The Theft of Memory

by Jonathan Kozol

  “You can still have them! You’re not too old.”

  “First we’ll have to find a wife for him,” said Silvia.

  My mother looked at her with irritation. In a snappish voice, she asked her, “Why?”

  “Mrs. Kozol!” Silvia said. “A man can’t just go off and start out having babies if he hasn’t bothered to find someone that he wants to marry!”

  “That’s absurd!” my mother said. “Why not?”

  Silvia, the most conservative of women, who exercised the strictest discipline upon her daughter and granddaughter, looked aghast.

  “Mrs. Kozol!” she said again. “What are you saying to your son?”

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” my mother said.

  I don’t think my mother actually believed what she had said in arguing with Silvia. But the words that bubbled up when she had risen to the battle against Silvia’s respectability, as well as the story of the love affair she had belatedly revealed, opened up the vista of a ribald sense of moral independence in my mother that went further than I’d ever seen in her before.

  Still, in spite of unexpectedly delicious moments like the one when she incited Silvia to wrath, it was apparent by the end of winter that my mother recognized a steepening decline in her clarity of thinking and the capability for detailed recollection in which she had taken so much pride.

  “I’m beginning to lose my memory,” she announced to me one night. “Sometimes there’s a place that I remember. I can see it, but I can’t think of the name.”

  “That happens to everyone,” I said, wanting to reassure her. I asked her, on an impulse, whether she could call to mind any of the Latin words she’d learned during her high school years. Forgetting the concern she’d just expressed about her loss of memory, she replied by chanting out the entire conjugation of the first verb generations of young people used to learn in Latin class.

  “Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Amant…”

  “Excellent!” I said, as if we were back in school and I was the teacher. I asked if she remembered any nouns, and she declined “puella” (girl) in singular and plural. Maybe the fear attached for her, as for many students, to the first intimidating weeks of Latin class had locked this in her memory.

  But the truth of the matter is that my mother’s own assessment of her declining faculties was proving to be more accurate with every passing day. By the spring of the year, her appetite was waning and, more and more, she wouldn’t eat the meals that Julia would insist on bringing to her bedroom. “Mrs. Kozol,” Julia would say, “you need to eat some food.” My mother, said Julia, would reply, “I don’t have to. You can’t make me. Take the tray away!” An hour later, she might call her back into the room and look at her scoldingly. “Julia, you didn’t give me dinner!”

  By May, however, even those brief stirrings of cantankerous vitality had become less frequent. Julia also noticed that she didn’t ask so many questions about Daddy anymore. “Sometimes,” Julia said, “it seemed as if she had forgotten he was still there in the room right next to hers….”

  One night in June, my mother whispered to me something that I couldn’t understand because she spoke so softly. When I leaned a little closer, she said there was something that she had to tell me, but she asked me first to go and close the door “so nobody can hear.”

  After I had shut the door and came back to sit with her, she said, “I have a lot of money right here in my purse.” During the past year or so, she had taken to keeping a small pocketbook beside her in her bed, hidden usually beneath the blankets. She took it out and showed me that it held $200. “There’s more in the bureau, underneath my sweaters. It’s in the bottom drawer.”

  She kept speaking in a whisper. “If there’s anything you need, I want you to have it. That’s why I’ve kept it safe for you.”

  I realized she believed $200 was a large amount of money, as it would have been, of course, when she was a child. I didn’t say a word that might have contradicted this impression. “I’m doing okay right now, Mom,” I told her. “But if I need it sometime, I’ll remember that it’s here.”

  “It’s my money. I’m your mother. I have the right to give it to anyone I want.”

  “I know you do. I won’t forget,” I promised her.

  “Come here,” she said.

  After she had kissed me and I kissed her back, she said it was okay for me to go and open up the door. When she said she’d like “a little tea…, maybe some cheese,” I went into the other room and Julia and I arranged things on a tray, three cups, one for each of us, and some Camembert and Emmenthal, still my mother’s favorites. She still enjoyed a cup of tea—“not too strong,” as she always said to Julia—but she barely nibbled at the cheese.

  With the arrival of summer, my mother grew increasingly withdrawn from Silvia and Julia. When I was in her room alone with her, she sometimes managed to find sufficient strength to talk with me—no longer, however, in that commandeering way in which she used to issue her decisions and demands, but in a quieter, more passive tone, and usually only a few words at a time. Little by little, she began to say good-bye to me.

  “I don’t want you to be scared,” she said to me one evening, holding my hand closely. “I’m not afraid to die. I want you to be strong. When it’s time for me to go…” She didn’t finish with the sentence.

  As the summer went on, my mother’s somewhat rigidified posture and more frequently closed eyes made it apparent that she was giving up the will to live even while she seemed to keep on fighting back against that loss of will. Her hands curled into tightened fists, not unlike the way my father held his hands, but in his situation it seemed to be a reflex action, without intentionality, while in my mother’s case those fists took on a more embattled look, like those of someone getting ready for a last encounter that she knew she would not try too hard to win.

  Even now, a sweet nostalgia and some of the mildest streams of memory from her early childhood appeared. She started to recite a rhyme her mother might have taught her in her infancy.

  One two

  Three four

  Five six seven

  All good children

  Go to Heaven….

  She began by saying this only once or twice each time. Soon, however, she would say it maybe six or seven times without leaving any interruptions in between. It ceased to sound as if it gave her a consoling feeling. It became more automatic and mechanical.

  By September, I noticed that her head was almost always tilted back when I came in the room. Her jaw had stiffened. Her mouth was generally open. Her fingers remained tightened into fists but did not look like those of someone who was fighting or resisting anymore. She rarely looked directly at me now unless I leaned across her body so that her upward-gazing eyes would meet my own.

  When the time for which she had prepared me finally arrived—it was late October now—I knew I had my orders from my mother. I did not disobey her.

  Swallowing difficulties and an aspiration problem caused by the flowing up of secretions from her stomach, or of undigested particles of food, into her throat and lungs, brought my mother into the hospital with severe congestion and with a low fever, which, however, worsened somewhat by the time she was examined and they got her upstairs into Phillips House. Antibiotics, I was told, might bring down the fever, but the aspiration problem, according to the resident, could only be addressed by insertion of a feeding tube into her stomach and a breathing tube into her throat.

  “I don’t think you want to do that to your mother at this stage of things,” he said.

  Looking at my mother’s upturned face, her eyes closed, her mouth open, the hardened outline of her jaw, I stood by her bed and briefly examined the DNR when one of the nurses brought it to me for my signature. After I signed it, I stayed to watch the resident setting up the morphine drip. Julia stayed there with me at the bedside.

  My mother remained alive for several hours. When, as the first rays of the sun began t
o filter through the window shades, I heard her groaning once, I asked the resident if he could raise the morphine level. An hour later, he came in and did it once again. In the final moments, the nurse who had been present left the room, as Julia also did without my asking her. I wanted to be there by myself to give my mother one more hug and one good final kiss.

  My mother had said she did not want a funeral but preferred a graveside ceremony. Lucinda and Julia and other people who had helped to care for her, and my sister and her daughters, a small number of relatives, and some of my closest friends who’d known my mother well, gathered at the grave site at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Martha read a passage from the Book of Ruth and spoke of my mother’s character and of her long and interesting life in a quiet, contemplative service that I think she would have liked. On a CD player I had asked one of my friends to bring, we played the Schumann piano quintet, the passage in which a cellist and a violinist play that hauntingly romantic melody I knew my mother loved.

  After the service I went back to the apartment, where Silvia had stayed in order to let Julia be present at the burial. My father was lying down in bed. His eyes were open. He was smiling. He had, of course, no understanding of the reason for my mother’s absence if he even had an inkling of the fact that she was no longer in the room next door.

  I went into my mother’s room and looked at the photos on her bureau. The Red Sox jersey had been folded on a table near her bed. The purse that she had kept beside her was still there, partially hidden underneath the blankets. She had neglected to bring it with her when she went into the hospital.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Pursuit of Recollection

  After my mother’s death I continued to have conversations with her for a while. I would lie in bed at night and tell her what was going on within my life—something of interest that had taken place that day, a difficult decision I would have to deal with when I woke up the next morning. For more than a year, with a stubbornness I may have learned in part from her, I would not accept that I had lost her.

  My father’s trust attorney set up a meeting with me soon after the burial. He said that, with my mother’s passing, it made even less sense than before to keep on paying rent for the apartment. He suggested again that Daddy’s belongings ought to be sold off, so that the money paid for them could be applied to his expenses and exhausted quickly. At that point, he would qualify for Medicaid and, as the lawyer said, we might find “a reasonably pleasant place” for him to stay for whatever time he might remain alive.

  “You could save yourself a barrel of money, old boy,” he observed, speaking, as always, in a patrician tone that made me think of the aristocratic boys from Groton and St. Paul’s School I had known in college.

  I don’t think he actually believed his argument would be convincing to me. I’d already told him I had brought my father home because he had asked for this repeatedly. Whether or not he recognized it anymore, this was his home and I resolved that he would go on living here until he closed his eyes for the last time.

  In the months after my mother died, the circadian rhythms of my father’s life continued to be pretty much the same as they had been. “When I come in at seven,” Silvia said, “I always say, ‘Good morning, Dr. Kozol!’ He looks right up at me, bright and alert. If he’s lying on his side and facing my direction, he moves his eyes to follow me.

  “If his eyes are closed when I bring his breakfast, I tell him, ‘You have to open your eyes. I’m not going to give you breakfast if you keep them closed.’ He obeys me! He opens them. Then when he sees me dip the spoon into the pudding or the applesauce, he opens his mouth and watches as I lift the spoon. After I put the food in his mouth, I see him chewing, even though he doesn’t have to chew. He does it automatically….

  “He loves puddings—anything sweet. His favorites are banana pudding, peach purée, mango pudding, and vanilla custard. I know this because he swallows them more quickly. When I give him a purée of vegetables, he takes it in his mouth but holds it there much longer.”

  Although his legs were very weak, his arms had remained strong, and he continued putting up a strenuous resistance when Silvia was bathing him. “He still would put his fists across his privates. No matter how many times I’d lift them up, he’d put them back again. Once, when I got really mad, I told him, ‘Take those hands away!’ He looked around sideways, since I was behind him, and he said, ‘Oh my God!’ And I told him, ‘Good! I made you talk!’ ”

  When I kissed him in the evenings now, he no longer had the strength to kiss me back. But he would press his lips against my cheek and sometimes he would just look up and study my face, as it seemed, with the greatest curiosity. That wonderful smile in his clear blue eyes that I had always loved would suddenly appear.

  One of the bright young research aides who had worked with me a couple years before and still liked to visit with my father, and always brought him flowers to cheer up his room, noticed that the Boston Globe continued to arrive at the apartment every day. She was a bit perplexed by this because she knew he couldn’t read it and would certainly no longer understand it even if Silvia were to read some stories to him.

  I explained to her that I was trying to do everything I could to keep the environment around my father as civilized, familiar, and connected to the outside world as possible. The arrival of the paper and its presence on his desk or on a table in his bedroom was simply a small part of this. (Julia and Silvia, who was staying overnight now almost as frequently as Julia, would read it in the evenings once he fell asleep.) One of the final things I did after my father died was to cancel the subscription.

  —

  In the following year, my father had to go into the hospital again. The problem had begun in February when his geriatrician, in the course of an examination, discovered what she termed a “superficial ulcer,” essentially an aggravated bedsore, just above his rectum. But she proposed no treatment for the ulcer and she set up no appointment for a follow-up exam. Instead, she said the visiting nurse would come to see my father on a weekly basis and would tell her promptly if the ulcer did not heal. But, as the ulcer failed to heal and progressively grew larger, the visiting nurse did not appear. The message from the doctor, for whatever reason, hadn’t been conveyed to her.

  By March 16, the ulcerated area had doubled in size and become what is known as “a necrotic abscess.” The doctor later said, “It had been my impression that the…nurse and [a] wound care specialist had been following the patient closely…,” but it seemed she hadn’t taken any measures to be sure that this had been the case.

  On March 17, another nurse appeared at the apartment. As soon as she looked at my father’s wound, she said he should be taken to the hospital. A doctor told me late that night that a CAT scan had confirmed a “sacral ulcer with necrotic tissue” that might already have expanded well into his rectum. A surgeon, he said, had been called in for a consultation and antibiotics had been prescribed and were being given to my father through an intravenous line.

  That night and the next three days I spoke or met with a series of physicians. The second physician told me that my father now was running a high fever and that he believed the abscess had, indeed, spread into his rectum. If this was so, there would be two options. “The extreme response would,” he said, “be major surgery under anesthesia,” which, he continued, “can be very difficult. He could die on the operating table.” The alternative, he said, was that the infection might be arrested by the antibiotic medication my father was receiving and that he “might be relieved” and the abscess might begin to heal if he could be given proper care at home.

  The following day, a different physician said that there appeared to have been no infection of the rectum, as was previously feared, and that my father’s fever had come down. But the day after that, yet another doctor told me that the ulcer had been left untreated for too long and permitted to expand to so large a size that it was uncertain whether it would ever close—or not at least for
many months, perhaps for an entire year.

  In the face of these differing opinions, and without my father’s regular physician (the “attending physician,” as she was termed) to pull it all together and present me with a clear and understandable prognosis, I didn’t know what I should do or which of these opinions I ought to rely upon. It was Silvia, in her unbounded confidence that she could help my father to recover sooner than the doctor said was probable—by which I mean the latest in the series of four doctors I had talked to—who swept away my sense of indecision and confusion and persuaded me to bring my father home as soon as this was possible.

  Once he was at home, she and Julia set out on a course of action to protect the wounded area from further irritation by ordering a special kind of soft and cushioned mattress and positioning my father so that he was lying on his side when he was asleep, and not putting pressure on his rectum and his lower back. That was not an easy job. They had to watch him through the night, but they did it with painstaking care and the ulcer started healing.

  As a matter of record, nonetheless, as Julia noted pointedly, my father’s doctor “had been unavailable to us at the time we needed her.” In view of this pattern, which was now predictable, friends have asked me why I didn’t spare myself, and Silvia and Julia, from more of these frustrations by asking for advice from one of the physicians in the Boston area with whom I was acquainted in the hope that he could help me find another doctor for my father. I did, in fact, put out some inquiries, but I was advised that it wasn’t likely any other doctor would be inclined, or think it wise, to intercede in my father’s care at this stage in his life.

  To start all over with a new physician would, in any case, destabilize the modus operandi to which Silvia and Julia had managed to accommodate themselves, no matter at how large a cost to their emotional endurance. The working relationships they had developed with some of the people in the doctor’s office, who, as they said, sometimes were responsive and did get answers back to them without worrisome delays, would have to be entirely reconstructed with a new physician. Then too, it seemed, every time I thought of ending the relationship with my father’s doctor, she would send me an extremely thoughtful ex post facto summary of his condition in the aftermath of one of these crises—highly detailed and, at times, almost apologetic—which would lead me to believe, temporarily at least, that she would be watching him more closely.