My Mother and Middlemarch

Abstract

My Mother and Middlemarch Ruth Schemmel (bio) One—As Is After my father died, my sister and I thought, Now my mother can start living. Time for her second act, the one we always knew she had in her. "The old girl will surprise us yet," my sister said, while my mother grieved about her old life and flitted about the old house. For a year she grieved and flitted. We, meanwhile, waited for her to come alive. A new goal, a new dream, a new story arc—that's what we wanted for her. Reinvention. Transformation. A character in a book would come alive. A character in a movie. We wanted this for her, too, this woman who had laughed too loud, had worn the wrong things, had seemed, in all the old pictures and stories, carefree yet caged, with a wider, wilder spirit than life and marriage had allowed for. She took steps. She sold the Virginia house "as is," picked through the detritus of decades, and filled the back of her Corolla with the sorts of necessities betokening if not revival then at least survival: her mildewed shower curtain, her mismatched cutlery and plates, a dish drainer, her well-worn bedding and pillow, her TV. She packed a few knickknacks: an old metal mask with gem-blue eyes, a plastic California Raisin figurine, a card my father, from the depths of late-life dementia, had scrawled on with black Sharpie. (She kept this message on her wall for years but I can't recall now what it said. Something like: Remember: go to JC Penney! Or maybe: Urgent! Do NOT lock car!) She had sold one table in the Richmond Pennysaver. Everything else she left behind: chairs, sofa, rugs, lamps, books, letters, houseplants. Two hundred VCR tapes we inherited from my lonely bachelor uncle, movies he'd taped once for us, anything risqué hand-edited out, along with scenes he accidentally slept through. Cups still in the cupboard. Food still in the pantry. As is, my mother was told. As is, it was. Among that everything else: photographs. Her marriage, early motherhood, the Jersey house, the Virginia one. Older photos, too: black-and-white glimpses of my mother, glamorous in a miniskirt and short-cropped [End Page 157] hair, laughing with her head thrown back, a glass of something in her hand. My mother again, slender, young, posing with friends I've never heard about on a New York City street. My mother with a crooked smile bent over a sink in an apartment packed with friends. This is the woman we wanted to see reawakened. The woman who had come through a shitty, abusive childhood, who had been briefly single in New York and free, who had settled into an old-fashioned model of marriage with a kind, exuberant, intensely religious older man, who had had a year now to regain herself, regroup. My mother moved out west. There—here, where I live—she volunteered at the senior center, the children's hospital thrift. She took care of my children: drove them to preschool, elementary, middle, high. She cheered for their teams from soccer sidelines and gymnasium bleachers. She took guided daytrips to mountain viewpoints and nearby towns. She took exercise classes, met friends for lunch. She came to my house for dinners, holidays, brunches. But there were no romances, no makeovers, no new image or career. She failed to take up travel or any other passion. She watched a great deal of TV. My mother seemed in some ways to have assumed the infirmities of the much older man she had married: fear of driving, iffy balance, difficulty seeing at night. A desire to stay put. She spent a lot of time alone. My mother was sixty-three when my father died. Still young. She still had time to become. Two—Grown-Up People I was reading Middlemarch during my mother's hospitalization for lung cancer in late 2020, sixteen years after my father's death. Her hospital stays accelerated the mental fog that had advanced on the sly through the pandemic months. A neurologist finally made the call: early onset Alzheimer's, not fixable...