By Selma Moss-Ward
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, August 6, 2007;
C08
After my mother died, friends gave me chocolate -- fudge, fruits dipped in bittersweet, a box of cocoa-dusted truffles. The gifts brought pleasure and consolation: pleasure because they were delicious reminders of the kindness of friends; consolation because they let me think kindly of my mother, a difficult person to love. Her favorite flavor was chocolate, and during her last days she allowed my sister and me to spoon-feed her chocolate pudding and chocolate ice cream as she lay in the hospital with tubes up her nostrils and IVs in her bruised arms, smilingly blissfully as each spoonful slid down her throat.
At the end, my mother, all 78 pounds of her, suffering from dementia and wasted by cancer, emphysema and pneumonia, became the sweet and caring mommy of my dreams. She told me and my sister that we were beautiful and that she loved us; she apologized frequently for the anguish she had caused. "It wasn't easy to live with me, I know," she said. "I was so angry all the time."
We didn't disagree. Granted, as a divorced working mother, she was under great stress, but Mom was a screamer whose refrain was "I can't wait till you're 21 and out of the house!" We were three females without rapport, living parallel lives in a series of claustrophobic apartments. After I left -- at the foretold age of 21, to attend graduate school in another state -- there were years of estrangement. There were also years of psychotherapy. "This is the story of your mother," I recall one therapist telling me. "She gives with one hand and she takes away with the other."
For 30 years, unable to bear her hostility, I rarely saw my mother. But I returned after an absence of several years when my sister phoned from California and asked me, a New Englander, to go to the New York hospital where Mom had been taken after collapsing. The doctors thought it essential for family to be there, my sister said.
I walked into Mom's room wearing a paper gown over my clothes and latex gloves that made my hands look lifeless. She didn't know I had been summoned, but despite her failing memory, when she saw me, she began to cry. And then she said, "I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry."
"It's okay," I said, as tears rolled down my cheeks. "That part is over." I held her twiglike fingers in my rubberized hand.
Mom's eyes seemed huge in her emaciated face. "Now get me out of this place," I remember her commanding. "I'm being held against my will. Those people who look like doctors and nurses -- they're all actors."
I told her they weren't.
"How do you know?" she sneered, back to her familiar ways. "Have you seen their medical licenses? They look like medical people, but this is really a dinner theater."
During her weeks in the "dinner theater," Mom slipped in and out of lucidity. At one point she nearly died but, despite a "do not resuscitate" order, was revived. Then, heavily sedated, she was on a ventilator. A TV, recommended by doctors who thought she needed mental stimulation even if she appeared to be unconscious, blared in her curtained cubicle, sometimes advertising allergy pills "to help you breathe easier."
My sister arrived, and when we weren't at the hospital we tried to organize Mom's house -- a daunting task, as everything was chaotic, evidence of her long-term loss of memory. We found uncashed, expired checks mixed with ancient junk mail, overdue bills and collection notices; we found a frying pan in the newspaper recycling, potholders in the refrigerator, a plastic bag containing insurance policies, stock certificates, savings bonds and the deed to her house on the bedroom floor.
After her stint in the vent unit, Mom could sometimes recognize people and hold short conversations. Once, as we sat by her bed, she slowly awoke and with great effort said she had written us a letter.
And what did you say in the letter? we asked.
"I told you how sorry I was," she whispered.
This was the gift of my mother's dying days.
She finally offered reasons for the anger that had canopied our lives -- her own parents had been ill, physically and mentally. She was left motherless when a teenager. Her father was a suicide. Her acknowledgment of these factors made me surer of my own sanity, which I had often doubted because she'd constantly accused me of distorting reality, and it made me more sympathetic.
Mainly, though, it made me deeply sad, for all the time squandered, time when she was so inwardly tormented that there was no room for the people who could have given her what she really needed -- understanding and love.
The mortician met us at the faux stained-glass door of his establishment -- situated on a suburban thoroughfare of endless strip malls, auto supply stores and cineplexes -- and pressed our hands solemnly. "I'm sorry for your loss," he murmured. He had a lousy toupee and wore an Elvis shirt open at the top, revealing chest hair and gold chains. When he handed me the funeral estimate and I expressed surprise, he observed that it was not unusual for those who had never gone through this to experience sticker shock.
My sticker shock included incredulity at the idea of having to rent a coffin for $900 for the funeral -- Mom was to be cremated. But the mortician threw in, free of charge, as many shiva candles and preprinted condolence acknowledgments as we wanted. He also promised to get us the best rabbi.
That evening the best rabbi interviewed us by telephone; he clearly had a boilerplate eulogy and needed to slot in critical pieces of information. He asked us about "Mother's" profession, interests, friends, travels. "And of course, Mother was devoted to you," he stated.
Why don't you just not mention her parenting, I suggested.
In the end the rabbi characterized Mom as an individualist who wanted to do things her way -- like the Sinatra song. "My way or the highway," I thought, remembering how she'd thrown my sister out at age 18 because she was spending "too much time" with a boyfriend. But eulogies do not dwell on personality flaws, and the rabbi achieved a balance of truth and whitewash. And his delivery was sincere.
We held the funeral reception at a kosher deli, conveniently located in an adjacent shopping mall. The food was good, but most important, the restaurant was Mom's favorite. People glumly ate matzoh ball soup and chopped liver, and reminisced. My cousin's little daughter felt sick and rested her head on the table, as if to sleep. I understood; by then I could feel my adrenaline draining. By evening I was nearly comatose. I slept profoundly and have slept much since.
Getting back to normal was a slow-motion process. There was so much to monitor -- paperwork, legal and tax issues, selling a distant house, dividing possessions, caring for Mom's neurotic cat. So many loose ends.
But the chocolate was an unexpected boon. Three friends sent fancy assortments and another made me a pound of fudge. A week after the funeral I was studying this trove, spread across the kitchen counter, when a childhood friend phoned. I told her how the chocolate had simply come my way. It's not as if I have a reputation as a great chocolate devotee, I said. But it can't be mere coincidence that so many people are giving me chocolate.
"Ah, chocolate," sighed Heather, a psychoanalyst. "I just think of it as an excellent, all-purpose mental-health food."
And so, needing fortification, I cut myself a largish piece of fudge.
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