THE TREE SHALL BE KNOWN BY ITS FRUIT (On the 10th Anniversary of My Mother's Passing)

I would say that my mother began to lose her mind shortly after the millennium, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate. Her mental processes had never conformed to standard measures of normality; during my childhood she functioned with very little sleep, a condition that allowed her to raise four daughters while working full-time and compensating for a husband who managed his time in order that he spend almost none of it employed. Having been born "hypomanic," the diagnosis made by a psychiatrist once the court ordered her to live with me, also meant that my mother existed as a solipsism, free of constraints or expectations placed upon her by the outside world, and so confident in her decisions that she lived permanently in a worry-free zone. 

"Tomorrow is another day," she would say when “today” had wrecked on a reef and there were no survivors. (Scarlett O'Hara is the fictional embodiment of hypomania, obviously.) Her sternest criticism of me was that I was a “worry-wart.” If she wanted to express her disapproval, there was nothing she could say with more withering effect than “Susie, you’re just like my mother.” 

            There was plenty to worry about. Like many families, ours imploded under the stress of trying to reach consensus on the state of our eighty-five-year-old mother's fragile mental health. When my sisters and I couldn't agree on a plan of action, she was taken into guardianship. My siblings pursued litigation while my husband and I agreed to work with the authorities to obtain medical treatment for Mary Jo* and incorporate her into our lives in North Carolina. As survivors of those afflicted with Alzheimer's know, there is no happy ending for people with this condition. It's a good thing we didn't fully understand that at the time; otherwise, we wouldn’t have agreed to relieve my family of all responsibility for her. 

            

I fixed up our spare room for Mary Jo, installing a telephone and television. My husband found a shop selling manual typewriters and bought her a sleek little Olivetti: my mother had always been the fastest typist on two legs, and we were hoping she'd feel the urge to type up some of the stories from her childhood that she never tired of sharing. But the typewriter befuddled her by this stage of her illness, so my daughter and I took turns being her scribe while she dictated a series of wry, snarky observations of long-dead family members. (“My Uncle Frank had a pile of money and I don’t know what he did with it. He lived in a big house in D. C. with his dentist friend and the dentist’s two sisters. Now you figure that one out. Is it too early to start drinking?”)

We brought her to events at senior centers and to services at our Unitarian church where she was always brilliantly gregarious; we included her on vacations to the Outer Banks and on daytrips to museums. In the course of so much venturing out, we shared many happy moments together. But over time, the stress of caring for a seriously ill parent who is convinced that she's operating at the peak of her powers began to take its toll on me: I lost sleep, lost work, and started drinking too much. With my daughter leaving the nest, I made the rash decision to return to college, as well, and enrolled in a graduate program at a local university.

            That's when my mother manifested the strangest effect of her dementia. She stole my identity. I returned home one morning from a few rushed hours of research to hear the in-home care provider telling me what an interesting life Mary Jo had led before moving east. This amiable woman marveled that she had spent the morning with a former playwright who had traveled all over the country staging productions of her works. This writer had transitioned into non-fiction feature writing, apparently, and was still very busy with the creative work she did on the side. 

            I nodded, marveling too, and when I'd seen the care-giver out, I suggested we have lunch. My mother said, "I wouldn't say no to a hot fudge sundae." 

Over our meal I encouraged her to tell me what she'd been discussing with the aide, but having forgotten she'd ever met the woman, and having eaten her soup, she told me a bit crossly that she couldn't waste her entire afternoon chatting. She had writing to do in her room.

MJ with best friend Marion, Mt. Diablo CA

            My mother moved into a care facility a year later, her disease having progressed to a risky tipping point. She was falling a lot while simultaneously making runs for the border, telling the confused cabbie she summoned by phone to drive her to Mexico, a trip of sixteen-hundred miles. I hoped the move to Courtyard in the Pines would ensure her physical safety while easing stress on her deteriorating mental state. As for myself, I was expecting to address some of the goals I'd set before she’d moved in: completing a novel, earning my Master's degree, finding steadier work and spending more time with my husband. Although I hated to admit it, her purloining of my identity affected me more than I expected. In the past, no matter how inadequate I might have felt in my roles as a mother, wife, or employee, it had always been clear to me that I was, first and foremost, a writer. This is how I thought of myself, and it shocked me to see how precarious this vision of my purpose on the planet was, in actuality, when I wasn't working more actively toward validation. I may have established my roots as a writer quite solidly, but at the time I wasn't producing much fruit, and my experience caring for Mary Jo made it painfully clear that many trees stop bearing long before they wither and die. Through her own suffering, she was demonstrating for me the real-life equivalent of "use it or lose it," and lacking publication, I certainly wasn't using it.

            Despite our lives descending into chaos with the coming of the recession in 2008: jobs lost, house teetering on the edge of foreclosure, an imposed relocation and new austerities, I pushed forward with my novel, completing a draft in 2010. When I shared the news with Mary Jo on one of my bi-weekly visits to The Courtyard, she asked me how long it was. I hedged, admitting that it needed some trimming, but told her the manuscript was currently six-hundred and fifty pages long. 

"Oh my!" she responded. "I guess some people don't know when to shut up."  

            

She passed away on Valentine's Day, 2014, in the midst of a freak snowstorm. At that point I had been her sole family caregiver for twelve years, and when she died, I experienced the bereft, appalling sensation of being completely divorced from my emotions. Not grieving, but succumbing to exhaustion. Feeling emptied, spent. I was teaching college by then, so I had plenty of work to keep me occupied, but I wasn't taxing my brain in that regard. Or my heart. I was no longer a daughter, and now, with no buyers for the novel, I no longer identified as a writer.

 

            I'm not sure how that changed, or why. Several months after her death, while teaching summer school, I came across an item in my local library's archives that gripped my imagination and would not let go. I penned a few notes, sat down to put them together, and remember nothing about the fourteen weeks that followed except that all my students passed and I was writing again. Writing became as essential for me that summer as breath. It was my food. My fever. It was me.

            The new novel was published early in 2017.  An ice-storm crippled the state just as the book was about to launch, forcing adjustments to the signing calendar. One of the earliest events scheduled by my publisher was at a bookstore in the Sandhills, where the effects of the ice had been minimal but where I didn't know anyone planning to attend. I needn't have worried, because a radio interview I'd done the day before meant that my event turned out to be crowded and lively. I made my presentation and sat down to sign books. 

            The first person in line asked me to sign the novel for "Dorothy.*" This was my sister's name, the one closest to me in age. She was also one of the two sisters who cut ties with me after our mother was taken into care. Dorothy was diagnosed with breast cancer and died in 2015, but not before I called her to reconcile. We spoke for a long time before she had to ring off; it was the last time I heard her voice. 

            I signed the woman's book and greeted the second person in line. This woman asked me to personalize the book for "Martha.*" Goosebumps rose on my arms. "That's my sister's name," I said. Martha, the baby, was the sibling most resolutely estranged from me. I signed with a lump in my throat. 

            When the third woman stepped up to the table, I nervously joked that her name had better not be "Laura,*" the name of my eldest sister. She shook her head. "My name is Annie," she told me. "Not Anne. A-N-N-I-E." I signed the book, but my handwriting looked shaky. "Annie" was my mother's pet name for Laura Ann, her firstborn.

The author, age 4 (?), sits in the window of the stage coach beneath her little sister.

 

&&&

 

If I am ever able to overcome my WASP-ish antipathy for tattoos long enough to have one burned into my skin, it will go on my right forearm, my writing arm. It will be the comment made to me in a critical moment by one of my graduate instructors, a comment that came back to me as I walked out of the Sandhills bookstore on that wintry night and looked up at the sky. I was searching the cold darkness for a single brilliant star, feeling the connection to my mother more deeply than I had since I was a child. 

My teacher said: "Writing is tricky and mysterious shit."  It occurred to me that this could also be said of love. And when you think about it, aren't they really the same thing?

 

&&&

 

This essay was first published in the Wake Forest Review 2023

* names and place names have been changed