My mother died on a cold December morning. She was a hundred years old. I didn’t cry when she died, even though I’d been her primary caretaker for twelve years. My anxiety then involved the thought that there was something wrong with me.
Mom was a woman who still laughed a lot despite past ordeals. She was eighty-eight when her third husband died. Because I lived nearby and worked mostly from home as a telecommuting technical writer, I became her next overseer. “Why me?” I often asked myself. It seemed unnatural for a man on the verge of retirement to have to take on the added problems of an ancient mother whom he’d never quite forgiven for the harebrained behavior that had stained his childhood. Could a child fall out of love with parents if they’d abrogated their responsibility for providing a safe home? Could I still love Mom after the many years she’d permitted my father’s abuse and threats to “kill the kids?”
Mom struggled with her fear of dying. Even if I’d been at her house during the day, she called each night at eight to chat, although sometimes she was engrossed in a novel that distracted her from the time. Then I called her. When she developed a pain in her left ear and neck, she seemed convinced it’s her carotid artery. She spent sleepless nights wandering around her house, worrying whether her time had come. The examining doctor said she probably strained her neck, which seemed reasonable in that, when she dozed from a sitting position, her head dropped back and her left leg hooked over the arm of her sofa like some dormant octopus clinging to its favorite coral reef. When I asked why her leg was up, she said it was comfortable that way.
Mom seemed to recognize my effort. Whenever I prepared to leave her house after doing a variety of chores, she always said, “Thank you for everything you do for me. I really appreciate it.” Knowing she was grateful helped me on days when I despaired about her decline and our awkward relationship.
A few months after her one hundredth birthday, Mom stopped eating much and was sleeping more during the daytime (often in her clothes in bed). My wife Shelley and I thought she was nearing the end. Complicating matters was that I was having daily radiation treatments to shrink a cancerous tumor that would require colon surgery. Shelley called Home Healthcare to Mom’s house. Hospice followed. Just before Thanksgiving, my sister Karla flew in from Colorado to help with Mom, who kept fighting to get out of bed. As she weakened, Mom asked why she felt so bad. Shelley asked her why she thought she felt bad.
Mom said, “Because I’m old and dying.”
Shelley said, “Your spirit is strong, but your body is very tired.”
Shelley and Karla had been taking turns sleeping at Mom’s house. Shelley was there when Mom died in her sleep in the pre-dawn hours of December 2, 2015. She called me around 7 A.M.
As I bumped around Mom’s house later, I found my gratitude list on her living-room coffee table. On her hundredth birthday, I’d given her a list of twenty-nine good things in my life for which she’d been responsible. I suppose, like every child, I had loved Mom in the beginning but had fallen out of love with her during the turbulent years. Now, after twelve years of my caring for her, I thought she’d been content to have me ease her through the tough transition from independence to infirmity. I hoped she’d seen my small acts of help as a form of love larger than the words often used to proclaim it.
I often recall the day she read a bumper sticker on a passing car as I drove us to the supermarket. “I like that one,” she’d said. “I Don’t Brake for Yankee Fans.” Then she’d cackled, perhaps at the thought of running over my father, who’d been a big Yankee fan.
I like to remember the laughter that spanned her one hundred years and how our love had been rekindled more toward the end. Still, I wonder why I hadn’t felt the emotion of a loss that would have compelled me to cry.
Perhaps I’d seen too much suffering in my lifetime and was now numb to loss and death. I hadn’t cried twenty years ago when my sister Donna died of cancer. I seem to tear up only for an emotional scene in a movie. Maybe I should see a therapist.
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Kurt Schmidt’s memoirs and essays have appeared in the Boston Globe, Bacopa Literary Review, Storyhouse, Please See Me, The Examined Life Journal, Discretionary Love, Eclectica Magazine, and others. Ten years after being expelled from the Naval Academy, he authored the novel “Annapolis Misfit” (Crown). In late winter last year Kurt flew in a small plane piloted by his son, although he was anxious that his son was newly licensed and inexperienced. He is currently finishing a 30-year memoir about parenting a snowboarder and risk-taker.
© 2023, Kurt G. Schmidt
Halfway Down the Stairs 