In the background I could hear peals of girlish laughter. Were these nurses heavily made up? This was New Jersey after all. I decided that they had to be. My mother’s use of the antiquated term brothel made sense given her background and present state of mind. Still I was not comforted by the open mockery of the attending nurses. I felt anxious and scared for my mother. She shouldn’t be alone in the hospital. Someone should be there who can advocate on her behalf.
I’ve killed John
Anxious, I began a heavy regimen of exercise. At night, I would take long walks around the Silver Lake reservoir, climbing steep cement staircases that cut through the hillsides. During the day, I took Pilates classes, and it wasn’t long before I overdid it and injured a knee. Cortisone shots did little to ease the swelling or the pain. Foolishly, I continued to exercise, until eventually I found it difficult to walk even the shortest distance. I had no doubt torn a ligament, but refused my doctor’s request to get an x-ray after the possibility of surgery was mentioned. I was determined to keep working until somehow I mended on my own. An adjunct, I had limited access to sick days. I couldn’t fathom how I would continue to make a living if I was laid up.
Meanwhile, my phone conversations with my mother grew more disconcerting. Her blood pressure had stabilized, enabling her to return to Ramapo Ridge, where she had been assigned around-the-clock nurse’s aides. Now when I spoke to her, she felt compelled to confide in me that she had killed someone. This someone turned out to be my brother.
“I feel terrible,” she would say. “I’ve killed John.”
“No, Mom,” I promised her. “You haven’t killed John. You haven’t hurt anyone.” I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the expression of a guilty conscience.
“Is this why he never calls?” she asked me finally.
A tremendous thing
Before I returned to Ramapo Ridge, my mother’s neighbor and estranged friend called to tell me of her attempts to visit my mother. Apparently, Anita had been turned away from the facility twice. It was a fair distance from Chatham in Morris County to Ramapo Ridge in Wycoff, over an hour by car. I was saddened to hear that my mother would not permit her friend to visit. Anita had brought to the hospital clothes that my mother needed from her apartment. Underwear. Nightgowns. I hadn’t accomplished much shopping on my mother’s behalf. My shipment of clothing was late, and not entirely complete. My mother was lucky to have such a caring friend, and I wished she could find it in her heart to see her, though a number of minor disagreements in previous months had precipitated an unfortunate strain on their relationship already.
Sharing my disappointment with my brother, he reminded me that my mother’s reaction was perfectly understandable.
“In this condition, she won’t want anyone to see her like this. She feels ashamed. They will be friends again. Once she’s feeling better. You’ll see.”
My mother’s consistent refusal to answer her friend’s phone calls over the next week told me otherwise. The advantages of staying in New Jersey with its familiar set of circumstances—doctor, local stores, and a best friend and daily confidante—were slowly coming to an end for my mother. This seemed more than evident.
A final visit
After fielding phone calls from concerned family members, I packed for another short visit to New Jersey, afraid of what I might find. The next to call that day before I left was my aunt Anne from Texas. I was fairly pessimistic about my mother’s state. After being hospitalized for more than two months, my mother had stopped taking my calls, having slipped into a near-catatonic state. My mother always took my phone calls. I conveyed my anxiety to my aunt. I confided that I didn’t believe my mother would recover.
“This is it,” I pronounced grimly. “She won’t get better. She’s lost to us.”
My aunt had very reassuring words for me.
“She’s gotten better before, she will get better again. You don’t think she will, but she can.”
Despite her confidence, I still felt dubious. Before my mother’s sister hung up the phone, she asked if she could call the hospital to speak to my mother.
“Let me ask her first,” I suggested, all too aware of my mother’s typical prohibitions.
Watson’s Boy
Prepping that night for a creative writing class I was giving at SCI-Arc on the science-fictional grotesque, rereading Brian Evenson’s weird short story Watson’s Boy, I experienced a powerful sense of dread. This take on the discomfiting 1920 conditioning experiment of behavioral psychologist John B. Watson strangely mirrored the unrelenting misery I associated with my mother’s relapse.
A victim of a disorienting physical and mental bondage, Brey, the son of alarmingly dysfunctional parents, is burdened by the meaningless gathering of heavy metal keys from the intersections of endless and identical looking hallways. Not one of these keys fits a single door. Like neural circuitry that has been shorted, useful pathways collapse and disappear. Brey is oblivious to the impossibility of his task, obligingly working to gather these keys according to his poet father’s instructions. The heaviness and futility of his Sisyphean task is exacerbated through the attachment of these keys to a harness Brey’s father has strapped to his chest.
“He is capable of adjusting to the cruelty, to prolonging the madness for however long, no matter the effect…. The increasing weight of keys stunts his movement, cripples his growth,” Evenson narrates on Brey’s infernal state. “He does not resent this—he does not realize it.”
As the otherwise Sherlock Holmes-inflected title suggests, this is a detective story; but the burden Brey carries is an impossible koan. Our protagonist is prohibited from gathering clues, from unlocking doors. The keys do not fit the locks. The mind cannot be illuminated. There is no escape. In a paralyzed state on the bed, wrapped in bandages, Brey’s mother is “mummified” in advance of potential dangers, the inevitable charge of rats: the one other vestige of life in the dank dungeon of the “family mind.”
Reminiscence on a tragedy
Before leaving for the frigid East Coast the next morning, I succeeded for the first time all week in reaching my mother by phone. She now had the energy to confide in me a number of delusions. She was no longer able to walk. Again there was talk about the faulty hip replacement and her need to sue the manufacturer. She demanded I do some sleuthing online to look for a class-action suit.
I quickly changed the subject. “Anne called. She wants to know if she can call you.”
My mother grew silent for a moment, then cautioned me in a hushed voice against letting her sister know where she was.
“She wants my leg,” she said to my dismay. “She mustn’t know where I am.”
I promised not to disclose her whereabouts.
I was rattled by my mother’s reference to her sister’s missing leg. My mother had never spoken openly to me about her sister’s tragedy. Why had she been taken over suddenly by the past? Was this survivor’s guilt? Overpowering feelings she might have experienced more than forty years before? For the first time, I considered my mother’s reaction as a young woman to the news of her younger sister’s crushing loss. The utter confusion she must have felt upon learning that her eighteen-year-old sibling had suffered an amputation. We rarely spoke of familial pathos and certainly not without marked discord. For instance, in a frank conversation with my mother shortly after I learned of her psychiatric diagnosis, she grew defensive. “I don’t have schizophrenia,” she said in an injured tone. “I don’t.”
She then called my brother and sought his confirmation that I had lied about her diagnosis. He soothed her somehow. I don’t recall exactly what was said, only that my brother warned me, after speaking to my mother, to be more careful.
At twenty-four years old, I was no doubt tactless. Eventually she would embrace the full scope of her illness. I never raised the subject with her again.
Before the court
Over the course of the weekend I spent with my mother, she was mostly unresponsive
. She spoke in monosyllables. Yes. No. Shocked to see her in this condition, it confirmed fears I held about the unlikelihood of her recovery. I spent the majority of the day in the large common room alone watching television with an animated woman in her sixties. Quick-witted and easy to talk to, the stout-looking woman with a blonde up-do seemed perfectly stable, as far as I could tell. We shared a number of cracks about the true crime murder mysteries blaring loudly from the cathode-ray-tube TV. What could be more ironic given that this was meant to be a therapeutic environment?
After not too long, the air of normalcy was disrupted. This lively woman confided in me that she was being held against her will at Ramapo Ridge. In explicit detail, she told me how at the end of each week she had to appear in “court” and how, each time, “the judge” ruled that she could not be discharged, even though she was perfectly fine. She must be delusional, I told myself. This form of illness was new to me. My mother’s persecution complex made it impossible for her to openly discuss her fears with anyone unknown to her. This woman didn’t exhibit signs of mania or depression. She did not appear “medicated.”
I began to panic. What if there was some truth in what she had to say? Her fears confirmed for me complaints I had read on Yelp prior to visiting my mother here. A “patient” on Yelp had described being held hostage by this “court,” a weekly tribunal held in the basement of the facility. I began to worry that my mother might never be released. Would they keep her here until she went bankrupt? I contemplated my mother’s reaction when she finally learned that in order to leave she would have to go to “court” and appear before a “judge.” Would this trigger in my mother painful memories of a waylaid law career? Would she then suffer another setback?
I left to find my mother’s social worker.
“She won’t spend the last of her days languishing here?” I asked.
“Everyone eventually leaves,” she told me.
Markedly worse
The following day I returned to find my mother again in bed. On my last visit, she lit through the hallways looking for her doctor, eager in her own way to participate in her treatment. In a highly indecisive and agitated state known as aboulia, she vacillated between being in agreement and disagreement with his changes to her medication, the primary change being an increase in her anti-depressant, Zoloft. The moment she had succeeded in locating him and moved to reverse her previous position, she would invariably change her mind, and once again go looking for him. While her manic indecision was painful to witness, her present condition was markedly worse. No longer able to care for her appearance, her hair was fully gray, wild. Her pallor, chalk-white. She had lost even more weight. Whatever ability she had to care for herself when she first arrived had almost entirely vanished.
It took several hours of being woken by staff before she was able to rise. When she did, a painful scene would ensue. She would accuse her nurse aids of all sorts of abuse, refusing their help in getting dressed or to being washed. Convinced she was being beaten, it took two nurses to get her into the shower and dressed. One day, I found her nearly being dragged through the hallway coming back from the shower, her hair newly washed and combed, in loose khaki pants, shouting damning accusations.
“Ow, ow,” she cried irritably, impugning her nurses. “She hurt me. She hit me, she hit me.”
I began to fear that this would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sentimental drama
After she had managed to eat a spoonful or two of her gloppy-looking cereal, my mother allowed me to take her on a short journey about the carpeted hallways in a wheelchair. Not in good shape after her fall, she was no longer permitted to walk through the ward without nurse aids, or a wheelchair.
“Let’s sit someplace new,” I blathered, intent on a change of scene.
We entered the small lounge, and I took a seat on the couch. My mother remained in her chair beside me. On the television, a sentimental 1970s drama played. Our time here would be short. Soon my mother began to complain.
“It’s too smoky in here.” I had guessed she would feel this way from the moment I entered the room. What appeared to me to be sunshine refracted through sheer curtains appeared not as mitigated light to my mother but smoke. A visual hallucination: its origin, an affected occipital lobe.
I tried explaining the phenomenon. I had never liked being held under the sway of my mother’s fears, real or imagined.
“No, Mom. It’s sunlight being filtered through the curtains.”
I tried to persuade her to stay, but after some discord, finally agreed to move on. My distress must have been obvious because I was suddenly the beneficiary of a sympathetic ear. Another patient, a low-key looking man in a blue Lacoste tennis shirt, rose from where he was seated to approach me.
“Don’t worry. She’ll get better soon. You’ll see.”
I shook my head doubtfully. “I don’t think so.”
Another woman dressed in a long caftan echoed his well wishes.
“Oh yes, she will be better soon. Not to worry, dear.” Touched by these people battling troubles of their own, I felt a sudden ray of hope and thanked this small coterie for their kindness.
Back in the large common room, the television loud and blaring, I broached the topic with my mother about coming to live with us in California after leaving Ramapo Ridge.
Suddenly my mother began to convulse, shaking in her wheelchair from head to toe. I had never seen anyone shake like this before, least of all my mother. I felt terrible that our conversation had induced in her such a reaction and escorted her back to bed.
That night at my hotel
At 6 p.m., I perched myself at the compact two-person bar for a boozy evening. This seemed reasonable recompense for a stint at Ramapo Ridge. Located two short blocks from the Garden State Plaza and the Woodbury Commons Outlets, and twenty minutes by car from nearby Manhattan, the stucco corporate hotel was the main highlight in Woodcliff, a magnet for international travelers hoping to strike a good bargain. Seated at the black laminate bar in the foyer, I made the most of the half-warmed meal that had arrived in an unopened plastic container. There was nothing on the menu that did not come in this quick and convenient form.
After drinking more wine than I care to admit, and having finished my partially warmed hamburger, I returned to my room slightly inebriated but not nearly drunk enough to ignore my surroundings. The featureless room depressed me. At least I had learned enough from my previous visit to ask for a room that did not face the highway. This meant being spared a sleepless night of being awoken by the intermittent sound of passing trucks. I tried looking on the bright side. Unsure what I would do now in this softly painted corporate tomb, I lumbered onto the bed, snatching the remote from the night table. No sooner had I propped myself on the hard bed on a stack of foamy pillows then I received a call from a friend from my high school days in New Jersey. She had called to make sure I was not feeling too alone. I could always depend on Alida, whose gleaming acumen and steadfast tender heart saw me through most anything. We chatted for a good hour or so before hanging up. My anxiety had lessened enough after this call and an aimless scroll through lists of endless programming on television to course into a mildly antiseptic sleep.
Mom’s prognosis
Shortly before my departure for California, I stopped to talk to my mother’s doctor. Easy access to doctors and nurses was another commendable attribute of this facility. In the central annex, the medical staff would take turns sitting at a long desk, answering phones, administering meds, working on charts, always available to field questions, to discuss concerns with patients and family members. We engaged in a short discussion on my mother’s prognosis. I was hoping to broach with him the subject of moving my mother to Los Angeles. Given her present condition, I anticipated a negative reaction on his part. She is not nearly well enough to leave, I expected him to say. Instead, he surprised me by remarking on the healing power of family.
“The psychoanalytical literature emp
hasizes the importance of living in close proximity to family members. They don’t know why exactly,” he explained, “but it just seems to work.” I seemed to be laboring under negative suspicions of my own. The staff clearly wanted to see my mother reintegrate and leave.
Despite her doctor’s approval of our plan, I still wondered how she would ever convince the “judge” that she was well enough to leave. She was still suffering from a number of delusions, and there were still several requirements she had to fulfill in order to be discharged. She needed to eat complete meals. She had to become more mobile. After returning home, I still had trouble getting her to take my calls. When she did come to the phone, she confessed to me a range of disturbing delusions.
“I have been committing incest with your brother,” she divulged to me more than once. On another occasion she told me her roommate had been “skinned.” I found this revelation especially harrowing. Why did her delusions have to be so horrific? It didn’t seem fair or comprehensible that anyone should have to endure such unrelenting phantasma-gorical terror. Why didn’t her brain offer up more agreeable hallucinations? Soon she began to complain of being required to sit in “that awful room”: the one with the drugged, immobile patients.
“Start eating more so you can leave,” I begged.
The reports from her social worker on her progress were never good.
“Your mother is not eating her cereal, and she spends most of the day slumped over in her wheelchair.”
“You have to sit upright in your wheelchair,” I demanded of my mother when we spoke. “Otherwise, they won’t let you leave.”
The Rehabilitation Center of Beverly Hills
To my welcome surprise, when my mother finally made the dreaded “court appearance,” she did not crumble. On the contrary, her social worker reported back that once Mom knew she had to be in court, she took the whole event very seriously, dressing smartly for the occasion. The “judge” deemed her fit to leave, and we were set. The only other requirement of her release was that we find her a skilled nursing facility in Los Angeles where she would be assisted in making the transition. As it turned out, no one we called seemed to have room. Not even one nursing facility on the Westside of Los Angeles had a vacancy. We were stuck. As a last resort, I called my mother’s cousin, who worked as a doctor at Cedars-Sinai, and sought his guidance. He was able to get us in touch with someone at their Rehabilitation Center, where he often worked with recovering patients. Apparently this facility had vacancies, or would consider us—I couldn’t help but wonder if my mother’s illness was what precluded her easy admission to a general facility.
A Room with a Darker View Page 13