A Mother's Love

Was it worth it?

That’s the question I wanted to ask my father. He was sitting across from me in the slowly disappearing light. The blinds were open but the sun was setting. Soon we would be in the dark.

He sat there in his wheelchair, looking out through the blinds into the yard. Spring hadn’t quite arrived. His gnarled, arthritic hands lay slack in his lap. He was dressed in muted browns (flannel shirt, corduroy pants) blending into the background of the darkening room. Light coming in from the window reflected weakly off his bald head. Somewhere in the distance I could hear some music but otherwise we sat in silence.

Was it worth it?

My mother’s funeral was three days ago. I had always expected her to outlive him; his family was riddled with early heart attacks and other expirations, while her family uniformly lived into their late 90s. They both made it into their 80s when suddenly my mother dropped dead.

From my earliest memories, I lived in fear of my mother. She was not to be trusted. My brother described her as a vampire who fed on trauma rather than blood. In her 60s, she began attending AA meetings, even though no one had ever seen her imbibe. She loved the trauma of people’s stories. It was chilling and left her empathy suspect.

My father stoically enabled her madness. About once a decade I’d get a glimpse into a rich inner life that flourished safely hidden from my mother. (Or so it seemed; it is difficult to judge your parents’ marriage.)

I wanted to ask my father if being married to her was worth it -- all of the crazy that she brought with her into every room, every day. The crazy that I moved halfway across the world to avoid -- a survival instinct. Was it worth being married to her? Why?

We sat there across from each other in my mother’s study, a large cardboard box on the floor between us. My father looked out the window while I methodically went through her things. One pile for the trash; one pile for friends and family; one pile for sale.

My mother was wildly chaotic in everything except that she was always fastidious (and secretive) about the family’s finances. As in most things, my father yielded complete control to her. She kept all of the financial documents carefully ordered in a file cabinet. It was arguably the only ordered thing in her entire life.

The current box we were working through was full of things in German. In high school, my mother was sent to live with distant relatives in German, so far north it was practically Denmark. The reasons were obscure to me. My mother was born and raised in California; she didn’t speak German. Being dropped into Germany in the mid-1960s without much warning seemed like a punishment of sorts, but she thrived and recounted her years in Germany with a warmth that the rest of her childhood life never conjured. Her German “parents”, Mama and Papa Richter, would visit us regularly. Growing up I thought of them as an extra set of grandparents, even though I couldn’t speak a word of German and their English was limited. It wasn’t until I was well into middle-age that I discovered that Papa Richter was an avowed Nazi until his death in the 1990s, a fact that made the Holocaust all too terrifyingly real.

The closet in my mother’s study was packed to the brim, an intimidating hoarder’s paradise of papers and books. My father and I had been slowly working our way through all the detritus. The funeral had been well-attended -- all my mother’s friends from AA, and the various trauma survivors she had found and fed (or fed on?) over the years. Noticeably missing was my brother and two of my three sisters. I showed up, and so did Mary Margaret. Mary Margaret was a decade older than me. She had come first, and then ten years later me, my sister Angela, and then the twins: John and Jacqueline.

My mother never seemed to care much for anything prosaic. For many years, we had household help: nannies, a cook, a maid, a driver, other occasional help. About the time I left for college the money seemed to peter out. It was never entirely clear where the money had come from; my father was a civil engineer with a modest job in the county government. I assumed that the money was from an old family trust on my mother’s side; our cousins seemed similarly endowed. Under the pressure of five kids, it seemed likely the principle was slowly spent down. As the money faded away, so did my father’s career, and he took over all the household tasks previously managed by the help.

My mother’s transition from wealthy heiress to suburban housewife in her late 50s came with many challenges. She had never pumped gas in her entire life and would routinely run out of gas while driving around town. Even in her 70s she rarely filled the car up; mostly my father did that, as he did a great many other things. At her funeral, her friends recounted these sorts of eccentricities with great affection. The funeral reception was in the basement of the church, and it ran very long. I went into the industrial kitchen to escape and found my sister washing dishes. I leaned on the counter beside her.

“Did Jim go home?” Her husband was not one for socializing.

“Yep.”

“What’s your plan?”

“I expect I’ll be headed home shortly.”

I reached out and took a stray carrot from a half-emptied platter and started chomping away. My sister turned and looked at me, glasses slipping down her nose, her grey mousy hair cut practical and short. She had to look up at me; she was the only one who wasn’t over 6 feet.

“Michael.” She never called me Mikey, and I was grateful.

“Yes?”

“You’ll take care of Dad, then.” It was not really a question. I was unmarried, childless, and although I lived on the other side of the country, I was not exactly gainfully employed. I built custom dollhouse furniture for sale on Etsy. It was solitary, painstakingly detailed work, and I loved it. It did not, strictly speaking, constitute a career. I did other kinds of restoration and repair work to supplement my income. You’d be surprised how many old ladies in Manhattan have tiny delicate things that are in need of fixing. Living alone in a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan, I managed pretty well.

“Huh. Well, for a week or two, I guess. Think he can live by himself?” I asked.

With a harumph and a disgruntled sigh, Mary Margaret turned back to the dishes. My sister Angela had her hands full with a difficult, controlling husband and six kids. She had called and cried and called and cried but couldn’t make the three day drive from El Paso, Texas to Spokane, Washington for the funeral. The twins were united in a perpetual war against Mom; John worked in private equity and lived near me but I rarely saw him. Jacque was probably passed out following a raging bender fueled by anger and grief at my mother. John had sent flowers and food; Jacque did not make contact with any of us.

Dad-care was going to fall on Mary Margaret. And me.

“I’ll stay for a couple weeks,” I said, “Help get him settled, sort through Mom’s things. Then I have to go back and deal with a few projects, but I’ll see if I can come back for a while.”

She silently scrubbed away at the dishes.

“Listen, we’ll make a plan for Dad. It’s just going to take some time. I’m not going to disappear and dump him on you.” I added.

She kept scrubbing away at the sink but quietly said, “I don’t know how long he’ll last without her.”

It was true. For decades, maybe forever, my father’s sole purpose in life seemed to be caring for my mother. I had tried not to think about what he’d do now.

In any case, that had settled it. After the reception was wrapped up, I drove Dad home and the two of us took up a quiet routine. My mother was such an energetic, loud, large personality that the house seemed dim and dead without her. I went about sorting through things and my father watched me without saying much. He occasionally intervened to direct me to save something for a friend or someone who would want it. He seemed empty, all the life drained out of him, too.

Towards the top of the German box was a small black notebook. It had an elastic band around one side. I looked up at my father to see if he recognized it. He shrugged; no idea. I picked up the book. It was weathered, but not as old as most of the material in the box. A post-it note on the inside cover had my mother’s handwriting, grown spidery in recent years: “check next year”.

I paged through the notebook. At the top of each right-hand page was written a year; the first one was 1966. The last page had this year, 2033, scrawled across the top. The left-hand side of each page was blank; the right hand side, under the year, was a ledger. Deposits, debits. Some years just one or two transactions; other years a dozen. Never much more than that. The balance appeared to be about $20,000.

The back of the notebook had a little cardboard slot that folded out a bit, like a folder. Inside was a business card for a bank I’d never heard of -- a phone number in New York. I showed it to my father. “Do you know anything about this?” He shook his head and waved me away, uninterested. I looked at my watch. It was about 4pm on the east coast. I took out my phone and dialed the number.

Twenty minutes later, I hung up. It seems my mother had been keeping a little slush fund since she was 16. My father was surprised, but not shocked. My mother had never been particularly forthcoming about money. But more surprising was the revelation that she had left instructions that should she pass, the money would go directly to me -- not to her grandchildren, not to her other children, not to my father, but to me. Why me? And what misery would this create between me and my siblings? And what should I do with the money?

I went back to New York, but was soon back in Spokane with my father. I started going to the bank every few days to withdraw a couple thousand dollars in twenty dollar bills. I woke up one early September morning and without getting out of bed gazed at the giant mound of cash amassing on the dresser in my childhood bedroom. The sky was a bit overcast and the cold was coming. I got up, dressed, had breakfast, and went outside to rake leaves.

After a couple of hours of yard work, I had a pretty good pile of sticks, boughs, and leaves in the backyard. I looked at it for a few long minutes. I went back into the house, up to my bedroom, and started carrying the cash down to the pile of yard debris. My father was asleep in his easy chair, the television flickering silently.

I built a great bonfire with $20,000 in twenties at the center of it, and watched it burn. The next morning I gathered up the ashes and drove out to the cemetery where my mother was buried. I sprinkled the ashes of the cash over my mother’s grave and left.

Was it worth it? Yes. Yes, it was.