I Get a Kick Out of You

Today's blog post is by Paul Heller, author of the #1 Kindle Best Seller, Last Call, his account of taking care of his mother during her descent into dementia.  This essay originally aired on WDIY, Lehigh Valley NPR affiliate.

The most profound change in my life was my mother’s death at age 93. If you’ve heard The Police Song Mother, you have an accurate picture of my relationship with her. My mother Judy had Alzheimer’s, and for the last five years of her descent into darkness I took care of her with hired help at home. Several times the effort almost broke me. I was hospitalized twice with pneumonia. But in the end, being in close-quarters with my lifelong nemesis liberated me.

Calling one’s mother a nemesis. That’s harsh. But it was during these grueling five years that I came to understand both of us.

Judy’s bad luck with loved ones pre-wrote our script. Her first husband died when she was eighteen. She married my father at thirty-five, had a miscarriage at thirty-eight, and on the day I was born her beloved father passed away. Then my father died suddenly when I was seven. Reading her mind from this distance I hear her saying: Build a walled fortress. With a crocodile filled moat. NO MORE LOSSES.

So Judy had her reasons. But for me, my childhood was a black hole of suffocation.

Remember how Mary’s Little Lamb followed her to school one day? When I was old enough to walk to school with friends, Judy would follow, ducking into doorways when a friend spotted her. Mocking on my friends’ parts. Fist fights to settle what was seen.

For my eighth birthday she gave me a right-handed baseball mitt. I’m left-handed, but actuarial tables said that lefties die five years before righties. She was determined that I become right-handed to give us five more years together.

She cried when I learned to swim. Panicked when I learned to drive.

All this is funny to me now, but back then I had no idea who I was…what I wanted. Never mind. Judy would take care of everything. There was a right girl for me. Just like her. The right clothes for me. She’d pick out. An apartment for me. In her building. A job for me. President, undoubtedly. Single, of course. With her in my cabinet.  

Judy wanted certainty. I wanted to breathe. You know how adolescents are impossible? Multiply by fifty. That was me. To the peers she summoned as witnesses we were a car wreck. I was driving.

I wasn’t at home when Judy finally died. I was dawdling outside a drugstore where I’d gone to pick up her morphine prescription. When I returned to my house, a cousin who’d come to say good-bye to her told me she’d died a few minutes earlier.

Was I was happy? Yes. I felt giddy with exhaustion but free. But after a few weeks of elation and sleep I realized that nothing had changed because I hadn’t changed. The armor I’d worn since adolescence was who I was. I saw that I had a choice. I could go on nursing the anger and defiance I was so practiced at or I could get on with the task of trying to be myself, something I’d had no practice at at all.

It hasn’t been easy. There are days when I have to fight the urge to call it quits, to say: “it’s too late, what’s the use.” But each skirmish I win brings a welcome moment of understanding and forgiveness.

Last month I was walking through a mall when a Frank Sinatra song piped into the air. It was I Get a Kick Out Of You--one of Judy’s favorites--something she sang to me when I was little. I had a flashback that carried me past the bad things, always the first things that came to mind when I thought about her, to the gifts she gave me despite our life-long quarrel. Education at the best schools, exposure to the world, a love of beauty. A head start few are offered. And with each passing month it gets easier to say: Thank you for all the good things, Judy. Thank you, Judy… Happy Trails.”