I am pleased to share an essay by Writing It Real member Helen Donnelly Goehring from her recently published collection, Transformed by Grief: A Personal History. Helen’s essay “Taking Notes: Assisted Living” was a winner in Writing It Real’s 2012 essay writing contest. Eight years later, she has a whole collection out!

Many of us were raised in families that could not tell us the truth about death, loss, and grieving. Here is Helen’s experience and how it shaped her character.

Mother

by Helen Goehring

When a person is born we rejoice, and when they’re married we jubilate, but when they die we try to pretend nothing has happened. —Margaret Mead

How is your mother?” I heard it at school. I heard it at church. I heard it from friends. Like a ventriloquist, I’d push a button that produced a smile and say, “She’s fine, thank you.”

I knew that I was telling a lie. What people were really saying is that there must be a reason why my mother looked and acted so much older than other moms at St. Mary’s School. Her hands shook when she helped serve lunch in the school cafeteria. She shuffled her feet when we shopped at Fountain Square in Evanston. And she often spoke in hushed tones. She had Parkinson’s disease, and it would kill her. Everyone seemed to know that but me.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s when I was six. It wasn’t until I was 12, that my father, siblings and other relatives told me she had “neuritis,” an inflammatory nerve disease. But no one told me she was going to die. The first inkling I had of the gravity of her illness was when I was helping my sister Peggy pack for Rosemont College, a Catholic woman’s college outside of Philadelphia. Although I would miss her terribly, I was excited for Peggy to have the opportunity to go to Rosemont. We were giggling in our efforts to close her suitcase, jammed with Shetland sweaters, plaid skirts, and formals, when there was a knock on the door.

“I’d like to have a word with you,” Daddy said. I knew it was something serious, for he never used that expression lightly.

“I want you girls to pray for your mother. She isn’t well. It is not as if she’s going to die or anything. She just needs your prayers.” Before we could respond or ask questions, Daddy left the room.

“She is going to die!” I blurted, tears streaming down my face. Peggy leapt from the suitcase and gave me one of her bear hugs.

“Oh, Helen, honey. Not to worry. She just has neuritis. It is nothing serious. But we must pray for her, nevertheless.” I loved my sister, but I didn’t believe her when she said Mother’s illness wasn’t serious. Why would she lie to me? Or did she honestly believe my father?

I’d have to contemplate and process this later, for it was time to drive to Union Station, where Peggy would take the train to Philadelphia. We helped Mother dress and then navigate our stairway while Daddy went out to the garage to get the car. I didn’t want to rain on Peggy’s parade, for this was to be a time of celebration. But it seemed as if a ribbon of sadness was wrapped around our gray Chrysler as it headed south, along Chicago’s Outer Drive. When we arrived at the station, Daddy concluded that the trip down the New York Central track was too long for Mother, so I sat with her on a bench while he took Peggy to her train compartment. When he returned, I was stunned to see Daddy wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. He always seemed to have his emotional faucet turned to “off,” but not today. I felt like I was in a funeral procession as we strolled through the station, his arms through Mother’s and mine while we walked to our car.

As we drove home along the Outer Drive, it seemed that we were a village of lost souls, not sure of where we wanted to go. One thing was for certain, we didn’t want to go back to our home in Evanston without Peggy there. Daddy broke the silence. “The Ringling Estate is having an auction. Why don’t we stop by?” The famed circus family had a Gothic manor near our house. The estate had been sold to a developer, and the Ringling family was auctioning its art and antiques. Daddy thought that this sale would be a distraction for Mother and me. It was.

My parents were attracted to a marine painting resembling the view of Lake Michigan from our bedrooms. In it the moon appeared as a searchlight casting its beams over the waves marching toward the shore. Daddy told Mother that he would buy it for her to put over the fireplace in our living room. While he was negotiating the sale, I overheard a conversation between two of Mother’s bridge partners. “Doesn’t Marie (my mother’s name) look terrible? Poor, Helen. She has no idea that her mother is dying.” That night, sitting on the window seat of Peggy’s and my bedroom, I looked at the path the moon cast on the turbulent waters. This was not a painting, but a real-life scene. I needed a life jacket, for I was drowning in a tidal wave of fear. Now I knew why people asked me, “How is your mother?”

My mother was healthy until I turned six. That summer the family went to Estes Park, Colorado—our favorite vacation spot. While we were fishing, horseback riding, and camping, Mother was plagued by balance problems and tremors. We cut our trip short after Daddy telegraphed her doctor in Chicago to make an appointment to see Mother. This was the first of many medical consultations, none of which revealed an explanation for her symptoms. Daddy finally got his answer at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, albeit not the one he wanted. Mother had Parkinson’s, a neurological disease which was traced to her having the flu during the 1918 epidemic, when she was in high school. That epidemic was among the deadliest plagues in human history, killing over 50 million people. My mother could have been one of those 50 million and although her life was spared, she didn’t escape unscathed. The flu planted a virus that exploded in her brain twenty years later in the form of Parkinson’s. The doctors at Mayo said there was nothing they could do; she would live ten years. So even though he was privy to the information that my mother’s illness was terminal, Daddy did not tell anyone, including Mother. Instead he made up the neuritis story.

Did the presence of neuritis explain why Mr. O’Reilly, the grocery man, would ask me how Mother was when I went to pick up fresh fish on the way home from school? Would that explain why her friends often asked me how she was? Did that explain why my aunts (my father’s sisters) came to visit us from St. Louis, thinking they could help Mother? Did that explain why I had to cut up Mother’s meat, because her tremors prevented her from doing so? I had so many questions and not enough courage to ask them. The adults acted as if the problem would go away if we didn’t talk about it. So, we played the pretend game.

When this charade became too heavy, I would leave the dining room, go up to my bedroom, and release the geyser of tears that had been building up inside of me. To disguise my red swollen eyes, I’d apply cold compresses to them and return to the dining room for dessert. I fooled everyone but Mother. One night she came up to my room to see why I was gone from the dining room table for so long. When she saw my tear-stained face, she embraced me with her trembling arms and wept into my shoulder. Despite the gravity, she endeavored to keep her pre-Parkinson’s life going. Quivering fingers and all, she helped me with my piano practice. A gifted pianist and piano teacher, it was “love at first sight” for my father when he accompanied her on his violin while she played Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Those were the “good” years. As we approached Mayo’s ten-year deadline, Mother was forced to give up more. She gave up driving. She gave up gardening. She gave up bridge. She gave up the presidencies of the Catholic Women’s Club and Infant Welfare Society. She and Daddy gave up entertaining and dancing.

Daddy got more help, hiring a woman to do our laundry, in addition to our live-in maid, Catherine. I tied Mother’s shoelaces, addressed her mail and helped her balance her checkbook. I spent the summer of my freshman year in high school visiting her at Northwestern Hospital, where I’d see how she was responding to a medication to control tremors. Daddy’s office was just a few blocks from the hospital, and he would stop there to visit Mother before we went out to dinner. Over dinner we would talk about everything, except her illness.

As I unroll the scroll of my history, I realize that I bypassed adolescence and took an escalator up to adulthood. I battled depression and yearned for someone with whom to share my feelings. Something in my fourteen-year-old gut told me that there were valuable lessons to learn; things that I couldn’t learn from my father. I needed my mother, but she was not able to respond to my anxieties and provide life-lessons, as much as she may have yearned to do so. Amidst her outward fragility was an inward nobility. It was her faith that held her together and kept me from falling apart. Her blue crystal rosary was ever-present in her quivering right hand. All these years later, I see that her nobility and faith were her lessons for me.

As her disease progressed and Mother was too weak to come downstairs for dinner, the family would eat in my parents’ bedroom. After dinner, we would kneel around Mother’s bed, reciting the family rosary. Most of us also went to Mass at St. Mary’s Church every morning. Still, no one mentioned her illness. There was an army of nurses: Miss Bosch, Mrs. Green, and Miss Campbell, among a few.

Although I felt that the nurses were intruders in our home, it was actually the disease that was the intruder. In his book A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis, famed Irish journalist and author, confronted his mother’s death from cancer when he was ten. “All settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.” Referring to his younger brother and himself, he commented, “To us boys the real bereavement had happened before our mother died. We lost her gradually as she was gradually withdrawn from our life into the hands of nurses and delirium and morphia, and as our whole existence changed into something alien and menacing, as the house became full of strange smells and midnight noises and sinister conversations….”

It was a similar atmosphere in our home. There were letters, whispers, and overheard conversations amongst the adults. One day I was searching for some bus fare on my father’s dresser, where he would empty his pockets of loose change when he came home from work. Next to the change and cuff links was an opened white bond envelope with a St. Louis postmark. The letterhead had an “M” engraved on it for Margaret, my Aunt Tess’s formal name. Inside was a note that read: “Of course, the children aren’t aware of the seriousness of Marie’s illness, and I will never divulge that to them.” Another day I overheard Mother’s telephone conversation with her friend, Marilyn Brown. “Oh, so, so.” I knew that was an answer to Mrs. Brown’s query, “How are you today?” Mother never complained that she wasn’t well. “So, so” was a signal that she was having a bad day.

As I read and heard these secret messages, I’d go to my bedroom and bury my head in the down pillow. Because I was afraid that the laundress, Augusta, may question why the pillow was wet, I kept an iron in my drawer and pressed the pillow slips before I left home for my walk to school. By the time I arrived at St. Mary’s, I was floating in a fog. When Sister Donald, my eighth-grade teacher, wrote on my report card that “Helen doesn’t pay attention,” my parents wondered why. If I had told them that I couldn’t focus because I was frightened because of the darkness overtaking our family, they would not have known how to react.

Occasionally I would ride my bike to school and when I did, I would go home for lunch. I relished the time Mother and I would have together. Inevitably, she’d be on the back porch, arms extended. All my worries, whether about misunderstandings with a classmate or struggles with math, seemed to evaporate when she put her quivering arms around me. One day she was not on the porch; she was in the living room with Mrs. O’Brien and Catherine. Mother had collapsed at the Evanston Catholic Women’s Club meeting. Her face was as gray as her hair; her tremors were worse than ever. When Mother saw me, she assured me she would be fine. I reluctantly returned to school, tears streaming down my face. As my classmates and I were going up the school stairs, I sobbed, “My mother is dying!” Gripping my hand, the Principal, Sister Mary Margaret, called Mother, who assured her that all was well. I was a capricious adolescent, swinging on an emotional pendulum.

As I entered my teen years, I learned that depression was not an acceptable emotion in our household. We always kept a “stiff upper lip,” whatever that was supposed to mean. So, I didn’t complain when Daddy asked if I could give mother shots after school between nurses’ shifts. That meant passing up going to Cooley’s Cupboard in downtown Evanston with my friends to indulge in curly q’s (skinny, curly French fries) and coke. It was probably just as well, for all they talked about was dating. For these reasons I was stunned when my classmates elected me Junior Prom Queen; I suggested a recount. They assured me that I was their choice, so I had to show up. To me, it meant putting on a mask with extra layers of glue, so I could forge a pretend smile.

On prom night I tried to act excited, but this queen was awash in anxiety. Before I went down to greet my date, Jerry, I stopped at my parents’ bedroom to say goodnight to Mother. Catherine went in before me to say, “Mrs. Donnelly, Miss Helen looks beautiful and wants to show you her dress.” As I leaned over the bars of my mother’s hospital bed to kiss her good night, questions raced through my mind: Why is it that my mother is being held hostage to this disease, locked in a cage? My friends’ mothers are zipping their daughters into their gowns, greeting their dates, taking their photos and hugging them before they depart for this supposedly celebratory occasion. Beneath the sheen of my turquoise chiffon dress was the ache of a heavy heart as I descended our staircase to greet Jerry, who was holding a box with a white orchid in it. I pasted on a smile, but I think I was the only prom queen who spent the evening bawling her eyes out in the ladies’ room of Chicago’s Drake Hotel, with time out to receive a crown of carnations and holly before I danced with Jerry.

The morning my mother died, Peggy, who had married the previous summer and was due to deliver her first child in six weeks, and I attended Mass at St. Mary’s. Returning home, as we entered the front hall of our house, we heard my father crying. What a foreign sound that was! I had never heard this man display his feelings so blatantly. It was as if a geyser had burst after all of these years of trying to control his pain. I numbly helped Peggy ascend the front stairs to my parents’ bedroom, where my brother, Jim, was standing at the foot of Mother’s bed, tears rolling down his face. I had never seen Jim cry, either. The men in our household were showing their vulnerability, while the women took charge. My sister Marie gently pushed Mother’s eyes shut. “She had so much to live for!” Daddy blurted. Then we went into our separate bedrooms.

Even though I cried out for it, no one would help me face the reality of Mother’s illness or death—the single most significant and painful experience in my life. All I wanted was permission to grieve. I am 87 years old as I write these words, but I still feel like the 16-year-old who was robbed of her childhood and adolescence by the thief of secrecy. My mother’s death punctured my childhood, but in the process my character and values were shaped. I learned at an early age that life was short, and we had better use our time here well.

As I open the album of my life, I reflect on what I have learned in the 71 years since my mother’s death. I have acquired competence, independence, and strength. It was from my mother that I developed empathy for the vulnerable and downtrodden. Her illness taught me to embrace my own aging and that of others. It prepared me for my work with the vulnerable elderly at Horizon House, a retirement community in Seattle, Washington.

Time has dulled the pain enough so that I can view my lost childhood and adolescence with a wider lens, rather than the telescope of years ago, despite tedious detours and lots of false starts.

Rather than view my mother’s death with bitterness and loss, blaming my sorrows on the actions of the over-protective adults in my childhood, I prefer to claim it as one of gratitude: gratitude for my children and granddaughters, none of whom my mother knew, but like her, are accomplished, compassionate and gentle people. Gratitude for my extended family that is there for me when the river of pain is at my doorstep. And mostly, gratitude for my faith, that has seen me through the windstorms of life. By choosing gratitude, my mother’s beautiful legacy lives on through the generations.