The Questions I Never Asked My Mother

The Boston Globe

May 10, 2019

‘What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence,” is a book propped up on a table under “New Releases” at Barnes & Noble. I pick it up. And can’t put it down. So I buy it.

I’ve read only four of the essays so far. I want to absorb each. Maybe even more than absorb, I want to reflect, to think about these writers and their mothers, and to think about my mother, too, and all the things we never got a chance to talk about.

Except that we did have a chance.

I was 24 and nine months pregnant and my mother was 46 when she stopped talking. “I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll pick you up. We’ll go shopping,” I said to her on a Thursday evening in 1971. “I’ll leave the door open,” she told me. And then I hung up and finished watching “Longstreet.” She and my father lived in the house I grew up in 6 miles away.

Early the next morning, my phone rang. It was my father. “Your mother fell,” he said. “She’s at South Shore Hospital. I’m with her.” He had come home and found her unconscious at the bottom of their cellar stairs. How did this happen? Did she trip on her nightgown? Did her slipper catch on a stair? What was she doing in the cellar, anyway? Laundry? At night? In the morning? What time did she fall? How long was she sprawled unconscious on that concrete floor? Where were you, Dad? Why weren’t you there?

My mother would remain unconscious for months. When she finally spoke, it would be with her eyes first, then with her throat, moans and whimpers, guttural sounds, then syllables, then gibberish, made up words strung together.

Aphasia, the doctor called it.

I had to look up the word.

Ten years later, after she had relearned to speak, (she had to relearn everything: speaking, swallowing, eating, standing, walking,) as I was helping her to the bathroom because she needed help with everything, rheumatoid arthritis taking away whatever the fall had not, she said, in a whisper, “I can’t believe this is me.”

Her words broke my heart.

A door had cracked open, a long-closed door. My mother was communicating. My mother was saying, not just, “Yes, it’s a nice day.” and, “Thank you. Dinner was delicious, Beverly.” She was saying, “Look. I am here. I am in here.”

And I said nothing.

Why didn’t I stop whatever we were doing and mine this moment? Why didn’t I hug her and look into her eyes and ask her right then, “What happened, Mom? Do you remember before you fell? What’s the last thing you remember? You were in a coma for three months.”

But I was struggling, not to cry, not to think, not to feel, because it was terrifying to believe that my healthy, vibrant, funny, full-of-life, show-tune singing mother was fully present, but locked inside herself, a prisoner, forced every day to look out at the world from a body that didn’t work anymore and see all that she had lost.

We finished in the bathroom and went back to the kitchen table and idle chatter. Then, my mother said, “Dinner was delicious, Beverly.” And the open door slammed shut again. But who closed it? Did my mother? Or did I?

I played the cheerleader for her. I distracted her with gossip and funny tales about my kids. I made myself the butt of every story to make her laugh so that I didn’t have to see the pain that was always in her eyes. I scrubbed her kitchen floor because I cleaned the way she had taught me, with Comet and elbow grease. I brought her flowers, and coffee and muffins from Dunkin’ Donuts because coffee and muffins never failed to make her happy. And I read to her, too, every story I wrote. And “The Velveteen Rabbit.”

But I never really talked to her. I never asked the important questions. Why didn’t I? My mother lived to be 63. I had 17 years. “What’s the point of talking about the past when the present is all we have?” Did she say that? Did I? Did my father? Did I not ask because of this, because there is no changing the past? Or did I not ask because I was too afraid of the answers?