Her Beautiful Brain

by Ann Hedreen

  “Go home,” he said. “Go rest.”

  I nodded and wiped my eyes. Yes, I thought. He is right. I’m being ridiculous. This could be a long haul and I need rest.

  I got up and drove home and collapsed into bed next to Rus for about two hours.

  The ringing phone woke us at six. It was Kristie. She was calling from Northern House. Mom was dead.

  Mom was dead. I had left her in her final few hours. Mom had died alone.

  I can barely stand to write those words. I can barely stand the thought of my mother having to die alone because I stumbled out of her room at three something in the morning and drove home to my bed and my husband and my life while she breathed her last breaths alone. She worked so hard to stay alive as long as she did and her reward was to die alone. She had six children and fourteen grandchildren and she died alone.

  Some hours later, I called my minister and friend, Lee, from Northern House, to tell him Mom had died. And that she had died alone. Because I left.

  “I’ve seen this so many times,” Lee said. “The family gathers, people fly in from far away, like you did and James did, and then the minute everyone leaves the room, the dying person is able to let go. It’s almost like they’ve been waiting to be alone. Like death is a passage that many of us need to make alone.”

  I don’t know if this is true, or if Lee just knew I needed to hear something that would help me. But it did help; it helped so much. I won’t ever quite forgive myself for leaving that night but if Lee’s right, maybe Mom forgave me long ago. Maybe after all those years in the prison of Alzheimer’s disease, her soul longed to stand alone and step off the edge of the world, free of anything that might tempt her to stay another second—and that might have been my breath, my touch, still pulling on her ever so gently, just when she was ready to fly off into the light.

  Because wouldn’t she see it, after all? Letting go of her body, her physical wreck of a brain, wouldn’t her soul get to see all that light?

  I hope it was as warm as the light in Florida. As clear and pure as the Rocky Mountain camping trips of her childhood. As dazzling as the pink evening glow on Mt. Rainier over Lake Washington, which was her favorite view in all of this world, though it might be nothing much compared to what those who have come close say they’ve seen waiting for us on the other side.

  Whatever it is, I just want her to see it and feel it and be it. Be light, nothing but light, after all those years in the dark.

  Epilogue: Light She Was

  “Light she was and like a feather

  And her shoes were number nine;

  Herring boxes without topses,

  Sandals were for Clementine.”

  Like a feather: that’s how I remember singing the song, though I think the real words were “like a fairy,” which is funnier, especially considering that her shoes were size nine.

  Light she was and like a feather. And now, whatever her faults—big feet, funny sandals—Clementine is lost. Gone forever. That’s what the song mourns: that she was light and that she is now lost.

  There are some people who are going to read this book and say, There are a lot of things you left out.

  For example: I left out how Mom didn’t take me to the doctor for three days after I broke my wrist when I was seven because she thought I was exaggerating.

  I left out how she would put down my dad in front of the other guests at a party if she knew something about literature or history that he didn’t.

  I left out how blinded she was by my older brother’s brilliance. How she was so focused on John, the math genius, that she didn’t always see John, the angry little boy.

  I left out how her liberal politics did not match her love of the Tennis Club lifestyle.

  I left out the colossal sobbing fight she and I had one night in the middle of Second Avenue in downtown Seattle after a meal, paid for by her, in which I accused her of taking no interest in my life. It was 1986. I had recently left my husband and I was dating this new guy, Rus, and she seemed utterly uncaring, or so I thought at the time.

  Now I look back and think, Was she already struggling just to stay on top of the wave of information she had to remember every day? 150 high school students’ names? The new principal’s latest new rules?

  And why wouldn’t I leave all of that out? Why wouldn’t I prefer to dwell on how light she was?

  How light she was. How her smile could lift me, feather light, right out of the caverns of adolescent gloom.

  How lightly she wore the busyness of her life: never complaining, just moving through her day like the world’s calmest air traffic controller, constantly sweeping the sky, readying the next plane to launch or land. We all grew up aware that we were each just one of six little planes on her screen. But we also grew up knowing that she would never forget us, never let us drop off the radar and crash. Without dwelling on it, we relied completely on her talent for zeroing in on our needs at any given moment.

  In that paper she wrote for a psychology class that she took not long after she went back to school in the middle of her life, Mom laughed off the notion of mothering as a “skill.” “For me, it’s easy to have children and to love them, and no great thought or effort goes into rearing them. I just do what I have to do,” she wrote forty years ago. “When people mention my abilities as a mother, I feel fraudulent.” (No one said “parenting” back then; I’m not sure anyone even said “mothering” very often.) She insisted that whatever parental talent she possessed was completely instinctual—“no great thought or effort”—but lucky for us, her instincts were remarkably good.

  She snapped to attention, for example, when I came home at the end of my freshman year of college, encased in about thirty extra pounds, and told her I thought maybe I needed to see a counselor because I was having moments where I didn’t quite see the point of living. She sent me to a psychiatrist named Dr. Ottosen, a funny name that I will love forever. He was in a fancy office tower and wore perfectly tailored blazers and I’m sure he was expensive but Mom told me not to worry.

  Dr. Ottosen listened and listened and then he said the simplest things that somehow helped me change the way my brain worked. He taught me that I could accept and even embrace contradictions rather than letting them eat me up. He taught me that I not only deserved to, but also needed to, love myself whether or not any boy currently did. What this meant in practice was that I could go ahead and love my dad even though he’d done some things I hated, and I could love my brother even though he had been such a terrible bully, and I could love myself even though I’d gained a couple of sleeping bags’ worth of weight. Maybe I would have figured all of that out eventually. But Mom saw my neediness and she saw that I might crash, and I was forever grateful to her for taking me seriously.

  She took me seriously again when Claire was born and my feelings of isolation and panic caught me by surprise. Effortless though she claimed motherhood to be, she apparently had not forgotten her own first months, when maybe she wasn’t yet so ultra-sure of her instincts. Maybe she too had felt isolated with a new baby in a small apartment, her husband and neighbors and friends gone all day.

  She knew that what I needed was company, mainly: patient company, someone to make me laugh while I struggled with the car seat and the overly collapsible stroller and the diapers and the endless, endless feeding. She knew I needed someone to appreciate Claire’s quirks and incremental changes. The babies born in our extended family in the couple of years right before Claire were angelic and quiet, so Claire got labeled “fussy” by everyone but Mom, who often was able to magically soothe her and when she couldn’t, was happy to bounce, rock and roll along with her baby moods.

  There is one day I love to remember as much as I love the name “Ottosen.” It was a silly day, inconsequential; who knew that I would love the memory of it the way I do? A warm July day, Claire was still just a handful of weeks old, and Rus was working. Mom and I decided to go to the Northgate Mall: the mall of my childhood, an old and unp
retentious mall in north Seattle anchored, as it still is, by a Nordstrom store at one end and a Penney’s at the other. She drove across town from her Madrona house to my apartment on Queen Anne Hill. We struggled together down the three flights of stairs with Claire, the car seat, the stroller, the diaper bag. We worked together to figure out the best way to fit it all into Mom’s little Tercel, which seemed like a better bet than my VW bug.

  By the time we got to Northgate, all three of us were starving.

  “Let’s go to the restaurant in Penney’s,” Mom said. “They’ve got booths. You can nurse there.”

  “Mom, I haven’t nursed yet in public. It could be a disaster.”

  “Don’t worry. You just keep covered up with the baby blanket. You’ll be fine!”

  We ordered burgers and iced tea. Mom cut my burger in half for me so I could eat it while I fed Claire. But I still wasn’t doing very well, so she took Claire from me for a burp, throwing the blanket on her shoulder just in time, handing her back for another round seconds before wailing would have surely ensued.

  I got through my burger. It was a great burger, a memorable burger: bacon, cheddar, a big fresh tomato slice, the works. Claire got through her feeding. We spent several minutes in the restroom doing a complicated diaper change. Then, finally, we shopped.

  I needed new pajamas. Something practical.

  “I wish I could get these,” I sighed, Eeyore-like, fingering some lovely peachy satin pajamas, the kind Myrna Loy would wear in a Thin Man movie.

  “Why not?” Mom said. “They’re not real satin, look at the price! Machine washable too! Life is short. And this color is so beautiful on you.”

  I bought them. I didn’t wear them much, because they turned out to be a sort of unbreathable, man-made fabric that was way too warm. But the sight of them all shiny in my drawer was like the gentle and courtly Dr. Ottosen telling me to love myself. Only better, because it was Mom telling me to love myself. Just like she showed me that Northgate day that I really could take care of myself and my baby at the same time, that I really could buckle the car seat in if I swore a little and laughed a lot, that just because I had a baby didn’t mean I didn’t deserve a pair of impractical pajamas, the kind she must have known I would put on occasionally mainly for the pleasure of having Rus admire me in them for five minutes or so before removing them.

  When Claire was born, a dozen years had passed since Ron died: since that terrible time when, for the first time in her life, Mom’s customary lightness could not keep her buoyant. When, for a little while, she quietly drowned.

  I have often wondered if that’s when Alzheimer’s disease saw its chance and went to work, even though it was another decade before she or we noticed the changes. Sort of like when a tree is mortally wounded during a season of fierce weather—an ice storm or a drought—and appears to recover, but inside, there’s that weakness, that soft place, where illness or rot will some day set in.

  But after she died, we didn’t dwell on those dark days or on the many, many dark days that came later.

  What happened after Mom died was something we could not have foreseen: after years and years, suddenly we were freed from dwelling on her daily diminishment, the slow, sap-leaking grief of it, and into this new space in our hearts came flooding all of our memories of the mom we’d known as children. Because we didn’t have to make those dark, lonely visits anymore, we could dwell instead, at last, on how light she was.

  It was an unexpected gift. The long years of conserving emotional energy were over. Now we could let go of hoarded feelings, we could cry and grieve and remember, like you’re supposed to do after you lose your mother. For more than a decade, we’d been stuck in the cogs and wheels of losing her. Now she was lost and gone. Now we had a before and an after, like other bereaved people.

  We had been missing her for so long already. Now, at last, we could say goodbye.

  At her memorial service, we all got up and told stories about Mom. There were plenty to tell: Many variations on the crazy ski trip theme, including fond memories of Mom crouching in the snow next to our old station wagon, patiently tying together broken tire chains with shoelaces. Or the Mom-goes-off-to-college theme, featuring happy visions of her riding her bike to the University of Washington campus, unfazed by protest marches and sit-ins and unfazed by all the papers she had to write with all of us underfoot. Or travel tales, like Mom and Kristie going to Finland together and sitting in the sauna with distant cousins, who suddenly started thrashing themselves and their guests with bundles of birch twigs.

  I pondered what I should tell.

  I decided to go for a story with a little glamour to it.

  The preamble: After college and fifteen months of working the lower rungs of Little, Brown and Company, I went to England to live with Dick, my future first husband, who was studying literature at Cambridge. I worked as a waitress at a popular American-style pizza restaurant. At the end of the school year, Mom came over and met me and we traveled through Europe on Eurail passes.

  It was 1980. She was forty-nine; I was twenty-three. We had never in our lives spent a whole day, let alone three straight weeks, together without the rest of the family. But what I had hoped would be true, as we planned the trip, turned out to indeed be true: we wanted the same things from travel. When we weren’t on the train, we wanted to be on foot, walking everywhere, sometimes with a destination and sometimes without one. We cared more about cafés and shops and atmosphere than checking off the tourist sights, though art was important to us. Stained glass and paintings, preferably rich in color and brushwork, moved us. Statues, crown jewels, ancient furniture—not so much. Good food was a pleasure but we didn’t need it to be the best.

  Our favorite stop of the trip was the Pension Mary-Flore, an old, family-run hotel in Nice with tall, balconied windows that reminded us of Matisse’s paintings from his own days in Nice, those luscious paintings of windows full of blue sky and sea, curtains fluttering, shutters askew. We paid for the luxury of our own shower—and then realized it was, quite literally, in the room, sticking out from the wall like a light fixture. Not even a curtain around it. The floor was tile and there was a drain. But still, there was absolutely no way to take a shower without spraying the beds and everything else. And it made us laugh so hard that it took even longer to shower, which made even more of a mess.

  We got a little better at it each day. We had no choice, after swimming in the salty Mediterranean, which we loved so much that we stayed on a few days, an act of sacrilege on the Eurail circuit.

  Our last night in Nice, we decided to hop the train over to Monte Carlo for a little people watching. We showered ourselves—and our room—and then got as dressed up as we could: me in a twirly skirt, Mom in a strappy red sundress with a print of little white racehorses all over it. Her shoulders looked so sleek and tanned in that dress. Her hair was short and she was still dying it dark brown. She looked great and I could tell she felt great, too: excited and confident that it would be a memorable evening.

  Mom knew more about Monte Carlo than I did, mostly from the movies and from following the story of Princess Grace. She wanted to see the Casino, she wanted to see elegant people and she wanted to have a drink at the Hotel de Paris, preferably champagne.

  Monte Carlo on a summer evening sparkled. The hotel looked to us like an old palace, glittering at the top of the hill, limousines purring into the drive. We smoothed our hair and skirts and strolled purposefully up the steps, like we did this all the time.

  Just as we reached the entrance, a limo pulled up and who should step out but Johnny Carson. He turned and saw us and flashed his big white Tonight Show smile, skimming it gently past me and resting it right on Mom. She smiled right back at him, matching him watt for watt, her eyes shining. Then he gave us a long wave and disappeared inside.

  Mom was momentarily stunned. I took her arm and guided her into the bar.

  “Two glasses of champagne,” I said, and then we looked at each other and b
urst into laughter.

  “It was just a smile,” she said.

  “Mom, he wanted you.”

  “The smile was enough.”

  “Mom, you look fabulous. I bet he’s thinking about you right now.”

  “I’m just a miner’s daughter from Butte, Montana.”

  “Yeah, and he’s from Nebraska or somewhere, isn’t he?”

  “You bet he is. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

  “The point of what?”

  “What makes life great. That a kid like him can become rich and famous and stay at the Hotel de Paris and a kid like me can grow up and have six kids of my own and put on a dress and smile at Johnny Carson and walk right in here and have a glass of champagne. Just like that!”

  Just like that.

  Just a miner’s daughter, just a humble Clementine. At twenty-three, I never thought of my mom that way. At twenty-three, if you asked me to describe my mom, I would be more likely to tell you how proud I was that she had gone back to college and started a new life after her divorce. How different she was from the other moms, with their hospital guilds and teased hairdos. If I mentioned that she grew up in Butte, I would be more likely to talk about her high school stardom, her reputation as the brainiest girl in Butte High, the thick paragraph of accomplishments next to her name in the yearbook: band, art club, geometry award, trigonometry award, scholarship ribbon, senior council. I imagined Butte in the 1940s as a place of skating parties, proms, horseback rides in the country, not the place where my mom had been the daughter of a miner who dropped out of high school and did nothing but hard physical labor his whole life, except during the worst years of the Depression when there was no labor to do. It was later, as Alzheimer’s pushed her brain back down those childhood roads, that I finally understood how poor she’d been.

  We toasted Johnny Carson. Then we strolled across the bluff to the Café de Paris and dined outside under strings of starry lights, her smile still bright enough to light up all of Monte Carlo.