Promises to Keep

My mother and I had, if I were being charitable about it, what could be described as a strange relationship.

Granted that the Cleaver family only ever existed on television, I would be hard pressed to find exactly where my relationship with my mother fit on the spectrum covering the normal to the abnormal. Really, my only frame of reference is my own experience, which hardly makes for an objective analysis. It has, in fact, taken me a lifetime to reach the realizations that I have, and still there are things that elude me. Perhaps those things I still don't understand, or only understand dimly, will always remain as they are, unaswered mysteries. Yet I still feel compelled to examine those things, to try and impose some sense of meaning, for there is nothing quite as sad as questions without answers.

Like my father, my mother was a psychologist, which perhaps explains some, if not all, of my own quirks. Trust me on this one, there's no education quite like being raised by two shrinks. There's psychology, and then there's psychology as practiced on one's children.

My mother didn't work when I was growing up, her time being occupied with the important duties of being a socialite. In a very real way, I was raised in my formative years by a succession of maids, nannies and au pairs. But even that admission is a distorted view, for it wasn't like either of my mother or my father were absentee parents; they were both there when I needed them, for the important things and for the milestones.

Yet, more often than not, my mother was far more distant than my father was. I'm not sure, exactly, when that happened, but memory seems to fix that at some time between my being six or seven. There developed a routine where, when I returned from school, I would be greeted at the front door by the family dog, who would escort me to my parents' bedroom and a report on my day would be given to my mother. Other than that, however, our interactions were limited pretty much to Wednesday and Sunday family dinners.

Well . . . sort of. Every Spring, there was the obligatory two-week trip with my mother and my brother to Palm Beach. Before that, before her brother died, it was a family trip to Los Angeles. I still remember the night my Uncle Mike died, my mother wailing inconsolably in my parents' room as my father futilely tried to comfort her. We lived, at the time, in a Victorian brownstone, and there was a tree in the front yard who's branches brushed up against the windows of my bedroom. That night, as my mother gave vent to a breaking heart, the wind outside played among those branches and they tap-tap-tapped against the panes. For some reason, as I huddled under my blankets in child-like fear at my mother's pain, I made the connection between those branches and my uncle, not really old enough to understand the concept of death and convinced that he was tapping on my windows, trying to reach out to me. If I had been more self-aware, I would have remembered the lesson of that night years later.

My mother was never one to praise me, at least not when I was present, at any rate. Nothing I ever did was apparently good enough for her, and any success I had was almost invariably greeted with the admonition that I could have, should have, done better. The first story I ever wrote, when I was in the 4th Grade, which was endorsed with enthusiastic praise by my teachers, was critiqued by my mother with the comment "Who did you copy this from?" When I was a Senior in high school, and took Third Place in the National Merit Scholars in the Arts for creative writing, that achievement was greeted with complete silence.

And yet, to her friends, to other people, my mother did nothing but brag about me. What she could say to others about me she would not say to me, and it took me years to realize the purpose behind that. It wasn't that she was disinterested, that she didn't care; she did care, and very deeply. But the things she didn't say to me, as well as the things she did, were designed to challenge me, to force me to exceed what I saw as my own limits. A form of "tough love," if you will, and it worked. Still, it would have been nice to occasionally hear those things first-hand rather than second-hand. But if wishes were fishes, as they say, I'd be hip-deep in trout.

The years between when my father died and I left for college were the worst years in my relationship with her. At the time I most needed my mother to be an adult, to be a parent, she failed to be there. Everyone has their own tragedies, and mine was to grow from a child to a man in the space of an hour. Fate dictated that I would be the one to discover my father's body. My mother's collapse that morning dictated that I would have to be the one to call the paramedics, to call my school to excuse myself for the day, to make the other calls that would start the chain of notification for family and friends. No fourteen-year-old should ever have to bear that burden, should ever be thrust into a situation in which the role of child and parent are reversed, but what can you do? It was what it was.

Life became a brittle pretense of normalcy, and again it took me years to understand just how much my parents loved each other, just how devastating my father's loss was to my mother. Nor, in truth, did I help matters much. Driven by my own demons, I had little time or consideration for hers.

Of all the things my mother was afraid of, her greatest terror was reserved for being alone. She was supposed to grow old with my father, to have his comfort and presence as the years drew on and they passed into oblivion together. But she was cheated out of that and instead faced a future in which her oldest son had already left and her youngest son was on the verge of leaving. On the one hand, she had a sense of pride and accomplishment that I was going to college in California, but it was tempered by the knowledge that I was not only leaving, but moving all the way across the country, leaving her all alone. Not only that, but I was going to college on an NROTC scholarship which, to her, was perhaps the most frightening thing of all. My mother had always said that the worst thing that could happen to a parent was to outlive their child, and my decision to take a commission raised that as a very real possibility in her mind. That last Summer I spent at home before leaving for college and the Navy was the worst Summer of my life, and it took me years to realize that the root cause was her fear that I was leaving for good, that she would, indeed, be all alone.

There were those things that she could never say to me; maybe they should have been assumed, maybe they shouldn't have been. But Fate is a funny thing, and a few years later her fear of outliving me almost came true and, next to my father's death, must have been shattering for her. My separation from the service, though, at the time neither desired by myself nor by the Navy, is really a mundane tale, but it came at what would turn out to be a fortuitous time for her.

Rocky relationship or not, that old saw about Irish sons and their mothers is true. I was released from the service at a time when my mother's life entered a downward turn, an event that would, in the end, prove to be fatal. I came back home intending to be there only until I got my feet back under me, until I could make the transition from military life to civilian life, but whatever powers that be had other plans. Diabetic since shortly after I was born, that disease and it's complications attacked her with a vengeance, and her health quickly deteriorated to the point that it became obvious she could not care for herself on her own.

As far as my brother was concerned, he would have been happy enough to pack her off into a nursing home and not be bothered, but I couldn't do that to her. Whatever else she was, my mother was a beautiful, proud, independent woman, and I couldn't, wouldn't, take that away from her. After all that had happened, she deserved her own home, some measure of her old life and happiness, even if it were just an echo of what once was. So I stayed at home to take care of her and, yes, bowed to the inevitable and took up the family biz, becoming a shrink just like her and my father, helping her run her practice. And as she became sicker, child once again became parent an care-taker, but what else is a son supposed to do? She was my mother. I could not, would not, abandon her.

I know for a fact that my mother felt a tremendous sense of guilt, that she felt I was putting my own life on hold because of her. I wasn't, of course, I was still doing all the things that someone in their twenties was supposed to be doing, but still she felt like she was being a burden, like she was somehow holding me back. Yet the alternative was unacceptable. As I tried to explain to her, it hadn't even been ten years since I lost my father, I wasn't about to lose my mother while I had the ability to prevent that.

Perhaps that was pure selfishness, perhaps it was merely the due a child owes the parent, I know what her answer to that was. So many things that were never said, so many promises to keep that, in the end, were all in vain. Actions, they say, speak louder than words, but I never told my mother that I loved her. As sick as she got, I was always there to pick up the pieces, to try and make her as comfortable as I could, to make her life as normal as I could, but those words just never would come.

That last weekend she was alive, I think she knew that time was running out. She'd had another TIA the week before, a kind of mini-stroke, one of many that she'd been experiencing, and a friend and I had once again packed her off to the hospital. The day before I brought her home for the last time, we'd had a long talk, a good talk, and she finally told me how proud she was of me, that she loved me. And all I could say was that I knew, had, in fact, always known, even as she tried to apologize for all those things that had gone wrong. But those words themselves would not come to me, I could not tell her that I loved her. She knew, of course, but in the end I cheated my mother out of hearing me say them just one last time.

I couldn't save her, not when it counted, and that, perhaps, is the worst kind of hell to consign yourself to. My mother died of a massive G-I bleed, a rupture of an artery in her gastro-intestinal tract. It would have been like popping a balloon, one moment she was there and the next she was not, and even if she had been on an operating table with the finest surgeon in the world attending her, he could not have saved her. Intellectually, I know that, but crisis has always spurred me into action and, ever since I was in the Navy, at such times I have found it impossible to separate myself from the Officer they trained me to be. For every problem there is always an answer, and if solution A doesn't work you move on to solution B, or solution C, and so on until the crisis is resolved.

And I couldn't save her, no matter what I tried. That the paramedics couldn't save her, or the doctors in the Emergency Room, doesn't matter. I had a duty and an obligation, and I failed. Not just as a man, but as a son, and while she may have known, she died without hearing me say that I loved her as my mother. The crisis came and I failed the ultimate test. That may be a fair burden to bear, or it may not be, but it is mine to bear. And, again, I know what her answer to that would be; my mother always said that you shouldn't die with any regrets. But living with regrets is another proposition entirely. I could have been a better son, I should have been a better son, but what now is lies beyond my power to change.

"The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."