In those decades, my mother and father raised four children, each with quirks, but all basically normal, functioning (if complicated) adults, itself a testament to human resiliency. Despite the challenges of her upbringing, Julie was blessed with strong instincts regarding children’s needs, and she had been a psychology major, studying at Tufts with Zella Luria, a titan of her era, with whom my mother kept contact until the scythe of dementia severed the tethers of that relationship, as it did so many others.
If the reach of Julie’s value systems sometimes exceeded the grasp permitted by her mercurial temperament, there was no question that our parents loved us and were grateful for us, and their decisions in our behalf were almost entirely solid and well advised. We had everything we needed and much of what we wanted, but my mother also made damn sure we could cook a basic meal and do our own laundry before we left home.
Still, people are complicated. My parents divorced in 1988; my father remarried and lives happily in Florida, where he has logged 5,000 miles a year on his bicycle for more than two decades. He will turn 87 next week (the day before Willie Nelson does!).
During and after their marriage, my mother knew both joy and grief. Her four children have successful marriages and more-or-less civilized children, but the challenges of her upbringing never receded. She struggled to achieve emotional health throughout her life, and even in hindsight it is hard to venture a guess about whether her prevailing diagnosis might have been depression, bipolar disorder, or even borderline personality disorder (the last being a far more serious and, um, complicated condition).
Even people who suffer mental illness display profound charms, of course. Besides her often unhinged humor, one of her greatest pleasures was entertaining others, which afforded not only the opportunity to gather, but to impress, as she was a very good cook and she had a beautiful house. My high school friends still speak of the hours in our basement playing ping-pong, or lounging and cannonballing at our pool during Chicago’s short summers.
Julie loved to be the hub of almost any social wheel. At one point in the 1980s, one of my father’s close cousins married a Roman man. Both were students of architecture (and later professors of engineering and art history), and they were accompanied on honeymoon by about a dozen Italian architecture fanatics of varying English proficiency, eager to see Chicago and Oak Park. Though I knew she had cooked for two days, my mother made it seem as if dinner for 20 appeared on the table by some sort of magic she alone knew how to conjure.
Similarly, in my senior year of high school, two of the year’s biggest national debate tournaments took place locally on the three days before Thanksgiving (the Glenbrook Round Robin) and the three days after (the Northwestern Invitational). With friends from the Bronx, New Orleans, and California in town, we had nearly 30 people to dinner that Thanksgiving night. My mother’s cooking informed my later epiphany that she could make dinner for 12 in an hour using only salt, sugar, and some bacon fat (I exaggerate slightly), and it certainly spurred my own cooking adventures, which now provide some of my most satisfying extracurricular activities. In these strange times, I have taken pleasure in packing a nice lunch each day for Annice, who is still working, and I wonder if I have assimilated more “maternal” instincts than “paternal.” I am my mother’s child in many ways, I suppose.
Among the other items to which my mother asserted entitlement, it makes sense that she guarded Thanksgiving jealously. She grew anxious in the early fall if it became clear that not every child would spend the holiday with her that year, which happened, naturally, as we began to build our own families. I was nearly 50 when I was recruited to tell a short story at “Thanksgiving Lunch,” a much-loved tradition at the school where I was working at the time. Astonishingly, that was the first time it occurred to me: I had spent every Thanksgiving of my life with my mother. Last year marked the first time dementia rendered her unable to participate; perhaps fittingly, we punted and booked a restaurant meal. And her absence will surely make the holiday a little more ... complicated ... in the years ahead.
It may come as little surprise that my mother couldn’t bear to be excluded from a celebration, whether or not it was hers. We celebrated Christmas as well as Hanukkah, and no latter-day Chinese food tradition would be adequate, as it seemed a concession rather than a real party. She made a turkey, or a duck, or something that would be culturally appropriate if only we had belonged to another culture. No matter — if there was a party, my mother would be damned if she would miss it.
She also had an exceptional sense of style, born of an innate eye for decoration, and an interest in those same cultures that were different from her own. We moved in 1979, to a frumpy, dark, nondescript house that my mother described as “1970s goyishe,” but in which she saw potential. She tore out the red shag carpeting and tossed the dozens (maybe hundreds) of miniature airline liquor bottles that the previous owners had retained as decoration. She laid wood floors, installed French doors from the kitchen to the back yard, removed the pink fluorescent light tubes in the family room, painted the pink walls white in the family room (these are true details; it was a very pink room — with thoughtful touches of olive green here and there), and generally amused herself for years making things pretty.
That is not a trivialization. Photos of our house from the 1980s show bright rooms, fresh and ornamented in ways that were both artistically dynamic and invitingly warm. Remarkably, they do not seem dated; her style was based on timeless form, color, and combination. Our house was festooned with art pieces from West Africa, Indonesia, 18th-century New England, Jamaica, Europe, and, especially, T.J. Maxx. Even as a teenager I marveled at some of the totems she had acquired in her many (often irresponsible) shopping junkets.
She gave interesting pieces to others as well. Wedding presents for Annice and me came annually on our anniversary — silver napkin rings she had found at various flea markets and antique holes-in-assorted-walls. We use them whenever we host our own dinner parties, which are frequent. Yes, she was pathologically materialistic in some ways. (Some might even call it “hoarding” — when we emptied her last townhouse near Chicago, we donated 31 off-white short-sleeved shirts, as well as unworn Dior and Versace coats.) But she was also genuinely fascinated by objects — their functions, their stories, and their beauty. She loved giving things to others because she liked people; if she could be overbearing at times, she also communicated fondness through gifts of objects that fascinated her too.
Julie was a “housewife” or a “homemaker,” a role that she relished, and she was capable of surprise too. At age 50 she pursued and earned an MSW, a lifetime aspiration. The achievement meant a lot to her, coming as it did on the waves of her divorce, but she disliked the seed work for building a client base, and never did. She was still proud to announce, as she did from time to time, that she had a “masters degree in helping,” which conferred (obviously) the right to advise anyone, known or not, on anything, experienced or not. Similarly, she dated frequently in the years after divorce, but she grew tired of suitors quickly, and never found the right one. She liked funny guys and big personalities, but two big personalities in the same relationship are not always a great match.
My mother was a big personality in a family of big personalities, so when Annice and I began dating in 1993, my mother didn’t quite know what to make of her. Annice is warm and friendly but reserved; she takes up far less air in the room than most people. She is also practical, analytical, and, gravest horror of all, viscerally disinterested in “shopping.” Still, as I type this she reminds me how kind my mother was to her, and how graciously she felt welcomed to any family traditions and gatherings.
To be honest, there was one minor fracas when Annice was asked to bring my mother’s recipe for noodle pudding (a close relative of the Jewish dish, kugel) to Thanksgiving at my sister’s house in Boston about 10 years ago. The noodle pudding was “my mother’s recipe” insofar as she had made it for 25 years or more, and it always brought compliments — though she had, of course, stolen it from somebody else 25 years earlier. In a rare moment of gentle tweaking as she typed up the sheet, Annice chose the heading, “Annice’s Noodle Pudding,” and while even Mom knew that pitching a fit would be a bit much, she simmered, quietly. No matter how she came by something, if it was hers, she took her fiduciary responsibilities seriously.
Julie’s dementia was difficult at first, as these things are. Like many families, we didn’t see her initial slide for what it was, but she became irrational in measures that eclipsed her everyday emotional turmoil. She began making financial decisions even more senseless than the ones she had always made (who buys 100 mini-staplers just because they’re half-off?!), and she grew irritable when she insisted that my brother (in Chicago) had driven by her apartment (in Maryland) without stopping to see her. She imagined that her father’s store was still operating just across the street and over the hill — barely beyond her metaphorical reach, no doubt.
More miserably, she told us at times that her mother had been revived from the grave and was near to finding her, or plotting to kill her father, and of course these delusions frightened her. During the year she spent in independent living in Maryland, before she moved to the memory care facility, she contacted the New Britain police department to warn them and to ask where her father was; and she set a bagel on fire in the microwave (imagine how long that would take!), evacuating the building. She remembered and held grudges about minor debts, and she took personally the changes in camping regulations New York had imposed at Lake George, where she spent many summers — events a half-century old or more. We worked with physicians, mostly with success, to mitigate these effects of her disease through the miracles of pharmacology, but by this time there was certainly no denying what lay ahead.
Not everything was dark. She moved in 2015 to the memory care facility, and I visited her hundreds of times, which means that staff were asked excitedly, hundreds of times, “Have you met my son?!” (I am certain they were thrilled to meet me, hundreds of times.) And as we walked by the room of her next-door neighbor, a woman named Phyllis Judge, Mom read the door sign and grew excited. “That’s where Phyllis lives,” she’d exclaim. “She used to be a judge!”
That’s emblematic of another of my mother’s lifelong missions: sharing her knowledge, no matter how mundane, with others. As toddlers, my children loved to sit on Grandma’s lap and hear her explain the colors, or shapes, or various flora and fauna, which she did as if she were presenting the tablets to the Hebrews. To this day my siblings and I crack up if anybody mentions “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” or “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” which in her dementia she offered as edification to hundreds of young children once she spied them from across the room, across the hall, across the museum or shopping mall. We cringed when we saw her hijack another family’s outing, but there is no question that these antics were motivated by her wanting to share, wanting to teach, wanting to engage children, the people she loved most in all the world.
Though she expressed frustration with each of her four children countless times, we knew she loved those around her — not only us and her grandchildren, but also those who served her food and cleaned the bathrooms at the memory care facility, and many in between. She wandered the halls and asked staff, “Whooooo’s thaaaaatttt?” in the same sing-songy voice she’d use with a two-year-old, and they’d tell us how funny and engaging she was. Sure, that was their job. But just as sure, she was funny and engaging, right through the heavy, blurred curtain that dementia brings down. She lived in that facility for four and-a-half years, and while she was clearly in decline, she seldom seemed unhappy, which fulfilled our principal wish for her.
My mom died Sunday night. I was there, with Annice, and an agency nurse (because some of the facility’s nurses are in quarantine), and the poor marketing director of the facility who was the administrator-on-call on a Sunday night. I had been in touch with my mother’s physician for about a week, during which her condition worsened, then improved, then worsened again suddenly.
Name it what you’d like, there is no question that she died of acute respiratory distress. We never received a definitive Covid diagnosis, but, like everybody, we are aware of the pervasive infections, especially at nursing homes and care facilities. (Annice works at a hospital, spending part of every day studying models of the pandemic, so we may be even more aware than most.)
Still, I was unprepared for the palpable presence of invisible contaminants, an oxymoron that can only be explained with exponential notation. There was no mistaking the ugly environment for any kind of more normal scene in which one would draw tremulous last breaths. This was the first time I have been present at the death of another person, and I was just as spooked by the heft of sickness in the air (on the walls, around the door handles, in the carpets) as I was by bearing witness to my mother’s final moments.
Mom was surrounded by photos of her children and grandchildren, and the baby dolls that she loved and spoke to often, and a handful of stuffed animals — some of whom she adored, and some of whom, frankly, she just didn’t care for so much. Say what you will about my mother, we were always aware of her judgment — and Lord knows that’s the right word — on any critical topic.
On his masterpiece, “Elephant,” Jason Isbell sings, “There's one thing that's real clear to me: No one dies with dignity.” In a way that’s true for all of us, of course, but my mother wanted to project love and dignity, and, despite the sizable challenges, she usually did. She lived her life trying to brighten the lives of many others, whether by fighting real discrimination, by heaping gifts on her grandchildren, or by schooling parents, with whom she had no connection, on the most helpful songs to calm their crying infants. After all the crazy tales are stripped away, I knew that her intentions were always to leave the world better, to help others transcend their need to bear the weight of being human, weight that she knew well and spent a lifetime hoping to lessen. She wasn’t always successful, but I learned from her that intention, even when it’s complicated, counts for plenty.
See you on the other side, Mom.
