Widowhood did not become my mother. She had gone straight from her
girlhood home to marriage and motherhood. She often spoke of her loneliness as
an only child and vowed she would not inflict that loneliness on her children.
Remembering the large family of one of her friends, she said every night
was like a party at their house, something she strove to emulate with her own
brood. But, once everyone had left home, the only party she attended was her
private party with Jim Beam.
After the death of my father,
she tried desperately to hang on to the traditions she had so carefully developed
while raising her family, but unfortunately, alcohol clouded her ability to
pull it off. I remember one particular evening. She prepared a huge elaborate
paella, made from pounds of expensive fresh seafood. She invited several family
members and a couple who had been friends from the UC Berkeley days. When
dinner time arrived, she brought the masterpiece to the table stone cold. She
had forgotten to cook it.
My mother's friend pulled me
aside and said, "Poor thing, you children have got to do something about
her."
She was drinking heavily, I
found cash register receipts from several different liquor stores listing all
kinds of booze: bourbon, scotch, vodka, gin, rum, etc. She deluded herself into
believing she needed to stock up for a party or to have a full bar available in
case someone dropped in for a drink. I looked at her cancelled checks. Some
days she was so shaky so could hardly write. We did have to do something.
We planned an intervention. We
tricked her into coming to a facility in Half Moon Bay where we gathered in a
room. In a meeting facilitated by a staff member, we told her how concerned we
were for her, how we loved her, and wanted her to be the person we remembered,
the one who was bright, funny, creative, and sober. She was outraged. Even
though she had already been drinking that morning, she denied she needed help,
and asserted that she could take care of herself. She made it clear we were
trespassing in her private world.
The therapist said she had
never seen such a strong-willed resistant person and after a couple of hours,
we declared the intervention a failure and took her home.
No further parties occurred. I
took over holiday dinners except for one Thanksgiving; we decided to have
dinner at the Claremont Hotel in the Berkeley hills. When I stopped by to pick her up, she was in a bathrobe and nowhere near ready to go. I explained she
needed to hurry as we had to stop and pick up her father (Bobo) on the way to
dinner. She disappeared into her bedroom for a long time and when I went to
check on her, she was still in her robe, shuffling through stuff in her room,
but making no move to get ready. She was in a blackout, unaware I was
there and that it was time to leave. When I tried to explain that we were late
picking up Bobo, she just laughed and said, "Oh, Bobo doesn't care."
I told her I was leaving in ten minutes with or without her. Ten minutes later,
while she was still in her bathrobe, I left.
I did pick up Bobo and,
although we were late, joined ten other family members gathered for dinner.
About half way through dinner, an apparition appeared at the entrance to our
small dining alcove, and it snarled at me, "Melody, how dare you! I will
never forgive you." Fortunately, she had taken a cab, and not driven.
I think of my mother in
paradoxical patterns; she was shy and introverted, thought of herself as a
"private person", but she loved parties. She worked faithfully to
make holidays and birthdays special to each of us. And I think she loved the
release of inhibition from the alcohol that flowed freely on those occasions.
Sadly, as she drank alone, she became reclusive and shut herself off from
friends and family. She lived alone and in filth with a little dog who never
went outside. Her one constant contact with the outside world was a phone call
she made each morning to her father, to make sure he had made it safely through
the night.
One morning, he called me to
say he had not heard from her. Her telephone went unanswered. We both knew this
was an ominous sign. I lived an hour away, in San Jose, but decided to leave
right away to check on her. I hung up the phone, and called my son-in-law, Wes,
arranging to pick him up to make the trip to Oakland with me.
Arriving in her driveway, we
kicked our way through piles of fallen leaves to the locked front door. Looking
under all the obvious places, empty flower pots and planters, decorative rocks
and ceramic frogs, we found no key. Breaking a window in the still unfinished
downstairs game room, Wes worked his way upstairs through trash, dirty clothes,
and dog feces littering the green shag carpet, to open the front door. We made
our way through the silent house to her bedroom while the dog, a filthy shaggy
toy poodle, sniffed at our heels. She lay on a mattress that was askew, half
off and half on the bed, her head seemed caught between the mattress and the
headboard. She responded to her name with a groan, and we managed to get her to
an upright sitting position. She seemed conscious, but unaware of her
surroundings and with no sense of who we were, why we were there, what had
happened, or anything else that would affirm that she was mentally
present, so while I sat with her, Wes called 911.
She was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with a brain bleed
of unknown cause.
Comatose for several days, the initial outlook was grim. She was
not expected to be able walk, talk, or participate in her own care. But, she
did regain enough function to be able to live in assisted living for a number
of years, an arrangement that brought her safety and was a relief to all of us
who cared about her.
I assumed Power of Attorney and rented out Seward’s Folly. The
rent money, along with her other sources of income, provided for her very
comfortably the rest of her life. When she died, the mortgage-free house was
sold, and each of the heirs received a nice little sum for indulging their own
follies.
