“Because I didn’t show a clear villain,” my mother says. “It’s hard to blame someone for breaking the law when all your choices have been taken away from you. Nobody’s all good or all bad. They just get painted that way.”
I think about what my life would have been like if she had come home and sat down at the kitchen table with me and told me these stories. Surely I would have understood better what captured her attention and drew her away from my father and me, instead of only feeling jealous of it.
These days I am thinking a lot about loss. Because of this pandemic, everyone feels like they’ve been robbed of something, or—in the most extreme and permanent of cases—someone. A job, an engagement, a painting for auction. A graduation, a vacation, a freshman year. A grandmother, a sister, a lover. Nobody is guaranteed tomorrow—I realize that viscerally now—but that doesn’t keep us from feeling cheated when it’s yanked away.
During the past two months, the things we are missing have come to feel concentrated and acute, personal. Whatever we forfeit echoes the pain from all the other times we have been disappointed in our lives. When I was sedated and I thought I had lost my mother, it was amplified by all the times she left me when I was little.
She looks up and finds me watching her. I do that, now, trying to see myself in the curve of her jaw or the texture of her hair. “Have you ever been to Mexico?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I’d like to go, one day. It’s on my bucket list.”
Her face lights up. “What else is on there?”
“The Galápagos,” I say softly.
“I’ve been,” she replies. “That poor tortoise—Lonesome George. He died.”
I was the one to tell her that, a day before my life changed. “So I hear.” I lean back on my elbows, glancing at her through the screen. She is pixelated and whole at the same time. “Did you always want to travel?” I ask.
“When I was a girl,” my mother says, “we went nowhere. My father was a cattle farmer and he used to say you can’t take a vacation from the cows. One day an encyclopedia salesman came to the house and I begged my parents to subscribe. Every month there was a new volume showing me a world a lot bigger than McGregor, Iowa.”
I am entranced. I try to connect the dots between her childhood and her move to New York City.
“The best part was that we got a bonus book—an atlas,” she adds. “There weren’t computers back then, you know. To see what it looked like thousands of feet up a mountain in Tibet or down in the rice paddies of Vietnam or even just the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco—I wanted to be there. All the places. I wanted to put myself in the frame.” She shrugs. “So I did.”
My mother, I realize, mapped out her life literally. I did mine figuratively. But it was for the same reason—to make sure I didn’t get trapped someplace I didn’t want to be.
I don’t know what makes me ask the next question. Maybe it is because I have never struck a tuning fork in myself and heard it resonate in my mother; maybe it’s because I have spent so many years blaming her for not sharing her life with me, even though I never actually asked her to do so. But I sit up, legs crossed, and say, “Do you have children?”
A small frown forms between her brows, and she closes the photo album. Her hands smooth over its cover, nails catching at the embossed gold words. A LIFE, it says. Banal, and also spot-on.
“I do,” my mother says, just when I think she will not answer. “I did.”
Let this go, I tell myself. Alzheimer’s 101 says do not remind a person with dementia of a memory or event that might be upsetting.
She meets my gaze through the screen. “I … ?don’t know,” she says.
But the cloudiness that is the hallmark of her illness isn’t what I see in her eyes. It’s the opposite—the memory of a relationship that wasn’t what it might have been, even if you do not know why.
It’s blinking at your surroundings, and not knowing how you got to this point.
And I am just as guilty of it as she is.
I’ve spent so much time dissecting how different my mother and I are that I never bothered to consider what we have in common.
“I’m tired,” my mother says.
“You should lie down,” I tell her. I gather up my blanket.
“Thank you for visiting,” she says politely.
“Thank you for letting me,” I reply, just as gracious. “Don’t forget to lock the slider.”
I wait until she is inside her apartment, but even in the space of those few seconds, she’s forgotten to secure the latch. I could tell her a million times; she will likely never remember.
While I’m waiting for my Uber, I laugh softly at my foolishness. At first, I thought maybe I’d come back to this world so that I could give my mother a second chance.
Now I’m starting to think I’m here so she can give me one.