Laura Lee

White Rose (Written Six Days before my Mother Died)

When my mother turned fifty, she told me that after she died she’d send me one white rose to let me know she was okay and asked me to do the same if I died before she did.  I was appalled, yelled at her that I didn’t want any messages from the afterlife, none at all–and how was she going to get that rose to me anyway?  What, did she have some superhuman powers?  No, I told her, that was creepy, scary, and I didn’t want any messages that were secret ones.

We’d had enough secrets in our family: twenty years of physical and verbal abuse bordering on terrorism, alcoholism of our father, younger brother, mental illness of my older brother, mental illness of my father, wild behaviors of my sister and me–wound as tight as I could be and still breathe.  All things we must not talk about.  Disloyal. 

Besides, it wasn’t really that bad.  And weren’t we glad she stayed with the old man and didn’t divorce him? He was much better now, a perfect angel 99.9% of the time!

I didn’t understand then what my father’s diagnosis of borderline personality disorder meant.  Few people did, and when he was discharged from the mental health ward of a local hospital, we were told he was not crazy, not psychotic, just suffering from a personality disorder.

My sister and I were outraged. Not crazy? The bastard!  If he was not crazy, then that meant that he chose to beat his wife and children and threaten us in such specific detail that we believed we would be thrown out of an open window (he didn’t do this), have a heavy door thrown down upon us as we slept (he did this, but we heard him pulling the door out of his room and got out of the way in time), and cut us into little pieces with the very sharp knives he kept in the kitchen in a special drawer. 

He loved to sharpen them in front of us.

When he turned from drinking his cheap beer to vodka, my father’s behavior went from cruel to sadistic and extremely dangerous, and his rages could go on for up to three weeks at a time. 

That is when I began to hide the knives. When the vodka came out.

*****

But that is my father, and this is my mother’s story.  She is the one that bore most of the violence and abuse, both physical and verbal.

She is the reason my sister spoke up to our father, and so got beaten so often, and so often in the head that she developed MS and epilepsy.  She felt it was her moral duty to point out that he should leave, he the big man, and not kick his wife and children out of the house when it was winter and we had no car, no place to go, no money. 

So, she often was kicked out of the house alone, and developed a wild reputation for going with boys with cars.  Wild boys with drugs, cars, attitude.

I, on the other hand, honestly believed father was nuts, no matter what the psychologists and psychiatrists said.  I tested my hypothesis this way: I was the perfect daughter.  I earned straight As in school, never got into trouble, worked and paid room and board.  I did nothing wrong. I was perfect in every day. 

Yet, I still was beaten if I didn’t hide or stay out of his way, so I learned to become “invisible,” always leaving the room just before he entered a room, studying only after he went to bed so that he couldn’t find me.

I was nearly forty years old before I sat in a room alone with my father, and I developed a migraine and vomited. 

***

But this is not my story; it is my mother’s story and how my sister and I hoped she’d have some fun, some freedom after she retired.

My mother was a high school dropout yet learned bookkeeping and worked herself up from an entry level clerk to chief bookkeeper for a government agency, and with her charming personality and great work ethic–found a way to negotiate the best interest rates for the agency she worked for, this winning awards for outstanding work.

In an age when rates were rates, my mother thought that by sheer force of will and determination alone, along with a great rapport she had with just about anyone she met–she could do better.  And she did, earning millions of dollars for her agency in higher interest rates from banks.

My father kept pressuring my mother to retire, for he was lonely being home alone.   He had stopped working at age 43, simply stopped, saying he was too good for work; work was killing him.  If my mother suggested he get a job, he would beat her–was she trying to kill him?  He could not work, it cost him his stomach, and it would kill him if he had to work, he told her. He’d worked long enough, twenty damn years at a job he hated, and if he didn’t have all the damn kids and a wife, he could have stayed in Hawaii and shacked up with some native woman.  We were all killing him.

He gave up drinking when he lost his stomach, but continued in his obsessive behaviors, and began gambling.

He gambled away their retirement money.  He cashed in every savings they had and gambled and lost every penny.

My mother continued to work into her seventies, finally retiring at age 74.  The year before, she’d stopped driving when my father decided it was too dangerous to drive during a snowstorm, and then after the storm passed, he simply drove her to work each day, picked her up each night, thus cutting her off from her lunch time joy of shopping and going out to eat, getting out of the office.  Then she became too afraid of driving, saying she got lost, couldn’t remember how to get home, couldn’t find the car, kept driving over curbs.  She let her license lapse.

Finally, she retired, and my sister and I were looking forward to the summer. We hoped we could get out with her often, and get her away from the old man, who continued to threaten her, degrade her.  We wanted her to have some fun in her retirement–but we didn’t know then about their dire financial problems.  We thought the nest egg for taxes and emergencies was still there. 

For a few weeks, she seemed to enjoy her retirement–except that my father told her when to get up, when to go to bed, and she was dependent upon him to drive her where she wanted to go. Still, we kept telling her since both my sister and I worked in schools–she should hang in there until summer so we could go out to lunch often, go for rides, go to garage sales.  Hang in there.

She seemed to hang in there until she began slipping. 

With numbers, no less. Unable to remember addresses, birth dates.  She’d pay strange amounts on bills or forget to pay them.  Still we could take her shopping, take her to breakfast,. though she forgot the names of French toast, forgot how to use a fork, could not remember if we ate or not.  But always, she remembered her cigarettes.

And then the agitation began, and the swearing, and the constant calls about cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes.  My parents seemed to be fighting so often about her smoking.  My mother said she was old enough to smoke if she wanted to and it was her only joy in life and the only thing he could not control. He could not make her stop. My father claimed she was a danger to him, burning the sofa, lighting her cigarettes with the stove then forgetting to turn the burners off. 

My sister and I felt it was a control issue, that this was one more way of my father controlling my mother’s every action and thought. 

She, however, was not to be trifled with what she saw as her last freedom.  She began to call us, saying he was threatening her, had hit her, and then when we got to their house, she denied it all, said he was nice 99.9% of the time, and did we bring any cigarettes.

Her first summer of her retirement, five months into her retirement, my mother fell, broke her shoulder, broke bones in her face, cut her eye very badly.  She simply walked out of her brother’s house and into a dark summer night with her sunglasses on–and flew onto his concrete sidewalk.   There was blood everywhere.  My father was still inside but when he saw here after she fell, he fell apart, and we had to call paramedics for him as well as my mother. 

The emergency room doctor was angry, telling my father he was just having a panic attack.  He was fine and could go home.  My father said he was dizzy, his chest hurt, and he thought he was having a heart attack.  For some reason, they admitted him for tests. There is no one to take care of me, he complained, his family had abandoned him.

As to my mother, she was so agitated at the hospital that she swore at doctors and nurses. She would do anything to get out of the hospital and have a smoke.  I told the nurses this. 

They put my parents in the same hospital room.  A mistake, for they argued even there.

****

After my mother and came home, my mother became even more agitated, but was able to take care of her personal health.  They hired a part time housekeeper, and a nurse came in to look at her.

My father began taking her pain medicines, and became addicted to one of them, lying in bed waving his hands in front of his face.

What’s he doing in bed at three in the afternoon, I asked my mother.  What’s wrong with him?

Oh, he’s just tired, she said.  But you should come over and see him.

He was giddy and silly, and obviously high on some drugs.  He had urinated in the bedroom drawers, and his pupils were huge.

Your sister got me hooked, he said.  She’s been slipping these drugs to me and telling me to take them. 

My father had been shopping doctors, getting them to prescribe the same pain medicine for his “sore” on his backside. 

My mother called several times: could I come over and pick my father up off the floor? He had never fallen before, but now that he was gobbling painkillers, he fell a few times a week, never breaking anything. 

When she could not reach us, she called 911 and the paramedics came, picked him up, put him to bed. We didn’t know about that for a long time.

But these are mom’s pain pills.  How did you get them? Oh, they’re yours?  How did you get a prescription?  Oh, mom’s been taking care of your sore? Where is it?

He wouldn’t show it to his own doctor, who finally insisted he “drop his trousers.”  There was no sore.  No more pills.  Cold turkey.

He accused my sister, nonetheless, of trying to kill him.  My mother felt pulled in two directions. She was dependent on my father for everything: driving, money, who she could talk to on the phone.  Whether or not he let her have a cigarette or not.  And she lived for that cigarette, so agitated without them that he’d finally give in and ask me to bring a pack for his addict wife.

What a great first year of retirement.

******

The next summer, nearly one year later, she fell down the stairs and broke her hip.  My father let her lay there until my sister could get there, hours later.  It was not his job, he said, to deal with ambulances or insurance forms.  He didn’t know anything about insurance.  He would not call 911.

While my mother was in the hospital, my father found a doctor to come to the house for him, found people to shop for him, and said we’d have to find a place for my mother to live since he could not handle her.  After her hospital stay, she went to a nursing home for rehab, and was very agitated there.  She refused to eat.  She argued with the nurses and tore up records.  She moved constantly while in her wheelchair, holding onto the rails on the wall, and with her tip toes, went up and down the halls, muttering, yelling, and complaining.

We didn’t know these were all signs of dementia.  We were ignorant of the reasons for her erratic and changed behaviors.

After my mother was discharged from rehab, my father carried her downstairs every morning, strapped her into her wheelchair, and they argued most of the days.  Then she stopped arguing, and just scratched constantly, moving her hands, wiggling her fingers, trying to move in the wheelchair.

And then a call from my father that mother had somehow hurt her ankle and had to go to the hospital.  Details–none. Not how, not when, not where.  The stairs. The bedroom. 

While she was in the hospital, my father said he would kill himself if she came back home.  He could not deal with her anymore.

But she was never to come home, her dementia rapidly becoming worse after she broke her hip.  At Christmas that year, we visited with my father, and he yelled at her for not identifying family members in the pictures he brought, for not smiling at him, for letting her hair look so bad.

The next day she looked at me and said, Linda?  No, Mom, it’s me, Laura.

And I didn’t know it then, but this was the last day she was to use names, to know family names:

“Linda, I don’t like, I don’t don’t when we are kept apart for so long,” she said to me, and it broke my heart to hear her call me by the wrong name, but glad her agitation was over but sad a depressed time had found her. 

*****

And then, at increasing regularity, my mother had small losses in personal integrity, abilities…and I would get used to them after grieving each time for each loss: her ability to use the washroom, to bathe herself, dress herself, to remember our names. 

After my father died suddenly, she’d been in the second nursing home for five months.  After two months, she asked me, “That man. That man?” and pointed to a picture of my father.  I gave the picture to her, and she traced his face, held the photo.

The next day, she asked my sister why “that man” didn’t call anymore, nor visit anymore. After consulting with the doctor, they felt she should know he had died, not abandoned her.

She never got out of bed after that, never spoke of that man again, never recognized faces from the pictures of any family members.

But she spoke some. “Please.”  “Thank you.” “Love you, too.”  “Don’t worry.”  “No pain.”  “Have a good day.”  And she would smile when she saw a family member.

“Mom? Do you know who I am?”

“No. Mommy?”

Her mother had been dead for ten years.

****

And now, the glimmer in her eyes is gone, the few minutes an hour when she opens her eyes. She is extremely hard to wake up.  When she does, her stare is vacant.  She will make eye contact but stares blankly.  She doesn’t move her feet, her arms, her head.  She is in bed 24 hours a day.  It takes hours to feed her anything.  She sometimes says, “Thank you” to nurses or me or anyone else who comes into her room.  She doesn’t always say, “Love you” when I do, and I often cannot wake her up at all.

But now she opens only one eye, and not often.

And I know that death is close, that she is barely living now, one eye that opens and a throat that can still swallow sometimes–and that those abilities will end soon, also.

I know that this disease, this dementia, is truly the long goodbye.  As I sat with her tonight, I asked her if she was sleeping,

“Yes,” she whispered.

********

And she is dying without any visitors but me.  My sister was diagnosed with a terminal disease. My mother’s only sister died on 9-11.  My father is dead.  My younger brother is out of state, mired in his own alcoholism and problems. My older brother was disowned via my father’s will and is dealing with his own mental illness. 

So I, the medical phobic, the one who hid as much as possible to avoid pain, I sit with her, hold her hand, stroke her face when I can, and cannot hate myself for hating the place, hating death, hating the smells and the room on a beautiful day and knowing she has been dying for a long time, has had this dementia for a long time.

I used to cry before going in, sitting in the parking lot, not thinking I could go in, hear the other patients who were still in the agitated state yelling and crying and walking around, urinating on themselves, asking for their mommy or sister or just crying. 

I don’t cry going in anymore but become unable to speak for a while after visiting, stunned once again by the sheer physical nature of this disease and the mental nature of this disease–to destroy the mind and the body, to see the progression visit by visit, with no spontaneous recovery. 

I know now she’d been ill with dementia for some time. I just didn’t know the symptoms, the signs. 

And with each loss of ability, I grieve and mourn.  There will be no happy retirement. She will not spontaneously recover now that my father is dead, and she no longer has to deal with the stresses he created.  I had thought that–yes, naively hoped that–after she was free from my father that she might somehow “snap out” of whatever was wrong with her.

She will not.

****

So, I wonder about life and being one eye that opens and the quality of life.  I wonder whom I am to “play God” but cannot help thinking it’s not her in that bed. 

I wonder about the white rose, that if somehow she could send one if I’d want to receive it now, after all these years, after some of our family secrets are “out.”  I am not so superstitious.

I wish I could hear her speak about death, and how she would find a way somehow to send me a message that she was all right even after her death.

Mom, oh Mom… to see you as that one eye barely opening, such a shell when you used to be a spitfire life force.  I would welcome that rose.

No, I would not.  I would welcome your saying that, remembering that, remembering anything.

###

(c) L. Koenig  9/12/04