Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen

by Matt McAllester

  Later in the year she has another bout of drinking. In her drunkenness she fails to take her medication regularly and her mania returns. She is hospitalized.

  As she gets better, in the locked ward, she has a realization that will change all of our lives. She begins to understand that she is bipolar, that she is not well, that if she continues to drink and not take her pills on time she will repeatedly end up in this sad, depressing ward. She tells my sister all this. More than thirty years after she first threw the Irish builders out of our house, she accepts that something is wrong with her.

  My sister believes in my mother's commitment to not drinking, to taking her pills, and takes her on vacation to Crete in May 2002.

  In Crete, my mother is worried about what she considers Greece's readiness to lock people up for being mentally ill, and she makes Jane promise to be sure she takes her pills on time. At their first dinner, the waiter places a shot glass of local liquor in front of them both. My mother looks anxious, determined to stick to her abstinence but alarmed at appearing rude by declining the shot. My sister downs the firewater for her. And does the same every night. A couple of nights my mother takes a sip and giggles like a naughty child. She says how much she misses good wine. But she has turned a corner. In the future she will have the occasional drink, but never again will she drink herself into danger.

  Her illness remains unpredictable. On September 19, 2003, about three weeks after I move to London to live there for the first time since my family left for Edinburgh when I was three, she is hospitalized again, and something has changed.

  She has not been sleeping well and has been agitated, pacing up and down and has been repeating that she has a brain tumour and things got worse over the last week as she became more mute, not responding and unable to function, the doctor writes, recording what my sister tells him.

  When admitted, Ann was mute, not interacting, not socialising, very scatty in her speech, confused and there was a serious problem with her orientation, concentration and her memory, the doctor writes. Ann's admission was quite different from previous ones.

  I have been spending up to six weeks at a time in Iraq. But when I am in London, I have time to spend visiting my mother in the locked ward and talking to her doctor.

  He and I sit in a visiting room before I see my mother.

  “There is damage to the brain,” he says. She can remember little and she can't safely perform simple tasks like filling and turning on an electric kettle, he tells me. He draws a simple diagram on a piece of a paper. “The white matter is damaged.”

  He explains that white matter brings messages to gray matter in the nervous system. It can find new routes, new connections, but it is damaged, he says. It's the alcohol, the cigarettes, the hard living. They have run CT scans, blood tests, and ECGs. The damage is not fixable. And then the doctor says something that I have wanted to hear for almost twenty years.

  “I think Ann needs twenty-four-hour care,” he says.

  “My sister and I agree,” I say, and somehow brain damage seems almost like a blessing. “Thank you.”

  When I'm taken in to see her, my mother is calm but lost. She spends month after month in the locked ward as Jane and I look, in partnership with social workers and the hospital, for somewhere she can live.

  I am late for the movies one Saturday afternoon because I have been visiting her. My cell phone is dead and I have not been able to call, but Pernilla, whom I have only just met, has waited. There's no point in making an excuse. I tell her that my mother is very ill and explain that I was visiting her and so that's why I am late.

  Some weeks later I am due to visit my mother. I haven't known Pernilla that long, but something makes me ask her: “Would you like to meet my mum? You really don't have to. The hospital is not a nice place.”

  “I'd love to meet your mum,” she says.

  “Are you sure about this?” I ask. “Trust me, it's grim in there.”

  “Of course I want to come.”

  We take the subway up to the hospital and are buzzed in through the secure door. Pernilla sits in the visiting room, unfazed by the peeling paint, the reek of cigarette smoke, and the insane people who open the door to see what's going on, and she falls into an enthusiastic discussion of ancient Etruscan art with my mother, who cannot make a cup of tea but remains perfectly capable of describing in detail the elongated sculpted figures of that period. I am pretty much left out of the conversation.

  “She's so lovely,” Pernilla says, as we walk back to the subway station after the visit. She has not patronized my mother, nor has she found her scary.

  “That is a very nice girl,” my mother tells me when next I visit her.

  I have a meeting with the doctor, and he tells me of a home they have found named Pine Tree Court. He warns me that it is a proper nursing home and that my mother, not yet sixty, may find the other occupants of the home to be depressing. I don't care. I want her out of the ward, which she shares with the crazed and the destitute, and so just about anywhere will seem an improvement. I visit Pine Tree Court with my sister and we agree that it will do. I pretend to myself that it doesn't smell of the dying and their final, insulting meals of boiled vegetables and grease.

  My mother moves in and smokes in her room, against the regulations. The room has all the modern accessories of human collapse—the panic buttons and pull strings, the low toilet with supportive bars on the wall, the easy-wash carpets. It is a dulling, end-of-life motel room, stripped of warmth. A locked mental ward is a tough place, where some patients shamble along the corridor mumbling while others stride around with the certainty of their own angry brilliance, but it is not, at least, a place where you go to die. It is a place where you go to get better and then, in most cases, leave. No one at Pine Tree Court, we realize, has any plans to get better and leave. My sister takes my mother out of Pine Tree Court after a week and drives her back to the locked ward.

  Every few days my sister takes our mother cigarettes and treats, and once a week she takes her home and cooks for her. Sometimes I take her out for dinner. She drools and gets food on her face and moves slowly, attracting the attention of other diners and the staff. Sometimes I am embarrassed and ask her to wipe her mouth. My mother could not care less what anyone may think of her. She never has. That hasn't changed.

  My sister has apparently limitless patience and strength. I can't spend too long with my mother without feeling completely drained and depressed. It is a failing of mine, I suppose. And yet I have never felt guilty and still don't.

  By the beginning of January there was a dramatic improvement in her cognitive function including her memory, concentration and orientation, the doctor writes.

  Jane and I have begun to notice the improvement too.

  “I'm worried that she's getting too well,” I tell my sister.

  “I know,” she says.

  If my mother keeps getting better and advances into some zone of in-between wellness and illness, we fear that the doctors will reassess her, decide she does not need full-time supervision, and cast her back into the world of the self-sufficient. Where she will, before long, open her front door and walk out again into London in her bare feet, forgetting who she is and where she is meant to be.

  And then my sister finds Rathmore House, a home for the aged. There's a room available on the top floor of this large house on one of the most beautiful, expensive streets in all of London, where famous writers and entertainers live and a small collection of shops caters to the wealthy. She has a room with skylights and windows and an en suite bathroom. A room with views of trees and gardens and pretty tiled rooftops. A room where she can have her own furniture and carpets and paintings on the walls, where she can smoke, where she can have an armchair for herself and one for visitors, chairs covered with throws and cushions in the rich tones of the Middle East. It's a short drive from the area where both my sister and I live. We get her a stereo and buy her CDs of classical music and old standards. She has books aroun
d and begins to read a few of them. Rathmore House is a short walk to a sweet little café, where for the first time in years she enjoys a bit of a social life, befriending other regular customers, who seem to find her eccentric but good company. There is a freak morning when an angry man murders one of my mother's and Pernilla's neighbors on the sidewalk with an ax. Other than that, it could not be a safer place to live. The staff look after her and dole out her medication. Doctors stop by. There is no pressure on her to socialize with the genuinely old people, and the staff seem to love having someone around who is a bit younger and feistier, a bit more independent. I visit, and Jane still takes her home for dinner once a week. (She asks me if I will cook for her and so I have her and Jane over one evening, but I am rushed and distracted and the food is mediocre and bland.) I sit in the second armchair in her room, and for the first time since I was a child we have calm, laughing conversations. I still edit myself a little (rarely do I mention my father), and I still have to bite my tongue now and then when she prods a tender spot. But for the most part, we are at peace. I take Pernilla round there. I take Rich there. My sister and I have as good a version of our mother back as we are ever likely to have. I had never considered an outcome like this to be even vaguely possible.

  Rathmore House is, at last, a place where my mother can be safe and happy. She moves in on March 8, 2004.

  She dies there on May 6, 2005.

  That room in Rathmore House is my mother's due. Those fourteen months are her reward.

  43

  ONE OF THE RITUALS OF DEATH IS THE PAID DEATH NOTICE in a newspaper. My sister had one placed in The Scotsman, the daily newspaper of Edinburgh.

  The letters began to arrive. My mother had alienated just about everyone she had ever been friends with and many people she was related to. As their letters arrived, I opened them and read them with uncontrollable shaking and tears. My sister received some also and passed them on to me. I could not begin to write letters of thanks to these people, many of whom I had not thought of for years. Some had known my mother since she was a child.

  I put all the letters in a folder and for nearly three years I left them there, often thinking that I really should take them out and thank people for their kindness.

  Now I felt I could open the folder. Nearly all of the letters were from people who had not seen or spoken to her in a very long time. The first letter brought instant tears, but now it was, at last, absolutely fine.

  For someone like me who saw little of her in her bad times, it is easy to think of her as she used to be—sparky, laughing, quite challenging but always full of enthusiasm and generosity, wrote one old friend. And that is the picture I've retained over these long years.

  Another wrote: I got such a shock to read of your mother's death. … We were at Kilgraston together and probably in the same hockey team together as well—she was always quite a laugh….I know she had been through some difficult times but I shall remember her in happier times.

  Your Mum, on good form, was great company, wrote another. We had some brilliant conversations on such topics as poetry, literature and religion. She was so intelligent and amusing. We used to have some very good laughs. The poetry class, which we both attended, was amazing. Her contributions were always intriguing and interesting. One constant in your mother's life was her devotion to you and Jane. I am sure you know that.

  She was such a talented and fun lady when you were all little, wrote the mother of an old friend of mine. That is the way I shall remember her. Illness is often cruel and was, I fear, in her case-may she rest in peace now.

  Applying after-sun lotion at Port an Droighionn

  Ann was such a lovely person, an old friend wrote. I remember, with joy, the happy times we had with you all. On one particular occasion we were all going to a ball and I still remember how pretty Ann looked—her hair was in a short, sharp bob and she was wearing a straight, long black dress—she was stunning.

  One very old friend says she is shattered by the news and acknowledges she might have done more: I feel I failed her—in fact all of us, her long-time friends, did.

  She was my oldest friend, another wrote, and I loved and admired her.

  A childhood friend of Jane's and mine, the daughter of friends of our parents during their time in London, wrote to my sister: You probably don't remember, but when we were kids we had an argument, you and Matt against Sophie and me—we were convinced that you were our cousins, you explained that we were not. We were so upset, because we loved your family—I think we were forever smitten with the letter-shaped chips!… I have clear impressions in the background of a pretty young woman with dark hair and lovely eyes, and the memories are all so affectionate.

  And finally, at the bottom of the pile, I found a letter from my father to my sister and me, written after my mother's funeral. After I had given my eulogy at the funeral, I had returned to my pew to find my father crying. “It's so true, so true,” he had said, meaning how my mother had taught us all to love. I grabbed his hand and kissed the side of his head.

  A few days later he wrote to my sister and me.

  I wanted to thank you both for everything you did to make the day of Mum's funeral so special. The whole experience was more important and meaningful to me than anything I had imagined. For me it truly felt as if the four of us were really together again for one last time and it felt so good. After the years of anger, bitterness and craziness it became difficult for me to remember all those enormously good times Mum and I had together. They got pushed so far away that I really had to work hard to conjure them up and sometimes even gave up trying. But standing there in the church with her so close to us I felt a wave of love and wonderful memories wash over me and finally after all these years it felt alright again. I hope that now she is with her God she might be able to feel the same way.

  44

  THIS IS WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE WERE I REPORTING ON my mother's medical care like a thousand stories I have reported in my time: I would have torn into the medical records and bureaucracy until I had what I felt sure was a definitive answer. I knew there were more records in the archives of the hospital in Edinburgh. Were I reporting my mother's treatment as I would the shooting of an Iraqi child or the whereabouts of Balkan war criminals, I would have milked the available witnesses—my father, uncle, aunts, friends—for everything they could remember. I would have offered the hospital the right to reply and they, almost certainly, would decline to comment. They would fear legal action, I imagine.

  But I didn't have to report this story the way I always did. I could stop when I wanted to.

  I did stop. And it felt right, deeply right. In trying to bring her back to me, I had never really intended to revisit my mother's darkest years. They had turned out to be inescapable and unavoidable. Her medical records had given me a chronology and a narrative of my mother's decline—and some explanation. It was enough. It turned out that I did not need someone to blame for it all. The fury I had felt, never clearly aimed in any one direction, had steadily subsided as I came to the end of her medical notes. My mother's brain malfunctioned, that is all. People tried to make it work better and they failed and she slipped away. If the doctors made mistakes with my mother—and it's not like I had found a smoking gun of negligence or malpractice—then they were just that: mistakes. No apology, settlement, investigation, or acknowledgment of error would keep my parents happy in their love, would turn my teenage years and my twenties into decades of warm family Christmases and vacations in Ardnamurchan, would give me a mother I could turn to about girls or school or work, would give me a mother who would look after me and cook with love for us all as she had before she fell apart. Nothing could bring her back.

  Family portrait, taken in my father's studio in London

  Perhaps not even her cookbooks.

  45

  SUNDAY, JANUARY 27, 2008, WAS A SUMMER'S DAY LIFTED up and transplanted into midwinter. I went for a run. The sky opened up in all its brightness over a London that h
ad seemed suffocated for weeks by the withering gray of winter. I had been collecting some worries and wanted to pound them out. I was newly, if voluntarily, jobless. And in the coming days, Pernilla and I would try for the third time to create viable, strong embryos, to place them inside Pernilla, to make a baby. I was not sure how either of us could absorb the emptiness and silence that would come in the wake of a third failure. We did not discuss it. This time it had to work. But we were no longer making semi-joking assumptions about twins; we weren't stumbling upon nicknames for the embryos.

  So I ran into the sunshine and, involuntarily, I thought about my mother. For some minutes I just wanted her, as I had so often since her death, to come back. I wanted her to look after me, to tell me that she would make everything all right. But for the first time this familiar desire began to irritate me in its pointlessness. It was a wish that was so divorced from reality that it was just a waste of time and energy. “She's dead, okay?” I said to myself as I sped up along the sidewalk. “And Dad will die. Understand that. No one will look after you as if you were a child. No one can do anything further to make this baby happen.”

  And then I remembered again my mother's slightly stern face as she sat in her armchair in her room in Rathmore House. She was rather pitiless as she began to speak the words I had thought about a thousand times since.

  “If you need to keep the book open, you're not really cooking.”

  I was newly surprised by my memory of how severe she had looked as she said this. She was lecturing me, trying to teach me something important—even if she herself had, as my aunt insisted, never learned to keep the book closed herself. And I remembered a woman who had fallen apart for twenty years or more, and who had come back to us for just over a year, saying before she had died that she was ready to go. She said she had cooked enough, gardened enough, read enough. Remembering those words stung a little, because she had also been saying, I realized now, that she had mothered enough. My sister and I were okay, she had decided. We did not need looking after anymore. My mother had done her job. It had been imperfect, but that had not been her fault. She had given us, in our first years, enough to be getting on with forever. She would be giving us no more. She was ready to go. She accepted her life, with all its hardships and disappointments, and she accepted its end.