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| Jews by Choice By Mary Hofmann |
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righteous
gentile mother My mother, Mary (Mitzie) Robinson, died on August 4. She was 91 and had had Alzheimer’s for 12 years. Twelve very long years. I tried to handle it for the first 5 years and finally gave up during that awful cancer/chemo/radiation year when my doctor (who was also hers) told me that I’d be dead within a year if I kept it up. I decided, with much guilt and baggage, to choose life. For the last 7 1/2 years, Mom lived in a lovely home a few blocks from me with only three other patients. She had her own big room with her own things and a picture window, her beloved kitty, and round-the-clock caregivers who loved her. I was with her a lot, but at least I was no longer on call 24/7. It was, in a miserable situation, the best of all possible worlds, though the emotional drain was still enormous. When you lose a parent (or anyone) to an illness like Alzheimer’s, you lose them in tiny increments over an incredibly extended period of time. The person you loved is gradually taken over by someone who may look and sound like your Mom, but is in many ways a dreadful caricature who is both helpless and hateful, spiteful and ugly, veering from pitiful to paranoid. The years of loving get sucked out of you and mostly you feel guilt and resentment and a shrieking fury at not being able to fix this thing. Fortunately, Mom’s last few weeks were gentle ones. She may not always have been sure whether I was her mother or vice versa, but she was gentle and sad and loving and I was able to hold her and brush her hair and cuddle her and felt a kind of serenity for both of us. She died peacefully (finally peacefully) in her sleep. It would be very easy to heave a great sigh of relief and just move on with my life. Mom wasn’t Jewish (or anything else) and wanted a quick cremation, so years ago we contracted with Neptune Society. She had a living trust, so the legal end of things is fairly straightforward. Part of me really wanted to just savor the freedom. But the Mom I knew before – the one it’s frankly hard to remember at this point – deserved better. Vanessa, the granddaughter we raised, announced what we should do to celebrate Mom’s life. “We need to have a big family potluck party,” she said. “We’ll hold it in Gram’s backyard (which is where my daughter and her family now live), and we’ll sit around and tell Gram stories. Then we’ll scatter her ashes back in the big flower garden and put in a really pretty park bench with Gram’s name engraved on it.” Perfect. Vanessa has always had a flair for coming up with great ideas. So the family is gathering. My sister and her husband are coming, as are her two grown children and their kids. My two sons and their wives will come from far and wide and my daughter and her family will host this thing. Her caregivers, of course, will be there as well. A day of feasting and talking about Mom and celebrating family. Nice closure. But not for me. A rabbi I know, who knows my situation, gave me a hug and a blessing. “May the past 12 years become shadows,” he said, “and may the years that came before increase in brightness so your memories are good ones.” My mom was a pistol. She was funny, articulate, sometimes sarcastic and difficult, and she absolutely adored me. These things I remember. But most things are buried under the weight of 12 years of pain. I need to grieve for the mother I had before, the mother I can hardly remember. Another friend gave me a book, Mourning and Mitzvah, which carries one through a year of mourning, a year I need to use to learn to feel for her again. I need to find the mother I used to know, the one who – with all her faults and foibles and fun and wicked humor – was a large part of who I am today. She
wasn’t always the most righteous gentile, but she was a woman
worth knowing. And I’m hoping to get to know her again. |
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