I keep my eyes on my mother’s hands. Tremors, a shuffling gait, sometimes paralysis, all symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. I worry she’ll spill the iced water. “Ah,” she sighs, but even with tremors, she manages to set the glass safely back on the table. I lean in closer. “Nothing tastes as good as pure, ice water," she says, her voice faint.
She never liked to drink water, anything. “Why won’t you put the iced tea on the table instead of serving it after dinner?” my brothers complained. “Or at least bring out a pitcher of water?” Now she’s always thirsty. It’s the medicine. She finishes, and the look of satisfaction on her no lipstick, un-made-up face causes my heart to gallop. It’s so rare.
After she was diagnosed, she wanted us to kill her.
“Where’s my pill?” she would scream into the telephone.
“What pill?” we’d ask.
“You know, the one that kills you.”
“Mom, you don’t want to die, do you? You don’t want to leave Daddy.”
“Ha, daddy! What good is Daddy? He just sleeps. Sam? Sam? Are you awake? See? He’s no help. I’m hanging up. Go away.”
Instead of four places, the waiter sets three places, one for my husband, my mother, and myself. He maneuvers her wheelchair expertly -- a lot of old people live in this building – to fit at the table. It’s early spring. I babble idiotically about the kids, the new house, the crocuses, anything to keep the conversation going. My husband tries, too, softly and more gently. She finishes one of her blintzes and then looks at the empty seat across from her. “Daddy should be sitting there.”
“Mom, Daddy died last Thanksgiving. You remember.”
“That’s the mystery of it,” she says, not looking at anyone. “No one told me he died. People came up to me and asked me about him, and I didn’t know. No one told me.”
“Of course, we told you, Mom. Don’t you remember? We were all in his hospital room -- .” I go on with the litany I now recite every time we visit. “You were tired, remember? Vera brought you home. About ten minutes later, Daddy died. We called you but you were in bed. Remember? On Friday, we had the funeral. You asked the soldier to give the flag on the coffin to Adam, the youngest grandson. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
On a recent visit, I push her wheelchair.
“I have no one left. My mother and father are gone. My brother is gone. And Daddy --," she says.
“You have us. You have your three children –," I say.
“And me,” my husband adds.
“I know, but it’s not the same.”
My mother was diagnosed with late-onset Parkinson’s at 90. Now, she can’t walk, read, go to the bathroom, or even wipe herself. She has no agency over her body. A teacher once said of a character I devised, “she has no agency.”
The term stayed with me. Every time we wheel my mother back to the apartment, Vera, her aide, must lift her into the lift chair. Multiple times a day, she must be lifted from the wheelchair to the lift chair or into the shower, or onto the toilet. No one has ever dropped her, but still, she screams. “I’m falling. No, stop. Stop! Stop. Vera, help me.” When she is safely in the chair, she sighs. “I’m tired.” She takes my hand, still warm and smooth and miraculously tan although it’s been years since she’s been to the beach. Every summer she went to the beach. She swam twenty laps a day and walked along the ocean. Once a year, she and her friend Shirley Parker walked the six miles from our house past the airfield, over the bridge, and to the beach, then collapsed and ordered chicken salad sandwiches on toast, with extra tomato, no chips.
She looks up at me and squeezes my hand.
I can barely hear her.
“I love you,” she says.
Last week, I wheeled her from the coffee shop back to the apartment. She complained about a scuffle with Vera, a bad night, a new pain, I don’t remember what.
“Oh well, that’s life,” I said or something equally idiotic.
“That’s a real consolation!” she said.
My heart leaped. I was so happy. She was still my mother, my old mother. The one I’m losing a piece of every day.
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Fran Schumer’s poetry, fiction, personal essays, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The North American Review, Hole in the Head, Cerasus, Poetry Quarterly, and other publications. She won a Goodman Loan Grant Award for Fiction from the City University of New York and in 2021, a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing poetry fellowship. She is a native of Brooklyn, N.Y.