OCTOBER 2, 2023 – Mother, meanwhile, was losing altitude in both the mental and physical realms. Of course that tends to happen when a person hits 90 and shuffles into the uncertain territory beyond. Her memory—short-term and long-term—was still impressive, but her anxiety about minor matters, such as exactly where I parked my car during visits was in overdrive.
“Hi, Mother,” I’d say, as I entered her room.
“Hello, Eric. Where did you park?”
“The usual spot.”
“They don’t like you parking in the driveway, you know.”
“It’s fine, Mother. I’m off to the side. If someone wants me to move, I’ll gladly move.”
“But I don’t want to inconvenience anyone.”
“No one will be inconvenienced.”
“How do you know that for sure?”
“I don’t know it for sure, but the odds are . . .”
“Why can’t you park in the street?”
“I can.”
“I think you should.”
“Mother!”
“I don’t want people around here to think I’m being uncooperative.”
“Good grief, Mother, stop worrying about it.”
“That’s easy for you to say, but I have to live here.”
“Mother, have you had any other visitors today?”
“Now don’t go trying to change the subject just because you don’t agree with me or because you’re uncomfortable with what we’re talking about.”
“Mother, I have an idea . . .” I’d say at last and get her out of her chair and down the hallway to the piano. Once she started playing hymns, she’d be fine.
One fall evening in her 92nd year I knew she’d crossed a kind of Rubicon when the filter came off. The loss of filtering between a thought and expression is a common feature of old age. In retrospect, I think perhaps that was the case with Gaga, who amused us with her shocking “candor.”
A typical example was Gaga’sr response when one of my sisters asked her, “How do you like this new blouse?”
“I don’t,” said Gaga, “. . . since you asked me.”
Or the time Gaga and Grandpa were driving Nina to Hamburg for a weekend visit when she was a student at Connecticut College in New London. They’d just turned off I95 onto route 156 going north from Old Lyme. On the first curve of the five-mile winding route to the cove, the road passes a small marina and a picturesque view of the river.
“That scene always reminds me of Holland,” said Nina.
“Have you been to Holland?” Gaga asked, knowing full well that her oldest granddaughter never had.
“Well . . . no,” said Nina.
“Then how would you know?”
Gaga’s views of Jews, Catholics, and people of color were bluntly offensive, but by the time she was 97, she’d long had the quiet “old age” pass from us. Our own sense of propriety prevented us from attacking her for being racist, especially when we considered that she’d grown up in an era when prejudices broadly offensive by modern norms were shared almost universally among White Anglo Saxon Protestants. More to the point—in retrospect—I think Gaga had simply jettisoned her filters. What she thought about things she told you unabashedly. And if you knew you’d be reprimanded for chewing gum in her presence, you didn’t want to countenance how fast you’d be disinherited if you started an argument with, “Gaga, what you just said was racist!”
Mother, on the other hand, had her filters in place at least till 90. Then early one evening . . .
I’d entered the lobby of the assisted living facility to pick her up and take her to an evening concert of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. As members of the ensemble, Elsa and Elsa’s husband would be on stage. Mother stood waiting while seated nearby was her friend Molly, a fellow resident who was quite a lot younger than Mother and sharp and cultivated.
“Where are you off to tonight?” Molly asked Mother.
“A chamber orchestra concert,” said Mother.
“How wonderful,” Molly said. “I wish I were going.”
In response Mother clasped her hands together beside of her ear and with eyes closed, tilted her head to pantomime sleep. I was shocked by her non-verbal but unmistakable expression of boredom at the prospect of attending a concert. If ever in her life she’d not looked forward to attending a concert, she’d never let on: her filter had never been off.
I was so angered by her unfiltered response, I almost disinvited her and offered to take Molly instead, except Molly wasn’t ambulatory and wouldn’t fit in my car. Later when I aided Mother from the car to the entrance of the music hall and noticed she was wearing her sunglasses, I reminded myself that Mother was old and burdened by mental disorders and that I was mean and impatient.
Mother was wide awake for the entire concert. Me? A sforzando entrance by the horns saved me at the very moment I was dozing off. When I walked Mother to the car after the concert, I let her wear her sunglasses without my saying—or thinking—a word about them.
Mother’s unfiltered non-verbal communication was soon followed by a strikingly unfiltered verbal one. It occurred during a visit on the Saturday before Halloween. She was unusually alert.
“Everyone around here is all into football,” she said. “High school, college, professional football—it seems people can’t get enough of it.”
“Uh huh.”
“Yes, and if you dare question them about it,” she said in what I was about to realize was the marching band’s drumroll, “they’re likely to kick you in the ass.”
I was so stunned, a “What?” bolted out of my mouth before I could catch it.
“I said, if you question them about why they like football so much, they’re likely to kick you in the ass.”
There it was again. This time there was no place for a “What?” only a desire to dash out of the place and call my sister Jenny. Together we’d have a good laugh over the most improbable, nay the least possible thing we could ever imagine our mother saying out loud or even thinking in the deepest corner of her kaleidoscopic cranium.
Until then, never had I heard Mother say anything remotely close to crass. On the single occasion when I heard a swear word—“damn”—exit her mouth, it took me a week to recover[1].
On that Saturday in late October when Mother dropped the filter to her opinion of football, I stopped myself from dashing out. I did cut the visit shorter than I’d planned, however, and called Jenny from the car on my way home.
A week later, I found Mother back in her more characteristically depressed state. That evening, I wrote about it in my journal:
[My visit with Mother] was the usual—unsatisfactory and unfulfilling. I tried to spark, then carry the conversation, but so little came of it. Her memory remains largely intact, but she has long lost an interest in talking much about anything, even the things to which she once dedicated so much of her time and mental energy. On this occasion I let her hold my hands, and I told her, “I love you Mom.” But I looked into her face and saw the all-too familiar inner angst, born of her mental illness and twisted up psychological condition. She is not a person with whom I can much relate on a personal level. That was always the case, but now there is no longer even much to talk about on an intellectual level.
A week later, Jenny called me. She’d taken Mother to a cardiology appointment and learned that the doctor “was alarmed” by a recent echocardiogram. “There’s a sense that she’s not long for this world,” said Jenny.
I thought about Mother’s unfiltered sleep pantomime before the concert. My reaction, so well-filtered it would’ve been imperceptible to the sharpest observer, now filled me with shame and regret.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] She said “No, damn it” as she mildly slapped the table in the course of an argument at the dinner table. It was not a harsh “No, damn it,’ and the volume contrasted only slightly with the words that had preceded it. I was sitting immediately around the corner from her, and the argument wasn’t especially serious or emotional. It was with the rest of the family and over something dumb. She’d simply had enough of our persistence, and was announcing the close of argument. It was hugely irregular of her. In the silence that followed, I sensed she felt more of simple relief than of victory.
