The Parting Glass

Heroism means doing the hardest thing of all

Alzheimer’s took my mother from us last Thursday. She was 79.

I am not going to write the sort of teary praises here that would mean little to someone who never met her. I’m going to tell you a story about real-life heroism, the kind that we look for in movies and books, the kind that every one of us needs to summon at some point, but which very few actually do.

Inasmuch as I can make an objective assessment, I regard my mother as an extraordinary, powerful person. This isn’t because of the obvious qualities that made her immediately likable, such as her sunny disposition and joyful personality. She just seemed to be born wired for joy. Should I praise her simply for being the way she was? If she'd been cantankerous and sarcastic, I would still have found things to love about her. She was my mother, after all.

As I was struggling to write a tribute speech for her memorial and jotted down that phrase wired for joy, a quiet thought crossed my mind: didn't we all come into the world as children wired for joy and awe? Or shouldn't we be, even if there are times when life seems determined to beat it out of us? If we aren’t born eager for joy and delight, of what use is struggling to grow in wisdom if our only access to joy depends on luck? Of what use is joy if your ability to experience it is predetermined?

Although you might expect some serious drawbacks from being born to a teenager who got pregnant at 17, dropped out of high school, married hastily, and gave birth to you a month after her 18th birthday, in the 61 years I was lucky to spend with my mother, I only ever had one significant problem with her.

On February 15, 1977, my father woke me up and informed me that Mom was gone and that I needed to get my siblings up and get ready for school. It was a Tuesday, a school day. I was 13. After she'd responded to his Valentine’s Day flowers by informing him that she wanted a divorce, she'd left without a word to any of us. Months went by before we heard whether she was even alive.

I blamed myself. Throughout my childhood, she had increasingly struggled with depression, and had long been in the habit of coming to me privately to complain about my father and her unhappiness in their marriage. She'd inherited this lack of appropriate boundaries from her own mother, who still complained endlessly to Mom about her own father. I had no idea that solving my mother's marital problems was far above my pay grade. I only knew that she was deeply unhappy, that I was always secretly worried about her, and that I had failed to help her.

So although she eventually returned a year and a half later, went through years of individual and marriage counseling, and vigorously reclaimed her joyous birthright, even after my own therapy had clarified even to me that as a child, I couldn’t be held responsible for fixing her very adult problems, I was still left with a problem: I was angry and hurt that she’d disappeared in the night without a word of explanation, leaving us to wonder why.

There was no way I could let myself acknowledge the existence of that feeling, much less confront her with it. It was raw, irrational, childish in its intensity. It scared the hell out of me. It might trigger her self-recrimination. She might get suicidally depressed again. I couldn't risk it. We were a family again. Was I going to be the one to destroy us? So I hid those feelings from myself, unable to truly forgive her or myself, unaware that my anger had been leaking out in toxic ways that would ultimately destroy relationship after relationship and leave me fundamentally unable to trust anyone.

20 years later, I finally pried the lid off of the devastating secret that had been running my life. I stumbled out of a therapy session, sobbing so hard as I walked down the sidewalks of Cambridge that people kept asking me if I needed help. As soon as I got home, I picked up the phone and dialed a number I knew by heart. My mother answered. Without so much as a hello, I said Why didn't you say goodbye? I was still sobbing like the child I'd been.

Now there are a lot of ways my mother could have responded. She could have deflected, told me to get over that ancient history and grow up, defended herself, or simply demanded whether I had any idea of the suffering she had experienced to bring her to such a desperate act.

She didn't do any of these things. She didn't need a warm-up or a word of explanation. Even without the slightest preamble, she knew exactly what I was talking about, the 20 year gap notwithstanding. And so she calmly answered: I thought everyone would be better off without me. I knew exactly what she meant.

Three years before she’d left in 1977, I found her staring out her bedroom window one sunny afternoon, looking at nothing. My heart in my throat, I asked her What's wrong, Mom? Without looking at me, she murmured I don't think I want to go on living. I carried that secret for most of my life, tormented by my inability to fix things for her. One result was my unerring instinct for finding partners who, like my mother in those early year, could not love themselves, and whom I could never make happy. You cannot do for someone what they are unwilling to do for themselves.

We ended up talking for a long, long time, crying together. At no time was she self-pitying, defensive, or contrite. She was even-handed and completely present. She encouraged me to tell her everything, though I didn't yet know all of the ways in which those events had affected me. She met me where I was, listening, affirming, and accepting. We had one of the hardest conversations two people could have. It wouldn't be the last time we broached this topic, but that conversation fundamentally changed the course of my life.

Heroes are not those who sail through a life of easy success. So when I say that I hold my mother in the highest esteem, it’s because she did what the heroes of all great stories do: confronted with the most formidable challenge they've ever met, they do the impossible. They overcome it after a dramatic struggle.

Initially they're so focused on what storytellers call the Outer Problem, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic even as it sinks beneath them, that it takes some time before they realize that no matter what they do, this problem will never conveniently disappear until they change the deeply internalized negative belief about themselves that rationalizes all manner of self-destructive choices.

Changing this inner problem is the Hardest Thing, our life's work, arguably the most difficult challenge in human existence: to face the truth about yourself with honesty and compassion, and to actually change the belief that is running - and ruining - your life.

In my mother's case, it was a deeply internalized belief that the only kind of love she deserved was one which demanded that she erase herself, that she had to serve a narcissistic, fearful, controlling partner, that she surrender everything about herself which threatened her partner's fragile self-worth. Given that she was a joyful, extroverted, people-loving, highly social, hyper intelligent, popular, and intuitive person by nature, that meant muting pretty much everything that defined her.

Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln have each been credited with saying (without evidence that it originated with either of them) that success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. (Thanks to whoever did say it.) That might encapsulate the core challenge of life, not to get beaten down by the worst experiences and people we have. At 61, I am still struggling to recover my own natural ebullience after disappointments in myself and others.

Mom fought the hardest fight of all. She and my father worked tirelessly to change themselves, their marriage, and all of us with it. She reclaimed her natural joy and went on to lead an incredible life filled with fearless adventures, like riding 100 miles from 5AM until after midnight through the mountains and deserts of Wyoming on the back of her horse faster than anyone else in the race, taking risks large and small with unquenchable enthusiasm, fighting to acquire formidable wisdom and clarity, demonstrating deep compassion for the suffering of other people, and dedicating her professional life to healing and helping people as a social worker. Her courage helped me find my own.

When we avoid the difficult work of change, pain becomes suffering. Pain comes from difficulties beyond our control and is an inevitable part of life. Suffering is what we bring upon ourselves. Left unexcavated, suffering becomes bitterness confusingly flung in every direction long after you've forgotten the original problem. In the end, you’re left only with regrets, the bitter realization too late that your entire life could have been very different had you summoned the courage to have the kind of terrifying conversations my mother was bold enough to have with me and many others.

One of the last photos of my mother and I

And so today I stand here devastated by my mother's death, but not because we had unfinished business or unresolved conflict. Because we didn't. Because of her courage, we enjoyed an uncomplicated joy in each other's presence for three decades. I am devastated because she was my beloved, beautiful, playful, astoundingly courageous mother, my tough but compassionate conscience when my own faltered, and the person I was always most excited to introduce to everyone I ever cared about. I cannot conceive of a world without her. She was my hero. Like a child, I wanted it to go on forever.

And so I say goodbye to her with only one regret: that I never managed to kick her butt in Scrabble. God knows I tried.

Well done, Mom. You will never be forgotten.

. . . . .

Watch my video tribute here

Read my sister’s tribute to Mom here