushed her hair back from her forehead and then leaned down to kiss her on the lips.
“It's spring out there yet, Mom, and I thought you might like a little air.”
“Thank you, Janice. What day is it?”
“It's Friday, Mom, the first Friday in June.”
“Is Paul gone now?”
“No, he's been working the local trucking runs for a while now and the girls love it. After all these years they're sick of me, and he lets them get away with murder.”
My mother was thinking. She lifted her hand and put it on top of mine.
“For so long now I've wanted to tell you how sorry I am about the depression and all.”
“Mom . . .”
“No, please honey, listen for just a minute because I know there isn't much time left. I know that and I have to say this.”
“Okay, Mom, okay.”
“When you were born, I was so scared. I knew there was a chance that you would have what I have because I had read and talked to doctors, so I knew that you might end up sick like I was. Oh Janice, I'm so sorry about what I passed on to you, so sorry.”
“Mom,
I'm
not sorry. You saved me. You really saved me all those days and nights and through everything, you were always there. You never abandoned me. To never have known you and for you to have never known me, that would be so much worse.”
“Janice, it's okay now, isn't it? You're going to make it now, aren't you, sweetheart?”
“Oh, Mom, it's not going to be easy without you, but I'm going to be fine and the girls are fine. You taught me how to be such a good mother. That's something I've always wanted to tell you. Thanks for showing me how to do that. How to love so much and sacrifice and mostly how to hang on and never give up.”
My mother somehow managed to raise both of her hands and place them around my face. I could feel little pockets of warmness where she touched me, and I placed my own hands over hers. Then I lay down on the bed next to her, tucked my arm under her neck and held her against me while the birds sang and the phone rang and the few hours that she had left ticked away.
The months following my mother's funeral were not easy. I waited and waited for time to heal me, but I could tell time for me was going to be years and years. I was doing pretty well, working part-time, shuffling the girls around to all their activities, making certain that Paul knew I still loved him. Then my father called one day and said he was ready to clean out my mother's things. “Would you please come?”
This was not so long ago. Five years ago is not so long ago now that I am way past forty. It was long enough though for me to have been on medicine, finally the right dose of antidepressant, for me to gain enough years that I often felt perfectly normal, as if I would even know what that was like. Mostly I could tell I was doing good because I was happy, and only sad when I thought about normal things that make people sad, like the death of your mother.
My father was a mess that day I got to his house. He was pacing in the kitchen, and he had boxes lined up on the kitchen table. He told me he wasn't sure he could even touch Mother's clothing.
“Janice, I think this is too hard for me,” he said, standing with his head bowed and his arms dangling at his sides.
“Daddy.” I moved to him, placing my hands around his stooped shoulders and pressing my face against his. “It will be fine,” I lied. “You just go out today, call Ralph and go to lunch, and then go hang out at his house. I'll call you when I'm done.”
My father is a kind man who put up with two raving lunatics for most of his life. I owed him almost as much as I owed my mother, and when he left quickly, I stood in the kitchen with my stomach in knots, trying hard to stay balanced, trying to make certain that my old demons would not reawaken in the midst of all the memories I was about to touch.
Since my mother's death, my father had been unable to sleep in their bedroom so their room was filled with her things, and her smell. Everything that I saw when I went into the room was a painful reminder of the woman who had been my lifeline since the day I was born. After a year, her cotton bathrobe was still hanging behind the door, and when I turned to grab it, I buried my head inside of it and smelled the soft scent. Then I wept, thinking perhaps I could get it out of the way and get on with my horrible task. That did help, though I cried on and off during the next four hours anyway.
I filled the boxes my father had collected with her clothes, one with underwear, another with sweaters, socks, and so many shoes I started to laugh when I remembered how my mother loved new shoes more than anything. There were twenty-four pairs in all, lined up on the floor of her closet, just as she had left them.
My father had instructed me to take apart the entire bedroom. He had decided to paint it and use it as a guest room, so I took all the pictures off the wall, the ones mostly of me at various stages of my life as an only child. This is what my mother looked at, I thought, all those days when she was unable to do anything but lie here and remember. Me in those little brown and white shoes. Me with my head tipped to the side and standing by my first two-wheeler. Me, hands on hips, tongue wagging at the camera. Me graduating from high school, then the wedding, then the babies. My mother centered her life around me. Always me.
I saved her jewelry box for last and decided to scrounge through my father's refrigerator for a beer while I sat on the bed and picked through the necklaces and pins and earrings. I kept some of the pieces for the girls, the ones that I remember my mother wearing. I kept her high school ring, some gold earrings and a long gold chain that I vaguely remember playing with one of those long nights when Mother helped me keep those terrible dark thoughts at bay.
There was one particularly terrible time when I was pregnant the first time, and unable to take medication or drink or do any single thing at all to try and keep myself sane. My mother knew how terrible it was for me then, because even though her depression was a much milder form than mine, she too had suffered through pregnancy. I knew, because of what she told me before she died, that she was full of guilt.
Those months and months of waiting for the baby to come were by far the worst days of my life. Often, I would simply leave, especially if Paul was gone, and go to a hotel alone. My mother always knew where I was and I knew where she was. All I did was watch television and click my fingers against each other, counting endlessly to try and keep my mind on one thing.
Twice my mother had the hospital come and get me because she was afraid that I might hurt myself. I was only violent a few times, and it must have been terrifying for my mother to see me that way. What I found at the bottom of her jewelry box showed me how frightened she had been, and it is the reason why I am thinking every minute that there are still many things I need to forget and forgive.
The bundle of papers I found in the bottom of her jewelry box were scraps of menus, little notepad papers, receipts and other paper odds and ends about four inches thick—put together, one could call them a journal or a diary. When I found them, I had no idea what they were at first, and I set down my beer and began riffling through the stack.
Dec. 12, 1956 . . . Today my little baby is just two months old and when I look into her eyes I try to see deep, deep into her mind. Is there anything there? Will she get it too? Will my little baby girl, so beautiful, be overcome with the darkness?
“Oh, my God!” That's what I said to myself over and over when I read the papers, some of them ragged where my mother's fingers might have touched them a thousand times. I put my fingers there and when I closed my eyes, I could see her crouched over some table in a cafe, a cigarette in her left hand burning to the tip as she wrote her heart out.
Jan. 24, 1963…Today little Janice has been sitting all day just staring out the window. Now I know, I know for sure that she sees horrible things. I tried to go to her and hold her, but she pushed me away and cried and cried. Finally she came to me and said, “Mama, I feel so sad, I just feel so sad.”
I dared not read many more of these notes from my mother because I could not remember any of the things that she was talking about, and there was no way in hell I wanted to remember.
My severe depression bordered on every other mental disease known to man. One step south, and I could have been a flying mongoose. Another step east, and I could manifest thirteen different people inside of my brain. By the time I discovered my mother's diary, I already considered myself to be lucky. Lucky to be alive, to be better, to be able to function and to recognize colors and the beauty in the smile of my own babies, and in all the sunsets and sunrises that blew past my house.
But I also know, and will always live with the fact that every day of my life is a gift that might be taken away. My mind remains constantly crammed with “what ifs.” What if my chemistry shifts, and the current medicine no longer works? What if I'm struck by a car and go into a coma where I can sense everything but can't speak, and they take away the medicine and leave me there inside of myself like a trapped rat? What if my daughters—who are absolutely fine and healthy and mentally alert—develop this same disease in five years or when they have their own babies? What if Paul is finally sickened by the thought of living with a crazy woman who may dip over the edge at any minute?
And Paul, what about Paul? Paul who was gone lots and lots but who always came back and looked into my eyes as if he had just realized he loved me? What about Paul who still has the long and lean muscles of the eighteen-year-old boy/man I fell in love with? Paul, who bakes bread and built me a flower garden in the shape of a heart, who takes his extra money to buy me a $12 bottle of wine instead of the new things he needs for the truck? This is the man who can turn me on by simply lifting his pant leg. When he steps into the shower each morning and I watch him moving through that clear glass I made him install, one look at his lean body and the water is enough to make me want to dive on him through the shower door.