There were so many times I wished my mother dead during the past year. The violence of her suffering undid me. Hearing her scream, “My feet are on fire! My feet are on fire!” at 2 in the morning, hallucinating them burning before her . . . Or hearing her shriek as I held her down while a disgusted gastroenterologist in a business suit pulled fistfuls of shit from her rear . . . Or seeing her confined to a hospital bed on the first floor of her house while she pleaded with anyone who would listen to take her upstairs to her own room . . . these tortures seemed so unjust, even as the devil’s payback for such a fortunate life.
Wishing Her Dead
Robin Reif
Wishing Her Back
But while her suffering was unbearable to witness and her decline a testament to Nature’s cruel indifference, the emotional connection we’d developed during the last years of her life abided through it all. And having wished her dead, I wish her back.
She lost her mind but not her heart. She looked at me with love whenever I visited. We talked about her birth --at age 6 on a kitchen table--, about her beloved husband of 60 years who, she informed me, was named “Irving Lester Reif,” asking if I knew him. We sang “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” which she did with gusto and she let me sing to her-Shenandoah, The Water is Wide, Never-Never Land. She looked at me across the room and said with great feeling “you are my best friend.”
That emotional connection represented the repair of a deep rupture that occurred during our long relationship and, once made, it was stronger, more authentic and nuanced than I ever could have imagined. I miss my mother.