May 16 Friday roundup

First, a PSA: I’ll be flying out Friday evening for Europe, crewing a ship from the Netherlands up to northern Norway for the rest of May. After seven months of continuous publication—79 posts and more than 100,000 words so far—Degenerate Art will be on a two-week hiatus. We’ll pick up again the first week of June.

Next, some news. I’m delighted to announce that on June 2nd at 1pm [***UPDATE: this date may be moving due to a lovely addition to the conversation; I’ll update when I know more and have internet], I’ll be in conversation with Ami Fields-Meyer, who was a senior advisor to Kamala Harris and is currently at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, part of the Ash Center at Harvard. Ami and I have been talking about the trajectory of the country, and how detention and camp history play into current events, and we have a lot of thoughts to share, as well as suggestions about what you can do. This will be a virtual event and is free and open to the public. But you do need to register. I hope all of you will join us!

This week’s podcast episode of “Next Comes What” considers why the Trump administration wants to get rid of the writ of habeas corpus, and instances in which that’s gone very badly in other countries. You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

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Today, I want to write a little about my mother, someone many of you have read about in various posts on here or essays elsewhere. But my mother is an extraordinary creature, and no matter how much you know, there’s always more to find out.

At some point after I had my own children, I came to the realization that my mother had probably always been profoundly mentally ill. That’s a story for another time, but skipping ahead, it’s possible to say that by 2016 or so, she had serious dementia, accompanied by a wild, florid paranoia. She believed teams of assassins were after her. And witches. Her husband was an impostor. The simplest explanation for any observable event was the only possibility my mother absolutely refused to consider.

After her third husband’s diagnosis with cancer, she began interfering with his care. As he became sicker, she grew more dangerous to him. His daughter and a neighbor worked to take care of him, while my brother and I brought our mother to Northern Virginia to live with us.

Weeks later, the pandemic hit. We didn’t yet have legal custody of her, but we established a kind of joint-custody schedule, as if our mother were not our mother, but had instead become our child.

When she was in the house, relief became impossible. She followed me around and wanted my attention all day, and sometimes in the middle of the night as well. Occasionally she would wake in the dark and begin unlocking and opening outside doors. She set off the fire alarm chronically, as if dying in a kitchen fire were an evolved state to which she aspired. It was crucial to her that I believe all her delusions, and she tried to impose them on everyone else around her, too. She had single-handedly saved NASA’s moon-landing mission in 1969. She’d been a doctor at the age of eight. Nicholas II of Russia was her uncle. Whenever she felt unsafe—which was most of the time—she turned hostile.

I did puzzles with her in the evening, though she was long past being able to figure out how pieces fit together. Trying to focus on this arduous task took all her concentration, and for an hour or two might forestall her worst delusions.

I bought three puzzles. As soon as I put one away, she forgot about it completely. After we rotated through the trio, I would simply retrieve the first one again as if it were new. As we sat together, she invented stories of having been a professional puzzling champion, narrating breathtaking moments from her world competitions.

The actual first world puzzle competitions had been in Spain, only a few months before she came to live with me. Had she seen a news story about them on television during her last months in Ohio, or had her brain invented these competitions out of whole cloth, all on its own? Knowing my mother, either possibility is equally plausible.

One of the three puzzles we did seemed cursed. It was dark and repetitive, with pieces that seemed to fit together but would be found later to be mismatched. Progress was slow, even for me, and my mother found this particular puzzle enraging. Rather than soothing her, it seemed to goad her into anger and delusions.

The image we were trying to assemble was a picture of John Henry Dearle’s “Tree of Life”—a busy, dizzying tapestry of a tree in flower, bordered by flowering vines. Created around 1910, it was produced by William Morris & Co. The tree was boxed in heavily by its border, and had filled seemingly every inch of space, pressing at the edges.

The irony of the tree of life enraging my mother was not lost on me. In the end, I packed it up and took it out of circulation altogether.

But the maddening tree of life was not so easily dismissed. Months later, after the pandemic had arrived and her husband had died, the time came to clean out my mother’s house. I delivered her to my brother, then drove seven hours to Toledo, giving myself a long weekend to get everything done at nightmare speed. A realtor and estate agent met me to assess the task at hand. I rented a storage building, cleared out the basement, and went through their clothes and books.

My mother had been a voracious reader when I was young, but at some point, she’d given up on books, limiting herself to inspirational and aspirational material. I found no novels belonging to her, but instead a dozen or more life planners. Inside were heartbreaking lists of accomplishments, little soliloquies reminding herself of her value and calling on her best self to rise up, lose weight, get rich, and become transcendent.

With only a small window of time to get the house on the market, I’d grown mercenary in my willingness to cull. But one of the books had an intricate spine that looked like leather.

I pulled it out of the stack. The cover was a detailed reproduction of “The Tree of Life.” Opening the journal, I saw that on the front endpaper, my mother had written her full name and the year: 2018. The next page had only one line: “This time I am really going to get it right. No excuses.” The rest of the pages were empty.

I carried the book upstairs and put it my bag to bring home. The months that followed were hard on everyone. In time, my brother and I used the money from the sale of the house to get my mother into residential care.

The assisted living place we tried first didn’t know what to do with her. She had a crisis there followed by hospitalization, which led to a second facility, one with locked doors and a staff that indulged her, much as we had at home.

She went on to find a circle of friends to eat with in the dining room each day, and a boyfriend in the dementia ward. They each thought the other was someone entirely different, a person already known to them.

Yet they were a comfort to each other. They had arguments over matters that were trivial or incomprehensible then made up again. It was a life physically removed from the world but still a life, which inched forward with its own limbs and blossoms.

Meanwhile, I took her abandoned journal to the Arctic with me and used it as a diary on an expedition. In a frigid desert climate, a landscape inhospitable to the growth of anything taller than two inches, I thought about my mother’s regrets.

Planted in the wrong place and time, in an existence designed as if to thwart her, she’d never felt satisfied or even safe. She made bad decisions, over and over. A friend once said of her She has glass in her feet.

Still alive, she’ll be eighty next month and is now beyond boyfriends and meaningful conversation. She still knows who I am, but my name and identity have bled over into every woman she encounters and likes. She calls them all by my name.

In recent years, she’s told me that she had six, ten, or even more children. But there are really just two.

The life she was handed likewise wasn’t as large as the one she imagined. She struggled to become someone the world would love more than it did, a person who would matter. But even with the warped line of her growing and the way she bent back on herself as if there were no larger space in which to live, she somehow managed—because of and despite everything she did—to send me out to the farthest reaches of the planet to make a different kind of life on my own.

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