My Mother's Requiem
My Mother's Requiem
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ONE
September, 2009
My cell phone starts singing “Love Me Do” at seven in the morning. I’ve been awake for an hour, lying in bed, thinking, wondering what to do about my crumbling house and my crumbled marriage – abandoned like an old broken sofa by the side of the road. The sound of the phone so early brings on a rush of adrenaline. What now? It’s my daughter, Celina, in a quandary about a paper that’s due in an hour. I’m almost grateful to be given a problem that I can handle so easily. I get up and shoot her some suggestions by email. Celina is in college now and rarely needs my help anymore, but her moment of desperation brings me back to all those times when she was younger and she forgot her homework or lost her keys or had some other mishap and I always ran to the rescue.
A couple of hours later, my friend Darryl calls. He’s agreed to go play Scrabble with my mother on Tuesday and Thursday evenings since I have late classes to teach. He wants to know if I’ve seen my mother this morning. I haven’t.
“Well, she wasn’t doing well at all last night,” he says. “She was very slow and only able to come up with three-letter words. Then when it was time to go, I asked her if she wanted me to take her upstairs. She said no and then she said yes. So I started to walk with her to the elevator. She was wheeling herself, and she turned and went in the other direction. I tried to correct her, but she insisted I was wrong and when I tried to push her wheelchair to the elevator, she began to fight me.”
Oh God, I’m thinking, picturing my tiny mother, her mouth set in grim determination, her silver head lowered like a bull, and her hands with their purple bruises clutching the wheels of her wheelchair. And poor hapless Darryl, ever the gentleman, trying to convince her to go the right way.
“I finally let her go in the other direction and then after she couldn’t find the elevator, I pushed her the right way but by then she was very upset.” And this too, I can imagine: the resigned despair in her eyes, the fluttering hands, the hang-dog look and the inarticulate stammering.
“Yes,” I say. “Every time she goes to the hospital she comes back a step lower. I’ve no idea what to do.”
And it’s true. I’ve no idea what to do. They surely won’t keep her at The Sanctuary indefinitely if she’s that diminished. They do have a memory care unit – a locked door at the end of the hallway. I’ve never been inside, but I’ve heard sounds: people calling out, laughing sometimes, or crying.
It reminds me of a story by Ursula K. Le Guin that I often assign to my students called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Le Guin describes a happy, almost perfect society – except for the neglected child kept chained in a basement. This is the price that has to be paid in order for the society to be as delightful and orderly as it is. Everybody studiously ignores the horrid basement and the unspeakable cruelty in which they are all complicit. Though I know the memory care unit is not a bad place nor run by bad people, still, I have ignored it with the same suppressed horror as the people in Le Guin’s story ignore the child in the basement.
But why am I even thinking about the memory care unit? We can’t afford that. She’d most likely have to go to one of the nursing homes where the lumps of flesh are gathered in their wheelchairs, dozing and drooling and occasionally looking up to ask where they are and if you will take them home.
Then a new thought gives me pause: maybe it’s the new prescription the doctor in the hospital gave her. So I call her family doctor and ask him to “d.c.” – discontinue – that medication. Maybe I can buy her a few more months. If she can just make it till February 21 when I plan to take her back to the church in Jacksonville, Florida to hear her music one more time. Her Requiem.
I knew the main character personally but never really knew her until Trish’s book. This is a story of pain and (maybe) redemption. It is beautifully written and should be required reading for anyone facing a loved one’s descent into a mental neverland.
As someone who helped my own mother die and held her hand as she finally flew away from her pain, I could relate deeply to this poignant memoir. MacEnulty lays bare her struggles to help her mother die, from both entanglements of health care and complicated matters of the heart, all while trying to be a good mother and watching her marriage dissolve.
Do your emotional side a favor and read this book. Packed full of beautiful writing and a daughter’s love for her mother.
Even with a lot of experience with fiction and literary non fiction writers in my 7 decades, this is the kind of book you read and wonder how a writer can be so truthful honest, and real about life and its problems even in fiction, let alone in non fiction about people and places and life experience without what some writers call the "censor" creeping in to hide reality and raw truth. This is a book about how people really live, how families really struggle, and about the personal terror that confronts us in our lives, as well as about the real struggles that grow in families, that grow in marriages, but capturing so much real life. Having read Pat's fiction and non-fiction for years and know his skill and also her acclaim not only as a prize-winning fiction and screen writer, but also for decades she is renown as a writer's writer, the kind of writer you meet good fiction writers who tell you here is a great one you may never have heard of. Once I started this book, I could barely put it down, staying up too late at night snapping myself up in the morning to see this book to the end. I know Pat has worked at writing and self-realization for decades, but I still finished this saying how can someone write something so honest, so real, that grabs you and speaks to the reality of our lives, husbands and wifes, children and parents, and growing old in a way that grabs the attention and speaks to the lives of all of us. One I know I will read and reread. Thanks Pat McEnulty
Taking care of an aging parent can be a deeply challenging journey in multiple ways. This book was beautifully written and chock full of honest disclosure about the practical difficulties. It was also full of a daughter’s love for her mother within the difficulties. Sharing her mother’s full humanity and life beyond this last chapter gave me a deep appreciation for a life well lived. I love this book. I purchased the original version when it first came out and it is still on my bookshelf. I have shared it with friends over the years. Read it.