My Mother and Me

According to Jewish law, there is a religious, ethical, and legal obligation to rescue others. The legal and biblical scholar Aaron Kirschenbaum writes about the tragic and much studied death of Kitty Genovese, who was attacked in Queens in 1964; over 38 neighbors heard her screams but never intervened. He draws on Maimonides, who quotes Leviticus 19:16: neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor. The transgression is pivotal. The loss of a single Israelite is tantamount to destroying the world. When one dies, all die. When one survives, all survive.

More complicated is whether bystanders are duty-bound to rescue one in peril when such action puts their life in danger. Is self-sacrifice obligatory? Kirschenbaum claims there is no such duty when the danger is mortal. Doctors, however, must attend to patients even when their own lives hang in the balance.

But what if the person whose life is in danger is not your patient, but your mother?

In the 1980s, I was the clinical director of a day hospital for patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. It was the heyday of this psychiatric classification, though it would eventually become a wastebasket diagnosis. At that point, borderline personality referred to people with mood instability, intense anger, impulsive and self-damaging behavior, and unstable interpersonal relationships. They were not strangers to drug and alcohol abuse, self-mutilation, suicide attempts, and transient psychotic states.

We called our program “therapeutic community.” Housed in temporary trailers, the site was once a juvenile detention center, an irony not lost on the adult patients who were our charge. The walls were a colorless greige, a tone designers would one day emulate, but then felt more like a cold surround exposing the shrinking resources of a university-administered, county-funded psychiatric program in Sacramento.

In April 1984—the week after turning 31 and burying my mother, my birthdate and her yahrzeit forever entwined—I resumed my place at the head of the community meeting. As I settled in one of the plastic stack-chairs, a pall enveloped the group of patients and staff. They were waiting. Kathy, who was turbulent and spunky, broke the silence: “Are you OK?

“I’m OK,” I said. But I was not OK. I was anything but OK.

I lied about the cause of my mother’s death. I told my colleagues she suffered a massive heart attack. I did not reveal she had been given the same diagnosis as the patients I treated: borderline personality disorder. Or dare to admit I could not save my own mother, even though I had just published a book chapter about how to manage such patients. No one under my care had died at their own hand. Yet, I ignored the signs of impending death in the woman who gave me life.

I bundled up my own rage, guilt, shame, and sense of fraudulence. It would take much longer for the sadness to be unveiled. I would not reveal this to them. I would barely reveal this to myself. We abided by an unspoken contract between patient and doctor that any drama will be the patient’s, not the other way around. I braced myself. I felt strain and awkwardness being the focus of the group rather than in my usual role as their leader who observes and comments on the group members and their process. I was suited up both emotionally and in my dress, as if the assuredness of a tweed blazer and pencil skirt could override my mother’s decompensation and ward off mine.

I was a newly minted psychologist, and the psychiatry department had put its trust in me. As the only woman, the only psychologist, and the youngest among the clinical directors, I had taken a crash course in the theories pertaining to these patients. It would be a clinical trial by fire. Already harrowing developments included a patient who tried to run over her therapist in a car when the patient became convinced the clinician was her feared mother. I may not have run over my mother, but I failed to rescue her. I became an unwitting accomplice in her death.

The year before, in the months leading up to my wedding, Auntie Annie, my mother’s sister-in-law who lived over the hill from my mother in Beverly Hills, phoned unexpectedly: “Alberta, I have to talk to you about your mother. She’s not doing well. She’s not making a life for herself. I really think she needs to move to Sacramento to be closer to you.”

A pause, in which my stomach fell as if punctured.

I was about to marry the man I loved, thriving in a career I felt passionate about, and finally free of my mother’s tyranny. “Oh, Auntie Annie, for the first time in my life, I’m happy. She’ll spoil it.”

Another pause, this one hers.

“What can I say? She won’t last much beyond your wedding.”

Annie had known firsthand the accelerating downward spiral and burden of my mother’s despair and isolation. But she had known very little about the chaos behind closed doors: my mother’s alcohol binges, rages and threats, paranoia and stalking behavior, operatic screaming that occasionally brought neighbors running.

Less still did Annie know about my desperate childhood, when I felt trapped by an unhinged mother who distorted reality. Not long after my father’s sudden death, she sold our GI Bill tract home and moved us to a one-bedroom apartment with stark white walls and popcorn ceilings. My mother tried to convert me to her catastrophic thinking by falsely claiming we had only $1,000 to live on for the entire year. I was barely 9. It sounded like more money than I could imagine, but her frightful voice suggested otherwise. I was old enough to register her worry, but too young to discern that this tangible lie from a widow collecting multiple death benefits and book royalties revealed more about her depleting inner reserves than her pocketbook.

My father’s death compressed our lives, and my mother, an identical twin, merged them. She covered our single beds with a king-size, white, nubby bedspread folded into one, in much the same way monozygotic twins cohabit a single egg. She fostered symbiosis by making me her companion, sharing inappropriate confidences, torpedoing my autonomy with relentless criticism and ridicule and upholding perfectionistic standards. Her growing instability manifested in drunken blackouts on vacations, which I kept secret; whimsical purchases like a banana-colored Pontiac bought in an afternoon; and a facelift at 46, half expecting the surgeon’s knife to excise misery as well as wrinkles.

I felt both suffocated and responsible. Despite her volatility, I loved and needed my mother, so I became the ballast. I supported her misguided efforts to feel whole. When she waffled about purchasing 9 mm pearls or oil paintings from emerging artists, I encouraged her. Unless her happiness was assured, I wouldn’t be free to find my own. But underneath my straight-A, student-body-president persona, I often felt close to the edge myself and flirted with tiny overdoses of aspirin beginning in the fifth grade.

Nor did Annie know about my mother’s frenzied calls to my job, berating me to department secretaries. Would she show up at my office if we actually lived in the same town? All my aunt could see was that I’d slipped away. Abandoned my mother in her suffering. Failed as a daughter.

I resented Annie for puncturing my happiness without understanding she was witnessing my mother’s deterioration firsthand. In spite of her psychiatric illness and compounding losses, my mother was always a force. Her maiden name was Stone, and that’s how I always thought of her. Annie’s caveat gnawed at my guilt, but I consigned the conversation to another overreach of my mother’s manipulation. This time I would not be thrown out of the lifeboat.

On Presidents Day weekend in 1984, the month before she died, my mother flew to Sacramento to celebrate her 68th birthday. My husband, Steve, and I waited at the airport reception area, becoming increasingly concerned when she was not among the passengers deplaning. We scanned the crowd looking for a petite, unnaturally blond senior with oversize glasses and monochromatic mauve pantsuit. On the verge of making inquiries, we saw my mother being escorted in a wheelchair by airport security. Before I could register my alarm, my mother put her index finger to her lips to silence me. She had no physical disability requiring any assistance. Once out of earshot of personnel, my mother triumphed over her invention of a heart ailment to garner special attention and avoid the long walk from the gate. From the unsuspecting, she sought compensation for her pain and anguish. Steve and I shook our heads.

My mother reveled in riding shotgun in Steve’s sports car on the ride home, while I scrunched into the backseat. Much as he resented her dependency and intrusions, Steve greatly appreciated her razor-edge intellect and worldliness, which sharply contrasted with his own mother’s provincialism. My mother admired and fully comprehended the scope of Steve’s achievements as an academic psychologist. To his chagrin, she also basked in the status of introducing him to her friends as “Doctor.”

That night, I witnessed my mother’s uncharacteristic insecurity when she called me into the kitchen to confer about the browning of her signature fried rice dish, something she’d been cooking for most of my life. “Do the rice and onions have enough color?” she asked. I could never be sure whether she really needed reassurance or whether, like the airport caper, she sought an opportunity for attention and succorance.

The next day, we drove to Napa in my vintage BMW coupe. The panorama of lush hills, wild mustard blooms, and grapevine corridors heralded our arrival at Auberge de Soleil in Rutherford, renowned for its 180-degree view of the valley and Michael Taylor design as much as its food. The balance of elegance and rustic was reflected on every table, with the heavy ochre and orange tablecloths set with a single jonquil and eucalyptus in a black vase, a wire mesh candle holder, and salt and pepper shakers on a slab of granite. Temporarily transported to Provence, we were there to celebrate my mother in style.

There’s a photo taken of the two of us at my wedding, four months earlier, before we descended the grand staircase of the Flood Mansion in San Francisco to meet Steve under the shelter of the lily-trimmed chuppah. I was smiling in my Victorian-style gown, with violets adorning my curls, and gazing at her draped in burgundy organza with cascading orchids pinned to her dress. I whispered to her, “We did it. We made it.” Now, in these lavish surroundings of the Napa Valley, I relived the same emotion. We were not only celebrating my mother’s birthday. We were marking just how far we had traveled from those uncertain days following my father’s death and the austerity of that one-bedroom apartment.

As my mother prepared to return to LA, after our most felicitous visit to date, she let out, “You know, I could see myself living here.” Every fiber bristled, as I waited for the conciliatory atmosphere to become combative. “I’m not sure that would work,” I said, hoping the topic would die with my noncommittal response.

Abetted by regular doses of lithium, my mother had become easier to be around. But she had attempted “moving therapy” twice before. She had relocated to southern Florida on two separate occasions to be closer to her twin sister. Each move failed, the last attempt resulting in my mother’s first of two psychiatric hospitalizations. Still, I went so far as to say to Steve after she left, “Maybe it could work.”

But over the next month, she would stop using and start stockpiling her lithium. Written reminders to take her medication on alternate days were faithfully recorded in her Universal Savings Bank appointment calendar beginning with Jan. 2, 1984. But by March 9, two weeks after her visit and two weeks before her death, the word “pill” no longer appeared.

The phone rang mercilessly the night of March 21. Roused, but not completely conscious, I clung to the sanctity of sleep. Nothing quelled her plaintive cries. Like the howls of an inconsolable infant, she became more insistent. By the time I arose, the caller had hung up. I stared into the little black holes of the receiver.

The caller’s identity was clear before I answered. Those unremitting rings were her trademark. They followed me for most of my life. Whenever a phone rang, I startled. With Pavlovian predictability, I deployed my vigilance at the first sound of my mother’s distress signal. Even after I left home and traveled to remote places, I half expected to hear her voice at the end of a stranger’s receiver on a rural farm in Santa Cruz, a taco bar in Cuernavaca, or a taverna in Skyros.

I suspect she knew I avoided her calls. I felt desperate to maintain distance in a relationship that loomed too large for both of us. But my resistance only fueled her perseverance and ingenuity. Friends fielded my mother’s intrusive inquiries regarding my whereabouts and often got an earful about my grievous faults. As an identical twin living on a separate coast from her sister and widowed for too long, my mother never felt whole without the presence of another. As her sole child to survive birth, one sister stillborn and another dead after 48 hours, I was the only other.

That night was the last time her call would jolt me out of sleep. The following afternoon, I opened the Tudor oak door to collect the mail from the chute inside my house. The spring light gleamed through the leaded glass window and illuminated oversize catalogs and Penny Saver ads that had spilled onto the rustic tile floor cluttering the narrow entryway. Gathering the rest in haste, I walked upstairs to my desk and shuffled through a Mastercard statement, a city utility bill, a Charles Schwab trade confirmation, and the Smithsonian magazine among assorted junk mail—mindlessly sorting them into piles. Her letter was not the first in the stack. But I recognized the handwriting instantly.

My stomach seized in anticipation of some or another sharp reprimand. For what? Who knew? I never knew. An unforeseen slight I’d committed. Keeping my mother placated required constant surveillance. Often I failed. As simple as that.

I tore open the lined envelope and unfolded the sheet of stationery. A waft of her Estee Lauder Youth Dew fragrance filled the air. By the time you receive this letter, I’ll be gone …

I don’t remember whether I read to the end. I slumped back in my chair and my heartbeat slowed to a crawl. The painted surfaces of my home office, not quite the color of candlelight, stared back at me. Original crown moldings. Double-hung windows. My eyes roved the out-of-focus storybook cottages peeking through the dormer. Once a comfort, these features were now material witnesses—inert and cold.

Almost 40 years have passed. Now I am staring down the decade when both my mother and her mother ended their lives. My grandmother leaped to certain death from the ledge of her Brooklyn apartment on a November night at the age of 67, her slippers placed neatly beneath the windowsill. A month after turning 68, my mother swallowed a fatal dose of lithium as the walls of her one-bedroom apartment closed in on her. People who kill themselves kill others in their wake. Is this a lethal legacy?

But my father’s mother, my Grandmother Leona, lived well into her 90s, despite her own travails. She had lost her husband, my grandfather and namesake, from a massive heart attack when he was only 49. Left with three teenage children to raise during the Depression, she found solace in Judaism, family, burekas, Ladino music, and a second marriage. She emigrated from Istanbul and could trace our family lineage back to Dona Gracia Nasi, that most stalwart of widows who secured a homeland for Sephardim in Istanbul during the Spanish Inquisition. Though I’m not observant, Jewish heritage, culture, food, literature, and film sustain and fortify me. I wear Leona’s Turkish gold coin—minted in 1923, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire—around my neck. It is my amulet.

My work as a psychologist enriches my life and vision and furnishes me with a way of giving and getting meaning. I have also spent years on the other side of the couch. But mostly, I have scaffolded my life with family and friends and have known the safety and consolation of an intimate relationship over half my lifetime—something that eluded both my mother and her mother. I am not the poster child for suicide survival. We can never know how much heartbreak propels someone to jump or ingest a fistful of pills. By sharing my story, not keeping it secret, I hope to break the cycle for myself and the people I love.

Kirschenbaum points out that the obligation to rescue a person attempting suicide has been a matter of dispute among rabbinic authorities for the past four centuries. But I am not just a bystander. Honor thy father and thy mother. For me there is no dispute. Left with a dial tone, I did not save my mother. I chose to save myself. She left me desperate for the conversation we would never have. Once flooded by her words, now by her silence. She was everywhere. She was nowhere.