“I never wanted children,” Heather said. “I always preferred animals.”
I agreed.
“Not me!” my mother said, and we turned to her with interest. “Of course, I wanted children,” she said. “I just never wanted girls.”
“Well, you only had one,” I said.
“One was enough!” She grinned at Heather.
A nurse came to take Heather’s blood pressure, and my mother and I were left alone. We talked about the hospital food, which my mother said was delicious, and the bird that peered into her window from the ledge outside.
“What do you call that bird?” she asked.
“That’s a magpie,” I said.
“Yes! Magpie.”
I, too, forgot words and names. The last time I was in Sydney, I had met a friend for coffee. He’d told me he planned to travel to Muscat, the capital of Oman, which I had visited three years earlier.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “You must go out into the desert. What do you call those things in the desert with water?” I asked, unable to remember the word. I felt my heart stop. Every missing word seemed an indication of some fresh damage.
“Oases.”
“Yes!” I said, doing my best to compose myself. “You must see an oasis.”
My mother was trying to solve the daily anagram in the newspaper. We studied the letters, and she wrote down words that started with P. Suddenly overcome with concern that she would be better at it than I was, I blurted out, “Parlatory.”
“That’s not a word,” my mother said immediately.
She was likely right. Since my accident, she usually was when it came to language. I took out my cell phone and typed in “parlatory.”
“It is a word. It means the parlor of a convent or a monastery.”
Unconvinced, my mother demanded to see the evidence.
I noticed that the newspaper she was working on was from the day before. The current day’s paper sat on her bedside table, so I picked it up and flicked to the page with the solutions. “Portrayal,” the paper said. I felt my hands tremble.
My mother seemed unsurprised that I was wrong.
I drove to Sydney from Pearl Beach each day for the week my mother was in the hospital. Perhaps my fear was that she might die without us having a chance to reconcile. On the day she was discharged, she thanked me for coming. “It’s a long drive you’ve made each day,” she said.
I turned fifty-two alone but for the dogs and cats. My friends phoned from Hong Kong, and I got text messages and emails wishing me happy birthday, but it didn’t feel like a celebration. Giulia had forgotten. I had not drunk anything other than the occasional light beer since moving back to Australia, but that afternoon, I found a bottle of beer in the fridge and took the dogs down to the beach. I sat on the sand under a huge pine tree, with Sofia and Ambrose on each side of me, and looked out to sea. Scout had learned how to dig, and her new trick was to position herself in front of me and cover me in sand before leaping on top of me and licking my face.
I survived six months in Pearl Beach before the transition from Hong Kong to a sleepy beachside village proved to be too much. I missed living in a city—in a place with energy, where things happened. Thinking I was going to die, I had sold my house in Sydney before the market boomed, and eighteen months later prices had become so inflated I couldn’t afford to buy anything like my old place. I settled on a small house in Sydney’s Inner West, a short walk from a large off-leash dog park.
Now that I had moved back to Sydney, I felt a responsibility to see more of my mother, to do what I could to salvage the remains of our relationship before the opportunity was lost forever. I wanted us to create even one happy memory to temper all the unhappy ones.
My mother’s illness compounded my anxiety about my own memory problems, and that anxiety bled into a depression. There was nothing I could do to stop the progression of my mother’s illness. I felt I was about to watch her lose her mind in a loud and lurid dress rehearsal, before I lost my own.
Once she had recovered from her stroke, I offered to take my mother to lunch. I picked her up as planned, and she asked me to take her to the bank.
We drove to an ATM, and I helped her out of the car and stood behind her as she removed the leather watch band from her wrist and examined the four-digit code she had written on its back.
“Don’t look!” she shrieked. “I don’t want you knowing my password!”
On the way to the café, a man dashed out in front of my car, and my mother shrieked, “You drive like a lunatic! You could have killed him!”
At twelve miles an hour, it was unlikely I could have killed anyone and I told her as much. When she screamed at me again, I stomped on the brake, did a U-turn, drove her straight back to her apartment, and stopped outside her front door.
“Let’s never see each other again,” I said as I removed her walker from the trunk.
“Fine by me,” she replied.
By the time I left, tears were streaming down my face. What kind of person fought with their demented mother and then suggested they never see one another again? I sank into the same well of gloom and failure I seemed always to inhabit after seeing her.
As soon as I got home, I rang my mother and apologized.
“Thank you for apologizing,” she said, and hung up.
In desperation I started seeing the psychiatrist my neurologist had recommended once each month. Toby, one of the two street cats I had adopted in Hong Kong, had developed kidney failure, and his health had deteriorated quickly. I took him to four different vets, and after the various treatment options failed, I decided the best thing for Toby would be to have him put to sleep. With Toby’s death, my depression grew worse, and I realized if I was to keep going, I needed help.
Peter was a gentle man with kind gray eyes and a fondness for perfectly pressed shirts. I liked him from the moment I met him. We talked about Beethoven’s string quartets, Philip Roth, contemporary art, and famous psychiatrists in history. He told me that he believed the role of a psychiatrist was to provide a patient with hope. I told him that hope was something I looked forward to experiencing, although I had my doubts that it was possible.
Peter had studied my brain scans and talked to my neurologist. He told me he couldn’t detect any sign of cognitive decline from our conversations and promised he would let me know as soon as he did. He agreed that losing one’s memory was one of the most horrific things that could happen to anyone. He also told me he had patients who were judges and surgeons and scientists and that in his opinion, I could hold my own among any of them.
“You have a wonderful mind,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows and told him I couldn’t remember what I did yesterday. “I’ve spent more than twenty years learning how to disguise my cognitive shortcomings,” I said. “I’m pretty good at fooling people.”
“You’ve fooled me,” he said without hesitation.
“Last time I saw my neurologist, he told me he considered my injury to be severe. So much for mild.”
“I think he’s right,” he said. “You suffered a serious blow to your head. But you’ve made the best cognitive recovery of any person with a TBI that I’ve ever seen.”
We talked about my mother and her dementia diagnosis.
He wanted to know more. “Mothers are important, you know,” he said, giving me a half smile.
I explained that in the eleven-plus years I lived in Asia, my mother and I had barely spoken. I told him about showing her my short story when I was twelve, and her telling me I wouldn’t make much of a writer. And how, when I told her at age fifteen I wanted to be a journalist, she had said, “But you need to be clever to be a journalist. You’d better think of something else.”
“Why is she like that?” he asked.
“I honestly don’t know. My mother loves conflict. She hasn’t spoken to her only sibling for nearly three decades. My mother adores my brother and has always enjoyed pitting him and me against one a
nother.”
Peter raised his eyebrows and waited for me to continue.
“I come from a long line of difficult people,” I said. “We’re all difficult. But my mother, she is divisive.”
I told Peter everything I could remember. My mother and I had gone four years without seeing each other. During that time, she was either “busy” when I traveled home or didn’t “feel up to” seeing me. She sent me an email most years on my birthday, always with the same message: Happy Birthday. Cheers, Hilary.
I sent her an email for her birthday, telling her about the places I had visited, hoping she was interested, hoping she was doing well. I always signed mine, Love, Sarah. I’m not sure why. For a long time, I wished I could feel nothing for her at all.
“She’s an unusual woman,” Peter said. “An unusual mother.”
I saw Peter a fortnight before Christmas. We talked more about my mother. I would be her only company on Christmas Day; my brother and his wife had planned an overseas trip. Fourteen days separated me from alone time with her, and I was starting to panic.
“If it gets to be too much, just leave,” Peter said.
I told him how upsetting it was to watch my mother’s decline, to watch her live my imminent future. I wanted to make damned sure I was able to end my own life as soon as I started exhibiting obvious signs of dementia. When the time came, Peter said, he would write me a script for a box of fifty tricyclic antidepressants that I could keep at home and take when I was ready.
Euthanasia is illegal in Australia, and I had worried about how hard it would be to find a doctor who was prepared to help.
I asked him if I could get drunk before I took the pills, thinking it might make the experience easier. And more enjoyable.
“No. You might vomit, and then they will have no effect.”
“I never throw up from alcohol.”
“Well, you might if you wash down fifty of these tablets with alcohol.”
I sighed. “There’s no pleasure, even in death.”
He gave me a wry smile.
“If it were me,” he said, “I’d just wait till evening, go to bed, take them all, and fall asleep.”
As relieved as I felt that Peter was willing to help, I wasn’t charmed by the idea of swallowing fifty pills in a single sitting and dying alone shortly thereafter. What if something went wrong? The idea of going to Switzerland and being handed a green juice by an attractive Swiss nurse was much more appealing.
My mother took a taxi to church on Christmas morning. After my father died, she had begun attending weekly services at an Anglican church in the city. My father was an atheist, and I had always assumed my mother was too. I had been brought up to believe God was like Father Christmas. A couple of years after my father died, I asked my mother if she believed in God.
“Well, that is a private matter, but yes,” she said. As shocked as I was, I felt glad she had something to believe in. “I’m happy for you,” I said, and I was.
I took Sofia, the least neurotic, best-behaved of my three dogs, to my mother’s place on Christmas Day. Sofia, I hoped, would be our Switzerland, the neutral territory between my mother and me. She would distract us from each other. Sofia was boundlessly amiable—which made one of us.
I left the elevator on the fourteenth floor of my mother’s apartment building with Sofia by my side, my shopping bags stuffed with groceries. My mother was outside her front door, leaning on her walker. She looked older and frailer than when I last saw her.
“What’s his name?” she asked, beckoning my dog.
“Sofia.”
“What a pretty name.”
As soon as we were inside, my mother asked Sofia’s name again. She eased herself onto the sofa, and I coaxed Sofia up beside her. My mother reached into her pocket for a treat called a Schmacko, snapped it in half, and offered a piece to Sofia. She put the other half to her own mouth.
“No, Mum! That’s dog food!”
“Oh,” she said, surprised.
Sofia sat at my mother’s feet, waiting for the next treat.
“What a lovely dog,” my mother said, stroking Sofia’s ears.
She inspected the name on the tag hanging from Sofia’s collar. “Sofia,” she said, before digging into her pocket for another Schmacko.
Sofia swallowed the second Schmacko and started to pant. I told my mother Sofia needed a drink, and my mother pointed to a water bowl in the kitchen set out for a neighbor’s dog who occasionally came to visit. “She’s not stupid; she’ll find it,” she added.
“Don’t bet on it,” I said, and I led Sofia to the water bowl.
“Did you say she’s stupid?” my mother asked.
“I did not. But she is not the smartest of my dogs.”
Sofia drank from the bowl, and my mother produced another Schmacko from a packet stuffed into a crevice in the sofa. She motioned to Sofia and whispered just loud enough for me to hear, “That’s why she has you. So she can feel clever!” She gave my dog a smug smile and glanced up to make sure I heard her.
Watching my frail, elderly mother trying to conspire with my dog overwhelmed me with a bewildering flood of pity, dismay, and helplessness. I went inside the kitchen and hid.
The walls and doors of my mother’s apartment were festooned with yellow sticky notes full of commands:
Turn off the coffee machine!
Don’t forget to put coffee inside the machine! You have broken it TWICE already!
Don’t leave the house without your keys!
Don’t forget to take your medicine! It’s next to the kitchen sink.
The more important notes—the ones that prevented her from locking herself out or leaving the stove on and burning down the apartment block—had been fastened to the wall with tape.
A whiteboard on an easel stood in the middle of her living room. Written across the top in black marker were the names and phone numbers of people my mother might need to contact in an emergency: my brother, my aunt, my sister-in-law, the fire department. I noticed my name was not among them. At the bottom were the times when Vicky and Tracey would visit. Vicky and Tracey were the nurses my brother had employed to check on my mother each morning and afternoon while he and his wife were abroad.
Vicky and Tracey didn’t work on Christmas Day.
Between feeding treats to my dog, my mother told me that she planned to kill herself. When I asked how, she simply said, “I know people.”
This felt like dangerous territory. I understood exactly how she must be feeling, burying herself in sticky notes, reminding herself how to function. What lay ahead of her was an inevitable and devastating decline. But I couldn’t help thinking of my father, begging me to help him die, and my mother’s reaction. Telling our doctor and an aunt on the phone I wanted to kill him. It had almost felt to me as though she wanted to drag out the last weeks of his life, no matter how painful or horrific. And yet here she was, talking about ending her own life. I felt stuck. I could not help her because euthanasia was against the law, but it angered me that she was not able to make that decision herself. That my father had not been able to make that decision himself. In the end, I reminded her that it was illegal and mentioned that, if she wanted help, she’d better make arrangements while she was still able.
“I can do it myself,” she said.
“It’s not as easy as it seems,” I replied.
A decade before that Christmas, when I was in my early forties, I had written to my mother apologizing for my part in our relationship. I hadn’t been an easy child, I admitted, nor had she been an easy mother. I hoped we could put the past behind us and start anew. She never responded to my letter.
I waited a month before sending her an email to make sure the letter had reached her.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Did you plan to answer?”
“I didn’t think I needed to,” she wrote back. “Of course we are friends.”
I didn’t respond. I had friends already. What I needed was a moth
er.
In preparation for our Christmas feast, my sister-in-law had emailed me my mother’s detailed dietary restrictions, beginning with NO LEAFY GREENS! As a fish-eating vegetarian, I wondered what I could prepare for the two of us. It would also be fair to say my culinary skills are somewhat underdeveloped.
Alcohol is a wonderful salve at Christmastime, but neither my mother nor I was allowed to drink. Between my neurologist’s advice that I cut back to one glass of red wine a day and Peter, my psychiatrist, suggesting I stop drinking altogether, I was moved to action. Eager to conserve what few healthy brain cells I had left, I stopped drinking almost entirely. By that Christmas, half a glass of light beer made me giddy.
My mother nudged at the food I had prepared for her; without the leafy greens or the myriad other ingredients she was forbidden, it was a pretty Spartan meal. A large piece of Tasmanian salmon sat atop her noodles. She liked salmon, or so she had said before I put it in front of her.
“Is there anything wrong?” I asked. “Mine is nice!”
“No,” she said, but I could tell she was lying. I glanced out the window at the Opera House, and when she thought I wasn’t looking, she broke the salmon in half and fed part of it to Sofia.
“Dessert will be better,” I said. “I brought some goat cheese to eat with poppy-seed crackers and two mangoes.”
“What’s a mango?” she asked.
I wondered if she was joking. Growing up, mangoes were a luxury we couldn’t always afford, but when the price was right, my mother would buy three or four at a time, and we would share them after dinner.
She placed her knife and fork together on top of her plate. I took it to the kitchen, tossed the food (minus the remains of the salmon), and returned with a mango.
“What’s that?”
I looked at her, incredulous.
“A mango. Smell it.”
She held it up to her nose and shook her head. Nothing. I wondered if, like many people with dementia, she had lost her sense of smell. She examined the mango closely. “I have never seen anything like it!”
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