Take Care
Earlier this week I had a much-needed catch up over Zoom with one of my best friends of the last 25 years. She’s one of those friends you can go years without talking to and it’s fine—you just pick up where you left off and keep going, fueled by history and affinity. During our talk, I told her about this project of watching the video interviews with my dying mother and she asked me,
“Sheila, what are you doing to care for yourself while you do this?”
It’s a good question and one I don’t usually have a good answer for. I’ve not been great at taking care of myself the last few years. I’ve let my mental and physical health slide pretty considerably. But this time, I was able to say truthfully that I am pacing myself. I’m only watching one per week because they are so emotionally overwhelming. I’m allowing myself to feel what I need to feel but I’m not letting it spill into my every waking minute. One viewing a week is plenty. One post about viewing per week is, too. (Though I can hear my sister, Catherine, who demanded, “Woman! Where is my Substack?” when a post didn’t appear on Monday as I had imagined it would. Patience, dork. Here it is.)
It’s Valentine’s Day as I write this, but I’m not going to spend any time talking about how my parents got married on this day in 1969. It wasn’t out of any disposition toward romance, trust me. They got divorced on Halloween, which feels funny and appropriate. So no Whitman’s Sampler full of anecdotes from my childhood today, though of course this whole project is born out of love for my mother. I loved my mother. This sounds so obvious, but it’s really not. There were times when our relationship was so bad that, though I knew intellectually that I did, I could not feel any love for her, could not imagine missing her when she died. I can feel everything, now.
Today’s interview was recorded on December 23, 2020, while Mom was getting ready for Christmas in her Florida home with her husband, Gary, my sister, Catherine and her best friend, Mary who popped up on the screen at one point to say hello wearing a shirt that said “NOPE,” which made me laugh. Mary took great care of my Mom while she was sick. In fact, this whole interview, which covers the years 1992-2010 (note: I can’t find the interview that contains the 80’s, which breaks my heart. I must not have hit record.), seems to be themed around the idea of caretaking.
We started by talking about my father’s death in 1992 and the way it devastated her, even though they had divorced the year before:
“And then, everything unraveled, Sheila. And after it unravled, I unraveled. Completely. ”
Of course there were more details, many of which I already knew, but the thing that stood out to me this time was that just before he got sick, she was at his condo to work on some joint tax stuff that had him agitated. She said he looked and seemed unwell and she was worried about him. Worried enough to offer to stay with him to make sure he was okay.
In the end she didn’t stay—and he didn’t want her to; he had someone else caring for him already that she didn’t know about yet—but that’s who she was. A caretaker.
Other caretaking that occurs in this time period:
In 1993, cloudy with alcohol, she turned to my sister when she knew she needed to go to rehab:
“And then again it was your sister who I called for help. I knew she knew things. And she jumped right in, both feet, head first.”
In 1994, describing what drew her to Gary when they met,
“He was always making sure I had water or juice or food. Always putting his coat around my shoulders, protecting me.”
If you’ve been paying attention then you know how powerful this must have been to her after a lifetime of begging for scraps of my father’s meager affections.
In 1996 she spent months in New York taking care of her mother as she was dying from cancer. In listening to her recount this part, my heart and brain break together: my mother who is dying from cancer is telling me about what it felt like to be with her mother who was dying from cancer.
It’s too much and I have to take a break from viewing for a while so I can cry and cry. The break is self-care but so is the sobbing.
When I come back, the caretaking continues as she drives back and forth across Florida regularly to care for my father’s parents until their deaths in 2009 and 2010. In this moment I am able to tell her how grateful I am to her for that. I adored my grandparents. They were the loves of my life. She tells me it was easy but I know, I remember, that it was anything but.
As we wrap up this session, someone hands her a sandwich—only half because my mother only ever ate half a sandwich her whole entire life—and she bites into it right away. I ask her what kind it is and she has to stop mid-chew and consider. I think it’s hilarious that she would bite into it without knowing what it was, but she clearly trusts the caretaker, who happens to be my sister, at it again.
“Ham, American cheese. Salami. Delicious.”
I wasn’t with my mother when she died. I had been able to travel to Florida about a month before, in time to catch her last truly lucid moments and to witness her begin to shift from this plane of existence to the next. I stayed for a week or so and then flew home to my family in Pennsylvania, knowing I would never see her alive again.
Why did I do that? Why didn’t I stay to care for her, to see her through the way she had for her own mother? I don’t have an answer that satisfies me yet. I won’t say I regret my choice…not quite. But it’s bothering me more that I thought it would, particularly after listening to her story today.
But she wasn’t alone and that makes it easier to bear. Bestie Mary, Our Lady of Nope was very nearby. Her brother Rory was there. Her husband, of course, and his daughter, Sarah. That’s the way I always referred to her and her sister, Kelly: Gary’s daughters. But in those final months and days of Mom’s life, as they traveled away from their families and homes to be with their father, I came to understand—and it was like a glass of water to my face—that Mom had been in their lives since they were little girls. She had helped raise them. She loved them and they loved her. She was a mother to them, too. In techincal terms, they were—they are— my stepsisters, though in truth I had never thought of them that way before. This, too, is something I’m still grappling to understand.
Sarah was with Mom when she died. After, when we cried on the phone together, she assured me, and I believed her, that it was a peaceful death—at home, surrounded by people who loved her deeply and totally.
I will forever be grateful for that care.
Your mom and I had a quiet conversation at your dad’s funeral where she told me that she held the hand of the woman who was with your dad as he slipped away, comforting her. So like the dear person I knew, your mom. I’d think of that mulling whether I’d be as kind. But then again as she told me, their relationship was over long ago and she was more able to see your dad without the cloud of marriage, some clarity there.
The other thing that I’ve thought about when I think of your dad is your eulogy. Of course it was loving, made me cry as I recall. But your closing has stuck with me all these years; you said you regretted that your dad never read anything you wrote. I still can’t imagine. He missed one of the greatest joys of being a parent, and that is relishing your child’s accomplishments. Well, know this, I’ve read all of your chap books, and your recently published memoir. He missed a lot. XO