Saying Goodbye

There are moments when the reality of loss and the blessings of love fuse to unveil our struggle to make sense of it all.

I was not with my mother when she died. Although I had visited her in the nursing home for ten years, she hadn’t been aware of me for the last five. Alzheimer’s Disease prevented her from being present to anyone except my father, and then only occasionally.

When Mom finally passed, I was living on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago in an apartment that looked out on Lake Michigan. It was the day after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when I got the call from my brother.

 “Where have you been?” he shouted over the phone from his home in Maryland.  “I’ve been trying to get you for three days. Mom died on Tuesday and now it’s Friday. The nursing home didn’t know how to get hold of you, so they called me.”

“I’m married to a rabbi, you ninny, and it was Rosh Hashanah. For the past three days he’s been leading services in a synagogue out of town. You remember—that place where Mom and Dad took us every year.” I leaked sarcasm like an old oil drum. There was a pause.

“When Mom died, I didn’t know what to do” he said. “You have all the papers, her will and everything. And I didn’t know what to say to Dad. I knew her body had to be shipped to Philadelphia for burial and the funeral parlor had instructions, but I didn’t know if there was any money to pay for it. I was so frustrated.  Sorry.”

At times like these, it is a blessing to be married to a clergy person. I handed the phone to Rabbi Allen and went into the living room to stare at the calm surface of the lake that stretched out into forever.  As I sat there, a strange rocking swept over my body. My mind was blank, my breathing even. It felt like my body starting to unwind. Muscles that were knotted during the ten years of her illness loosened like well-done meat falling off the bone. There were no tears, only a feeling of relief and the constant rocking I couldn’t control. A gentle touch on my shoulder released me after what seemed hours.  

Allen wrapped his arms around me and explained what had to be done and the plans that he had made with my brother. He said that when told of her death, Dad, who suffered from a series of mild strokes, heart disease and depression for years, simply said, “She was a wonderful person.” For ten years he lived in an apartment on the hospital grounds next door to her nursing home. He spent every day of those ten years at her bedside, feeding her, dressing her, coaxing her to smile, and talking to her about all the things they would do together when she got well. Yet, he showed no deep sorrow for the loss of his wife of 56 years. He just walked back to his apartment and called his one remaining close friend who lived nearby in Miami.

Over the years, I developed heavy emotional armor to control my anger at having to be responsible for all their daily needs as they aged, including legal arrangements, and any additional nursing care. Now, sitting at the window, even though I felt tension release, the armor refused to give way. My father said good-bye in the simplest way…so simple that the doctor asked me to tell him again when I arrived in Florida the next day. “I don’t think he understood.” But I knew that Dad had always handled difficult situations with utter calm and control. It was his way. As he aged, he became even more unreachable. Still, I agreed to tell him again the following morning hoping that my being with him would touch his release button and mine as well.

“Your mother was a wonderful person,” he said again.

We sat together in the sunlight in the hospital garden. I felt no attachment to his good-bye, just the utter calm of knowing and accepting the inevitability of death.  Neither of us shed a tear.

It was not until later when I sat down to write her eulogy that my feelings began to surface. I struggled to put my armor aside to describe the woman I lost so many years ago, a woman who hadn’t recognized me for years, whose sickness had frustrated and angered me, turning my life into a series of frustrating weekends trying desperately to keep them both comfortable and alive. Now I wrestled with my guilt at being relieved by her death.

At some point, sitting at my desk, I looked up at a picture of Mom as a young woman in her twenties—a sweet, beautiful face framed by hair coifed in closely styled waves. Kind. Serene. Peaceful. Tears finally began to make their way to the surface as I remembered her before her illness when she was alive, cooking, playing golf, beaming up at me at my college graduation, diapering my sons, celebrating my brother’s wedding.        

Were these last painful years hers? No. They belonged to the disease and shouldn’t tarnish the gentle, patrician, loving, funny woman that was my mother. What became stunningly clear was that she was a victim of the disease, and so was I.

As I wrote, the photograph over my desk glowed with her young face and opened the floodgates of memories. And so, my healing began with forgiving her and myself as I recaptured my love for her.  I had opened the door and left my self-made prison of anger and sacrifice behind, moving out into the open fields of loving memories that would mend my heart and nourish my soul.