The Year My Mother Came Back

by Alice Eve Cohen

  “Thank you, Sweetheart. No argument from me.”

  I was twenty-two years old. It was June 1977. We were at my favorite Indian restaurant, in Greenwich Village. Mom and I had finally made peace with each other. Ever since she visited me at Princeton a year ago and spent the night in my dorm room, something had clicked. There’d been a sea change. She and Dad seemed also to have made peace with each other. She had made peace with herself.

  I’d graduated Princeton the previous June, and my first year out of school was wonderful. I was living in a loft in New York City. For the first time in my life, I was supporting myself—barely, but still.

  The turbaned sitar player and tabla player sat cross-legged on the Persian rug covering the wide window seat. My mother and I sat at a table near the duo, enthralled by the music and by the plates of food passing by: steamy curries, sizzling tandoori platters, deep-fried pakoras, and puffy golden poori bread, each one more aromatic than the next.

  “Mmmm, everything looks and smells so delicious,” said Mom. She looked older and grayer, but more relaxed, wearing a loose-fitting, Indian-print cotton dress and a long necklace of carved wooden beads.

  The waiter brought our menus.

  “The lunch special is enough for two to share, if that’s okay with you, Mom—”

  “Whatever you order is fine with me.”

  “Sir? We’ll have the vegetable pakoras, shaag paneer, lamb curry, poori, and two mango lassis.” The waiter left with our order.

  “How’s the loft working out?”

  “It’s a fantastic rehearsal space. I hope you and Dad can come see the new piece I’m working on with Anne.”

  “I’m sure we can.”

  “Anne is an incredible dancer and choreographer. She has this beautiful combination of stillness and intensity. I love collaborating with her.”

  “Does she live in the loft?

  “Nope, no room. At last count, I have eight roommates.”

  “Eight!”

  “It’s become a crash pad for the downtown dance and theater crowd.”

  “Is it worth the hassle?”

  “Well, it’s cheap. I only have to type two days a week.”

  “How’s the job?

  “It’s a typing job, with incidental teaching. I love the teaching and I have plenty of time to rehearse, so all in all, it’s pretty good. Yum, aren’t the pakoras terrific?”

  “Delicious.”

  “We each pay only fifty dollars a month, but forget about privacy. And then there’s the brothel downstairs —”

  “Brothel?”

  “Oops, forgot to mention—”

  “Alice!”

  “That’s why the rent’s so cheap.”

  “Don’t you think it’s time to move?”

  “Actually, Seth and I are looking for an apartment together.”

  “Mazel tov! I’m happy for you.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I mean it? I like Seth.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. He’s a nice guy, and you’re clearly fond of each other. What’s not to like?”

  “Wow. This is the first time you’ve approved of any of my boyfriends.”

  “Huh. I suppose you’re right. You’ve grown up. I have, too. As long as he makes you happy, I’m happy for you.”

  “Thanks, Mom, that means the world to me. What about you? How’s your new job?”

  “Best job I’ve ever had.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I love everything about Empire State College. I love mentoring. I love my students and my colleagues. It’s my dream job. They even pay me well, how d’ya like that—a first for me, after all those adjunct positions. I’m so grateful this job doesn’t require a doctorate. You know how long I worked on that damn dissertation.”

  “Yup.”

  “I’ve finally found myself, at age fifty-seven. Call me a late bloomer.”

  “You’re a late bloomer!”

  “This is the first time in years that I am truly happy.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I was depressed for such a long time—even before I had cancer.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Alice. I’m sure you knew, on some level. I’m convinced that my depression caused my cancer. Which reminds me—Great news! I just got a clean bill of health. Cancer-free for ten years!”

  “Wonderful!”

  “After the cancer, I was terribly unhappy. I was so disfigured, I no longer felt like a woman. But now—please indulge me, Alice, I want to tell you a story—I have a colleague at work named Seymour. His office is next to mine, and he flirts with me. Look at me, I’m blushing. It’s not an affair, but it’s a genuine flirtation. It makes me happy. Flirting with Seymour makes me feel alive. I feel more alive than I’ve felt in a very long time.”

  After hugging Mom good-bye, I walked up Second Avenue toward the loft, feeling so buoyant it was all I could do to keep from skipping—or floating—and I realized how remarkable that lunch was. After a decade of Sturm und Drang, we loved each other again. It was official! This wasn’t just a truce. We were no longer warily testing the waters. It had been a whole year that we enjoyed being together. As awful as our adolescent relationship had been, from this day onward, it was going to be great. And I was so thrilled for Mom. She was finally happy. God, this was a new dawn for her. She survived cancer. No recurrence for ten years—hooray! She finally achieved the professional success that eluded her all these years. After going through hell, she was at the height of her powers. Her happiness made me happy.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, my mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the early morning. Dad said they were both asleep, when she bolted upright with her head in her hands, groaned in pain, and fell back on her pillow. She never regained consciousness. A fault on her main artery burst. She died of cerebral hemorrhaging from a ruptured aneurism.

  AND THEN I was in Colorado, two months after her death, trying to create a piece about her. My choreographer friend Anne and I were living for one month in Boulder, in an old miner’s cabin high up a mountain, two vertical miles out of the city. We pumped water from a well and bathed outdoors under a canvas army-surplus shower. We drove down the mountain every day to rehearse in a sun-drenched, maple-floored dance studio in town. We were creating a dance-theater piece called Separation in Four Parts.

  I had never lived in such a beautiful place as this. And I’d never felt so lost and unrooted, as if I might float away. I scrambled up to the summit behind the cabin and watched an eagle circling over the ravine. I sat at the edge of the cliff, fighting vertigo, fighting the urge to leap off the edge and fly. I wondered what it must be like to soar on air currents like the eagle, defying gravity, unafraid. The eagle made me think about Mom.

  It’s risky business, transforming grief into something else before its time, giving it a shape, putting it outside yourself, to examine and edit and craft into something beautiful, performing it for an audience before you’ve finished grieving. It’s an occupational hazard of being an artist.

  Being in Boulder and creating this performance was a wonderful way to honor my mother, but it wasn’t helping me to mourn. Some days, I felt strangely detached from her death, as if it didn’t really happen. Death was the subject of our new show, but constructing the piece was helping me to keep her alive. I struggled with this.

  “The Giant and Puppet Show” was Part 1 of Separation in Four Parts. Anne was a beautiful dancer, riveting to watch, even in a rehearsal room, even when she was perfectly still. Anne was the Giant. She sat silently on top of a tall ladder, wearing an embroidered Tibetan prayer robe with long sleeves that extended past her hands, and an enormously long black skirt that covered the ladder and draped onto the floor.

  The skirt doubled as a puppet stage. I sat on the floor below the ladder with a hand puppet, which reached through the opening in the long skirt, searching for the Giant, trying to get her attention by tell
ing jokes, singing love songs, throwing tantrums.

  But the Giant was transcendent and unreachable. Arms extended like wings, her torso turned in the slowest possible slow motion, like a shape-shifting cloud, or an eagle weightlessly riding the wind.

  I try to remember what my mother was like in that very brief time—the last year of her life, the year when she was happy for the first time in years. She and I were finally close again. She had just come back from her long sojourn in the land of illness and despair and anger—and so had I. I want to remember her the way she was then, in her brief, glimmering coda of true happiness.

  I pull an old scrapbook off the bookshelf in the living room and open to a clipping from the Empire State College newspaper from 1977. There’s a photo of Mom. No longer beautiful, she’s a pleasant-looking woman of fifty-seven, with warm eyes, wrinkly skin, short curly gray hair. She’s looking slightly to the left, listening intently to someone off-camera, perhaps a student she’s mentoring. The text surrounding the photo is the eulogy given at her funeral by her friend and colleague Lois Lamdin, an associate dean at the college. I remember trying to listen to her eulogy at the funeral, but I was crying too hard to hear. I had been asked if I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t do it. If I spoke at her funeral, it would mean she was actually dead.

  I curl up on the sofa and read.

  “Those of us who worked with Louise Cohen carry in our hearts indelible images of this woman we loved so dearly. We remember Louise spending hour upon hour of patient, loving time with students, laughing and crying with them, opening up vistas of the intellectual world she inhabited. When problem students came along, we assigned them to Louise, and then, magically, they were no longer problem students. Louise said all her students were either beautiful or brilliant, but most often both. And with her loving encouragement and support, they usually became brilliant and beautiful.

  “We will remember the Louise who brought us cookies and the solace of her presence when we were down, and told us how beautiful and brilliant we were. And Louise at graduation, such a few weeks ago, smiling with embarrassment as student after student stopped at the microphone to pay special tribute to their mentor.

  “We will remember Louise as a woman totally devoid of materialism. When others talked about new clothes and cars and houses, she talked about ideas and feelings and philosophical first principles. Her only pride was in her family, in Ira and Madeline and Alice and Jennifer.

  “Louise never met a person she didn’t like, and she could discern and draw out the best qualities in all of us. We remember her ingenuousness, her honesty, her sense of wonder that the world and all the people in it were good. And we will remember how, when any issue, any policy, any course of action was discussed, Louise would ask the basic question: ‘Will any one be hurt by this?’ And if the answer was yes, then arguments of mere logic or expediency could not move her. She became, gradually, this gentle woman, our conscience, the one voice that spoke up always, fearlessly and at any cost, from her impassioned sense of justice, for the rights of the individual human being.”

  I put the scrapbook away and climb into my bed, pulling the down comforter up to my chin. This was my mother. This loving and beloved woman was my mother, as were all her other shape-shifting incarnations. My brilliant, adoring mother, who protected her three babies with fierce dedication. The woman who visited the jaws of death and returned angry and cold, an unrecognizable ghost of herself. The loving mentor, filled with life and happiness and confidence, who—as soon as she returned fully to life—suddenly died.

  I roll onto my stomach and cry silently, my face pressed into the pillow. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you so much.

  SEVEN

  I have an indelible image of my mother in her final hour, buried under life support equipment, eyes closed, her face expressionless.

  But this is an image I never saw. The last time I ever saw my mother was at the Indian restaurant.

  The day my mother died, Madeline and I went to the hospital. At the door to the ICU, we were greeted by a nurse.

  “Girls,” she said, gently, “You can go in to say good-bye to your mother if you want, but you won’t recognize her. She’s brain dead. She’s gone. She’s not your mother anymore. You don’t want to remember her this way.”

  I took the nurse’s advice and didn’t go in. I had just seen her two weeks before, when she told me she felt happier and more alive than she had in years. That’s how I wanted to remember her. Madeline went into the ICU to say good-bye, while I waited outside.

  The day my mother died was the first time I ever saw my father cry. He held me and my sisters in his strong arms, protecting us as if we were still little girls. We, in turn, protected him. We clung to each other, our faces puffy, our eyes narrow slits from so much crying.

  Later that day, when our crying had briefly subsided, Dad suggested that we begin to sort through Mom’s things. I didn’t question the timing of this; why, even before she was buried, we were combing through her closets and papers and jewelry box, deciding what to keep, what to discard, and what to give away. I trusted Dad. It seemed a sensible way to move forward.

  We each went to a different room. From my mother’s study, I could hear the alternating crescendo and decrescendo of Madeline’s sniffling, Jennifer’s sobbing, Dad’s keening. I quietly pored over the mishmash in a tan leather purse: a memo book, three ballpoint pens, peppermint Life Savers, a shopping list, sunglasses, an old picture of my sisters and me on the beach in matching blue bathing suits—and an unsealed envelope, simply addressed, in my mother’s handwriting, “Ira.” I opened the envelope and unfolded her typed letter.

  If you don’t end your affair, I will end our marriage.

  The words flew off the page and reassembled into the angry voice of my mother, speaking to me—like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, “List, list, O, list! If thou didst ever thy dear father love, revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!”

  This wasn’t Hamlet. Mom wasn’t murdered. But she was wronged, and she was asking me to avenge her. “If thou didst ever thy dear mother love . . .”

  I didn’t know if the accusation was true, though I’d long suspected it; and if true, what I was supposed to do with it. I didn’t know how old the letter was. But I read it today, of all terrible days, and I couldn’t unread it.

  What am I supposed to do? What do you want me to do?

  I wished there’d been skull and crossbones on the envelope, warning of its poisonous contents. But I opened it and released her fury, which was now my burden, mine to interpret and act on. Unless I simply gave the letter to my father. It was addressed to him, it was his letter, not mine. I never should have read it. I would just give it to him.

  But from the next room, I heard Dad burst into tears like a little boy, and my sisters comforting him, and I couldn’t show the letter to him. It would be cruel. I tore it to pieces and threw it away, thinking that would be the end of it. But my mother’s voice stayed inside me—like a dybbuk, a wandering spirit that enters and possesses the body of a living person.

  At my mother’s funeral, I had trouble believing she was dead. I forced myself to look at her casket, and to shovel dirt on her grave, so that I would remember burying her. But none of it seemed real. The next day, I couldn’t remember the funeral, I couldn’t picture the cemetery, couldn’t remember shoveling any dirt, though I did remember the percussive sound of pebbles falling on wood. Instead, I heard her voice from the letter. And I pictured her in the ICU, where I never saw her.

  I tried to stop hearing the angry voice of the letter. I tried to get her out of my head, but I couldn’t. I was possessed.

  I KEPT THE letter a secret for two years. In some desperate and inconsolable part of my mind, the secret kept her alive. I was in limbo, my grief in suspended animation, my life held hostage by magical thinking. I longed to retrieve my gentle, loving mother who was happy for the first time in years, and with whom I’d finally reconciled. But I only heard her b
itter, angry voice, asking me to avenge her.

  When I couldn’t bear it any longer, I told my dad.

  We sat in his kitchen, our coffee getting cold. Our old cat, Amanda, rubbed against my legs under the table and purred. My dad was sad for me.

  “I wonder why Louise was still carrying it. That was probably an old purse. She gave me that letter years ago.”

  “You already read that letter?”

  “Yeah. We worked it out.”

  “You already read it,” I groaned. The secret I was protecting my father from wasn’t even a secret. What a humiliating anticlimax. Amanda jumped in my lap and licked my face, like she always did when I cried.

  “Gee, Alice, I wish you’d given me the envelope when you found it. What a terrible burden you carried for two years.”

  “Dad. Did you have an affair?”

  “Yes.”

  I stared at the table for a moment, then looked up at him.

  “I’m angry. And sad.”

  “Of course you are. I’m sorry this has caused you so much anguish.”

  “I need to tell my sisters.”

  “I understand.”

  It was a letter she wrote to my father, not my mother’s ghost commanding me to avenge her. But in that moment of unbearable grief—grief being just a hair’s breadth away from madness—I wanted it to be my mother’s voice talking to me. We had just begun to talk to each other again, and I didn’t want it to end. I had lost her once, when I was twelve years old. I couldn’t bear to lose her a second time.

  I’D BEEN STALLED in the grieving process. I missed the moment to say good-bye to Mom the day she died. No do-over. There was just moving forward. I needed relief from those two years. I didn’t want my mother’s voice inside me anymore. I wanted to stop thinking about her. I could try to forget her. Gradually, I did.

  EIGHT

  “Everything’s gone like clockwork, don’t you agree?” says Dr. Campbell cheerfully to Eliana and me at her final post-op visit in May.

  Eliana and I stare dumbly, trying to process his breezy assessment.