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How My Mother Disappeared

Slide 1 of 6

Barbara Witchel, circa 1955

Credit...Photographs from Alex Witchel
  • Slide 1 of 6

    Barbara Witchel, circa 1955

    Credit...Photographs from Alex Witchel

The meatloaf fooled me.

I should have known it would. That’s what a meatloaf is meant to do: make you believe the world is so forgiving a place that even an array of bits and pieces, all smashed up, can still find meaning as an eloquent whole. The duplicity is integral to the dish, if you make it well. And when I made my mother’s meatloaf, it was perfect.

In 2005, as my mother began the torturous process of disappearing in plain sight, I retreated to my kitchen, trying to reclaim her at the stove. Picking up a pot was not the instant panacea for illness and isolation and despair that I wanted it to be. But it helped. When I turned to my mother’s recipes, I felt grounded in her rules, and they worked every time. I could overcook or undercook the meatloaf, and it still tasted the same. I could eat it hot and eat it cold, and I ended up doing both, because my stepsons, Nat and Simon, and my husband, Frank, like meatloaf fine, but they don’t love it. The writer Peg Bracken summed it up perfectly in “The I Hate to Cook Book”: men prefer steaks and chops to casseroles and meatloaf, she wrote, because they “like a tune they can whistle.” But it was those inexact elements, murky and mystical, that drew me to my mother’s meatloaf again and again. It was my remnant of home and I conjured it, reaching back, always back. Each time I made it, it was absolutely perfect. And each time I made it, I felt more and more afraid.

The episodes, awkward and fleeting, started casually enough, little tickles of annoyance more than alarm. In 2000, at a Seder, Mom called Nat “Nate.” He seemed surprised, hurt even. She didn’t remember his name? I growled at her, sotto voce, while we fussed over a serving platter. When she remained silent, I figured she was embarrassed.

At my brother Emmett’s wedding in 2004, she wore a lavender shirtwaist, its matching fabric belt askew, revealing the elastic beneath. My mother has never been a stylish dresser, but she has always been a fastidious one. Making sure that belt had loops to hold it in place was the kind of thing she would do automatically.

One night, she and my father saw a movie with friends, one I had already seen. I asked her opinion of a plot point, and it became clear she hadn’t followed the story. She changed the subject.

Like I said, little tickles. People misspeak — we actually had a relative named Nate. Errant belt loops on a wedding day might not be important to someone who doesn’t care about clothes. Not recalling a movie plot? I can’t remember the movie in question myself.

But during the course of the next year, she didn’t seem quite right. I bought a new dress, what she and I would call a schmatte dress, to cook in, wear around the house. It had three buttons beneath the collar, each of a different design. When she saw them, she recoiled. “What’s wrong with that dress?” she shouted. “Why don’t the buttons match?”

“It’s the design,” I said. “They’re not supposed to match.” That didn’t mollify her. She continued to glare at both me and the dress.

At the time, I dismissed the incident, but I have thought of it frequently since, her off-kilter reaction to something so small. I know now what I missed then. It was about order. The buttons weren’t uniform. And in her condition, that felt like chaos.

One day my sister, Phoebe, called, distraught. A friend at work had logged on to a Web site where college students comment on their professors. Someone had posted a complaint about Mom. She was too old to teach. She had given the same lecture twice.

“Completely untrue!” I thundered. “You know it was just some kid who was failing, seeking revenge.” We knew no such thing, but agreed never to mention it. We made it our secret. When Mom “decided” to retire a few months later, we knew it was not our secret at all.

By the following September, she was tired all the time, and I insisted she see a neurologist. It turned out that she’d already seen one, Jesse Weinberger, at Mount Sinai Medical Center, the year before. When we went to see him together, he told me he’d done Doppler ultrasound tests that determine whether your carotid arteries, a marker of cardiovascular disease, are in working order. The results were dicey enough to warrant retesting, but my mother never went back.

“Was she sent a reminder card?” I asked stiffly. Weinberger opened the file and showed me three dates on which three cards had been sent. It didn’t surprise me that she would ignore them; she never put much stock in doctors. That she wouldn’t remember receiving the reminders, however, was unthinkable. Yet that’s what she said. She didn’t remember.

Weinberger repeated the Doppler and discovered that one artery had closed completely; the other, 75 percent, which had been the case for at least six months. That she had been teaching at all was astonishing.

I struggled to contain my panic. When Weinberger asked her what medications she was taking, and which doctor had prescribed which pill for which illness, she hesitated. I leapt in authoritatively, starting to recite. Quite firmly, he asked me to stop; he was addressing my mother. She continued the list while I listened, feeling lightheaded. She was naming doctors I had never heard of, medications I had no idea had been prescribed. Over the past couple of years, she had assured me she was fine.

Weinberger instructed her to collect all the medications she was taking and bring them in. At the next visit, she placed two bulging plastic bags on his desk. There were easily 30 bottles of pills, mostly antidepressants in differing doses. When he asked her why she was taking them, she squinted at some of the labels, as if the answers would be written there. She made jokes and smiled coyly. She didn’t know.

I was equally baffled. When had this happened? Why hadn’t I seen it more clearly? Most important, how fast could we fix it?

Not fast at all. Tests and procedures, small and large, loomed. A CT scan ordered by Weinberger showed that she had suffered ministrokes, transient ischemic attacks. The scar tissue the strokes left in Mom’s brain was anything but mini; because of its location, it was not only impairing her memory but ensnaring her in a state of depression.

“Have you had any surgeries?” a technician asked her a few weeks after she had one to fix the carotid artery that could still be salvaged.

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You make a good team,” he said.

Weinberger referred me to Roberta Epstein, a social worker in Scarsdale and an expert in dealing with senior citizens who did not want to be dealt with. Epstein put me in touch with a woman who provided home-care attendants; she referred me to Caroline Harrison. Harrison was Irish, in her early 40s, and the mother of four children. She had been doing this kind of work for years. Since Mom was unable to keep track of her medications, Harrison bought a Mediset, organized the pills and administered them. She drove Mom to the library and surveyed her garden with her. For the first time in months, I felt I could breathe.

In the weeks after her aortobifemoral bypass surgery, I would call Mom to see how she was doing. “I feel like myself again,” she would say assertively.

“That’s great!” I would reply. “I am so glad.”

“So I don’t need this woman here.”

The very fact of Harrison was a problem for Mom, striking at the heart of her stubborn independence. Mom loved to drive, but it was Harrison’s job to drive. Mom wanted to be left alone. Harrison kept her company. Mom preferred silence. Harrison preferred conversation. Harrison is a person who is naturally patient. She never rushes. She asks how you are and when you say fine, she asks you again, because she actually wants to know.

“She talks too much,” Mom complained.

A week later I asked Harrison how things were going. “Just fine,” she said calmly. I could tell she knew that she was making my mother crazy, even though my mother hadn’t said a word to her. “It’s hard for your mom not to be teaching anymore,” Harrison said. “She’s an educated woman and very accomplished. It’s upsetting to her not to be working.”

The professional life that had sustained my mother for so long was gone. Martin Goldstein, a psychiatrist and neurologist, tested her for Alzheimer’s. She didn’t have it, which was good news, he said. Stroke-related dementia was not progressive in the same way as Alzheimer’s. Still, she continued to deteriorate. A few months later, Harrison called with a problem. Whenever she and Mom went to the cash machine, Harrison would stand back to give her privacy. Now, Mom was stopping halfway through the process and leaving empty-handed. She couldn’t remember which buttons to push. Loss of executive function, Goldstein said. Which was a fancy way of saying that she could no longer manage the progression of a task, follow a prompt. Everyone in the family kept calling me, asking when Mom would get better. Soon, I assured them. Soon.

But by the spring of 2007 her condition had not improved. We were due back to see Weinberger for another Doppler test. As Mom and I waited near a nurse’s station at Mount Sinai, we tried to ignore the bed someone had parked a few yards away. An elderly woman lay on her side, drifting in and out of consciousness.

Mom faced me. “I want you to kill me,” she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included her being compromised outside of a hospital, lasting years on end.

“I can’t kill you,” I answered steadily. “I have a husband and two stepsons and a mortgage. Someone will find out, and then I’ll have to go to prison.”

She sighed, exasperated.

“I know this issue has always been important to you,” I said. “So if you feel strongly about it, I understand that. You can end your own life. There are plenty of places that can help you do that.”

She was monumentally offended. “Committing suicide is against the Jewish religion!” she declared.

I was dumbfounded. “So is committing murder! Did you ever think of that?”

Apparently not.

When we saw Goldstein in July, his theory was that Mom’s depression was exacerbating her problems with concentration and cognition. The strokes had caused “insidious damage to her cognitive and emotional regulation,” he said, referring to the fact that Mom was crying — all the time. “Emotional incontinence,” he called it. She winced. The very term incontinence both frightened and humiliated her, the loss of control the ultimate degradation.

Around this time, I lost my own memory, just like that. Frank would tell me about his day and minutes later, I would ask him about it again. I would be sure I sent an e-mail I had written only in my head. I would walk into a room in my apartment, then stop and search for a clue as to why I was there. If Mom wasn’t coming back to me, I would go to her, instead.

In July 2008, I took Mom to Lord & Taylor in Eastchester, near Scarsdale, for shopping and lunch, a throwback to our old life together. Bonwit Teller had been in that shopping center. I. Miller shoes. A bookstore, I think Brentano’s. Now there was Nike.

I had persuaded Mom to go on the outing with the promise of a Clinique gift bag, another remnant of the old days, and one she seemed to remember. We headed inside and made a beeline for the Clinique counter. Samples? There were none that day. Slightly dispirited, we wandered toward pocketbooks. I’d had the same one for at least a dozen years, I told Mom. Disgraceful, really.

“You always have trouble buying bags,” Mom said offhandedly, as if we talked about this yesterday. I looked at her. Same clouded expression, same uncertain gait. But that comment came from some part of her brain that was still alive. She was right. I’ve had trouble buying bags ever since college, when I read in some magazine that small women carrying bags too large for them look like children carrying their mothers’ bags.

“Anything here look good to you?” I asked brightly.

She shrugged and turned away. “I don’t need anything anymore,” she said.

“That’s not true,” I countered. “Everyone needs something.”

She shook her head. “When I shopped, I bought what I liked and what I wanted. I didn’t like much, and I didn’t want much.”

I laughed. I was the same.

The one thing we both wanted, always, was to eat. For years, the restaurant at Lord & Taylor was the Bird Cage. I can still taste the “society sandwiches” — shrimp salad, cucumber, chicken and date-nut bread with cream cheese.

The store had expanded and the restaurant was now upstairs. It wasn’t called the Bird Cage anymore. It was Larry Forgione’s Signature Café, and not for long, according to our waitress. Every restaurant in Lord & Taylor stores would soon be a Sarabeth’s. This one was about to close so they could redesign the space. She didn’t know if she would keep her job, she said. On the sunny summer day, the unadorned room felt forlorn.

We asked for a menu. There they were still, society sandwiches. “Does that sound good?” I asked, and Mom nodded. She knew enough to know that familiar references escaped her, so instead of drawing attention to that fact, she would just acquiesce, hoping to catch up later.

I gave the waitress our order. When she left, Mom leaned across the table. “Give her a good tip, she’s old,” she said.

The sandwiches came on a naked white plate, ice cold. We sipped our Diet Cokes and picked up one tasteless triangle at a time. Suddenly, I glimpsed Mom across the table. I saw her come back, inhabit her face. She remembered this was something we had done together before. She had loved it too. “This is good,” she said, and I knew she was not talking about the food.

We wished the waitress luck on the transition, and I left her a generous tip, pointing it out to Mom. She looked blank. “O.K.,” she said tentatively.

Once we were back home, we made some tea and sat at the dining room table. I lighted a cigarette. Mom stopped smoking when she got sick, but she always asked me to blow some smoke in her direction. My own smoking had dwindled to an average of one cigarette a day. Being my mother’s daughter, I could not quit just because I was supposed to.

As I smoked, we talked some more, until she blurted out, “Don’t finish your cigarette.”

“Why?” I asked.

She looked like a child. “Because when you finish it, you’ll leave.”

I promised her I wouldn’t, and for another half-hour we sat and talked. I got up to go to the bathroom. When I returned a few minutes later, she was fast asleep at the table. I touched her hand. “Hi there,” I said. “Do you want to sit some more or would you like to rest?”

“Maybe rest,” she said.

I walked her into the den, where she napped in the afternoon. She lay down on the couch, and I covered her with a blanket. “I can stay here until you fall asleep,” I offered, but she shook her head no. “I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you for a wonderful day.” I kissed her. “Thank you,” I said. “I loved being with you, my sweet Mommy.”

“And I loved being with you. . . .” She searched for the word “daughter” and couldn’t find it. “My big girl,” she said. I tucked her in. My big girl. How I wished those words were true. I had never felt smaller.

As Thanksgiving neared, Mom grew calmer. I did not. I spoke with Roberta Epstein, the social worker, filling her in on Mom, how she was there, but not there.

“It’s called ambiguous loss,” she said. “Gone, but not gone. She is your mother, but not the mother you knew. If she had died, it would be easier to grieve the loss. It’s hard to do that when she’s sitting in front of you.”

Would I prefer to have lost my mother completely, without warning? I used to think the answer was no. Still, as hard as that would have been on me, maybe it would have been better for her. To die as herself. Because the worst part was watching her know that she wasn’t in there anymore — watching her face as she heard herself speak and saw how other people reacted. No awards for bravery for keeping going while realizing how diminished you are, watching flashes of yourself crackle then disappear, like lightning.

So at that point, who was my mother? A 77-year-old woman who could no longer remember how many years she had been married or any of her children’s birthdays. She did not recognize her grandchildren. She stood in my apartment, where she had visited me for 19 years, and asked me who lived there. But the fierce, loving, prickly person she had always been was still in there, fleetingly for sure, and I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to track her down and keep her there.

But she didn’t want to be tracked down. She didn’t want to be kept, anywhere. “Is someone here for me?” she had gone down to the lobby in her nightgown to ask the doorman one morning. “Am I moving?” she asked my aunt. She was sensing it was time to go. Even halfway out of her mind, she seemed to recognize the truth of that. When I still couldn’t.

I never wanted her to think I’d abandoned her. I wanted her to know I was fighting for her. I kept asking what I could do to help her, what I could do to make her happier. She looked at me pityingly every time. “There’s nothing you can do, because it’s not up to you,” she would say. “You’re here with me now. That’s enough.”

Toward the end of the summer of 2009, as we stood out in her garden, she said: “It’s not like my old garden. I don’t work here much. It’s not at the front of my mind.” I said nothing. We had actually worked on it quite a bit just a few weeks before.

I walked her upstairs and offered to tuck her in for her nap. “I’m not sleeping, I have things to do,” she proclaimed. I hoped that didn’t mean making three dinners, as my father told me she recently had, but again I said nothing. Once outside the building, I looked up at her apartment, and there she was, standing on the terrace, waving. I felt buoyed by that. Often, she didn’t remember I’d been there, even a minute after I’d gone.

I love you, she mouthed. I blew her kisses and patted my heart and mouthed back, I love you. She was wearing a yellow shirt and she was smiling and her blond hair shone in the sunlight. She was so beautiful, and she beamed down at me with so much love, and I waved and she waved. And then her expression changed — ever so slightly — as she looked at me standing there waving, and she grew impatient, possibly a shade scornful, as if to say, “Enough already.”

Out of the blue, I thought of Hickory Hill, a summer camp at a country club where she was a counselor when I was 3 or 4. We were near the pool, and she had given me a dime to buy potato chips at the snack bar. I waited for her to take my hand and lead me there, but she shook her head. She wasn’t going with me. I was a big girl, and she wanted me to get in line alone. It’s O.K., she told me. I’ll be right here, watching.

I wanted no part of that experiment and was about to throw a fit, but there was something in her face — the same something I had just glimpsed — that assured me I had no choice. I was a big girl, whether I wanted to be or not. I got in line.

And that day, as I watched her on the terrace, it was she who made the decision again. I stopped waving and smiling and patting my heart. I left.

This article is adapted from “All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia. With Refreshments,” to be published this month by Riverhead.

Alex Witchel is a staff writer for the magazine.

Editor: Sheila Glaser

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 40 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: How My Mother Disappeared. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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