The Woman Who Can't Forget

by Jill Price

  I was determined after that to do something to show my parents how much I cared, so I went home a couple of weeks later to surprise them. I will never forget my dad’s reaction when he opened the door: he was unhappy to see me. He tried to hide it, and the look just flickered across his face, gone almost as soon as it was there. But I saw it. I felt my whole body react with shock, as if I had just taken a bullet. He just didn’t want me there.

  My family was, and is, my center. No matter what I had ever done, I knew they loved me and had always forgiven me. I had never seen that look before, and now I would live with it all of my life. The pain I gave them is the pain I have to live with too. Forgetting and forgiving are bound so tightly together that one cannot exist without the other. The expression on my dad’s face that Saturday, October 24, 1987, will never fade in my mind; it cut to the quick, and at that point, my mind became fixated on remembering the cycle of days that had led up to that day.

  One date cued another in a vicious circle: Saturday, January 31, 1987—being mean to my mother. Wednesday, April 29, 1987—the “good” diagnosis of tinnitus. Friday, May 22, 1987—seeing my mother crying and being told about her brain tumor. Memorial Day 1987—the barbecue where no one talked about her illness. July 4 weekend—home to another party where no one talked about her illness. Wednesday, July 8, 1987—the operation and my dad’s call to tell me my mom was okay. July 10—my uncle telling me my mother had almost died on the table. July 17—coming home to see my mother in the hospital and causing a huge fight with my dad. October 24—my father’s face when I came home to surprise them. All those memories churning through my mind once again overwhelmed me. The feeling of disconnection got so strong I parted company with reality in some way I still cannot define. Tangible things weren’t important anymore. I was me watching me, and I didn’t care what I did or what I felt.

  On Friday, November 27, the day after Thanksgiving, my mother told me that her operation had been postponed yet again and was scheduled for Tuesday, January 5, 1988. She told me that although she knew she could die on the table, she was going to take that chance because she wasn’t going to have this brain tumor kill her. The surgery was going to deprive her of hearing in that ear because they were going to have to remove the whole ear canal. But she was facing that prospect with remarkable stoicism.

  During the Christmas break that year my dad got me a job working as an assistant to Les Moonves, then senior vice president at Lorimar Productions. Before I left for work on Monday, January 4, my mom, our housekeeper, and I stood in the living room crying and saying good-bye. She was leaving for the hospital that day. There was a moment when I looked at my mother and knew I might never see her again, and it kept me holding on to her tightly. I knew that by the time I got home that night, she would be under premedication for surgery. At work that day, I made it through entirely on automatic. It is one of the few times I have absolutely no memory of the specifics of what I did. I couldn’t concentrate at all because my memories were racing so wildly through my mind. The next day, when she was in surgery, would clearly be worse, and I told Mr. Moonves that I was going to stay home, which he was wonderfully understanding about.

  The day of her surgery, I was so distraught that I didn’t go to the hospital with my father to wait. I stayed in bed all morning, terrified. I simply couldn’t go. I couldn’t forget her surgery the past July, and I knew that the surgery was risky and she might die. I could not bear the thought of facing that news with all of the family and so many of her friends who would be there around me. I felt I needed to be by myself if it happened. I didn’t have the words to explain that to her then, and I didn’t understand it myself at the time. She and I both struggled for many years to come to terms with how I had behaved.

  I now realize that I needed to know she was alive before I could go there. When Vivian, one of her best friends, called me to say she was all right and the tumor had been removed successfully and she wouldn’t need any more operations, I could finally let the fear go. That night when I went to the hospital, my mom was still heavily sedated, and I just sat and watched her, feeling shame that I hadn’t come earlier—shame that still haunts me regularly.

  From the moment my mother was out of surgery, she went on with her life. What did I do? I could not stop remembering the ordeal, and I felt that I was losing my mind. The detachment I’d been feeling was strange and inexplicable, and I still felt disconnected from myself. I had stopped journaling that past October, after the crisis of my mother’s first surgery, and now I was compelled to go back to it. I sat down and wrote all eight months of days from October 1987 to May 1988, and then up to the day that I finished, which was Tuesday, June 21,1988. The job had taken a month, and it helped me get some control over my emotions from the crisis, but it didn’t purge the memories, and a deep fear of my own mortality began to plague me.

  Then, two years later, the second big crisis that rocked my family during my twenties commenced. My mother and father were one of those couples everybody assumed would be together through the good and the bad for the rest of their lives. They had fallen in love in a whirlwind and had never looked back. But our home life had become more and more tempestuous, mostly because my mother and I fought so much, but I had never doubted for one second that their marriage was rock solid. My parents themselves almost never fought. Then starting in late 1989, my father started to feel that he needed a break, though he and my mother didn’t tell me and my brother for a while that anything was wrong.

  Looking back, I realize that my father’s fifty-third birthday, Tuesday, November 14, 1989, was a sign of things to come. That night, The Godfather was showing on TV, and my dad had said that what he most wanted to do for his birthday was for all of us to stay home to watch it and order pizza. Then that morning, we got the news that my grandmother on my mom’s side, Nana, had suffered a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. She had moved out to LA in 1983 to be near us because she had developed Parkinson’s disease and was beginning to fail. At first she lived in our house, but then she moved into a retirement home close by.

  That morning, my mom rushed to the hospital to be with her, and we were hugely relieved when they were able to stabilize her. Later that night, we were still planning to watch the movie, but instead, as happened much too often in my house, a fight started. My brother and I got into it first, and then my mom tried to stop us, and we all ended up yelling. And all of a sudden, my father stormed out of the house. He had never done that before.

  He may have been affected by the stress of Nana’s condition. Though she hadn’t been a fan of his at all when my parents started dating, he knew how important she was to my mother, and through the years he’d become devoted to her and she to him. She came with us on all of our family vacations, and she was a vital part of our immediate family. I’m sure he was also feeling the pressure of knowing how upsetting to my mother Nana’s condition would be. But later it became clear that the problem was more deeply rooted and that this was just the first clear sign that he wasn’t happy at home.

  He didn’t move out right away, and as I think about it, I realize he may have been staying at home at least in part due to my grandmother’s deteriorating condition. Her heart had been stabilized, but her health took a decided turn for the worse, and she declined steadily over the next six months. On Friday, April 27, 1990, she suffered a massive stroke and was in a coma until she died on Thursday, May 10. Five days later, my dad told my mom he didn’t want to be married anymore. He still didn’t move out, though; that wouldn’t be for several more months, and my parents didn’t tell my brother and me for some time.

  We could see that my mother was feeling really low, which was unsettling to my brother and me because she had always been such a stoic, but we knew that she was devastated by her mother’s death. They had been so close, and now she had to go through all of Nana’s things, which must have been horribly painful for her. On top of that, my father telling her that he wanted to leave must have been an en
ormous blow.

  On May 19, my mother told me that things were bad between her and my father. I was completely shocked and didn’t in fact really believe her. I had noticed that he was tense, but I was sure that due to all of the stress of her grief over Nana’s death, she was overdoing the extent of whatever was going on between them. Then things took another twist. After Memorial Day weekend, my mom felt ill and began to worry that she had symptoms of a brain tumor again. She called her doctor, but he couldn’t see her for two weeks, and those two weeks were like reliving the drama of her illness and surgery two years before. This time, however, she insisted there was no way she was going to have the surgery. The operation would require the complete removal of her remaining ear canal, leaving her deaf, and she was determined that she was not going to live without being able to hear. Hit by the emotions of everything that had scared her the first time, along with my father saying he was going to leave, I think she felt she didn’t have the strength to go through it all again.

  Suddenly life had become overwhelming again. Nana had died. My mother might be dying, and on top of that she was saying that she and my dad were having troubles. This was when I decided that I had to get my personal time line completely down on paper and holed myself up in my room all day doing so. I’m sure that the trauma of all that was going on had a good deal to do with why I became so obsessed with getting that done.

  It wasn’t an elixir for my family’s problems. Although I was hugely relieved when it turned out a while later that my mother’s tumor had not come back, things between her and my father didn’t improve, and in midsummer—Monday, July 23, to be exact—my father finally told my brother and me that he was going to leave. Though my mother had told me things were bad between them, I was stunned that he was actually leaving, and I was torn between panic and disbelief. On Saturday, August 4, 1990, my father finally did leave—a day I hate to remember. I still had not accepted that my parents were splitting up, and in the end, they didn’t, but years would go by before they would be reconciled. In the meantime, he moved into an apartment in the Wilshire Corridor, a strip of Wilshire Boulevard between Westwood and Beverly Hills twenty minutes from our house.

  As he explains it now, he had taken care of everybody in his family since he was fourteen years old, and then all of us, and it had just begun to be too much. His business was high pressure. He was the one everybody came to for help professionally and personally. He had been basically on his own since he was fourteen, and now he was almost fifty-four, and he felt he just couldn’t do it anymore.

  The strange thing was, though, that he still spent a good deal of time with us. For the first six months, our family life stayed remarkably the same. He’d come over every Sunday night, and we’d go out to a restaurant for dinner, and he was over for every holiday that fall. The situation was confusing, and it took years to work itself out.

  Not long after my dad moved out, my brother decided to share a house with his girlfriend. I was home from college by this time and had been a production assistant on several TV shows. I was liking the work, and I probably would have started looking for my own place too around this time, except that I did not want to leave my mother alone. My parents’ split sent me into a serious, long emotional decline, with memories of all of our family fights careening through my mind. I still also had a good deal of pent-up emotion about my mother’s brush with death, and I was angry at my dad and angry at myself for causing so much turmoil in the house. When my job as production secretary on a game show pilot ended on Halloween 1990, I stopped working. By the time January 1991 rolled around, I hardly went out of the house at all.

  My friends would come over and ask what the matter was with me, but I couldn’t shake the cycle of remembering, and I didn’t want to talk about it with them. I didn’t feel mentally disconnected the way I had during my mother’s illness, I think because I was in the warm blanket of the security of my home, but I fell into a deep and unrelenting depression.

  For the next two and a half years, I stayed very close to home. I almost constantly remembered every event from my mother’s illness to my parents’ breakup, and the whirl of incessant memories increasingly exhausted me. I should have been working my way up the ladder in entertainment, going out to trendy restaurants and clubs and looking for the man I’d marry, starting the family I’d dreamed of since I was a little girl. Instead, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was still much too tied to my past and failing to move on with my own life.

  Everyone else in my family was coping with the changes in our lives much better than I was. I was amazed at how they were just adjusting and making new lives for themselves. My brother was upset that they’d split up, but he was coping well and throwing himself into the early days of what would become a highly successful career as a TV producer. I was hiding out in bed.

  The only good thing about my parents’ separation was that it was the reason that my family went into much-needed therapy. I got out of the house in these years almost exclusively for the purpose of going to those sessions. The family therapy itself was unproductive and unpleasant. I was fixated on going back to when my mother was sick because I still felt so much emotion from that, and the rest of my family, and the therapist too, wanted to focus on the current problems between my parents. I also couldn’t help myself from correcting everyone else about their memory of events, which was diametrically counter to the whole point of everyone sharing their interpretations.

  What was good about the family therapy for me, though, was that the therapist recommended that I go to therapy on my own and also recommended a therapist, who turned out to be perfect for me. I hadn’t understood that I had been waiting for years to talk to somebody about the bizarre phenomenon of all of my memories swirling in my head, and at this point in particular, I felt a tremendous need to rehearse all of the events from the day my mother discovered she had a brain tumor up to my father telling Michael and me that he was leaving the house. The shock from the fear of my mother dying was still very much in my mind—the look on my mother’s face walking up the driveway that day played itself over and over. That would set off a whole string of memories in a vicious cycle, and those were what I now needed to talk into submission.

  Most people describe the process of therapy—if it is successful—as a journey they make with their therapist. I can’t really describe it that way. My therapist hardly said a word to me; he might make one or two observations or give me a different take on something, but he rarely interrupted my steady stream of remembrance. At first I questioned him about why he wasn’t saying more, but over time, I realized that just letting me talk things out was the best thing he could possibly have done for me. As I look back on the process, I think that so much of what I needed was to talk about all of those memories nonstop and without offending anyone.

  In a way, those therapy sessions were comparable to my journaling. Once I’d verbalized the memories, somehow I owned them in a new way. But there was another great benefit from those sessions: along the way I realized that I had never really allowed people into my life, not fully; I had never shared with them in any truly revelatory way what was going on in my head. By never having been able to make them understand, I had been unable to make sense myself of how my memory was ruling my life, imprisoning me and holding me back so profoundly from the normal process of emerging into a life of my own.

  It took seventeen months of talking to get it all out, and then, for whatever reason it was on that particular day, the morning of Tuesday, October 20, 1992, I woke up and my funk had lifted. There was nothing special about the day. It was an absolutely ordinary, perfectly pleasant October day in southern California. I just didn’t feel bad anymore. I called a friend who was living in New York, and we talked for a while. When I got off the phone, I made breakfast and realized that I felt lighter of spirit than I ever had before. That morning was the beginning of the end of my therapy and the start of my return to life. The 1992 holiday season was wonderful.

  M
y therapist had told me back in late August that he was leaving Los Angeles in January to take a job in North Carolina. I was stunned and worried about finding someone new, but I still had five months. As the date got nearer, he told me that he could give me a referral to a new therapist, but he thought I had come a long way and that if I didn’t want to continue, that was okay. I have heard that in therapy, it is the last few minutes of a session that are the most important, because that’s when you know that you’d better get out what you came to say or you’ll have to wait a week to say it. My last therapy session was the day after President Clinton’s first inauguration, on Thursday, January 21, 1993, and in those last minutes, I was sure I was done; I had nothing left to say for a next session. I felt that I was making a fresh start, as was the country.

  A few months earlier, the sister of a friend of mine had given birth, and I started to take care of her baby almost daily. She was adorable, and I absolutely loved taking care of her. Spending time with her, taking part in the excitement and joy of a new life embracing the world, was rejuvenating. Although I continued to shy away from romantic relationships, my friends had stayed loyal to me, and I resumed my social life. The release from emotional strain that I learned in those therapy sessions proved a lasting ballast for me.

  In the end, many years later, my parents got back together, eight years after my dad had walked out of the house. In March 1998, I went out of town for a friend’s wedding, and when I came home, my mom right away told me that my dad wanted me to call him. When I did, he said to me simply, “I’m coming home.” All he would say at the time was that he realized that he made a big mistake. I was surprised that after all that time, my mother took him back, but when I asked her how she felt about it, she reminded me that he had never asked for a divorce, and he hadn’t kicked her out of the house, or ever refused to pay for anything. In many ways, he had continued to be with us and had shouldered his family responsibilities. I found myself listening to her quiet wisdom with new respect, and I envied her ability to move on from the past.