Margie became a maternal figure. Mother would curl up on the couch in her office, talking nonstop. Margie had been a nurse for many years and understood old people, the mentally ill, the dying. Mother seemed to sense this woman’s compassion and deep soul acceptance of her. Perhaps she had never felt such an unconditional presence before in her life.
At the nursing home, Mother’s queenly demeanor was indulged. She was allowed extra favors and given sterling attention. When she acted out by running off to have dinner at her favorite restaurant across town, she was brought back with gentleness. Mother loved it when Margie hugged her and tucked her into bed like a little child. During this period, Margie tried to help Mother face her impending death, but Mother always laughed her off.
As for our relationship, Mother still treated me like cast off rags. Once, I recorded a phone conversation with her, just to preserve the sound of her voice. At times it was her usual throaty monologue, but when I said something she didn’t like, she responded with a scathing attack in a high-pitched rant. To this day, I can’t bring myself to listen to that tape.
During that summer I kept a journal entitled “Requiem for a Ghost Mother,” chronicling events from the day she was moved to the hospital’s psychiatric unit.
A deep purple sorrow rides within me. I ride it, like th e horse of death. I am chained to it as we careen through this dark time, galloping as if the devil is chasing us. Sometimes it feels that through my mother—and before that, my grandmother—the devil has been chasing me. Some people romanticize mental illness. For me, there is nothing interesting or fascinating about it. It is pure pain, the kind of thin, trilling pain you feel when the dentist drills with no Novocain. The pure pain when you slice your finger or have one of those late labor contractions. It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t get pretty and light. It is what it is. Pain is.
Who am I? Who are we? What is it about, this trip though the vale of earth shot through with flashes of light? I have tried to understand it all by becoming a therapist. I thought there was a way out. This kind of ending with my mother makes me feel as if I’m strapped in a jet plane. There is great, frightening turbulence, and I can’t get off. I have to stay here until the turbulence stops or we land. No escape.
She is lost, the woman inside the illness. She is lost, the mother I always looked for when she came to visit. I’d wait and watch for the human to come out of the demanding, whiny child in a woman’s body. I’d wait for her, holding my breath. She always showed up, for a few minutes—when she played Liebestraum on the piano. When she asked me to scratch her back.
I hadn’t predicted that I would experience such pain about my mother’s death. I thought I would escape.
Mother kept up her old ways, trying to control my access to the lawyer and to Margie, but behind the scenes we all worked together. I told Margie I might want to be with Mother at her deathbed, and she agreed to let me know when that time came. I was torn. I wanted to keep my promise to myself that I would be with Mother when she died, but there were still occasional torrents of abuse. My stamina was wearing thin. Despite feeling more sorry for her, I couldn’t take any more of her attacks. I was afraid I’d lose control if she tore me down one more time. Fifty years was enough.
As it turned out, the effects of the brain tumor made it possible for me to honor my vow. During the first week of August, Mother lost her ability to speak. Margie told me Mother was failing fast and that now was the time to come. All summer, Mother had told Margie that she didn’t want to see me. The week she lost her speech, Margie said, she became very docile and weak, sweetly smiling at everyone. The last day Mother could speak, she said yes when Margie asked if she wanted me to come.
I got on the red-eye at once and flew to Chicago.
Requiem for a
Ghost Mother
I arrived in hot, muggy Chicago as a reluctant visitor to the valley of death. I wondered how I could spend time with my dying mother without succumbing to her anger. I followed the orderly down the carpeted halls of the nursing home. On each side of the hallway were people in various stages of illness, people who had once been young and vibrant. They had all been sent to this place to die. The nursing home was well appointed, clean, even luxurious, with its stylish furniture and modern paintings, but a heavy sadness filled my chest.
The orderly gestured toward a room and left me. Confused, I lingered in the doorway, noticing a woman lying in the far bed. She had long gray hair and a sharp face, and she stared at me with suspicion. In the other bed was another old woman I didn’t recognize. She was bald. IV tubes hung from arms that repetitiously lifted and fell back to the bed. This couldn’t be my mother, I thought, yet there was something familiar about her. I looked more closely and a moment later noticed a white birthmark on her left eye. I caught my breath. This must be my mother, but where were her lovely dark hair, her beautiful face?
I was still hesitating at the threshold of the room, trying to grasp this horrifying reality, when Mother caught sight of me. She cried out, an animal-like keening that cut through me, her trembling arms held out to me, begging me to come to her. I crossed the room quickly and gathered her up. “Mommy, oh, I’m so sorry,” I whispered, draping myself gently across her chest while she clutched me like a terrified child.
In that moment, our past melted away. My mother had always been a lost soul, she’d never felt truly loved, and now she was helpless and dying. She sobbed and wept uncontrollably, clinging to me. Out of her desperate need, she seemed to realize that I, and only I, could help her. We clung together for a long time, weeping. My heart was broken by her pitiful condition, the depth of her wounds and fear. I broke away to wipe her face, but with surprising strength she pulled me back to her chest, where she held me so tightly I could barely breathe, sobbing, crying, for everything in her life it seemed. The nurses stood by, silenced by the pathos that was unfolding in front of them. They and the old woman in the other bed stared at us; bells and footsteps continued in the hall, but mother and I existed in a separate world of our own.
Finally, after an immeasurable time, I stood back to look at her. She had the look of a trapped animal, her eyes constricted in abject terror. She was dying, and she could no longer deny it. She clutched at me again, her fingers digging into my skin. Never before had I felt such tenderness toward her. After a while, she allowed me to sit in a chair beside her but she wouldn’t let me release her hand for hours. From time to time, she gathered me to her chest, wailing. For hours, my mother’s grief, and my own, swelled to the surface in waves.
All I could do was take care of her basic needs, wiping her mouth, caressing her forehead. For the first time in my life, performing these age-old human tasks, I felt whole. When Mother drifted off to sleep, I walked around the nursing home feeling more sure of myself than ever before. Despite the terrible circumstances, I felt proud and elated. My mind critiqued this scene: How can I feel happy when my mother is dying a terrible death? Then, in a flash, it hit me: At last, after a lifetime of longing, I have a mother who accepts and embraces me. Everyone can see that I am her daughter.
For ten days I took care of Mother’s physical body, watching her medications and making sure the nurses did what was needed to control her pain. Though she couldn’t speak, she could understand me, so I stood at her bedside and told the old stories, weaving the web of the generations of our family. I talked about Blanche and Gram, Josephine—Blanche’s mother—and my grandfather Blaine. I reminisced with her about our visits in Wapello, the doll clothes that Bernie had made, and the long prayers that Grandpa said over dinner. I showed Mother photographs of my children and told her stories about their lives. I told her about my life, too, stories I’d never shared before—my life as a therapist, my writing, books, and music.
One afternoon, a priest from the parish down the street administered the last rites to Mother, as had been done with Gram, marking a cross on her forehead in oil. During this process, Mother began to choke. Margie and the nurses turned her o
ver, exposing her bare back. I couldn’t bear to see my beautiful mother like that, bereft of her dignity, with no control over her body. I left the room and stood in the hall to cry. When the priest was finished with Mother, I told him some of our story. He listened patiently, compassion and concern in his eyes. I knew there was nothing he could do, but it helped me to tell another impartial person our sad generational saga.
Several days later, it was clear that Mother was about to die, though the doctors couldn’t predict the course of events or how long it would take. She needed more and more medication to keep her calm. When its effects began to wear off, she cried and wept inconsolably. I tried to prepare myself for what was to come. During the daytime, I was busy with her, but at night I was alone with my thoughts and memories.
One night, I dreamed that Mother was in the next room, crying out for me, dying alone. Convoluted circumstances in the dream kept me from getting to her. I was separated from my mother, powerless to help, while I listened to her terrible death cries.
I woke up from this dream shaking and weeping, wrapped in its horror. I felt again the terror and bone-wrenching mother-loss I’d experienced so often when I was young. Kaleidoscopic images tumbled through my mind, one after the other—Mommy getting off the train in Perry, her soft fingers on my skin soothing the ache I’d been carrying since the last time I saw her. Gram with her cigarette holder, her face showing only a hint of the complex feelings she had for her daughter. Mommy as a little girl, abandoned and lost, aching for her own mother who came to see her so infrequently. Mother had been that girl who felt unwanted, who yearned for love her whole life.
My other mothers appeared—Blanche digging in the garden, eating a strawberry, juice running down her chin. Josephine, that stern-faced pioneer woman, working the land, birthing six children in a farmhouse with only a midwife to attend her. In my mind’s eye, I’m at the train station again, where Mommy is leaving me. It’s the station in Wichita, that first place of abandonment. The whistle shrieks and I tremble with dread. Mommy is leaving me. My precious Mommy is all I’ve know for four years, but I can’t stop her from tearing us apart. I’m crying, “Don’t leave, don’t leave. Don’t die, Mommy, don’t die.”
An ancient grief overwhelmed me. I had spent my adult life trying not to love her, trying to reject her before she rejected me, always failing miserably. I had tried to ignore her and I tried to win her, and neither strategy had worked. I understood now in the early hours of the dawn how much a daughter needs her mother, how deep the wounds get buried when she is gone.
Fifty years of suppressed feelings were shaken loose that morning. For a long time, I rocked on the bed, mourning for the losses of the generations, sobbing for my mother. Now that I knew how to love her, I wanted us to start over, to have another chance.
The next morning, Mother’s eyes were closed, her breathing labored. As I stroked her face I knew she was gone from me. I thought of all the years we’d shared, and lost, sensing in the depths of my soul that the mother–daughter connection can never really be broken. This primal bond guides and shapes a woman’s entire life. When it all goes adrift, when the connection is severed, a lifetime of grief and brokenness must be healed before the next generation can be free.
As it happens, Mother dies without me at her side. I’m at Aunt Edith’s at the time, recovering from the flu. The wind is blowing off the Mississippi, billowing the wet clothes I’m pinning to the clothesline, when the call comes from the nursing home. “Our condolences,” says the nurse on the other end of the line. “Your mother has passed.”
Aunt Edith, herself weakened from a series of strokes, carries in her arms a basket of fresh-picked tomatoes. The ripe, red tomatoes are voluptuous on the kitchen table where we gather over a cup of coffee and a piece of lemon meringue pie. I sit in her kitchen as I have since I was seven years old, the clocks ticking as they always have, while all around me the ghosts of the past dance through the room. All the mothers, so many memories…
The day Mother is buried is August hot. At the gravesite, I inhale the scents of newly turned earth and freshly mown grass. As I sit under the blue Iowa sky, patches of white clouds scud by, making shadows on a nearby cornfield. A meadowlark sings as the wind whooshes through the cemetery, stirring the leaves of a sycamore tree. Here, Mother’s soul flies free, beyond the body she pampered, the body that betrayed her. My mother, Josephine Elizabeth Myers, is finally free of her pain. At last, she can know silence and peace.
In the distance, a train whistle cries its lonely song, calling out across my beloved plains. It is calling out, as it always has, for me and for my mother.
For a long time after she dies I dream of her. We are riding the train, the wheels click-clacking on the tracks, great ease and peace between us as I rest my head on her shoulder. We are traveling together now, in the same direction. In my dreams we are free, freer in her death than in her life to feel love and compassion for each other. Free at long last to be mother and daughter.
Silent, we watch the tracks coming together at the misty horizon, that place where the past and the future meet.
Epilogue
After my mother died, I became free of the yearning that had plagued me all my life. No longer did my mother hover in far away Chicago, enticing me with promises that she would never fulfill. I began to feel normal. After all, everyone has a mother who dies someday.
After her death, I became even more determined to get to know her. I became insatiably curious about the lives of all my family members and undertook intensive genealogical research, combing through dusty courthouses in Iowa and scrolling through microfilm in libraries.
Blanche had told me that Gram left my mother when she was a baby, and I’d always believed that, but in the 1920 census I discovered that they were living together in Burlington, Iowa. They were still together when mother was five years old. In shock and disbelief, I put my head down and wept. All my life, I’d believed that Gram had left Mother behind when she was an infant. Perhaps when Blanche said “baby,” she just meant “very young child.”
Through reading the Wapello Republican, the newspaper owned by my grandfather’s family, I tried to find out about my mother’s early life. In the old newspapers, the social lives of local people are listed with colorful detail—births, guests, travels, illnesses. I read every weekly newspaper from 1914, when my mother’s brother, Harrison, was born and died, through 1921, when the trail grew cold.
For at least three years, Gram and Mother and Blaine were together as a family, living in Wapello, where he worked for the newspaper. At some point, Blaine took a job, perhaps when the marriage began to fail, in Rock Island, Illinois, fifty miles away.
Blaine remarried when Mother was seven, and it is then that she was sent to live with Josephine, her great-grandmother. The discovery that my mother had lived with Gram for seven years gave me insight into her emotional troubles. My mother at age seven was no doubt deeply bonded with Gram. How and why Gram left her when Blaine remarried, no one knows.
Gram’s elopement with Blaine in 1911 when she was sixteen had been harshly judged by Blanche and the Iowa relatives, and was still passionately argued about sixty years later. Gram’s flight to Chicago, where she took up an entirely new life and identity, did not make her popular among the plain folks who composed her family.
For years, I tried to understand why Gram was such a snob. I had confirmed that she never graduated from high school, but she must have been ashamed of her roots. Our Iowa relatives could sense that—thus the jokes they made at her expense about education and running off to Europe and wearing fancy clothes. Gram’s family was working class and owned no land, having only rented the land they’d farmed all those years. They had little money or material possessions. She married into a middle-class professional family—Blaine’s father was a newspaper owner, his grandfather an attorney who had served in the Iowa state legislature. They were educated people. She must have felt quite out of place when she lived with them, i
gnorant of the ways of their refined world.
So Gram reinvented herself as a worldly, sophisticated woman. She was self-educated by virtue of having read hundreds of books, and her travels to Europe helped her develop that English accent and her love of the fine life. Her second husband, a man with money, left her enough at his death so that she did not have to work again; that’s when she moved us to Enid to be near Aunt Helen, who had moved there with Uncle Maj after the war.
Gram lived her own fantasy life through me, finding herself in a position to raise me when Mother left, and deciding clearly to take me on full time when I was six, interestingly close to the age that Mother was when Gram left her. I can imagine that she was determined to do it right this time. She wanted me to have the things she’d always yearned for. In her day, a fine, educated lady played the piano, learned foreign languages, and dressed perfectly; she had good manners and knew how to speak to anyone. This was the life Gram had never lived as a child or young woman. Mother didn’t go along with Gram’s program, except for playing the piano, and even that was against her will. “I always hated the piano,” she confessed to me once.
So I became a pawn in the game between my grandmother and the rest of the world. I was the chosen one who was supposed to finally make Gram happy and proud.
The mystery surrounding my father has taken many years to sort out. I’m certain that the root of the conflict between Gram and him was due partly to their perhaps unconscious sexual attraction. She was only twelve years older than he, and still very beautiful. I don’t understand why they came to hate each other, but perhaps it had something to do with money. Just before I was sent to Vera’s, Gram hired a lawyer to sue my father for child support, which then was paid to Vera.
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